FARM ECONOMY CAMPAIGN ISSUE

The economy is down, down on the farm.

U.S. Rep. Jo Ann Emerson and her Democratic challenger, Tony Heckemeyer, agreed Thursday the farm economy is ailing.

Heckemeyer on Thursday blamed the farm bill passed by a GOP-led Congress in 1996.

The Sikeston Democrat said the Freedom to Farm Act is a road to ruin for family farmers.

"We are in serious trouble in agriculture," said Heckemeyer, a former circuit judge who has a large farming operation.

Emerson Congress probably will look at the farm problems this September.

"We need to make sure we have a farm program that provides a safety net for our farmers," she said.

Heckemeyer said American farmers are losing their safety net of farm subsidies while being forced to compete with overseas farmers who are heavily subsidized by their governments. That is a major concern in a state where farming is a $5 billion industry.

It also is a major concern in Southeast Missouri where agriculture is the backbone of many rural towns, he said.

"It is not a coincidence that the last three years have hit the farmer the hardest," Heckemeyer said.

Speaking on the steps of the Scott County Courthouse at Benton, Heckemeyer told a crowd of about 30 supporters and officeholders commodity prices have dropped 50 percent and Missouri's farm income has fallen by more than 70 percent.

"It is because Republicans are subsidizing agribusiness and murdering local farmers," said Heckemeyer, who plans to speak out on the issues at all 26 county courthouses in the 8th Congressional District.

But Emerson said the problems plaguing the farm economy can't be placed solely at the doorstep of Congress.

She said a bumper crop of corn, wheat and soybeans has left a worldwide surplus that helped lower commodity prices.

"Secondly, we have an Asian financial crisis that is hurting our exports tremendously," Emerson said from a car phone while traveling through the district.

Forty percent of U.S. agricultural exports go to Asia, she said, explaining that weather has played a factor too. There have been droughts in Texas and flooding in parts of the Midwest. The wheat crop has been plagued by disease.

Emerson said the farm bill was passed before she took office. Her late husband and then congressman, Bill Emerson, had opposed some of the provisions of the new farm bill. He voted against the bill in committee.

She said her husband fought to protect the family farmers even as he was dying of lung cancer.

In the end, Bill Emerson voted for the Freedom to Farm Act, but Jo Ann Emerson said the bill was supported by Democrats in Congress, too, and was signed into law by President Clinton.

"You really can't call that a Republican farm bill," she said.

Jo Ann Emerson said the six-year farm bill has lowered caps on marketing loans for farmers.

Like Heckemeyer, Emerson said American farmers aren't competing on a level playing field when it comes to world trade because other nations subsidize their farm economies to a far greater extent than the United States.

Production costs for farmers in South America, for example, are low, she said, adding: "They don't have the Environmental Protection Agency breathing down their necks."

Congress, she said, might have to raise the marketing loan caps for farmers and extend the repayment period from nine months to 15 months.

The farm bill also included funding designed to help farmers in their transition from a largely government-regulated agriculture economy to an open-market system.

Transition payments scheduled for next spring will be made available in October, she said.

The federal crop insurance program needs to be scrubbed, Emerson said, explaining: "We have to have a more well thought out crop insurance plan."

Most farmers can't afford it, opting instead for only catastrophic insurance, she said. Agriculture exports are suffering because 75 countries are now under economic sanctions or have been threatened with U.S. sanctions.

"That could account for $15 to $20 billion of agricultural trade dollars that we could have in our pocket if those economic sanctions weren't there," she said.

Emerson said it is wrong to use food as a weapon of foreign policy.

"It doesn't work. It only hurts us," she said.

But, Emerson said, none of the farmers with whom she has talked wants to return to the old farm bill provisions that regulated what and how much could be planted.