There's The White House Food Movement...and then there's the rest of the Obama administration. With a guest post by Paula Crossfield after the jump...In the past week leading up to the anniversary of President Obama's election, a recurring theme among food and Ag writers has been to cast a scythe-sharp eye on President Obama's progress in policy. An oft-repeated sentiment has been some kind of variation on "And all we got is a garden?!" There's been an odd assumption, particularly in the sustainable Ag world, that the planting of the White House Kitchen Garden somehow meant that the rest of our Ag economy was going to transform--possibly overnight--from being centralized yet sprawling, industrialized, and dependent on medical and chemical interventions to a magical greeny nirvana. But the administration is dealing with the hard fact that we have more than 300 million people to feed in America, a massive economy of scale...and currently, our basic infrastructure is built around this, and dependent on it. So right now, there's The White House Food Movement...and then there's everything else in the Obama administration's approach to Ag...
Which is all over the proverbial map, and must necessarily address the needs of all players. The White House Food Movement exists in its own best-practice bubble of locally and sustainably grown veggie intensiveness, which has had an influence in a variety of soft policy areas, but which has had little discernible impact on any potentially harmful Big Ag practices. But hey, we're actually just ten months into the Obama project and change takes time. In the guest post below, Paula Crossfield, a sustainable advocate and the managing editor of the website Civil Eats, takes a good look at what Ag issues President Obama campaigned on, and what's actually gone on to date. Crossfield doesn't bemoan the fact that all we got is a garden, but rather expertly delineates not whether the hayloft is half full or half empty...but what it might take to have a different hayloft altogether.
President Obama and Food System ReformPaula Crossfield
A year after America voted for the change-agent they saw in Barack Obama, advocates hoping for deep improvements in our food system can point to only a few successes, while other policies that could lead to food insecurity are brewing in back rooms.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.
Food Safety, recurring meat recalls, and pork bailouts
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 excrement, 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.
Islam Siddiqui, Roger Beachy, and going backward?
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 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.
GMOS and foodteching the developing world
Indeed, the 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 $20 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 Hillary Clinton, and including pro-biotechnology advocates 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. Last week's Class 1 recall of tainted ground beef from Fairbank Farms has already killed two people, sickened dozens of others, and spread to nine states--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 proverbial 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.
*Paula Crossfield is the managing editor of Civil Eats. She is also a regular contributor to the Huffington Post's Green Page and is a contributing producer at The Leonard Lopate Show on New York Public Radio, where she focuses on food issues. Cross-posted from Civil Eats.
*Barns painted with the Obama logo were very popular during Election Season; the photo at top of post is from the official Obama campaign Flickr.
