Predicting Obama's Food Policy

On Monday, the New York Daily News blog Mouth of the Potomac passed along a rumor that President-elect Obama was thinking of moving Tom Vilsack, Obama's pick as Agriculture secretary, over to the Commerce Department.

Though the blog's source was "well-placed," it turns out the rumor was almost certainly not true. Vilsack's confirmation hearings are slated to begin in days, and his aides told KCCI TV in Des Moines, Iowa, that he is busily interviewing candidates for staff positions at the USDA.

So we're probably left with the somewhat-inscrutable Vilsack. Although nobody in the sustainable-agriculture movement is thrilled with the choice—Vilsack, a former governor of Iowa, doesn't seem likely to bring revolutionary change to agricultural policy—most people realize that there were far worse picks out there.

Still, some people are hopeful that Vilsack will be open to new ideas. New, that is, to the federal government. Some environmentalists have applauded his stances on issues such as global warming and conservation.

Tom Philpott, a blogger with the environment site Grist who has been closely following the issue, calls Vilsack a "boldly conventional" choice. Vilsack has supported both the biofuels industry and genetically modified crops.

Philpott also notes that Marshall Matz, who was the Obama campaign's main adviser on agriculture issues, recently wrote (along with George McGovern) an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune "advocating a business-as-usual approach to ag policy." The article, Philpott wrote, "is a lightweight document that hangs on easy platitudes."

True enough. Matz and McGovern essentially argue for maintaining our industrial food system, which is, among other bad things, wrecking the environment and harming our health.

They even go so far as to argue that the industrial agriculture system "is still the backbone of the economy in most rural counties across the nation" and that it "is a big factor in offsetting our unfavorable balance of international trade."

Nonsense. As Phillpott notes, "industrial ag has essentially emptied the countryside and hollowed out rural economies." And "if we're relying on farming to offset the decline of our industrial base, we're in deep trouble."

Matz, by the way, is a partner specializing in agriculture law and regulation at Olsson Frank Weeda. He represents agricultural businesses against federal regulators.

Still, in October, Obama showed that he at least knows what the problems are. Without prompting from Time magazine's Joe Klein, Obama said in an interview that he had read Michael Pollan's widely cited article in the New York Times Magazine calling for major changes in federal food policy. His remarks don't seem to square very well with the ideas of the people with whom he is surrounding himself, but they do offer cause for hope:

"I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollan about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the meantime, it's creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they're contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs."