Merrigan is best known for her local foods initiative called Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food, which brought all of the agency’s efforts to improve regional and local food systems under one conceptual roof. It was a modest program in terms of budget – its funding was measured in mere millions while agribusiness reaped tens of billions in subsidies – but it was the first effort of its kind at an agency long known for its support of large commodity growers. (And small as it was, it was revolutionary enough to draw the ire of Republicans.)

Merrigan is also credited with preserving strong standards for the Organic label, championing a national farm-to-school program, funding hoop houses to allow farmers to grow later into the season, and acting as a key player in the effort to improve the foods sold in school vending machines. Jerry Hagstrom has a good wrap-up in National Journal.

But it wasn’t just about her favored policies. Merrigan also provided political cover to her boss, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack. She was a counterweight to the administration’s more industry-friendly moves, especially regarding support for biotech seeds. Decisions like Vilsack’s fast-tracking of approval of so-called Agent Orange corn and its willingness to ignore a court order and allow farmers to keep growing GMO sugar beets infuriated sustainable agriculture types. But Merrigan’s presence near the top of USDA’s chain of command convinced them that the agency wasn’t totally in the tank to Big Ag. Indeed, a large group of her admirers including the President of Environmental Working Group, the CEOs of Organic Valley and Whole Foods and chef Alice Waters just released a heartfelt thank you note to Merrigan.

Merrigan is the latest of a long line of administration officials to depart as Obama begins his second term, and she’s said that the change has been in the works for some time. But given the abruptness of her departure and the brevity of her resignation announcement, some observers, such as Tom Philpott at Mother Jones, are concerned that she’s being forced out by those who oppose her efforts to reorient the USDA, in however a small way, toward more support for local and regional food. Hagstrom even speculates that Vilsack himself may have engineered her departure because “he was jealous of her public profile.”

Merrigan herself made clear that her departure was not “for personal reasons.” She made a strong statement to USDA staff that she disagrees with those who say that women can’t hold top positions in government, a sensitive topic in the Obama administration.

Regardless of Merrigan’s reasons for leaving, there’s no question that Vilsack supports the policies she championed and a more sustainable agriculture in general. And Merrigan insists that she has institutionalized an interest in local and organic farming within USDA. But hers will be big shoes to fill. Merrigan was not just the government’s highest ranking sustainable agriculture advocate, but also perhaps the only such person with the bureaucratic expertise to run the day-to-day operations of the enormous $150 billion-a-year, 100,000-employee agency.

Before joining the USDA, Merrigan was a top aide to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) who was then chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. There, she helped write the original law that created the USDA Organic program. A few years later, she was brought in by President Bill Clinton to run the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service just as it was beginning to implement the organic law — and she’s credited with saving it from regulatory irrelevance.

There are certainly many people at the state level and even within USDA who could serve in her current position, but there is no one else out there who has the breadth of expertise and experience in sustainable ag and in USDA administrative wonkery wrapped up in one hard-nosed, efficient package. The closest such person I can think of currently at USDA is Miles McEvoy who runs the National Organic Program, but it’s difficult to imagine that he’s seriously in the running to replace Merrigan.

One is left hoping that Merrigan is right — that there’s enough institutional momentum behind her work that it continues in her absence. But institutions like USDA are far more often driven by inertia from the status quo – and at the USDA, the status quo ain’t exactly local and organically grown. Kathleen Merrigan will be sorely missed.

This post originally appeared on Grist.

Will the food movement ever really turn political? This question has been much discussed of late, thanks in part to Michael Pollan’s recent New York Times magazine op-ed on California’s GMO labeling referendum (which I discussed here).

And yes, as Pollan argued recently, whether or not California’s Prop 37 passes will be one sign that the movement has come of age (i.e., eaters “voting with votes, not just forks”). But winning one election in one state, however large and trend-setting, would be just the beginning. Every good political movement identifies its allies and its enemies in an attempt to breed more of the former and weed out the latter.

Now we’re seeing signs that the food movement may in fact be starting to grow up. And like learning how to balance a checkbook or making sure bills get paid on time, some of the most crucial rites of passage can seem more like chores than privileges.

So it is with a new organization called Food Policy Action, a lobbying group that intends to grade members of Congress on their voting records on food-related legislation. The group’s board of directors includes several big names in food: Stonyfield Farm’s co-founder Gary Hirshberg and the Humane Society of the United States’ CEO Wayne Pacelle, as well as leaders from Oxfam America, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and the Environmental Working Group—and lest I forget, Top Chef’s head judge Tom Colicchio.

The Food Policy Action website will quickly become essential for anyone interested in food policy (just don’t all click the link at once now!). Like other food-related advocacy groups, it presents an overview of issues such as jobs, nutrition, sustainability, and hunger as they relate to food.

But the meat of the effort—and the thing that distinguishes it from other groups—has to do with the sometimes mind-numbing but essential subject of federal legislation. Food Policy Action has collected all the pending federal legislation and agency rulemaking with a bearing on the food system in one place. The site displays roll call votes for all food-related bills from the 112th Congress (i.e., bills voted on from January 2011 until now) with the outcomes color-coded red or green depending on whether FPA supports or opposes the bill in question.

