A new EWG report released this week pulls back the curtain on the billions of taxpayer dollars that get wasted every year through the “prevented planting” federal crop insurance program that encourages growers to plow up ecologically important wetlands in the Prairie Pothole Region of North and South Dakota.
Prevented planting is supposed to pay growers only when extreme weather events keep them from planting their crops. Under the current system, however, growers are getting payouts year after year for trying to plant in the aptly named “potholes" – seasonal wetlands that are almost always too wet to plant in the spring. Farmers try anyway because the insurance payouts are so big and so frequent that they can’t really lose. If they manage to plant the wetland they get a crop. If they don’t, they get an insurance payout. So why not roll the dice and plow out the wetland?
The losers are taxpayers, clean water and wildlife. More than 50 percent of the breeding waterfowl in North America depend on the Prairie Pothole Region’s seasonal wetlands to survive. Plowing through these important habitats year after year causes them to shrink or disappear. This greatly degrades their ability to prevent floods and sustain wildlife.
EWG’s analysis shows that a whopping $4.4 billion in payouts went to just 94 counties that generated payouts at least 13 out of the 14 years between 2000 and 2013. It’s no coincidence that those same counties encompass 69 percent of the wetland area in the Prairie Pothole Region, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. EWG’s 2013 “Going, Going, Gone” report documented that over half a million acres of wetland and adjacent habitat went under the plow in those counties between 2008 and 2012 alone.
And taxpayers aren’t the only losers. These big payouts drive up crop insurance premiums for farmers in the region who aren’t making claims for prevented planting.
USDA’s Risk Management Agency has tried repeatedly to rein in this troubled program, but it’s futile to try to oversee insurance coverage that just doesn’t work in a landscape dominated by seasonal wetlands. The Agency is trying once again to tighten up its rules, but the best solution would be for the federal government to quit subsidizing prevented planting coverage for excess moisture in this unique and important region.
Without a policy shift and aggressive action, taxpayers, the environment and many hard-working farmers will continue to lose.
