The 2008 Farm Bill included reforms to protect small and medium-sized farmers who raise cattle, hogs, and chickens from unfair treatment at the hands of meatpackers and poultry companies. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyard Administration proposed rules (known as the GIPSA Rule, after the agency) to protect poultry and hog farmers from unfair contract terms–like retaliating against poultry and hog growers who speak out about abuses–and ensured that cattle and hog producers could get a fair price from meatpackers for their livestock.

Nearly three years later, the fair livestock rules have been shredded and there is plenty of blame and shame to go around. The Obama administration failed to show leadership on this issue and reneged on President Obama’s campaign pledge to “fight to ensure family and independent farmers have fair access to markets, control over their production decisions, and transparency in prices.”

Agriculture Secretary Vilsack caved to meatpacker money and power by issuing significantly watered down rules–after nearly 18 months of foot dragging to issue the final rules at all. USDA’s final proposal indefinitely postponed any efforts to protect independent cattle and hog farmers and issued a much weaker set of protections for contract chicken and hog farmers. Many Democratic Senators on the Agriculture Committee–including Chairman Debbie Stabenow from Michigan–stood on the sidelines and refused to stand up for livestock producers in their states.

But the final attack came from the duplicitous House Republicans who included sneaky language in the agriculture appropriations bill that prevents USDA from finalizing or developing any rules on livestock markets and only allows the pending rules to address a few of the crucial reforms to poultry contracts. This essentially means that House Republicans, who claim to believe in a “free-market,” have empowered the meat industry to rig a competitive market through unfair and anti-competitive practices that are widespread in the livestock industry. While they mouth support for family values, small businesses, and the family farmer, their failure to allow the fair livestock rules to be implemented is two-faced and un-American. The policies they have supported by doing so will drive even more small and midsized independent producers out of business and increase the monopoly power of the meatpackers.

By prohibiting USDA from finalizing the fair livestock rules, House Republicans didn’t just vote against a new regulation that would have prohibited commonplace abuses in the meat industry. They voted against the family livestock producer by signing off on:
• Unfair and deceptive practices
• Abusive contracts
• Retaliation against farmers who speak out about abuses
• Sweetheart deals for factory farms that receive higher prices for livestock than independent farmers
• Secrecy so diabolical that it forbids the USDA from providing farmers with sample contracts that have fair terms and pricing.

Farmer and consumer advocates will not give up the battle to prevent the rapacious meat industry from destroying family farms and the future for a sustainable food system. The next farm bill must ensure that farmers are paid fairly and prevent meatpacking and food processing companies from running roughshod over farmers and consumers. It’s time for those who talk about the market with reverence, but who support non-competitive practices, to stop being hypocrites. Our coalition is hopping mad and don’t think for a minute we are going to let Big Meat and complicit politicians get away with this outrage.

Nearly two years ago, candidate Obama said the following in a speech at the Iowa Farmer’s Union:

We’ll tell ConAgra that it’s not the Department of Agribusiness. It’s the Department of Agriculture. We’re going to put the people’s interests ahead of the special interests.

Then, less than two weeks before the election, Obama told Joe Klein at TIME:

I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen [sic] about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they’re contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs.

Sure these comments didn’t go silently into the good night; Big Ag pitched a fit. But wow! Our president once used the word monoculture in a sentence. And he made the connection between health care and food. And threatened to take back the USDA. I belabor this point only because I would argue that Mr. Pollan’s piece has become required reading, even a blueprint, for the movement – and has set the bar ever higher for what food system thinkers have come to expect from President Obama. But whether or not these ideas are still in the president’s mind, with an economic crisis, the health care debate and two wars to distract him, we can’t be sure. At one point, though, we know he got it.

Perhaps as a result of the public conversation about food taking hold, Michelle Obama planted a garden on the White House lawn and used it as a jumping off point for a conversation about food choices with children. And because the movement showed up and made itself heard through the Secretary of Agriculture selection process, in which Tom Vilsack was nominated, when it came time to choose a Deputy Secretary of Agriculture this administration listened and selected Kathleen Merrigan, a Tufts University professor who’d previously helped develop the organic standards. Vilsack and Merrigan have together launched Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food, an initiative designed to connect consumers to producers, a “start of a national conversation about the importance of understanding where your food comes from and how it gets to your plate.” In addition, the Justice Department is currently reviewing the consolidation of agribusiness for potential monopolies, which could result in a re-structuring of control over meat, seeds, processing, and grocery sales. This could mean the opening up of suffocated markets to competition, and more choices for consumers and farmers.

