Act Immediately to Support Family Farms and the Environment!
Call Your Senators to Support the Grassley EQIP Payment Limitations Amendment
The Issue in Brief: The Senate will take up the agricultural
appropriations bill for 2004 on the floor the week of July 21, quite
possibly fairly early in the week. Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa will
introduce an amendment to scale back the per farm payment limitation for
the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) from $450,000 to
$300,000, and apply the limit to all the farming sites that are part of a
single operation, regardless of the number of partners investing in the
operation.
The Grassley amendment will put some brakes on the use of EQIP to subsidize
expansion of industrial livestock confinement facilities, while allowing
for a wider, fairer distribution of EQIP funds to a larger number of
farmers. The amendment will redirect funding to help family farms and
improve the environmental outcomes of the EQIP program.
Act Now: The Senate could start debate on the agriculture appropriations
bill at any moment. Please call both of your Senators offices right now.
Don't hesitate! Time is very short!
You can reach your Senators via the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and
asking for their office by name. Tell them you are a constituent and urge
them to support the Grassley EQIP Amendment to the Agriculture
Appropriations bill. Leave that message with the receptionist who answers
the phone and/or ask to speak with the staff person who covers agriculture
and give them the same message.
Background: The EQIP program was enacted as part of the 1996 farm bill as
a major, positive reform of previous conservation cost-share programs.
Payments were limited to $10,000 a year, with a cap of not more than
$50,000 over five years. Animal waste storage structures for large-scale
confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) were ineligible for EQIP
funding. The program worked reasonably well in support of farm
conservation efforts, with a special emphasis on cost-effective land
management practices.
In the 2002 farm bill, however, Congress reversed course in response to a
massive lobbying campaign by corporate livestock interests and their
allies. Large-scale confinement operations were made eligible for EQIP
funding, the yearly payment limit was eliminated, and the overall payment
limitation mushroomed nine-fold to $450,000 over the six-year span of the
farm bill. Proponents of these changes spoke openly about converting EQIP
from a conservation program to a commodity program for livestock groups.
Despite a five-fold increase in annual overall funding for EQIP provided in
the 2002 farm bill, the total number of farms and ranches benefiting from
EQIP has not increased because the payments per farm have become so much
larger. The primary beneficiaries of these changes have been large
livestock confinement operations and other large farms and ranches
investing in capital-intensive structures and equipment with public
cost-share dollars. These taxpayer expenditures probably do far more to
increase production (and thus lower the prices farmers receive for their
products) than to achieve any benefits to natural resources and the
environment.
The Grassley amendment, while not going as far as we would like, would be a
very big step in the right direction of restoring some sanity to the
once-proud program. The amendment would allow more farmers to participate
in EQIP by reducing the high-end payments to the largest operations. The
amendment would also rectify a further problem created by USDA in the
rulemaking process, namely allowing the already extreme $450,000 payment
limit to be multiplied by the number of partners in a single farming
operation ? this from the same USDA team that invented commodity program
payment limitation loopholes that provide million dollar payments to large
grain and cotton operations! The Grassley amendment tries to nip this
slide toward more handouts for the powerful in the bud.
Please note -- the Grassley amendment does not change the total funding for
the EQIP program ($1 billion in 2004). It only addresses the payment
limitation and thus the distribution of dollars internally within the
program.
This amendment is a great opportunity to start correcting one of the
biggest mistakes of the 2002 farm bill. Thank you for making those calls
today! Let's take back our program!
Erin E. Jordahl
Director, Iowa Chapter Sierra Club
3839 Merle Hay Road, Suite 280
Des Moines, IA 50310
515-277-8868
[log in to unmask]
www.iowa.sierraclub.org