By Hal Herring

Bob Marshall recently described on this blog how the biofuels mandate from the Bush administration has had an unpleasant result: the explosive conversion of native grasslands (our gamebird and waterfowl habitat) to corn crops, with their high uses of water and the fertilizers that run off and pollute watersheds for hundreds of miles downstream. As Marshall pointed out, what we are doing to our native grasslands is almost exactly what the Malaysians, Brazilians and Indonesians are doing to their native forests.
 
The biofuels mandate is a perfect example of unintended consequences. But there’s another engine driving this destruction of our wetlands and wildlife, too. This engine dates back to the 1996 Farm Bill, when Congress de-coupled what is known as “conservation compliance” - basic protections for wetlands and highly erodible lands- via our government supported crop insurance programs.  At that time, it did not seem too important. Farmers in the U.S. relied more on direct subsidy payments - which came with an extensive set of mandates for conservation compliance - than they did the federally supported crop insurance plans.