Blog Posts: Agricultural policy

By Patty Lovera

Confused about the Farm Bill? Click here to read our report, Farm Bill 101.

This week, both the House and Senate Agriculture committees adopted their versions of the 2013 Farm Bill. This is the latest move in the long-running attempt to pass a “normal” 5-year farm bill to replace one that was last passed in 2008. Several attempts to pass a farm bill in 2012 were unsuccessful and the farm bill that is currently in effect is a short-term extension that expires in September 2013.

There are some significant differences between the House and the Senate, in both what their bills actually contain and in the process used to get them through the committee. Both sides had an abbreviated process, skipping the normal step of conducting a series of hearings to explore various issues before writing the bill. But the Senate Agriculture Committee took the streamlining even further, managing to discuss, amend and pass its version of the bill in a little under three hours on Tuesday. The House Agriculture Committee finished theirs in a marathon session that took most of the day, wrapping up just before midnight Wednesday night.

Now each bill (HR 1947 and S 954) has to go to the floor for the whole body to vote on. The Senate is going first, with leadership claiming they will do the Farm Bill as early as next week. The full House may see their bill in June.

Read the full article…

By Wenonah Hauter

Wenonah Hauter, Food & Water Watch Executive Director

Originally posted at The Guardian’s Comment is Free

If you have a feeling that genetically modified (GM) foods are being forced upon the population by a handful of business interests and vociferously defended by the scientists that work in the ag industry or at the research institutions it funds, you might be onto something. The zeal with which GMO proponents evangelize transgenic seeds (and now, transgenic food animals) is so extreme that they are even pouring vast sums of money to defeat popular efforts to simply label GE foods—like the nearly $50 million spent to defeat the popular ballot measure to label GE foods in California, Prop 37. What’s more, it’s not just happening in the United States. A new report by Food & Water Watch shows the extent to which the U.S. State Department is working on behalf of the GM seed industry to make sure that biotech crops are served up abroad—whether the world wants them or not.

The report analyzes over 900 State Department diplomatic cables from 2005 to 2009 and reveals how far the U.S. government will go to help serve the seed industry’s agenda abroad, knowing that resistance to GMOs worldwide is high. It lobbies a vociferously pro-biotech agenda, operates a rigorous public relations campaign to improve the image of biotechnology and challenges commonsense safeguards and rules — including opposing popular GM food labeling laws.

Here are some of the tidbits gleaned from our comprehensive look at the cables:

• Between 2007 and 2009, annual cables were distributed to “encourage the use of agricultural biotechnology,” directing U.S. embassies to ”pursue an active biotech agenda”.
• There was a comprehensive communications campaign aimed to “promote understanding and acceptance of the technology” and “develop support for U.S. government trade and development policy positions on biotech” in light of the worldwide backlash against GM crops.
• Where backlash was high, some embassies downplayed efforts. In Uruguay, the embassy has been “extremely cautious to keep [its] fingerprints off conferences” promoting biotechnology. In Peru and Romania, the U.S. government helped create new pro-biotech nongovernmental organizations.
• The State Department urged embassies to generate positive media coverage about GE crops. Diplomatic posts also bypassed the media and took the message directly to the public; for example, the Hong Kong consulate sent DVDs of a pro-biotech presentation to every high school.
• The State Department worked to diminish trade barriers to the benefit of seed companies, and encouraged the embassies to “publicize the benefits of agbiotech as a development tool.”

Click here to read the report, “Biotech Ambassadors: How the U.S. State Department Promotes the Seed Industry’s Global Agenda”.

Monsanto was a great beneficiary of the State Department’s taxpayer-funded diplomacy, helping pave the way for the cultivation of its seeds abroad: the company appeared in 6.1 percent of the biotech cables analyzed between 2005 and 2009 from 21 countries. The embassy in South Africa even informed Monsanto and Pioneer about two recently vacated positions in the agency that provided biotech oversight, suggesting that the companies advance “qualified applicants” to fill the position. Some embassies even attempted to facilitate favorable outcomes for intellectual property law and patent issues on behalf of the company.

