FAPRI Analyzes Farm Bill
Posted: July 17, 2008
The highly anticipated analysis of certain provisions of the new farm bill by the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri–Columbia, better known as FAPRI, was released this week.
The report provides preliminary analysis of impacts of certain provisions of the 2008 Food, Conservation and Energy Act, including the ACRE program. The report found that, besides ACRE, most of the selected provisions of the law would have only modest impacts on commodity markets, farm program expenditures and consumer food prices.
The ACRE program could have significant effects on producer income and taxpayer costs. On a crop year basis, the program increases net farm program payments by an average of more than $1 billion per year and the potential expenditures are much larger. Given program rules and estimated payments, the ACRE program appears much more likely to appeal to producers of feed grains, wheat and soybeans than to producers of cotton, rice and peanuts. Thus, the program is more likely to be attractive to producers in
northern states than in southern states.
The report also looked at the impact of extending the ethanol specific tariff and reducing the ethanol tax credit and found that “extending the $0.54 per gallon specific tariff on ethanol imports for two more years results in lower ethanol imports and slightly higher prices for ethanol and corn. In contrast, reducing the ethanol tax credit to $0.45 per gallon from the current $0.51 per gallon would tend to reduce ethanol and corn producer prices. The tariff effect is slightly larger than the tax credit effect, so average corn and ethanol prices increase slightly.”
Read the entire report here.