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Like a tractor driven by a drunk, the Obama administration keeps zigzagging on food/ag policy--sometimes veering in the direction of progressive change, other times whipping back toward the agrichemical status quo.
In the last couple of days, there's been a sharp turn toward the status quo. As I reported yesterday, Obama plucked Islam “Isi” Siddiqui from the nation's most powerful agrichemical lobby group and made him our chief negotiator on ag issues in global trade talks. This is a major coup for Big Ag. Ramming open foreign markets for our cheap food commodities and pricey ag inputs is critical to the industry's future profits--and perilous for global food security and the environment.
And today, Obama's Big Ag side got the best of him again. He tapped Roger Beachy, long-time president of the Danforth Plant Science Center, as chief of the USDA's newly created National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA).
A creation of the 2008 Farm Bill, the NIFA "replaces the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service, which distributes $200 million in competitive grants and about $280 million in 'formula funding' to land-grant universities," Science blog reports.
Science continues:
The Farm Bill adds another $106 million annually of competitive funding for research into organic farming, biomass, and fruits and vegetables. It also calls for a "distinguished scientist" to be appointed for a 6-year term as director.
So this is a critical post. If the sustainable farming movement is going to scale up and really start providing a large portion of the nation's calories--and deliver on its potentially huge environmental promises--than we're going to need a significant commitment of federal research dollars.
Roger BeachyPhoto: Courtesy of the Danforth CenterAnd what are we getting with the appointment of Beachy? The Danforth Plant Science Center, nestled in Monsanto's St. Louis home town, is essentially that company's NGO research and PR arm. According to its website, the center "was founded in 1998 through gifts from the St. Louis-based Danforth Foundation, the Monsanto Fund (a philanthropic foundation), and a tax credit from the State of Missouri."
Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant sits on the center's board of trustees, along with execs from defense giant McDonnell Douglas and pharma titan Merck. Another notable board member is Alfonso Romo, a Mexican magnate who cashed in big during his country's notoriously corrupt privatization /liberalization bonanza in the early '90s.
Romo used his connections to build a company called Seminis into the globe's biggest vegetable-seed concern, with dreams (as yet unrealized) of loads of new GMO veggie varieties. Monsanto bought Seminis in 2005. Here's a revealing Wall Street Journal profile of Romo from 1999; and here's what I wrote about him and the Monsanto/Seminis tie up back in 2005. (Interesting tidbit: Romo claims credit for innovating those insipid and ubiquitous "baby carrots"; and for reducing the spiciness of jalepeno peppers.)
On its short list of "partners" we find several research-oriented universities and one corporation: Monsanto. In the Danforth Center's 2007 annual report (PDF), Monsanto is mentioned no fewer than ten times funding this or that project.
So essentially, the public face of Monsanto's research efforts now has his fingers on the USDA's research purse strings. Score a big one for agribusiness!
So Obama has become an agribiz shill, right? Well, it's not nearly so simple.
Last winter, the administration tapped Kathleen Merrigan as deputy USDA secretary. This is traditionally a powerful position within the agency; under Bush, a paid-up industrial corn man held the post. Merrigan has pristine credentials as an organic advocate--and from the whispers I've heard, has been pushing that agenda within USDA.
I'm told she's met with many prominent sustainable-ag advocates--folks who were completely frozen out by the Bush USDA. The latest: On Twitter, Michel Dimock of California's Roots of Change recently announced he has "4 mtngs w/ USDA nxt 2 days." That sort of access simply wasn't available at Bush's USDA.
Then there's Merrigan's brainchild, "The Know Your Farmer Know Your Food" initiative (complete with splashy new web site). It's essentially an attempt to alert players in the sustainable food movement to possibilities of getting existing USDA funding. (I wrote briefly about its limits and promise lat week.) Again, you can call the initiative largely symbolic, but nothing remotely like it was happening under Bush.
It's certainly energizing sustainable ag NGO chiefs. On Chews Wise blog, Sam Fromartz reports that such folks are "pumped" by the initiative. He asked several for their reactions. Words like "fantastic," "thrilling," and "quite encouraging" tripped off their tongues.
Meanwhile, Michelle Obama--and her food ambassador, White House assistant chef/gardener Sam Kass--continues to push sustainable ag from the East Wing. One can assume she has some influence in the Oval Office.
So what's going on here? Whither the Obama administration on food and ag--toward a food future that seeks big, top-down, corporate-led answers, always straining to leapfrog ecological limits--and creating new sets of problems to be (lucratively) solved? Or toward one that works within ecological limits, builds resilience, and generates wealth and health within communities?
Right now, we're getting a kind of policy whiplash. But I have a conjecture--based completely on my own observation, not on any inside info. I'll give it here; and I urge readers to give their own conjectures below.
My conjecture is this: Obama likes cutting-edge ideas. You look at the ag landscape, and you see two distinct areas with great innovation, energy, and movement: biotech and organic/sustainable. So he's coming out strong behind both camps, and plans to sit back and see which one develops the best ideas.
The problem is that the biotech side has a massive advantage in terms of resources; and, as I've shown before, has benefitted from years of government cronyism and coddling. Moreover, it utterly dominates the university research agenda, aided by the draconian intellectual rights the government has awarded it.
So if Obama is setting up a kind of contest between the two camps, the game is rigged in advance.
That's what I think. Please write what you think below.
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Very clever observation about Obama's seduction by cutting edge ideas. Perhaps it is up to us to distinguish, as you do here, the good from the bad and keep landing hits on this front.
