to EQIP, other USDA programs
Jan Shepel
Associate Editor
WASHINGTON, D.C.
One environmental group is criticizing budget cuts to popular USDA conservation programs that never have enough money to enroll all the farmers who want to be part of them.
On Thursday (July 15) the Senate Appropriations Committee cut more than $500 million from the USDA’s conservation programs including the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), Wetlands Reserve Program, Farm and Ranchland Protection Program and Grassland Reserve Program.
The 2008 farm bill had mandated a funding level of more than $2 billion in the coming fiscal year for these programs.
Sara Hopper, director of agricultural policy for the Environmental Defense Fund, told Wisconsin State Farmer, that her organization has “pretty significant concerns” about the committee action. There was supposed to be significant new money for the programs, she said, that are intended to help farmers deal with pressures to protect resources.
“Every year there are people who get turned away from the programs,” she said, because they are “oversubscribed.” These conservation programs are one way to help agriculture “avoid future regulation” she said.
Because there are public benefits, the public should help pay for these programs, Hopper said, through the cost-share provisions. “Producers should be concerned,” she said.
The move by the Senate committee follows a vote two weeks ago by the House Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee to cut $270 million from next year’s baseline spending for EQIP, the USDA’s largest working lands conservation program. (Hopper explained that in the Senate, the bill went directly to the full appropriations committee without a discussion in the agriculture appropriations subcommittee).
The two votes fail to recognize the urgent need for action to conserve the working lands — farms, ranches and private forestlands — that make up two-thirds of the continental United States, said Hopper, a former staff member of the Senate Agriculture Committee.
Hopper said the budget cuts will jeopardize conservation advances that were overwhelmingly approved by Congress in the last farm bill debate and leave even more producers waiting in line to install conservation practices on their land.
“Farmer demand for assistance through EQIP and other conservation programs routinely outstrips available funding. We urge Senate and House leadership to reverse these cuts to these critical programs that assist farmers,” she said.
President Obama’s Fiscal Year 2011 budget also called for cutting more than half a billion dollars from USDA conservation programs, including EQIP, the Conservation Stewardship Program, Wetlands Reserve Program, Grasslands Reserve Program, Farmland Protection Program and Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program.
Last month, 17 conservation groups wrote key House committee and party leaders urging them not to cut USDA conservation programs to pay for an $8 billion increase in spending for child nutrition programs.
Hopper doesn’t think farmland conservation programs should be pitted against feeding hungry children. “These are disappointing choices but that shouldn’t be the tradeoff,” she said in a telephone interview. “That money doesn’t need to come from agriculture.”
While the current House version of the child nutrition reauthorization bill does not cut USDA conservation programs, the Senate Agriculture Committee voted in March to cut EQIP by $2.8 billion over 10 years to pay for a smaller $4.5 billion increase in funding for child nutrition programs.
Hopper urged farmers to let their congressional delegation know how they feel about the cuts to these programs. When the two plans get to a conference committee — because the House and Senate versions are not the same — agriculture will have another opportunity to make their concerns known to lawmakers, she said.
