Concerns About America's Food Bill

Floor Speech

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Mr. COSTA. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to raise concerns about the farm bill that we will consider in the House Agriculture Committee tomorrow.

In any legislation, there are parts of it that you support and there are areas that are problematic and there are titles that you may oppose. That is part of legislation. Some of these areas, of course, are works in progress. That is part of legislation as well. The farm bill is no exception.

There are parts of this proposal that are a continuation of good things that we have done in previous farm bills that have worked. This version of the farm bill supports programs that are critical to specialty crops in the San Joaquin Valley and across California and the Nation. Specialty crops are special. They are fresh fruits and vegetables that serve as the foundation of a healthy diet. California grows half of the Nation's specialty crops.

This bill also provides support for research and risk management tools that are necessary. That includes continuous support for the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, a program that encourages farmers to be good stewards of our environment. It also has proposals that support programs that help our farmers, ranchers, and dairy producers expand to foreign markets so we can compete.

Further, it also includes research and development of organic farming that continues to be very, very important, and it encourages a comprehensive approach to ensuring the health and security of our livestock. But we could do more in all of these areas.

There are also parts of this farm bill that, for me, are problematic. As written, the dairy provisions create an uneven playing field that protects some, while leaving others exposed, sowing a regional divide within the dairy industry.

Instead, we should raise the threshold for catastrophic coverage under the dairy safety net so we can respond more quickly for all dairy producers when milk markets plummet. The California dairy industry has hit hard times in recent years.

Lastly, there are components of this farm bill that I strongly oppose, as do countless other organizations, people in the San Joaquin Valley and across the country. One of these proposals makes changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, otherwise known as SNAP, that will devastate parts of the food program that are working well.

SNAP education and training programs are designed to help people and help recipients develop skills so ultimately they become self-reliant. I am a strong supporter of SNAP education and training programs. Although some of our SNAP education and training programs are yielding great results, we have a pilot project in Fresno County called the Fresno Bridge Academy that has expanded, and we now, as a result of the last farm bill, have 10 pilot projects around the country. In 2019, they are supposed to report back to the Congress to say what works and what doesn't work.

That is the way we should be doing this so that we can get people off of assistance, make them self-sufficient. We all agree that able-bodied people should be working. Yet, this farm bill makes enrollment in the SNAP education and training program mandatory, and in many cases, without giving them the necessary tools to get real jobs that exist.

We have been warned that such a strain on burgeoning programs may very well collapse, costing billions of dollars, and creating a new Federal bureaucracy. In addition, this proposal would systematically prevent people from getting food assistance that they badly need, including our disabled, our seniors, and our veterans. Twenty-five percent of my constituents are on SNAP and require food assistance.

This program is vital to the health of our communities, both in rural and urban areas in every State in the Nation. The farm bill is America's food bill. It is about our national security. It is very important. It should not serve some well and abandon others.

Although this proposal does include some good provisions, it fails to serve important parts of our community, and it builds a bigger and more intense divide between regions and groups in our country. Our Nation's food policy should not be something that further divides us. This part of the House farm bill proposal, I think, is bad policy. It will not succeed legislatively, nor can it be successfully implemented.

The United States Senate is writing a bipartisan farm bill, and that is what we should be doing in the House. As a matter of fact, the farm bill, for over 40 years, has been one of the most bipartisan things that we do in Congress.

I call upon my colleagues to work together, in a bipartisan fashion, to negotiate these differences, one that serves the widest range of Americans so that we can produce enduring good public policy decisions that serve to protect the safety net for all Americans, promote American farmers, ranchers, and dairy people so that we can not only feed the Nation but compete in foreign markets.

We can do better. We should do better.

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