President Barack Obama signed a new Farm Bill into law

this is the Agriculture Report.

President Barack Obama signed a new Farm Bill

into law this month.

Under the legislation,

the federal government will no longer

guarantee automatic payments to farmers.

Critics say the law replaces the old payment system

with new assistance

that may violate international trade rules.

The law also includes changes in how the United States

helps hungry people around the world.

From VOA Learning English,

The new Farm Bill ended $5 billion a year

in automatic payments to farmers.

The president said the law sends a message to people

who have abused the system.

"This bill helps to clamp down on loopholes

that allowed people to receive benefits year after year

whether they were planting crops or not.

And it saves taxpayers hard-earned dollars

by making sure that we only support farmers

when disaster strikes or prices drop," the president said.

The new legislation expands programs

that protect farmers from bad weather or low crop prices.

It raises the lowest price growers will be paid for some crops.

And it offers a taxpayer-supported insurance program to farmers,

the program guarantees that their wages

do not drop much from year to year.

Dan Sumner is an economist with the University of California, Davis.

He told VOA on Skype that the new Farm Bill could cause problems.

"That's the kind of assurances that the U.S. government

is willing to provide that most farmers in the world,

in fact, don't have access to," he said.

He adds that with the help of the government,

American farmers can produce and export more crops,

but he warns that could hurt crop prices.

"That drives down world prices and it's a little tougher

for farmers in developing countries to compete with that," Sumner said.

U.S. government subsidies pushed down

world cotton prices in the early 2000s,

the United States lost an international trade dispute over those payments.

Dan Sumner says the new Farm Bill could re-open that dispute.

But groups representing growers say

trade rules do let governments

pay a limited amount of subsidies to farmers.

Dale Moore is the chief of policy at one of those groups

- the American Farm Bureau Federation.

"We're pretty confident that it would take an extremely bad situation

for us to even come close to violating those particular limits,

something the United States hasn't come close to in years," said Dale Moore.

Other changes in the Bill should help food aid

get to more needy people around the world.

Aid groups will be able to spend more of the assistance they receive

to buy food from markets near where it will be used,

earlier rules forced aid groups to buy food from American farmers.

Eric Munoz works for the aid group Oxfam America.

"Not only will that save money,

but it will help reach people faster.

The actual program of buying locally is a much quicker response

than buying food from the United States and shipping it," said Eric Munoz.

He told VOA on Skype that with the same amount of money,

help can now reach more hungry people.

And that's the Agriculture Report.