| Chapter 1: | Farm Bills, Interest Groups, and Policy Change |
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these particular calls for farm bill reform, they together indicated burgeoning support for the idea of a more sustainable and equitable commodity policy.
But whereas additions to the farm bill have been made repeatedly over time, such major reforms of farm policy have been few and far between. The few “change” farm bills found in farm policy history were the 1933 farm bill, which marked the origin of commodity policy; the 1973 farm bill, which made significant alterations to commodity support provisions; the 1985 farm bill, which melded supply control tools with conservation objectives; and the 1996 farm bill, which moved farm policy toward the reduction of commodity support provisions (Orden, Paarlberg, & Roe, 1999). Most other farm bills, like most government policies in general, have changed only slowly and incrementally (Baumgartner & Jones, 1993; Dluhy, 1981). Interest groups coming to the farm bill seeking more substantial commodity policy reform thus faced what historically has been a challenge.
The difficulty of pursuing reform efforts comes in part from interest groups that historically have benefited from commodity support programs, as well as from a system that externalizes and therefore undervalues the costs of environmental damage to soil, water, and other resources necessary for a sustainable agricultural system (G. C. Daily, 1997; Hesse, 2005; Knutson et al., 1990).5 It comes, too, from the Jeffersonian ideology of rural life as the “bedrock of American values” used to support subsidies to corn, soybean, wheat, cotton, and rice farmers. The cultural power of this idea has made critiques of subsidies sound antipopulist and antidemocratic, even though payments generally do not go to the smaller farmers conjured up by the Jeffersonian imagery (Environmental Working Group, 2006; Knutson et al., 1990).
A unique opportunity for farm bill reformers to make significant changes to farm policy, however, presented itself in the lead up to the 2008 farm bill debates. First, World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations in 2005–2006 brought significant pressure to bear on the United States (and Europe and Japan) to reduce or eliminate their domestic agricultural subsidies to facilitate trade flows among nations. Second, a