Back in April, it already seemed obvious: Spooked by skyrocketing prices for corn, soy, and wheat, policymakers would push to put as much land as possible in the Midwest under the plow, environmental consequences be damned.
One of the first policy levers, I figured, would involve gutting the Conservation Reserve Program. The CRP is a federal scheme that pays farmers to take ecologically fragile land out of production -- an act which benefits society but would otherwise not benefit farm owners, since idle land brings in no money.
By gutting the CRP, we get more land planted in corn and soy, and thus price relief for consumers. Or, so the logic goes. Back in April, I compared this dubious "solution" to the food crisis to the effort to drill in the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve as a response to the energy crisis: i.e., no solution at all.
Well, just as Democrats are coming under increasing pressure to allow drilling in ANWR and other environmentally sensitive areas, the USDA is actively being hectored by farm-state politicians to let farmers plant land now enrolled in the CRP. And now the call to gut this vital program has gotten support, albeit quite measured and qualified, from a progressive source: The Washington Post editorial page.
Now, the above-linked WaPo editorial is no wild-eyed call to plow up the last bits of the American prairie and drench them in chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
Rather, the Post merely wants USDA secretary Ed Schafer to "consider opening up some of the [CRP] land to farming while continuing to protect the most environmentally sensitive acres."
My question is, why support a scaling back of the CRP at all? As the Post itself acknowledges, "Farming land [currently] in the program isn't a long-term solution" to high food prices. Land in the CRP tends to be what ag economists call "marginal," meaning that its yields will be lower than most other land in the corn belt. That means that farming it won't dramatically increase the supply of crops like corn and soy, and thus not provide much price relief for consumers.
Of course, if policymakers really wanted to bring down the price of food, they'd leave the CRP alone and instead take aim at the biofuel mandates that are currently drawing a quarter of the corn crop into ethanol factories. (One World Bank economist reckons that mandates and other government biofuel supports are responsible for as much as 75 percent of the recent run-up in food prices.)
The Post even acknowledges this point in its CRP editorial: "The United States should reconsider subsidizing the production of ethanol, responsible for much of the increase in corn prices since 2006."
Well, I think the Post should reconsider its support for scaling back the CRP. If anything, the program should be scaled up, not trimmed.
I would direct the Post editorial writers to reread the excellent article their paper recently published by Joel Achenbach about the recent floods in Iowa.
Far from a "natural" disaster, devastation from the floods stemmed from egregious land-use decisions, Achenbach found. The main culprit: The very kind of relentless monocrop farming that the Post editorialists would like to see expanded into some CRP land.
Achenbach relates an interview he conducted with agriculture expert Kamyar Enshayan of the University of Northern Iowa:
[Enshayan] points out that the heavy rains fell on a landscape radically reengineered by humans. Plowed fields have replaced tallgrass prairies. Fields have been meticulously drained with underground pipes. Streams and creeks have been straightened. Most of the wetlands are gone. Flood plains have been filled and developed. "We've done numerous things to the landscape that took away these water-absorbing functions," he said. "Agriculture must respect the limits of nature."
Note that these conditions held sway with 34 million acres protected under the CRP. Do we really want to scale back this program?
Finally, I'd direct the Post editorialists to a 1979 book by veteran Post reporter Dan Morgan called the Merchants of Grain. Commenting on the last great boom in grain prices, the one that took place in the early-to-mid 1970s, Morgan writes:
The land itself exhibited the scars of ... the grain economy. Along the North Carolina coast, Italian and Japanese investors bought tens of thousands of acres of marshy wetlands, cleared the trees with bulldozers and Caterpillar tractors, installed drainage ditches, and announced plans for "superfarms." The incentives were corn at $3.00 a bushel and soybeans at $6.50; the world needed more food. But environmentalists in the state expressed concern about the effect of the runoff of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides on the fish and wildlife in the coastal waterways. Investors also purchased marginal farmland in the western edge of the corn belt in Nebraska and ordered fragile grasslands to the plow. Groves of trees, planted under federal programs in the 1930s to prevent soil erosion, were bulldozed so that spindly irrigation systems that wheeled around a central well in 160-acre circles could move unhindered. The land irrigated by these watering systems was plowed, disked, and planted to corn. After the corn was harvested, the thin layer of topsoil blew away in many places, leaving gashes of dunelike sand in the fields of Nebraska.
The answer to the energy crisis isn't to drill for crude oil and mine for coal at any environmental cost. Rather, it's to figure out creative ways to conserve energy and invest in truly renewable, low-carbon sources.
Likewise, the answer to the food crisis isn't yet more resource-intensive, ecosystem-destroying industrial agriculture. Rather, it's to conserve the precious agricultural resources we have -- and to invest in more sustainable production systems.
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Comments
View as Flat
JMG Posted 10:08 am
21 Jul 2008
The 5% Project
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OhioPaul Posted 11:10 am
21 Jul 2008
Food prices are going up because it's the energy, stupid. Come on. Get on biofuels for legit reasons I can respect.
