Greetings on May 21,

The Ag Insider contains original reporting as well as a survey of top news on food, agriculture and the environment. Emails are welcome at chuck@thefern.org. I am on Twitter @chuckabbott1. If you received this briefing from a friend and wish to receive it directly, you can subscribe for free by clicking this link.  

After a landslide 38-6 vote in committee, Agriculture chairman Michael Conaway said the House might vote in early June on legislation to repeal mandatory country-of-origin labels (COOL) for beef, pork and chicken. The Agriculture Committee voted for repeal two days after the WTO ruled the labeling system is a barrier to livestock imports. COOL has been mandatory for U.S. meat since 2008.

Conaway said he was working with House Republican leaders for a prompt floor vote on repeal. Agriculture Committee members approved the three-page bill after less than half an hour of discussion that was dominated by warnings of retaliatory tariffs by Canada and Mexico on U.S. manufactured and agricultural products. "We are talking about an impact here in the billions and billions of dollars," said David Scott, Georgia Democrat.

"I don't think this is the best way to avoid retaliation and, quite frankly, I don't think the Senate will be able to pass a repeal," said Collin Peterson, one of the six Democrats to vote against the bill. He said repeal was a hasty over-reaction when the three nations still might find "a workable North American solution." As committee chairman in 2008, Peterson engineered a compromise between meatpackers and livestock producers to get COOL adopted.

The Canadian Cattlemen's Association called the committee vote "an important first step," said the Toronto Globe and Mail. It said the Canadian Pork Council estimates hog farmers lost $3 billion in exports because of COOL.

Conaway, from Texas, the No. 1 cattle state, said COOL was a "failed marketing program [that] adds extraordinary costs with no - I repeat, no - quantifiable benefits." Meatpackers and retailers complained from the start that COOL would be a costly bookkeeping headache. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers joined the call for repeal after Canada unveiled a broad-ranging target list for retaliation.

Consumer groups and the two largest U.S. farm groups have supported COOL as satisfying the consumers' right to know where their food comes from. Backers say the labels will distinguish U.S. meat from imports at the grocery store. They have called on Congress to look for ways to revamp COOL to comply with the WTO ruling, or to force Canada and Mexico to prove to WTO that COOL actually damaged their livestock industries. The National Farmers Union says the weak economy is the real reason why livestock prices fell.

The labels, which say where animals were born, raised and slaughtered, often are in small type and may appear on the front or back of a package. They are not as prominent as the familiar Nutrition Facts label, introduced two decades ago.

Beef and pork were the lightning rods for the WTO challenge because of sizable cross-border trade in meat and animals. But COOL also applies to poultry, lamb, goat, venison, seafood, fruits and vegetables, peanuts, pecans, macadamia nuts and ginseng.
    --Reporting by Chuck Abbott

To read the text of the bill, Agriculture Committee releases about the bill, or to watch a video of the committee meeting, click here.

The USDA homepage on COOL is available here.

The government runs 18 public nutrition programs through the departments of Agriculture, Health, and Homeland Security, said the GAO at a House Agriculture subcommittee review of the food stamp program. "This decentralized network of programs emerged piecemeal over many decades to address a variety of targeted needs," said GAO's Kay Brown. The network "shows signs of program overlap, which can create unnecessary work and waste administrative resources, resulting in inefficiency."

Some programs provide comparable benefits to similar groups of people but are run separately, said Brown, using the example of school lunch, school breakfast, school milk, the fresh fruit-and-vegetable snack, and child-care food programs. The five largest nutrition programs - food stamps; school lunch; Women, Infants and Children; school breakfast; and Child and Adult Care Food - account for 96 percent of nutrition spending and all are run by the USDA. For that reason, GAO says, the USDA should look for ways to reduce overlap and inefficiency.

Nutrition subcommittee chairwoman Jackie Walorski said, "Our job today is to figure out where overlap, duplication or inefficiency exists" with an eye to serving "potential unmet needs." As an example, she said the majority of food stamp families are eligible for assistance from some of the smaller-budget programs. Food stamps accounts for 71 percent of the more than $100 billion spent last year to provide food to Americans.

The top-ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, Jim McGovern, said the underlying problem was inadequate benefit levels for food stamp recipients. "We ought to be talking about a benefit that meets the need."

One of the witnesses, Sherrie Tussler, head of the Hunger Task Force in Milwaukee, said the food programs "are a patchwork of underfunded programs layered around the shortfalls" of food stamps and school lunch. "What you think is duplication is a safety net," said Tussler.

Angela Rachidi, of the American Enterprise Institute, said administrative costs for food programs were too high because each is managed separately with little sharing of information. "A better system would be to consolidate programs that share the same goals and coordinate programs across one or two governing bodies, with a focus on the person or household," said Rachidi. She said the programs have differing nutrition standards and different approaches to deciding which stores can serve participants.

One of the common areas of intersection for the nutrition programs is when low-income families receiving food stamps have children who qualify for free meals at school.

Criticism of the multiple nutrition programs is raised routinely - the GAO report presented to Walorski's panel was an update of a 2010 report. But it would be difficult for Congress or the administration to unify programs when jurisdiction is split so widely. The USDA is home to 15 of the 18 programs listed by GAO, yet the food-stamp and child-nutrition programs are reauthorized in different legislation on different timelines. The Senate Agriculture Committee oversees food stamps and child nutrition, but in the House, the Agriculture Committee has jurisdiction over food stamps while the Education Committee has control of school lunch and the other child nutrition programs.

