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August 10, 2009
· New program pays farmers for how they grow
· Food safety bill not as damaging as feared
· Biotech giants in fierce battle over corn seed
· Scientists demand better access to biotech seeds
· Organic food just a tax on the gullible – opinion
New program pays farmers for how they grow
(DesMoinesRegister.com)
–
The result is the new Conservation Stewardship Program, a revamped and better-funded version of the old Conservation Security Program. Farmers nationwide can start signing up for the new program, starting Monday.
Both programs offered payments to farmers who undertake environmentally friendly practices, such as reducing tillage and planting cover crops to curb soil erosion and prevent farm chemicals from polluting rivers and streams.
But enrollment in the old program, created by the 2002 farm bill, wound up being restricted by the Bush administration to a relative handful of watersheds, or river drainage areas, around the nation. The new program will be open to farmers nationwide.
The Agriculture Department is required to enroll more than 60 million acres nationwide through 2012, nearly four times what was enrolled in the old program.
"That's a lot of conservation," said Dave White, chief of the Agriculture Department's Natural Resources Conservation Service. He said the program will be simpler and more targeted to addressing environmental problems because of the way the rules are written.
Aaron Lehman, who grows organic and conventional grain with
his father near
"I still think there is a huge need for the traditional farm programs, set up and run in the right way to provide a good safety net for farmers," Lehman said.
But "rewarding farmers for using the best practices from a conservation standpoint only makes sense," he said. "The more widespread you can make the program, the better we're all going to be."
Enrollment won't be automatic. Instead, farmers will be scored based on the conservation practices they now follow and new ones they promise to take on and to what extent they are addressing issues of highest concern in their state.
In
The conservation program owes its origins in many ways to
But
That means
More land to be organic farming
About 130 acres of Lehman's farm is certified organic or in transition to becoming organic, and the practices he follows there could help him qualify for the conservation program.
He plants a winter cover and follows a four-year rotation to improve the soil quality. He grows corn every fourth year instead of every year or every other year, as is standard on conventional operations.
Lehman said he is considering reducing tillage on the 500 acres of corn and soybeans in fields that he farms conventionally. He's not doing it without a return, however. How much he's wiling to do will depend in part on much the payments will be worth, he said.
Exactly how much the payments will be has yet to be determined. Nationally, the payments are supposed to average $18 an acre. But the payments will vary depending on what type of land is enrolled, whether it's rangeland or cropland, and how much of each is enrolled, White said. Payments for rangeland will be much lower than those for cropland, so the more rangeland that is in the program, the higher the payments will be for crop farmers.
The payment levels won't be decided until the Agriculture Department can evaluate the applications in this first round, White said.
Also unclear is how the payments will be calculated for individual farmers. Payments will be weighted in some ways, according to farmers' existing and future practices.
Farmers in the program can receive a maximum of $40,000 a year, or up to $200,000 under the five-year contract.
Even though the program will add nearly 13 million acres
each year, only a fraction of the nation's farmers and land can participate.
The
The program's size limits the impact it can have on
environmental problems such as the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, which has
been linked to runoff of farm chemicals in
Adequate funding is key
The program "is a step in the right direction, but it has to be funded adequately," said Bill Ehm, who coordinates water and agriculture policy for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.
"We need 13 million acres right here in
Still, Francis Thicke, a longtime
leader in organic farming who operates a dairy near
The program "will help level the playing field for farmers who have been using resource-conserving crop rotations and practices, and it will encourage more farmers to adopt those practices," he said.
Additional Facts
Same CSP acronym, different program
Many still call it CSP and the goal is still to reward good environmental practices. But the Conservation Stewardship Program bears little resemblance to the program it replaced, the Conservation Security Program.
- Farmers nationwide are eligible to apply for the new program. The old program was limited to select watersheds.
- The old program's three-tier payment plan was abolished.
- The application system has been revamped. Applications will be scored based on farmers' current practices and what changes they pledge to make.
- Farms of top-scoring applicants will be inspected to verify they're doing what they claim. The Agriculture Department's inspector general recently found widespread violations of eligibility requirements among farmers enrolled in the old program. More than half of the 75 contracts the inspector general reviewed had eligibility problems.
Food safety bill not as damaging as feared
(NewsVirginian.com) – A federal food safety bill piles more burdens on fruit and vegetable farmers but stops short of delivering the wallop initially feared, lawmakers and agriculture experts say.
