Statement of Mark Shaffer, Defenders of Wildlife Senior Vice President for Programs, on Farm Bill Consideration in Senate

Defenders of Wildlife
Wednesday, 8 May 2002

The Farm Security and Rural Re-investment Act of 2002 as passed by the House of Representatives on May 2 is neither economically nor environmentally sustainable.

Later this week, the Senate will likely pass this compromise legislation that will supposedly structure farm and food policy in the United States for the next six years. We believe that this bill is so badly out of balance that it will topple of its own weight long before then. It is cold comfort that we will likely face a major rewrite of basic farm legislation – and with it a chance to address again this bill's dramatic under-emphasis on conservation and unconscionable lack of real payment limits – well before the year 2008.

Several Congressmen and Senators, even the Administration at one point early on, have been intensely critical of the fact that this farm bill will drive new agricultural subsidy levels to record heights, costing taxpayers an estimated $130 billion over the next 10 years, aiding in the demise of small and medium sized agricultural operations and consolidation of the agricultural industry, alienating trading partners and closing our markets to poor and developing countries, and likely harming our nation's soil, water, and wildlife resources. While the growth in conservation funding and programs is of some benefit in this farm bill, especially the addition of Senator Harkin's Conservation Security Program, these gains easily could be erased by perverse incentives to open native grasslands and other lands to crop production.

Instead of breaking the cycle of overproduction and low prices that forces farmers to expand production and destroy shrinking wildlife habitat, this bill pushes the accelerator to the floor in a race to see whom will be bankrupted first: farmers, taxpayers, or our dwindling wildlife habitat.

This farm bill represents at least three lost opportunities to correct for past failed agricultural policies. The first lost opportunity was the failure to balance out unlimited income subsidies with environmental protections. The defeat of the Durbin amendment which would have disallowed payments to producers who plowed-up restored or native grass lands, eliminated a major restraint to increasing land in production and compromising recent gains in stemming soil erosion, and improving water quality and wildlife habitat.

While the dollar amount of conservation spending has grown, it has actually decreased as a percentage of the overall agricultural budget. Furthermore, nearly 40% of the increase in conservation spending is really a sewage subsidy for livestock producers to clean-up water pollution resulting from their operations. Most of these producers will be large concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO's). There are real equity issues here. At the last minute, funding to assess and evaluate conservation programs over the next six years, ostensibly to make them more effective and efficient, was eliminated.

The farm bill also misses an opportunity to develop sound federal policy for meeting agricultural risk and providing small and medium farmers an appropriate safety net. The safety net has become a black hole into which taxpayers will pour subsidies for larger producers because of the lack of effective limits on payments. Increased subsidies will lead to overproduction of crops and inflation of land rents, which will raise costs for independent producers who do not own land.

Those small and medium sized producers who cannot afford to rent land will go out of business, leading to increased consolidation in agricultural production and the further decline of rural communities.

Finally, the bill misses the chance to establish a rational basis for U.S. agricultural trade and development policy. In a WTO dominated era, high levels of subsidies for domestic agricultural production will only compromise the global competitiveness of U. S. agriculture as well as undermine the development assistance we provide to poorer countries, especially those in Africa. We expect this new farm bill will have to be redone long before its authorization expires based on trade issues alone. We suspect that line of reasoning is what led the Bush administration to oppose passage of the subsidy-laden House version of the bill last summer. Maybe when this train wreck happens, wiser heads will prevail and American farm policy can be put on the right track toward ecological and economic sustainability.

For more information, or to contact Defenders of Wildlife, see their website at: www.defenders.org