A recent string of crop-destroying weather has helped spur farmers to ask for more federal crop insurance, making disaster relief a top priority in the 2012 Farm Bill, perhaps at the expense of direct subsidies. However, as they ask for more insurance, farmers and their lobbies don't acknowledge climate change as a possible cause for the troublesome weather and aren't attempting to adapt to it, Jean Chemnick of Greenwire reports in The New York Times.
Kansas corn growers have had to deal with both drought and flood this year, and the executive director of the Kansas Corn Commission, Jere White, told Chemnick that climate change is not discussed when his group talks policy. He said the increased interest in crop insurance has more to do with the fundamentals of farming than climate change. Richard Krause, senior director for congressional relations for the American Farm Bureau Federation, told Chemnick that increasing crop insurance would be a way to "fill the gap" if Congress stops direct subsidy payments to farmers through spending cuts.
However, Brian Murray, director of economic analysis at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University, told Chemnick that federal insurance programs protect against disaster with no guarantee of payment, while subsidies do guarantee a minimum return on investment. He suggested that farmers are using crop insurance as a way to adapt to increasingly extreme weather without discussing climate change, even though adapting to weather and climate is part of being a farmer.
Jim French, an agriculture advocate for Oxfam America, told Chemnick that farmers could better prepare for extreme weather if they would be willing to acknowledge climate change, adding that a cap-and-trade bill would help fund these adaptation efforts by paying farmers for agricultural practicies that keep carbon from entering the atmosphere. The only farm lobby that has accepted climate change as the reason for extreme weather patterns is the liberally oriented National Farmers Union, which backed legislation during the last Congress to cap industrial greenhouse-gas emissions. (Read more)
Kansas corn growers have had to deal with both drought and flood this year, and the executive director of the Kansas Corn Commission, Jere White, told Chemnick that climate change is not discussed when his group talks policy. He said the increased interest in crop insurance has more to do with the fundamentals of farming than climate change. Richard Krause, senior director for congressional relations for the American Farm Bureau Federation, told Chemnick that increasing crop insurance would be a way to "fill the gap" if Congress stops direct subsidy payments to farmers through spending cuts.
However, Brian Murray, director of economic analysis at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University, told Chemnick that federal insurance programs protect against disaster with no guarantee of payment, while subsidies do guarantee a minimum return on investment. He suggested that farmers are using crop insurance as a way to adapt to increasingly extreme weather without discussing climate change, even though adapting to weather and climate is part of being a farmer.
Jim French, an agriculture advocate for Oxfam America, told Chemnick that farmers could better prepare for extreme weather if they would be willing to acknowledge climate change, adding that a cap-and-trade bill would help fund these adaptation efforts by paying farmers for agricultural practicies that keep carbon from entering the atmosphere. The only farm lobby that has accepted climate change as the reason for extreme weather patterns is the liberally oriented National Farmers Union, which backed legislation during the last Congress to cap industrial greenhouse-gas emissions. (Read more)
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