For example, on Sen. Mike Johanns’ (R-Neb.) amendment to the Senate Farm Bill that would keep the EPA from monitoring the pollution of large livestock operations via airplanes, the “yea” votes are red, since Food Policy Action opposed that piece of legislation. Meanwhile, the “yea” votes for Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s (D-N.Y.) amendment to the Senate Farm Bill, which would have restored $4.5 billion in cuts to the food stamps program, were coded green.

Many interest groups before it have taken this tactic, but this is the first time a food group has taken a “scorecard” approach. Each legislator’s “score” is searchable by name and zip code, and the information can also be sorted by state, party, chamber, and score.

The legislators who come up short receive the shameful label of “Food Policy Failure,” like Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio) (0 percent), Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.) (8 percent), and Sen. Roy Blount (R-Mont.) (6 percent). You’d think it would be helpful to highlight “Food Policy Heroes” as well (you know what they say about carrots vs. sticks). But it’s not hard to find folks with good scorecards on the site. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), for instance, earned 100 percent, according to the scorecard methodology (as did about 40 other Democrats, although it’s worth noting that legislators don’t seem to get penalized for skipping a food-related vote, so 100 doesn’t mean a “yea” vote on every food-related bill or amendment).

While it can’t compare to other prime examples of the Internet’s unmatched ability to aggregate important information into one convenient package—I’m talking, of course, about sites like Binders Full of Women, Otters Who Look Like Benedict Cumberbatch, and Dog Shaming—this kind of infrastructure is absolutely vital to the food movement’s ability to become a political force. Indeed, Food Policy Action is explicitly trying to fill the gap Michael Pollan has noted.

A true movement must hold its politicians accountable. And you can’t do that unless you know what they’re up to. It’s the freedom to operate out of the limelight that gives lobbyists and corporations the chance to move legislation that’s less in the public interest than their own.

By putting all this information in one place—and weaving the many pieces of legislation that touch on the food system into a single narrative, as it were–Food Policy Action goes a little way toward helping advocates build a genuine movement. It’s not the last piece of the food politics puzzle, but it’s an important one nonetheless. So, go take the site for a spin. You may be shocked (or pleasantly surprised) by what you learn about your representatives.

Photo: Shutterstock

Originally published on Grist.

Recently, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal of a federal court ruling that Monsanto won against an Indiana soybean farmer. And while that’s no guarantee they’ll side with the farmer, I’ve often heard it said that the Supreme Court doesn’t take cases to pat the ruling judge on the back.

This particular case is a patent dispute. In fact, much of the blame (or credit) for Monsanto’s success in court lies with the U.S. Patent Office, which takes the view that things like individual product features, business techniques, website functions, and DNA are all patentable.

Of course, patent rights are just part of it. Every time Monsanto sells seeds to farmers, the company requires that they sign an incredibly strict terms-of-use agreement—in essence, a contract between Monsanto and the farmer that dictates exactly how the farmer may use the seeds. One of the agreement’s most notable clauses is the restriction against seed saving from one harvest to the next, even though Monsanto’s seeds grow “true-to-seed”; i.e., its herbicide-resistant “Roundup Ready” seeds will create corn plants whose seeds are also herbicide resistant.

Interestingly, this is not true for many conventional “hybrid” seeds, which are bred so that the next-generation seeds often result in less-desirable versions of the plant—thus causing the farmer to have to buy new seeds every year. So Monsanto has achieved through law what it could not through nature.

And while several farmers have been successfully sued for violations of this agreement, the company has also sued farmers who never signed its agreement but instead had Roundup Ready plants appear in their fields through windblown pollination (a.k.a. “contamination”). These farmers, knowingly or not, had violated Monsanto’s patent—and the courts have repeatedly upheld that conclusion.

But there is one tiny crack in Monsanto’s legal fortress. The company allows farmers to sell saved seeds from harvests of Roundup Ready crops to local grain elevators, which is where commodity crop farmers sell their harvests as well. The grain elevators mix the seeds up with other seeds from brand-name hybrids and resell them as generic seed packs, called “commodity seeds” in the trade, which are often used for late-season “second crop” planting.

Soybean farmer Vernan Bowman of Indiana saw the implications of this crack in the fortress and decided to try and drive his tractor through it.

For years, Bowman would grow a first crop of Monsanto seed, which he would purchase legally, and then would buy some commodity seed from his local grain elevator for his second crop. While aware he could not save seeds from the first crop he grew, Bowman would later plant the commodity seeds, spray the plants with Roundup, and was then able to identify which were resistant to the herbicide when they didn’t die. Bowman saved those seeds and saved money, since he had bought the commodity seeds for his second crop at a steep discount without paying Monsanto or signing its licensing agreement.

As the TechDirt blog reported at the time, Bowman was so convinced he hadn’t broken any law that he told Monsanto representatives what he’d done.

