Policies and pollinators: the feds, the farm bill and the pricipitous decline of monarchs

The numbers are in from Mexico, and they ain’t pretty. Every fall, monarch butterflies fly thousands of miles from the Great Plains to their winter grounds in central Mexico, where they're scrupulously counted by the World Wildlife Fund. In 1996, the overwintering monarchs blanketed 45 acres of forest. This year, they cover only about 1.6 acres, and the population – already at its lowest ever recorded – has dropped by half again since just last year. Scientists fear that one of North America’s greatest migrations is in its death throes.

The stats were announced Jan. 29 by the Mexican government and the World Wildlife Fund. Blame has been sure and swift. It’s Monsanto’s fault, it’s climate change, it’s shrinking winter habitat. Yet while those are indeed factors, the biggest – and perhaps the easiest to change, relatively speaking – are U.S. government policies like the farm bill signed into law by President Obama last Friday.

Not that you can call anything about the farm bill “easy.” The $956 billion, 949-page behemoth took three years to craft and covers a veritable Swiss army knife of programs, including agriculture, conservation, rural development, energy, forestry and food stamps. That it passed Congress at all is impressive; that it did so with the support of conservation groups like the World Wildlife Fund and Ducks Unlimited is even more so. Julie Sibbing, senior director of agriculture and forestry programs for the National Wildlife Federation, called the bill “worth the wait.” One provision in particular discourages farmers from plowing up virgin grasslands in Montana, the Dakotas and three other states, with the hope that limiting crop insurance on such fields will discourage sodbusting, thereby preserving native prairie and improving the chances of monarchs. Monarchs only lay their eggs on milkweed plants, which are rapidly disappearing under heavy machinery and herbicides.

Yet though the farm bill offers some protection for grasslands, it also maintains incentives for farmers to plant ever more corn and soybeans – a policy that’s led to a rate of grassland destruction on the northern plains greater than that of Amazonian deforestation. The new bill cuts back on the direct subsidies of the past and replaces them with crop insurance and price guarantees, but critics counter that the end result is essentially the same.

Plus, the bill cuts $6 billion in conservation programs ...

... You can read the rest of my story right here: http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/policies-and-pollinators-the-feds-the-farm-bill-and-the-precipitous-decline-of-monarchs