USDA Announces New Bureaucratic Branch
By Monica @ 2:39 PM   
From Grainnet:
Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer announced Dec. 19, the intention to establish a new USDA Office of Ecosystem Services and Markets and the creation of a federal government-wide Conservation and Land Management Environmental Services Board to assist the Secretary of Agriculture in the development of new technical guidelines and science-based methods to assess environmental service benefits which will in turn promote markets for ecosystem services including carbon trading to mitigate climate change. "Our Nation's farms, ranches and forests provide goods and services that are vital to society - natural assets we call "ecosystem services," said Schafer. "The Office of Ecosystem Services and Markets will enable America's agriculture producers to better compete, trade their services around the world, and make significant contributions to help improve the environment." Agriculture producers provide many ecosystem services which have historically been viewed as free benefits to society - clean water and air, wildlife habitat, carbon storage, and scenic landscapes. Lacking a formal structure to market these services, farmers, ranchers and forest landowners are not generally compensated for providing these critical public benefits. Market-based approaches to conservation are proven to be a cost-effective method to achieve environmental goals and sustain working and natural landscapes. Without financial incentives, these ecosystem services may be lost as privately-owned lands are sold or converted to development.
Earth to government, earth to government! Here's the real market-based approach the government could use: get out of agriculture. The USDA should not be setting up a new bureaucracy to pay farmers to do something sensible because it has been paying them to do something un-sensible for the past 90 years. It's the whole bailout nonsense all over again.
This news is frustrating, because when you look at the history of the USDA it becomes clear that the policies it has supported in the past, which encouraged unsustainable agriculture, have clearly led to "conservation" incentives like EQIP and CRP. USDA policies have given rise to so many problems that we have today, including the depression of agricultural land prices that has spurred the sale of agricultural land for development -- which is now to be "offset" but this Office of Ecosystem Services!
What else will need to be offset by the Office of Ecosystem Services? The USDA's biofuels boondoggle. The USDA is subsiziding ethanol to the tune of 50 cents on the dollar because corn-based ethanol (as opposed to cellulosic) is economically unsustainable on its own. What is the effect? Net CO2 released into the atmosphere (not sequestered as was originally thought and intended) and the promotion of ecologically unsustainable soil erosion and nutrient depletion as farmers for the first time ever plant corn on corn on corn. (And of course this is a violation of taxpayers' rights by stealing the wealth of all to provide gifts to corn farmers for a product that could not compete in a free market.)
The logical solution is to eliminate the ethanol subsidies, eliminate the grain subsidies, and return to a sustainable system of agriculture with animals as the basis of healthy, fertile soil as we largely had before the Butz era. A lack of government intervention would honestly lead to more ecosystem services (and yes, it's a valid concept). This won't happen because Obama has appointed Tom Vilsack for Secretary of Agriculture, who is a true believer in biofuels and NAIS. It is going to be business as usual at the USDA, despite all of Obama's talk of "change". Now we will have an Office of Ecosystem Services to deal with the ethanol problem that largely rose in the Bush administration.
Do you see how this works? There is no admission of a problem by the USDA. Even though they know biofuels is a boondoggle, they can't reverse ethanol spending too quickly because it would undermine their credibility (ethanol subsidies actually were reduced in the most recent Farm Bill, but the spending has only gone down by around 10%, around 5 cents on the dollar). No, instead the USDA will distract the public and spend more of their tax dollars on another new bureaucracy to pretend that it is actually doing something useful. It's all about job security for the folks at the USDA.
Farmers periodically took their land out of production for millenia, all without a government directing them to do it, and they would have been doing so all along if the USDA hadn't interfered in the first place. We would have had more scenic landscapes, less water pollution, more wildlife habitat, and probably more carbon sequestration if the USDA hadn't been so busy trying to "feed the world" with grain subsidies for the past 40 years. Now we have a new bureaucracy designed to "fix" the "problems" it has created. Business as usual at the USDA. And the only "change" we will have is what little is left in our wallets at the end of the Obama administration.
Labels: Global Warming, Government Idiocy, Why the USDA is Not Your Friend
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