Saturday, September 23, 2000
Tobacco group offers surplus to avoid cuts
The Associated Press
LEXINGTON — The Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association will sell about 60 million pounds of surplus leaf in an effort to avoid further cuts in the amount of tobacco that farmers can sell.
The co-op took bids on all the tobacco in its surplus pool and accepted those that would amount to a 35 percent discount or less, said Danny McKinney, the co-op's director. Accepting deeper discounts would have meant passing significant cuts along to farmers, he said.
“We were bid anything from full price to an 89 percent discount, with the average being about 60 percent,” he said.
A sister organization in Tennessee, the Burley Stabilization Board, will also sell about 9 million pounds of surplus.
The amount of burley tobacco farmers can sell each year, known as the quota, is based on a formula that considers how much is stockpiled, how much cigarette companies intend to buy and how much is exported.
If none of the other variables changes much, the sale means next year's quota will likely hold steady at 169 million pounds, McKinney said.
Kentucky Agriculture Commissioner Billy Ray Smith said the sale of pool stocks was the “best news Kentucky tobacco growers have had in a long time.” He said he hoped it would prevent additional quota cuts.
“This news, coupled with the overall high quality of the 2000 crop, will give tobacco growing families a reason to smile for a change,” Mr. Smith said in a statement Friday.
Kentucky farmers have endured three years of deep quota cuts, selling only about a third of the tobacco this year that they sold in 1997.
Farmers have been lobbying to have the 1999 drought-stricken crop declared a disaster and have forgiven those federal loans used to buy the crop at the USDA-mandated price.
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Tobacco group offers surplus to avoid cuts
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