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“We end, I
think, at what might be called the standard paradox of the
twentieth century; our tools are better than we are, and grow
faster than we do. They suffice to crack the atom, to command
the tides. But they do not suffice for the oldest task in
history; to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.”
~Aldo Leopold,
“A Sand County Almanac”
In Iowa there is an old saying that corn and hogs go together
like ice cream and kids. Growing up in the Midwest, I could
see this adage illustrated on the Iowa countryside as my family
drove along the rolling county highways. The only landmarks
interrupting the dizzying rows of corn were farmhouses, dirt
hog lots and small farrowing huts scattered around pastures.
More recently the view from the car window has changed, as
the predominance of small- and medium-sized diversified farms
has given way to an industry increasingly characterized by
highly specialized, large operations run by a dwindling number
of farmers.
Besides displacing other farmers in their area, these farms
have received increased media attention for the water and
air pollution attributed to their sizeable lagoons of manure
wastes. In short, the scale these farms are operating at exceeds
the land’s capacity to recycle the nutrients produced,
leaving the excess to contaminate nearby drinking water and
ecosystems as far away as the Gulf of Mexico.
A leading cause of this development on Iowa farms and elsewhere
is the current structure of commodity payment programs. These
are taxpayer dollars paid to corn, wheat, soybean, cotton,
and rice growers according to the land’s historical
base acres and yields. On Capitol Hill last Wednesday, the
Chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, Senator Saxby
Chambliss (R-GA) chose to support these commodity payment
programs at the expense of food stamps and the environment
during his announced strategy for cutting the food-and-agriculture
budget as required by the budget Congress passed this spring
(called Budget Reconciliation).
Under this current proposal, hugely disproportionate cuts
will come from conservation programs, though they make up
a comparably miniscule fraction of the overall budget. In
particular, Chambliss’ proposal targets the Conservation
Security Program (CSP), a policy that rewards farmers and
ranchers for achieving environmental benefits on their land
through conservation practices. The current proposal would
virtually gut CSP, allowing it to make up 27 percent of the
total reconciliation cuts though it represents less than 1
percent of the total Farm Bill mandatory spending.
While originally designed during the Depression to support
small- and medium-sized family farmers, commodity payments
have more recently contributed to their decline. Of the 33
percent of farmers who receive commodity payments, the top
10 percent receive more than 70 percent of the allocations.
The largest payments, some of which are in excess of $1 million,
not only allow these recipients to increase the scale of their
operations, they are capitalized into land values which benefit
the largest landowners most while detrimentally impacting
renters, who make up 40 percent of all U.S. farm operators.
With a growing number of family farmers getting pushed out
of their livelihoods because of prohibitive land and rent
prices, as well as increased competition with industrialized
mega-farms, Budget Reconciliation presents a timely opportunity
to make changes to our outdated and dysfunctional commodity
payment programs.
Payment limitations are part of the Rural America Preservation
Act of 2005 (S. 385), a bipartisan bill that offers a palatable
solution to our budgetary situation. Payment limitations could
produce much of the needed savings by lowering the payment
caps on commodity program subsidies from $360,000 to $250,000
for individual recipients and closing loopholes that allow
recipients to legally evade the $360,000 cap. Payment limitations
are not an elimination of subsidies; rather, they are a way
to discipline the $10 billion-$20 billion dollar a year commodity
programs in a way that targets only those farmers already
reaping well over $250,000 from the government. The savings
from payment limitations could ease the pressure on food stamps
and conservation programs while also preserving rural communities
and keeping family farmers on their land by reducing land-price
inflation. Utilizing payment limitations is clearly a more
equitable and rational way to produce the needed budget savings.
We face crucial decisions in the way to proceed with our
farming programs. The
CSP represents a positive example of an alternative direction
in agriculture. Unlike any other federal program, the CSP
payments are available to all farmers and ranchers who develop
a plan to protect resources of concern. We have hardly begun
to see how this new program, passed in the 2002 Farm Bill,
can flourish if implemented and funded adequately so that
farmers can actually take advantage of it. Environmental and
energy costs, strengthening hurricane storms, and pressure
from our World Trade Organization (WTO) trading partners are
impacting and being influenced by the way we produce food
in the United States. The CSP seeks to achieve energy conservation
and riparian protection, and is also accepted by the WTO for
its non-trade-distorting status. Perhaps most importantly,
the CSP is supported by a growing number of consumers who
are demanding food that is produced by farmers taking concrete
steps to ensure the sustainability of the land for future
generations.
The window and view from it are still open. Tell your senators
to implement
payment limitations and save the CSP.
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