And while public nutrition programs exist in three federal departments, almost all of the money is spent in five USDA programs, as GAO made clear in its report. The other programs have comparatively small budgets and enrollments. And some of the smaller programs are variants of the mainstays; the Nutrition Assistance for Puerto Rico is similar to food stamps but reflects Puerto Rico's status as a U.S. commonwealth rather than a state.

GAO said consolidation of programs could save administrative costs by eliminating duplication of work in screening applicants and improve efficiency, but noted that it "could also make it more difficult to achieve the goals of targeting services to specific populations." 
    --Reporting by Chuck Abbott

To read Walorski's opening statement and testimony by witnesses, or to watch a video of the hearing, click here.

Minnesota legislators passed a bill that requires buffer strips along major waterways - meeting much of a goal set by Gov. Mark Dayton - but it "is not a done deal," said the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Lawmakers failed to agree on funding for the new program. And some environmental groups say the governor should veto the bill because it doesn't go far enough to curb agricultural runoff. The Minnesota Soybean Growers Association said there would not be sufficient financial assistance to farmers.

The legislation calls for vegetative buffers that are at least 30 feet in width but an average of 50 feet along public waters, said the Associated Press. Strips could be narrower along drainage ditches. Deadlines for compliance would be late 2017 for strips along public waters and 2018 for ditches. A fine of $500 could be levied on violators, said the AP. The Star-Tribune said strips would not be required along the smallest streams.

Five months into the year, the House Agriculture Committee has completed work on its must-do list. It has approved bills to reauthorize the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Grain Standards Act and the mandatory livestock-price reporting law, as well as repeal of mandatory country-of-origin labeling for meat, pork and chicken. The COOL and CFTC bills could be called for a floor vote in early June.

Committee chairman Michael Conaway of Texas said oversight of USDA will be a focus in coming months. He said there were 17 agencies that needed review and specifically called attention to the ongoing review of the food-stamp program. That top-to-bottom review is going full speed, said Conaway.

House Republicans have called for converting food stamps into a block grant for states to run and to reduce costs by $125 billion over 10 years.

House Commerce chairman Fred Upton plans to hold a hearing soon on legislation to pre-empt state labeling of GMO foods, "then move the bill through subcommittee and the full committee by the August recess," said Agri-Pulse. Along with precluding state labeling laws, the bill would keep labeling voluntary at the federal level and put the USDA in charge of certifying non-GMO food.

"Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack offered to provide technical assistance to the effort to pass a labeling pre-emption bill. Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., is developing similar legislation in the Senate, although it's not clear when or if the bill can get a hearing," said Agri-Pulse.

Jerry Greenfield of the ice cream company Ben and Jerry's said in a blog at the Environmental Working Group that Congress should not interfere with state labeling laws.

The world's largest seed company, Monsanto Co., says it is prepared to sell the seed and genetic-traits business of Syngenta AG, as well as some overlapping chemical assets, in order to gain regulatory appoval of a takeover, said Reuters. In a presentation to investors, Monsanto's president said the goal was "to make this a really clean deal ... really easy to get done." Syngenta rejected a $45 billion offer from Monsanto and is skeptical that the divestitures outlined by Monsanto would be sufficient. Monsanto president Brett Begemann said the St. Louis-based company continues to talk to Syngenta and, according to Reuters, is "not precluded from developing relationships with other chemical suppliers."

Said Reuters, "Acquiring Syngenta is a compelling need for Monsanto, according to those who follow the industry, as the company known best for its Roundup herbicide and biotech seeds faces mounting threats from both regulatory scrutiny and consumer opposition."

Analysts believe Monsanto will prevail in its pursuit of Syngenta, said Agrimoney.

Foodmaker Hormel Corp. warned that short supplies due to the avian influenza epidemic would cut sales at its Jennie-O turkey division during the second half of this year, said the Associated Press. Jennie-O is the second-largest U.S. turkey processor. Bird-flu outbreaks "afflict about 55 farms in Minnesota and Wisconsin that supply it with turkeys," said the AP. The disruption in supplies was expected to cut Jennie-O sales by 15 percent and force the processor to buy birds from other sources, said Hormel's chief executive, according to AP.

Some 1.5 million children live in poverty in rural America, says the White House in releasing a report on the challenge of reducing poverty rates. More than 300 rural counties have had poverty rates above 20 percent in each census since 1980, says the administration. "While the fight to eliminate poverty is far from over, the 2014 Economic Report of the President documented that federal programs designed to reduce poverty and promote opportunity have cut poverty by more than one-third over the past 50 years. This report also shows that poverty in rural areas fell by nearly half between 1967 and 2012, compared to about one-quarter in urban areas," says the report. Social security and food stamps "have profound impacts on well-being," says a White House blog.

The White House report, "Opportunity for all: Fighting rural child poverty," is available here.

Did you enjoy FERN's Ag Insider by Chuck Abbott? Please consider donating to FERN to help produce more in-depth reporting on food, agriculture and environmental health.