If South Dakota’s political climate is at all representative of the Agricultural Heartland, long-term agricultural sustainability issues will be pretty much ignored in campaign debates this election season. Campaign statements and debates thus far in South Dakota’s lone Congressional race have been largely devoid of any meaningful discussion of sustainability issues. The electorate would benefit greatly from candidates addressing fundamental policy issues that have been raised in the recently released National Academy of Sciences report on sustainable agricultural systems.
This summer, the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies released Toward Sustainable Agricultural Systems in the 21st Century, a 570-page report based on an assessment of American agriculture’s sustainability by a distinguished committee of natural and social scientists (The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 2010). The Study Committee and NRC staff spent more than two years holding hearings (I presented invited testimony at one of the hearings), studying evidence, and drafting its report and having the report reviewed before publication. The study was designed to assess how far the United States has come in addressing agricultural sustainability problems and issues raised some 20 years earlier in the NRC’s landmark report, Alternative Agriculture (National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 1989). The new study, funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, also was structured to draw some lessons for agricultural sustainability strategies in Sub-Saharan Africa.
In my opinion, the Agricultural Systems report was disappointing for its lack of boldness. Authors of the report seemed to waffle on many fundamental issues. This was probably the inevitable result, however, of attempts to reach consensus by a group of scientists representing a broad range of perspectives – ranging from some who perhaps feel that radical reform of American agriculture is needed to others who recognize that problems remain but believe that science is on a path to solving those problems. Nevertheless, the economic policy portions of the Agricultural Systems report provide fodder for what could be searching debate and discussion in the political process.
Authors of the Agricultural Systems report settled on four goals that help define a sustainable agriculture:
• "Satisfy human food, feed, and fiber needs, and contribute to biofuel needs.
• Enhance environmental quality and the resource base.
• Sustain the economic viability of agriculture.
• Enhance the quality of life for farmers, farm workers, and society as a whole."
With those goals in mind, we should be asking our U.S. House and Senate candidates across the country to address the following policy issues that were identified in the Agricultural Systems report (page references in the report are shown in parentheses):
• Some economists believe that Federal Farm Bill commodity support programs encourage farming practices and systems that move agriculture away from sustainability, and that those programs help accelerate the loss of mid-sized family farms (pp. 293, 334, and 531). They argue that the support payments tied directly or indirectly to major commodities like corn, soybeans, and wheat encourage specialization in just a few crops and, hence, discourage ecological diversity. This specialization also tends to be associated with intensive production practices that can be associated with excessive use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Adverse effects can include neglect of conservation practices, destruction of wetlands, loss of wildlife habitat, and other negative externalities. Concentration on just a few commodity crops has also been alleged to result in a food supply that is inconsistent with healthy diets.
Ask the candidates: Do you believe that the current Farm Bill commodity program payments generally support or detract from sustainability goals? Please explain your position. And if you believe they detract, what alterations in the Farm Bill would you propose to correct this condition?
• Crop insurance subsidies under the Farm Bill can help undermine environmental quality and the resource base by encouraging intensive crop production on fragile lands and by making it economically possible for farms to avoid diversification. However, some Federally subsidized crop insurance programs, such as the Adjusted Gross Revenue Lite program, focus on whole-farm revenue risk and are more compatible with diversification (pp. 294-95, 334, and 531).
Ask the candidates: The Environmental Working Group’s farm subsidy data base indicates that Federal crop insurance subsidies were nearly as large in 2009 ($8 billion) as direct payments and counter-cyclical payments (a combined $9.3 billion). If crop insurance subsidies are going to constitute an ever-larger share of the Farm Bill safety net, what policies need to be put in place to assure that they are compatible with agricultural sustainability goals?
• The Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) has been one of the Farm Bill’s major voluntary environmental programs in recent years, providing technical and financial assistance for various practices. Most EQIP funds have gone to livestock producers, many of whom have large operations referred to as CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations). Some have criticized the livestock funding priority because much of the cost-share funding has gone for structures and practices (such as improved manure storage facilities and transporting manure to farm fields where it can be applied at environmentally and agronomically sound rates) that would have been required of CAFOs under the Clean Water Act. In effect, U.S. Department of Agriculture environmental funds have helped CAFOs come into compliance. Many policy analysts feel that this cost-share provides an unfair economic advantage to CAFOs relative to smaller, more ecologically based livestock systems. The net effect, these analysts maintain, is to foster an overly industrialized form of livestock agriculture, rather than systems of livestock production that are inherently more compatible with sustainability goals (p. 296).
Ask the candidates: Do you agree or disagree with present EQIP funding priorities? Please explain. And if you disagree, what change in priorities would you advocate?
• U.S. public spending on agricultural research and development was about $5 billion per year, as of 2009. "Although roughly a third of public research spending is devoted to examining environmental, natural resource, social, and economic aspects of farming practices, the other two-thirds is focused on improving the productivity and efficiency of conventional farming systems." (Quote is from p. 335; also see pp. 336 and 528.)
Ask the candidates: With many large agri-business firms presently involved in production agriculture research, is this allocation of public research and development dollars appropriate? Might it make more sense to reverse the proportions, spending about two-thirds of the public funds on environmental, natural resource, social, and economic research and only one-third on production agriculture research? Wouldn’t that contribute more effectively to achieving agricultural sustainability goals?
• Global trade negotiations are carried out under the auspices of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Negotiations under the current round of WTO talks have been stalled now for several years, in large part due to disagreements about existing and potential agricultural provisions. Many countries, and a substantial number of analysts and organizations within the U.S., feel that the WTO’s very strong emphasis on trade liberalization in some ways works against food security and some other sustainability goals (pp. 298-99 and 335).
Ask the candidates: Do you favor further agricultural trade liberalization – i.e., continuing to lower agricultural trade barriers, worldwide, and reducing all forms of direct and indirect export subsidies – or would you prefer that the next WTO agreement make much greater accommodation to sustainability goals? Please explain.
Unfortunately, most candidates for national elective office will not voluntarily address these agricultural sustainability policy issues. We should seek opportunities during the remainder of this election season, however, to make them do so!
[A slightly different version of this column appeared in The Dakota Day on Sept. 6, 2010 under the title "The Congressional Debate That Is Not Happening: How to Make Agriculture Sustainable for the Long Haul".]