Washington Insider -- Thursday

By DTN's Washington Insider

Here's a quick monitor of Washington farm and trade policy issues from DTN's well-placed observer.

Resolution of Tax Incentives Problems Remains Elusive

Senators have yet to agree on a way forward that would allow a vote on a bill to reauthorize a package of tax incentives covering a wide range of industries. The legislation would extend more than 50 tax provisions for two years (including one for biodiesel producers), and even though it appears to have wide congressional support, there remain disagreements on several issues. The most contentious at this point appears to be whether to retain an excise tax on medical devices.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Wash., and ranking member Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, favor repealing the device tax, which they say stifles innovation. However, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and the Obama administration oppose repeal of the tax, which helps pay for Obamacare.

An agreement would clear the way for the measure to reach the Senate floor, and to likely passage. Failure to reach a deal risks pushing a vote on the tax extenders package well into the summer or even past the fall midterm elections. And if Republicans were to gain a majority in the Senate in the November elections, the package likely would return to the drawing board and emerge from next year's Finance Committee in vastly different shape.

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House Approves Water Projects Bill

After months of congressional debate, the House this week overwhelmingly (412-4) approved a conference report that would authorize a number of Army Corps of Engineers water projects. The conference report, a compromise between the House and Senate versions of the legislation, is expected to face a vote in the Senate as early as today.

The legislation would authorize projects to widen and deepen ports and coastal navigation channels; improve and replace locks, dams and levees on inland waterways; enhance dam safety; engage in ecosystem restoration projects, especially in wetlands; and enhance structures to help protect against storm damage, such as barrier sand dunes. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the legislation would cost $5.4 billion over 2015-19.

In debate prior to the House vote, many members praised the legislation for the funds it would provide the Army Corps for dredging U.S. ports in anticipation of the deeper-draft ships that will be moving through the Panama Canal when the current expansion work there is completed. The legislation also would speed up project studies and environmental reviews by requiring more coordination among federal agencies.

The Senate is expected to approve the legislation.

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Washington Insider: Questions of Future of Organic Sustainability

Henry Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, was the founding director of the Food and Drug Administration's Office of Biotechnology and now is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He commented to the press recently on what he calls the myth that organic production is more "sustainable" than that produced with conventional technologies.

First, Dr. Miller observes that the organic section of your local supermarket is growing as advocates increasingly support organic certified production in everything from milk and coffee to meat and vegetables as a "sustainable" way to feed the planet's expanding population.

For example, the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental group, goes so far as to say organic farming "has the potential to contribute to sustainable food security by improving nutrition intake and sustaining livelihoods in rural areas, while simultaneously reducing vulnerability to climate change and enhancing biodiversity." The evidence, Dr. Miller says, argues otherwise.

He cites a study by the Israeli Institute for Water Research at Ben-Gurion University published last year in the journal Hydrology and Earth System Sciences that concludes that "intensive organic agriculture relying on solid organic matter, such as composted manure as the sole fertilizer resulted in significant down-leaching of nitrate" into groundwater — hardly a hallmark of sustainability, he opines.

Moreover, as agricultural scientist Steve Savage has documented on the Sustainablog website, wide-scale composting generates significant amounts of greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide. Compost may also deposit pathogenic bacteria on or in food crops, which has led to more frequent occurrences of food poisoning in the United States and elsewhere.

He also questions the efficiency of organic farming on the grounds that while it might work well for certain local environments on a small scale, its farms produce far less food per unit of land and water than conventional ones. Organic yields are typically 20% to 50% below conventional agriculture. They also impose various stresses on land and especially on water consumption, based on an analysis published in the Journal of Environmental Management. That report found that "ammonia emissions, nitrogen leaching and nitrous oxide emissions per product unit were higher from organic systems" than conventional farming systems, as were "land use, eutrophication potential and acidification potential per product unit."

Another limitation of organic production is that it disfavors the best approach to enhancing soil quality, which is minimization of soil disturbances such as tilling, combined with the use of cover crops. Both approaches help to limit soil erosion and the runoff of fertilizers and pesticides. Organic growers frequently do plant cover crops, but in the absence of effective herbicides, they often rely on tillage (or even labor-intensive hand weeding) to control plant pests.

Miller also points out that it is a myth that organic agriculture does not employ pesticides, when in fact it does allow more than 20 chemicals (mostly containing copper and sulfur) that are commonly used and are acceptable under U.S. organic rules. They include nicotine sulfate, which is extremely toxic to warm-blooded animals, and rotenone, which is moderately toxic to most mammals but so toxic to fish that it's widely used for the mass poisoning of unwanted fish populations during restocking projects.

Miller then observes that it is highly illogical for organic certification programs to exclude "genetically modified organisms" but allow those modified with less precise and predictable techniques. He points out that except for wild berries and wild mushrooms, virtually all the fruits, vegetables and grains in our diet have been genetically improved by one technique or another, often through what are called wide crosses, which move genes from one species or genus to another in ways that do not occur in nature. Therefore, the exclusion from organic agriculture of organisms simply because they were crafted with modern, superior techniques makes no sense. It also denies consumers nutritionally improved foods, such as oils with enhanced levels of omega-3 fatty acids.

In recent decades, there have been advances in agriculture that have been more environmentally friendly and sustainable than ever before. These, he thinks, have been produced by science-based research and technological ingenuity by farmers, plant breeders and agribusiness companies rather than from social elites opposed to modern insecticides, herbicides, genetic engineering and "industrial agriculture." The result, he thinks is a far less sustainable or natural system than advocates imply, and has little chance of providing the increases in production the world needs, Washington Insider believes.

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