" I heard it through the AgLine"

August 1, 2008

 

 

 

·        Congress hears attack of the outraged tomato growers

·        Earth to USDA: Don’t drop pesticide and fertilizer data

·        Olympic food grown under guard, lock and key

·        FAO announces launch of new global soil database

·        Analysis – Past lessons should yield harvest of hope

 

 

 

Congress hears attack of the outraged tomato growers

 

WASHINGTON -- Turf struggles, bad communication and weak leadership undermined the federal response to a recent salmonella outbreak that cost the tomato industry a bundle, witnesses told a House of Representatives subcommittee Thursday.

 

Lawmakers joined farmers in a wholesale attack on the Food and Drug Administration's performance, potentially laying the political foundation for a regulatory overhaul and multimillion-dollar compensation package.

 

"We have been the primary injured party," Reginald Brown, the executive vice president of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, told the House panel, "and we look forward to Congress addressing that in the future."

 

Farmers say that the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention erred in indicating that the salmonella outbreak was associated with tomatoes. State regulators testified that the FDA shared information reluctantly, while produce industry representatives complained that no one seemed to be in charge.

 

"We've noticed tensions [and] rivalries" among federal food-safety agencies, United Fresh Produce Association President Thomas E. Stenzel told the House Energy and Commerce Committee's oversight and investigations panel.

 

Federal food-safety officials still decline to exonerate tomatoes, although they say that fresh tomatoes currently on the market are safe. FDA Assistant Commissioner David Acheson stressed Thursday that the initial reported illnesses were "statistically linked to consumption of raw tomatoes," although no tainted tomatoes were found.

 

More than 1,300 U.S. residents have been sickened by the salmonella Saintpaul strain in the past three months. At least 252 people have been hospitalized in 43 states, and two have died.

 

The complex investigation is ongoing, and California Department of Food and Agriculture Secretary A.G. Kawamura acknowledged that federal authorities "have been working very hard with the resources they have." Nonetheless, some of the 16 witnesses summoned Thursday recommended that an outside blue-ribbon panel thoroughly examine what happened.

 

"If we do not learn from this case, we will be doomed to repeat the failures," said Rep. Bart Stupak, R-Mich., the subcommittee's chairman.

 

The uproar isn't over the fact that people got sick from salmonella, a group of bacteria commonly found in animal intestines.

 

About 40,000 cases of salmonellosis are diagnosed annually, according to the FDA. Rather, the current problem rose from the response of regulators.

 

The FDA warned consumers nationwide June 7 against three types of tomatoes thought to be possibly implicated in the outbreak.

 

The agency lifted its warning July 17. Investigators since have traced salmonella to jalapeño and serrano peppers grown on two Mexican ranches.

 

The finger-pointing has been escalating nearly as fast as the damage estimates.

 

"From the very beginning, it was clear to us that FDA was not sharing important information with state regulators," Florida Agricultural Commissioner Charles Bronson testified.

 

Last week, eight Florida lawmakers introduced a bill authorizing $100 million in compensation for growers and others who lost business as a result of the FDA's consumer warnings. By Thursday, Stenzel put the losses at about $200 million.

 

Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Calif., suggested this week that the cost could reach $300 million or more.

 

Some of the claimed losses are direct, the price tag for tomatoes that were destroyed because they couldn't be sold. Other claimed losses are estimated by comparing conventional sales records with the reduced sales that followed the FDA's warnings.

 

"In just the first week, we lost several hundred thousand dollars' worth of perfectly good tomatoes," said Parker Booth, the president of the Ace Tomato Co., based in Manteca. "We are still tallying the total impact."

 

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Earth to USDA: Don’t drop pesticide and fertilizer data

 

(enn.com) – The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has eliminated the only federal program that tracks the use of pesticides and fertilizers on American farms.

 

The move has left scientists, industry groups, and public advocates surprised and confused about how to carry on their work without this free information. The canceled program was the only one to make freely available to the public nationwide data on the amount of pesticides and fertilizers applied to U.S. farms.

 

In May, USDA announced that it had published the last of its Agricultural Chemical Usage reports, which are based on detailed surveys of farmers’ chemical use, collected since 1990 by the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS). In an unusual alliance, industry and environmental groups are lobbying USDA and Congress to restore the program, which costs $8 million out of an annual NASS budget of $160 million.