However, with an ever-increasing amount of meat recalls and hundreds of thousands of Americans sickened by food-borne illnesses every year, we still don’t have anyone running the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspections Service (FSIS) – the body that is responsible for the safety of our eggs, meat and dairy products. Back in March, the President launched the Food Safety Working Group, but the group has not had an affect on how food — and especially meat — is processed and regulated. Meanwhile, last month President Obama declared the swine flu a national emergency, and while bailouts totaling $150 million have been doled out to hog operations for their losses this year, those operations are still not required to test their pigs for the H1N1 virus. No one seems to be willing to discuss the obvious: that these pigs, living mostly in Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), are standing in their own potentially bacteria and virus-laden shit, and are being given eight times the antibiotics of the average human, scientifically proven to lead to resistance. This means more virulent sicknesses could be getting passed on to farm-workers, their families, and the public.

Some have argued that there is an empty seat at FSIS because the Obama administration had trouble finding a non-lobbyist for the position who simultaneously wouldn’t upset the meat lobby. Surprisingly, though, Obama recently nominated a pesticide lobbyist, Islam Siddiqui, from CropLife America (the organization that wrote a letter chastising Michelle Obama for not using pesticides on the White House garden) to handle our agricultural trade interests abroad. He also nominated Roger Beachy, former director of Monsanto-funded research facility, the Danforth Plant Science Center, to head the newly branded research arm of the USDA, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). Beachy promised to give ever more money to public-private sector research collaborations (read: technology-focused), despite a broken funding system that already favors agribusiness while we actually need more research on how the current food system affects our health and the environment.

Indeed, our Blackberry-toting president is fond of technology, and he seems to believe that all of it is moving us in the right direction when it comes to food. In July, President Obama secured $25 billion in agricultural aid at the G8 in Italy, and has stated his interest in a second green revolution for Africa in an interview (the first one brought genetically modified seeds to India, and created chemical dependence and debt in its wake). If his team, led by Secretary of State Clinton, and including pro-biotechnology Nina Federoff and Rajiv Shah, is any indication, instead of focusing on localized education, markets and infrastructure in countries in need of food security, this money could be invested in shiny new technologies that are years from implementation, have yet to fulfill the promise of high yields, and that are overly dependent on irrigation (water) and chemical fertilizers (oil). He will most likely be speaking in Rome this month at the FAO Summit on Food Security, so there is still time to retool the focus.

Maybe candidate Obama spoke out on food issues with the greatest of intentions, but didn’t realize the scale of the task at hand. But there are issues ripe for the taking, that Big Ag just can’t credibly pitch a fit about. Like research – Without facilitating necessary research that looks at the results of years of chemical agriculture on the land, how can we expect our president to see just how our current food system is making us sick, and then acknowledge sustainable agriculture for what it is – human-scale operations, which build soil and focus on diversification? And school food – who could argue with increasing the rate spent per child by $1 in the upcoming Child Nutrition Act and building relationships between farms and schools without looking like a bully?

And though there may be backlash, we need a strong regulator at FSIS. The Fairbank Farm recall has already killed two people, so no matter what the industry wants, we need to protect eaters first.

Despite my harsh critique of Obama’s first year in food system reform, one takeaway is that no matter the business on the President’s preverbial plate, he can be engaged about the actual food on our collective plates. It might take a team of skilled community organizers to keep showing him the movement. But once convinced, President Obama and his team have proven they will act.

In 1906, Upton Sinclair published his classic book The Jungle, awakening America’s consciousness to the horrors of corruption in the U.S. meatpacking industry with the story of Chicago’s stockyards. The Jungle so shook the American people’s confidence in how their meat and food was processed, that President Roosevelt created the Food and Drug Administration to quell public outcry.

Fast-forward a hundred odd years later and all evidence points to the fact that we are living in an era of food crisis that rivals the turn of the last century. Regretfully, America’s modern food system has become – The Jungle 2.0.

Indeed, there have been prodigious grumblings from Washington, D.C., over food safety issues in the past months. Thanks to the current peanut butter fiasco from the now bankrupt Peanut Corporation of America, our nation is once again in the throes of a record food safety recall, signaling that we need a serious overhaul of our nation’s food safety system and the industrial food model.

America’s current food system has the potential to create an epidemic food safety crisis much larger than even Sinclair or Teddy Roosevelt could imagine. For a variety of reasons, including the corrosive influence of agribusiness corporations and lack of government funds, staff and training, we now live in a world where food safety in America is on the verge of facing a collapse similar to that of our recent financial, mortgage and housing industries.

