Tag: corporate farms

Brazil’s Rousseff signs new forest law opposed by farm lobby

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Brazil enacted a controversial law on Thursday meant to protect forests and force farmers to replant trees on scattered swathes of illegally cleared land totaling an area roughly the size of Italy.

The law, signed by President Dilma Rousseff, overhauls the “forest code,” a set of laws unchanged for decades that dictates the minimum percentage and type of woodland that farmers, timber companies and others must leave intact on their properties.

The new code, following years of tense negotiations with Brazil’s powerful farm lobby, is considered necessary to help establish clearer rules for the ranchers, soy growers and other producers who pushed into the Amazon rainforest and other sensitive climes in recent decades, enabling Brazil to become one of the world’s biggest exporters of food…

But the lobby, which fought to keep the law lenient, now says it could challenge the final version in court after Rousseff late Wednesday vetoed a handful of congressional changes.

Environmentalists have opposed the bill because it reduces the total forest area many farmers are required to keep intact. Many critics also believe the law does too little to punish those who have conducted illegal clearing in the past…

Brazil is a global commodity powerhouse and a major producer of soy, corn, sugar, coffee, oranges, cotton and beef. Illegal land clearance has enabled cattle ranchers and producers of soy, the top export crop, to expand into the Amazon basin.

The rate of deforestation has slowed in recent years because of tougher law enforcement and the use of satellite imagery to track areas with the most troubling rates of clearcutting.

But environmentalists fear that trend could reverse as Rousseff dismantles longstanding environmental policies in a push to further develop the economy, which began to slow last year after nearly a decade of steady growth.

RTFA for the details. A lot of this sounds just like another day in the life of our American Congress. Lobbyists buy and sell our elected representatives. Passing laws that should benefit the lives of citizens and future generations is like an episode from one of our wars. Corporate lobbyists, profiteers present themselves as defenders of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – simply aiding poor little mom-and-pop farms.

I wonder when they’re going to discover Clean Coal?

No one in government ever felt we should track antibiotics in the meat we eat – WTF?

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The numbers released quietly by the federal government this year were alarming. A ferocious germ resistant to many types of antibiotics had increased tenfold on chicken breasts, the most commonly eaten meat on the nation’s dinner tables.

But instead of a learning from a broad national inquiry into a troubling trend, scientists said they were stymied by a lack of the most basic element of research: solid data.

Eighty percent of the antibiotics sold in the United States goes to chicken, pigs, cows and other animals that people eat, yet producers of meat and poultry are not required to report how they use the drugs — which ones, on what types of animal, and in what quantities…

Advocates contend that there is already overwhelming epidemiological evidence linking the two, something that even the Food and Drug Administration has acknowledged, and that further study, while useful for science, is not essential for decision making. “At some point the available science can be used in making policy decisions,” said Gail Hansen, an epidemiologist who works for Pew Charitable Trusts…

But scientists say the blank spots in data collection are a serious handicap in taking on powerful producers of poultry and meat who claim the link does not exist.

The Food and Drug Administration has tried in fits and starts to regulate the use of antibiotics in animals sold for food. Most recently it restricted the use of cephalosporins in animals — the most common antibiotics prescribed to treat pneumonia, strep throat and urinary tract infections in people.

But advocates say the agency is afraid to use its authority. In 1977, the F.D.A. announced that it would begin banning some agricultural uses of antibiotics. The House and Senate appropriations committees — dominated by agricultural interests — passed resolutions against any such bans, and the agency retreated…

Regulators say it is difficult even to check for compliance with existing rules. They have to look for the residue of misused or banned drugs in samples of meat from slaughterhouses and grocery stores, rather than directly monitoring use of antibiotics on farms. “We have all these producers saying, ‘Yes, of course we are following the law,’ but we have no way to verify that,” said Dr. Hansen…

All the “heroes” of both parties have walked away from any responsibility to get this sorted.

RTFA. More details – leading to the conclusions you must expect. Congress represents moneyed interests, corporate producers, before they ever consider the American families that voted them into office. Corruption has always been endemic. Nothing has been done or is being done to press the regulatory agencies into doing their job – or mandating cooperation from the corporations making their profits from protein that walks around.

One more of those issues we may see dealt with if and when we have sufficient leverage in Congress and the White House to get it done. If you believe. If you live long enough.

Farm law “reform” would increase subsidies, guarantee farm income

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The farm law being written by agricultural leaders in Congress — and the lobbyists who own them — would boost support rates for some crops and may remove caps on how much money growers collect in subsidies.

Three agricultural sources said that crops grown in the Midwest and Plains — corn, soybeans and wheat — would be covered by one subsidy plan, while cotton and rice, grown in the South, each would have a separate program.

This three-track plan is designed to shore up support from a broader number of farm-state lawmakers for a new approach to farm policy.

Leaders of the House and Senate Agriculture committees…hope to piggyback it onto a government-wide deficit bill in exchange for a $23 billion cut in their programs. It would bar any change in their plan and enact it a year ahead of schedule…

“There’s nothing good about any of this,” said agricultural economist Vince Smith of Montana State University after reviewing the expected crop subsidy changes.

Higher supports could encourage growers to over-produce, said Smith, and they could breach world trade rules against production-distorting subsidies…

Under their plan, corn, soybean and wheat growers would get federal payments when revenue from a crop was more than 15 percent below average, said a farm lobbyist. Crop insurance would cover deep losses. So-called marketing loans would put a floor on prices.

Cotton growers would operate with a higher marketing loan and revenue insurance policies. Target prices for rice and peanuts would be raised, an effective guarantee of revenue.

The package also could remove caps on subsidy payments.

What would happen if someone offered a bill before Congress guaranteeing income protection for working class Americans? Yes, I know that’s a silly question. The bill would never get out of committee much less face a vote before our manure pile of politicians.

Congress is more likely to vote for guaranteeing a healthy life for chickens before schoolchildren.