Farm bill to put emphasis on paying farmers to go 'green'

By JAMES W. BROSNAN
Scripps Howard News Service
July 23, 2001
from http://www.knoxstudio.com/shns/story.cfm?pk=FARMBILL-07-23-01&cat=WW

WASHINGTON - Environmentalists like it. Hunters like it. And farmers like it, too, up to a point.

The "it" is conservation, and the word is being used a lot as the House and Senate agriculture committees start rewriting the 1996 farm bill.

For years conservation programs were largely seen as a way to combat soil erosion and boost prices by setting aside acres. Now they're being sold as a way to protect the environment and build habitat for wildlife.

"This is a more politically correct way," said Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss. "The farmers love it."

Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., another member of the Agriculture Committee, said, "You're taking marginal land out of production, which is increasing the environmental value of the land. Not only that, but you're also helping the surrounding land. And it's entirely voluntary."

This year the U.S. Department of Agriculture is projected to spend more than $2 billion to pay farmers not to plant crops on highly erodible lands, convert cropland back to swamps or plant buffer strips of trees and ground cover along streams.

The largest program is the Conservation Reserve, which paid farmers more than $1.4 billion last year to idle 31 million acres of land.

Farmers also can apply for USDA funds to help with pollution control measures, such as manure lagoons, or to develop wildlife habitat.

The House Agriculture Committee leadership is promising a boost of 75 percent for these conservation programs over the next 10 years in the outline of a farm bill being considered. Environmental groups vow to push for even more.

Conservation is going to be "a central part of the bill," says Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, D-Iowa. He is putting together a plan that would vary payments to farmers based on their level of conservation practices.

Lobbyists for environmental and farm groups point to five reasons for the support behind conservation spending:

- Demand vs. money. There is a backlog of unfilled requests for most of USDA's conservation programs. According to a new report by Environmental Defense, USDA has had to turn down 3,000 landowners who offered to enroll 500,000 acres in the Wetlands Reserve. And fewer than 20,000 of the 75,000 farmers who sought funding to help control pollution received any help last year.

- Regional politics. Commodity subsidies are concentrated in the corn-, wheat-, cotton- and rice-growing states of the Midwest and the South. Conservation spending is a way to spread payments to New England dairy farmers, California fruit and vegetable growers and livestock producers everywhere.

- "Green Box" vs. "Amber Box." Under the rules of the World Trade Organization, countries are limited to how much they can subsidize producers. Payments meant to boost farm income to make up for low prices go into the limited "Amber Box." But money spent on conservation, even in direct payments to farmers, goes into the unlimited "Green Box."

- Louder sportsmen. Hunters and fishermen and the businesses that rely on them are having an influence. For instance, Mississippi and Tennessee lawmakers hear that spending more to convert farmland to wildlife habitat will help restore the Mid-South quail population.

- Smarter greens. Frustrated in their attempts to control farm runoff, environmentalists now see USDA as the source of funds to pay farmers to be "green."

"There's not a great deal of political will to regulate farmers, and administratively it's very difficult to regulate farmers," said Scott Faber, an attorney with Environmental Defense. "So incentives to reward farmers who clean up rivers and save species or preserve open spaces are increasingly seen by environmental groups as the only real hope of making progress on some of the environmental issues."

The biggest problem conservation backers face is from the commodity lobbies that favor conservation spending only if enough is allotted to subsidies.

"We cannot help but to take a first-things-first approach," said Robert Echols, president of Hohenberg Brothers Co. in Cordova and chairman of the National Cotton Council.