Excerpt
One of the fundamental roles of a professional society in any policy debate is to talk about the facts and present the implications of those facts for policy in such a way that policymakers and opinion-leaders understand what their decisions will mean. That's not lobbying; that's education. That's what a professional society is all about, and that's what role the Soil and Water Conservation Society will assume in the upcoming farm bill debate.
So what are the facts surrounding the next farm bill debate as we now understand them? Today, we are still working with the policy framework established in the 1985 farm bill. The policy innovations in that bill focused almost entirely on soil erosion on highly erodible land and on wetland conservation. Evidence from the National Resources Inventory and elsewhere suggest that those measures resulted in significant, perhaps historic, progress in reducing erosion rates on highly erodible land and in slowing wetland conversion. Regardless of what we think of the means, the ends clearly were achieved, if our national inventories are to be believed.
But a lot of policy changes have taken place within the context of that …
Footnotes
Craig Cox is executive vice president of the Soil and Water Conservation Society. This viewpoint is based on a presentation given at the SWCS annual conference in July, 2000.
- Copyright 2001 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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