Back in August, the Department of Justice announced an investigation into competition issues in the agricultural sector. This week, the Department released details of the workshops to be held, “to promote dialogue amongst interested parties.”
Public attendance and participation are encouraged in these workshops, and those seeking to get involved are encouraged to submit written comments by Dec 31, 2009: see details on the press release.
Here are the details from DoJ release:
March 12, 2010 – Issues of Concern to Farmers – Ankeny, Iowa
This event will serve as an introduction to the series of workshops, but also will focus specifically on issues facing crop farmers. Specific areas of focus may include seed technology, vertical integration, market transparency and buyer power.
FFA Enrichment Center
1055 Southwest Prairie Trail Parkway
Ankeny, Iowa
May 21, 2010 – Poultry Industry – Normal, Ala.
Specific areas of focus may include production contracts in the poultry industry, concentration and buyer power.
Alabama A&M University
Auditorium, James I. Dawson Cooperative Extension Building
4900 Meridian St.
Normal, Ala.
June 7, 2010 – Dairy Industry – Madison, Wisc.
Specific areas of focus may include concentration, marketplace transparency and vertical integration in the dairy industry.
University of Wisconsin
Great Hall, Memorial Union
800 Langdon St.
Madison, Wisc.
Aug. 26, 2010 – Livestock Industry – Fort Collins, Colo.
Specific areas of focus will address beef, hog and other animal sectors and may include enforcement of the Packers and Stockyards Act and concentration.
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, Colo.
Dec. 8, 2010 – Margins – Washington, D.C.
This workshop will look at the discrepancies between the prices received by farmers and the prices paid by consumers. As a concluding event, discussions from previous workshops will be incorporated into the analysis of agriculture markets nationally.
U.S. Department of Agriculture
Jefferson Auditorium
1400 Independence Ave., S.W.
Washington, D.C.
A study released this month reveal that 49% of American children will be in a household that uses food stamps at some point during their childhood. The study, conducted by Mark Rank and Thomas Hirschl at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis, is based on 30 years of data and examined children aged 1 – 20. Published in the journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, the findings also indicate significant differences based on race and the marital status of parents.
These findings come as participation in food assistance programs across the country continue on an upward trajectory. Enrollment in SNAP (the food stamp program) nationwide reached a record high in August 2009, at over 36.4m people. Some of the highest increases in enrollment from August 2008 to August 2009 were in the western states, with Nevada reporting a 53.1% increase, and other high figures in Washington (47.9%), Utah (47.3%) and Idaho (44.3%).
Click the image below to watch a video interview with study co-author Mark Rank discussing the findings:
Speaking at a forum addressing the challenges of feeding the world in 2050, FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf said that agriculture must become more productive in order to feed the world’s growing population:
“Agriculture will have no choice but to be more productive. Our analysis shows that future production increases would mostly come from yield growth and improved cropping intensity rather than from bringing more land into cultivation despite the fact that are still ample land resources with potential for crop production particularly in Latin America and sub-Sahara Africa. And this will require substantial increases in investment in the sector – better access to modern inputs, more irrigation systems, machinery and implements, more roads and better rural infrastructures, as well as more skilled and better trained farmers.” (Full text here p.1)
Reading between the lines
Diuof also spoke about the need to ensure that food is being produced by those that need it most, and of problems in distribution systems. It is interesting here to ask what we can read between the lines of the speech. Take this line as an example:
If people go hungry today it is not because the world is not producing enough food but because such food is not produced by the 70% of the world’s poor whose main livelihood is agriculture and who cannot afford to eat their fill. (from full speech, p. 3)
I could read two messages into this line — messages which embrace an altogether more alternative message than that usually espoused by the FAO:
- First, this sounds like a call for the localization of food production. Diouf says that a major problem is that food is not being produced by those that need it. If it were to be produced by those currently hungry, this would inevitably involve a significant degree of localization of what is currently a much more global food system.
- This also sounds like a recognition that markets are not functioning to distribute food efficiently and equitably. If we have enough food to feed everyone worldwide, but some aren’t getting what they need, we need to ask questions about the primary mechanism for food distribution: the Market. Do people have equal access to markets? Is food priced out of reach of those currently going hungry?
