Senior Dem fears 'supercommittee' cuts to farm programs

House Agriculture Committee ranking member Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) said last week that he fears the new congressional "supercommittee" tasked with finding $1.5 trillion in spending cuts will take a big bite out of agriculture programs by the end of the year.

Peterson said congressional leaders have already asked the committees what could be cut, and said there is discussion of cutting more proportionally from agriculture than from other programs.

"The cuts that they’ve been talking about, they're talking three times as much as cuts in agriculture as they are in other areas, which I am not going to go along with,” Peterson said, as reported by The Iowa Independent.

Peterson said his understanding is that the supercommittee will decide on a set of numbers that each committee has to work with, and then the committees will make recommendations on how best to meet that target. "That's as much as I know about the process, and that may or may not be right," he said.

Peterson said he is hopeful that Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) or Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) can be appointed to the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction to represent agricultural interests. He added that he is "pretty well-resigned" to the idea that House members of the committee will have minimal connection to agriculture.

Under the debt-ceiling agreement passed last week, members of the supercommittee must be named by Aug. 16. If they don't reach an agreement by the end of the year, automatic spending cuts would be made.

Peterson said failure to reach a deal might be best for agriculture, since it could spread cuts more equally across a range of programs.