| 摘要 | Key Points
Conservation programs that have been included in farm bills since the New Deal originally set out to protect the country’s agricultural productive capacity and to provide income support for important farm constituencies.
Since 1985, conservation programs have been expanded in terms of their scope (to include wetlands preservation and wildlife habitat), complexity of programs, and levels of funding for conservation payments to farm businesses.
The House and Senate draft reauthorizations of the 2018 Farm Bill retain most of the current features of agricultural conservation programs but include changes that may lead to efficiencies (for example, reducing and rationalizing the numbers of programs) and other changes that do little to improve program effectiveness.
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Executive Summary
In April and June 2018, the House and Senate independently voted to approve two distinct versions of a new farm bill that, with respect to conservation programs, have many similarities but differ in some important ways. Both bills would retain funding for conservation programs at close to current levels, but with modest overall cuts. Nevertheless, with expected annual average outlays of close to $6 billion between 2019 and 2023, they would continue to account for about 30 percent of all federal spending on farm programs.
Both bills would also retain support for two broad categories of the program. The first category includes paid land diversion programs that shift acres from agricultural production to conserving uses. The second category consists of working lands programs that pay farmers to adopt or continue to use conservation practices. Both legislative initiatives continue a trend of shifting funds toward working lands programs and away from paid land diversion programs.
To a large extent, both bills would concatenate the wide range of paid land diversion programs available under the 2014 Farm Bill into two major initiatives: the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program (ACEP). The CRP would continue to focus resources on land diversion in the Midwest and the Great Plains, rather than in more populated regions where water-quality issues are of considerable concern and benefits are likely to be higher. The House bill exacerbates that problem by freezing the geographic distribution of current CRP enrollments. In addition, funds would be shifted modestly toward the ACEP, although there are substantial questions about whether conservation easement programs, which result in more permanent land diversion, provide much in the way of environmental and other conservation benefits.
Three programs account for the bulk of spending on working lands initiatives: the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), and the Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP). Both the Senate and House bills include modest increases in funding for the RCPP, which focuses on major projects that cut across state boundaries addressing explicit national environmental problems such as water quality in extensive watersheds (for example, the Chesapeake Bay). The House bill limits funding to shorter time periods than the Senate bill does even though such projects often take many years to have their full effects. The Senate bill retains the EQIP and CSP programs as separate and distinct entities. The House bill restricts the scope of conservation practices eligible for subsidies by replacing CSP contracts with stewardship contracts under EQIP, with a corresponding reallocation of funds toward the EQIP initiative.
Overall, none of the changes in the House and Senate bills would substantively increase the environmental benefits derived from outlays on the CRP, EQIP, and CSP programs that account for 90 percent of all federal spending on conservation programs. Some efficiencies in program implementation would be obtained through rationalizing the number of conservation programs. Further, the modest expansion in funding for the RCPP at the expense of support for the CRP, EQIP, and CSP could, at the margin, increase the environmental benefits obtained from federal conservation programs.
Introduction
From their earliest days of the 1930s New Deal, farm bills in the US have included conservation programs. Those programs have always had multiple goals, which have evolved as the US economy has changed. Initially, there were two major objectives: (1) protecting the country’s agricultural productive capacity by conserving essential resources such as soils and water and (2) providing income support for important farm constituencies by reducing the amount of cropland in production as a means of increasing prices. The rise of the 1970s environmental movement motivated adding new goals, notably protecting water quality and wildlife habitat and, somewhat later, preservation of wetlands, grasslands, and farming more generally— all of which were essentially grafted onto the existing program rootstock.1
That expansion of goals signaled an increase in the importance of conservation in the farm bill and was correspondingly accompanied by increases in spending on conservation. In 1990, for instance, spending on conservation programs amounted to $1.9 billion, most of which paid for retirement of highly erodible land. By 2014, spending on conservation programs had almost doubled, due to expansion of both highly erodible land retirement and subsidies for conservation on working farmland. In 1990, conservation programs accounted for about a fifth of direct federal farm program payments to farmers. By 2014, the conservation program share of direct federal farm program payments to farmers had increased to about a third.2
Since the New Deal programs of the 1930s, the federal government has used two general types of policy instruments in pursuit of conservation goals: (1) paying farmers to divert farmland into some form of conservation use such as grassland, forest, or wetlands and (2) paying farmers to install and maintain farming practices on working farmland that reduce erosion and runoff or protect wildlife habitat. Currently, five major programs implement one or both of these conservation strategies.
The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and Agricultural Conservation Easement Program (ACEP) use the first approach. The CRP pays farmers to convert cropland (and some grassland) to conservation uses, while the ACEP pays farmers to maintain or restore wetlands or grasslands. The Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) use the second approach. EQIP subsidizes up to 75 percent of the cost of installing approved conservation structures or equipment on working farmland, while the CSP pays farmers an annual fee to maintain a suite of approved conservation management practices on working farmland. The fifth program, the Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP), funds projects at a regional or watershed scale that are undertaken by governmental or nonprofit entities. Those projects can include both land diversion and subsidies for conservation on working farmland and technical assistance to farmers provided by those projects.
Over the past 30 years, subsidies for conservation on working farmland have increased in importance relative to subsidies for land diversion. In 1990, for instance, the CRP accounted for virtually all conservation spending under the farm bill. By 2017, its share had fallen to under half, while EQIP and CSP combined accounted for a little over half.3 The RCPP is quite small, accounting for only 2 percent of spending on major conservation programs since its inception in the Agricultural Act of 2014.
Both the Senate (Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018)4 and House (Agriculture and Nutrition Act of 2018)5 draft reauthorizations of the farm bill retain the current status of conservation programs in terms of the overall level of spending on conservation and the importance of conservation subsidies relative to other direct payments to farmers. Both legislative proposals also arrest the trend toward conservation on working farmland at the expense of land diversion by retaining the division of expenditures at roughly current levels. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that both bills would increase outlays on these five major conservation programs by roughly $310–$350 million over fiscal year (FY) 2019–23, or about 1 percent relative to a baseline of $28.7 billion (Figure 1).6
According to the CBO projections, outlays on conservation programs under both the Senate and House farm bills would total about a third of combined spending on the programs that account for most of the direct payments to farmers (commodity programs, crop insurance, and conservation) over that same period. Under both bills, as in the Agricultural Act of 2014, outlays on subsidies for conservation on working farmland (EQIP and CSP) would account for over half of conservation spending, and outlays on payments for land diversion (CRP and ACEP) would account for under half, while the share of outlays under RCPP would increase by 1 or 2 percentage points (Figure 2).
However, the Senate and House farm bills would affect the structures of the individual programs differently (Figure 3). Both bills increase funding for ACEP and decrease funding for CRP while keeping the overall share of spending on land diversion roughly constant. The House bill eliminates the CSP and incorporates some, but not all, of its provisions into EQIP. Both bills feature increases in RCPP spending.
The two bills differ in important details within each program as well. The following sections compare the changes the two bills would make to each of the five major conservation programs, and evaluate the potential advantages and disadvantages of those changes.
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