Can organic feed the world?
Diouf also continues to support intensification of agriculture, and the “judicious use of chemical fertilizers” (p.3). He challenges proponents of organic agriculture, stating:
while organic agriculture contributes to poverty reduction and should be promoted, it cannot feed 6.8 billion today and 9.1 billion in 2050. (from full speech, p. 3)
This conclusion conflicts with a recent study from the University of Michigan, however, that seeks to discount the idea that organic agriculture cannot feed the world. The research, published in Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems (pdf available here), evaluates the claims that organic agriculture cannot feed the world due to low yields and insufficient quantities of organically acceptable fertilizers. Their research, based on dataset of 293 sites worldwide, suggests that:
organic methods could produce enough food on a global per capita basis to sustain the current human population, and potentially an even larger population, without increasing the agricultural land base. (source)
Moreover, the study’s analysis of organic substitution of chemical fertilizers indicates that:
[in] temperate and tropical agroecosystems … leguminous cover crops could fix enough nitrogen to replace the amount of synthetic fertilizer currently in use. (source)
In searching through the ‘Supporting Documents’ posted to the forum website, I can find no mention of organic agriculture, and much less, a clear justification for the rejection of organic methods presented by Diouf. While I don’t spend all my time and energy supporting organic agriculture, I do feel that given the current state of the global food system, we should not be rejecting an agricultural method that offers so much in terms of environmental and social justice.
Resources
Listen to a podcast about about the University of Michigan study.
Watch video reports from the How to Feed the World 2050 forum.
Reference for U Michigan study:
Badgely, C. et al. (2007) Organic agriculture and the global food supply. Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, 22:2, 86-108.
Another interesting development for one of the most exciting Urban Agriculture programs: the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) announced – among many other commitments – that Milwaukee-based Growing Power will be branching out to work on food security issues in South Africa and Zimbabwe. The CGI Fifth Annual Meeting press release stated that:
Growing Power commits to strengthen food security for school children and their care givers in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Growing Power will build a new model of local food systems to ensure adequate nutrition in the short-term and build a long-term foundation for competitive African human capital in the global market place.
Growing Power has, under the leadership of Will Allen, expanded its operation from its roots in Milwaukee to add farms in Merton, Wisconsin and Chicago, and established satellite training sites in Massachusetts, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky and Mississippi.
This latest announcement looks set to bring Growing Power’s insight into the issues of urban agriculture and food access to Southern Africa. However as Tom Philpott points out at Grist, what works in Milwaukee won’t necessarily be appropriate in Maputo. Local resources, particularly in terms of the city food waste that Allen uses in Milwaukee, are very different. The project is posed as a cultural exchange, with activists learning from examples in both regions.
Keep an eye on the Growing Power blog for more on this.
Source: The Official White House Photostream
Last Thursday, Obama addressed the Organizing for America Health Care Forum, and in response to a question regarding food and exercise, spoke about the possibility of food system reform and establishing a farmers’ market at the White House.
His answer recognized the direct impact that conventional food systems have on the nation’s children through school lunches — referencing upcoming child nutrition legislation — and drew links between food system reform and the current debates surrounding health care.
On school meals, Obama had this to say:
When it comes to food, one of the things that we are doing is working with school districts. And the child nutrition legislation is going to be coming up. We provide an awful lot of school lunches out there and—and reimburse local school districts for school-lunch programs. Let’s figure out how can we get some fresh fruits and vegetables in the mix. Because sometimes you go into schools and—you know what the menu is, you know? It’s French fries, Tater Tots, hot dogs, pizza and—now, that’s what kids—let’s face it, that’s what kids want to eat, anyway (Laughter.) So it’s not just the schools’ fault.
A, that’s what kids may want to eat. B, it turns out that that food’s a lot cheaper, because of the distributions that we’ve set up. And so what we’ve got to do is to change how we think about, for example, getting local farmers connected to school districts, because that would benefit the farmers, delivering fresh produce, but right now they just don’t have the distribution mechanisms set up.
