If one were to look for specific examples of “logjams” in U.S. environmental policy, a prime candidate would be the agricultural lobby. This past Sunday the Wall Street Journal, in an article entitled “Farm Lobby Beats Back Assault on Subsidies,” detailed the most recent victory of the agricultural lobby against a proposed (and modest) reining in of the vast system of direct payments and price supports that undergird the multi-billion dollar agricultural subsidy system within the U.S. (make sure and check out their fantastic interactive breakdown of the U.S. agricultural subsidy system).

Thanks in large part to their successful lobbying, agriculture has been practically exempt from environmental regulation, either through explicit exemptions for agricultural activities, or through laws structured in such a way as to allow for farms to escape most or all environmental regulatory impact in what professor J.B. Ruhl (and Breaking the Logjam participant) has deemed the “anti-law of farms.” Professor Ruhl has researched and analyzed agriculture and environmental law in extreme detail, and notes there are “few exceptions to this anti-law.”

It is not a stretch to say that a great many of the harms agriculture is responsible for have been created by or exacerbated by our regulatory coddling of agribusiness. Take just three examples: 1) as noted by fellow BTL blogger Daniel Wieck, agricultural runoff is responsible for the majority of non-point source water pollution in the U.S., yet many “normal farming practices” are specifically exempted from the Clean Water Act; 2) Agricultural price support programs for sugar have artificially raised the price of sugar in the U.S. and have led to the destruction of a large part of the Florida Everglades; and 3) Agricultural activities are also responsible for 7% of domestic greenhouse gas emissions, yet the U.S. is not even considering direct regulation of these emissions.

To top it all off, when Congress actually has legislated curbs on environmental harms from agriculture, they have done so through billions of dollars worth of more subsidy payments - to the very same farms creating the pollution in the first place! (There are two primary types of federal programs that provide subsidies to the agricultural industry ostensibly for environmental protection: land retirement, easement and conservation programs such as the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), and working lands programs such as the Environmental Qualities Incentives Program (EQIP) (the NYT had a great recent article on EQIP)).

This is a serious logjam in environmental regulation, and many people on both the left and the right agree something needs to be done to lessen agribusiness’s hold on legislation. New Zealand managed to do so in 1984, despite having an economy much more reliant on agricultural production. It’s time we follow suit.

Further Reading:

• Agribusiness: Long Term Contribution Trend (agribusiness lobbying data from the Center for Responsive Politics)
• “Surviving Without Subsidies” (Aug, 2007 NYT article by Wayne Arnold)
• “In the Farm Bill, A Creature from the Black Lagoon?” (January 2008 NYT article by Andrew Martin)
• “EQIP in the News” (post by Anthony Schulz in Agricultural Law Blog)

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 12:13 pm and is filed under Agriculture, Politics of Environmental Reform. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.