The Latest on Farming
“The less we spend on food, the more we spend on health care,” author and food activist Michael Pollan said on Oprah. Today, Americans spend almost 20 cents of every dollar managing disease -- diabetes, allergies, asthma, cancer, obesity -- and only 10 cents of every dollar on food. The jury is still out on what exactly may be causing all these epidemics, but genetics don't change that quickly. The environment does. And increasing evidence points to the role that diet is playing in the onset of disease.
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Tonight, President Obama will announce a budget freeze as part of his State of the Union address. The New York Times' Jackie Calmes described today (Jan. 27) what specific programs will be hit: "The freeze would cover the agencies and programs for which Congress allocates specific budgets each year, including air traffic control, farm subsidies, education, nutrition and national parks."
Read MoreClearly, the only criterion Forbes magazine uses when determining which U.S. corporation wins its yearly “Company of the Year” title must be profit. That’s the only way to explain how a company as notorious as Monsanto could possibly get the nod for 2009 from the mag, which proclaims itself “The Capitalist Tool.”
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The Wall Street Journal's Real Time Economics blog interviewed Minnesota Twins' President Jerry Bell (subscription required) and asked him about the Twins' new taxpayer-funded stadium.
Read MoreThe American Farm Bureau convention irresponsibly passed a resolution opposing climate change legislation on January 12th. Laughably, at the same time they threw down the gauntlet on climate legislation, the Farm Bureau also created a Budget Deficit Reduction Task Force.
Read MoreReliable Big Ag accomplice Collin Peterson, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, made clear last week that he plans to vote NO on the pending climate bill, after signaling as much this spring. Peterson's move comes after he extracted lucrative concessions in the bill for Big Ag -- concessions that were sold as crucial to securing agriculture's support for the legislation.
Read MoreLast summer, EWG President Ken Cook dropped in on the Kickapoo Country Fair held by Organic Valley - a farmer-owned cooperative of more than 1,300 organic family farmers nationwide – in LaFarge, Wisc. There he was interviewed by Dorothee Royal-Hedinger, the host, web video producer and blogger for OrganicNation.TV website.
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The Center For America Progress's Eric Alterman and Mickey Ehrlich have written an interesting piece on recent legislation and the impact that campaign contributions from well-funded special interests have had on the final shape of critical bills.
Read MoreThe CBS Evening News with Katie Couric aired a piece on Thursday (Jan. 8 ) called Where America Stands on Obesity. The report cites many factors for the nation's current obesity epidemic, including some that haven't gotten much attention.
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It's tough to rattle a scientist's cage. But Bob Stallman, president of the American Farm Bureau, has found a way by scoffing repeatedly at the biblical calamities that climate change is predicted to bring down on agriculture. Stallman denies that climate change even exists and pounds the denier drum daily to the members of America's largest agriculture organization.
Read MoreEPA Administrator Lisa Jackson is the new head of the Chesapeake Executive Council, replacing Virginia Governor Tim Kaine. The panel, which sets policy for the federal-state effort to restore the Chesapeake Bay's health, met this week to make the shift official.
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Michael Pollan made an appearance on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart Monday night to promote his latest book, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual. He came out swinging at Big Ag and the subsidies doled out to commodity crops such as corn and soybeans that are artificially cheap and have "a very high cost in terms of health and terms of the environment."
Read MoreA flurry of blog postings in the last two days have pointed out that the conservative Minnesota congresswoman, who has regularly attacked President Obama’s health care and foreclosure relief proposals as “socialism,” takes full advantage of taxpayer dollars through the dysfunctional federal farm subsidy program – to the tune of $259,332 paid to a family farm between 1995 and 2008.
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The Cato Institute's Sallie James has an eye-popping post on Cato's Liberty blog: Well, here’s an interesting, if three-weeks-old, story. Apparently the North Dakota Farm Bureau’s annual convention recently passed a policy calling for the elimination of all agricultural programs.
Read MoreIn October, EWG released a report that questioned the misguided claims made by farm lobby organizations and their patrons in Congress who are arguing that climate change legislation would cause devastating increases in the costs of production. Crying Wolf clearly demonstrated that any increases in farmers' production costs would be minimal and would be lost in the background noise of annual swings in income caused by yield variation, crop prices and the cost of seed and chemicals -- a small price to pay to protect agriculture from the crippling droughts, volatile weather and increased pest and disease outbreaks expected as the planet warms.
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Taking steps to confront the threat of a warming planet would have the huge added payoff of making people healthier around the globe, a group of scientists have concluded in a unique package of new research papers.
The health “co-benefits” of cutting greenhouse gas emissions include significantly cutting rates of heart and artery disease, respiratory infections, strokes, various cancers, lung disease and dementia, the scientists found. They argue that the financial savings from these health gains could offset a significant portion of the economic cost of reducing emissions.
Read MoreLaw professor Neil Hamilton penned a harsh critique of the Farm Bureau's dangerously shortsighed opposition to climate change legislation in a guest column in
Read MoreLast night, Stephen Stock -- lead investigative reporter for Florida's CBS-TV 4's I-Team -- aired a report on people collecting taxpayer-funded farm subsidies for years after they've died. Stephen's story is a timely follow-up to a Government Accountability Office report two years ago that showed how $1.1 billion in those federal subsidies went to the estates or companies of dead farmers over the course of 7 years.
Read MoreBig Ag is taking a beating from Al Gore's recent green blitz of late night comedy shows. On tour promoting his new book, Our Choice, the former VP and Nobel Prize and Oscar winner has been blunt in his assessments of agriculture's contribution to the climate change crisis.
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