Now that Obama’s out making awesome speeches, I’d like to comment on his recent food policy record. From the speeches, he sounds like the Obama that I hoped for when I cast my vote in 2008. From his policy, not so much. And it’s not all Congress’s fault. To recap:

  • Food Safety: His administration supposedly supports improvements in food safety but he’s only just recently named someone to head up food safety at the USDA (which oversees meat and poultry safety). It took him a year to do it but he didn’t pick someone with ties to industry (like many of the prospective nominees whose names were floated over the course of the year). A food safety bill has not yet passed Congress but it may pass the Senate soon. Historically, food safety bills often have the effect of crushing and pushing out small producers while giving advantage to large producers (who can afford to meet the regulations) and calming public fears of tainted food. Our job now is to make sure this bill does not do that. Congress has been open to some suggestions but the sustainable ag community but this bill may not be everything we hope for. And it will only cover the FDA (which oversees 80% of our food), not the USDA.
  • Child Nutrition: In speeches he’s all for this. In his 2011 budget, not so much. This is VERY important as one of the biggest hurdles schools have in providing healthy food is funding, and with Obama recommending so little money, it will be hard for even the most well-meaning schools to make changes. On the bright side, we might finally see some funding for farm to school programs. Obama’s administration is also working on curbing food marketing to kids, but it remains to be seen what will actually happen. I’m hopeful that this will result in an improvement in the situation but skeptical that we’ll see real change, let alone "the change we need."

Ag Subsidies: I hear talk of change, but I don’t see any credible evidence it will happen. One thing he did was open up a loophole to supposedly send more subsidy money to small family farms. First of all, 96% of all farms, sustainable or not, big or small, are family farms. So when you say "family farms" you might as well just say "farms." Second, the farms eligible for this loophole aren’t exactly tiny. All the same, I don’t see this new loophole as a bad thing really. It’s just not as awesome as the headlines made it sound. Other than that, don’t expect any real change prior to the passage of the 2012 farm bill, and even then, don’t expect much. The Blue Doggiest of the Blue Dogs control both ag committees in the House and the Senate. If Blanche Lincoln loses her 2010 race, then we might have a bit more hope for the 2012 farm bill. The likely new Ag Committee Chair in the Senate will be Debbie Stabenow. She’s not exactly Bernie Sanders, but she’s way better than Blanche Lincoln.

On top of that, there are two MAJOR things that are going on that I’d like to give details on. One is good and one is bad. On the good side, the Obama administration just announced they are dropping the National Animal ID System. This is a HUGE victory for the grassroots. If fully implemented, NAIS would have put a lot of small farmers out of business. It was advocated as a food safety program, but in reality it was just to protect our export markets. And that’s a pretty clear picture of the government’s priorities. They will bend over backwards to help enormous corporations with exports, even if it means putting small farmers out of business. Only now they aren’t going to do that. They are still planning to have some kind of traceability system but it will only be for livestock crossing state lines and it will be much less intrusive.

Then there’s the bad thing. There’s something Obama said recently in a speech that made me spit out the Fair Trade organic shade grown coffee I was drinking:

We’re living up to our obligations as a wealthy nation, helping to promote food security around the world, helping to deal with diseases around the world.

He’s doing SOMETHING, but promoting food security ain’t it. According to his budget proposal’s goals for the USDA, he wants to:

Help America to promote agricultural production and biotechnology exports as America works to increase food security.

I’ve written about this issue at length (here and here). Haiti is a case study for why free trade and industrial, export-driven ag do not work to do much other than line corporate pockets. Cuba, on the other hand, is a beautiful success story for food sovereignty and organic, small scale agriculture. When Cuba was cut off from aid after the Soviet Union collapsed, they no longer had access to the oil or chemicals required for industrial ag. They went organic by necessity – and it worked! Currently, 70% of the produce eaten in Havana is produced within city limits.

The short version of the story is this: When the UN and World Bank brought together 400 scientists from around the world to determine how to best feed the world using modern technology, they published their results in the IAASTD report. And they recommended organic agriculture. They said that biotechnology is not consistent with the needs of the smallholder farmers who make up the majority of the world’s hungry and free trade is harmful to food security in the developing world. The U.S. is NOT doing what they recommended, and specifically doing what they said to NOT do (biotech, free trade). Obama just called for more free trade agreements (Columbia, Panama) in the State of the Union. And his appointees to key positions really make clear his intentions (Rajiv Shah to USAID, Roger Beachy to head up the new USDA agency for handing out research grants, and Islam A Siddiqui for Chief Ag Negotiator in the USTR’s office). You can read about Beachy and Siddiqui here, and I also recommend the New York Times editorial against Siddiqui. As for Shah, he comes straight from the Gates Foundation, where he promoted the use of biotech and pesticides to "feed the world." He continues to do the same thing as the head of USAID. He’s in good company there, as Hillary Clinton’s science advisor, Nina Federoff, is also die-hard pro-biotech. She’s actually a holdover from the Bush administration. As Joe Biden once said about John McCain "That’s not change; that’s more of the same."