U.S. House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas, R-Cheyenne, and retired general and NATO Commander Wesley Clark, a Democrat, have something in common. They see America's farmers and ranchers as a "thin green line" that we must hold.

Both point to a Federal Reserve paper that says U.S. agriculture is driving economic recovery. Both underscore the role food plays in our national security. And both alert us to an ominous reality: Earth will hold 9 billion people within 40 years, many of whom will go hungry unless our farmers and ranchers double production.

Armed with these facts, one would think Washington would work overtime to promote a positive business environment in which American agriculture can unleash its full production potential.

Instead, as Lucas notes, there are no fewer than 10 new regulatory assaults being waged upon the American farmer and rancher today, threatening to bog down producers with higher costs, burdensome paperwork and legal uncertainty.

On energy policy, too, Washington continues to vacillate between inaction on one hand and contradictory policies on the other. Lawmakers should work toward a consistent, focused and ambitious agenda that uses every tool available to promote greater domestic production - which in the short run might help arrest today's spiking energy costs that hit American agriculture hard, and in the long run promotes our energy independence from thugs like Moammar Gadhafi and Hugo Chavez.

And then there is farm policy, the one thing Washington loves to cut. Although already inadequate to handle a farm crisis if one comes, cut three times in the last five years, and whittled down to a quarter of 1 percent of the total federal budget, the administration has nonetheless proposed another round of deep cuts and some in Congress may be poised to follow.

Yet if history is not a strong enough reminder of why America needs to maintain a sound farm policy to respond when the bottom falls out, Texas Tech University gives us another nudge: sky high foreign subsidies and tariffs that just keep on rising. How America's farmers and ranchers can be expected to compete against foreign treasuries, I'll never know.

Growing up, if your parents were like mine, they probably said you don't fully appreciate something until it's gone. Well, if Washington keeps up the assault on agriculture, the "Greatest Generation" that saw hunger in so many places where they fought to keep us free may be able to add one more "I told you so" to that list.

They would no doubt tell us that we should have listened to Lucas and Clark and held that "thin green line." And they would be right - again.

Combest, a Republican from West Texas, was a member of the U.S. House from 1985-2002 where he served as chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Agriculture Committee.

This story originally appeared in The Oklahoman on Saturday, March 19.