The CSREES posting is deeply disturbing -- there is already not enough research being done on pesticide body burden, the potential for organics, etc. because CSREES mostly requires 50% matching funds for research -- and the matching is almost always done by the private sector, which is most interested in funding things that could potentially be a boon to their bottom line. I think that it is crucial for us to bring the point home that if we don't have proper research, we will not have any chance of wide acknowledgment that sustainable agriculture practices are the only way forward. With a Monsanto man on board, the status quo will be harder to change.
I'm writing this for discussion's sake: The alternative food movement cares about community; Obama is giving them that. The industrial ag sector cares about profit; Obama is giving them that. It's not a competition, since both parties want different things. If the alternative food movement starts caring more about the economic structure of the food system, then there will be conflict between Obama's two approaches.
Well, I think that Obama probably doesn't spend too much time thinking about agriculture policy and isn't going to risk and serious political fights over the issue.
Appointments like this are always viewed as throwing a bone to one interest group or another. Merrigan is a win for sustainable agriculture; this guy Beachy is a win for conventional agriculture. The really interesting part will be seeing where the 106 million for sustainable research actually ends up. If done right, it has enormous promise to reshape large parts of of the land grant university research landscape, encouraging more researchers to look at critical sustainability concerns. Once you start getting grad students doing that research, they'll stay on that path for the next 50 years.
Keep up the good reporting.
As a member of the National Farm to School Network, I see the shift from a concentrated industrial agriculture system controlled by multinational corporations to a decentralized food system more democratically controlled by regional and local citizenry as a huge shift in culture that flys in the face of the institutional top-down command and control nature of DC ways. If we can make this happen, we need to get organized, to match the level of federal organization, without losing our commitment to a more associational model of organization. Creating this more biological model of being national, while acting locally, is slow patient work, requires sophisticated communication, grassroots engagement and we not only have to learn how to do it ourselves but also to teach our leaders, and the farther from home they are the harder this will be, and the more hiccups like Beachy there will be.
And my .02 cents on Obama's ag policy: Willing to toss a few bones at the organic/sustainable folks who can be deluded into thinking Obama actually is on their side and that a White House farmers market represents real "change," not willing to challenge the industrial ag guys fundamentally who run Washington. Does Monsanto or ADM really give a rat's ass about Merrigan's Know your Farmer initaitive as long as we keep a cheap grain, pro-export market/free trade, pro-biotech structure in place?
Now the Antitrust workshops in 2010 to me ARE a serious threat to agribusiness and business as usual. It could be window dressing or represent the deep structural challenge we need to the current system. I think it's up to us to make sure it's not window dresing and something substantive comes out of it. so for now, i'll praise Obama to the moon on that front. Too bad The Nation in their food issue was too busy featuring celebrity chefs to actually cover these more structural issues and the people doing shit to address corporate control of our food system!
And my .02 cents on Obama's ag policy: Willing to toss a few bones at the organic/sustainable folks who can be deluded into thinking Obama actually is on their side and that a White House farmers market represents real "change," not willing to challenge the industrial ag guys fundamentally who run Washington. Does Monsanto or ADM really give a rat's ass about Merrigan's Know your Farmer initaitive as long as we keep a cheap grain, pro-export market/free trade, pro-biotech structure in place?
Now the Antitrust workshops in 2010 to me ARE a serious threat to agribusiness and business as usual. It could be window dressing or represent the deep structural challenge we need to the current system. I think it's up to us to make sure it's not window dresing and something substantive comes out of it. so for now, i'll praise Obama to the moon on that front. Too bad The Nation was too busy featuring celebrity chefs to actually cover these more structural issues and the people doing shit to address corporate control of our food system!
Thoughtful post Tom.
But I think it would have been unrealistic to expect Obama to have a consistent as opposed to a schitzo food policy, simply because he must deal with what exists. He might want to change things on the margin but not much else, especially coming from Illinois. I see his moves so far as incrementalism. A cynic may say he's throwing a bone to the sustainable crowd. I think it's more, but I'm not sure he really wants to or believes he should go up against agribusiness and things-as-usual. Obviously, the number 1 issue in that regard is subsidies but they won't change due to Congress. And there is no ground-swell to push that along.
That said, effective appointees can make significant changes in terms of where current money goes, what the priorities are, etc. They can tweak and refine the inner workings of the USDA to make it more receptive to sustainable ag ideas. That is essentially what Merrigan is doing with local -- altering the direction of existing programs to fund new initiatives. But that won't happen if a pesticide industry lobbyist is in the decision-making position, which is why some of these appointments - at face value -- are disappointing.
I am glad for this post, which I read on Comfood, because we in the foods movement must approach government support/initiatives with sophistication or we will be discredited or misdirected into oblivion by corporate interests. There is something childish about our collective need for approval by authorities. It is my view that more attention should be paid to building not just some vague "community," but a wider, more inclusive, more directly democratic foods movement. The potential for "window dressing" is very great. For a start, I recommend more honest discussions about money, academic qualification and research, and continued calling out of industry-sponsored experts.
It's also crucial for reform-minded groups to develop, circulate and press for their own lists of prospective nominees for jobs like these. True, agribiz has better access to top USDA brass than any reformers, but it's important to create the infrastructure that allows reformers to get on job candidate shortlists. It takes a lot of contact and a deep bench of talent. Your average lobbyist could reel off a dozen qualified candidates for any open senior position at USDA. Can we say the same?
I agree -- maybe Obama is trying to do the balancing act. My concern, however, is that Merrigan is out-numbered and her voice for change will be drowned out.