Abstract
In the mid-2000s, rising gas prices, political instability, pollution, and fossil fuel depletion brought renewable domestic energy production onto the policy agenda. Biofuels, or fuels made from plant materials, came to be seen as America’s hope for energy security, environmental conservation, and rural economic revitalization. Yet even as the actual environmental, economic, and energy contributions of a biofuels boom remained debatable, support for biofuels swelled and became a prominent driver of not only US energy policy but of US farm policy as well. This paper asks why biofuels became such a powerful force in farm policy debates, and draws on policy windows theory and discourse analysis to analyze biofuels’ contributions to the passage of the 2008 farm bill. It finds that budgetary and political factors combined with a particular set of patriotic biofuels-oriented discourses to carry energy policy debates into farm policy. It also comments on the implications of biofuels policies for conservation and sustainable land use in 2008 and beyond.
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Notes
The specific roles and impacts of budgets and party politics, as well as other political, situational, and institutional factors, on the 2008 farm bill will be discussed in greater depth later in this paper.
All bolded fonts are added to highlight key frames.
While greater fissures between biofuels positions appeared by 2008, contentious debates over the value of biofuels promotion surfaced only after the 2008 farm bill was already largely written.
There were, however, some increases in food prices domestically, with important impacts especially for poorer consumers, as well as increased costs for livestock producers and grain exporters. There were also significantly larger increases in food prices abroad, for example in the case of tortilla prices in Mexico (Hagenbaugh 2007; Leibtag 2008). However, these concerns did not surface clearly until late in the 2008 farm bill debates.
While the rise of biofuels and associated crop prices was detrimental to some parties—grain exporters and importers, some consumers domestically and especially abroad, and many livestock producers, for example—even these groups for the most part did not oppose biofuels development outright. Some opposed the subsidizing of biofuels, but flat opposition was rare.
At the time of completion of this paper, however, the outlook for communities with an ethanol plant is less rosy. Many of these communities, having invested in biofuels, have become more vulnerable to the decreasing energy prices seen in 2008. A number of biofuels plants have remained idle and several companies have gone into bankruptcy (Pore 2009; Steil 2008). Thus, the rural development implications of biofuels development remain mixed.
Abbreviations
- CAFE:
-
Corporate average fuel economy
- EU:
-
European Union
- GMO:
-
Genetically modified organism
- USDA:
-
United States Department of Agriculture
- WTO:
-
World Trade Organization
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Acknowledgments
The author gratefully acknowledges Dennis Becker, Rachel Schurman, the late G. Edward Schuh, Paul Porter, Kristen Nelson, Edith Lehrer, and Mike Cochran, as well as the editor and three anonymous reviewers of Agriculture and Human Values, for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Thanks also to Vickie Bierman, Brooke Haworth, Meagan Keefe, Lisa Kissing, and Kaitlin Steiger-Meister for their work transcribing interviews, and to the many interview participants, informants, and colleagues who gave of their time and energy for this project. The research described in this paper was funded by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, a United States Environmental Protection Agency—Science to Achieve Results Graduate Fellowship, a MacArthur Interdisciplinary Global Change, Sustainability, and Justice Fellowship, and a University of Minnesota Graduate Fellowship. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this document are solely those of the author. The National Science Foundation, Environmental Protection Agency, and other funders have not officially endorsed this document, and the views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation, Environmental Protection Agency, or any other funder.
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Lehrer, N. (Bio)fueling farm policy: the biofuels boom and the 2008 farm bill. Agric Hum Values 27, 427–444 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-009-9247-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-009-9247-0