Public Policy and Funding Support for Sustainable Agriculture

Margaret Krome

The federal funding process publicly begins each February with the release of the President's budget, in which programs we support as well as scores of thousands of others are detailed. This budget is very important to our work, as in recent years Congress has frequently reduced funding for sustainable agriculture programs from levels that the President proposed; rarely has it funded programs at higher levels. Thus it has become quite important to make sure that our programs are funded at reasonable levels within the President's budget, all of which effort has begun eight to ten months before.

Shortly after the President's budget is released, the Appropriations Agriculture Subcommittees in both houses of Congress begin holding hearings. At some point in the spring, the House of Representatives subcommittee chair (currently Rep. Joseph Skeen of New Mexico) signals that he expects to "mark up" the House appropriations bill by a certain date. All of the subcommittee members must submit a letter to him by another, earlier date, stating what programs they especially care about and at what levels they want to see them funded; these letters are quite confidential. Thus it is that we, the constituents of those members, must contact subcommittee members before they write those letters in order to influence what they put, and in turn the chair puts, into the House Agriculture Appropriations bill. Although the most important step in the process is at this subcommittee level, after markup the bill goes to the full Appropriations Committee and the full House—before the Senate undergoes the same process, typically sometime in late June or July, but sometimes later. The two houses then have a "conference committee" to work out the differences between the bills sometime before the next fiscal year begins October 1; if they fail or if there's a larger issue of dispute between Congress and the President, Congress operates under a "Continuing Resolution."

In the last two years, the typical process outlined above has been thrown way off course by two things. The first is the fact that the agricultural appropriators have lacked clear information from the budget committees regarding how much money they have to spend. Even when they've gotten such information, the budget caps within which they must appropriate – set by a 1997 Congress/President budget agreement – have been set impossibly low, and trying to negotiate for more has slowed down the process. The second wrench in the system has been that Congress has spent enormous time and billions of dollars in emergency spending measures; unfortunately, it has been extremely hard to persuade key appropriators to take the "long view" of sustainable solutions in this process, and our programs have benefited only a little from it.

Clearly, the funding process is shrouded both when the Administration puts the President's budget together and when subcommittee members write their letters to the Ag Appropriations chair. This is why our movement must influence both processes as strategically as possible. A few grassroots supporters can dramatically change the fate of funding for our programs. Relatively few people have several times saved key programs. Through your Sustainable Agriculture Working Group, and by signing onto the action alert lists of the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture, you can be maximally effective with least bother to you.

Policy work coordinating the grassroots campaign to increase federal funding for sustainable agriculture has been funded for many years by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation.

Margaret Krome
Michael Fields Agricultural Institute
2524 Chamberlain Ave
Madison, WI 53705
Tel: (608) 238-1440
mkrome@inxpress.net

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