"If there is a cheaper date in town, I'd like to meet them"

You may have seen The New York Times article about farm policy and produce juxtaposed with a picture of U.S. watermelon queens. The story questions whether the industry won the battle in the House farm bill but may lose the war in the end. From the story:


"If there is a cheaper date in town, I’d like to meet them,” said Kenneth Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group that backs changes in farm policy. “We would never trust them to work with again.”

TK; No, he definitely wasn't talking about the watermelon queens; Cook and other conservation- and reform-oriented lobbyists were spurned when produce industry lobbyists cut a deal with the House Agriculture Committee.

From the top of the NYT story by Andrew Martin:

With Americans eating bad diets and getting fatter by the year, the nation’s produce industry made a bold political calculation. Surely, farmers thought, the government could be talked into supporting crops like New Jersey tomatoes, Michigan apples and California spinach.
A new farm bill is on the drawing board in Washington, and growers of fruits, vegetables, tree nuts and nursery crops, known collectively as specialty crops, came up with an $8.5 billion wish list. They built political alliances. They doubled their campaign contributions. They even sent nine perky watermelon queens in white sashes to Capitol Hill to press their case.

TK: Of course, the writer has set it up to drop the hammer, or to tell the story of Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown.......

But confronting what a United States senator calls “old-time power politics,” mastered long ago by savvier farm lobbies like cotton and corn, the specialty crop growers are coming up short of their goals. They have secured only $1.6 billion so far in a House vote and are scrambling to improve on that as the Senate takes up the issue this week.
“We have a voice in Washington, but it isn’t anywhere near what the cotton boys or corn or soybeans or ethanol has,” said Chuck Obern, a vegetable farmer in Clewiston, Fla.


TK: No doubt, the writer is underestimating just how hard it is to get "only $1.6 billion."

The House version of the 2007 farm bill would keep most of the subsidies for commodities like corn and cotton intact. Specialty crop farmers would get $1.6 billion over five years, or about $320 million a year, for the programs they favor, which do not include direct subsidies. Under existing law, they get $65 million to $100 million a year. One reason commodity subsidies are so durable is that farm politics are regional, not Republican or Democratic. The strongest subsidy advocates in Congress come from rural states where commodity agriculture is a potent economic force, like Iowa, Mississippi and North Dakota. Those representatives dominate the Congressional agriculture committees that write the farm bill.

Another reason is that the farm lobby has sought allies to broaden its coalition beyond rural states. For instance, nutrition programs such as food stamps were added to the farm bill more than three decades ago in part to ensure support from urban lawmakers. The authors of the farm bill try to spread enough money among nutrition programs, crop subsidies and farm-related conservation programs to secure the votes for passage.
For decades, even as commodity growers collected hundreds of billions from the government, produce farmers wanted nothing to do with Washington. Concentrated in the Sun Belt states of California, Texas and Florida, they enjoyed healthy prices for their crops and managed to grow them with no government subsidies.
But in recent years, the industry has confronted unprecedented challenges. Outbreaks of food-borne illness from contaminated lettuce and spinach created an urgent need for research to safeguard the food supply. Foreign competition and labor shortages, meanwhile, have decimated some produce sectors like garlic, tomatoes and apricots.
Produce farmers argue that consumers have a stake in their success, and should therefore support their requests for farm bill dollars. Without a strong and competitive produce industry in the United States, consumers would depend on foreign sources of fruits and vegetables where regulations may not be as stringent, they contend.
And the industry wants government money to promote consumption of fruits and vegetables. For instance, the House version of the farm bill would expand a program that provides free fruits and vegetables as school snacks to all 50 states.

Produce growers first decided they needed help the last time the farm bill was up for revision, in 2002. They debated whether to ask Congress for subsidies but ultimately decided to seek money for research and marketing instead, mostly to help farmers compete with an onslaught of foreign competition.
With little experience lobbying Congress, the industry’s campaign fell flat.
“We put together a nice little booklet for the farm bill. We were so proud of it,” said Robert L. Guenther, senior vice president of public policy for the United Fresh Produce Association. “We didn’t work the Hill much.”
Having learned from those mistakes, industry leaders began planning for the current farm bill in May 2005. They set their sights much higher, $8.5 billion for marketing, research and grants, but no direct subsidies. They built an alliance that included winemakers, nurseries and other groups, and started cultivating ties on the Hill.
Simultaneously, the industry sidled up to a coalition seeking huge cuts in subsidies for commodity groups. But some groups, including the specialty crop industry, abandoned that coalition after House negotiators offered money for their programs.
Industry leaders acknowledge they used the reform coalition to gain leverage. After winning $1.6 billion in the House, they noted it was bigger than any previous appropriation — but also said it was far less than they wanted.
“We would not have been able to support it if it was any lower,” Mr. Guenther said.
The industry tactics angered some longtime critics of farm subsidies.
“If there is a cheaper date in town, I’d like to meet them,” said Kenneth Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group that backs changes in farm policy. “We would never trust them to work with again.”
Whether the specialty crop industry’s political strategy will pay off should become apparent in coming weeks.

TK: Did the industry pick the wrong side when they chose establishment over anti-establishment? Would the industry be better served to be on board with the EWG? I can tell you that fresh produce industry lobbyists feel it was a much better move not to have to go outside the Agriculture Committee to get funds in the House farm bill How they feel about the Senate may be another question.

The story concludes:

The specialty crop industry has put out a letter from 36 senators promoting its size and importance and seeking $3.2 billion, twice the amount in the House bill.The industry also brought farmers and the watermelon queens to Washington last month to plead its case.
“We all came, and we all got separated into groups and did the lobbying thing,” Emily Frey, the 20-year-old watermelon queen from Illinois and Indiana, said afterward. Members of Congress “definitely knew that we meant it, we were serious and we needed their help.”