| Chapter 1: | Farm Bills, Interest Groups, and Policy Change |
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positions. Some groups still advocated reform, but many downplayed the role of the WTO in their arguments. And biofuels, or renewable energy from plant materials, became the new focus of agricultural policy debates, the new sphere in which public excitement in agriculture lay.
In this book, I argue that, among other situational and political forces, the shift from a focus on the WTO to a focus on biofuels changed the tenor of farm bill debates from reform oriented to stability oriented. It assuaged tensions over how agriculture—and the food system as a whole—should be oriented by layering atop these tensions a broader blanket of consensus that came to support farm policy for the contributions it could make to renewable energy. This change was reflected in the media, in interest group positions, in the halls of Congress, and in the discourses used to talk about farm policy priorities. Though by no means uncontested or free of conflict, the 2008 farm bill was in the end crafted in a context of relative cooperation rather than amid the tensions that had seemed to pit reform-oriented interest groups against stability-oriented interest groups in 2005.
This change is important because, whereas agricultural supports have helped many farmers stay in business through the boom-bust cycles of agriculture, built an extremely productive agricultural sector, provided surplus food to the poor and low-cost food to consumers in general, and set aside lands for conservation, they have also had significant environmental and social downsides. By providing payments primarily to farmers producing corn, wheat, soybeans, cotton, and rice,1 agricultural support policies have favored monoculture plantings of a certain few crops over others, increasing erosion, fertilizer- and pesticide-related pollution, and water use (Foltz, Lee, & Martin, 1993; Killpack & Buchholz, 2006).
Agricultural supports have also reinforced inequalities domestically and internationally by channeling payments to wealthier farmers, consolidating U.S. agriculture onto fewer larger farms, and lowering the world price poor farmers in other countries receive for their goods (Offutt & Gundersen, 2005). In addition, supports have subsidized high-fat, high-sugar foods over fruits and vegetables, created barriers to trade, and cost the government significant sums of money (Cline, 2005; Johns Hopkins