Blog Posts

By Patty Lovera

Food & Water Watch Assistant Director Patty Lovera

The House Agriculture Committee adopted its version of the 2012 farm bill, the Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act (FAARM), early Thursday morning after an all day session to “mark up” the bill with amendments. Here’s a media statement on what we think about the bill.

The House committee’s farm bill has some significant differences from what the Senate passed last month. It maintains commodity crop programs that make payments for farmers based on crop price, while the Senate version ends those programs and shifts commodity producers to a crop insurance model. Both the House and Senate versions do away with direct payments to commodity crop producers, a type of payment that is not tied to market conditions or actual production.

The House Ag Committee bill, approved by a 35 to 11 vote, would cut the commodity title by $14 billion, the conservation title by $6 billion and the nutrition title by $16.5 billion. This is in comparison to the Senate version that cuts $15 billion in the commodity title, $6 billion in conservation and $4.5 billion in nutrition programs. Read the full article…

By Patty Lovera

Food & Water Watch Assistant Director Patty Lovera

The House Agriculture Committee began marking up the farm bill today at 10:00 a.m. and proceeded all day with only a short break for the House health care vote. By 7:00p.m., the committee had considered about 40 amendments.

Most of today’s action was related to the nutrition title, which primarily funds the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps). The House Agriculture Committee Farm Bill cuts $16 billion from SNAP benefits, primarily by limiting eligibility. The Committee rejected an effort to make the cuts even steeper (by applying the draconian Ryan Budget cuts) but also rejected an effort to restore the SNAP cuts or use the lower level of $4 billion in cuts in the Senate Farm bill.

The Committee allowed for people with SNAP to use their benefits to purchase a share in community supported agriculture (CSA) local farms and approved an amendment to direct money to farmers market programs to increase access for SNAP recipients. The Committee also took up amendments to alter the sugar program (rejected), revisit the changes to the dairy reforms (rejected), keep open busy county USDA offices in the face of proposed closures (accepted), and new microloan program for beginning and socially disadvantaged farmers (accepted). Finally, past midnight, the Committee passed their version of the farm bill. Here’s a media statement we released about where we think Congress should go from here.

Glacier National Park

By Katherine Boehrer

*Updated Thursday, July 12

We’ve all been feeling the heat lately. A record breaking heat wave has stifled much of the Midwest and East Coast, and some scientists are saying this could be a taste of what global warming will mean for the United States. Ironically, the National Park that is arguably most vulnerable to climate change, Glacier National Park in Montana, now faces the prospect of hosting more natural gas pipelines, thanks to a bill recently passed by the House Natural Resources Committee. Not only would pipelines carry a fossil fuel that contributes to climate change, they could put a fragile ecosystem at risk and perpetuate dangerous fracking in the region. 

The bill, H.R. 4606, was introduced by Representative Denny Rehberg (R-MT) and would allow the Secretary of the Interior to issue right-of-way permits for natural gas pipelines located within Glacier National Park. Simply put, this is bad for Montana in just about every way imaginable.

Since 90 percent of all gas wells in the United States are fracked, a pipeline through the park would almost certainly carry gas obtained through this hazardous process, perpetuating all the problems that come with fracking. Fracking can contaminate the water we drink with methane, salts, heavy metals and radioactive compounds. It can also pollute the air and impose economic costs on local communities. A pipeline in Glacier National Park could make the entire state more vulnerable to this harmful practice. Read the full article…

By Wenonah Hauter
 
How did you spend your weekend? Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo spent his talking up the presidential potential of his son, current New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, telling people that the younger Cuomo may “have an opportunity to serve at a higher level, to serve the people of the United States.”
 
While it’s always nice to see a parent take pride in the accomplishments of their children, in this case, the elder Cuomo’s plug seems a little premature. Right now, nearly 20,000,000 New Yorkers are waiting to learn the fate of their essential resources as Governor Andrew Cuomo considers proposals to open New York State to shale gas development.
 
But the road to the White House is not lined with fracking rigs, and Cuomo’s cozy relationship with the oil and gas industry does not bode well for his energy policies if ever elected president. Before Governor Cuomo throws his hat into the ring, he needs to address the needs of his current constituents by banning fracking in New York.
 
All Americans deserve a future lit by clean, truly renewable energy, not dirty fossil fuels. Fracking threatens the air we breathe, the water we drink, the communities we love and the climate on which we depend. We don’t need it in New York, or anywhere else.
 
Opening New York up to fracking will set a dangerous precedent—in the state and the 2016 presidential campaign. Tell Governor Cuomo to preserve essential resources in New York and beyond by rejecting fracking.

By Michael Pineschi

There was a time when “super” meant something really, really good. But lately the adjective has been used to describe some of the most despicable menaces to society: super-sized fast food, Super PACs, and possibly the most dangerous of the lot: super bugs. These are not insects with capes that battle evil. Super bugs are antibiotic-resistant bacteria that have evolved because of the abuse and overuse of antibiotics in factory-farmed livestock. Every year, 2 million people contract an antibiotic-resistant infection and 90,000 of them die. And today, ABC News and the Food and Environment Reporting Network reports that there could be a direct link between the overuse of antibiotics in chicken and the increase bladder infections. 