The cables also show extensive lobbying against in-country efforts to require labeling of GM foods. In 2008, the Hong Kong consulate “played a key role” in convincing regulators to abandon a proposed mandatory labeling requirement. One in eight cables from 42 nations between 2005 and 2009 addressed biotech-labeling requirements.

What’s more, the U.S. government is now secretly negotiating major trade deals with Europe and the countries of the Pacific Rim that would force skeptical and unwilling countries to accept biotech imports, commercialize biotech crops and prevent the labeling of GM foods.

The vast influence that Monsanto and the biotech seed industry have on our foreign affairs is just one tentacle of a beast comprised by a handful of huge corporations who wield enormous power over most food policy in the United States. My new book, Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America (which is being launched in Europe this week) deals extensively with this corporate influence over our food system.

It’s no accident that we’re here: a farm policy of “get big or get out” that has been going on for decades has only benefited big companies that are becoming more and more consolidated. They wield unprecedented power over the market, putting small and midsized farmers out of business and favoring factory farms and the cultivation of GM commodities that fuel them—GM corn and soy, which are also the cornerstone of junk foods produced and sold worldwide (fueling an obesity epidemic in America and beyond.)

Thanks, Monsanto. And thanks, State Department. Not only are you selling seeds—you’re selling out democracy.

Food & Water Watch Assistant Director Patty Lovera

By Patty Lovera

It’s time for another installment in the saga of the never-ending Farm Bill debate. In previous episodes, Congress passed a terrible bill to extend portions of the last Farm Bill as they tried to escape the “fiscal cliff” on New Year’s Day. That kept some parts of farm policy alive until the end of September, 2013, but abandoned important programs for organic and sustainable agriculture, conservation and beginning farmers.

And now, Congress is once again working to try to pass something before the short-term Farm Bill expires. Both the House and Senate Agriculture Committees say they will develop their versions of the bill this month (Exactly which day or week isn’t quite clear). The committees say they will “mark up” the bills quickly and get them out of committee so the full House and Senate can vote on them this summer.

At this stage of the game, we don’t know exactly what will be in the bills the committees work on. But we can make some predictions on what will need improving.

On competition, we will be urging the committees to include a ban on packer ownership of livestock, creation of a special counsel at USDA to deal with competition in agriculture markets, and to not include any measures that limit USDA’s ability to enforce rules on contracts for poultry growers that were in the 2008 Farm Bill.

There will once again be battles over the food safety net for low-income families, especially in the House, where there will likely be multiple attempts to make big cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps), the main federal nutrition program (background info on SNAP).

Organic and sustainable agriculture were victims of last year’s political gridlock, which allowed some important programs to expire and be abandoned by the last Farm Bill extension. This version of the bill should restore these programs for beginning farmers and ranchers and conservation. Specifically on organic agriculture, the bill should restore funding for the organic certification cost-share program (which helps operations that are new to organic pay for initial certification costs), and organic data collection and research programs at USDA.

Senator Gillibrand (D-NY) is offering an important addition to the Farm Bill that would require USDA to develop and implement a mechanism for employees of the Food Safety and Inspection Service to coordinate the reporting, evaluation, and abatement of potential occupational safety hazards. This is a critical improvement, given the recent news about health threats to workers and USDA inspectors in poultry plants due to the chemicals used to disinfect chickens. This problem will only get worse if the USDA is allowed to go forward with its proposal to deregulate poultry inspection and speed up the lines in poultry slaughterhouses, with likely increases in chemical use to pick up the slack.

Let your members of Congress know that you expect them to do a better job this time around on the Farm Bill. You can take action here: http://fwwat.ch/FBMay

By Tim Schwab

Journalism and agriculture students at public universities, watch out.

Your administrators are laying out the red carpet for corporate junkets at a campus near you. With names like HungerU and Biotech University, these “educational” opportunities amount to little more than a slick propaganda campaign from biotech corporations.

DuPont Crop Protection (translation: herbicides and pesticides) is visiting universities in California and Arizona this week, wooing students with $2,500 grants and embarking on a mission to “educate college students about the significance of modern agriculture.” It’s called HungerU.

