From the WSJ Opinion Archives
THE WESTERN FRONT
Wild Blue Squander
A pork-barrel expenditure even vegetarians find kosher.
Wild blueberries are a small fruit with a big following. Nearly every year Washington bureaucrats come to the "rescue" of the tiny industry by buying millions of pounds of the berries. They call it a "bonus buy," and the goal is to drive up the price. The result is a twofold payout to wild-blueberry producers: first from taxpayers, then from consumers. This year, taxpayers will spend as much as $10 million on the project, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That'll buy about 12 million pounds of wild blueberries, a big sale for an industry that produces 70 million to 75 million pounds of berries in an average year.
The feds aren't alone in their love for the wild blueberry. Health researchers, intent on showcasing blue fruit benefits, convened in Bar Harbor, Maine, last year. They trotted out claims that the same chemical that gives the fruit its color is also an antioxidant that can help stave off cancer and heart disease and even keep you young.
Why all the fuss for a fruit that sells at a premium and that grows naturally throughout New England, New York and elsewhere?
Politicians, of course, love to harvest the federal government's bounty for home-state farmers. The wild-blueberry industry is small and therefore easy to enrich. The industry is also almost entirely located in Maine--by one estimate, 99% of commercially picked wild blueberries come from that state. What's more, blueberries have been a staple of the rural economy for decades--if not centuries--and are now part of the state's culture. Supporting such an industry is an easy political decision. Oppose it and you'll be opposing the local farm stand's wild-blueberry pies and hot, fresh muffins.
Maine's two Republican senators--Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe--certainly understand this. They teamed up with the Wild Blueberry Commission of Maine and pushed USDA officials to buy the blue fruit again this year. And they were happy to oblige. Today is the last day in the federal government's fiscal year, so for the past couple of weeks Washington bureaucrats have been busy spending what was left in their budgets. After all, it's harder to ask Congress to increase next year's budget you couldn't spend all your money this year. In the vastness of the federal budget, tossing Maine $10 million was easy.
Of course, no one in the system owns up to this political game. The official justification for the bonus buy is to stave off a pricing "crisis" facing the wild-blueberry industry this year. The industry needs help because there are too many berries bumping around out there, explained David Bell, executive director of the Wild Blueberry Commission of Maine. This despite this summer's drought, which he expects to produce an anemic crop this year. Market prices are still depressed because of a bumper crop of 110 million pounds two years ago and then a slightly higher than normal crop last year, he said. The berries can be kept frozen for up to two years.
Yet while Mr. Bell talked about 2000's bumper crop still holding prices down, he couldn't tell me how many wild blueberries were sitting in commercial freezers. Nor could he tell me the current price of wild blueberries, or at what price Maine's industry needs to sell its berries to turn a profit. "We don't track prices," he said. The USDA has "economists to do that."
So how did Mr. Bell know there was a crisis that required federal assistance? "I went around to industry," he explained. The wild blueberry producers tell him if there should be a buy this year and how much, he said. Some told him the feds need to buy 15 million pounds, others said less. He settled on a number somewhere in the middle of all the estimates. He also couldn't remember the last time the feds didn't step in the "stabilize" the price of wild blueberries. "Maybe in the '90s."
The politics of wild blueberries are about granola as well as pork. The "wild" label distinguishes the little berry from its plumper cousin, the domesticated and commercially planted blueberry. It conjures up images of a lost age in which man was more "in balance" with nature, heading into the wild to harvest Mother Nature's bounty.
In reality, farming these berries is very commercial. The "wild" blueberry does come from a plant that took root naturally and is helped along with few, if any, pesticides. But "wild" blueberry fields are maintained by farmers, who in the winter or early spring mow the plants to within a few inches of the ground. (Before the advent of large, affordable machinery the farmers simply burned the fields each year.) This increases the yield, because berries grow from new, green branches. It also makes it easier to harvest the berries because pickers don't have to wade through a tangle of denser, years-old branches.
All this means that next year, Mr. Bell and Sens. Collins and Snowe are likely to be back, asking for more money. This time, they'll likely explain that the anemic crop of 2002 justifies the expense.
Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Mondays.
