Tom Philpott — 4 of Obama’s Worst Food and Ag Wimp-Outs

Right-wing critics like to denounce President Obama’s supposed penchant for “job-killing regulations [1].” Just last month, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus complained [2] on the conservative blog Red State that “instead of pursuing policies that would help job creators put Americans back to work, he’s burdened them with ObamaCare, regulations, and continued threats of higher taxes.”
Meanwhile, back here on Planet Earth, the government keeps making industry-friendly regulatory decisions, at least in the food and ag field that I cover. Here’s a list of four recent Obama administration bows to the agrichemical and meat industries.
1. It allowed factory farms to remain on the DL.
Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency withdrew [3] its own proposed rules [4]that would have required operators of factory-scale livestock operations to report basic information to the agency, such as the number of animals kept, whether manure from the facility is applied on surrounding land, and, if so, how much land is available for manure application.
If the now-defunct proposed rules sound rather modest, they really are. Back in 2008, the General Accounting Office issued a report [5]on the EPA’s ability to monitor pollution at factory livestock farms, which are known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. Here’s what GAO concluded:
Despite its long-term regulation of CAFOs, EPA still lacks comprehensive and reliable data on the number, location, and size of the operations that have been issued permits and the amounts of discharges they release. As a result, EPA has neither the information it needs to assess the extent to which CAFOs may be contributing to water pollution, nor the information it needs to ensure compliance with the Clean Water Act.
Then, in 2010, as part a settlement of a lawsuit filed by environmental groups [6], the EPA agreed to propose new rules that would address this information void. The proposal that it came up with [4], which finally emerged in 2011, was widely viewed as weak and industry-friendly in sustainable-ag circles [7]. Still, the meat industry shrieked [8] in response. “Making this kind of information readily available to the public puts the safety of the food chain at an even higher risk for acts of bioterrorism,” gasped Big Poultry [9], a refrain echoed by Big Pig [10].
And now the EPA has caved, citing not specious biosecurity fears but rather declaring it would be more “efficient” to continue relying on “existing sources” of information on CAFOs [11]—you know, the very same information-poor status quo deplored by the GAO in 2008. So much for Obama, the regulatory zealot.
The EPA’s latest green light for Bayer’s pesticide comes even as a damning weight of evidence indicts clothianidin as a trigger for colony collapse disorder.

Read more.. http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/07/4-egregious-recent-obama-administration-wimpouts

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