• Don't Miss This Year's National Grange Legislative Fly-In
• National Grange Commends Congress on Recovery Act
• Stimulus Package Thankfully Excludes Major Provisions to Rewrite the 2008 Farm Bill
• Legislative Round Up

The 2009 National Grange Fly-In will take place May 17-19, 2009 in Washington D.C. and registration is currently underway. This exciting event will include information workshops, Congressional visits, and effective networking opportunities with Grange political activists from across the nation.

In order to participate in the 2009 National Grange Fly-In you must complete the Conference Registration Form. Please fill out the form entirely and submit it to Molly Thompson, Program Assistant for the National Grange at mthompson@nationalgrange.org. Additionally, in order to ensure appointments with your elected officials or their staff, please fill out the Congressional Meeting Request Form and submit it to Molly. The deadline for registration and Congressional meeting forms is APRIL 10, 2009.

Please be aware that the hotel reservations are the individual responsibility of each Fly-In participant. The National Grange has reserved a block of rooms at Club Quarters, but space is limited. To make your reservation for Club Quarters, please contact Samantha Johnson, Sales, Benefits, and Programs Manager of National Grange at 1-888-447-2643 ext. 109 or at sjohnson@nationalgrange.org. You will need to provide the arrival and departure dates and the names of the Grangers who will be staying in the room. Club Quarters is located at 839 17 th Street, NW Washington, DC 20006 and phone is 202-463-6400. Room rates are a single standard room at $194.00 per night plus 14.5% tax and a double standard room with two twin size beds at $209.00 per night plus 14.5% tax. Please note that there is an extra $15.00 charge per extra guest per room per day. Please discuss parking costs and arrangements directly with Club Quarters at the above telephone number. All room reservations must be made by APRIL 10, 2009.

The National Grange along with 22 other like-minded organizations commended House and Senate conferees for their leadership on the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.” The groups urged the conferees to accept the language in the Senate Bill, as well as the Senate Report, which ensured that the comparative effectiveness research (CER) provisions establish a legislative framework that was strong and patient-centered. The changes adopted by the Senate were of vital importance to patients and providers, and promoted government-supported CER that is focused on improving the quality of patient care and empowering provider and patient decision-making.

Specifically, the National Grange strongly supported the improvements in the Senate Bill and accompanying report language that focused CER on comparative clinical effectiveness, and protected against the use of CER to deny access to care based on cost. The Grange stated the importance for patients and health care providers to have clinically-based information to facilitate decision- making and improve care. The Senate changes ensured that CER focus on medical outcomes and contained the flexibility to take into account variations among different patient populations.

The National Grange asked that any recovery legislation guarantee the transparency of medical research by including patients and providers in the process. We urged clarifying provisions in the bill requiring openness and transparency, and suggested patients and providers have representation in setting priorities, conducting research, and communicating results.

Leroy Watson, Legislative Director for the National Grange, wrote the following Op/Ed for Ag Talk

On February 17, President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) a $787 billion piece of legislation that proponents believe will help our nation’s economy recover from the worst economic down turn in more than 25 years. AARA is also known in the short hand of media and Washington terminology as the “stimulus package.” Many agriculture observers have lamented the fact that a greater portion of the stimulus package did not directly benefit family farmers and ranchers.

However one of the most important victories of the stimulus package may actually be that agriculture was generally left out. That omission should not be regarded as a sign of indifference to the economic plight of family farmers. The stimulus package made no significant changes to the existing provisions of the 2008 Farm Bill that provide “counter-cyclical” financial assistance to hundreds of thousands of US farmers. As the Farm Bill’s commodity programs kick in this year in response to projections of lower commodity prices and reduced global export demand, the federal farm programs will probably perform as intended to provide “stimulus” for hundreds of thousands of family farmers. And unlike the stimulus package to address economic problems facing the general economy that was written in less than six weeks and which was unavailable for public review in its final form up until 24 hours prior to the final Congressional vote, the 2008 Farm Bill was crafted as a model of legislative transparency and open debate over more than 18 months.

In fact, one of the lessons we may take away from the regular and predictable process of full Congressional review and reauthorization of federal farm programs is that it forces farmers, policy makers, federal program managers, and other stakeholders to anticipate and discuss “what if” contingencies for both good times and bad that can affect the agriculture sector, and to incorporate creative policy responses to those potential situations into law, before, and not after, a crisis hits. What the lessons of agricultural economics and federal agriculture policy have taught us over the past 75 years is that market and/or unanticipated problems (like weather) create uncertainty that can drive apprehension and even financial hardship among family farmers. However, for a full-fledged economic panic, you really just need to throw government uncertainty and indecision into the mix. We have recently seen two successive Administrations, from two political parties, expend their political reputations on massive increases in federal spending to rectify the economic challenges facing our nation on little more than promises to “trust us, we are from the government and we know what to do.” Every ad hoc announcement of a new government response to the crisis seems to result in a drop in the stock market and announcements of more layoffs. These responses are not exactly ringing votes of confidence.

Trusting our government should never be uniformly treated as a cynical exercise in a democracy. But neither should our trust in our government be based entirely on faith, hope or expediency. The legitimacy of democratic government comes from its accountability to the people it serves and that legitimacy is best earned in the open, transparent, and deliberative process of crafting legislation. The most critical resource in an economic emergency may not actually be money or regulation but time: time to think, plan, and anticipate what might go wrong, time to think through what the proper government response should be, and time to put a plan in place to execute when and if unforeseen contingencies come to pass. Unfortunately, most economic emergencies are not anticipated and adequate time to deliberate a thoughtful government response is the first resource sacrificed to public expectations of expediency of action.

While not all of the widespread economic problems facing our nation and the world economy could have been anticipated, certainly portions of the current “perfect storm” could be anticipated independent of other factors. It is not so difficult for legislators and policy makers to postulate what the appropriate response should be if general unemployment goes from less than 5% to more than 8%; it is not difficult to anticipate and discuss what the appropriate public policy response should be if the number of mortgage defaults double or triple over the amounts seen in historical norms; and so on and so forth. However, uniquely among government programs and responses to unforeseen circumstances, U.S. farm policy seeks to address many of these issues and questions when cooler heads can prevail and before a crisis gets out of control. U.S. farm policy is designed to respond to economic challenges even if we don’t exactly know what the major factor or factors that bring on those challenges might be such drought, market collapse, trade disputes or natural disasters that disrupt transportation of farm products to market. The economic challenge of $1.60 corn to a family farmer is pretty much the same regardless of the circumstances that brings that price on. So when the government response to that situation is also pretty much predictable for individual farmers, it goes a long way toward stabilizing the expectations of family farmers and alleviating the final ingredient of widespread economic panic, government indecision.

Farm Bills and U.S. farm policy are obviously not perfect. For one thing, Grange policy clearly articulates that far too many U.S. family farmers and ranchers who do not produce “program crops” (and the rural communities that rely on their spending to keep their local economy moving) are not directly covered by the counter cyclical, stimulus benefits of U.S. farm programs. But farmers, almost uniquely among other major economic segments of U.S. society have consistently held their elected officials accountable for legislative programs that make at least some attempt to anticipate what might go wrong with their industry and to put in place contingency plans through new pieces of legislation that are openly and publicly debated and discussed at regular intervals, so that while the circumstances that lead to economic hardship in farm country may not always be fully anticipated, the government’s response can be anticipated and the public’s trust in their government is maintained. It might not be such a bad idea if this kind of open, transparent, and deliberative legislative public policy process was regularly utilized to address the economic challenges facing other major segments of our nation’s economy.