Reproduced, with permission, from: y U.S. Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). 1991. Changing by degrees: Steps to reduce greenhouse gases. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.

Box 8-D--USDA's Environmental Mission and Commodity Programs

The USDA's mandate under the 1985 Food Security Act (Public Law 99-198), the Food, Agriculture, Conservation, and Trade Act of 1990 (Public Law 101-624) and other statutes includes considering agriculture's effects on water quality, and the agency has established programs that seek to lessen these effects. For example, through provisions such as the Conservation Compliance Program run by the Soil Conservation Service, about 800,000 farms were required to submit plans by 1990 to reduce erosion and to implement these plans by 1995. If this is enforced, failure to comply with these plans will preclude eligibility for various commodity price supports and other Federal programs.

However, other environmental effects are not explicitly included as part of USDA's statutory mission. Including a broader definition of environmental protection as a part of the agency's mission could ensure that issues such as the food sector's effects on climate change are factored directly into national farm policies.

This could be particularly important with respect to USDA commodity programs, which are maintained to stabilize and support crop prices and farmers' incomes, as authorized in the Food Security Act. About two-thirds of all U.S. cropland is enrolled in programs that support such crops as wheat, feed grains (e.g., corn, sorghum, barley, oats), cotton, and rice. The cost to the Federal Government was about $11.6 billion in fiscal year 1990 (76).

Price and income supports are based on the amount of acreage devoted to a given crop (called "base" acreage) and the average yield of that crop over the past 5 years (crop yields are currently frozen at the 1981-to-1985 average). Farmers who plant any other crop besides the one designated for that base acreage not only lose payments for that year, but also lower their base acreage for that crop and therefore lower future payments. This encourages farmers to grow the same crop on the same plot of land, year after year, in order to maximize their Federal subsidies. Furthermore, to comply with "cross-compliance" provisions (ie., eligibility for a benefit depends on compliance with other provisions), farmers may not plant any other crop unless it is within their allotted base. Therefore, a farmer who wants to rotate crops using a crop in which he/she has little or no base acreage will lose all entitlements for that year.

All of this encourages a tendency to overuse fertilizers and other inputs, because maintaining yields on lands devoted to monocultures often requires significant amounts of these inputs. Excess fertilizer use, however, can cause groundwater contamination (128), surface water eutrophication, N2O emissions from denitrification, and loss of soil organic carbon.

Decoupling the rigid connection between Federal subsidies and production decisions would allow farmers flexibility to plant crops based on market demand, without risking the loss of all income supports, and reduce Federal expenditures on crops already in surplus (60, 118, 128).[1] Proposals to achieve this include allowing farmers to: 1) obtain payments for an enrolled crop, even if a portion of base acreage is planted with other crops; 2) temporarily switch a portion of their base acreage crop to another crop without losing the original base; and 3) plant any combination of crops (allowed by USDA) within a designated "normal" acreage, if a certain portion of other acreage on which these crops are grown is taken out of production. In fact, the 1990 farm bill (Public Law 101-624) now allows farmers to plant a limited amount of selected crops on lands designated for other crops, without losing commodity program benefits.

1 These options assume that the Federal Government will continue providing financial assistance to farmers to compensate for droughts and other poor growing conditions.

SOURCE: Office of Technology Assessment, 1991.