News Coverage
What's in the Water?
New Rules Make it Harder for Reporters (or anyone else) to Find Out
Published March 28, 2003
Much has been made lately of the proliferation of government secrecy. Whether our receding rights to information serve the cause of national security and how much the one weighs against the other are not always easy questions to answer. But what cause does secrecy serve when it conceals potentially fatal environmental risks?
The problem is manure: millions of tons of it produced on American factory farms every year. Much of this waste winds up poisoning the nation's lakes and waterways, and is suspected in over a hundred deaths and thousands of hospitalizations, as The Dayton Daily News reported in a recent series on megafarms. The courts have taken notice, and last December the Environmental Protection Agency just met a deadline to improve runoff regulation under the Clean Water Act. The agency's solution - leaving regulation to the states - underwhelmed environmentalists. For journalists, though, one provision stood out: the waste management plans that are supposed to solve the problem will be written by the farms themselves, and kept by them on-site. And rather than reporting their discharge to regulators once a month or quarterly, as most factories and sewage plants do, the farms will report once a year.
Or maybe they won't. While the EPA was effectively putting the fox in charge of the henhouse, the 2002 federal farm bill moved pollution management even further from scrutiny. Under the new law, farms that come to the U.S. Department of Agriculture for money for environmental problems are assured that the information in their waste-management plans will be kept secret, not only from the public, but from regulators like the state and federal EPA. Now, we haven't yet seen what happens if a farmer tells the EPA that it can't have his pollution-management plan because it's protected by the USDA. But when the Daily News reporter Ben Sutherly tried to find out the dimensions of the manure lagoon at a farm he suspected of evading regulation, the USDA denied his Freedom of Information Act request for the farm's waste-management plan. As a result of the 2002 farm bill, it said, that information is proprietary. The paper is considering an appeal.
All this creates a "pretty disturbing gap" in what was supposed to be the government's strategy for regulating farm pollution, says Ken Cook, founder and president of the Environmental Working Group. "To have a veil of secrecy that would make it harder to check if the environment is being protected, is political cowardice." We couldn't agree more.
The USDA has a history of siding with farmers against FOIA requests. What is new, and gives all these provisions troubling strength, is the Bush administration's practice of denying FOIA requests whenever possible (see CJR, January/February 2002).
That places the burden on lawmakers to put FOIA protections in black and white - something that could have been done in the farm bill - and on journalists to make sure we know when they don't.