“This is just a lot of bureaucracy,” Bob Goodlatte, R-Roanoke, said. “That’s not going to make food safer, but make it more expensive.”
Goodlatte and Rep. Tom Perriello, D-Ivy, both opposed the bill. It passed the House 283-142 and awaits Senate action.
The measure could have been worse, said Spencer Neale, senior assistant director for the Virginia Farm Bureau Federation.
Late changes mitigated much of the negative impact the $3.8-billion bill could have had on agriculture, Neale said.
Neale said the initial language would have broadened the scope of the Food and Drug Administration to regulate food safety and activities of farms that are currently regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. However, with amendments to the bill, farms, restaurants and retail food establishments have been largely exempted from the bill’s requirements, as have farmers’ markets.
“At the end of the day, most agricultural groups supported it,” Neale said.
The bill, Neale said, tries to update production standards for fruits and vegetables. The bill places a $500 fee on food facilities to cover the costs of oversight.
The Grocery Manufacturers Association and the National Restaurant Association are among the supporters of the legislation.
Still, Goodlatte contended, the
legislation “does not do the kinds of things necessary to make our foods
safer,” but instead adds more unneeded regulations. The
Goodlatte says the legislation will not require the FDA to spend any additional money on food inspection but will impose “significant regulatory burdens” on small businesses while not holding the agency accountable.
He said the bill “effectively creates a federal license to be in the food business.”
Language to exclude row crop producers and relieve livestock producers from some of the bill’s regulatory burdens was a start, Goodlatte said, but those measures did not go far enough.
“This bill still leaves our nation’s fruit and vegetable producers subject to objectionable regulatory burdens,” Goodlatte said on the House floor before the vote.
Goodlatte, like Neale, expressed concern over a provision that would allow the FDA to quarantine a geographic area if there was “credible evidence” that food posed a health risk.
Biotech giants in fierce battle over corn seed
(delawareonline.com) – Even in these lean times, people need to eat.
And as the world grows larger and wealthier, the seed business is poised for growth of its own.
The industry has seen technological advances in recent decades, as companies have used the tools of biotechnology to tinker with the genetic makeup of seeds, giving crops tolerance to weed killers and resistance to insects.
It's a business marked by cooperation among the major players, as companies license one another's technologies and collaborate on new products.
But there's also bruising competition -- none fiercer than that between DuPont Co., whose Pioneer Hi-Bred business boasts a proud, 83-year history, and Monsanto Co., a one-time upstart whose early embrace of agricultural biotechnology has helped cement its position as the world's top-selling seed company. The two companies are locked in a legal dispute over a critical DuPont product in development.
"It's a very heated rivalry, and in recent years, the thermostat has been turned up a few degrees," said Ben Johnson, an investment analyst with Morningstar. "And DuPont's starting to claw back ground."
Through the first half of the year, DuPont's agriculture and nutrition division -- which includes Pioneer, the world's No. 2 seed producer, along with the company's crop protection and nutrition businesses -- buoyed the company in a dismal business environment, posting pre-tax profits of $1.43 billion, up 11 percent from 2008. DuPont expects the division to grow its earnings 15 percent each year through 2013.
Pioneer's first-half sales were up 17 percent. Perhaps most
notably, the seed company gained an estimated two points of market share in the
all-important corn seed market in
Paul Schickler, Pioneer's president and a DuPont vice president, credited the market share gains to Pioneer's efforts to beef up its sales organization, including its network of independent agents.
"We're really seeing this differentiated strength setting us apart to a greater extent from the competition," Schickler said.
The gains in North American corn seed reversed a steady decline for Pioneer, which saw its market share decline from 45 percent in 1998 to 30 percent in 2008, according to figures from Deutsche Bank.
Monsanto, meanwhile, saw its market share for corn seed rise from less than 10 percent to an estimated 38 percent this year.
The reason for Monsanto's rise was, in a word, biotechnology. The company was the first to commercialize a genetically modified trait -- a plant characteristic created by inserting foreign genetic material into the seed -- with Roundup Ready soybeans in 1996. The plants were engineered to tolerate Monsanto's Roundup herbicide, allowing farmers to apply the weed killer without harming their crops. The altered soybeans were followed by an insect-resistant corn in 1997 and Roundup Ready corn in 1998.