The current crisis is an opportunity for the Obama Administration to make bold change in how this country addresses how our food is grown, raised and processed, tracked, sold, cooked and fed to American consumers.

Like all warnings that have come in the past, it would be easy to bury our collective heads in the sand and once again accept Washington’s standard approach — throw a band-aid on the system. But the truth is, we can’t afford it. At least nine people are dead from the latest contamination and over 650 have been sickened.

However, food safety is not only important from a human health standpoint, but also for reasons of commerce. With over 3,000 products taken off the shelf because a corporation failed to live up to the law, the impact of this recall could total over $1 billion. According to peanut industry estimates, sales have dropped 25% for a loss of over $500 million for the industry.

If consumers lose faith in how America food is grown and processed, they will lose confidence in the companies and brands that have become household names. This not only hurts the food company, but also harms the small family farmers who grow and raise their food safely and can’t absorb the losses like large agribusiness conglomerates.

If the corporations that have helped create and reinforce the current flawed system don’t care about their customers’ safety, they should care about their profits. Simply put, a poor food safety system is bad for business.

Leading food safety advocates are recommending an end to band-aids as usual.

“What everyone needs to understand is that our country’s food safety system is deeply dysfunctional. As evidence, I need merely recite the recent scandals: spinach, pet food, tomatoes, and now peanut butter,” says author and nutrition and food safety expert Dr. Marion Nestle.

As a former member of the FDA Food Advisory Committee, Nestle understands the root of the problem.

“The system is fragmented between the FDA and USDA and deals with individual foods, not food systems. It begins at the packing house, not on the farm. And the rules that do exist are hardly enforced.  We know what we need to do to produce safe food and it’s time we did it,” continued Nestle.

Several proposals are out there to reform the system, including a call for a single food safety agency. But the real question we must focus on now is WHO will be appointed to do the actual work.

The ability to reform a system starts not only with ideas or policy or even problems, but also with personnel. Who is hired for the job matters as much, if not more than, the policy proposal going forward, which is something that large corporations have understood from the beginning and is why we are in this current mess.

So the first place to begin reforming the system is by choosing the right person for the job, which is why Food Democracy Now! has advocated from the beginning at the secretary and under secretary levels. Like President Obama, we agree that it’s time to close the revolving door between government, corporate lobbyists and the private sector. And, while we got some good news when President Obama announced Kathleen Merrigan as the next Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, there’s a lot more work to be done.

The individuals chosen to head of the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) and other food safety positions in this administration need to come from the mindset that food safety begins at the farm level and that it must come before corporate convenience and profit. They should not have a preexisting bias towards technologies that try to paper over serious flaws in our nation’s food supply. Nor should they have served as lobbyists for or executives in large agribusiness corporations that profit from the status quo.

We need candidates with a proven record of objectivity, individuals who have the courage and record to put real teeth into regulation, inspection and enforcement.

The fact is, food safety cannot be legislated or ruled into being if federal inspectors are not properly trained or enough workers are not hired or if farming practices are not fundamentally safe. Food safety cannot be cloned, genetically modified, implanted with an electronic chip or medicated or irradiated into being. Nor can food safety be solved by a quotidian reliance on additional technological interventions such as factory farming, excessive use of antibiotics, pesticides, massive slaughter houses and a consolidated non-regional processing system which have all converged to create the current food safety crisis.

Our political leaders need to understand what the grassroots already knows, that reforming the food safety system will come out of reforming agriculture. The problem has been created by rampant market concentration and consolidation; the solution is local and regionalized food systems, using sustainable practices that rebuild America’s rural economies and produce the healthiest, safest food in the world.

Now is time to plant the seeds for a 21st century food system that respects the biology and cycles of nature, that protects family farmers, worker rights, farm animals, rural communities and offers clean, safe and healthy food to American eaters.

We must invest in America and stop speculating with our future by continuing along the same old trajectory that brought us to where we are. Americans are ready for visionary leadership and creating a real food safety system that works is a good place to start.

Photo: Original cover of The Jungle; Upton Sinclair, from 1934

In an interview with Joe Klein of Time Magazine today, Sen. Barack Obama acknowledged the brilliant letter to the next president by Michael Pollan and said that agriculture is a huge contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, is a national security risk, and is built on cheap oil:

“I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael
Pollan about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is
built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is
contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And
in the mean time, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to
national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices
or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are
partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because
they’re contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease,
obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in
healthcare costs. That’s just one sector of the economy. You think
about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true
on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.
For us to say we are just going to completely revamp how we use energy
in a way that deals with climate change, deals with national security
and drives our economy, that’s going to be my number one priority when
I get into office, assuming, obviously, that we have done enough to
just stabilize the immediate economic situation.”

