The Real Threat from the Farm Bill"More troubling than the administration’s indifference, however, is its active support for new programs to conserve “environmentally sensitive” farmland. “One important aspect in both (the House and Senate) farm bills is that substantially more money is allocated for conservation,” Veneman said at a Modesto, California event. “The administration will push for more money to address environmental concerns on working farmlands, not just conservation programs that take land out of production.” The administration wants the farm bill to not only set the nation’s food production levels, but dictate how private land is used to reach those quotas as well.
The Senate farm bill devotes $21.3 billion towards new environmental conservation programs and $350 million a year for the “Farmland Protection Program,” which buys development rights to land to prevent citizens and private businesses from using the land as they see fit. The House bill provides $16 billion for conservation and $50 million a year to confiscate property.
Conservation programs are particularly threatening because they undermine property rights and create new dependency on federal aid. While explicit economic intervention to benefit producers of commodities such as corn, wheat, soybeans, and cotton may violate international trade agreements, new environmental conservation programs do not. Thus, tying federal funding to environmental mandates is a way to subsidize farmers while not instigating an international trade war.
In the past, Congress supported price levels by rewarding farmers for not using land to produce food, but new conservation programs would pay farmers to preserve soil, protect wetlands and aquifers, preserve wildlife habitats, and reduce runoff of fertilizers and manure. Farmers do many of these things already and would be happy to do the others if the price is right.
As environmental groups are well aware, farmers are “stewards of half of the country’s surface area.” The farm bill would give extreme environmentalists control of this land and supplant private property rights with federal mandates. The agriculture industry is eager to cede this control if it results in more lavish subsidies, which makes it difficult to confront federalization, since the very property owners whose rights are being trammeled are complicit in the arrangement.
But the threat to private property and agriculture markets is obvious. A new round of commodity subsides will almost certainly draw retaliation from America’s trading partners, whether or not the World Trade Organization endorses such action. The most heavily subsidized commodities are also the ones “dumped” in international markets. The United States exports one-third of its soybeans, 20 percent of its corn, half its wheat, and 60 percent of its cotton. This in the face of a strong dollar that has depressed other American exports.
As the farm bill demonstrates, if explicit subsidies lead to a trade war, an eager coalition of environmentalists and agribusiness is in place to replace that assistance with money for conservation. This would push domestic agricultural production even further from anything that resembles a market economy and empower the government to set commodity prices, production levels, and determine how land is used. The government would make every major decision relating to food procurement and the use of farmland.
Since passage of the Rural Development Program in 1955, the government has dominated the economics of agricultural production through subsidies, crop insurance, and below-market interest rate loans, but the resources used to produce food has remained in private hands. This farm bill would usher in a new era of agricultural policy by ceding control over the factors of production – most importantly, the land itself – to government control and manipulation.
In their search for more resources from the government, many agriculturalists have willingly accepted the changing character of conservation subsidies, but this new revenue will come at price. As the billions of dollars in direct subsidies for “proper” land management add up, it will not be long before environmentalists demand that farmers not only adhere to their mandates, but hand over their land as well."