That didn’t stop Monsanto from suing him, which the company finally did in 2007. Monsanto could not claim he had violated the company’s terms of use, since he never signed an agreement regarding the commodity seeds. But what Bowman did, according to the company, was violate its patent rights—rights which the company claims go beyond the term of any particular agreement it may or may not have with any farmer. As Monsanto sees it, its patent rights apply to all uses of its products, in perpetuity. A federal court agreed and Monsanto won. Again. Bowman was ordered to pay Monsanto over $80,000. And then a federal appeals court upheld the ruling in 2011.

But there’s a small problem, as TechDirt pointed out after the appeal. This ruling appears to now contradict a limitation the Supreme Court put on patents back in 2008. It determined:

… that patent holders can’t shake down the entire supply chain, by forcing each level of the supply chain to also license the patent (even if they bought a product from someone who had licensed the patent).

And that’s exactly what Monsanto wants to do. Even if you legally buy seeds that were saved from a legally purchased Roundup Ready crop (in other words, through the commodity seed market), you still can’t actually plant them! (Yes, it really is as crazy as it sounds.)

Monsanto wants relief from what is technically called “patent exhaustion.” And if the company gets it, it will have total control over its seeds. Like the ultimate patent troll, Monsanto will be entitled to licensing fees from any appearance in nature of its patented genes, regardless of whether the company’s license terms were directly violated or not. That’s a lot of power for one company to have.

It’s hard to believe that Monsanto will get the right to claim that it can extract fees from anyone anywhere who grows a plant with the company’s genetic material in it—especially because those genes are so easily spread.

Of course, if the case gets upheld, and Monsanto’s DNA is this special, so is any product that includes patented genes. And that will extend an enormous amount of power to the whole biotech industry, including pharmaceutical companies. Imagine owing a drug company licensing fees because you passed genetic material from some advanced gene therapy drug onto your child, for instance.

So this case is actually a big deal in all sorts of ways. If Monsanto loses, it will finally have a limit on its power. Would it cause a wave of farmers to jump on Bowman’s bandwagon tractor? Who knows. Whatever happens, a limit is a limit—and it’s something Monsanto hasn’t had to deal with in the legal realm before (the natural realm is providing many limits to Monsanto’s power, however.)

Here’s hoping sanity prevails in the Supreme Court.

Originally published on Grist

A new coalition is trying to throw sand in the gears of industrial agriculture’s chemical treadmill. And this one just may have what it takes to slow it down. I’m referring to the fight over USDA approval for Dow AgroScience’s new genetically modified corn seeds (brand name “Enlist”), which are resistant to the herbicide 2,4-D.

This is part of biotech’s “superweed” strategy, by which they hope to address the fact that farmers across the country are facing an onslaught of weeds impervious to the most popular herbicide in use, Monsanto’s glyphosate or RoundUp (and in some cases impervious to machetes as well!). Of course, this is a problem of the industry’s own making. It was overuse of glyphosate caused by the market dominance of Monsanto’s set of glyphosate-resistant genetically engineered seeds that put farmers in this fix in the first place.

One of the older herbicides, 2,4-D is a pretty nasty chemical—it’s been linked to cancer, neurotoxicity, kidney and liver problems, reproductive effects, and shows endocrine disrupting potential—which is one of the many reasons farmers prefer the more “benign” glyphosate. In fact, on the basis of the scientific evidence, especially related to human cancers, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) several years ago to withdraw its approval for 2,4-D. Earlier this month, the petition was summarily denied.

So it’s interesting to see this new coalition’s opposition to 2,4-D getting so much traction so quickly. Perhaps it’s because the group—dubbed Save Our Crops—isn’t made up of environmentalists and sustainable agriculture types, but rather Midwestern and Mid-Atlantic conventional farmers and large food processors (and Organic Valley, the organic co-operative organization which is both a producer and a processor).

The basis of their concern isn’t so much the health effects, but the fact that their farms may end up as collateral damage from the increase in the use of 2,4-D that will occur if Dow’s seed is approved. After all, the use of glyphosate went through the roof once Monsanto’s RoundUp Ready seeds took over the marketplace. These farmers expect 2,4-D to follow the same path. (Rodale News estimates a 60 to 80 percent increase.)

The problem has to do with pesticide drift—an issue with many pesticides, but a particular problem with 2,4-D, which unlike glyphosate is highly volatile. While its volatility was in one context considered a strength, at this point even Dow itself acknowledges that it’s a concern. In an article on the battle over the new seed’s approval, The New York Times offers an illustration of what these farmers have to fear:

To Jody Herr, it was a telltale sign that one of his tomato fields had been poisoned by 2,4-D, the powerful herbicide that was an ingredient in Agent Orange, the Vietnam War defoliant.

“The leaves had curled and the plants were kind of twisting rather than growing straight,” Mr. Herr said of the 2009 incident on his vegetable farm in Lowell, Ind. He is convinced the chemical, as well as another herbicide called dicamba, had wafted through the air from farms nearly two miles away.

