The U.S. Department of Agriculture just scrapped millions of dollars for farming, and advocates say it’s a blow to Hawaiʻi agriculture.
Last week the agency slashed around $46 million meant for Hawaiʻi as part of the Biden-era Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative.
That funding had been on pause and was under review before USDA finally decided to terminate it.
U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, the new head of the Trump administration’s USDA, called it a “slush fund” to “advance the green new scam” in a news release.
“The concerns of farmers took a backseat during the Biden Administration. During my short time as Secretary, I have heard directly from our farmers that many of the USDA partnerships are overburdened by red tape, have ambiguous goals, and require complex reporting that push farmers onto the sidelines,” Rollins said in a statement.
Her statement was in line with the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to ignore climate change by defunding climate-related projects and scrubbing keywords from federal government websites and databases.
The $3.1 billion initiative began offering grants to farmers and related organizations around the country in 2022, with some projects already receiving funding by the time the initiative as a whole was frozen earlier this year.
In 2022 the USDA said it was meant to promote “U.S. agricultural and forest products produced using climate-smart practices, and include innovative, cost-effective methods for quantification, monitoring and verification of greenhouse gas and carbon sequestration benefits.”
Part of the funding for Hawaiʻi was a $6 million Expanding Agroforestry Project that would have funded eight farmers with commercial agroforestry operations.
The EAP has been eliminated completely. The funds would have supported more climate-friendly farming, and gone to farmers directly.
Dana Shapiro is CEO for the Hawaiʻi ʻUlu Cooperative, one of the partner organizations helping disperse the EAP funding. She argued that the canceled funds would have helped farming operations — even if they had no climate-related benefits.
“Climate-smart agricultural practices are just smart agricultural practices. It’s taking steps to minimize soil erosion, to reinforce the resilience of your agricultural system in the face of extreme weather events like floods or droughts,” Shapiro said. “Removing this funding is a huge setback for American farmers who were, at this point, counting on the funding to strengthen their operations.”
She said funding was just about to be dispersed when the initiative was frozen, and farmers who were awarded funding and in the middle of the contracting process were already prepared to receive that funding.
One ʻUlu Cooperative employee working solely on the program was let go.
The other $40 million cut was from the Hawaiʻi Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities Program offered grants to incentivize farmers to take on agricultural practices with “ecological and economic benefits.”
While it was eliminated, Shapiro said the USDA invited the Lynker Corporation, which was the program’s lead organization, to reapply to the USDA’s reformed initiative.
Now called the Advancing Markets for Producers initiative, the USDA has changed some of the program’s criteria, which it says ensures that most of the federal funding actually goes to farmers while also reducing the bureaucratic “red tape” Rollins said was a problem with the PCSC.
More than half of the initiative’s $46 million was set aside for technical assistance, monitoring and reporting, but AMP requires that at least 65% of the funding goes to producers directly.
Shapiro said that the long wait time to get funding to farmers is a valid complaint, but that “it wasn't the fault of the applicant entities or certainly not the fault of the farmers that it was taking so long.”
She added that the leading organizations weren’t given an opportunity to comply with the new rules before their programs were terminated.
While it’s too early to say whether AMP will actually be better for farmers in the long run, it’s hurting farmers now — especially those who won’t have a chance to reapply for the program.
“Some of these farmers have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours already on the project, and now the project has disappeared, so there's no way that there won't be a negative impact for some farmers,” Shapiro said.
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