Not much direct Walz news so far today, though Sean wraps up some recent coverage and puts a bow on it over at MnPublius in a post called Tim Walz Continues to Be Awesome. In addition to the 22 public meetings Walz has conducted since being sworn in (news accounts mention that there were 18 before the 4 additional meetings held on Thursday and Friday), we like to remind our readers about Walz's work in DC, especially that on veterans' issues.
Congratulations to one of our favorite pesky people: 2007 WSU grad and blogger Jason Bauman passed his nursing boards. We look forward to reading what he has to write about health care issues and everything else.
Farm Bill
[Update] The Center for Rural Affairs' Dan Owens sends a letter to the Bemidji paper urging Coleman to support the Grassley-Dorgan bill in the Senate [/end update].
The Mankato Free Press reports that the corn in Southern Minnesota is "towering" at ten feet, one inches tall, so we'll look at the Farm Bill again today. We've been searching for articles that expand on CFRA staffer Dan Owens' analysis of one "reform" proposal. Still looking, but the search yields some interesting reads.
Like the CFRA, we favor legislation containing strong agricultural market competition and rural development language, as well as payment limitations, rather than outright elimination of all subsidies. Those who have been swayed by the notion that eliminating all payments are the way to go should check out the Center For Rural Affairs' arguments. We'd also like to see adequate funding for conservation programs like wetlands and grassland reserves, conservation reserves and the Conservation Security program, which rewards farmers for practicing sound conservation methods on land that's still in production.
The CFRA argues policy far more than it looks at the political alliances forming during the drafting of the Farm Bill. For that, we found some other instructive links. Grist magazine's farm writer, Tom Philpott takes a look at one Farm Bill player at Victual Reality, then extends his point in a Gristmill post, Ag policy as if people mattered. in the latter, Philpott suggests that farmers be given the tools to manage supply. He notes the alliance behind eliminating subsidies:
The terms of debate around the 2007 farm bill's controversial commodity title have gotten rather narrow.
On the one hand, you've got the House subcommittee on ag commodities, which essentially cut and pasted commodity language from the subsidy-heavy 2002 farm bill into the 2007 version now being drafted.
On the other hand, you've got a chorus of critics, ranging from Oxfam to the Cato Institute to the Environmental Working Group, demanding an end to ag subsidies. This group would like to see an unfettered market work its magic on agriculture.
Straddling in between we find the Bush administration, which chastised the House subcommittee for failing to reform subsidies. Last winter, USDA chief Mike Johanns floated his proposal, which wouldn't abolish subsidies but rather tweak the program a bit to give it a "more market-oriented approach." Language in the proposal hinted strongly that subsidies would eventually be phased out.
Forced to choose, the Oxfams, Catos, and EWGs of the world throw their lot with the Bush Administration. If they can't get the subsidy-free bill they want, they'll take the Bushies' slow-motion reforms.
In last week's Victual Reality, I weighed in on the debate by rebuking the Oxfam/Cato/EWG aproach. I argued that "abandoning farmers to the clutches of a highly consolidated food-processing market ... won't solve our enormous social, public-health, and environmental troubles related to food."
Due diligence is never easy in looking at the Farm Bill. Progressives should look before they jump on a sweet-sounding band wagon created by correct-sounding organizations, probing the details and history of Farm Bill programs. There are some curious bedfellows, there.
For the devil is in those details, alas, and sometimes they are found almost inadvertently. Last month, for example, a down-home rural activist one county over sent me a link to a report from the EPA Inspector General about $25 million and change in mismanagement and possible embezzlement of grant money given to the now-defunct America’s Clean Water Foundation, along with Alan Guebert's column about the matter. Guebert writes that:
. . . the not-for-profit NPPC established a for-profit subsidiary - then called Environmental Management Solutions, LLC (EMS), now Validus - with the help of the not-for-profit, Washington, D.C.-based ACWF.
. . . NPPC then became the “exclusive” license holder of producer checkoff-developed programs like the On-Farm Odor/Environmental Assistance Program, the Environmental Assurance Program and “all other [checkoff] environmental programs.”
The deal was particularly sweet because NPPC would make “no royalty payment” for the licenses to the checkoff for “years 0 to 5 inclusive” while allowing it to “grant sublicenses to ‘third parties, including a subsidiary Limited Liability Company...’”
The licenses were the linchpin to NPPC hopes for its fledgling subsidiary.
At that time, NPPC was pushing Congress to boost the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program from $200 million in the 1995 Farm Bill to nearly $1 billion in the 2002 Farm Bill. (Its wish came true.) Most of the cash would assist livestock producers to identify, then fix, their environmental problems.
With arguably the best livestock assessment program licensed to it free for five years and an anticipated five-fold increase in federal dollars to fix problems identified by that program, NPPC had positioned its for-profit arm, at the time EMS, to profit for years to come.
In lobbying for the 2002 Farm Bill, the NPPC was joined by the National Cattlemen's Beef Association and the (hold on now) Environmental Working Group in both raising the payment limit and asking that more of the EQIP pot go to livestock operations; the coalition also opposed the Conservation Security Program, according to a 2002 column by Land Stewardship policy program director Mark Schlutz:
Out-of-touch environmental groups like Environmental Defense and the Environmental Working Group worked to undercut the CSP in favor of more money for EQIP, despite EQIP's terrible pro-factory farm orientation and bloated budget. These groups found willing allies in the U.S. House and with commodity groups like the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.
Once again, the move to undercut CSP in order to more fully fund EQIP is on the table in discussion of the 2007 Farm Bill. Hmm.
Ironically, the dollars that the EWG helped pump into EQIP are now in its new Section 1614 farm payment database, fuel for the anti-subsidy outrage industry. Go figure.
On its web site, the EWG doesn't lay out on the table (so far as we can find) specifically what it wants in "reform," other than asking readers to sign a petition favoring a "level playing field" for organic growers. We're told many farmers get no payments, but there are no specifics about whether the solution to this is no payments for anyone, smaller payments for all, or limits on payments to smaller operators.
There's passing mention of conservation programs that aren't getting enough funding for the farmers who want to enroll in them; we're curious if that means the CSP it opposed in 2002, or the expansion of EQIP and livestock focus it supported in 2002, while including EQIP dollars in its database for those decrying "farm welfare" programs. More money should go to Food Stamps and other nutrition programs, though there's no how or how much.
Maybe Beltway insiders know exactly what the EWG is asking for;
those looking at its web site for specific language will have to have
far more time than we do. Since the organization condemns support for
corporate agriculture, we'd like to see its support for family farms.
The average newspaper reader isn't going to get the perspective of smaller groups that remained centered in the midwest, nor will they learn much about the payment limitation bill that the Center for Rural Affairs favors. It's called the Rural America Preservation Act (S. 1486 or Dorgan-Grassley); go check it out.
If the source of outrage is large corporate, industrial-style operations getting a lion's share of the farm payments, why not S. 1486? Or legislation promoting fair and competitive ag markets? And why not tools that would help farmers manage supply, if overproduction continues to be an issue?
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