 

The program had many users and supporters in academia, industry, environmental and community groups, and government agencies. “The industry and the people who do dietary risk assessments in companies could not be more upset by this,”� says Leonard Gianessi, director of the Crop Protection Research Institute at the CropLife Foundation, a nonprofit research center funded largely by CropLife America and other industry groups.

 

“If the program had the support of the industry, the agencies, the public, and [nongovernmental organizations], who did want to cut it?”� asks Jennifer Sass of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), an environmental advocacy group.

 

Mark Miller, who heads the NASS environmental and demographic section, says the program fell victim to a shrinking budget. NASS prioritized programs that provide data for national economic indicators, such as commodity prices, or that directly impact commodity markets such as the Chicago Board of Trade, he says. Chemical usage did not meet these criteria. “Unless we get additional funding [from USDA or Congress], the program’s not coming back,”� Miller says. The only remaining data collection on chemical usage will be for wheat, which USDA’s Economic Research Service will provide.

 

After a flurry of protests by agriculture and environmental groups, on July 21 the Senate Appropriations Committee recommended that USDA reinstate the chemical usage reports in the 2009 budget and directed the department “not to disrupt ongoing market analysis reporting and to notify the committee in advance of any termination of other ongoing NASS activities.”� It remains unclear whether the Senate and the House of Representatives will agree to keep this language in the bill before it is passed into law.

 

“Irreplaceable”� data

 

Many scientists say that the NASS data are essential for their research. For pesticides, the other major data sources are the California EPA’s statewide data and a national data set produced by the private company Doane Marketing Research (doing business as dmrkynetec but often referred to as Doane, a former parent company). However, Doane’s collection methods differ from NASS’s, and there are strict limits on how data can be publicly released to protect the company’s proprietary information. And Doane’s price tag—about $500,000 per year for a full national data set—is too steep for most academic and nonprofit users.

 

The NASS program worked by sending trained specialists, called enumerators, to a statistically determined selection of farms across the country to survey farmers’ actual application rates of pesticides and fertilizers. Enumerators helped farmers with calculations to produce more reliable data than self-reporting typically provides. Because of the cost and time required, not all crops or states were surveyed annually.

 

California is the only state requiring agricultural pesticide users to report to the government their chemical use on a monthly basis, detailing where, when, how much, and on what crop a pesticide was used. In contrast, the Doane data sets were not originally intended for public use or research purposes, but rather as a business tool for agricultural chemical manufacturers. As a private entity, Doane’s data collection methods are not entirely transparent, but they combine surveys with expert opinion to provide data on all major crops every year. Because researchers do not know exactly how the data were collected and cannot publicly release Doane’s raw numbers, many consider Doane’s data to be unreliable and inappropriate for their work.

 

The loss of data puts ongoing research programs at risk. Scientists studying integrated pest management (IPM), a set of strategies that reduce pesticide use, use NASS data to study farmers’ pest management practices and how effective they are, says Susan Ratcliffe, director of an IPM research center at the University of Illinois. “We can get a better feel for whether growers are moving away from high-risk compounds”� with NASS data, she says. Ratcliffe also notes that in many states, farmers are shifting away from corn−soy rotation to continuous corn crops in response to biofuels trends, which will change pesticide practices. “The loss of this survey will leave a lot of unanswered questions,”� she says.

 

Programs that monitor U.S. water quality will also suffer, says Janice Ward, who directs agricultural programs for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). “We depend on these data for helping to interpret our water-quality results,”� she says. For example, the National Water-Quality Assessment (NAWQA) program at USGS relies largely on NASS data to understand the sources of pesticides and nutrients found in streams and groundwater.

 

“What we really need is something like the California system nationwide, with complete reporting from the point of use instead of a survey,”� says Robert Gilliom, who directs the Pesticide National Synthesis Project at USGS, which assesses pesticides in the nation’s streams and groundwater. “It’s the Cadillac of pesticide use data in the country.”�

 

 However, Gilliom notes that other states such as Oregon that have proposed such a system have met with resistance from farmers because of the expense of reporting. Gilliom says his program relies heavily on NASS and hopes to buy older data from Doane, which is less expensive than current-year data, if Congress does not restore funding for the NASS program.

