| Chapter 1: | Farm Bills, Interest Groups, and Policy Change |
|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
School of Public Health, 2007). Thus, alongside the benefits they have provided consumers, producers of supported commodity crops, livestock producers who feed corn and soybeans to animals, and agribusiness processors who add value to raw commodities, these policies have resulted in costs for the environment and for social equity (National Corn Growers Association, 2007a; Oxfam America, 2006). Commodity policies have contributed to a pattern of unsustainable agricultural land use, where the benefits of an extremely efficient food production system come at the expense of soil and water quality, diversified ecosystems, small farmer livelihoods, and conservation of fossil fuels.
I begin with the premise that maintaining these agricultural supports, referred to in this book as commodity supports or crop subsidies, is problematic. I suggest that modifying them to encourage, or at least not discourage, more sustainable land uses could bring substantial benefits for the environment and for rural communities alongside the security for farmers and consumers these payments currently provide. In contrast, a continuation of farm policy as is promises to perpetuate negative environmental, social, and economic impacts along with its many benefits. In this book, I ask how the construction of a more environmentally and socially friendly farmer safety net might be approached.I focus on the period between 2005 and 2008, when such commodity policy reform seemed imminent but then later unlikely. This focus provides a unique opportunity to examine how prospects for such policy change came about and then how they shifted, in turn providing insight as to what factors favor or disfavor change over time. This book also asks what such changes (or lack of changes) mean for future patterns of land use and food production and how farm policy interest groups can approach future policy change.2
This book's theoretical framework is based in two complementary but separate social science literatures, policy change and social movements. I draw from the policy change literature the concept of a policy window, or a temporary opportunity for policy reform created when a combination of situational factors and actions favorable to change converge at a particular moment in time. The opportunity for farm bill reform in