Mike Conaway: “I'm going to oppose my good friend from Arizona's amendment. He tried this in the CR 1 and lost this vote. This is a bad…”

“I'm going to oppose my good friend from Arizona's amendment. He tried this in the CR 1 and lost this vote. This is a bad way to attack this policy. Quite frankly, the Ag Committee did a good-faith effort in addressing what we thought were the issues in 2008 with a farm bill by doing away with Step Two and other programs. Quite frankly, though, the Brazilians won't lay out for us exactly what it is about our policies that they don't like. We would be happy for the gentleman to elucidate that for us, if he can describe exactly what those policies are. It's not the countercyclical payments; it's not the marketing loan payments. It's other things that we've been trying to fix, and we will attempt again to fix those in 2012. This safety net that he attacks with a meat cleaver instead of a scalpel is important to production agriculture in this country. As we've said over and over these microphones the last 3 days, America has always had an ag policy that attempts to put a safety net under production agriculture. We enjoy the safest, most abundant, cheapest food and fiber supply in the world because of the hard work, the sweat equity, and the risk- taking of the American ag producer. They rely on this safety net that is intricate, it's complicated, it's interwoven, and it works. We understand in 2012 we will have far fewer resources with which to work that safety net.…”