{"id":30221,"date":"2014-06-17T09:45:40","date_gmt":"2014-06-17T13:45:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sustainableagriculture.net\/?p=30221"},"modified":"2016-06-23T15:43:47","modified_gmt":"2016-06-23T19:43:47","slug":"what-is-the-gipsa-rider","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sustainableagriculture.net\/blog\/what-is-the-gipsa-rider\/","title":{"rendered":"What is the \u201cGIPSA Rider\u201d and why is the House once again attacking farmers\u2019 rights?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ed. Note (April 21, 2016)<\/em>:\u00a0 On Tuesday April 19, 2016, the House Appropriations Committee<\/a>\u00a0convened to debate and pass their FY 2017 House Agriculture Appropriations bill<\/a>.\u00a0This bill funds the major programs and functions of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Perhaps most concerning of the riders passed, was the “GIPSA Rider”, introduced<\/a> by Representative Andy Harris <\/a>(R-MD), which\u00a0prohibits USDA from protecting poultry, hog, and cattle farmers against anticompetitive, deceptive, fraudulent, retaliatory and other abusive business practices by multi-national meat processing companies. The Senate’s<\/a> appropriations bill was passed without the inclusion of the rider.\u00a0NSAC and our members will continue to fight<\/a> to keep\u00a0this\u00a0deleterious\u00a0rider from the final, joint appropriations bill.\u00a0<\/em>Though the following\u00a0post was originally published in 2014, all of the background information is still relevant, and the same obstructionist methods have been used\u00a0in 2016 \u00a0to weaken farmers’ rights and protections.<\/em><\/p>\n

With the annual Congressional appropriations cycle underway, there has once again been a lot of talk in Congress about the so-called \u201cGIPSA rider.\u201d\u00a0 The GIPSA rider refers to a legislative provision tacked onto the annual agriculture funding bill.\u00a0 In this case the rider is a package of policies that severely limits USDA\u2019s ability to protect farmers\u2019 basic rights — like the right to free speech or freedom of association — in their dealings with large meatpacking and poultry companies.<\/p>\n

The big picture issue is that a small handful of huge meat and poultry companies have been able to use their market power to get away with the fraudulent, deceptive, and anti-competitive and abusive practices that have allowed them to profit at the expense of small, independent farmers for years.\u00a0 To address this problem, the 2008 Farm Bill required USDA to write regulations, under the Packers and Stockyards Act<\/a>, to provide basic protections for farmers who do business with these companies.\u00a0 But when USDA tried to write the regulations, the meat and poultry companies launched a full -scale attack to get Congress to prevent USDA from finalizing those farmer protections.<\/p>\n

This effort by some in Congress to use the annual appropriations process to stop USDA\u2019s efforts to provide protections for livestock and poultry farmers is called the \u201cGIPSA rider,\u201d which is a reference to USDA\u2019s Grain Inspection Packers and Stockyards Agency <\/a>(GIPSA), the agency in charge of enforcing the Packers and Stockyards Act.<\/p>\n

Below we provide some of the basic background on this issue and detail an amendment pending in the House of Representatives in support of farmers and fair practices.\u00a0 In a second post,<\/a> we provide additional details on the market competition and contract reform rules that the GIPSA rider is attempting to forestall.<\/p>\n

Background in Brief<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Packers and Stockyards Act is the primary law governing livestock and poultry markets.\u00a0 The goal of the Packers and Stockyards Act — which became law way back in 1921 — is to make livestock and poultry markets open, transparent, and competitive and to protect farmers and ranchers from fraudulent, deceptive and abusive practices in their dealings with the meat industry.<\/p>\n

The 2008 Farm Bill directed USDA to issue regulations to help define and enforce the Packers and Stockyards Act.\u00a0 Though the law has been on the books for decades, it has never gone through the rulemaking process that is normally part of the basic implementation of any statute.\u00a0 The lack of rules has made it very difficult over the years to enforce key portions of the Act.<\/p>\n

Hence, the corrective action that Congress took in the 2008 Farm Bill was critical and long overdue.\u00a0 It held out the promise of having clear ground rules that are necessary to prevent unfair, discriminatory, and deceptive practices within the livestock and poultry industries.<\/p>\n

USDA issued the proposed rules<\/a> in 2010.\u00a0 To date, however, only a very few of those proposed rules have been finalized.\u00a0 The delay, in large part, has been due to the riders attached to the annual appropriations bills ever since the proposed rules came out.\u00a0 In essence, the big meat and poultry companies have used the backdoor approach of annual riders on the appropriations bills to reverse the decision made in the 2008 Farm Bill.<\/p>\n

The Appropriations Committees do not have jurisdiction over policy, but only over spending.\u00a0 Hence, their job is to determine the annual funding level for GIPSA and its Packers and Stockyards Program, but not to determine what the policies are.\u00a0 The policy job is the responsibility of the Agriculture Committees.<\/p>\n

In the lead up to what became the 2014 Farm Bill, the House Agriculture Committee passed a provision that would have repealed the 2008 Farm Bill section of the Packers and Stockyards Act, prevented any of the proposed rules from being finalized, forced the rescission of most of the rules that have already been finalized, and directed GIPSA to stop taking any action to enforce the law.\u00a0 Thankfully, this complete giveaway to the big meat and poultry companies was rejected in the House-Senate conference on the farm bill<\/a> and therefore there is no repeal of the 2008 provision or interference with USDA\u2019s job to enforce the law.<\/p>\n

When Congress rejected the gutting of the Packers and Stockyards Act in the Farm Bill, that should have been the end of it.\u00a0 The authorizers have spoken, and the issue should not come up again until the next consideration of the Farm Bill in 2018.\u00a0 But such was not the case.\u00a0 The big companies went right back to work and convinced the House Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee to put the rider back in play.\u00a0 Senate appropriators did not include the rider in their bill.\u00a0 Now both the House and Senate versions of the bill are headed for floor action.<\/p>\n

With the floor debate over the agriculture funding bills for Fiscal Year 2015 looming before us, the House of Representatives sits poised to vote on this very policy that will prevent USDA from finalizing several commonsense rules that aim to protect the rights of farmers.\u00a0 Worse, the so-called \u201cGIPSA rider\u201d would rescind rules that have already been finalized.\u00a0 First, however, the full House will have a chance to vote on an amendment to reduce the impact of the rider.<\/p>\n

Attempt to Beat Back the House Rider<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Although the agriculture spending bill (HR 4800) that is on its way to the House floor sometime this summer contains the awful GIPSA rider that will once again limit USDA\u2019s ability to protect farmers rights, there is a glimmer of hope that Congress will finally start to chip away at these anti-farmer attempts.<\/p>\n

Representative Chellie Pingree (D-ME) has introduced an amendment that will remove two of the most harmful provisions from the rider, allowing USDA to finalize a portion of these common sense rules.<\/p>\n

So, what would the Pingree Free Speech and Transparency Amendment do?<\/p>\n

It would strike the House language that prevents USDA from finalizing two important rules to ensure farmers have the right to free speech and transparency in how their pay is calculated.<\/p>\n