The National Association of State Departments of Agriculture has offered the federal government a new proposal to help the nation's embattled dairy and pork farmers by removing some of their products from the marketplace.
Called "Meat the Need," and created recently at NASDA's annual meeting in Montgomery, Ala., the plan would "take extra dairy and pork supplies off the market, bringing up prices paid to producers," says North Dakota Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring.
Dairy and pork producers "across the country are suffering deeply with many facing bankruptcy and foreclosure at an alarming rate."
Dollars and cents
The commissioners, behind the leadership of Leonard Blackman, Agriculture Commissioner of Utah, worked with the Office of Management and Budget at the White House to identify how much of the agricultural products they thought would have to come off the market to support and lift prices.
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For dairy producers, the proposal calls for the federal government to purchase cheese and other dairy products in up to three installments of 75 million pounds each within 120 days.
"If the target price of $16 per hundredweight of milk -- the cost of production -- is reached before the second or third installment, the purchases would stop," Goehring says.
For pork producers, the government would purchase up to three installments of 100 million pounds of pork products within 180 days until a target price of 49 cents per pound is reached.
The plan also includes of a one-time purchase of 100 million pounds of turkey.
According to the proposal, the commodities then would be made available to various food assistance programs.
Priority issue
Goehring calls the proposal a high priority, noting that there ware several committee meetings and a lot of discussion on the topic at the NASDA conference.
"It was a big issue because the dairy industry is suffering immensely in the U.S., and pork is closely behind," he says.
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The purchased agricultural products would be distributed to food banks, school lunch programs, U.S. soldiers serving abroad and a new Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, he says.
"SNAP-Plus would allow the U.S. Department of Agriculture to increase allocations to the SNAP program and require beneficiaries to spend the new allocations on meat and possibly dairy products only," Goehring says. "These products would be available through commercial grocers. Participants would be given separate electronic benefits transfer cards to purchase the products."
Where the funds will come from is unknown, though Goehring suspects it will come from outside of USDA's budget. He thinks the potential $8 billion cost should be allocated without difficulty from elsewhere.
"Because we've thrown several hundred billion dollars at the financial industry, we've done cash for clunkers and given $30 billion to the automotive industry, if we need $8 billion to prop up a primary sector in our economy, which stabilizes our economy and does so much more, this shouldn't even be an issue," he says.
Each of the state officials contacted their congressional delegations to familiarize them with the program and to ensure they are aware of the levels of support which exist in their own states. Goehring wants to move forward with the purchases as soon as possible.
"As soon as we get approval by Congress to move forward," he says. "I know that NASDA has certainly made this a priority issue. This is one of the first things they started tackling when they got back from Montgomery, Ala."
