Food and Ag News Nuggets
Ag Roundup: New GOP House May Strip Food Safety Law … Can GE and Non-GE Alfalfa ‘Co-Exist?’
The latest food fights over farm safety and genetically modified crops.By Courtney Lowery Cowgill, 1-06-11
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| Photo by Daryl Mitchell and used here under Creative Commons license. See more of Mitchell's work here. | |
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Note: Starting this week, each Thursday, Courtney Lowery Cowgill will be rounding up the more interesting and pressing stories from the food and agriculture world. Read something you think should be included next week? Reach her at courtney@newwest.net
When President Obama signed into law the the Food Safety Modernization Act on Tuesday, the food and ag story of the year, maybe of the decade, came to a close. Or so we thought.
The bill may be law, but the teeth will come in the funding for it and Republicans are warning that, considering this is a new Congress, the real food fight has just begun.
The bill had its critics, but was largely popular with the food and ag crowds, big and small alike, especially after Montana Sen. Jon Tester amended it to quell the concerns of small producers.
Now, though, it seems to have become a favorite scapegoat of the Tea Partiers. (Glenn Beck even called it the ”Death Star.")
The new chairman of the House subcommittee that manages the FDA, Georgia Rep. Jack Kingston, is already promising to cut funding.
He told the Washington Post’s Lyndsey Layton late last month:
“I would not identify it as something that will necessarily be zeroed out, but it is quite possible it will be scaled back if it is significant overreach.”
This week, after being sworn in, he told Bloomberg:
“While it’s a great re-election tool to terrify people into thinking that the food they’re eating is unsafe and unsanitary, and if not for the wonderful nanny-state politicians we’d be getting sick after every meal, the system we have is doing a darn good job.”
Marion Nestle, one of the leading advocates in the food safety realm, expressed her concerns for the law in a blog post for the Atlantic this week, calling the FDA’s response to funding questions ”not-quite-satisfactory.”
She also wrote in a column for the San Francisco Chronicle:
“The bill’s provisions require the Food and Drug Administration to hire more inspectors just at a time when Republican lawmakers have sworn to cut domestic spending. The FDA also must translate the bill’s requirements and exemptions for small farmers into regulations.
Rule-making is a lengthy process subject to public comment and, therefore, political maneuvering. Watch the lobbying efforts ratchet up as food producers, large and small, attempt to head off safety rules they think they won’t like.”
A few other links to get you up to speed on the issue:
The Christian Science Monitor has a nice piece on the facts and myths surrounding the law.
Marcus Baram of the Huffington Post does a good job of parsing the politics of the law.
And, Deborah Kotz of the Boston Globe digs into what the law will do.
The other big story making waves in the food and ag world is what to do with Roundup Ready alfalfa, now that the court-directed Environmental Impact Statement is done.
Roundup Ready alfalfa—alfalfa that has been genetically modified to resist the popular herbicide, glyphosphate (marketed mainly as Monsanto’s Roundup) was pulled from the American market several years ago when a California court ruled that the USDA had failed to protect the environment by not doing an environmental impact statement before the crop’s release.
Last month, the USDA released the long-awaited EIS (click here to download the full document) and now the agency says it will either allow the re-release of the crop unregulated or with some restrictions. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has promised that the agency will have a decision by Jan. 24.
Vilsack has met with and continues to meet with GMO critics and supporters, searching for a way to allow non-GMO and GMO strains to “co-exist.” After his end-of-the year meeting with stakeholders, Vilsack released an open letter, in which he wrote:
“Regrettably, what the criticism we have received on our GE alfalfa approach suggests, is how comfortable we have become with litigation – with one side winning and one side losing – and how difficult it is to pursue compromise. Surely, there is a better way, a solution that acknowledges agriculture’s complexity, while celebrating and promoting its diversity.”
But, that “compromise” is what has critics most worried. When it comes to GMO and non-GMO, the issue at hand is really not how to coexist, but whether they can co-exist and alfalfa particularly cross fertilizes like mad. So, what some might call “co-existence,” others might call “certain contamination.”
As a side note, one of the more interesting exchanges on this issue has been on the pages of the Wall Street Journal. First, the Journal criticized Vilsack for using this stakeholder meeting to politicize a process that should be based on science and free of politics. Vilsack fired back, writing, “My goal was simple: to determine if common ground exists that advances all interests, including those of farmers of GE crops, conventional and organic producers. But agricultural issues are complex and rarely lend themselves to simple solutions.”
Then, Gregory Conko, with the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Henry I. Miller, the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology, published an op-ed that claims all this litigation over biotech crops will drive up the cost of food.
Finally, on a happier note, another recent story worth a mention is one from the New York Times about how if you really cared about the environment, you’d eat invasive species.
Roasted pigeon anyone?
Courtney Lowery Cowgill is a writer and editor (formerly of these pages) who also runs Prairie Heritage Farm, a small farm near Conrad, Montana. She and her husband grow vegetables, turkeys and ancient and heritage grains. As a farmer and writer, she works on and follows food and agriculture issues closely and each week, rounds up the top stories in this arena for New West. You can reach her at courtney@newwest.net.