That’s a catchy name, but does a profit-driven chemical producer whose goal is to expand herbicide and pesticide sales really have much to offer students on the issue of food security? Something tells me its answer to hunger is more chemicals.

Meanwhile, Biotech U goes beyond the ag school to influence an entirely different set of future professionals: journalism students. Each year, the industry-friendly United Soybean Board partners with our nation’s journalism schools in an effort to “educate” future reporters about the role of biotechnology. The program includes all-expense paid gigs on agricultural reporting in exotic places like Turkey and China. This year, the winner goes to Italy. Who wouldn’t want a trip to Italy?

Noting that these future journalists will be “shaping the public’s perception of biotechnology in the coming decades,” Biotech U is part of a long-term strategic plan by the biotech industry to foster public acceptance of genetically engineered crops. The program also intends to “enlist future biotech advocates identified within university journalism programs to develop a draft program at other journalism schools.”

These insidious efforts by the biotech industry are a very small part of the hundreds of millions of dollars pouring into academia from corporations, distorting the science and perverting the mission of higher education. Our public universities increasingly function like corporate laboratories—taking corporate research money to conduct experiments in corporate-sponsored laboratories, then publishing pro-industry findings in corporate-sponsored “scientific” journals.

Food & Water Watch detailed the ways in which industry is buying influence at our public universities in our report Public Research, Private Gain.

This new era of corporate influence is undermining intellectual freedom and academic independence. Professors that might otherwise pursue research that might challenge the bottom lines of biotech companies—for example, studying the negative health, environmental or economic effects of pesticides and biotech crops—simply choose not to for fear of losing future industry research funding or upsetting tenure-granting administrators. That means federal agencies writing the rules and regulations that govern biotech corporations often base their decisions on a body of science that only says industrial agriculture is safe, good and necessary.

Meanwhile, farmers that might want to want to pursue an alternative production model to agrochemicals, monocultures and factory farms have little research or academic support.

And students—our next generation of journalists, farmers and policy makers—graduate from schools that increasingly offer only the virtues of big business instead of teaching students to think critically about the dominant model of industrial agriculture or consider alternative solutions.

Don’t biotech and pesticide companies already have too much influence over our public universities? If you attend one of these schools, call your university administrators and tell them enough is enough.

By Genna Reed

Early this week, USDA announced the availability of a petition for a new GE alfalfa, marking the 20^th GE crop currently awaiting USDA’s approval and eventual commercialization. Since the introduction of GE crops, the USDA has never denied a single petition for commercialization.

Touted as “low-lignin” to make it easier for livestock to digest, Monsanto and Forage Genetics’ new alfalfa variety will likely be stacked with Monsanto’s Roundup Ready trait (already approved for alfalfa in 2011). Throughout the petition, the companies cite the fact that “extensive review” has already been performed on GE alfalfa with the 2010 Environmental Impact Statement for Roundup Ready alfalfa.

Back then, the Environmental Impact Statement pointed to some negative economic impacts for organic and conventional alfalfa farmers, including increased costs needed to prevent contamination, reduced demand and lost markets due to contamination—which didn’t stop USDA from approving the crop. Those contamination costs are even more pronounced now. Alfalfa is an open-pollinated crop, meaning it is much more likely than corn or soybeans to contaminate nearby non-GE fields with the help of wind or insects. This crop poses special risks for organic alfalfa and for organic dairy farms whose crops may be contaminated.

Additionally, the review was performed three years ago and a lot has changed since then.

Since 2010, the number of Roundup-resistant weeds has grown from 11 to 14 and the amount of land infested with these weeds has grown from a reported 2 million acres in 2010 to industry estimates of more than 60 million acres in 2012. These numbers should raise a red flag, but Monsanto continues to petition for the introduction of more and more glyphosate-tolerant crops.

Herbicide use has escalated since the introduction of GE crops, and will only continue to grow as more of these GE crops are introduced. As the “superweed” problem worsens, the USDA must seriously consider the environmental, health and economic ramifications of this new GE alfalfa, and the agency’s overall system of blanket approvals on herbicide-tolerant GE-crops.

