| 摘要 | Key Points
From the beginning, conservation provisions in the farm bill have been linked to farm income support.
Over the past 10–15 years, spending on conservation programs in the farm bill first rose and then remained relatively stable even in the face of budget retrenchments, so that conservation now accounts for roughly a third of direct farm program payments.
But reform of funding allocation mechanisms are needed to improve the efficiency of conservation spending in the sense of getting the most environmental-quality protection for the money we spend.
Read the full PDF.
Executive Summary
From the beginning, conservation provisions in the farm bill have been linked to farm income support. In the past few decades, spending on conservation programs in the farm bill has both risen and remained relatively stable even in the face of budget retrenchments, so that conservation now accounts for roughly a third of direct farm program payments. The stated rationales for conservation programs in the farm bill are (1) to prevent farmland degradation to preserve productivity and (2) to mitigate environmental externalities, notably damage to water quality, wildlife habitat, and air quality.
There are clear economic efficiency grounds for policies that address environmental externalities from agriculture. We know from numerous agronomic studies that there are complementarities between many agricultural conservation measures and reductions in environmental damage, implying that conservation can play a productive role in addressing environmental externalities. And the United States Department of Agriculture has taken some significant strides in reorienting conservation programs toward environmental goals.
Together, these considerations suggest that prioritizing conservation spending, as the most recent farm bills have done, has been a good thing. Conservation spending deserves to be maintained if not increased in absolute and real terms. That said, conservation spending has not allocated those funds in ways that adequately prioritize environmental quality at the national level. Reform of funding allocation mechanisms are needed to improve the efficiency of conservation spending in the sense of getting the most environmental-quality protection for the money we spend.
Introduction
On January 6, 1936, the US Supreme Court ruled the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933— which authorized the federal government to prop up farm prices by paying farmers to reduce planted acreage and kill off livestock—unconstitutional. Four days later, Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace unveiled a proposal for a replacement that empowered the federal government to pay farmers to replace soil-depleting crops with grass and legumes as a means of conserving soil. Funding for the program would come from the federal government, while the program itself would be administered at the local level by soil conservation district committees elected by and from the farm community. On February 27, 1936, Congress adopted Wallace’s replacement program by enacting the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act.1
The Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act’s explicit goal was to increase farm income by cutting production to achieve a ratio of prices received to prices paid to that which prevailed during the period August 1909–July 1914.2 From the beginning, then, federal agricultural conservation policy in the United States has been intertwined with farm income support. The waxing and waning of conservation in subsequent farm bills bears out that close connection: The cropland diversion provisions of the 1936 act were retained in the 1938 Agricultural Adjustment Act. They were suspended from 1940 until the mid-1950s as World War II, war devastation in Western Europe, and the Korean War heightened demand for US agricultural commodities. They were reintroduced in the form of the Soil Bank Program in the Agricultural Act of 1956, when US agriculture again faced reduced export demand due to recovery in Europe and the end of wartime while increases in US farm productivity increased supply.
Income support has never been the sole motivating force for conservation programs. The 1936 act built on the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1935, which established an administrative structure for helping farmers control and prevent soil erosion, to “preserve natural resources, control floods, prevent impairment of reservoirs, and maintain the navigability of rivers and harbors, protect public health, public lands and relieve unemployment.”3
Enacted in the shadow of the Dust Bowl, the 1935 legislation created the Soil Conservation Service (since renamed the Natural Resource Conservation Service) in the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and authorized it to provide technical assistance to farmers for planning and installing erosion control and other conservation measures. The 1936 legislation augmented that technical assistance role with financial support in the form of cost sharing provided via the Agricultural Conservation Program (ACP), the principal forerunner of today’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP). As with land retirement, funding for the ACP that Congress appropriated was allocated to states, distributed by states to counties, and administered by county-level associations of agricultural producers.
Beginning around 1960, US grain exports andfarm income entered an extended period of growth. Existing Soil Bank Program land retirement contracts were maintained, but new enrollments were discontinued. The ACP remained in effect, and a variety of similar cost-sharing programs, mainly focused on specific regional concerns, were added to the USDA portfolio; none received significant amounts of funding. During the 1970s, a boom in export demand made shortages rather than surpluses the concern of the day. Then, in the early- and mid-1980s, US grain exports collapsed due to contracting foreign demand, an overvalued dollar, and high interest rates. The collapse of grain exports triggered a financial crisis throughout the farm sector.4
In the 1980s, as in the 1930s, hard times in agriculture brought conservation back into prominence, with an emphasis once again on paid land retirement. The secretary of agriculture already had the authority to require farmers to limit specific land-planted crops as a condition of receiving farm subsidies. The Food Security Act of 1985 resuscitated the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), a component of the 1950s-era Soil Bank Program, and authorized the USDA to enroll a total of 40 million acres of highly erodible cropland in long-term rental contracts. Farmers entering into those contracts were required to convert enrolled cropland into an approved conservation use such as vegetative cover. Up to half the costs of establishing those approved conservation uses were shared by the department.
A notable new feature of the CRP was a broadening of goals to encompass environmental concerns, with improvements in water quality and protection of fish and wildlife habitat being added to the more traditional goals of protecting cropland productivity, reducing sedimentation, curbing surplus production, and supporting farm income. Despite these new concerns with water quality, though, CRP enrollment was directed largely toward the wheat-growing areas of the High Plains and Palouse regions—wind-erosion-prone areas that had been the center for erosion-control attention during the Dust Bowl years.
Environmental concerns were also addressed by other provisions of the 1985 act, notably the sodbuster and swampbuster provisions that rendered farmers who converted virgin grassland or wetlands to crop production ineligible for any farm program benefits, including price supports, crop insurance, disaster payments, and some federally guaranteed loans. New cost-sharing programs (e.g., the Water Quality Incentives Program) aimed specifically at protecting water quality were added to the USDA portfolio later in the 1980s. The Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996 combined the ACP, the Water Quality Incentives Program, and several smaller regional programs into a larger, consolidated conservation cost-share program, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP).
As with the CRP, the erosion-control programs of the 1930s remained the rootstock of these cost-share programs, with environmental concerns grafted on. EQIP, for instance, provides technical and financial assistance (up to 75 percent of approved costs) to farmers for projects that protect or improve soils (and thus agricultural productivity), conserve water, and improve other natural resources, as well as help farmers meet environmental-quality regulations. The administrative structure of the 1936 legislation—federal appropriations of funds allocated to states and then counties by formula and administered locally—also remained largely intact.
Read the full report.
Notes |