Food & Water Watch has teamed up with Fix Food and Consumers Union in a new campaign entitled “Meat Without Drugs” to educate consumers about the serious problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and encourage grocery stores to only sell meat raised without antibiotics.  Read the full article…

By Patty Lovera

Food & Water Watch Assistant Director Patty Lovera

Now that the Senate has finished its version of the farm bill, it’s the House’s turn. Tomorrow, July 11, the House Agriculture Committee is scheduled to begin its draft they’re calling the Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act (FAARM, naturally). This “mark up” process starts with a draft of the bill that was released last week and will include debate on amendments offered by members of the committee.

The House version being considered by the committee has some significant differences from the version passed by the Senate besides its moniker. It maintains many existing commodity crop programs that make payments for farmers based on crop price, while the Senate version ends those programs and shifts commodity producers to a crop insurance model. Both the House and Senate versions do away with direct payments to commodity crop producers, a type of payment that is not tied to market conditions or actual production.

The House version makes much deeper cuts in nutrition programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, primarily by restricting who is eligible. Read the full article…

By Kate Fried

The dollars you drop at the grocery store have a direct impact on your health and the health of the planet. But try to tell that to Nestlé Pure Life, a brand of bottled water sourced from municipal tap water supplies, which recently launched its “2012 Hydration Movement.” In choosing tap water (rather than bottled tap water) you reject the commodification of a vital, increasingly limited, natural resource (and the extra expense) and choose water that hasn’t been left to languish for months or even years in chemical-leaching plastic bottles.

Nestlé’s latest attempts to put a positive spin on its products by marketing bottled water as the obvious replacement for soda inspired the following satire. Read this blog in your best late-night television infomercial voice. Remember that here at Food & Water Watch, we are all for replacing bad habits with healthy ones; but bottled water is not the key to a healthier planet or a healthier you.

Read the full article…

By Rich Bindell

Some good news to kick off your Independence Day! In Las Cruces, New Mexico, local citizens rallied to defeat an unfair city policy that would have blocked citizens with unpaid traffic tickets from having the right to water.

If you recall, Food & Water Watch issued an unofficial citation to the city council for violating the right to water. Just a few weeks later, the council backed off and declared that the city would seek alternatives to punishing violators.

This is a wonderful victory for the local citizens of Las Cruces! It’s nice to be able to report to volunteers, organizers and our supportive social media community that their voices were heard!

Food & Water Watch Volunteer Jason Burke, who lives in Las Cruces, said it best… Read the full article…

By Rich Bindell

Summer means cooking outside and, for many of us, that involves finding the perfect piece of fish to throw on the grill. But the way we source our seafood is changing dramatically these days, so you might want to pay close attention to what’s happening with the last wild food source in America.

Our report, “Factory-Fed Fish: How the Soy Industry is Expanding Into the Sea,” shows how the soy industry, which is dominated by Big Ag giants Monsanto and Cargill, are promoting the use of soy as an environmentally-friendly way to feed factory farmed fish. For them, it could mean millions in profits. But for consumers, it’s like taking our factory farm model of food production and putting it right in the ocean.

As consumers turn to fish more often for a healthy source of protein, more and more of us are getting our seafood from aquaculture or factory fish farms. In fact, close to half of the seafood we consume globally comes from these factory fish farms.

Add to that the fact that soy farms were second only to corn farms in the U.S. in 2007, and you can see why the powerful soy lobby, which is well represented in Washington, D.C., is aggressively promoting the use of soy to feed farmed fish. From 1996 to 2009, the sales of foods containing soy increased from approximately $1 billion to almost $4.5 billion.

But SHOULD we feed soy to fish? Read the full article…

By Walker Foley

“On behalf of the department, we’re delighted to share our 150 years as part of this Folklife Festival. 150 years. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s our birthday.”

That was USDA Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Kathleen Merrigan as she welcomed onlookers to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the Mall yesterday afternoon. I was there alongside other Food & Water Watch staff, coalition partners – the National Consumers League, the Coalition for Sensible Safeguards and the American Federation of Government Employees – and a dozen helpful interns. We had heard the USDA planned to give a food safety demonstration for the average consumer, and couldn’t help but enjoy the irony accompanying their demonstration. 

As the Food & Water Watch savvy already know, the USDA has been pursuing a pilot program for little over a decade that purports to cut meaningful food safety inspection out of the budget, and out of poultry plants all over the United States. We decided it best to inform the crowd by handing out an abridged version of a recent LA Times editorial, aptly retitled by the Arizona Daily Star, “New US approach to poultry safety isn’t safe at all.” USDA organizers did not appreciate our efforts, and didn’t hesitate to tell us – more on that in a moment.

Merrigan’s speech glossed over the USDA’s mission statement, and gave a brief history of the USDA from its inception in 1862 to the present. However, one statement struck a poor chord and, had we not flyered the entire audience, may have gone unnoticed.

“We create jobs and economic opportunity in the nation’s rural communities. We help keep America’s food safe,” she said. But her words fell short of the truth, as the USDA’s new approach to poultry inspection would do just the opposite – eliminate jobs of skilled USDA food safety inspectors (about 800 of them) and increase conveyor line speeds. With fewer inspectors and faster birds, the process begs for higher rates of contamination. 

Shortly after Merrigan’s speech USDA workers gave a food safety demonstration in a specially-zoned area of the Mall. This was a no-free-speech zone, where we were not allowed to give flyers to participants. We quickly found ourselves directed out of the enclosure (a three foot mesh fence) by USDA event organizers. But the damage was done. We had already put a flyer in the hand of every participant.

If you would like to wish the USDA a happy 150th birthday, then call the U.S. Capitol Switchboard – 202-224-3121 – to be connected with your Senators and Representative. Let them know you don’t support this unsafe approach to the nation’s poultry production.