To weigh in on the rocket docket containing seven petitions for approval of new, herbicide-tolerant crops, sign this petition.

By Patty Lovera

Last week, you may have been puzzled by headlines about a new decision to end the use of the antibiotic tetracycline in organic apple and pear production. Since when are organic foods produced with antibiotics? Unbeknownst to most consumers, since the beginning of the USDA’s national organic program in 2002, apple and pear growers have been allowed to use the antibiotics tetracycline and streptomycin to treat a disease called fire blight on organic apple and pear trees.

Food & Water Watch worked with other consumer and environmental groups, and thousands of you who wrote comments to the National Organic Standards Board, to make sure they took a strong stand for public health and the integrity of the organic standards by rejecting an industry petition to allow the use of tetracycline until 2016.  We urged the Board to end the use of tetracycline as soon as possible in order to meet consumer expectations for organic and to respond to mounting evidence that antibiotic-resistant bacteria is a serious threat to public health. Antibiotics are not allowed in any other types of organic food, including production of organic livestock.

At their meeting last week, the Board did reject the petition, which means that the use of tetracycline will not be allowed after October 21, 2014. But they also passed a resolution to encourage the USDA to investigate a transitional option for the emergency use of tetracycline until 2017. So we will be keeping an eye on that process, to make sure that if the USDA sets up an emergency use provision, that it is extremely limited, ends as soon as possible and, most importantly, that apples and pears from treated trees can not be sold as organic.

Even until 2014, when tetracycline will be phased out, organic apples are still a better choice than conventional. Organic growers can’t use synthetic pesticides or herbicides, genetically engineered crops (there is a GE apple variety in the approval pipeline), or sewage sludge on their fields; all practices which conventional orchards can use. And here are a couple of ideas for ways to find organic apples and pears produced without antibiotics:

• Look for apple and pear varieties that are less susceptible to fire blight, and less likely to need treatment. Beyond Pesticides has a list (and a great history of this issue.)   
• Look for apples and pears that are certified with both the USDA Organic and the EU organic seals. The organic standards in the European Union do not allow any use of antibiotics on fruit trees, so U.S. growers who export to the EU are not using the drugs on their orchards.

Stay tuned. We’ll be calling on you to help us make sure we keep the organic standards strong.

By Patty Lovera

If there is one thing you can count on with this Congress, it’s drama over money. The month of March has seen plenty of funding fights, with sequestration in the beginning of the month and an ugly process to prevent a federal government shutdown at the end.  

One of the many problems with operating this way is how many opportunities for mischief are available when Congress is dealing with a huge package of “must pass” legislation. That’s exactly what happened last week when Congress passed a “continuing resolution” to fund the federal government for the rest of the year (the President signed it into law this week). This continuing resolution was necessary because Congress did not complete the normal process for setting budgets for federal agencies and the government has been running on an extension of the previous year’s budget that was about to run out. Read the full article…

By Eve Mitchell, Food & Water Europe

Click to see a larger image.

Watching UK’s National Farmers Union (NFU) President Peter Kendall testify to the UK Parliamentary Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ inquiry into horse meat contamination of the EU beef supply on March 5, I was struck again by the inconsistencies in the NFU approach when it comes to GM animal feed.

I have three questions for the NFU:

1) In his testimony, Mr. Kendall repeated the position that short supply chains are the answer to predictable control of our meat supply and regaining consumer confidence. How does this tally with the repeated insistence that UK livestock farmers need industrial GM feed from the Americas traded through complex international commodity markets?

Much is made about the allegedly dwindling availability of non-GM soy (known in the UK as soya), but the non-GM soya industry itself paints a rather different picture. On February 26, Augusto Freire, Managing Director of Cert-ID (a company certifying non-GM soya supplies), said, “20-25% of Brazilian soybean production is free from genetic modification for the 2012/13 crop. China’s and India’s soy production is 100% Non-GMO….Estimates for 2013 are strongly up compared to earlier years due to adoption of the CERT ID and ProTerra [non-GM certification] programs by new operators in Brazil, as well as increased demand in Europe.”

