Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Ken Salazar's "squeeze" budget still subsidizes grazing on public lands
The Salazar idea is that higher user fees and slashed expenses will help make new acquisitions possible. But one area that remains a loss leader has to do with the grazing fees imposed by the Bureau of Land Management; they're going up, too, but not nearly enough to cover the historic losses the government has sustained when dealing with the livestock industry. Livestock, mostly cattle and sheep, make use of more than two-thirds of the BLM's vast holdings in the West. Ranchers pay $21 million a year for the privilege -- but the program costs $144 million to administer and has long been a target of environmentalists and wild-horse advocates, who claim the true impacts of overgrazing haven't been figured in the official cost analysis. Under Salazar's proposed budget, the fee to graze a cow/calf pair or five head of sheep on BLM land would rise from $1.35 a month to $2.35. The cost of leasing comparable private land for grazing can rise to 10 times that amount or more. Less than 4 percent of the nation's cattle are estimated to use public lands, but it's been an inviolable bit of policy to keep the fees absurdly low. The last time a Secretary of the Interior tried to push through a substantial fee increase, back in the early days of the Clinton administration, it met fierce opposition from livestock producers and was promptly abandoned. The Colorado Springs-based Cloud Foundation, which has long pushed for a more dramatic fee increase, says Salazar's proposal will do little to help the wild horses that compete with grazing interests for forage on public lands. "We continue to request a reduction in the destructive overgrazing of livestock on public lands and to allocate a fair share of forage for wild horses and other wildlife," says Ginger Kathrens, the foundation's executive director...more
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As others here and other places have suggested, I do not believe that this "budget" is anything more than a device to encourage a restoration of funds for other DOI programs that has been cut. As such, I am not sure it warrants serious discussion.
Observing cityfolk attempting to make sense of livestock grazing is always entertaining, although often in a train wreck sort of way. We are presented with a very schizoid view of the American West, filled with contradictory statistics and old stereotypes. Consider the divergence in numbers over the "loss" Uncle Sam encounters on grazing between this article and the column by Prof. Nelson last week. What gives? Does it even matter, given that public accounting typically centers on a cost/benefit ratio as opposed to the breakeven analysis used in industry? Further, no detail is provided in either article as to what exactly constitutes an "administrative expense." Do those numbers include the costs associated with lawsuits filed against the agencies on a routine basis by environmental groups, for example? What about EAJA payouts? If this is being rolled into the figures and then transformed into a "subsidy" using that logic, that is strange, indeed.
The second glaring weakness in both articles is this business of comparable private land. If memory serves, the Nelson piece at least compared to state trust land in some cases. This article is considerable worse, offering no particulars whatsoever. Comparing feedlot prices to public graze is ludicrous. It should come as no surprise that people will pay a premium for access to higher yield potentials and/or friendlier regulatory structures.
This particular article departs from that of Prof. Nelson's in that it includes many of the other typical talking points offered up by grazing opponents. Weirdly, as they yammer on about overgrazing, the power of the industry, etc., we observe this business of only 4% of the nation's bovine population actually living on the public range. The modern cowman is thus simultaneously an insignificant minority and a powerful corporate interest. We are led to believe that the same land being destroyed by bovis taurus can miraculously support all the equus caballus we can throw at it. We are given articles that toy with the subsidy-cutting rhetoric of the Tea Party alongside the fair-share rhetoric of the Occupy crowd. All this is over Public Lands management, which came into being because Progressives of the day were concerned that ownership of the West would be concentrated into the hands of a powerful few at the expense of the many. I ask you all, has this been truly averted, or have we merely substituted bureaucrats for real estate or cattle barons?
I can appreciate that many of these people want to become involved in the management of "their" public resources. It is easy to believe the everyone-as-stakeholder cliché, but it is flatly false. Unless you can sell your stake, it is, to say the least, not entirely yours.
I have studied these issues for many years, and I know that this blog's owner has substantially more time into it. Articles like this one do the public a disservice both by oversimplifying a very complex issue and by providing information to readers that is contradictory to say the least.
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