Conservation Reserve Program The Ultimate Misnomer
August 24, 2001
CHURCHVILLE, Va.- Howard Buffet is an Illinois agri-businessman and a widely published wildlife photographer who has traveled the Third World. Howard has given me permission to excerpt from his recent letter to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Democrat of South Dakota.
“Dear Senator Daschle: “I am writing to ask you to consider several factors, which are not often discussed during farm policy debates. Environmental discussions revolving around production agriculture in the U.S. generally focus on negative aspects, such as point source pollution…they fail to consider the positive environmental achievements of U.S. agriculture….I believe this thinking has caused us to direct our farm polity toward the wrong initiatives with the wrong priorities.
“Today U.S. farmers utilize about the same acreage as they did in 1950, yet they have tripled their output through technology and efficiency….if technology that we had in 1950, it is estimated we would need an additional 10 million square miles of cultivated land to sustain the current amount of agricultural output.
This is 21 times the current acreage used to produce crops in the United States. Brazil and Argentina are perhaps the best examples of areas where millions of acres of the most unique and biodiverse ecosystems have been consumed for increased agricultural production, largely to compensate for U.S. farm policy…
“In the last decade, the U.S. has idled over 30 million acres of land that previously produced agricultural crops….the (Conservation Reserve Program) was promoted as a conservation initiative, but ironically it has contributed to one of the largest global conversions of wildlife habitat for agricultural use in the history of mankind (elsewhere in the world)…
“The common response is for other countries to cut down trees, displace species and destroy irreplaceable habitat to increase their agricultural production. This is the global impact of the Conservation Reserve Program.
“As the CRP was put into motion…in rural America…there was less demand, from the fertilizer store to the hardware store. Fewer acres meant fewer farmers. Fewer farmers meant fewer jobs, less demand for inputs, a reduction in rural population and ultimately a deterioration of financial support for rural health care and education…
“I would not argue that all CRP acres should be put back into production, but with the proper use of buffer strips, filter strips, tiling, terracing and conservation tillage such as no-till, the majority of this acreage could be productive farmland, slowing the urge of other countries to encroach on irreplaceable habitat. (Wildlife) habitat protection is difficult enough without U.S. policy encouraging the destruction of millions of acres of unique forest and jungle. Those forests and jungles are home to the most biodiverse ecosystems ever identified…
“While many people focus only on the domestic environmental impact of farm production, they fail to see the global picture in which U.S. production can help prevent deforestation and species decline in other parts of the world.
“They also fail to recognize that high production, intense farming systems cause less soil erosion than any other farming systems, therefore making them one of the most sustainable….Low yielding methods, where there are less plants per acre, and high tillage methods, required by organic systems, which use no herbicide or pesticide, are the worst combination for preventing soil erosion.
“We need an aggressive and comprehensive conservation program that increases production responsibly, not one that retires acreage….The U.S. will need to participate in a global risk assessment to understand what land has the highest value and how to preserve and apply that value, both on a conservation basis and an agricultural basis…This will demand merging conservation goals and agricultural goals into a combined set of priorities.
“It will also require better distribution of resources and an export policy that incorporates measures to deal with hunger hotspots…I have watched children dying from malnutrition in hospitals and in remote villages in other parts of the world. This experience provides a different view on priorities, which illustrates our failure to maximize our ability to feed people.
“…if we stay on the present course, we are shortchanging the global environment, jeopardizing our future food safety, relinquishing control over our future food resources, continuing to inadvertently support consolidation in the agricultural sector, and finally, we are putting more pressure on rural America and U.S. farmers.”
“Sincerely,
Howard G. Buffett
Assumption, Ill.”
DENNIS T. AVERY is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis. His views are not necessarily those of BridgeNews.
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Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis.
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