This last section demonstrates the growing awareness in Washington (or perhaps they always knew, but weren’t letting on) that cheap food is only cheap because of the way ag subsidies and food distribution and retail are currently set up. Acknowledging this fact will be a prerequisite for any future food system reform.
Obama continues to suggest that the First Lady might not stop at an organic garden for the White House:
One of the things that we’re trying to do now is to figure out, can we get a little farmers’ market—outside of the White House—I’m not going to have all of you all just tromping around inside—(laughter)—but right outside the White House—(laughter)—so that—so that we can—and—and—and that is a win-win situation.
It gives suddenly D.C. more access to good, fresh food, but it also is this enormous potential revenue-maker for local farmers in the area. And—and that—those kinds of connections can be made all throughout the country, and—and has to be part of how we think about health.
We’ll keep you posted! Thanks to Grist for the transcibed Q & A, and if you want to watch the entire Organizing for America Health Care Forum, you can do so below.
Time, Aug 21 2009
The cover story of Time Magazine’s Aug 21 issue today puts cheap food in the spotlight, and lays out a strong argument against the conventional food system. Following in the footsteps of Food Inc. and King Corn, Bryan Walsh’s article runs readers through the standard arguments against the mainstream, corn-heavy food system. Industrial animal production comes under particular scrutiny.
Although the article brings little new material to the debate, it will (hopefully) serve to add to the momentum behind current challenges to the food system. Walsh argues that we need a scaled down food system — to “quit thinking big” — with more distributed local and regional production, and in turn, more farmworkers. This need for a growth in farm and food system employment is linked to the current surge in unemployment. Walsh also recognizes that price remains the biggest obstacle to food system reform. Demand for food produced sustainably continues to outstrip both supply and consumers’ ability to pay for more sustainable food at higher prices.
Link to Dept of Justice Antitrust Division
Exciting news from the Department of Justice last week: the Department’s Antitrust Division is to run a series of workshops exploring competition issues in the agriculture sector, with the aim of developing an appropriate regulatory policy for the agriculture industry.
This engagement will take the form of a series of joint public workshops held by the DoJ and the USDA, both in DC and around the country. The press release stated that:
The joint Department of Justice/USDA workshops will address the dynamics of competition in agriculture markets including, among other issues, buyer power (also known as monopsony) and vertical integration. They will examine legal doctrines and jurisprudence and current economic learning, and will provide an opportunity for farmers, ranchers, consumer groups, processors, the agribusinesses, and other interested parties to provide examples of potentially anticompetitive conduct. The workshops will also provide an opportunity for discussion for any concerns about the application of the antitrust laws to the agricultural industry.
The announcement was followed by a speech on August 8 from Philip J. Weiser, Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the Antitrust Division entitled “Toward a Competition Policy Agenda for Agriculture Markets”. Weiser explores the role that agriculture played in the establishment of the antitrust laws, which are built on the Sherman Act, 1890. As described in the press release, Weiser also comments on the 5 areas that have been identified for examination in the workshops:
- evaluating the state and nature of competition in a range of agricultural markets
- the impact of vertical integration
- concerns about “buyer power”
- relevant regulatory regimes
- questions about the nature of transparency in the marketplace
It will be fascinating to see how these workshops develop, and to follow the development of new regulatory action or legislation that may emerge. Most importantly, these workshops are open to the public, and the Department of Justice and the USDA are soliciting comments from a range of stakeholders including lawyers, economists, agribusinesses, consumer groups, academics, agricultural producers and agricultural cooperatives. As Mary Hendrickson (University of Missouri) wrote to the comfood list last Sunday — and I hope she doesn’t mind me quoting:
It will be critical that consumers and communities emerge en masse to respond to these workshops, and also to new rules that will be coming out this fall from USDA-GIPSA. Many times the only people who comment on this are farmers who are struggling through price discrimination or other forms of discriminatory practices … or industry folks who are determined to make sure that we don’t get any sort of effective competition laws.
An example of “buyer power”
Finally, I want to close with an example which ties these competition and antitrust concerns to the comments on Eliot Coleman’s piece at Grist about local meat production and climate change — which I blogged about here a couple of days ago.