In the current climate, before supply and demand reduce the cost of non-GM feed, it may well be a bit more expensive per tonne, but according to our calculations if non-GM feed costs an extra £14/tonne (about $21.00), this works out to be a mere 3p/dozen eggs (about 5 cents). Mr. Kendall asks, “Are we going to produce chickens in this country that are non-GM, but buy them in from Asia because they are 20% cheaper and they are fed on GM [feed]?” Is he perhaps confusing feed costs with the poor animal husbandry that keeps meat from many non-European factory farms cheap?

We also need to be careful in working out how much animal feed is actually GM – any amount of GM feed comingled with an otherwise non-GM shipment means the entire quantity, and all subsequent feed bags, are labelled GM. This does not mean that feed is anything like 100% GM, and in fact the bulk of any animal feed is probably non-GM.

2) If, as Mr. Kendall says, UK farmers need “confidence” in the market to invest and improve UK beef production levels, why does this logic not apply to the farmers in Brazil already growing non-GM soya but unable to risk the costs of certification without confirmed advance orders from the EU to ensure they gets a return?

Augusto Freire notes, “An additional volume of Brazilian soy meal representing 1.5 million metric tonnes of soybeans could have been certified [as non-GM] if EU buyers had expressed their demand early in the year.” The non-GM soya is there, and more can be grown, we just need to say we want it. It’s not hard.

Consumer demand should boost confidence enough to take this step. A 2010 GfK/NOP poll showed fewer than 40% of supermarket shoppers were aware that imported GM animal feed fuels British factory farming, and 89% wanted these products to be clearly labelled. In January of this year the UK Food Standards Agency published research showing again that two-thirds of respondents want all use of GM feed to be labelled. Even among those undecided about GM food and crops respondents felt “some form of labelling should be in place to help them determine GM content and avoid choosing foods containing GM if they so wish”. Overall there is a clear indication this need to identify GM use applies to animal products in particular. People don’t want GM feed in the food chain, and they want clear labels to help them see where it is – or isn’t.

3) I completely agree that there is, as Mr. Kendall told the Committee, “too much focus on price” in the food industry. If this is the case, why are industrial crops feeding industrial megafarm production to produce cheap meat worthy of such vocal support?

True, there are vested interests on both sides of the discussion, and there are rumours that Indian soya is less desirable than Brazilian. Overall we’d be far better off moving away from the industrial meat model. Yet this does not explain why supermarkets can’t do their part in delivering what the market demands now by placing clear orders for non-GM soya (or non-GM fed products) to give Brazilian farmers the confidence they need to grow and certify non-GM crops. The NFU position invokes the market, but goes directly against the basics of supply and demand. The more non-GM feed is demanded, the more will be supplied, and the costs will come down—unless vested interests interfere with the market. Large supermarkets and dairies in other parts of Europe seem to be able to manage it, so it is very difficult to see why the UK is different.

Mr. Kendall told the NFU 2013 conference, “Today I want to talk about a pact with the great British consumer to get things changed…We now need supermarkets to stop scouring the world for the cheapest products they can find and start sourcing high quality, traceable, product from farmers here at home…That may mean more dedicated supply groups. It will certainly mean longer-term thinking and a shorter supply chain.” We agree, and we’re here to help.

Mr. Kendall, if you truly “Do not want food safety and standards to be politicised,” as you told the Committee, why do you say GM skepticism is “directly comparable to Nazi book-burning in the 1930’s”? Why do you not support your members in providing what the market clearly wants?

The situation with regard to GM animal feed looks increasingly like lucrative supply lines controlled by shippers and importers, not farmers, attempting to force an end to non-GM supplies on an unwilling market. The NFU position, which wedges farmers uncomfortably between their market and these vested interests, remains very difficult to understand. The sooner the NFU applies the logic it uses in the meat chain to the feed chain, the sooner consumers will begin to regain confidence in our food.

