Farmers propose guarantees on tobacco settlement
Associated Press

WASHINGTON Tobacco farmers are seeking $7 billion in economic
protection and requirements that cigarette companies buy a certain
amount of U.S. leaf in the proposed tobacco settlement.

The growers also want assurances of government compensation for losses
in land value and other property if future regulations cause tobacco use to
plummet, according to an eightpoint plan developed by farm organizations and
obtained by The Associated Press.

``We're after what the companies got: stability,'' said Tim Cansler,
national affairs director for the Kentucky Farm Bureau Federation. ``The
implications of this negotiated settlement very much put us into a new
light.''
The proposed $368 billion settlement of healthrelated tobacco
lawsuits negotiated by the cigarette companies and 40 state attorneys general
makes no mention of the impact on America's estimated 124,000 tobacco farms.
Tobacco is the nation's sixthlargest cash crop.

On Thursday in Raleigh, N.C., officials from tobaccostate farm bureaus,
farmer cooperatives and others reached consensus on a plan now being
circulated in Congress. The document represents the first time tobacco
growers have put their demands in writing, although they cautioned the
plan is subject to change.

The plan calls for 2 percent of the settlement roughly $7 billion
from the tobacco companies to be set aside for the ``economic benefit'' of
tobacco growers. That could include price supports or possibly buyouts of
farmers who want to quit the tobacco business.

Health groups encourage assistance to get farmers out of tobacco, but
growers are reluctant because tobacco is so lucrative. It would take 747 acres
of corn to produce the same income as 50 acres of tobacco, and many
tobacco farmers do not have the extra land.

In addition, overseas markets are booming, giving farmers added
incentive to stick with the crop. ``Our tobacco farmers want to continue
to grow the crop,'' Cansler said.

The growers want a guarantee that each year cigarette makers will buy 90
percent of their historic levels of the two main kinds of tobacco:
fluecured and burley leaf. That is so cigarette makers do not buy more
cheaper foreigngrown tobacco.

President Clinton and Republican leaders already have begun discussing
the pact's potential effects on farmers, who were invisible in earlier
negotiations. They could provide attractive cover for politicians who are
troubled by a settlement that benefits big corporations.

``We don't have much sympathy for the tobacco companies, but we do have
real sympathy for the family farmers who have been growing this crop for
generations,'' Bruce Reed, a top Clinton aide, said this week.

The farmers' proposal would eliminate use of reconstituted tobacco
essentially, cheap floor sweepings from warehouses in cigarettes and
clarify that growers would be immune from any healthrelated lawsuits.

If future government rules, such as FDA curbs on the amount of nicotine
in cigarettes, trigger steep declines in tobacco use, the growers want the
government to enable them to ``cash out.''

In the case of fluecured tobacco, for example, the government would
give growers a onetime payment of $14 a pound for their farm's usual
tobacco production and compensate them for any declines in property values.