One of the concerns that arose in the (currently 68) comments following Coleman’s piece is the difficultly of making alternative meat production — on a smaller scale, selling to local markets — work when the meat processing infrastructure and regulatory regimes are set up for industrial, intensive, and corporate-controlled animal production.
Commenter Alida Antonia Cornelius describes how as stockyards close, producers now take their animals to auction, where buyers for large corporate producers purchase their animals to take for fattening and slaughter within the industrial animal production system. Alida writes:
When only two buyers show up at the auction to buy most of the feeder calves, they can pretty much control how much money is paid for them.
This demonstrates the issue of “buyer power”, or monopsony, that is on the list of the DoJ/USDA’s concerns. As Weiser explains:
where a firm possesses monopoly power, it may be able to charge prices higher than would be the case in a competitive market. Monopsony is the other side of the coin. When there are a number of producers in an “input market” and a dominant buyer of those products, the buyer may exert its power to press the prices lower than they would be if the buying market were more competitive–i.e., if the sellers had more choices of where and to whom to sell their products.
The issue of excessively consolidated buyer power in the agricultural sector is just one of the issues these competition workshops will examine. If they were to find evidence that undue monopsony exists in agricultural markets, a logical and ideal outcome might include the expansion of smaller-scale, regional buyers with associated processing infrastructure.
So … stay tuned for more news on these workshops, and prepare comments to submit. The workshops will be held early in 2010. If you have comments to submit, follow these instructions (from the press release):
Interested parties should submit written comments in both paper and electronic form to the Department of Justice no later than Dec. 31, 2009. All comments received will be publicly posted. Two paper copies should be addressed to the Legal Policy Section, Antitrust Division, U.S. Department of Justice, 450 5th Street,N.W., Suite 11700, Washington, D.C. 20001. The Department’s Antitrust Division is requesting that the paper copies of each comment be sent by courier or overnight service, if possible. The electronic version of each comment should be submitted to agriculturalworkshops@usdoj.gov. Detailed agendas and schedules for the workshops will be made available on the Antitrust Division’s web site at www.usdoj.gov/atr.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced last week that August 23-29 will be National Community Gardening Week, and declared the need for Americans to connect with the land, the food it grows, and their local communities.
A community garden is an opportunity to educate everyone about from where food comes, whether that is a Farmers Market or a garden, and is important to increasing generations of healthy eaters. Community gardens can be anywhere whether it is in the country, a city or a suburb. It can be one community plot or can be many individual plots.
“Community gardens provide numerous benefits including opportunities for local food production, resource conservation, and neighborhood beautification,” said Vilsack. “But they also promote family and community interaction and enhance opportunities to eat healthy, nutritious foods. Each of these benefits is something we can and should strive for.”
Annoucing the release of a package of food system research yesterday, Hilary Benn called for a “radical rethink of how we produce and consume our food”. I couldn’t agree more.
Benn, UK Government Secretary for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said that:
we need to consider what food system should look like in 20 years, and what must happen to get there. We need everyone in the food system to get involved – from farmers and retailers to the health service, schools and consumers.
The package includes the following components:
- The UK’s first Food Security Assessment (available to download here)
- A discussion document on developing a set of indicators for sustainability in the food system (read more here)
- An online discussion forum called Food 2030, which allows us to submit comments in response to a discussion document (get started here)
Take a look at the documents, and have your say via the online discussion…
public enemy number 1?
I just want to offer my opinion on a recent thread of the debate about the impact of meat-eating on climate change, and what’s best to do about it. I’m particularly interested in what Eliot Coleman had to say about the issue in a recent letter to Grist, but I’ll give you the backstory first.
First, WaPo columnist Erza Klein published an article suggesting that people eat less meat because of its huge carbon footprint. Fair enough.
Second, and predictably, this was vigorously refuted by a meat industry lobbyist in a letter to the editor. In this case, J. Patrick Boyle of the American Meat Institute did the leg work. He claimed that the GHG emissions of the US meat industry are in fact far lower than those described by Klein, who based his article on the 2006 FAO study Livestock’s Long Shadow.
Third, Tom Philpott at Grist did a good job demonstrating how Boyle had carefully picked his stats to form a counter-argument that absolves the US meat industry, when in fact, the Klein’s original article had been pretty much on the mark.