As explained by Rodale News, 2,4-D-resistant plants will alter the way farmers use the chemical, encouraging them to apply it later in the season to more kill weeds (you normally wouldn’t apply a herbicide on a field full of mature plants). This fact makes it particularly problematic since, as Rodale News put it:

… not only are humidity and temperatures higher, but also neighboring tomato plants are leafing out, making them most susceptible to the drift. If the chemicals don’t outright kill plants like tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, peppers, and other favorites, they could cause severe twisting and other deformities to occur as the plants in the drift’s path grow, rendering the harvest useless.

Which is just what farmer Herr saw in his field. Indeed, it is tomato farmers who may be the most at risk. Rodale also reports on a study produced by scientists at Ohio State University, which simulated the effects of 2,4-D drift on tomatoes [PDF]:

Experts found that the migrating pesticide vapors sparked late bloom, which diminishes the marketable red part of the tomato and stimulated growth of unmarketable green growth, which can’t be sold. In fact, just tiny amounts—1/300th of what was applied to field crops—caused significant field loss on neighboring tomato farms.

Ohio researchers concluded that realistic drift from corn or soy fields treated with either dicamba or 2,4-D will result in a 17 to 77 percent reduction in marketable fruit for neighboring farms and gardens.

These are, of course, estimates from a simulation. But the farmers and processors behind Save Our Crops would rather not be the guinea pigs in the real-world version of this experiment.

For its part, Dow assures the USDA that its new version of 2,4-D doesn’t have the same volatility—and the company will “urge” farmers to use the new, branded version rather than the far less expensive generic version of 2,4-D that’s been on the market for decades. How reassuring.

Indeed that’s where I get worried. If I had to guess, I suspect that the USDA will approve Dow’s new seed but with restrictions on things like planting acreage and use of recommended formulations and so on (though there’s always the chance the agency will punt the final decision until after the election). In any event, restrictions are only as good as their enforcement, and the USDA doesn’t have an inspiring track record. Farmers have routinely violated planting restrictions on GM seeds in the past—while regulators have a history of acceding to industry’s demands to reduce the restrictions rather than enforce them.

The public comment period on the 2,4-D-resistant seeds ends today. According to the Center for Food Safety 365,000 people have already submitted comments to the USDA. An additional 143 farm, environmental, health, fisheries groups and companies will submit a letter to USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack expressing their opposition to the GMO seeds. Save Our Crops has also already submitted two petitions [PDF] while the consumer group Just Label It is sponsoring its own petition to protest USDA approval, so there’s still time for the public’s voice to be heard.

But the real fight appears to be between commodity farms who want a simple answer to the growing problem of superweeds and fruit and vegetable growers who don’t want to see their crops damaged as a consequence. The latter are often treated by the USDA as step-children while growers of the Big Five commodities—corn, soy, wheat, rice, and cotton—receive the overwhelming majority of federal farm subsidies.

I doubt that USDA approval of Dow’s new seed, if it comes, will be the end of the story. But it should tell us something that even some large conventional farmers are starting to get angry and scared by the direction industrial agriculture has taken.

Below is a video produced by Dow AgroScience advertising Enlist, or 2,4-D. Skip ahead to 2:35 to hear the company’s take on superweeds and to see some compelling images.

Photo: A still from a promotional video for the herbicide 2,4-D, which is being marketed as a solution for “superweeds” (picured), which have grown tolerant to other herbicides.

Originally Published on Grist

When I wrote recently about the next generation of genetically engineered seeds, I was in truth referring to the next next generation. The fact is that the next actual generation of seeds is already out of the lab and poised for approval by the USDA.

And I’m not talking about Monsanto’s recently approved “drought-tolerant” seeds, which the USDA itself has observed are no more drought-tolerant than existing conventional hybrids.

No, the “exciting” new seeds are simply resistant to more than one kind of pesticide. Rather than resisting Monsanto’s glyphosate-based Roundup alone, they will now also be resistant to Dow AgroScience’s pesticide 2,4-D.

“A new pesticide,“ you say. “How exciting!” Except 2,4-D, despite its catchy name, has been around since World War II. Not only is it one of the most commonly used pesticides in the world, but it came to further prominence in certain circles when it was incorporated as a main ingredient in Agent Orange.

Indeed, as with research into new antibiotics, research into new—potentially safer—pesticides has come to a virtual standstill. Like the drug pipeline, the pesticide pipeline has run dry. Instead, biotech companies are going back to the older, more toxic chemicals, like 2,4-D, for inspiration.

And while you’d expect opposition to these new products from the likes of Tom Philpott of Mother Jones or Doug Gurian-Sherman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, one place you might not expect to see it is the pages of the influential, peer-reviewed journal BioScience.

And yet there it is! Led by David Mortensen, a team of scientists from Penn State, Montana State, and the University of New Hampshire published a paper that describes the effects on agriculture from an over-reliance on glyphosate and an overuse of Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds. It also discusses at length the risks of using new seeds that “stack” resistance to various pesticides into one genetically engineered package.