Photo: megpi

In fifteen days, Americans will make an important decision: who will take the reigns and get us out of this mess.  One topic the candidates have mostly left out of their speeches on the campaign trail thus far is food.  Whether they realize it or not, when either John McCain or Barack Obama sit down next January to begin the task of fixing our economy, to promote green energy in order to produce the jobs they’ve both promised, and to deal with the climate crisis and health care, food will be the unavoidable issue that keeps cropping up.

Perhaps the candidates don’t yet realize food’s role in these issues, or maybe they assume that because less than 1% of the population is currently working as a farmer, the topic does not appeal to the voting constituency that matters most.  But I think we are ready for a president that is willing to create a more nuanced food policy as opposed to leaving it unchanged in thirty years.  Telling farms to “get big or get out” as a philosophy for food security has long ago reached the point of diminishing returns.  So what will the next president do about it?

McCain’s agriculture policy can be found under the heading Prosperity for Rural America.  There is little here to show that a McCain administration would stray very far from current agriculture policy that favors agribusiness.  Recognizing agriculture’s role in national security is a good start.  But in McCain’s plan, there isn’t even a peep about organic or local agriculture.  He supports unchecked free trade, meaning that our lower priced subsidized food will compete with other nations that might not have such subsidy programs, disenfranchising small farmers in developing nations.  Should McCain follow through with his threat to end subsidies, however, there is no evidence here that he would offer any alternatives to struggling farmers.

He also views technology and growth as the sole measure of our agricultural potential.  Scary is McCain’s plan for upping production: to “direct the USDA to carry out comprehensive research to help develop more stress-resistant, higher yielding crops to increase production per acre,” giving a further carte blanche to corporations like Monsanto, which have dominated the genetically modified foods and pesticide sectors for decades.  McCain sees bio-technology as the key to “reducing reliance on petroleum-based inputs, and improving the long-term sustainability of agricultural production.”  But the track record is clear, genetically modified foods do carry unforseen consequences, require much oil in the form of pesticides and the energy moving the machines spraying them, encourage practices that strip the land of productivity over time and encourage less diverse crops and by extension, less diverse diets.

While McCain supports funding nutrition assistance programs, including indexing food stamps to reflect the current cost of living, he also seeks to cede the marketing of healthy diets to the fruit and vegetable companies, which have special interests at heart when doling out such information.

By comparison, Obama’s plan, Real Leadership for Rural America, reflects actual change from the current corporate-friendly policies.  Though for the most part lacking in concreteness, his plan goes further by recognizing the problems that previous administrations have been unwilling or unable to discuss.

Obama supports capping commodity subsidies at $250,000, and looks to close loopholes that allow farmers to subdivide their operations into multiple paper corporations.  His plan talks about regulating Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), which raise 40% of our livestock and are one of the largest polluters in America, with tougher air and water pollution standards.  Extending from that, the plan states that there will be limits placed on Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) funding to CAFOs, so that instead of taxpayers, the largest polluters must pay for their own environmental clean-up.

He promises to strengthen anti-monopoly laws, which thrills me, though I worry that riding on the Archer Daniels Midland corporate jet during the campaign has fueled Obama’s interest in ethanol, that company’s largest emerging industry, even though it has a poor net return on energy invested ratio (currently 1 unit of energy invested nets 1.3 energy output) and is destroying car engines.  Here I agree with McCain: corn-based ethanol production should no longer be subsidized by the U.S. government.

Both agriculture plans tie in energy, but Obama’s plan goes further to seek to improve the quality of life in rural America.  Community is an essential element to building local economies.  The Obama plan includes providing locally grown, healthy foods to school meal programs.  It also promotes encouraging young people to become farmers through training programs and capital gains tax breaks for those selling their land to beginning family farmers.  Obama’s plan also gives importance to encouraging organic and sustainable agriculture through increased funding to help farmers become certified.  But most impressive: “Barack Obama and Joe Biden recognize that local and regional food systems are better for our environment and support family-scale producers.  They will emphasize the need for Americans to Buy Fresh and Buy Local, and will implement USDA policies that promote local and regional food systems.”

Does this mean that the Victory Garden on the White House lawn that Alice Waters has been promoting and that Micheal Pollan suggested in last week’s New York Times Magazine might be within reach?  We will have to wait and see what happens on November 4th.

Photo: rhondawinter Victory Garden, City Hall in San Francisco