Suchergebnisse

Presented at the Bridging the gap: collaborative conservation from the ground up conference, September 8-11, 2009, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, sponsored by the Center for Collaborative Conservation, https://collaborativeconservation.org/. This conference brought together people with experience working collaboratively to achieve both conservation and livelihood goals in tribal nations, rangelands, forests, watersheds, agricultural lands, and urban areas. Ted Toombs is affiliated with Environmental Defense Fund, Center for Conservation Incentives. Ralph Heimlich is affiliated with Agricultural Conservation Economics (ACE). ; Farm bill programs currently provide a "pseudo-market" for conservation where a contract between the public and the government (the farm bill) is intermediated by the USDA. In this pseudo market, the USDA provides payments for management practices, which can lead to ecosystem service benefits. But, it does not currently pay directly for the ecosystem service benefits themselves. The goal of this presentation is to highlight considerations for USDA and private landowners (ranchers in particular) if USDA were to transition to a PES approach. I contrast the current system with a PES, and illustrate that significant differences might emerge in the size and character of the "markets" under each scenario. Many difficult questions would need to be addressed to determine how the profitability of a ranch would potentially be affected by a switch to a PES approach.

AbstractWetland protection is an issue of ongoing debate. Although it is widely agreed that wetland loss to agriculture has been declining in recent decades, the role of policy remains contentious. We analyze the effect of changes in wetland delineation rules that were proposed but rejected by Congress during the 1996 farm bill debate. Our research combines detailed, site‐specific information on wetlands with a broader model of the agricultural economy. Using site‐specific data, we analyze the potential agricultural profitability of a representative sample of actual wetlands. We estimate wetland acreage that would have been exempted from swampbuster and Section 404 of the Clean Water Act under the proposed delineation changes, the acreage of exempted wetland that could be profitably converted to crop production, and the associated commodity price, crop acreage, and farm income effects. We find that up to 82.7 million wetland acres would be exempted under the proposed delineation changes, of which as many as 12 million acres could be profitably converted to crop production. This conversion would have a dampening effect on commodity price and farm income. We conclude that (a accurately estimating the effect of resource policy depends critically on detailed information on resource quality and (b) commodity price and farm income effects imply that all agriculture producers—not only those who could expand cropland acreage through wetland drainage—have a stake in wetland policy.