Farm Bill Boosts Conservation in Agriculture

Environmentalists said they were heartened by the approval early today by a House-Senate conference committee of a $40.8-billion farm bill that enhances agricultural conservation.

“It’s now an environmental statute,” Ken Cook of the Center for Resource Economics said of the farm bill. “We’ve made it one where it wasn’t before.”

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee and the conference committee, said the package was “a mark of how environmental awareness is changing in this country.”

The committee, which had been working on the legislation for weeks, completed the bill after a 14-hour marathon of negotiations that ended at 3:45 a.m.

The major disappointment for environmental groups watching the lengthy negotiations was the omission of a ban on the export of pesticides that are outlawed or unregistered in the United States.

“They showed who they work for,” Bill McNichol of the National Coalition Against Misuse of Pesticides said of the conferees.

“It was an important provision that will be enacted someday soon,” said Kathryn Hohmann of the Sierra Club. “But we look at the other provisions in the bill and we see some gigantic strides.”

Leahy had made the pesticide export ban a personal crusade but pulled it from the negotiating table when conference members tried to water down stringent language he had designed.