Biotech crops have exploded in the years since they were
introduced, especially in the
As Monsanto was pouring resources into biotechnology in the
1980s, the more-conservative Pioneer was relying on its leading position in
plant genetics. The
In the early 1990s, Monsanto, then a newcomer to the seed business, tried to interest Pioneer in its Roundup Ready genes. Pioneer bought nonexclusive rights to the altered soybeans seeds in 1992 for $450,000. A year later, it paid Monsanto $38 million for nonexclusive rights to Roundup Ready corn.
Those deals, which included no royalty payments, led to a series of legal disputes between the two companies. DuPont, which acquired 20 percent of Pioneer in 1997 and the remainder in 1999, and Monsanto settled 11 lawsuits in 2002, reaching an agreement that gave Pioneer a license to use Roundup Ready and other traits.
Monsanto licenses its traits to about 200 seed companies, a major source of revenue for the company. DuPont has the largest deal with the company -- its license for corn herbicide tolerance and insect-control technologies is worth $725 million over 8 years, according to a Monsanto financial filing from last year.
Combining technologies
For several years, DuPont has worked to develop its own trait for herbicide tolerance. The company said its trait, known as Optimum GAT, would give soybeans and corn tolerance to both glyphosate -- the chemical name for Roundup -- and another class of weed killers known as ALS herbicides.
Earlier this year, DuPont revealed that it was planning to "stack," or combine, its Optimum GAT trait with the Roundup Ready trait in soybeans. Schickler said the company had seen a response from crops when high doses of glyphosate were applied to Optimum GAT soybeans in field tests.
"We solved a number of issues with the combination of these two technologies and got a better product than either one of them by themselves," Schickler said. He said the company does not intend to stack Optimum GAT with Roundup Ready in corn seeds.
Monsanto, arguing that stacking the two traits violates the terms of DuPont's license, sued DuPont in May. The use of the Roundup Ready technology was "an apparent attempt to remedy unacceptable risk posed by DuPont's product," the company argued.
DuPont fired back in June with a countersuit that accuses Monsanto of "a new anticompetitive campaign to extend monopolies into stacked products."
"Monsanto has abused its unlawfully acquired monopoly power to block competition, thwart innovation and extract from farmers unjustified price increases of over 100 percent in recent years," DuPont alleges in the lawsuit.
In a statement, Monsanto called DuPont's allegations a "smoke screen" to obscure problems with Optimum GAT. But although Monsanto said it does not believe two forms of glyphosate tolerance would benefit farmers, the company suggested it would be open to negotiations if yield and stewardship concerns were addressed.
Neither company would benefit from a protracted legal war, said analyst Dan Ortwerth of Edward Jones. He said he expects the dueling lawsuits to lead to an out-of-court settlement with minor adjustments to the current license agreement.
"Monsanto makes a lot of money licensing to DuPont," Ortwerth said. "Why would they want to cut that off?"
Meanwhile, the companies continue to square off in the
marketplace. Monsanto and development partner Dow AgroSciences, a unit of Dow
Chemical, said last month that they have received
The corn seeds combine eight different genes to protect against above- and below-ground insects, as well as weed killers. The companies, which plan to launch SmartStax on 3 million to 4 million acres next year, said the product will allow farmer to plant a significantly smaller "refuge" -- an area planted with conventional corn to help prevent pests from developing resistance to the traits designed to repel them.
Pioneer is waiting for approval for Optimum AcreMax, the company's own system for refuge reduction that it says will be an "in the bag" solution, alleviating the need for farmers to plant a separate refuge plot.
Schickler said Pioneer is working closely with the Environmental Protection Agency to get regulatory approval and is confident it will be able to launch the product next year. The company originally planned to launch Optimum AcreMax this year.
Pioneer intends to introduce Optimum AcreMax in two phases, offering protection for above-ground pests in the second phase. Morningstar's Johnson said the slower introduction may benefit SmartStax.
"I think at the onset, Monsanto's obviously got a head start," he said.
More legal problems
As for Optimum GAT, DuPont faces difficulties beyond the Monsanto lawsuit. The company is also involved in competing lawsuits with rival BASF, each side accusing the other of infringing patents for the ALS herbicide-tolerance trait.
