Spitting In The Ocean
The Farmers Shoot the Moon
Updating our earlier posting (Telling People Things that They Don't Want to Hear) on public response to increased accountability for the Chesapeake Bay water quality problem, we note that just two weeks after the EPA posted its TMDL the farmers have decided to take the plunge. The Bay News listserve is full of stories about the American Farm Bureau Federation's decision to sue EPA over the new pollution abatement requirements.
In The Capital, an Annapolis newspaper, a Farm Bureau Federation water quality specialist is quoted as saying, "We want the government to get it right". Now, I understand that interest groups endeavor to apply a favorable spin to their efforts. But this statement did not come out of marketing or management. It came from a water quality specialist. He, more than most, should be aware that the Farm Bureau Federation does not want the government to get it right.
Getting it right, in this context, means correctly attributing nutrient pollution to the Chesapeake Bay across its various sources. Anyone familiar with the process by which the Chesapeake Bay's "pollution diet" has been devised knows that there is a certain amount of politics involved. The science by which one attributes nutrient pollution across sources is limited by the data that are available. And for agricultural sources, state agricultural departments have been an important gatekeeper for much of the data.
State agricultural departments serve the agricultural producers (and up-stream enterprises) of their state; that's who their constituency is. Given an opportunity to serve their constituency in the forum where nutrient load allocations were being determined, state agricultural departments have fought valiantly and thoroughly. I am not suggesting politicized science here. Just the intimation that if there were some opportunity to err on the side which minimized costs to agriculture, that is often the preferred error.
If an effort is made to remove those vague biases, I think that some may be surprised how much larger a share of the Bay's water quality problem agriculture can be held accountable for. The USGS' National Water Quality Assessment tells us that the shallow ground water under most of our nation's cropland is laden with nitrogen and, less often, volatile organic compounds (particularly, agricultural fumigants). Pesticides are found in waters draining agricultural basins.
There is in fact a lot of compelling information out there that squeezing ever higher levels of agricultural production from the land is not as inexpensive as it appears at first. Some costs, such as resultant water quality impairments, have not been factored into the equation. When those costs do get factored into the equation, the question will inevitably arise, "who pays them?"
One could view payments that the government makes to farmers to get them to plant cover crops or riparian buffers or any other pollution mitigating practice as acceptance of cost liability by the public sector. As Ronald Coase pointed out many years ago, this is an okay allocation of property rights for the pollution problem. But it is not an example of the "polluter pays" principle. New confined animal feeding operations (CAFO) regulations will, on the other hand, put agricultural producers out of pocket. That, in all likelihood, is what the Farm Bureau has a problem with.
The risks that the Farm Bureau takes in its suit against the EPA are at least three-fold. First, if the science of pollution loads and load mitigation practices is improved, agriculture may be shown to have a lot more work to do. Second, budget constraints in the public sector might cause a re-evaluation of who the pollution costs from agriculture should belong to. And, third, by appearing the spoiler in the Bay clean-up, agriculture might undermine the widespread public support that it currently enjoys.
The payoff for the Farm Bureau's lawsuit is that CAFOs may be taken off the hook; either literally, by stopping the Chesapeake Bay TMDL altogether, or though promised subsidies for mitigation requirements. When playing hearts, this is called shooting the moon.