American Farm Bureau takes hard-line stance against climate legislation, EPA
At the opening of the four-day American Farm Bureau Federation convention in Seattle, Washington over the weekend, AFBF president Bob Stallman pushed for a tough stance against climate legislation currently being debated in Congress. Stallman called called for American farmers and ranchers to “aggressively respond to extremists” and “misguided, activist-driven regulation,” adding that “the days of their elitist power grabs are over.”

And when the AFBF’s first policy session began on Tuesday, delegates took that message to heart, approving  a special resolution against both cap-and-trade legislation and the regulation of carbon by the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA’s recent endangerment finding sets the stage for the agency to regulate all greenhouse gas emissions under its existing power.

“As Congress returns to the issue of cap-and-trade this year, the message of Farm Bureau will continue to be: ‘Don’t Cap Our Future’ agricultural productivity and food security,” said AFBF President Bob Stallman in a written statement. “We will now send that message even more strongly.”

The resolution passed by the Farm Bureau states that cap-and-trade legislation would raise farmers’ and ranchers’ production costs, and the potential benefits of agricultural offsets are far outweighed by the costs to producers. Due to these and other concerns, the delegates voted to strongly opposed “cap and trade proposals before Congress” and to support “any legislative action that would suspend EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.”

“Congress should focus on renewable energy that is better for the environment and our domestic energy security,” said Stallman, “but it should not tie the hands of U.S. producers, whose productivity, historically, has provided the world’s food safety net. We should not shrink U.S. agriculture at the very time when many are concerned about how to feed a growing global population.”

The group is skeptical about climate legislation currently being batted around Congress, despite the fact that a recent study showed the agricultural industry would have more to gain than to lose if the House version of the climate bill were passed.

The American Farm Bureau was formally created in 1919 and has about 2,800 county farm organizations which in turn elect representatives to state farm bureaus.

Source: GO Media - Written by Timothy B. Hurst - Photo: mike 138 via flickr/Creative Commons