Today in Biofuels Opinion: “The political climate has radically shifted”; The Farm Bill: “Plow it Under”

May 9, 2008

A spokesman for Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla: “The political climate has radically shifted,” commenting on attitudes on ethanol, but Mark McMinimy, an agribusiness analyst at Stanford Group Co., said “Congress has made a strategic decision to support the building up of a biofuels industry” and won’t make a “highly disruptive” about-face.

The Washington Post, in an editorial titled “Plow it Under”, called for a veto of the Farm Bill: “After weeks of wheeling and dealing, a House-Senate conference committee has finally produced a farm bill. And what an unlovely creation it is. The nearly $300 billion, five-year legislation brims with subsidies for everything from biofuels to historic-barn preservation. It includes a dubious sugar-to-ethanol program and billions of dollars for a permanent disaster relief fund that essentially pays farmers to grow crops on land too dry to sustain them…Attaching wasteful subsidies to the poor’s nutritional safety net is the oldest trick in the agriculture politics book. It secures the votes of urban and suburban representatives who otherwise would have no reason to countenance the most egregious farm subsidies….This is not reform….President Bush should veto the bill, as he has all but threatened to do, and Congress should deny it the two-thirds vote in both houses necessary to override….In 2009, a new president and a new Congress could hammer out something more defensible.