Environmentalists fear loss of US farm data
Date: 05-Apr-02
Country: USA
The government spends about $2 billion a year on soil and water stewardship on the farm. Spending would climb by 80 percent under the new farm subsidy law being assembled by Congress, particularly in programs to control manure and farmland run-off.
Staff workers for the House and Senate Agriculture committees say the concerns by the Environmental Working Group were misplaced and no substantive change in law was planned. "They are really off-base," said one House staffer.
EWG, which advocates larger conservation spending and derides crop subsidies as wasteful, created a nationwide stir last fall by posting on the Internet a database of farm subsidy recipients from 1996 to 2000. Recently updated with 2001 data, the site has handled more than 30 million searches, EWG says.
Besides providing fodder for coffee shop chatter, the Web site (http://www.ewg.org) was cited by senators in debate leading to a 66-31 vote to limit farmers to no more than $275,000 a year in crop subsidies, a 40 percent cut from current limits.
Now, EWG says House-Senate work on the final terms of the farm bill seemed likely to include limits on public access to information about conservation spending. Both chambers approved language to restrict access to some degree, it says.
Negotiations reportedly were leaning toward the Senate language, which environmentalists find more acceptable than the House. The Senate would allow release only of aggregate data about conservation activity in an area, EWG said, and would give the Agriculture Department the option of refusing to release the names of recipients and how much money they got.
WOULD "HIDE EVERYTHING"
By comparison, one environmentalist said, the House "would hide everything" - application forms, the timetables for stewardship improvements that farmers draft to obtain federal cost-share money and lists of recipients.
House and Senate staffers disagreed with those descriptions.
Seth Bofelli, spokesman for the Senate Agriculture Committee, said the Senate language would protect the privacy of proprietary information submitted by growers and still would make payment data available. "You can't change the Freedom of Information Act," he said.
Two House Agriculture Committee staffers said their language was not a significant change in law. The government does not now release proprietary data about a farmer or farm operations or the problem being tackled.
"You might be trying to do the right thing but get punished if this private information is released," said one.
The other said the House language would assure confidentiality of applications. He objected repeatedly to EWG assertions that "all disclosures of any information...other than reports of aggregated data" would be barred.
Ann Keys, who spearheaded EWG work on the farm bill, said blocking access to conservation plans would make it impossible to see if money was being spent wisely or to identify operators with the worst problems.
"It's the big CAFOS (feedlots) that don't want the Environmental Protection Agency to get their hands on their conservation plans," she said.
Melanie Shepherdson of the Natural Resources Defence Council said EPA oversight of large-scale livestock feeding operations would be complicated if it did not have access to data on nutrient management plans.