And DuPont announced disappointing news last month -- the company said it was limiting the introduction of Optimum GAT corn to "controlled releases" in 2010 and 2011 because regulatory approvals were taking longer than expected in important export markets like Japan. The company had originally hoped for a wide launch of Optimum GAT corn next year.
DuPont had hoped to mostly convert its herbicide-resistant corn seeds from Roundup Ready technology to Optimum GAT by 2015 -- and end its licensing payments to Monsanto. In the announcement, the company said the conversion was unlikely to happen by then.
Ortwerth, the Edward Jones analyst, said the revelation was a mild surprise, but it fit the pattern of a company that faces an uphill battle to claim the top spot in the seed industry.
Ortwerth said DuPont has made "impressive strides" in recent years to improve its business and become more competitive. But, he said, "Between the two, we view Monsanto as the clear leader, and we don't think that's going to change."
Scientists demand better access to biotech seeds
(delawareonline.com) – Scientists and advocates are sounding the alarm on a practice of high-tech seed producers: limiting the independent research that can be done on those seeds.
Since their introduction in the 1990s, genetically modified seeds -- those altered with foreign genetic material to give them special characteristics -- have become an indelible part of the agricultural landscape.
Thanks to a 1980 Supreme Court decision, genetically modified organisms can be patented. And the biotech seed companies -- including the top three seed producers, Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta -- require a signed user agreement to purchase their seeds.
Among the stipulations of the agreements is a prohibition on independent research, which prevents public-sector scientists from conducting head-to-head comparisons or environmental and health studies of genetically modified seeds.
Earlier this year, a group of 24 corn insect scientists from public research institutions submitted a comment to the Environmental Protection Agency, urging regulators to require the seed companies to allow research on their products.
"As a result of restricted access, no truly independent research can be legally conducted on many critical questions regarding the technology," wrote the scientists, who withheld their names "because virtually all of us require cooperation from industry at some level to conduct our research."
The magazine Scientific American published an editorial this month highlighting the practice and calling on the EPA to require access to new seeds for independent researchers.
"When scientists are prevented from examining the raw ingredients in our nation's food supply or from testing the plant material that covers a large portion of the country's agricultural land, the restrictions on free inquiry become dangerous," the magazine's editors wrote.
Bill Freese, a science policy analyst with the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Food Safety, said the research restrictions point to the larger issue of the shrinking role of the public sector in agricultural research.
Freese said that in previous decades, universities provided many of the seeds for farmers. "What we've seen with biotech is that those public sector breeding programs are almost defunct," he said.
The seed companies argue they need protection for the massive investment they make in seed technologies. Paul Schickler, president of DuPont's seed producer, Pioneer Hi-Bred, said the company's genetics and technology are its "critical resources," and the company needs to protect trade secrets.
Pioneer supports public research institutions and collaborates closely with researchers, Schickler said.
"At the same time, we have to have the appropriate mechanisms in place to protect our investments," he said.
Organic food just a tax on the gullible – opinion
(timesonline.co.uk) – By Dominic Lawson – There are two reliable ways of telling if you have won an argument. The first is if your disputants switch from discussion of the facts to accusations about motives; the second, more obviously, is if they descend to mere abuse.
Alan Dangour, a nutritionist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, should therefore feel he has had an encouragingly uncomfortable week. He is the author of a peer-reviewed meta-study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that concluded, from 50 years of scientific evidence, that so-called “organic” food was no healthier than conventionally farmed products. By the end of last week Dangour felt as if he had been covered with the brown stuff the organic lobby holds most sacred. He revealed that he had received “hate mail” and was “taken aback” by the “abusive” language used.
Ben Goldacre, an NHS doctor and
author of the acclaimed book Bad Science, has had a similar week. In his
newspaper column he had taken apart the Soil Association’s criticisms of Dangour’s paper – which was funded by
As Goldacre pointed out to the Soil Association: “Either you are proposing that there are health benefits which cannot ever be measured. In this case you have faith, which is not a matter of evidence. Or you are proposing that there are health benefits which could be measured, but have not been yet. In which case, again, you have faith rather than evidence.” Cue an avalanche of organic ordure on the “comments” section at the foot of the online edition of Goldacre’s column.
