By John Lyon
Arkansas News Bureau

LITTLE ROCK — A recent spate of editorials in the national press knocking U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s efforts to secure $1.5 billion in disaster aid for farmers shows how the East Coast media misunderstands the importance of agriculture, Lincoln said today.

“It’s certainly nothing new for the East Coast newspapers to be extremely critical of agricultural support, that’s for sure,” Lincoln said in an interview with the Arkansas News Bureau. “I think it’s just another example of how those folks truly, I don’t think, understand production agriculture and how important it is to our economy and how important is to feeding the world.”

Lincoln, who chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee, won a fight in July to include $1.5 billion in agricultural disaster aid in a bill to aid small businesses, but Republican senators voted to block the bill. The Obama administration, which supported the small-business bill, promised to provide the disaster aid administratively in exchange for Lincoln agreeing to drop the provision from the bill.

In the past week, The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have all published editorials criticizing the aid package, which is aimed at helping farmers cope with losses caused by natural disasters.

Critics say the aid package is an end run around the Supplemental Revenue Assistance Payments, or SURE, program, which was included in the 2008 Farm Bill. The program sought to reform farm subsidies by offering formula-based payments to farmers who signed up for federally subsidized crop insurance.

“We’ve not had a single farmer sign up for this program in Arkansas because it’s not effective for the crops that we grow and how we grow them,” Lincoln said. “It’s very similar in other Southern states.”

Lincoln said Arkansas farmers’ crops are capital-intensive.

“In terms of the capital investment that they have to make through this type of program, the way that it’s designed, it’s just cost-prohibitive,” she said.

Another complaint is that most of the money will go to the wealthiest farmers. Lincoln said the payments follow production.

“If you have a large farm, you had a large loss, which means you’re going to have a large assistance. You may not have taken out a $5 million loan, you may have taken out a $10 million loan, because you plant more acreage,” she said.

One editorial asserted that Lincoln wants the money to come from a part of the budget that provides food for needy children. Lincoln said a source has not yet been found for the funding, but no money will come from nutrition programs.

The editorial writers saw election-year politics behind the aid package. Lincoln is facing a tough election challenge from Republican U.S. Rep. John Boozman.

“This looks to us like a save-Blanche-Lincoln program rather than a save-the-farmer program,” The New York Times said.

“That’s just crazy,” Lincoln said. “It’s not for me, and it’s not just Arkansas. There’s plenty of states across this country that need assistance.”

Boozman, who leads Lincoln in most polls, has also criticized the aid package and questioned whether the Obama administration is trying to bail Lincoln out in a tough election year.

But Jay Barth, a political science professor at Hendrix College, said this is one case where negative press could actually help Lincoln.

“She can use it to say, ‘I was looking out for Arkansas even though people in Washington didn’t always agree with me,’” Barth said.