U.S. Congressman Colin Peterson (D-Minn.) recently provided perspective on future conservation programs and on the success or failure of the so-called "Supercommittee" assembled by Congress to recommend at least $1.5 trillion of additional deficit-reduction measures. Peterson, former chairman and current ranking minority member on the House Agriculture Committee, noted that federal agriculture programs might actually fare better if the Committee fails to agree on deficit-reduction recommendations, according to the Wildlife Management Institute.

Representative Peterson pointed out that the legislation that created the Supercommittee also provided a mechanism for deficit reduction should that entity fail to reach agreement or if Congress fails to pass its recommendations. In either of these cases, automatic cuts of $1.2 trillion of federal spending will be applied across the board to hundreds of military and non-military programs over the next 10 years.

Should either occur, according to the Congressman, there are two ways that spending for agriculture programs might be higher. First, the Committee is authorized to review and recommend changes to the budget of any federal program. If automatic cuts are triggered as described above, some programs including the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), would be exempted from reductions. ?CRP, being one of the more expensive conservation programs in the Farm Bill, could be targeted for more reduction by the Committee. Second, cuts to all federal programs that were not exempted, including many other conservation programs, would be administered evenly across those programs. Peterson's preliminary estimates for this scenario would be cuts in the range of 4 to 5 percent to each of the programs. That would translate to a budget reduction of $5 billion to $6 billion for agriculture programs. ?Recent suggestions by several deficit-reduction committees or groups on the matter of cuts to agriculture spending have ranged between $10 billion and $48 billion. Representative Peterson emphasized that these estimates were preliminary and could differ from final calculations. Furthermore, his efforts were directed at an analysis of all agriculture programs, not just conservation programs.

At any rate, many in the conservation community are concerned that federal conservation programs might absorb a disproportionally high rate of funding reductions during the ongoing effort to curb federal budget deficits. ?(pmr)