You may have watched the video to your right. If you haven't, it's Barack Obama's recent address on his commitment to fighting global climate change. Other than the 'clean' coal business, it sounds very reassuring if you spend a lot of time worrying about the environment.
Still, when I say, "the environment," I do remember the areas and issue sets I used to think about when someone else said that: waste from heavy industry, urban air quality, water pollution (via manufacturing, chemical dumping and road runoff in urban areas), bad logging practices, and wilderness reserves. But the environment includes the whole planet, including that half of the land mass (give or take) devoted to food and fiber production for human uses. Agriculture is the largest source of what's called non-point water pollution, basically runoff from large areas, and the primary cause of the enormous ocean dead zones at the mouths of our rivers. It's a major factor in soil erosion, and depending on who you ask, may be responsible for nearly 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.
It's simply impossible to fix our environmental problems as a whole without taking agriculture into account. Further, agriculture, as one of the few professions that remains heavily weather dependent, is already taking hits from global climate disruption. Global grain productivity is already dropping in the face of droughts and warmer weather, which is leading farmers to further overuse rapidly depleting sources of fresh water, while common land management practices further diminish the availability of that water.
The major agribusiness consortiums are peddling all sorts of snake oil to supposedly address these crises, as well as the global hunger problem. But their solutions are retreads of the Green Revolution strategy that substituted petrochemical fertilizer and broadly damaging pesticides for soil-building, and patented hybrid crops for locally adapted varieties.
The Green Revolution did temporarily solve the world's calorie shortage. But it did so by adding to the 20th Century's orgy of mass extinction, leading to the destruction of both small farms and food varietal breeds:
... Even before we've been able to take stock of the enormous diversity that today exists -- from undescribed microbes to undocumented tongues -- this epidemic carries away an entire human language every two weeks, destroys a domesticated food-crop variety every six hours, and kills off an entire species every few minutes.... A world increasingly calibrated on consumption, efficiency, and convenience is perhaps most apparent in modern industrial agriculture, which churns out mass quantities of food but also demands ever greater uniformity and standardization. And deep flaws within the system are beginning to show. This year a potent mix of drought, flooding, high fuel prices, and an increased developing-world demand for meat caused supplies of many staple crops to plummet and their prices to surge. But as scientists and farmers consider how to breed and engineer the next generation of higher-yielding, climate-resilient plants, they confront an alarmingly shallow gene pool. Addressing the audience at the World Food Summit in May, Alexander Müller, assistant director-general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, warned that most of the global food supply had narrowed to just a dozen crops and 14 animal species. According to the FAO, three-quarters of the world's critically important food-crop varieties have disappeared during the 20th century, and hundreds of locally adapted livestock breeds are on the verge of doing so. "The erosion of biodiversity for food and agriculture severely compromises global food security," said Müller. ...
Add the very new wrinkle that the genetically modified corn that's a crown jewel of modern agribusiness has been linked in a study to longterm decreases in fertility. Dr. Sandra Steingraber, author of "Living Downstream", (can't find my copy this morning for her exact figures, grumble) has also noted that during spraying season, miscarriage rates go up significantly in farm country. As Steingraber suggested once, whatever your position on reproductive choice, and she supports it, reducing people's fertility against their will or knowledge wrongly denies people their own decisions.
Corn found new popularity as a crop after legislators fell in love with ethanol. Now the distilleries are going down and changing hands at an alarming rate. The ethanol boom has already been blamed by UN leaders for raising global food prices, though farmers were looking forward to getting their production costs met on the open market at long last. (I will mention briefly here that subsidies pushing grain prices below production costs have driven a lot of developing world farmers out of business, and now that prices are high, their communities are deprived of that production and the farmers themselves can't always afford to buy what they used to grow.)
Also, under Bush, further choices about managing agricultural productivity and human health have been foreclosed. Farmers have been saying that, for them, the Great Depression II began a few years ago and rates of farm closure have gone up precipitously. (The acreage doesn't always go out of farming, but if it isn't eaten by suburb development, it's often consolidated into a larger operation.) The current administration has all but stopped enforcing fair market competition rules, allowing large purchasers to enact pricing and contract models that bankrupt small operations:
... [John Crabtree of the Center for Rural Affairs] said that an audit requested by Iowa's Senators, Harkin and Grassley, of the performance of the Packers & Stockyards Administration at the USDA found that out of around 1800 investigations they claimed to have carried out between 2002 and 2005, 1739 cases included no documentation indicating that there had been any action taken. There were cases where a single phone call made to the department and noted in the records had been reported as an investigation, he said. ...
