The Latest from AgMag

If you wanted an object lesson in how broken food politics are in America, you couldn't do better than to read how farm lobbyists, teamed up with big food companies and malleable friends in both parties in the House and Senate, tore up USDA's fledgling, modest school lunch reforms as they wrote this year's agriculture spending bill.

Key Issues: 

Farming

Food

Healthy Eating

The leaders of Congress' Agriculture Committees continue to deliberate the next farm bill in secret, and the conventional wisdom now is that direct payments may see cuts or be entirely banished in the final product. We hope so.

Key Issues: 

Farming

Subsidies

A secret farm bill will leave out healthy food and hurt California. Nearly 70 environmental, public health, nutrition, food and farm groups – including EWG – are calling on California’s congressional delegation to take a stand in the current debate over food and agriculture policy.

Key Issues: 

Farming

Subsidies

Farm Policy

Food

Local & Sustainable

The new film “Freedom” is an industry bought-and-paid-for infomercial for environmentally destructive corn ethanol, masquerading as a pseudo-documentary on the nation’s oil addiction. Josh Tickell won the Sundance audience prize award for his 2009 film “Fuel.

Key Issues: 

Energy

Biofuels

Chensheng (Alex) Lu, Associate Professor of Environmental Exposure Biology at Harvard School of Public Health has advised parents and caregivers to use the Shopper's Guide to "keep nutritional foods in their children's diets but avoid the intake of pesticide residues in the high-pesticide-risk items." Lu’s comments came in a study publichsed in Environmental Health Perspectives, that found that about half of the foods most frequently eaten by children were on EWG's Dirty Dozen list.

Key Issues: 

Toxics

Pesticides

Food

Chemicals in Food

Since the Environmental Working Group released its 2011 Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce earlier this year, apologists for the pesticide industry and conventional agribusiness have attacked it.

Key Issues: 

Toxics

Pesticides

Farming

Food

Chemicals in Food

Amid an epidemic of childhood obesity, food companies are taking lessons from the tobacco industry on how to target children with advertisements for unhealthy products. The Sensible Food Policy Coalition is the latest industry attempt to undermine public health by lobbying Congress, federal agencies, the White House and the general public with misinformation and bad science.

Key Issues: 

Children’s Products

Food

Healthy Eating

Lobbyists for polluting industries and opponents of environmental regulation have been tripping over one another to come up with self-serving lists of targets for the Congressional Super Committee as it labors to find ways to reduce federal spending and trim the deficit. The nation deserves a more thoughtful approach, one that recognizes that Americans want, and deserve, to live in a place where air and water are clean, where soil and natural resources are conserved for future generations, and where health and safety – not merely profit – stand atop the hierarchy of public values.

Key Issues: 

Farming

Subsidies

Environment

Food

Healthy Eating

Chemicals in Food

Water

The current focus on deficit reduction has government leaders scrambling to find places to make significant cuts. Congress and the President are currently grappling with what to do about farm subsidies – namely the nearly $5 billion direct payment program that pays farmers and landowners year after year regardless of circumstances, and the federal crop insurance program that costs taxpayers between $6–to–$8 billion a year.

Key Issues: 

Farming

Subsidies