Filed under: Agriculture, Climate Change, Environment, Environmental Policy, Legislation, Policy | Tags: Agricultural Lobby, Agricultural Runoff, Agricultural Subsidies, EQIP, Logjam, New Zealand
[I originally published this post at the Breaking The Logjam blog, where I periodically blog. Here's the original. Here's the post explaining my participation at BTL.]
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)
Filed under: Agriculture, Climate Change, Ecosystems Services, Environment, Environmental Policy, Policy | Tags: Agricultural GHG Emissions, Logjam, New Zealand, Sequestration
[I originally published this post at the Breaking The Logjam blog, where I periodically blog. Here's the original. Here's the post explaining my participation at BTL.]
Panel IV has been discussing the role of ecosystem services in our approach to land and farm policy. Panelist Baron Thompson discussed the wide-randing opportunities and challenges from reframing environmental issues in terms of ecosystem services, and JB Ruhl, while not present at the panel discussion (due to a canceled flight) is presenting a symposium paper on agricultural ecosystem services.
Discussion of ecosystems services brings to the fore the important issue of what role we can expect from the agricultural industry in domestic climate change policy. In the US, agriculture is responsible for approximately 7% of GHG emissions, mostly in the form of methane and nitrous oxide emissions. However, agriculture also has the potential to biologically sequester carbon (and thus reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide) through the adoption of certain farming practices such as reduced tilling. Biological greenhouse gas sequestration is a perfect example of an ecosystem service, and, as professor Thompson pointed out, it is currently one of the only ecosystem services that actually has any money behind it.
Despite agriculture’s non-trivial contribution to GHG emissions, it is highly unlikely to expect U.S. legislation to directly limit agricultural emissions. So far, only New Zealand has planned to include agriculture “within” its cap-and-trade system (which probably has something to do with New Zealand being the only OECD country without a vast system of agricultural subsidies). We will likely see, however, assisted voluntary participation in U.S. climate change policy through the sale of “offset credits” to entities directly capped in their emissions (for example, the current version of the Lieberman-Warner bill — the only bill to have already been passed by the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee — will allow for up to 15% of capped entity emissions reductions to be achieved through the purchase of agricultural offsets). Typically, such an offset system within a larger cap-and-trade program allows for the capped industries to purchase a certain amount of offset credits from individual farms that have adopted practices or technologies that will decrease direct GHG emissions or increase the amount of GHG sequestered.
In such a system, while the agricultural industry will not be forced to reduce their GHG emissions or increase their carbon sequestration, they will be incentivized to do so. If the price that the buyers are willing to pay for the offset credits are more than the cost to farmers for adopting the new practices or technologies required to reduce emissions or increase sequestration, then farmers will adopt these new practices and technologies voluntarily in order to reap the financial benefits from selling offset units. It remains to be seen if such a program will be a useful contributor to domestic greenhouse gas emissions reductions.
Filed under: Agriculture, Animal Law | Tags: Blogs, Chicago, Commenters, Foie Gras, Lack of Nuanced Debate
The city of Chicago overturned a ban it had previously imposed on foie gras. Nick Fox of the NYT’s “Diner’s Journal” blog had a post on it, where he mentions that:
Similarly, many of the comments to the blog post make the same argument, and are cheering Chicago’s overturning of the ban as a victory against so-called “Nanny-State” regulation of behaviors that pose health problems, such as the ever-growing bans on smoking in public places, or New York City’s recent ban on trans-fats in restaurants (the “food police” is mentioned more than once). Some typical comment excerpts:
But this is the wrong debate, and is conflating two separate issues. The foie gras ban was not pushed for and passed for the reasons that people support smoking and trans-fat bans, which are regulated for the effect they have on the health of the general population. Supporters of the ban wish to eliminate what some people believe to be a food production process that by its very nature (necessarily requiring force-feeding ducks until they get diseased livers ten times their natural size) is inhumane.
There are plenty of sound libertarian arguments against government trying to stop us from hurting ourselves through our choices, but it’s an entirely different issue when the harm is being imposed on others by our choices, which is what the animal activists believe is wrong in this case. Whether or not one believes the harm caused on these ducks and geese is acceptable for our high-end culinary pleasures is, it seems to me, the debate that should be had.