| Chapter 1: | Farm Bills, Interest Groups, and Policy Change |
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and pesticide use, soil erosion, water pollution, wealth disparities among farmers, consumer health concerns, and trade disputes (Green Lands Blue Waters, 2004; Hanrahan, 2007; Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, 2007; Killpack & Buchholz, 2006; Offutt & Gundersen, 2005).
These costs of domestic agricultural supports are certainly multipronged, complex, and related to a multiplicity of factors both internal and external to farm policy. Nevertheless, they point to the host of unintended consequences that have followed in the wake of subsidies for the major commodity crops. As such, many environmental, sustainable agriculture, public health, rural development, and subsidy reform–oriented interest groups have come to agricultural policy debates seeking additions or fuller reforms to these commodity supports that would satisfy their interests, including a desire to mitigate some of these negative consequences. They have come to expect that farm and food policy should benefit not only certain farmers and supermarket shopper pocketbooks but also non-commodity-crop farms, health needs, soil and water resources, rural jobs, and agricultural communities. Or at the very least, they should not subvert these goals to the narrower needs of crop productivity.
Examples of these calls for change in 2005–2006 included green payment plans proposed by many sustainable agriculture and environmental groups to support farmers for their environmental stewardship rather than for crop production. They included popular critiques of the extensive resources granted to mainstream agricultural production, by the likes of journalist Michael Pollan and novelist Barbara Kingsolver and in series of Washington Post and New York Times articles critical of the inequities inherent in farm subsidy payment distribution (Kingsolver, 2007; Morgan, 2005; Pollan, 2006; Weisman & Barrionuevo, 2006). And they included farm bill reform legislation introduced prior to the drafting of the 2008 farm bill by the likes of Senators Charles Grassley (R-IA) and Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Rep. Ron Kind (D-WI) to increase federal support for conservation and nutrition and to cap subsidy payments to wealthy farmers (Grassley, 2007; Herszenhorn, 2007; Kind, 2007). Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of