Tom Harkin: “The 1996 farm bill is not the Ten Commandments. It was not written in stone for all time. We have a crisis impending on…”

“The 1996 farm bill is not the Ten Commandments. It was not written in stone for all time. We have a crisis impending on us in agriculture. The bottom is falling out. Prices are going down every day. Are we so stuck in our ways here, are we so wedded to some ideology imprinted in the 1996 farm bill, that we cannot respond? "Oh, I am sorry. We see you are losing your farms. We see the prices going down. But, I am sorry, we passed a bill here 3 years ago and we cannot touch it." Again, we are not really opening up the farm bill. We are simply making one minor change. Loan rates were capped in the 1996 farm bill-- capped, frozen; they are still there. We are not introducing something new into agricultural legislation. It is simply that a decision was made to cap them.”