'TWO YEARS EARLY, HOUSE AG COMMITTEE BEGINS LOOKING AT FARM BILL'

(AgWeb.com) -- AgWeb.com reports that even though the reauthorization of the current farm bill isn't needed until 2012, House Ag Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) last week invited experts to testify on how Congress might "shake things up" in the next farm bill rewrite. Some of those testifying "handed out harsh criticism of the current program, including Iowa State University's Bruce Babcock," who called some of the current crop subsidies coupled with subsidized crop insurance "as basically a waste of taxpayer dollars." Scott Brown of the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute (FAPRI) "focused most of his attention on the livestock sector and stepped lawmakers through the factors affecting the sector that are truly beyond their control, such as the downturn in the U.S. economy, noting that the first-quarter 2009 GDP shrunk to a level not seen since the early 1980s." Harvard's Robert Paarlberg noted that while farm interests "want an expensive business-as-usual farm bill," the U.S. deficit and debt will make it "more difficult to hide the high costs of a business-as-usual 2012 farm bill." http://www.agweb.com/get_article.aspx?src=gennews&pageid=157422