RURAL ROOTS - BROTHER DAVID ANDREWS, CSC
Farm Bill is Important

We at the National Catholic Rural Life Conference want to be sure our friends and members are well prepared to discuss the farm bill and to encourage others to educate themselves about the significance of this piece of public regulation which is reviewed every five years.

It is a pastoral document in that it provides support for those whose livelihoods are dependent on economic and social justice. Homes, communities, livelihoods and habitats are dependent on what is in the farm bill. Your friends and neighbors may thrive – or merely survive – as a result of what is in this legislation. City people, those who would go hungry (increasingly suburbanites are documented as among the hungry) are dependent as well on what gets put into the nutrition section of the farm bill.

So, there are serious pastoral reasons why city and suburb, as well as small towns and rural areas, need to be concerned about what is in this farm bill. We have put together a rather comprehensive review of the farm bill. This is a resource that should be utilized for the entire period of review up until September 2007. I suggest that it will be worth having beyond that period. After legislation is passed comes rule making and appropriations. The implementation of the law is as significant a period as the time during which it is debated.

As always, our focus is on values, not just the laws or regulations, but their impact on communities, real people at home and abroad. Our values are those of Catholic Social Teaching. Recurrently these values, which if applied to food and agriculture, will be redemptive sources of change. The dignity of the human person, solidarity, subsidiarity, the common good, the universal destination of goods, the option for the poor and integrity of creation – these seven principles are the value frames for our decision making. They guide our choices, as they have in the past.

I presume that this copy of Catholic Rural Life will be useful as you attend to the complex farm bill. I believe that we at the NCRLC have made the farm bill accessible in the materials provided in this issue. Please be sure to check out our website: www.ncrlc.com for continuing educational materials, resources and guidance. Our policy coordinator, Robert Gronski, has done a wonderful job of making the complex readable, and the arcane understandable. n


National Catholic Rural Life Conference
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Des Moines, Iowa 50310-2199
(515) 270-2634
email address: ncrlc@mchsi.com
website: www.ncrlc.com

This article was published in the Spring 2007 issue of Catholic Rural Life©. No portion of this article may be reproduced without written permission from The National Catholic Rural Life Conference. To purchase the Spring 2006 issue of Catholic Rural Life, please contact The National Catholic Rural Life Conference office at 4625 Beaver Avenue, Des Moines, Iowa 50310-2199, call (515) 270-2634, or e-mail ncrlc@mchsi.com. The cost is $2.50 an issue plus postage and handling.