| Chapter 1: | Farm Bills, Interest Groups, and Policy Change |
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alongside pervasive agricultural overproduction and associated environmental, health, trade, and community impacts. As such, these complexities of the benefits and problems associated with commodity support programs became the basis for struggles between groups over potential commodity reform in the 2008 farm bill.
Farm Policy Interest Groups
Agricultural policy was once an arena in which a handful of agricultural and rural state interest groups, legislators, and administrators crafted an economic support system for American farmers. It has now become an arena where groups ranging from environmentalists to consumers to antihunger groups to commodity interests fight over food stamp, conservation, international trade, and energy policies, in addition to the traditional economic supports for the small percentage of Americans who still farm (Browne, 1995; K. L. Robinson, 1989). The 2008 farm bill debates in particular attracted the attention of an extraordinarily wide range of interest groups. In these debates, the many groups that supported commodity policies continued to argue for price supports as a necessary safety net for agriculture, whereas other groups argued for farm policies that would benefit a more diverse set of farms, natural resources, consumer health concerns, or rural community development plans.
Many of these reform-oriented groups argued that it is important to farm in a way that is not only efficient but that also protects the environment, communities, and human health and livelihoods. Although proponents of the current agricultural support system would agree, the two groups differed on how this should be done. They defined efficiency, environmental protection, and health risks differently, advocated a different balance among these factors, and suggested different strategies for how the balance should be achieved. Industry, for example, often sees evolving technology as the primary way to correct for negative consequences of previous agricultural technologies. Pesticides and herbicides were formerly the answer to the risks of producing in monoculture. Now genetically modified (GM) crops have become the way to mitigate