The U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry recently approved the Agriculture Reform, Food and Jobs Act of 2012, also known as the Farm Bill. Because the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, accounts for the lion’s share of this bill’s budget, representing about two-thirds of 2008 Farm Bill spending, innovation in SNAP could have a tremendous impact in improving the nutritional status of its participants. Last year over 45 million people were enrolled in the program, which combats hunger by providing a monthly benefit to low-income households to purchase food. Read More >
This story has conflict, suspense, fast-moving legislators (oh, my!), and sexy terms like “conservation compliance,” so stick around.
The fast-moving legislators have already entered the stage and have been acting against type by drastically speeding up the normally glacial process of creating a new farm bill. The Senate Agriculture Committee on Thursday finished marking up a version of the bill that will now be sent to the full Senate. Read More >
Carole Morison, independent chicken farmer
Two years ago, the U.S. Department of Justice raised a lot of hopes among contract farmers that they would finally get some help from the federal government in their struggles with corporate control of the livestock industries.
The department’s Antitrust Division held five workshops around the country that dealt with competition (or the lack of it) in agricultural markets. There were sessions devoted to poultry, dairy and beef/hogs.
At the poultry workshop in Normal, Ala., contract farmers had a forum to vent about their disempowering relationships with corporate integrators. Many spoke out despite fear of reprisals from the industry. DOJ’s antitrust chief, Christine Varney, handed her business card to any farmer who expressed such fears. They could call her directly if industry threatened them with retaliation for speaking out, she said. Read More >
No farms, no food.
It’s a slogan you might have seen on a bumper sticker somewhere. Substitute “soil” for “farms” and you have a sentiment that’s equally apt. Maintaining our future food security and our health requires us to preserve the quantity and quality of a vital natural resource—the topsoil that we need to grow healthy food. Read More >
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus
News media outlets throughout the nation were abuzz last week with the report of new scientific research showing, for the first time, how a strain of infectious Staph began life in humans, then spread to livestock where it became MRSA, and then jumped back to humans. The study was published Tuesday in the online journal mBio.
National Public Radio’s popular blog, The Salt, noted in its lead story Tuesday, that “Researchers have nailed down something scientists, government officials and agribusiness proponents have argued about for years: whether antibiotics in livestock feed give rise to antibiotic-resistant germs that can threaten humans.”
“Finally, a smoking gun connecting livestock antibiotics and superbugs,” said a headline in the online environmental publication Grist, written by contributing writer Tom Laskawy. As one who has covered the topic for years, Laskawy was not understating the importance of the research. Read More >
Agree/Disagree: The Farm Bill is a Public Health bill.
For those of you who agree, give yourself a pat on the back! For those of you who do not believe that the Farm Bill is a Public Health bill, read on, and we just might convince you.
As Roni Neff, PhD, Research and Policy Director for the Center for a Livable Future, explains, the Farm Bill affects the health of the American public in at least five important ways: Read More >
How are concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) profiting from Farm Bill subsidy programs targeted at U.S. crop farmers? How are these “hidden subsidies” for industrial farm animal production (IFAP) hurting more sustainable food animal producers? The answers to these questions lie—and are at stake—in the convoluted world of the 2012 Farm Bill legislation.
To say that the Farm Bill is both large and complex is understating the obvious. This legislation impacts every aspect of our food system. One role that the Farm Bill has is to dole out billions to subsidize various producers and industries of the U.S. food economy. A large portion of these programs subsidize crop production. The largest recipients of the most federal dollars through these programs are corn and soybean producers. Read More >
This November, the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future joined with fellow members of the Healthy Farms, Healthy People coalition steering committee to officially launch the Healthy Farms, Healthy People coalition—“a broad-based collaboration of organizations committed to achieving a healthier nation in tandem with a strong farm economy through policy reform at the local, state and national level.”
The Coalition will work on short-term targeted policy efforts, as well as long-term goals centered on policy change and information-sharing across sectors. The Coalition brings together stakeholders from the health, agricultural, anti-hunger, environmental and economic development communities, whose diverse expertise is necessary to make such reforms to the food system a reality. Read More >
I’d like to contribute to the Farm Bill discussion initiated earlier this week in a Baltimore Sun op-ed penned by Tom Albright, Holly Freishtat and the CLF’s own Bob Lawrence. The op-ed called for farmers’ markets to be provided with electronic benefits transfer (EBT) technology, to ensure that they are able to process purchases made with SNAP benefits (otherwise known as food stamps). The authors rightly point out that providing EBT at farmers’ markets would provide both a financial boon for local farmers, and increased access to fresher, more nutritious food for SNAP participants, who often live in areas where such food can be hard to come by and difficult to afford. I encourage you to read the op-ed for more information on the cost and benefits of this provision, and would like to add a few additional points for your consideration. Read More >
The Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future has launched the Farm Bill Budget Visualizer, an innovative web-based application that allows visual analysis of Farm Bill spending since the 2008 Farm Bill.
The Budget Visualizer uses “treemap” technology, a method of displaying spending data as nested rectangles, which allows users to “see” the proportion of federal funding received by Farm Bill programs. The application, developed in partnership with the Hive Group, is intended as an educational aid for the general public, advocacy groups, and policymakers who wish to better understand the relationships among public health and other priorities, and federal spending in the Farm Bill. Read the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s news release announcing the Farm Bill Budget Visualizer. Read More >
