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1 1 (February 2016)

handle is hein.amenin/aeiachz0001 and id is 1 raw text is: Thecurrent farm bill, formally titled theAgricultural Act of 2014, was signed into law by President Barack Obama on February 7, 2014. The act's provisions radically changed the structure of price and revenue-per-acre subsidy programs for crops that have received subsidies for more than 70 years.1 Subsidy policies for dairy producerswere also revamped.2 In addition, disaster aid programs for livestock producers, for which funding had ceased at theend of 2011, were modified and refunded, generally on more favorableterms. Federal crop insurance programs were expanded, and at least notionally, conservation programs were rationalized.3 Additionally, the scope of one long-standing initiativewas substantially reduced-the Conservation Reserve Program, acropland retirement program under which farmers are paid to place part or all of their cropland into conserving uses.4 The2014 farm bill provisionscover the period from its passage on February 7, 2014, to September 30, 2018, the end of the 2018 fiscal year. By that time, either a new farm bill will have been passed, the provisions of the 2014 farm bill will beextended for up to acoupleof years (aswith several previous farm bills), or all major provisions of the2014 farm bill will be terminated (an unlikely outcome). When the 2014 farm bill was being debated, the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate agricultural committees claimed that thechanges in the agricultural subsidy provisions of the2014 farm bill, coupled with cutting $800 million a year in food stamp spending, would reduce annual government spending on the farm bill by about $1.7 billion. Funding requirementsfor new subsidy programswould be smaller than thosefor thefarm subsidy programsthat would beterminated (for example, the Direct Payments program, which had been funded at about $5 billion ayear since 2002, and the Milk Income Loss Contract program) and downsized (the Conservation Reserve Program). The new programs included Price Loss Coverage (PLC), Agricultural Risk Coverage (ARC), a supplementary revenue insurance product for program crops, a heavily subsidized STAX (staked income protection plan) insurance program for cotton, and a quasi-insurance Dairy Margin Protection Program for milk producers. According to the January 2014 estimates from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), all the new programs together would involve estimated annual average expenditures of about $4.2 billion from 2015 to 2024. However, terminating other subsidy policies-such asthe Direct Payments program, under which annual subsidies were approximately $4.9 billion over the period 2002-13-would apparently lead to lower total annual average outlays on farm programs.

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