Ground truth

Excerpt

STROLLING out of a meeting on Capitol Hill recently, I asked a representative of a major environmental group why no one had ever sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for failing to prepare an environmental impact statement (EIS) on its agricultural price support programs, like this year's Payment in Kind (PIK). It seemed to me to be a case custom made for an EIS suit.

Some eminently logical arguments that might be used against USDA were spelled out clearly in Bud Mekelburg's recent “Viewpoint” in the JSWC (July-August 1983, pages 324–325). The crux of the argument revolves on the fact that crop program benefits, in the form of loans or direct payments in cash or (this year) in kind, are proportional to the acreage farmers plant to the program crops—wheat, feed grains, peanuts, cotton, tobacco, and (for loans only) soybeans.

In the Great Plains this means USDA subsidizes the plowing of fragile rangelands that suffer high rates of wind erosion once the vegetation has been buried …