House to Vote on One-Year Farm Bill Extension: Energy and Conservation Programs at Stake

The House leadership has decided not to bring the 2012 Farm Bill to the floor for debate this week. Instead, the leadership has decided to propose a one-year extension of the current 2008 Farm Bill, which would be linked to drought disaster assistance. The drought assistance would be paid for primarily with already planned reductions in conservation programs, and energy programs would not receive any mandatory funding.

The House may vote as soon as August 1 on a measure to provide a one-year extension to the current 2008 Farm Bill and to provide disaster assistance to farmers and ranchers across the central United States who are facing the worst drought in decades. By doing so, the House leadership is choosing to by-pass the 2012 Farm Bill recently approved by the House Committee on Agriculture (see the July 13 SBFF post on that bill here ) and is further delaying progress toward enacting much-needed reforms in the nation’s food and farm policies. The current 2008 Farm Bill authorization expires on September 30.

The one-year extension would extend most of the food and agriculture programs that currently receive (more or less) guaranteed baseline funding for one more year. It would also reauthorize most current programs in the energy title, qualifying them for some discretionary funding, but it would not provide any mandatory spending, which is critical for those programs to continue at a time when discretionary funding is being cut deeply.

The drought assistance would be paid for primarily with cuts to several conservation programs. These cuts were already planned to occur in both the House and Senate versions of the 2012 farm bills, which the full Senate and the House Committee on Agriculture have already approved. (See the Congressional Budget Office itemization of which conservation programs will be cut and by how much here ).

Expanding sustainable biomass production, renewable energy and conservation programs (rather than cutting and shrinking them) and increasing conservation compliance can be key to helping farmers and ranchers manage and survive droughts and other extreme weather events and adapt to a changing climate, while also providing a variety of other critical environmental benefits.

The best outcome for Farm Bill energy programs would be for the House to approve the one-year extension and agree to establish a conference committee with the Senate to combine the extension with the Senate-passed version of the 2012 Farm Bill. As reported previously , the Senate bill would provide $800 million in mandatory funding for many of the current energy programs. If a conference committee agreed to provide mandatory funding for current energy programs, and if both the House and Senate approved the conference committee bill, then many of the current energy programs could continue to move ahead, helping advance the nation’s energy security, creating jobs, and developing more environmentally sustainable, renewable energy sources across rural America.

Click here to see EESI’s new Issue Brief: Renewable Biomass Can Help Reduce U.S. Petroleum Dependence: Farm Bill Energy Programs Are Key .