Farm Program Is Sown, But Will It Survive?

Wall Street Journal
by David Wessel
July 22, 2004; Page A2

In what's politely called the legislative "process" in Washington, combatants sometimes agree just long enough to get a bill through Congress -- and then turn to squabbling over what they did, why they did it and whether it was really a good idea.

Take the Conservation Security Program just getting under way. It was created in 2002 at the urging of Iowa Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin to, as its quasiofficial slogan goes, "reward the best and motivate the rest" to be greener farmers. After some hesitation, President Bush embraced it publicly. Now the administration -- depending on your perspective -- is either strangling a good idea or prudently restraining a new way to move money from taxpayers to farmers.

The CSP is the sprout of a big idea. Conservation programs once were crafted to improve the productivity of farmland -- by paying farmers to build terraces to prevent erosion, for instance. The 1980s brought big payments to farmers who leave land idle to benefit wildlife and water quality. In the 1990s came experiments to encourage farmers to adopt practices that may not increase farmland productivity but reduce air and water pollution.

Before the CSP, the government payments largely went to farmers who adopted specific practices. Farmers and environmentalists protested that meant paying sinners to change their ways and short-changed farmers who were already "good stewards of the land," and perhaps encouraged them to backslide.

"The really new thing about CSP is that we're going to reward you through taxpayer subsidy for conservation and environmental performance whether it's something you've been doing for the last decade or for new stuff," says CSP aficionado Ferd Hoefner of the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.

It is a farm program everyone can love. It is voluntary; no coercive rules. It rewards better environmental outcomes, measured by soil and water quality; it doesn't micromanage farms. "It incentivizes landowners to think holistically to take us to a generation of good practice on farms," says James Connaughton, head of the influential White House Council on Environmental Quality.

The politics are clear: Greens are happy. Farmers are happy -- as long as this doesn't substitute for other farm aid. Far-sighted fans of farm aid are happy, too: The CSP shores up the political base for farm aid by including vineyards, orchards and others who don't receive much taxpayer money today. And it could evolve into a way to keep subsidizing farms if the World Trade Organization attack on conventional subsidies intensifies. (Global trade pacts frown on paying farmers to produce more or less; paying them to be green is cool.)

The rub? Money. The 2002 farm bill opened the CSP to all eligible farms, just as programs like Medicare are open to all eligible. "If implemented as originally envisioned ... the CSP could cost as much to operate in any given year as do traditional farm programs now," Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service economist Katherine R. Smith (speaking for herself, not the agency) told a conference last month. Bean counters initially put the price tag at $2 billion over 10 years, then upped it to $7 billion.

That alarmed the White House budget office. The White House pushed Congress to limit spending on the program -- and won a $41 million spending limit for this year. Farmers, greens and friendly congressmen have pushed back with some success.

Congress writes laws; administration bureaucrats write rules that implement them. Writing these rules brought the tensions to the surface. For a time, it seemed the rules might never be done. A January 2004 draft drew 14,010 letters. Then someone apparently realized the political wisdom of getting money out by Election Day; the rules were issued last month. Applications are due next week. Checks will arrive by Sept. 30.

Citing the spending cap that it favored, the administration limited the program to 18 watersheds the first year. Not all of them are in swing states, though Iowa, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin did make the cut.

The rules resemble the tax code in their complexity; the greener the farm, the more it gets. Fans protest ceilings on what any one farm can get -- as much as $45,000 for the greenest farms -- are too low to entice farmers. The USDA counters that it is getting plenty of applications. Sen. Harkin says the administration has gutted the program; the administration says it's weighing benefits against costs.

With any luck, the good idea behind the CSP will survive. Paying farmers to do what they're already doing doesn't seem the best use of taxpayer money, and finding new ways to shovel billions of dollars to farmers is unwise. But if we are going to pay farmers, paying them to make the air and water we all share cleaner seems smart.