ABSTRACT
To understand how and why it came into existence, the Conservation Reserve Programme needs to be placed in the wider context of recent changes in US agricultural policy. Few countries can be so experienced in the diversion of farmland as the United States. Since the 1930s, vast areas have been taken out of agriculture, not only to reduce over-production but also to ease many of the environmental problems associated with continuous, intensive farming. North American agriculture suffers, like its European counterpart, from chronic over-capacity. The history of US farm policy is of a series of attempts to reduce supply or open up new markets abroad in order to stabilise farm prices and incomes. Large-scale acreage reduction took place for the first time in the 1930s when the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 empowered the federal government to pay farmers to reduce their acreage of certain surplus crops (chiefly corn and cotton). Each farmer was assigned an allotment which specified the acreage of land that was eligible for land retirement payments in any one year. The allotment level was adjusted after each harvest to take account of market changes so that the set-aside policy, as it came to be known, operated year by year to reduce market imbalances and prevent fluctuations in commodity prices. This simple, indeed crude, idea of temporarily withdrawing land to equilibrate agricultural markets was to be the basis of much larger acreage reduction or set-aside programmes later on, geared to reducing excess production over short periods. Many of the inefficiencies and drawbacks of set-aside were prefigured in this first programme (Brandow 1977). It was found for instance that farmers had a tendency to expand their production of crops that were not qualified for allotments, increasing the revenue from these crops as well as receiving the set-aside payments. As uncontrolled crops flooded onto the market, consumers and users often switched to buy more of them at the expense of the more highly priced controlled crops, a propensity which only exacerbated the surplus problem by reducing demand for controlled crops still further.