Mr. Kendall also told your 2013 conference consumers should demand answers from the people they buy from. We agree European consumers can and should get what they want.

This action is a good first step.

By Michele Merkel & Scott Edwards

“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1913

This Saturday, March 16th, marks the end of Sunshine Week across the nation. This weeklong celebration of open government was established in 2005 to help counter the increasing level of secrecy under which our federal and state government seem to be operating. Sunshine Week was created with the recognition that transparency in government is vital for any nation to claim to be a true democracy, ruled by an informed citizenry making informed decisions. The ideal of open government forms the basis for one of our most important protections against tyranny: the Freedom of Information Act. Unfortunately, when you’re dealing with agribusiness and its pollution in Maryland, sunlight is a disinfectant that our policymakers want nothing to do with.

Take the latest agribusiness bill to be introduced in the state legislature this year. Next Tuesday there will be a Senate hearing on Senate Bill 1029, entitled “Agricultural Certainty,” or Ag Certainty for short, a bill that was introduced by Senator Thomas Middleton, who has been a member of the state Joint Committee on Transparency and Open Government since 2011. Ag Certainty purports to create yet another incentive for the state’s more than 5000 agricultural operations to enact some pollution abatement measures that most of them are required to adhere to anyway. Getting these facilities to stop their polluting ways is critical given the fact that agriculture remains the largest source of nutrient and sediment pollution in the Bay watershed. In exchange for agreeing to try to stop polluting our waterways, the bill grants agricultural operations 10 years of immunity from future pollution abatement measures.

Although some recent press articles have indicated a “split” among environmental organizations in the region on the bill, the fact is there is no “split.” Twenty-one organizations including Food & Water Watch, Environment Maryland, Maryland Sierra Club, the Maryland League of Conservation Voters and many others stand united in opposition to this bill. To date, only one environmental organization, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, has expressed support. Read the full article…

By Patrick Woodall

Patrick Woodall, Research Director and Senior Policy Advocate

It is shaping up to be a banner year for the big food monopolies. This week, Cargill’s wheat milling partnership (Horizon) announced a proposed merger with ConAgra Mills, joining two of the nation’s largest wheat flour milling operations. This is on top of two flour mills Cargill bought earlier this year.

Cargill already is probably the world’s largest grain trading company and the merger would only increase its stranglehold on the food supply—on the farmers that raise wheat and the consumers that eat, well, practically anything.

The new company, Argent, would control a third of the wheat flour market. Today, the top four flour making firms (Horizon, ADM, ConAgra and Cereal Food Processors) mill more than half the wheat flour in the country—sort of like making the flour in the bread for every other sandwich.

If the proposed merger is approved, the top four firms (Argent, ADM, Cereal Food Processors and Bay State Milling) will mill nearly two-thirds of the flour—like making the bread in two out of three sandwiches. The new Argent would mill the flour for one-third of all sandwiches.

A lot of reporters are calling this “flour power,” and it is all about the bread because the new company would sell about $4.3 billion in flour every year. Most of that is not in the $3 bags of flour we buy at the supermarket, but in the millions of loaves of bread sold in supermarkets and restaurants. The consolidation will affect the companies that buy flour to bake bread and the farmers that sell wheat, because a stronger Cargill-ConAgra partnership gives them more leverage as both buyers of wheat and sellers of flour. Bakery companies will have fewer competitive sources for flour, which could make flour more expensive.

Farmers will have fewer competitors bidding for their wheat, which tends to drive down the prices farmers receive for crops. Already, farmers get less than a slice of bread out of each loaf. According to the National Farmers Union, wheat farmers receive about 19 cents for every $3.00 loaf of bread or about 6 percent, well below the average farmer share for food of about 16 percent.

This may just be the beginning of a wave of mega-mergers. In the past six months, there has been the proposed big beer merger, the Ralcorp-ConAgra snack and frozen dinner merger, a proposed beef-packing merger between JBS and XL Foods, the takeover of Heinz ketchup and Hormel’s purchase of Skippy peanut butter. And the year has just begun.