Common agribusiness-intended market distortions have led to a downfall in small farm profitability, leading directly to larger average farm sizes and lower average crop diversity. Also, less farmer diversity. The average age of farmers in the US as of 1997 was 53.4, and 61 percent of them were 55 or older. It's not seen as a growth industry and fewer farms are being handed down the generational tree.
You also end up with hazardous confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) representing the bulk of meat production, with the farmers who were able to get big among the few who didn't have to get out. CAFOs are significant greenhouse gas producers, poison groundwater and streams, spread antibiotic resistance among bacteria, and turn manure from helpful soil additive to concentrated pollutant. And as if the meat industry were not already consolidated enough, the country's 2nd largest chicken producer (Tyson) is trying to put the largest (Pilgrim's Pride) out of business. That will leave growers with even less choice about which chicken contractor to deal with, in a situation that's already structured around de facto geographic monopolies.
Into this unfortunate mess, which is so much worse than I have room to describe, will step the next Secretary of Agriculture. Gods help us all.
Here's a rundown of the choices in the pipeline as of about a week ago by Steph Larsen of the Center for Rural Affairs, and while some of them are out of the running already, they're good thumbnail sketches of some people who are still being discussed.
The two most likely picks, former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack and House Agriculture Chair Collin Peterson (D-MN), seem to be out of consideration for good. As to other potential choices, this is Obama's rural policy agenda, and I want to look at them in light of that. And while I'm pleased by what I've read about his interest in promoting organic agriculture, there are a couple other topics that stand out as important and underserved needs of the agricultural industry as a whole.
Policy Promises
Key to me is his promise to enforce anti-monopoly laws to allow small and family farms to compete fairly in the market again. This is perhaps one of the most important undercurrents in agriculture, an important industry to reform as society transitions to sustainability.
Why the focus on competition? In this respect, agriculture is like the auto industry: its knowledgeable workers and productive capacity has to be saved for long enough for there to be anything left to fix. Banning packer ownership of livestock and enforcing price transparency goes a long way towards that end, but unlike an auto company bailout, it will only cost the government the salaries of a few good anti-trust regulators.
Because the main problem with farming is the jaw-dropping levels of bullying, price-fixing, contract shennanigans and retribution directed towards low volume producers by agribusiness distributors that make it difficult to stay in business if your farming operation isn't large and lawyered up. That's fine with the processors, who'd rather deal with other large companies. It's a disaster for the environment and for the preservation of any deep knowledge or connection to the land. And when I say connection, I mean that farms need to be increasingly managed by people who live on them and care whether the land will still be good farm land in 100 years, not absentee landlords who'll never care about the local soil's peculiarities or the farm's microclimates.
We'll all be best served if the farmers who do care and would like to pass their craft to a new generation can do so. Now though, they increasingly tell their kids to do other things, because there's no future in farming, and they may lose heart when they'd like to practice better farming methods but can't get support from banks or insurers to do so. Nor is it like there are droves of people seeking to enter the profession from outside. You could always go into less cutthroat careers, after all, like debt collection or competition for tenured professorships.
Which brings me to another highlight of Obama's plan, which resurrects an aspect of the 2007 Farm Bill proposals that didn't make it into the final law fully funded: a new farmer recruitment and startup support initiative. Thumbs way up. Along with the proposal to reform crop insurance so that it properly covers organics, and a reduction in certification costs, the profession could see a lot of new blood that would help satisfy the unmet demand for organic produce, staples, meat and animal feed.
Hitch these supports with the proposed reforms to the farm safety net, a push for rural broadband, and his program for fighting methamphetamine distribution and addiction, that's a solid platform for rural revitalization. I presume the idea is to find someone who's minded to help in those goals.
