Washington Insider -- Tuesday

By DTN's Washington Insider

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

Vilsack Concedes Lack of Movement on Transatlantic Partnership Talks

Neither side is happy about where negotiations are on the agriculture chapter of a potential Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) free trade agreement, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told the press yesterday in Europe. The secretary was in Luxembourg where he met with European Union agriculture ministers as well as EU Farm Commissioner Dacian Ciolos.

Vilsack is in Europe this week to meet with agriculture and trade officials as well as stakeholders about the forthcoming TTIP negotiations ––with stops planned in Luxembourg, Brussels, Paris and Dublin, in addition to Luxembourg.

He told reporters that both sides needed to focus on the fact that they share a "common language" which is science. This is in reference the EU's precautionary approach to food safety issues such as GMOs, an approach that focuses more on social and political pressures than on science. In the United States, by contrast, foods produced from GMO crops have been on supermarket shelves since the mid-1990s. Calls to label those foods for other than scientific reasons are growing, however.

The next round of official TTIP negotiations is scheduled for mid-July in Brussels, a meeting that may allow trade officials to gain a better feel for whether a transatlantic trade agreement remains a possibility.

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Senate Poised to Take Up Agriculture Spending Bill; House Will Wait

The Senate this week plans to take up its version of the Agriculture spending bill, which appropriators plan to bundle into an appropriations package that also includes Commerce-Justice-Science and Transportation-Housing and Urban Development. The House, on the other hand, is still struggling to continue its work on the Ag spending measure, largely due to divisions between parties regarding child nutrition programs and food safety initiatives

The spending measure is expected to hit the House floor sometime next week, thus giving both parties time to consider a controversial amendment expected to be introduced by Rep. Sam Farr, D-Calif., that would cut language from the bill that would allow schools to opt out of nutrition standards. Congressional Democrats and the Obama administration both oppose the proposed waiver that USDA could grant to any school with a food program that has run at a net loss over the last six months. The White House is so opposed to the proposed waiver that the Office of Management and Budget has issued a Statement of Administration Policy threatening a veto of the bill if waiver language is not removed.

The decision by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., to resign his position at the end of July is not making the legislative process any easier, and it was almost intractably difficult before. His lame duck status is being held up as another reason why Congress is unlikely to accomplish much of anything in the relatively few legislative days remaining in 2014.

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Washington Insider: Politics of School Nutrition

It seems now that the House FY2015 Ag Spending bill may well be delayed longer than expected. Initially, the House leadership announced a brief delay in further consideration of the bill. However, the upset over the House majority leader's position after Eric Cantor's primary loss last week has the chamber's schedule in disarray. This apparently will mean that the Ag spending bill will be delayed until later this summer.

Last week, the House considered several amendments to the $20.8 billion discretionary spending bill that funds USDA, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the Food and Drug Administration. Most of the amendments shifted uncontroversial amounts of funding from various USDA agencies. Now, members are telling the press they plan to offer more contentious amendments — not more important, but more contentious — when debate resumes. For example, Rep. Sam Farr, D-Calif., is pushing a provision that would remove the bill's current language allowing schools to opt out of nutrition standards if their cost means the program is operating at a net loss over the last six months.

Other amendments that may be offered include one that would prohibit the USDA from importing beef from certain regions of Brazil, and another that would prevent USDA from implementing a poultry inspection modernization rule.

As for the bill itself, even in this era of large budget numbers, the scale of USDA-FDA spending is daunting. For example, the bill would appropriate a total $142.7 billion for programs under the jurisdiction of the House Agriculture-FDA subcommittee. Even so, the total would be about $2.78 billion less than in fiscal 2014.

Ag program funding, both discretionary and mandatory spending, would be $25.6 billion, down $4.31 billion down from FY 2014. However, funding for conservation program spending, at $850.2 million, would be some $24.4 million above the FY 2014 level.

Rural economic and community development programs would receive $2.45 billion, $51.2 million more than in fiscal 2014.

The largest allocations in the bill support the domestic food programs and provide mandatory funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and child nutrition programs. The measure would provide $109.8 billion for all domestic food programs, which is $1.22 billion more than provided for fiscal 2014.

The Women, Infants and Children's program, however, is considered a discretionary effort and is included in the bill for $6.62 billion in funding. While this is $92.8 million below the amount the program received last year, USDA says funding at the proposed level would cover all women expected to participate.

It is sort of amazing that widely supported programs like school lunch could become as controversial as they have. As provisions were added to the House bill pulling back some of the relatively new nutrition standards, Democratic rhetoric became white hot.

For example, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told the press recently that Republicans are going after school lunches and even the WIC program for pregnant women and children with an amendment that allows more white potatoes than nutritionists recommend. These, she says, betray the best interests of America's families while protecting "special" interests.

Patricia Montague, the chief executive officer of the School Nutrition Association, described the complications involved. She argues that "School cafeteria professionals have been leading the charge to help students adopt healthier lifestyles." However, she thinks USDA's new nutrition standards for school meals are "so extreme that many students are leaving the cafeteria altogether," thus missing out on nutritious school meals.

SNA, however, has drawn criticism for its ties to corporations that rely heavily on serving ready-to-eat food products such as pizza.

Press reports also indicate that last week, "First lady Michelle Obama encouraged parents to fight with her 'until the bitter end' to preserve tougher new school lunch standards that House Republicans are working to roll back."

So, the nutrition element in the old Ag, conservation, nutrition farm bill coalition seems increasingly in tatters. Whether this can be repaired in time to move Ag appropriations through to passage this year remains to be seen. However, the current fights seem to clearly indicate increasing troubles for expensive agriculture and food programs in the future, Washington Insider believes.

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