Vilsack Promotes Cap-and-Trade to NFU

Agriculture Secretary: legislation will "provide enormous benefits"

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told members of the National Farmers Union that "properly structured" cap-and-trade legislation could offer significant benefits for farmers and farm workers who sequester carbon dioxide in farmland through tree planting and other conservation measures.

Analyses by USDA staff and other experts "as well as our experience in implementing conservation techniques make it absolutely clear that properly structured legislation will avoid unintended consequences and provide enormous benefits to our agricultural economy" and the environment, Vilsack said at the National Farmers Union 2010 convention in Rapid City, S.D.

The secretary said the department will work with Congress to ensure that any carbon offsets market authorized in the legislation provide "significant income opportunities to America's farmers and ranchers."

USDA also released a status report sent to Vilsack from Chief Economist Joe Glauber that provides an update on an economic analysis of carbon offset proposals requested by the secretary in December. The updated report says that previous studies, including those undertaken by both USDA and the Environmental Protection Agency, have concluded that such carbon offset programs would provide a net benefit for farmers and ranchers. 

"However, much of the economic benefit [would be] caused by large shifts in land use as landowners planted trees to sequester carbon," Glauber writes, and such land-use shifts would "result in higher commodity prices and reductions in livestock production." 

To help improve the accuracy of such estimates, USDA and EPA are both conducting assessments of the Forest and Agriculture Sector Optimization Model developed by university researchers and used by the agencies to assess how climate bill provisions could change how farmland is used, according to Glauber's memo.

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