January 23, 2001

The American Farm Bureau Federation and four state Farm Bureaus have filed an administrative protest with the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) regarding "a massive federal land-management scheme" in the Pacific Northwest. The Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project, devised by the Forest Service and the BLM, would impose land-management standards and objectives on more than 63 million acres of Forest Service and BLM lands in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana. State Farm Bureaus in those states joined AFBF in challenging the project.

It's considered an ecosystem management project that proposes to limit greatly the uses of those federal lands, resulting in livestock grazing reductions of up to10% and timber reductions of 20%, according to Farm Bureau. Those reductions are aimed at the project's overriding goal of restoring those lands to the condition they would have been in had people not settled in surrounding areas.

Farm Bureau argues that the Interior Columbia Basin project is contrary to the "multiple-use mandate" of Congress, and that the agencies "have no authority to unilaterally change the stated management goals of Congress for management of federal lands." Farm Bureau also contends that the project disregards the procedures Congress created for managing federal lands. Implementing laws require that federal land-use plans be developed and revised at the local level, not imposed by federal agencies. According to Farm Bureau, the Interior Columbia Basin project fails to consider local input by simultaneously amending 62 area land-use plans.

According to the protest document, the project's proposal is founded on "fuzzy concepts and buzzwords," and there is "no real science" to substantiate agency action. Farm Bureau stated that standards included in the proposal, such as "ecosystem integrity" and "ecosystem health," are not scientific terms, but rather value judgments that would be imposed on local decision-makers.

AFBF and the four state Farm Bureaus are calling for the project to be withdrawn and that implementation of the project be halted while their formal protest is pending. The administrative protest is a prerequisite to filing a lawsuit, but there is no timetable for a decision on the protest.