In short, they say that you can’t believe Monsanto and Dow when they hype gyphosate resistance plus 2,4-D resistance as two great tastes that taste great together. The two companies are promising to eliminate the growing superweed menace—the one that has caused farmers to abandon thousands of acres of prime farmland and to return to older, more toxic pesticides to protect their crops.

What these scientists conclude is that with so many weeds resistant to glyphosate already, it won’t take long for them to develop resistance to 2,4-D as well.  According to the study’s authors, almost half of the nearly 40 species of weeds that are already resistant to two pesticides have arisen since 2005 (i.e. since the Roundup Ready era began). In short, the crisis Monsanto and Dow are promising to head off is already here.

There are other problems with 2,4-D, such as a strong link to cancer and a much greater tendency to drift on the wind (and thus contaminate nearby fields and waterways)—problems that the development of the less toxic, less volatile glyphosate was supposed to have “solved.” Yet now, thanks to Big Ag’s over-reliance on these genetically engineered one-hit wonders, which encouraged farmers to use too much glyphosate too often, we’re back to square one—or rather to square toxic.

There is, however, an alternative—and one that doesn’t require a total transition to organic agriculture (not that there’s anything wrong with that!). Mortensen and his team describe in detail a practice called Integrated Weed Management (IWM). Like its sibling, Integrated Pest Management (IPM), IWM does involve the use of chemical pesticides. But it’s a judicious use that can act as a last resort rather than a first line of defense. As the paper states:

IWM integrates tactics, such as crop rotation, cover crops, competitive crop cultivars, the judicious use of tillage, and targeted herbicide application, to reduce weed populations and selection pressures that drive the evolution of resistant weeds.

It’s designed for production agriculture and would most likely increase farmer profits, since farmers would get the benefit of reduced seed and pesticide costs and no real loss of productivity. But, as with the climate-friendly agriculture I discussed the other day, you’re unlikely to see IWM embraced by Big Ag any time soon.

The USDA, along with the entire large-scale agriculture economy, is built around the profits of pesticide and biotech companies. You need only watch the USDA approve new genetically engineered products—which the agency admits represents a threat to other forms of agriculture—to see how deep in the tank to these companies our government is.

Tom Philpott observed that with this latest development, agriculture is at “a crossroads.” I disagree. I would say that if the USDA approves this new multiple pesticide-resistant GMO seed as it’s expected to, large-scale agriculture in the country will have reached a true dead end.

Photo: Minnemom

This is a sorry end to a process that began in 1977 (!), but McKenna created an excellent timeline that traces the history of the issue back to the 1950s. In 2009, the Obama administration breathed new life into a moribund process because the top two Obama appointees at the FDA, Commissioner Margaret Hamburg and her then-deputy Joshua Sharfstein, strongly supported restricting antibiotic use in agriculture.

But despite Hamburg and Sharfstein’s many supportive statements, the FDA has only produced a draft set of “voluntary” guidelines. And, with this latest announcement, it looks like that’s as far as they’re willing to go.

Inaction has consequences: According to the vast majority of microbiologists and public health experts, restrictions on agricultural uses are key to preserving the effectiveness of antibiotics as well as to preventing the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria like MRSA and salmonella Heidelberg (cause of last summer’s record-breaking ground turkey recall). And it’s no small dosage: Every year 29 million pounds of antibiotics are given to animals — often via their feed. That figure represents 80 percent of all antibiotics used in the U.S.

Consumer groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Pew Charitable Trusts have been calling for an end to the practice for years. But it’s not just outsiders who are fed up with the agency’s work on this issue; the administration’s own watchdog group, the Government Accountability Office, recently gave the agency a failing grade in the subject.

In many ways, this issue parallels the ongoing battle over BPA, the endocrine-disrupting chemical used in food packaging, plastics, and register receipts. When finally pushed to ban the chemical, the FDA declared that “its hands were tied” by regulatory hurdles and jurisdictional questions. Yet soon after, the industry lobbying group American Chemical Council responded to consumer anger and petitioned the agency to go ahead and ban BPA. Only then did the FDA indicate it would follow through.

In other words, the FDA is admitting that as long as the industry opposes it, the agency can’t keep antibiotics out of our meat and dairy products (nor, for that matter, can it ensure that antibiotics will remain effective). It’s also admitting it has no real power over the industries it regulates. If the agency continues to favor industry’s concerns over the public health, it begs the question: Who exactly is looking out for us?

On the brighter side, several organizations, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and Public Citizen have actually filed a lawsuit against the FDA demanding the agency restrict antibiotics in animals. This is promising, because courts have shown more interest in defending science than the federal agencies (see this example from last year regarding rBST/rBGH in milk).

So it may just fall to a federal judge to determine what’s truly good for the public interest. Of course, it would be nice if the agency actually tasked with that responsibility would step up to the plate. But I guess that’s just too much to ask.

Originally published on Grist

Typically, passage of the Farm Bill occurs every five years and involves a lengthy process of hearings, constituent meetings, and (sad but true) many a high-priced meal on the tab of some lobbyist or other—followed by detailed negotiations between the House and Senate Agriculture Committees. It has also often been seen as an opportunity to—as one recent action alert put it—change the food system by supporting small farms, investing in rural economies, and “supporting more diversified farming and livestock systems, healthy food access, conservation, and research.”

The next reauthorization was not expected until late in 2012—if not 2013—but through an unexpected turn of events, it may be decided much faster, and with even less input from the good food movement than the last one.

And when I say faster, I mean at warp speed. Earlier this week, according to the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, the House and Senate Ag Committees suddenly announced that they would write the entire 2012 Farm Bill in the next two weeks.

This new Farm Bill will also be smaller, thanks to the deal cut to avoid a government default over the summer. In the wake of that agreement, Congress convened a “super committee” of House and Senate negotiators that’s required to come up with a plan by this Thanksgiving to cut $1.2 trillion from the deficit over the next decade. Of that total, $23 billion must come from the USDA budget—a number recently recommended by House and Senate Agriculture Committee leaders. There is panic in the fields of Big Ag at such a drastic reduction in farm and food spending.

As well there should be: The prospect of a small group of negotiators who are not beholden to traditional farm interests working behind closed doors to slash farm spending might strike some as a sign that our long national industrial agriculture subsidy nightmare is over. But as Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group (EWG) and an advocate for farm subsidy reform, told me, it’s likely that we will get a “secret farm bill” with “no accountability” for those involved.

No one knows exactly how it will turn out. As one source close to the process said, “there are people betting on all” possible scenarios. But one thing is certain; negotiators are desperately trying to maintain the annual flow of $18 billion in subsidies to the largest farmers who produce commodity crops like corn, soy, and cotton. And while there will certainly be losers, you can count on the fact that there will also be winners.

This is reflected in the proposals currently circulating in Congress, specifically over a set of subsidies known as “direct payments.” Originally designed as a temporary means to get around World Trade Organization restrictions on government support of private industry, direct payments go to large farmers based on past farm yields and acreage. It’s the classic “cash the check whether you grow something or not” kind of subsidy that drives food reformers crazy. Direct payments have particularly benefited large-scale soy and cotton farmers from the South, and were thought to be facing the ax.

But as The New York Times reported, rather than pocketing the savings, farm state reps have proposed a new subsidy in its place—and it may not be much different from the old one. It’s known as a “shallow loss” subsidy, and it would protect commodity farmers from small drops in prices. You know, just to take the edge off.

And while direct payments cost $5 billion per year, if crop prices drop from current levels, the new “shallow loss” program could cost around $4 billion per year. No wonder ag economist (and admitted subsidies critic) Vincent Smith of Montana State University described the proposal as a “bait and switch” on NPR recently.

EWG’s Cook is concerned about another potential problem with the proposed new subsidy. With the current set of farm payments, groups can track exactly how much government support individual farmers receive (as EWG does with its Farm Subsidy Database). But with the “shallow loss” plan, says Cook, “the subsidy lobby” is creating a new “income-guarantee entitlement aimed at the biggest commercial operations” that will likely be “totally opaque to the public.” Which means no more tracking who gets how much.

In sum, the super committee process has caused what is often (by congressional standards) an orderly process to devolve into a legislative free-for-all. Whatever happens, the outcome is likely to be hidden by a fog of backroom deals and—this being Congress we’re talking about—bitter recrimination.

Adding to the uncertainty, there’s the very real possibility that the super committee will fail to come up with a deal. In that case, a set of cuts will be automatically triggered, which might leave agriculture subsides more or less intact (though the same may not be true of the USDA’s food safety system).

We already know that land and watershed conservation programs will face the worst cuts. And the House GOP wants to kill the small-farmer friendly “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” initiative as well. It seems clear that Big Ag is embracing former Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel’s advice not to let a good crisis go to waste by aiming a body blow at reform in general and sustainable agriculture in particular.

It’s hard not to be cynical about a process whereby powerful corporate interests divvy up taxpayer dollars like so much pirate’s booty. To switch (and mix) metaphors, Big Ag is circling the limos around its giant pile of cash and hoping for the best. If nothing else, the current farm subsidy “debate” is Exhibit A of the need for Americans to Occupy the Food System—though perhaps this big-time money grab can be read as a sign that Big Ag actually fears the growing Occupy Wall Street movement.

Meanwhile, the EWG, along with the NSAC, are asking people to call their representatives to try to head off the worst kind of deal. And while there’s no telling how this particularly nasty bit of sausage making will turn out, it’s a fair bet that only agribusiness will like the taste.

Call your senator or representative to ask for a Farm Bill that supports sustainable food and farming.

Originally published on Grist

Though it has dropped from the headlines recently, the bisphenol A discussion continues to rage. California is one Jerry Brown signature away from a partial ban of the chemical, which is used in everything from canned goods to PVC plastic to cash register receipts. There is ample evidence that BPA, an endocrine disruptor, has been linked to various ills, including diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. Some scientists are even raising questions about the damage it’s doing to our oceans.

And, despite FDA footdragging on the issue, the government is worried. The National Institutes of Health recently initiated a $30 million research program (though not without some controversy) to examine the growing risks and make a final call on BPA’s safety.

