Obama Sells Out Supporters. . . Again

Perhaps the most corrupt agency in the United States is the Department of Agriculture (“USDA”). From the decades spent pimping an upside down food pyramid for the meat industry, to its attempts to reclassify ketchup as a vegetable to save money on school lunches, to the decades-long fight against food labeling, to Team Bush trying to prevent you from knowing if your food was genetically altered or if your milk contains hormones, to the trillions of taxpayer dollars handed out as subsidies to huge agribusinesses, the whole agency has been a blight on America. Fortunately, Obama changed this disgrace. Oh wait, no. . . no, he didn’t.

Over the last 100 years of incompetence and whoring itself to agribusiness, the USDA has done many disgraceful things. One of the worst things it’s done has been to utterly disregard its obligation to inspect our food supply, an obligation assigned to it by statute in 1909. The consequences of that have been an ever increasing number of recalls, though these recalls rarely happen until after enough members of the public are poisoned that other agencies get involved. . . and even then USDA resists the recall for a few more days.

But never fear, because Obama is here and he’ll save us all, right? Obama’s different, right? In fact, the left assumed that Obama would finally clean up the corrupt mess that is USDA. They assumed the days of the USDA doing the bidding of huge agribusiness was over. They were wrong.

Team Obama has just introduced a new rule that will require new inspection procedures for meat (13 samples before processing, 13 sample after processing, for each batch). Sounds good right? Not so fast. These rules will cost producers hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, and their value is dubious. More importantly, the cost is high enough that it will likely wipe out many small producers. One small producer estimates it will add $500,000 a year to their expenses, which they can’t afford.

But safe is safe right? Actually no. It turns out that the safety risks have been disproportionately linked to large-scale producers. The likely explanation for this is that customers of small producers pay closer attention to the producers, and because small producers have much more to lose from any failure, unlike large-scale producers who have little to fear. Notes Greg Higgins, the founding member of the sustainability-focused Chefs Collaborative:

“[The health scares] are all related to large-scale food production, whether it’s spinach from a massive grower in California or ground beef out of the Midwest, they’re all gigantic, they’re never these little plants.”

Dustin VandeHoer of the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship also thinks that applying these regulations to small producers makes no sense. He also worries that this will put small plants out of business.

Over the past few years, small producers have made significant in-roads into the market for specialty foods, locally grown foods, and organic foods. This regulation could be all it takes to wipe those small producers out. If the small producers shut their doors, then the small farms from which they purchase will no longer have an outlet for their products. In effect, these regulations could leave nothing but big players in agriculture.

So why would Obama do this? The suspicion being voiced by many is that Team Obama is doing a favor for the large producers who give generously when it comes to political contributions. When regulations makes little sense except to shut down influence-less competitors, that’s usually the reason.

It is also probably no coincidence that the current Agriculture Secretary, Tom Vilsack, has been in the back pocket of the biotech industry for years. He actually earned an award from a biotech industry lobbying group for passing a law in Iowa in 2005 that prevented local communities from regulating where genetically engineered crops could be grown. His nomination was opposed by the Organic Consumers Association because “Vilsack has repeatedly demonstrated a preference for large industrial farms and genetically modified crops.”

So much for Obama changing things. In fact, it looks suspiciously like Obama’s as big a tool for agribusiness as every other President before him. Surprise, surprise.

Personally, I’d like to see the USDA gutted. This agency has been corrupt since its birth and has only gotten worse. They need to be returned to an inspection agency that conducts its own on-site inspections. They need to stop protecting producers at the expense of consumers and stop issuing regulations that do little more than throw up barriers to entry. The inspection of our food supply should not be a political game with the booty going to the highest bidder.