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 n The
Wizard of Oz, after Dorothy's house falls on the Wicked Witch
of the East, the Munchkin Coroner declares to much celebration that
the witch is "not only merely dead, she's really most sincerely
dead." Alas, the same cannot be said from some other wickedness
from the east, the Northeast Interstate Dairy Compact.
The NEIDC was
a provision of the 1996 farm bill that allowed a panel of state
bureaucrats and farmers to unilaterally set the price that milk
bottlers in New England had to pay for milk off the farm. All in
all, the compact cost consumers in the northeast more than $130
million in higher retail milk prices.
The NEIDC expired
on September 30, with the fiscal year. But it seems, unlike the
Wicked Witch of the East, the compact is only merely dead. Indeed,
one Capitol Hill source gives the compact a "25 percent chance"
of being reinstated during the on-going conference committee to
reconcile the House and Senate farm bills.
While 25-percent
odds may be a bad bet in Atlantic City, the fact that anyone in
Washington would consider seriously — on or off the record
— that the NEIDC has any chance whatsoever of making a comeback
boggles the mind. Legislation to reauthorize the NEIDC was not included
in either the House or the Senate farm bill. And, according to a
Library of Congress primer on the legislative process, "a subject
not dealt with in either the House or the Senate version" of
a bill may not be added in conference deliberations.
Legislative
odds makers who foresee a NEDIC comeback can't be faulted for being
realists, however. After all, the original NEIDC was not in either
the House or Senate farm bill back in 1996, the last time Congress
undertook a comprehensive rewrite of our nation's agriculture policies,
but it emerged from the House-Senate conference nonetheless.
The original
NEDIC was intended to last 36 months; instead it lasted 65 months.
It was extended in large part because Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords
had convinced the Republican Senate leadership he needed to deliver
an NEIDC extension in order to be reelected and prevent the Senate
from falling into Democratic control. How ironic.
Now there is
threat from supporters, and speculation from observers, that the
NEDIC might be brought back to life in the farm-bill conference
committee. Enough so that more than 15 industry groups are starting
to lobby lawmakers to "reject efforts that would bring back,
and possibly expand the use of interstate dairy compacts."
According to a letter sent to Capitol Hill by the groups —
ranging from the Chocolate Manufacturers to the Independent Bakers
Association to the Consumer Federation of America — dairy compacts
"would enable a totally arbitrary and higher milk price to
be set, region by region, disrupting the free flow of milk and milk
products at competitive prices. The failure of the Northeast Compact
experiment makes revisiting the idea impossible to justify."
Impossible
to justify, yes. But alas, not impossible to imagine.
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