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Wolverine Posted 2:18 pm
21 Jul 2008
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Russ Posted 4:36 pm
21 Jul 2008
By now there really are no "natural" disasters anymore. All are at least exacerbated, and most, like this one, directly caused by man's destruction of the land.
What's worst, however, is this sort of
disaster capitalism, where the exploiters first create the antedisaster circumstance, wait for the disaster to occur, and then seize that opportunity to push their agenda radically further.
We saw this most starkly with Katrina, where the inevitable result of oil addiction and out-of-control carbon emissions was used as the pretext to further gut America's already tenuous environmental regulations.
Now we see the same thing with drilling and the CRP. Oil addiction and greed has brought America to the Peak Oil precipice, prices skyrocket and anxiety spreads, but is the result any kind of policy sanity? No - the Hitlers-in-the-bunker (my term for fossil fuel dead-enders) instead seize the pretext to advocate ripping apart what's left of the land to squeeze out a few measly drops of oil which won't do anything for supply or price, but which will of course be grotesquely profitable to them and their Big Oil clients. It's using fear and gathering crisis to generate a profitable climate. It's war profiteering plain and simple, where the war was started by them with precisely that intent.
Same with the CRP. As Tom says, destroying this land will do little or nothing for food prices. I don't know how directly profitable it'll be for agribusiness, but at any rate it provides misdirection. It's a bogus "solution" which distracts from the real ravages of biofuel mandates and the systemic depravity of monoculture, both of which are monstrously profitable.
(Also, I imagine for the right wing the CRP is ideologically objectionable, so they're happy to seize any crisis opportunity to try to get rid of it.)
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Ron Steenblik Posted 6:14 pm
21 Jul 2008
I depends on at what point in the supply chain you measure the price of "food". When the USDA speaks of food, it is referring to the consumer price index for food, which is based on movements in estimated total expenditure on food and non-alcoholic beverages -- some $1.14 trillion (with a "t" a year). Forty-five percent of the weighting in that index is expenditure on meals eaten outside the home. And, as we all know, the cost of the grain and other foodstuffs in the price of a meal is a tiny fraction. When one looks at expenditure on food at that level, the contribution of rising grain and oilseed prices is bound to be moderate, while the contribution of the cost of energy (used not only for farming, but also for processing, transporting and refrigerating the final products) will be significant.
When one looks at the international prices for food commodities (corn, wheat, barley, soybeans, etc.), supply and demand factors dominate, not production costs. According to the USDA's latest "Cost of production forecasts", the costs of fuel, lubricants and electricity for corn growers is expected to be around $47 per acre this year. At a projected average yield of 134 bushels per acre, that comes to $0.35 per bushel -- a rise of $0.20 per bushel compared with 2002. The cost of fertilizer (which is strongly linked to the price of energy) is expected to be around $167 per acre, or $1.25 per bushel -- up $0.95 per bushel since 2002. Altogether that represents a rise in energy-related costs of $1.15 per bushel since 2002 (when corn was selling for closer to $2 per bushel at the farm gate). Seed costs have doubled, but a large part of that rise is due to the overall increase in the price of corn. Other costs have increased by about 10%.
In short, only about one-quarter of the increase in the price of corn can be attributed to rising energy and fertilizer costs. Most of the rest is due to supply and demand factors. And by far the largest component of the increase in demand for corn is corn used for ethanol.
These are only my personal opinions.
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justlou Posted 9:35 pm
21 Jul 2008
We taxpayers have made a contract with those farmers who enrolled in CRP. They made an agreement with us that they would take land out of production for 10 to 15 years in exchange for an annual rent payment from us. We also paid a big chunk of their costs for land preparation, seed and planting of these CRP acres. In the case of native grass plantings, it takes a few years for these plantings to become established. Early outs from contracts would happen on many of these lands before the full benefits of the plantings are achieved. We have an investment in these lands and we should not allow any landowner to shirk his contract obligations to us by not paying the penalty of doing so. We should demand repayment of all rental payments and cost share payments if landowners choose to opt out. They have a choice.
Ironically farming is one of the least regulated industries in the US. They want about every freaking subsidy that we are willing to give them and then gripe like hell when they don't get their way or when we try to impose some sensible regulations on their industries. And they have been largely successful in doing so. I expect our weenie farm state legislators to bend over the barrel on this one too. Weeeeeee!
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MAD MAC Posted 3:32 am
22 Jul 2008
Victory in Pattani
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MattKirby Posted 4:26 am
22 Jul 2008
http://www.sierraclub.org/wildlegacy/blog/2008/07/conserv ...
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Ron Steenblik Posted 8:06 am
22 Jul 2008
These are only my personal opinions.
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sderoote123 Posted 11:02 pm
24 Jul 2008
I appreciate your comments and your insight; I always look forward to your pieces in Grist. Would it be possible or useful to define some of the terms that all of us toss around as though we actually have a consensus opinion on them?
For instance; I don't really believe that a large-scale (several hundred or even thousand acres) mono-culture crop production can truly be defined as true agriculture, nor can its keepers or tenders truly be defined as farmers. Maybe there could be some lines of distinction drawn here. How about some of the terms that have fallen into disuse, like husbandman?
I would welcome your thoughts.
sderoote123
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