《农地保护政策法》如何实现农地社会化

When Congress enacted the Farmland Protection Policy Act (FPPA) in 1981, it declared that a “continued decrease in the Nation’s farmland base may threaten the ability of the United States to produce food and fiber.” The statute—together with later summaries—announced a national policy to “minimize” the “unnecessary and irreversible” conversion of farmland to non-agricultural uses and required federal agencies to factor farmland into project decisions.

Four decades later, we know that the “vanishing farmland” crisis that birthed this law was largely a statistical mirage. Yet the FPPA has helped entrench the notion that the federal government has a collective claim on how land may be used and has quietly reinforced exclusionary, anti-housing land-use politics in metropolitan America. From a libertarian perspective, the problem is not just that the act’s empirical premise was weak. The deeper issue is that it presumes a quasi-national ownership of privately-held land, converting what ought to be private decisions into objects of bureaucratic supervision and political bargaining.

A Crisis Manufactured in Washington

The FPPA followed the US Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Lands Study (NALS), which warned that the United States was paving over three million acres of farmland per year and that irreplaceable “prime” soils were being permanently lost. NALS publications circulated with alarmist titles like, “Where Have the Farmlands Gone?” and their “three million acres per year” figure quickly became what one critic called a “magic number” in policy debates.

Legal scholar Jim Chen noted that the FPPA’s findings section enshrined the fear that shrinking farmland threatened national food security, only to be contradicted by later USDA technical work and by Easterbrook’s statistical autopsy. The “crisis” rationale for the FPPA was dubious even at enactment and has grown weaker with every decade of better data.

Farmland Preservation as Metropolitan Exclusion