01/30/06 Satellites, Crop ins. fraud, spying? Pt.1

U.S.D.A.'s Risk Management Agency has set a tone in recent years that they are not going to tolerate crop insurance fraud. PUGH: Congress wants us to control that. There is no more fraud in this program, then there is in any other similar federal program that deals with money, but we still want to make sure that the taxpayer, which includes all these farmers, are getting a dollars worth of service for the dollars' spend in the federal crop insurance program. R.M.A.'s Shirley Pugh says that is why her agency has been aggressive lately in pursing multi-million dollar crop insurance fraud cases. There was the recent conviction of five suspects in such a case in North Carolina. And R.M.A. is currently investigating three other cases similar in scope for the amount of potential fraud. But the attention is not on the fact that R.M.A. is making a concerted effort to crack down on crop insurance fraud, it is how they are doing it. A recent Associated Press story detailed how the suspects in the North Carolina fraud case were convicted using evidence gathered from satellite technology and detailed maps gathered from global satellites. PUGH: They take satellite pictures around the country all the time for mapping and other purposes so we go and pull those images when we need them, and they can tell whether or not vegetation was on that certain acres, whether or not that had been plowed or not plowed contrasting that with the field next to it, so that people who are trying to farm their insurance have to know that we do have the ability to go back and take a look at what their land looked like. And R.M.A. is not the only U.S.D.A. agency that uses satellite technology to assure policy compliance. The Farm Service Agency also uses imaging from satellites. And other agencies use such data for a wide range of applications, from monitoring the timber and mining industries to settling water rights litigations. However, the A.P. wire story did get a reaction, and not necessarily the one R.M.A. may have expected. In fact, several producers, honest ones at that, began to wonder if perhaps the satellites were being used to, well, spy on them. PUGH: I think it might have led people to believe that we have the ability to target people's farms at the drop of a hat. So is our government really spying on its farmers and ranchers using satellites? Some answers, and reactions, are shared in our next program.