Market Oriented Revenue Assistance for Farmers: A Case Study of the United State’s ACRE Program

Purpose - Intense debate is occurring over support for farmers in Korea, specifically on the justification, policy design, and equality issues of the farm support programs. Given this debate, a new type of farm program in the US, a market flexible revenue program(the Average Crop Revenue Election, ACRE), is examined. ACRE stands in contrast to traditional programs that tie payments to price and have parameters that are fixed or change only infrequently. Research design, data, and methodology - Based on the ACRE program formulas, the potential payments are estimated by crop year, program crop and geographical area using the FSA acreage and payment rate data. Results - If all US farm program acres were in ACRE over the 2009-2013 crop years, payments would have totaled $7.95 billion or 1.2 percent of average market receipts for US crops. Enacting ACRE as a revenue program instead of a similarly-structured price-only program increased payments by $1.75 billion or 28 percent. Conclusions - Potential payments by ACRE largely reflected the distribution of the value of production across the program crops eligible for ACRE as well as across state geographical areas. If program parameters can be made acceptable and if data availability issues can be addressed, market flexible revenue programs offer a farm policy option that can address many of the concerns that have arisen over farm policy in Korea.