[Vision2020] Harvesting a Climate Disaster

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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September 12, 2012
Harvesting a Climate Disaster By MARK HERTSGAARD

San Francisco

FARMERS went to Washington yesterday. Members of a coalition representing
more than 80 agricultural organizations rallied on Capitol Hill to demand
passage of a new farm
bill<http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2012/09/11/us/politics/11reuters-usa-agriculture.html?ref=farmbillus>that
has been stalled in Congress.

The Democratic-led Senate has already passed its version of the bill; the
Republican-controlled House is squabbling over a competing approach (one
that sharply cuts food aid to the poor). Irate farmers want both sides to
shut up and pass something that can replace the current farm bill, which
expires on Sept. 30.

All of the parties, though, are focused on the wrong thing.

The farm bill is not only the centerpiece of United States food and
agriculture policy, it is also a de facto climate bill. And in this
respect, both the Senate and House versions of the legislation are a
disaster waiting to happen.

Consider, for a moment, the summer of 2012. For an agricultural superpower
like the United States, it should have set off alarm bells. The
hottest July<http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/>on record and the worst
drought in 50 years — both driven partly by global
warming, scientists say — have parched soil and withered crops across the
Farm Belt. Yet America’s lawmakers aren’t even remotely addressing the
issue in a piece of legislation that will affect the climate profoundly for
years to come.

The proposed farm bill — Senate- or House-style, take your pick — would
make American agriculture’s climate problem worse, in two ways. Not only
would the bill accelerate global warming by encouraging more greenhouse gas
emissions, it would make the nation’s farms more vulnerable to the impacts
of those emissions.

Indeed, instead of helping farmers take common-sense measures to limit
their land’s vulnerability to extreme weather, the legislation would simply
spend billions more on crop insurance — sticking taxpayers with the bill.
“It’s like giving a homeowner cut-rate fire insurance but not requiring
fire extinguishers,” Jim Kleinschmit of the Institute for Agriculture and
Trade Policy told me in an interview.

Except in a technical aside, neither the bill passed by the Senate or by
the House Committee on Agriculture even mentions climate change.

Coal and cars are blamed, but agriculture is also a major contributor to
global warming: by some estimates, it accounts for roughly a third of
emissions globally. The industrialized, meat-heavy food system of the
United States takes a heavy toll on the atmosphere; it takes an enormous
amount of fossil fuel to run farm equipment and harvest the mountains of
corn that fatten livestock. And most fertilizers contain nitrous oxide, a
greenhouse gas 298 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a century.

Both of the farm bill proposals would maintain agriculture’s large climate
footprint, mainly by continuing to skew subsidies toward a mere handful of
commodity crops. The “big five” — wheat, rice, soybeans, cotton and above
all corn — have received 84 percent of subsidies since 2004, according to
the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group critical of the
practice. Subsidies increase with output, encouraging farmers to run highly
mechanized operations that plant “fence row to fence row” and apply oceans
of fertilizer and pesticide, all of which boost emissions.

But industrial agriculture’s ability to produce gargantuan amounts of food
also makes it exceptionally susceptible to climate change. Relying on vast
monocultures — the miles and miles of cornfields one passes when driving in
Iowa — captures economies of scale. But that lack of diversity invites
trouble. A monoculture’s uniformity means that if temperatures spike or a
new pest arrives, the damage is likely to spread throughout the entire
planted area. By contrast, the diversified landscapes of organic
agriculture — corn planted between, say, other vegetables and chicken pens
— tend to limit damage.

Farmers can best boost resilience to climate change, scientists say, by
improving their soil’s fertility and capacity to retain moisture. That
means cutting back on chemical fertilizers, which kill many of the
microorganisms that ventilate soil, and shifting to compost and manure
fertilizers and crop rotations.

Instead, leading lobbyists for agribusiness want to retain the current
production system but shift the mounting climate risks to the taxpayer.
Both versions of the farm bill would expand the $11 billion crop insurance
program, a move championed by the National Corn Growers
Association<http://www.ncga.com/issue-briefs/7-farm-policy>.
The Senate bill, for instance, would authorize $3.8 billion a year for
additional insurance.

But neither version would require farmers to take other measures to reduce
their climate vulnerability, like investing in healthier soil. In fact, the
draft bills would actually make it harder for farmers to do that because
the expanded crop insurance would be paid for by cutting the Conservation
Stewardship Program, which helps farmers improve their land’s ecological
health.

Shifting federal policy from a longstanding emphasis on industrial
agriculture to more organic approaches <http://www.agassessment.org/> is
too large a task to complete by Sept. 30. But Congress could pass a
one-year extension of the old bill and direct the Department of Agriculture
to use the extra time to develop, with farmers and other stakeholders, a
plan to segue to climate-smart agriculture as soon as possible. As the
summer of 2012 has reminded us, this agricultural superpower has already
waited too long to take climate change seriously.

Mark Hertsgaard <http://markhertsgaard.com/>, a fellow of the New America
Foundation, is the author, most recently, of “Hot: Living Through the Next
Fifty Years on Earth.”




-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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