Now we get back to subject of this post:
Author and farmer Eliot Coleman of Four Season Farm in Maine wrote a response to Philpott’s piece, questioning the argument that because meat production has such high GHG emissions we need to stop eating meat. He argues that “The culprit is not meat eating but rather the excesses of corporate/industrial agriculture”. Coleman’s letter continues to argue the case for pasture-raised, grass-fed beef — that by avoiding the reliance of intensively-raised beef on feed crops (which in turn require fertilizer and transportation), the GHG emissions of extensively-reared cattle are much lower. On my reading, Coleman’s argument comes in two parts:
- that there are significant differences in GHG emissions between different models of livestock production, extensive being less damaging than intensive,
- therefore that the recognition that as currently managed, meat production results in unacceptable GHG emissions, does not mean that we need to eliminate meat-eating. Coleman suggests that we can switch instead to more benign production models.
I feel that Coleman makes a good point: it is important that we avoid simply constructing a straw man in meat-eating as a physiological-social practice, and then demanding that it be reduced or eliminated because of the high GHG emissions caused by meat production. While reducing meat consumption is undoubtedly important, there’s another approach open to us — and this is Coleman’s argument — we can change the way we produce meat.
A realist perspective would suggest that even if it was desirable, it’s highly unlikely that the almost-300 million non-vegetarians will stop eating meat within the timeframe necessary to make significant cuts in GHG emissions. So we have to pick an approach that will work. The FAO report argues that we must accept the existence of intensive meat production, and work to make it less environmentally damaging. Coleman reminds us that extensive production offers another model, and while it could not meet the current demand for meat sustainably, it could play a much greater role, particularly if overall meat consumption were reduced.
In reading the comments posted below Coleman’s letter, readers repeatedly question Coleman’s assumptions about methane production. They suggest that higher methane emissions are an uncounted carbon cost in the extensive model that Coleman advocates.
As for the methane — and I’m no expect — opinions differ. Coleman states: “Excess flatulence is also a function of an unnatural diet.” — suggesting that flatulence is greater in cattle eating the ‘unatural diets fed in intensive systems — and continues to suggest that “If cattle flatulence on a natural grazing diet were a problem, heat would have been trapped a 1000 years ago when, for example, there were 70 million buffalo in North America”.
This issue is more complicated than this quote suggests. In intensive production, artificial diets are adjusted to reduce methane emissions. The FAO reports:
For the United States, US-EPA (2005) reports that greater efficiency of livestock production has already led to an increase in milk production while methane emissions decreased over the last several decades. The potential for efficiency gains (and therefore for methane reductions) is even larger for beef and other ruminant meat production, which is typically based on poorer management, including inferior diets. (p. 120)
The key factor to remember here is that feed production is not benign in emissions terms. The FAO again:
When evaluating techniques for emission reduction it is important to recognize that feed and feed supplements used to enhance productivity may well involve considerable greenhouse gas emissions to produce them, which will affect the balance negatively. (p. 120)
When the emissions associated with the production of feed crops, and the supplements used to reduce enteric methane emissions are accounted for, the overall balance can tip the other way. A commenter on Coleman’s article pointed me towards a study by Casey and Holden that examined GHG emissions from conventional, agri-ecological and organic suckler-beef production in Ireland. Their results show that although the contribution of enteric fermentation to overall GHG emissions is higher in organic production, the overall emissions (per unit and per area) are successively lower in the agri-ecological, and then organic models than the conventional model. Thus the contribution of enteric methane is offset by the reduced emissions contribution of external feed and fertilizer (If you want the details of this, check out the authors table on of emissions contributions in the results section).
Where does this leave us?
Working from the realist assumption that people will continue to eat meat, we can focus our efforts on changing what meat they eat, and how much meat they eat. Changing consumer preferences will take us a little of the way, but the missing piece now is strong regulatory involvement in the industrial food system: both intensive animal production, and the heavily subsidized corn and soy production on which it rests.
It is vital that in this debate, people are clear about the statistics in play. A US equivalent of the study conducted by Casey and Holden on Irish beef production would be a valuable addition to this debate.