 

Charles Benbrook, chief scientist for the nonprofit research group the Organic Center, regularly probes the NASS database for trends in pesticide use that USDA does not analyze. His work has contradicted industry claims that genetically modified crops reduce pesticide use. “I will update my 2000 report [on pesticide use] soon, and it will be a lot harder for me to do it [without NASS data],”�

 

 Benbrook says. He adds that the lack of publicly available information hurts the public the most. “Without NASS data, all the policy issues and debates that have been going on for the last 15 or 20 years over pesticide use would be based largely on speculation.”�

 

Organizing opposition

 

Several groups sent letters to USDA and Congress, urging both to restore funding for the chemical-use survey program. The NRDC sent a letter May 20 signed by 44 environmental, sustainable-agriculture, and health-advocacy groups. The Association of American Pesticide Control Officials sent a similar letter to USDA, as did a coalition of agricultural groups, including commodity groups such as Syngenta Crop Protection, Inc., the Fertilizer Institute, and CropLife America.

 

The U.S. EPA and state governments also use NASS data, in combination with Doane’s data, to evaluate pesticide risk and set pesticide-use policies and regulations. The director of EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs, Debra Edwards, recently sent a letter expressing concern about the NASS cuts to NRDC. “We have discussed with USDA the need for such reliable, publicly available data, but at the same time we are exploring alternative sources of information to ensure we can continue to provide robust pesticide risk assessments,”� Edwards wrote in the letter.

 

So how did such a popular program find itself on the chopping block? Most people are not sure, although some have an explanation. “We took it for granted,”� says Gianessi. He was on a 2006 NASS advisory panel that recommended against expanding the program but did not recommend cuts.

 

At a 2008 advisory committee meeting with USDA, Gianessi complained that the panel’s 2006 report had been misinterpreted to justify rolling back data collection in 2007 to only three crops—cotton, apples, and organic apples. “We meant that the current surveys are taken for granted. Users are not demanding more and have been quietly going about their business of using the NASS surveys for the past 17 years,”� Gianessi said at the 2008 meeting.

 

The bottom line, Gianessi says, is that “no one was shaking the table saying ”˜don’t touch this’. If you’re a bureaucrat and no one’s shaking the table, you ignore them.”�

 

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Olympic food grown under guard, lock and key

 

(Daily Yomiuri) BEIJING--Vegetables and grains for about 16,000 athletes and officials at Beijing's Olympic Village are being grown under heavy guard.

 

China is making efforts to dispel uneasiness about food safety after pesticide residue was found on some vegetables and food poisoning cases involving frozen gyoza dumplings came to light.

 

One farm cultivating vegetables and fruit for Olympic athletes and officials is about 30 minutes away from the village by car. It is located on a piece of land surrounded by a three-meter-high brick wall. The farm is contracted by the Olympic organizing committee, and is run by the Beijing-Tianan agriculture development company.

 

The farm's dozens of plastic greenhouses are heavily guarded. License plates on cars that enter the farm are strictly checked. Vegetable delivery trucks are monitored by the Global Positioning System.

 

According to a farm employee, each plastic greenhouse is locked and has a label bearing the name of persons responsible for cultivating each vegetable. The labels state that the plants are organically grown. Bags of organic fertilizers are piled up around the greenhouses.

 

On the opposite side of the street from the farm is vegetable-processing factory.

 

A female employee on a break from working at the plant said that food processed there was safe.

 

Meals are provided in an all-you-can-eat style at the Olympic Village. The eight-day menu contains 70 percent Western cuisine and 30 percent Chinese food.

 

The Olympic organizing committee subcontracted Aramark Corp. to cater the facilities. Aramark is a U.S. food service company that has provided food for athletes in the past 13 Olympic Games

 

More than 2,300 employees from 100 countries will work at restaurants and coffee shops during the Games.

 

The committee intends to ban foreign foodstuffs to secure food safety--to the shock of South Korean athletes.

 

Kimchi is a staple of the South Korean diet. Although kimchi is available in China, many South Koreans prefer to make the fiery pickled cabbage at home.

 

The South Korean team asked the committee to allow it to bring kimchi as an exception to the rule, but the team has not received an answer.

In June, a South Korean newspaper reported that the team was not likely to be allowed to bring their own kimchi to China.

 

A South Korean TV reporter predicted the country's medal count would decrease if the athletes had to go without Korean kimchi.

