IMPORTANT article: Big Food Under Fire

Big Food Under Fire
Industrial agriculture shouldn't worry about the government. Mother Nature is a far more potent foe.
By Tom Laskawy
Wednesday, June 3, 2009

http://www.slate.com/id/2219686/
http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=2219686

The corporate behemoths collectively known as "Big Food"—companies like General Mills, Monsanto, Cargill, Tyson Foods, and Archer Daniels Midland—are feeling squeamish. They've watched with dismay as President Obama and his agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, have adopted "sustainability" as a top priority for the USDA and inched the department toward greater support of organic agriculture. With Kathleen Merrigan—noted sustainable agriculture advocate and former director of the USDA organic program—as the department's new second in command; more money now available for organic farmers; and a grand USDA-funded study of organic agriculture and its role in American farming in the works, Big Food feels the ground shifting beneath it. So much so that it's acting as if it could lose its grip on the American food system. But Big Food persists in battling the wrong target. While it is indeed locked in an existential struggle with an implacable foe, the
government is not the enemy. The enemy is Mother Nature.

The simple fact is that the interests of Big Ag remain well-served by a broad range of government policies from agriculture, to trade, to the environment, to nutrition, and even to commodities market regulation. To suggest, as Nebraska's Sen. Mike Johanns (a former Bush-era agriculture secretary) recently did, that the administration has "let [its] fervor for organic production cloud [its] judgment" vastly overplays the administration's ambition. And when Obama did make a substantive attempt at reform, with his proposal to cut agricultural subsidies paid to the largest farmers, Big Food's congressional allies moved quickly to kill it. Rep. Collin Peterson, the powerful chairman of the House agriculture committee and close friend of Big Ag, wasn't kidding when he declared the proposal "more than dead on arrival." No trace of the cuts made it into Congress' final budget.

And that new funding for organic farmers? At $50 million, it's no chump change. But it pales in comparison with the $11 billion conventional agriculture is estimated to receive in government payments this year—most of which, according to the Environmental Working Group, will go to the largest 10 percent of industrial farms. It's clearly not the scale of the administration's commitment to organic that's at issue, however. Small gestures may also offend—which could explain why the pesticide industry has begun a letter-writing campaign protesting Michelle Obama's much-ballyhooed organic "kitchen garden" at the White House.

Also overstated is the threat that food-borne illnesses could pose to Big Food's bottom line. With E. coli contaminating not just hamburger meat but vegetables and with salmonella-tainted peanut butter causing the recall of thousands of products, Big Food is painfully aware that it must protect its centralized yet globalized supply chain. But, while large companies might complain about the potential costs of new regulation, their deep pockets will cushion any blow Congress might land in the form of restrictive new food safety laws.

In fact, it's the small food processors and farmers who should be (and are) honestly panicking at the prospect of costly new regulations.

To read the full article: http://www.slate.com/id/2219686/