When I called him, he remarked: “In my experience the [comments of the] organic food, antivaccine and homeopathy movements are unusually hateful and generally revolve around bizarre allegations that you covertly represent some financial or corporate interest. I do not; but I do think it reveals something about their own motives that they can only conceive of a person holding a position as a result of financial self-interest.”
His linking of the organic movement with homeopathy is
telling. They are cults masquerading as science, rather like the creationists
of
As Luc Ferry, the French philosopher, wrote in The New Ecological Order: “The hatred of the artifice connected with our civilisation... is also a hatred of humans as such. For man is the antinatural being par excellence... This is how he escapes natural cycles, how he attains the realm of culture, and the sphere of morality, which presupposes living in accordance with laws and not just with nature.” Guided by Ferry’s insight that this philosophy is based on “hatred” of humanity – and I accept this is dangerously close to an attack on motives – we should hardly be surprised by the nature of the e-mails directed at Dangour and Goldacre.
Nor, indeed, should anyone have been in the least surprised by Dangour’s results. The more rational among the organic movement long ago stopped claiming as scientific fact that their products are better for humans. The Canadian Organic Growers, reacting less hysterically than the Soil Association, responded to Dangour’s survey by saying that it “didn’t make health claims based on the nutrition of organic food”. This is the scientifically responsible attitude; but it is also a deadly blow to the marketing of organic foods, which depends on yummy mummies continuing to believe that if Cecilia and Frederick are fed only organic foods, then the little darlings will grow up healthier and stronger. It is in this sense that the organic business – ordinary food at extraordinary prices – is nothing more than a tax on gullibility.
Such gullibility can have dangerous effects on your health, as well as your bank balance. A few years ago my wife decided we should have an entirely organic vegetable garden. To this end she refused all man-made fertilisers and ordered a truckload of pigeon droppings. What could be more natural? Neither was there anything unnatural in the germs I inhaled through the spores of our organic manure, thereby contracting psittacosis. This developed into “atypical” pneumonia, which was of course resistant to all standard antibiotics. Had a hospital doctor not guessed the cause and put me on a drip with the appropriate drugs – ooh, chemicals! – I could have become a fatal casualty of the organic movement. Obviously my wife might have ordered cow manure rather than pigeon poo; then I could have been felled by E coli instead.
Think about it from the other end: if chemicals and pesticides in foods are as dangerous for humans as the Soil Association claims, we should expect conventional farmers, who handle the stuff in industrial quantities, to be dropping dead before the rest of us with all sorts of chemical-induced cancers.
The most exhaustive analysis of this matter was published in 2004, a peer-reviewed paper by Professor Anthony Trewavas of Edinburgh University, entitled “A critical assessment of organic farming-and-food assertions with particular respect to the UK and the potential environmental benefits of no-till agriculture”. (Trewavas is an advocate of no-till farming, which avoids damage to the soil caused by ploughing; “organic” farmers must plough to destroy all the weeds which would otherwise have been killed by pesticides.) His paper revealed that “of 12 separate investigations on farmers involving in total about 300,000 people, 11 found that farmers had overall cancer rates very substantially lower than the general public”.
Trewavas concludes that “the reasons why farming is so healthy are not known, but these data indicate not only a null result for the hypothesis relating pesticide exposure to cancer, but a consistent result for the alternative, that pesticide exposure may protect against cancer”. I realise that publicising Professor Trewavas’s paper might itself cause medical problems, as Soil Association executives choke with rage, but I think this a risk offset by the benefits to the public as a whole.
The provocative professor also points out that in the period since 1950 – as pesticides and industrial farming took an increasing role in food production – “stomach cancer rates have declined by 60% in western countries”. This is generally ascribed to the fact that fruit and vegetable consumption has doubled in that period – but why did this change in diet occur? Because modern agriculture, aided by air freight, has been able to get such products to consumers at ever-cheaper prices all year round.
This just demonstrates the common-sense point that diet, rather than whether food is produced “organically” or not, is the key to healthy eating. It is that which lies behind the Ratner moment of the chief executive of Whole Foods, who confessed last week that he had been selling “a bunch of junk”. What the organic chain store boss was trying to say, I think, is that a high-fat diet is as bad for you when the food has an “organic” sticker on it as when it doesn’t.
The general public, however, had already begun to call the
organic bluff, perhaps one reason Whole Foods’ sales have suffered over three
consecutive quarters in the
End Transmission