Some Choices
- Charles Stenholm: A former congressman who says he's for better food safety now, but when he shepherded the 2002 Farm Bill through the House, he led the charge to make sure that slaughterhouses could include cows too sick to walk in our food supply. After the melamine scares, the E. coli recalls, and the loss in recent years of much of the nation's seed rice to contamination from unapproved biotech crops, the nation's farmers can't afford the lax enforcement standards that give a short term benefit to those who like to work fast and sloppy, or who take poor care of their animals. He's also been lobbying for the horse meat industry the last few years, I'm sure that will make him popular and effective.
- Tom Buis: President of the National Farmers Union, he's been working in DC since 1987. Scuttlebutt is that he's all right on paper, but to put it delicately, isn't a coalition builder even within the agricultural policy community. Considering that agriculture suffers greatly from being an insular, ghettoized issue, maybe he'll have a hard time making the necessary changes.
- John Boyd: Founder of the National Black Farmers Association and a fourth generation farmer, very scrappy. Has taken on Purdue, WalMart and the Bush administration. I so approve. If Obama puts only one enthusiastic progressive on his cabinet and it's this civil rights leader, I'll take my win and go home smiling.
- Stephanie Herseth Sandlin: She was one of the few representatives on the House Agriculture Cmte who spoke up in spirited defense of competition reform in contract law. She's well liked in South Dakota though, perhaps too well liked. As an at-large representative, she may be more interested in running for another statewide office than taking a cabinet post. But that may be our loss in agriculture, she's also one of the few picks from congressional ranks and alumni that has people excited.
- Rod Nilsestuen: An interesting highlight from the second tier of likely choices, Wisconsin's Secretary of Agriculture has a bottom-up policy creation style, favoring locally sponsored solutions to farmland preservation and environmental concerns. He's known for listening tours in his very aggy home state and for approaching problems with an eye for solving them by as many means as possible. Nilsestuen's broad-minded attitude and open communication style might just be a great fit for the Obama administration, or perhaps someone with a similar background of good work in state, rather than federal, policy.
As Larsen noted in her post, people who are merely popular policy advocates or journalists, think Jim Hightower or Michael Pollan, just aren't in the running. This doesn't seem to be shaping up to be that sort of administration.
My main hope is that the eventual nominee, while they'll likely be selected for policy experience and an ability to work with what's a fairly conservative sector, will at least not have a history that contradicts Obama's stated policy direction outright. A pick like Peterson, a staunch opponent of competition reform and important sustainability measures, would have demonstrated a willingness to let this sector go to a business as usual approach, as not being perhaps important enough to breathe new life into. That would be disappointing.
Though reviewing the credentials and background of the transition team who'll be doing the vetting leaves me less worried than I was when I first heard about the Peterson pick. They seem solid, and collectively represent a good range of interests, even if I'd rather there wasn't a Monsanto representative in the mix.
Obama's full USDA transition team, as per the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition's Nov. 21st newsletter:
Agriculture Transition Team Co-chairs
Carole Jett - most recently served as deputy chief of the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) at USDA where she also served as the agency's Farm Bill Coordinator. Jett was the point person for implementation of the 2002 Farm Bill Conservation Title and was previously on staff for the House Agricultural Committee.
Bart Chilton - formerly deputy chief of staff for Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman and staffer for Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Most recently, Chilton was a commissioner for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Agriculture Transition Team Members
Douglas Jake Caldwell - Trade and Environment project manager for the National Wildlife Federation
David Lazarus - former legislative assistant to Senator Richard Durbin (D-Illinois)
Mary McNeil - Director of Native American Programs at USDA during the Clinton administration; member of Nebraska's Winnebago tribe
Karen Stuck - recently retired from her post as Assistant Administrator for International Affairs at USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS)
Michael Taylor - research professor of health policy at the George Washington University; former Deputy Commissioner at the Food and Drug Administration; former Acting Undersecretary for Food Safety at USDA and administrator at FSIS; and Vice President for Public Policy at Monsanto
Dallas Tonsager - member of the Farm Credit Administration Board; former Executive Director of the South Dakota Value-Added Agriculture Development Center; USDA State Rural Development Director in South Dakota; past president of the South Dakota Farmers Union
Christopher Wood - Chief Operating Officer at Trout Unlimited; Senior Policy and Communications Adviser to Forest Service Chief Michael Dombeck during the Clinton Administration
Update [2008-11-24 3:11:31 by Natasha Chart]: Because that paragraph just ended up in the wrong place the first time.|
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