Now, a new study by U.S. government scientists purports to debunk the entire BPA threat. It claims that BPA poses no risk whatsoever and goes so far as to conclude that every previous study that found otherwise was fundamentally flawed.

If true, that would be great news. Getting BPA off the toxic chemical list would make everyone’s life a whole lot easier. So I contacted experts in BPA research to see if this study was all it was cracked up to be. Their answer: No way. They expressed serious concerns, if not outrage, over the study’s broad conclusions and went so far as to question its validity.

The study, recently published in the Journal of Toxicological Sciences, was performed by toxicologists from several government agencies, including the Department of Energy, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Center for Toxicological Research. It involved feeding a group of 20 subjects canned food three times a day in a laboratory setting and then measuring the levels of BPA in their blood and urine.

When all was said and done, the scientists claimed to find “undetectable” levels of the endocrine disrupting chemical in the bloodstreams or urine of their subjects. It claims to debunk  previous studies that have detected low levels of BPA in human blood or urine. And it says the risk from BPA to pregnant women and their fetuses is likely non-existent, despite the fact that no pregnant women (and thus, no fetuses) were involved.

Interestingly, this study was not part of the NIH BPA research program. It was done independently and funded by an EPA grant, according to its lead author, Dr. Justin Teeguarden, a scientist with the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. For the record, Teeguarden’s previous work focused on nanotechnology and, as far as I can tell, this is his first published work on BPA.

Being new to BPA research did not stop Teeguarden from telling a Forbes columnist:

In a nutshell we can now say for the adult human population exposed to even very high dietary levels, blood concentrations of the bioactive form of BPA throughout the day are below our ability to detect them, and orders of magnitude lower than those causing effects in rodent exposed to BPA.

That is quite a statement. Indeed, the broadness of Teeguarden’s claims, as well as several of the study’s techniques, have caused serious consternation among other scientists.

Dr. Laura Vandenberg, author of a definitive peer-reviewed survey of BPA research, said that the work, is “interesting,” but has major shortcomings. The first thing that caught her attention was the fact that the researchers didn’t test the BPA levels in the food given to study participants. BPA may be, as the study declares, “ubiquitous” but it’s also well-known that BPA levels vary greatly from brand to brand and even from can to can. Given those facts, said Vandenberg, “they made tremendous assumptions … I can’t see how you can conclude that all previous studies” were invalid based on this one investigation.

Vandenberg went on to say that it’s impossible to “ignore dozens and dozens of blood studies and 80 biomonitoring studies” that have consistently found detectable BPA levels in human blood and urine. Nor does she feel comfortable blaming others’ positive results on “contamination,” as the team led by Teeguarden does.

In fact, when I spoke to Dr. Michael Hansen, senior scientist at Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports, he pointed out  that this study did find detectable BPA levels in three subjects, but for reasons that are not well explained, they were excluded.

Another mystifying element of this paper involves water–and lots of it. The study participants drank 3.5 liters of water each day of the study. That’s about three and half times the amount most people drink in a day, Hansen explained. And while most BPA research uses methods to account for dilution caused by water, this study did not.

To conduct the research, Teeguarden applied what are called “toxicokinetic” techniques, which involve examining exactly how a chemical breaks down in the bloodstream and precisely what happens as it interacts with the human body. While that sounds like a helpful way to approach BPA, Vandenberg believes that there are significant problems with relying on toxicokinetic techniques to analyze BPA exposure. In fact, she has written extensively about those problems. She concludes, in essence, that both the current toxicokinetic tools as well as the scientific understanding of BPA are limited enough that these techniques alone could lead a researcher down the wrong path.

Another odd feature of this study that caught Vandenberg’s attention was that, for key citations regarding how the body handles BPA and how much BPA people consume, the study relied on industry-funded work that many scientists consider to be flawed. Vandenberg couldn’t come up with a reason why Teeguarden would do this.

For his part, Teeguarden vigorously defended his work to me in an email. As for his use of toxicokinetics, he said:

If it is so problematic, why has it been identified as so important and why are so many people working on it? …The truth is, without the information we obtain from measuring BPA in the blood of animals and humans, we have no basis for assessing hazard in the human population.

This is undoubtedly true. However, scientists who have applied this technique to BPA say that it simply can’t yet do the “heavy lifting” Teeguarden is asking of it. Teeguarden has, if not misused it, at least stretched it beyond its current capabilities.

Despite Teeguarden’s abundant confidence, there is nothing clear cut about his research. In fact, several leading BPA researchers have penned a highly critical dissection of Teeguarden’s study–including a rejection of its approach, its choice of sources, and its validity–that has been accepted for publication by the journal that published the study in the first place.

If you’ve made it this far–despite the total absence of puppies–and are wondering why I’ve devoted so much space to this issue, it’s due to this latest work’s pedigree. A government-funded study performed by government scientists in government labs and involving the DOE, the CDC and the NCTR is bound to get a lot more attention than a smaller academic study, especially given its dramatic conclusions. Even so, the study provides little for industry to sink its teeth into–though the tin can lobby is surely trying.

