Congressional leaders reached agreement on a massive year-end bill that would provide $3.7 billion in disaster aid for farmers, including $250 million in aid to rice producers and $100 million to cotton merchandisers. According to the USDA’s Economic Research Service, revenue from rice fell from $3.5 billion in 2021 to $3.2 billion this year when adjusted for inflation. Wheat revenue jumped more than 15% this year, and corn revenue rose by 20%.
The bill also includes a reauthorization measure for the pesticide registration process at the EPA. The disaster funding would cover crop and livestock losses due to drought and other problems this year. The bill specifies that the $3.7 billion in disaster aid is for losses “of revenue, quality or production losses of trees, bushes, and vines, as a consequence of droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, floods, derechos, excessive heat, tornadoes, winter storms, freeze, including a polar vortex, smoke exposure, and excessive moisture.”
Missing from the bill are any farm labor reforms, which would have expanded the H-2A program and provided a path to legal status for domestic workers.
The omnibus also would reauthorize the Pesticide Registration Improvement Act (PRIA), which imposes fees for the maintenance and registration of active ingredients. PRIA has broad support among industry and environmental groups that are actively involved in implementation of the program, which partially funds the EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs. The reauthorized legislation, known as PRIA 5, would boost registration and maintenance fees by 30% and allow the EPA to raise fees by 5% in 2024 and 2026. The reauthorized law also would phase in, over eight years, a requirement that pesticide labels be available in Spanish. The Center for Biological Diversity submitted a petition in May seeking bilingual labels. In addition, PRIA 5 would require the EPA to perform a workforce assessment of OPP and authorize $7.5 million in farmworker education grants.
Agricultural research funding would be increased by $175 million over fiscal year 2022 to $3.45 billion in FY23, which started Oct. 1. The Agricultural Research Service (ARS), the USDA’s in-house research arm, would get $1.74 billion, a $111 million increase over FY22. ARS programs include the Aerial Application Technology Research Unit that NAAA has supported for years due to its development of technologies and techniques advancing the application of crop inputs by air.
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