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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The Single Biggest Thing We Can Do To Reform Food
  • Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2010 11:05:27 -0700


The Single Biggest Thing We Can Do To Reform Food
January 28, 2010
http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/01/28/the-single-biggest-thing-we-can-do-to-reform-food/

When it comes to problems with our food system, we’ve got a chicken and egg
problem on our hands. Enormous corporations sell most of our food and they
use environmentally harmful methods to produce it and put unhealthy
ingredients in it – much of which is legal (and sometimes when something is
illegal, the law isn’t enforced). The obvious solution would be changing the
law, except these same corporations lobby politicians NOT to change the law
(and too often, the politicians obey the lobbists).

Currently, Congress has a few bills that would ban BPA – a harmful chemical
found in can linings and some types of plastic – but a powerful BPA lobby
that includes aluminum can makers, soda companies, and other food companies
has thus far succeeded in keeping any of those bills from passing. Then
there’s the climate change bill, which specifically excluded agriculture from
emissions caps even though agriculture is responsible for quite a bit of
greenhouse gas emissions. And there’s the upcoming child nutrition
reauthorization, which governs school lunch and other federal nutrition
programs. Every single food industry wants to make sure that their products
are allowed to be sold in schools, so their lobbyists are working on that.
And, of course, there’s the commonsense Preservation of Antibiotics for
Medical Treatment Act, which simply says that you cannot drug livestock with
classes of antibiotics important in human medicine if the animal is not sick.
Sick animals would still get the care they need. The goal is to avoid
creating antibiotic resistant bacteria, a problem that is already documented
in livestock operations in the U.S. The bill was introduced by Louise
Slaughter, a microbiologist, yet the livestock industry is lobbying hard
against it and so far they are winning.

So – if we have bad food because our laws are too lax, but we can’t get
better laws because food companies lobby the government, what can we do? I
believe that the single biggest thing we can do right now is to try to break
up agriculture corporations that violate our nation’s antitrust laws. We need
fair competition, and that’s something we don’t currently have. Farm Aid
recently posted a graph of consolidation in a number of agricultural
industries and that says it all. In each industry within food and
agriculture, only a few companies control most of the market. And, quite
often, they also have a considerable amount of influence over the government
as well.

Fortunately, Obama’s antitrust czar, Christine Varney, stated in her
confirmation hearings that she would look into anticompetitive behavior in
agriculture, and she’s keeping her promise. The Department of Justice
recently began an investigation of Monsanto and filed a suit against dairy
giant Dean Foods.

Monsanto’s in trouble over its soybeans. The issue is a particularly
disturbing one because it involves not just the buying and selling of seeds
but ownership and patenting of life itself. Seed companies don’t just own
seeds – they own traits (and the DNA that governs those traits). Monsanto
licenses other companies to sell seeds made with traits they own. Over the
years, they’ve written licensing agreements in a way that makes it very hard
for their competitors to compete with them. Either they were shrewd
businessmen or they were breaking the law – that’s what the DOJ is trying to
find out. (Find more information on this here.)

The suit against Dean Foods seeks to undo their acquisition of two companies,
but it won’t be enough to fix the dairy industry. This past year, dairy
farmers suffered the hardest times since the Great Depression. Farmers
received prices as low as $10 or $11 per hundred pounds of milk even though
it cost them about $18 to produce it. They lost money with each gallon of
milk they sold, and many dairy farmers lost their farms altogether. Prices
are beginning to go up, but the dairy farmers I know have felt for a long
time that a few powerful players in the industry have been manipulating
prices. They went to the Senate about this a few years ago and several
Senators asked the Government Accountability Office to begin an
investigation, which it did. Then the investigation got a little too close to
friends of Bush, and the investigation was called off altogether.

The two actions taken by the Dept of Justice are necessary but they are a
drop in the bucket. Fortunately, the Department of Justice has been accepting
comments about antitrust issues in agriculture (the deadline was a month ago)
and they are holding a series of public workshops on the topic as well. I
look forward to these workshops, and I hope that the DOJ continues and
expands its action to promote fair competition in food and agriculture.





  • [Livingontheland] The Single Biggest Thing We Can Do To Reform Food, Tradingpost, 01/28/2010

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