WASHINGTON, March 9: House and Senate negotiators should not make crop subsidies the sole target in correcting a $6-billion mistake in the expected cost of the Senate-passed farm bill, farm lobbyists said on Friday.

The error, disclosed on Thursday, involved mistakenly low estimates of the cost of two kinds of crop subsidies in the bill. Budget officials incorrectly assumed benefits would be pro-rated at 85 per cent of a farm’s planting and yield base instead of a full payment.

Because of the error, the Senate bill now exceeded congressional spending limits by $6.1 billion over 10 years.

The mistake compounded the task facing negotiators, who hope to draft a final version of the farm bill before the March 22 start of the congressional Easter recess. The House and Senate have passed bills boosting crop subsidies by at least $5 billion a year.

Written every few years, farm bills bundle crop support, antihunger, export, rural development and agricultural research programs together costing tens of billions of dollars a year.

Mary Kay Thatcher of the 5.1-million-member American Farm Bureau Federation said AFBF would fight “diligently” to preserve crop funding. Bruce Knight of the National Corn Growers Association said “it’s not going to be acceptable” to put the onus on crop subsidies to make up the $6.1 billion.

They said other sections of the bill should be considered for cuts too, because those sections were boosted in the belief that crop subsidies, traditionally the heart of a farm bill, were set at sufficient levels. Senators voted to give antihunger programs an additional $8.4 billion over 10 years and land stewardship an additional $21 billion.

Farm groups want the new law enacted in time to cover this year’s crops. While an agreement soon was desirable, a House Agriculture Committee staff worker said a bill could be passed as late as mid-April and still apply to this year.

Negotiators were scheduled to hold their first formal meeting on Wednesday afternoon. Staff-level talks, under way since late February, have resolved many minor issues but none of the key disputes, such as crop support rates.

A House staff worker suggested the Senate bill ought to be scaled back to $73.5 billion — the spending limit — to make it easier for negotiators to assemble the final bill.

It’s pretty difficult for two houses to fight through $6.1 billion of differences that aren’t there, he said. If the Senate was restricted to offering $73.5 billion in proposals, “then we’ll see what differences are left” between the bills.

Seth Bofelli, spokesman for Senate Agriculture Committee chairman Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, said the issue of farm bill costs “is just one more issue we have to deal with” in House-Senate discussions.

This is just going to be dealt with in the regular...deliberations, Bofelli said. It would be unusual for Senate negotiators to unilaterally revise a bill passed by colleagues, he said. There never was a guarantee they (all the Senate proposals) were going to be in the final bill anyway.

Under the Senate bill, crop support rates would be increased, while the House would give farmers larger annual payments. Both bills would release billions of dollars in subsidies whenever grain, cotton and soybean returns fell below targets set by law.

The five-year Senate bill would spend $49 billion, or two-thirds of the $73.5 billion earmarked for new agricultural spending through 2011. The 10-year House bill would spend $38.5 billion in its first five years and $73.46 billion overall.

Bush administration officials have criticized the Democratic-drafted Senate bill for “front-loading” its spending and leaving too little money for predictable farm needs after 2006.

Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman said the corrected, higher cost of the Senate bill causes us great concern because it would put the budget numbers of the Senate farm bill far in excess of the budget agreement and in fact it would front-load it even ore than we had talked about earlier.—Reuters