The National Academy of Sciences should review the health, environmental and safety effects of E15 ethanol blends before they’re allowed on the market, but limiting EPA’s authority to enforce the Clean Air Act would be a bad idea.

When the farm bill fight gets rolling again in Congress, one question will be at the heart of the debate: Is it fair to ask farmers to take a few basic steps to protect soil and clean up waterways in return for the billions of dollars that taxpayers spend each year to provide them with cut-rate crop insurance?

Genetically engineered food is commonplace on supermarket shelves today, but food manufacturers aren't required to disclose GMO ingredients on the label. We have a right to know what's in our food!

Climate Change activists should be concerned about proposed cuts to farm bill conservation programs, which would be the carbon emissions equivalent of adding 2 million cars a year to America’s roads. As a possible 2012 farm bill looms, the ag committee leaders and their industrial agriculture lobby remoras are sorting through the smoking ruins of the 2011 secret farm bill process.

For the third consecutive year, the Environmental Protection Agency has drastically reduced cellulosic biofuel mandates, citing economic and technological hurdles. Even though industry officials consistently assure lawmakers and taxpayers that commercial production is “just around the corner,” EPA yesterday reduced the 2012 cellulosic mandate by ninety eight percent.

Gulf state taxpayers help fund the creation of agriculture pollution they ultimately deal with. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has launched a new initiative to pay Gulf Coast farm businesses in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida $50 million over the next three years to help reduce the pollution that runs off their farm fields into the public’s waters.

With deliberations on the 2012 farm bill due to begin in January, EWG looks at how the industrial agriculture lobby dominates the hearing process, leaving little room for good food reformers.

Details became public today of a farm bill proposal written in secret by the top leaders of the House and Senate Agriculture committees and sent this week to the Congressional “Super Committee.” As Environmental Working Group had predicted, huge grain and cotton operations would harvest a windfall in taxpayer dollars while hardworking American families that are just scraping by would be badly hurt by cuts to vital nutrition programs such as SNAP (formerly called food stamps).

Industrial agriculture’s lobbyists and a handful of their powerful Congressional allies have been working overtime to skirt the usual democratic process and write a new five-year farm bill behind closed doors.