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Comments
Layers of regulation still do no prevent contaminated food from entering the retail food chain. Producers and consumers ask for exceptions to the food safety rules and get them, and the food does cause sickness and even death every year. Laws don't seem to make food any safer than food that is third party certified to be safe, which is a customer demand that is met by farmers and packers who enter into third party food monitoring for good practices and attention to food sanitation.
Government cannot do what we ask of it. Period. So we have to accept less than perfect results. Or regulate ourselves into poverty for forever and a day. The law of diminishing returns has bitten government on its ass, and now our job is to quit digging, which is the only way not to go deeper in the hole.
The marketplace has a preference for clean, healthy, nutritious food. It pays for it. You name your favorite new store, and it is probably some form of new, smaller, customer directed wholesome food selling. It ain't cheap to grow niche marketed food, whether plant or animal. It costs more to produce and to buy. There are customers enough that every grocery chain now offers some kind of special organic and prepared food section. People want safe food, and stores now profess to provide that chain of monitoring that produces safe food.
I manage a berry farm. We sell to a packer. Our fields are identified, and we know daily which rows we are picking, which sections of each field. That information follows the fruit into the reefer trailer parked at the farm, as each pallet load has a code number and is tied to the field data, all on a bar coded piece of paper. The fruit goes into a super cooler at the packing house, and is processed in a packing shed that is kept below 36 degrees all summer long. Every clam shell of fruit, the box of 12 that the clam becomes a part of, the pallet loads, all are bar code connected to the picking date, processing date, farm, field, row, and all that information is on the clamshell container at the market. None of this is about government regulations. It is all about food safety and being a part of a third party inspection and monitoring program called GAP, Good Agricultural Practices. It is about field sanitation, hand washing, water quality, irrigation practices, the whole of pesticides and pesticide applications. No part of it is by government mandate. It is all about marketing and customer satisfaction. We get more money for our GAP certified fruit. Basic business. How will more government regulation bring more money to the producer, whole seller, and retail seller?? It never does. It is just an added cost to the consumer, and as experience has proven, adds little or nothing to food safety.
My son is an hourly employee, a logger. He is a trained First Responder, Green Logger, Certified Thinning Logger. It is about marketing lumber, from the stump to Lowes or Home Depot. It is not about a zealous government doing the nanny state two step on loggers. It is about what the customer expects in the products they buy. Marketing. The interface of a willing seller and a willing buyer. There is a market for certified lumber from certified sustainable forests logged by certified loggers who use light on the land methods and practices. The market pays extra for that lumber. Meanwhile, Government finds it impossible to reliably offer a timber selling program. And, their management is not considered sustainable. Sort of like salmon caught on the high seas not deemed organic. So they are marketed as "wild" as opposed to the pen raised "farmed" salmon, which can garner the "organic" label. Go figure.
The government cannot be the minder of the conditions under which every food customer stores or uses the food they buy. Nor can they dictate how it is cooked. The law of diminishing returns is upon us. If we regulate too much, we no longer can afford to buy the product produced. Or we import it from some other country where none of the nanny state rules apply.
Let the buyer beware. Let the buyer choose his or her own food.
Certainly we need to regulate pesticides. Those are pest specific poisons. But most customers don't know that state regulations for pesticides and fertilizers can make it illegal to sell organic fertilizers because ingredients cannot be measured as to percentage of the whole of active ingredients because each load of manure is different. Or feathers. Or fish guts. Fulvic acid does not exist as a measurable ingredient, evidently, so that is not legally for sale as fertilizer in some states.
If we were to back track to five years ago, I don't think any law passed since then makes a statistically relevant impact as to protecting consumers and the food they buy. If the food does not pass muster with the green grocer, the produce buyer, the meat or cheese buyer, or the customers, there is no market for that food and it is not in the market place. Of course, fresh food means nothing to the customer buying with food stamps, because seldom do you see raw foods in their carts. Most of that food is processed or pre cooked, dated, and requires heating, not cooking. If you have a portable debit card reader and processor, most food stamp debit cards can be used at farmers markets now. Like, if you need a few boutique smoked organic pork chops and some fresh goat cheese, or a bouquet of fresh flowers, and some winter dug red beets, farmer's markets are gearing up to sell wholesome food to salary challenged buyers.
Beware of what? Food that looks nice, and smells nice can kill. Of course when you're dead you won't be buying that product again. Is that the hidden hand of the market at work?
Mickey: a blanket endorsement of genetically modified organisms is as wrong-headed as fear based on superstition.
I'm comfortable trusting Monsanto (for example) to look out for its corporate interests in the short to medium-term. I am not comfortable trusting it to look out for the general welfare of the public at large. They're not in that business.
The large-scale industrial program to drive evolution of glyphosate-resistant organisms has been a fabulous commercial success, but it remains to be seen whether it was a good idea.