This is not the only recent work on BPA that’s raising eyebrows among independent scientists. Research out of China published in Annals of Internal Medicine claiming to find no conclusive link between BPA and diabetes is also under fire. As Reuters reports, the study did find that those with higher levels of BPA exposure were more likely to have diabetes, but the authors simply dismissed the connection.

Meanwhile, research on the dangers of BPA continues to come out as well. Scientists recently found evidence that BPA (as well as the preservative methlyparaben) can, as hormone disruptors, interfere with breast cancer drugs (via SF Gate). That might partially explain why industry is so desperate to find evidence that BPA is not at detectable levels in human blood.

The fact is that, like Agent Mulder, I too want to believe; if BPA was completely harmless we could all go find other things to worry about. And while any scientist can stand up and claim that it’s safe, there are still quite a few of them telling us loud and clear that it’s not.

Originally published on Grist

There’s a new study out purporting to show that, as this AP story puts it, “healthy eating is a privilege of the rich.” In many ways, this headline is meant to be a spear slicing deeply into the Achilles heel of the food movement. In one stroke, it seems to confirm the stereotype of the elitist, Alice Waters-loving, farmers-market-shopping locavore who demands we all drop the Doritos and start learning to love kale chips instead. It is, however, a bit of an overstatement.The study, published in the journal Health Affairs, is actually doing something a bit different from what the news coverage would lead you to believe. The researchers have excellent pedigrees: epidemiologists from the University of Washington’s School of Public Health, including Adam Drewnowski, who has a large body of work looking at the various challenges of healthy eating for low-income people, and ways to overcome those challenges.

The authors looked at four basic nutrients that the USDA recommends Americans get more of: potassium, calcium, vitamin D, and fiber. Then they looked at the buying habits of a group of residents from King County, Wash. (an area that includes Seattle) and calculated the increase in cost for them to do just that. The eye-opening finding that got most of the press coverage was that increasing consumption of potassium to meet USDA recommendations “would add $380 per year to the average consumer’s food costs.”

But even the study authors admit that there’s a wrinkle here worth noting: They didn’t search out the cheapest source of potassium (bananas, for the record) to come up with that figure. They performed statistical analysis to model a diet higher in those nutrients based on what the study participants were already buying. That’s very different from trying to shop on a budget!

Indeed, their point was not to demonstrate that healthy eating is the province of the rich. Their conclusion was simply that “adopting a nutrient-dense diet in line with both dietary recommendations and current U.S. eating habits may raise food costs for consumers.” In other words, it’s not enough for the government to set dietary guidelines. It needs to radically change its policies, including but not limited to possibly subsidizing healthy foods, if we are to achieve the goal of healthy eating.

Last year, writers Jane Black and Brent Cunningham demonstrated the possibility of healthy, even locavore-style, eating on a tight budget during time spent researching a book in Huntington, W.Va., site of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution television show. They spend $2.38 per person per meal (cooked at home) while eating “plenty of organic produce … local eggs, buffalo meat and un-homogenized milk in glass bottles.” That’s not to say it’s easy, of course. But it’s not impossible.

The new study’s main thrust is that Americans will have to change their eating patterns if they are to eat a healthy diet affordably. But didn’t we know that already? Forget potassium — it’s well known that Americans don’t come even close to the recommended number of servings of fruits and vegetables, and if they tried, there wouldn’t be enough fruit and veggies to go around! The real question, which the study does not address, is how to get from where we are to where we want to be.

To me, the most interesting finding of the paper was not the “cost” of potassium (which may be a convenient nutrient for this kind of analysis but is certainly not the one most consumers focus on when shopping). Rather, it was the researchers’ results that showed “each time consumers obtained 1 percent more of their daily calories from saturated fat and added sugar, their food costs significantly declined.” Over the course of a year, a consumer could reduce food costs by $125 for each 1 percent increase in calories from sugar and fat. In other words, all the financial incentives point strongly to upping calories from fat and sugar and slashing the nutritional quality of the American diet.

The sad fact is that we are not born knowing how to shop for healthy food. While the concept of “healthy eating” has a long pedigree, for most of history the vast majority of people ate what was available or, if possible, the foods their parents ate. To vastly oversimplify, this fact held true for most people in the developed world until the middle of the last century when the great “labor saving” wave swept over American households (much to the relief of millions of women). It was at that moment that traditional “foodways” finally gave way to a corporate version that emphasizes convenience, ease, and palatability (achieved through manipulating sweet, fat, and salt). Government should be the obvious counterweight to the corporate marketing machine, but for reasons of internal conflicts and regulatory capture, it’s not.

Navigating the grocery aisles has never been more complicated — and not just for low-income folks. I can attest to the fact that many of my well-educated, affluent peers don’t manage things so well either, if the number of parents who serve their children sports drinks but limit soda is any indication. With time and money at an absolute premium and when most food education takes place in front of the television, do we really need a study like this to tell us which way the food winds are blowing?

Originally published on Grist