Articles by Grist staff

Big Organic execs and some activists rally behind Obama's USDA pick

A group of NGO chiefs, activists, and Big Organic executives have launched a website and petition to support Tom Vilsack, president-elect Barack Obama's choice to lead USDA.

Participants in the site, known as supportvilsack.com, include Bob Scowcroft, executive director of the Organic Farming Research Foundation; Iowa sustainable-food activist Denise O'Brien (who recently guest-posted on Gristmill); Wayne Pacelle, CEO of the U.S. Humane Society; Gary Hirshberg, CEO of organic-yogurt giant Stonyfield Farm; Steve Demos, founder of soy-food giant White Wave (now owned by industrial-dairy behemoth Dean Foods); and several others.

Institutionally, the Organic Trade Association -- whose members range from tiny producers of hemp products to global agribiz giant Bunge -- signed on.

The effort strikes me as bizarre. Why band together to support someone who's a shoo-in to be confirmed? Vilsack is no firebrand reformer; his nomination will generate little controversy in the Senate.

Moreover, I understand the argument -- made on Gristmill by O'Brien and by John Crabtree of the Center for Rural Affairs -- that Vilsack is a relatively innocuous pick. After all, Obama's short list of USDA candidates included some real doozies, like agribusiness lobbyist Charles Stenholm.

But Vilsack isn't likely to lead U.S. food/agriculture policy in new, more sustainable and socially just directions -- at least not without a real push from below. As I've written before (and many others have pointed out), he has been a fervent booster of the genetically modified seed and biofuel industries -- both of which proffer what I think are dead-end "solutions" to environmental problems and offer little to any but the largest-scale and most commodity-oriented farmers.

I agree with the thesis that the sustainable-food movement should "work with" Vilsack, in the sense of pushing him to chart new directions in food/ag policy. But the "support Vilsack" movement (if it can be called that) seems less like a push than an uncritical embrace. Why, again?

Rocker Neil Young says America can take lead in efficient autos

Dial up “Live Rust” on your MP3 player while you kick back to read Neil Young’s auto call to action over at Huffington Post. Young has gotten plenty of mileage lately off of his involvement with Team LincVolt, a 1959 Lincoln Continental outfitted to run on electricity. But if you’ve missed out on Young’s non-musical […]

Two gray eminences of the food movement lay down the law on farm policy

There's an idea out there that reforming U.S. food policy simply can not be a priority for the Obama administration. We're enmeshed in two wars (three, if you count what our dear Israeli friends are up to in the Gaza Strip), the economy is crumbling, and climate change is accelerating.

Under these conditions, how can Obama possibly busy himself with something as trivial as food? The president-elect himself seems to buy into this line of reasoning. By nominating a corn-belt pol with a history of playing footsie with agribiz as his USDA chief, Obama signaled that status quo, not reform, will mark his food agenda, at least early in his presidency.

I think the food-reform-can-wait logic is wrong on several counts. As I'll argue later this week in Victual Reality, investing in a new food system could make for an excellent piece of a stimulus package. And on practical grounds, food-system reform is urgent. Anyone who doubts that should read the powerful, concise op-ed in today's New York Times by Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson.

The sustainable food movement's most revered elders make the case with characteristic bluntness:

McKibben wonders if U.S. is mature enough to confront climate change.

Check out Bill McKibben’s essay in the latest Foreign Policy magazine. It’s full of straight talk about the reality of climate change, debunking plenty of the skeptics’ arguments along the way. For McKibben (a Grist board member, BTW), the real question is whether there’s sufficient will in the international community to take on the very […]