 

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FAO announces launch of new global soil database

(CropBiotech Update) – The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has unveiled a new global soil database that will help better map current and future land productivity as well as the present carbon storage and carbon sequestration potential of the world's soils. FAO says that the database will also help identify land and water limitations and assist in assessing land degradation and soil erosion risks.

"The more information we have about soil properties, the more we can evaluate the quality of our natural resources all over the world and their potential to produce food now and in future scenarios of climate change", said Alexander Muller, FAO Assistant Director General for Natural Resources and Environment Management.

Based on the soil database, the FAO has produced a Global Gap Map which will help identify where soil carbon storage is greatest and the physical potential for billions of tons of additional carbon to be sequestrated in degraded soils. Efforts to use agriculture to capture green house gasses have involved above ground sequestration mainly by planting trees. Although the amount of carbon captured using this approach is substantial, there are growing interests in finding ways to increase carbon sequestration in soil.

For more information, read http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2008/1000882/index.html The World Soil Database can be accessed at http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Research/LUC/luc07/External-World-soil-database/HTML/index.html

 

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Analysis – Past lessons should yield harvest of hope

 

(Scientific American) – Global food prices have roughly doubled in three years. At the World Food Summit in Rome in early June, United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon recalled that on a trip to Liberia he encountered people who had once bought rice by the bag and whose cash now suffices for a meager cupful. The current crisis means that another 100 million hungry may join the 854 million who already lack sufficient daily nourishment.

 

An immediate response should include policies that discourage grain hoarding, that reapportion the way food aid is delivered and that ensure that subsidies for food purchases are carefully targeted to reach the truly poor. Just shipping more grain to Africa, by far the most vulnerable region, will not suffice. Over the long haul, science and technology have a big role to play. Finding nonfood substitutes for ethanol produced from corn or sugarcane would help. But the only lasting solution to hunger in Africa and elsewhere must focus on poor agricultural productivity.

 

U.S. secretary of agriculture Ed Schafer called on participants at the summit to consider the use of biotechnology to grow crops with higher yields that are capable of resisting assaults from inclement weather, disease or pests. Some activists, invoking fears about genetic manipulation of food crops, have jumped on the administration’s stance as pandering to agribusiness and overhyping benefits from genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

 

That criticism is unfounded. Nongovernmental organizations that advocate exporting the organic food movement to Africa are at best misguided. Much of Africa practices what political scientist Robert Paarlberg calls “de facto organic farming,” and overall productivity has plummeted. African small farmers achieve crop yields only one third of those obtained by farmers in developing countries in Asia. GMOs have the potential to increase productivity by incorporating beneficial traits that would, for one, allow crops to thrive even when rain is a rare event.

 

The Bush administration, never a beacon of enlightened social policymaking, would have come across more convincingly if it had incorporated biotechnology into a well-defined framework of research and development assistance. At the moment, genetically modifying cassava or cowpeas against viruses or insects is akin to producing hydrogen fuel cells in the energy arena. Both hold tremendous promise, and both are not ready for wide commercial dissemination.

 

The best hope for improving African crop yields today would be to borrow technology from the decades-old green revolution that transformed agriculture in Asia and Latin America. Using conventionally bred hybrid seeds, farmers in certain fertile areas of Ethiopia have witnessed their fields turn into a breadbasket that is rivaled in the sub-Saharan region of the continent only by South Africa. Eventually these same farmers will likely demand still better yields that will leave an opening for acceptance of genetically modified crops.

 

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (a partnership of the Rockefeller and Gates foundations) signed an agreement with three U.N. food agencies at the June summit meeting to bolster the lot of African small farmers. The Bush administration had asked in May that part of a recent aid package to address the food crisis go to agricultural development, including the planting of GMOs. More is needed, though. As the world’s largest food aid donor, the U.S. channels most of its dollars to pay for acute emergencies, a response that, by law, requires shipping crops grown in Iowa or Kansas to needy countries—largely on U.S. ships. Meanwhile the U.S. Agency for International Development’s funding for agricultural science in Africa dropped by 75 percent after inflation from the mid-1980s to 2004.

 

To avoid a crisis without end, we should back a program that not only delivers better seeds to African farmers but also devotes still more assistance to support improvements in soil, irrigation, roads and farmer education. Then, when necessary, we should use remaining aid money to buy either hybrid or genetically modified crops grown in African soil for local distribution. The U.S. farm lobby will howl in protest, but this action will be the best way to work toward putting African bread on African tables.

 

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