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I got sent a mailing from USDA: “FACT SHEET: Biden-Harris Administration Delivers on its Promises to Invest in Rural Communities, Nutrition Security, Climate-Smart Agriculture, More and Better Markets and Lower Costs for Families.”

This is a summary of an extraordinarily long list of actions taken by the administration, many of them having to do with food production and consumption.

Food System Transformation: USDA is transforming the food system and improving the resilience and security of the food supply chain through more than 60 programs so that today’s markets work better for family farmers and the families they support. This multi-billion dollar effort …touches all parts of the food supply chain – from food production, food processing, food aggregation and distribution, to consumers.

A great many other sections also deal with food issues.  Here are a few examples of the range.

Food System Transformation: USDA is transforming the food system and improving the resilience and security of the food supply chain through more than 60 programs so that today’s markets work better for family farmers and the families they support. This multi-billion dollar effort is funded largely by ARP with some additional investments from the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 (CAA), the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, and the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC). It touches all parts of the food supply chain – from food production, food processing, food aggregation and distribution, to consumers. Select programs include:

• The Farm and Food Workers Relief Grant Program will make beneficiary payments to reach at least 1 million farmworkers, meatpacking workers, and front-line grocery workers who incurred pandemic-related health and safety costs.
• Organic Transition Initiative: USDA launched a $300 million Organic Transition Initiative including establishing the Transition to Organic Partnership Program (TOPP) in six regions across the U.S. as part of USDA’s Organic Transition Initiative to help transitioning and recently transitioned producers who face technical, cultural, and market shifts during the transition period and the first few years of organic certification.
• A new online tool called FarmerFairness.gov allows farmers and ranchers to report potentially unfair and anticompetitive practices in the livestock and poultry sectors.
• Assistance for Distressed Producers: USDA provided nearly $800 million in financial assistance to more than 13,000 distressed farmers and plans to provide assistance to thousands more in 2023. This work accompanies an ongoing effort to transform USDA’s farm lending programs with a focus on proactive loan service and support to keep farmers farming, rather than requiring farmers to become distressed before assistance is provided.
• In August, USDA announced up to $550 million in funding to support projects that enable underserved producers to access land, capital, and markets, and train the next, diverse generation of agricultural professionals.
• More than 41 million Americans participated in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and 2022 marked the first full calendar year that participants received a 21% average increase in monthly SNAP benefits due to USDA’s reevaluation of the Thrifty Food Plan – the first permanent increase to the purchasing power of SNAP benefits since the Thrifty Food Plan was introduced 45 years ago.
• USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) launched a new initiative to reduce Salmonella illness linked to poultry through a strong, comprehensive framework to address Salmonella in poultry that is responsive to evolving food safety hazards and embraces the latest science and technology.
• USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service is advancing tribal self-determination and awarded $5.7 million to eight tribes for demonstration projects that gave them more options to directly select and purchase foods for their Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR). This is an important step to increasing tribal food sovereignty in the program and support tribal economies, vendors, and producers.

As seems always the case with USDA, there are so many small programs (“trees”) under discussion that the big picture (“forest”) gets lost.

The forest is the need to support food system transformation to focus agricultural policy on the health of humans and the planet.  Will trees get us there one by one?

Only if there are enough of them.

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Here’s what’s going on.

SNAP costs are high

• SNAP data table, participation and costs: In 2022, 41 million SNAP participants received an average benefit of $230 per month for a total yearly cost of $119.2 billion ($113.7 billion in benefits plus $5.5 billion in administrative costs).
• Congressional Budget Office (DBO) Budget and Economic Outlook: 2023 to 2033: This projects a drop in SNAP costs by $21 billion in 2023 but only because the additional benefits awarded during the pandemic have now been reduced (CBO Baseline projections for USDA farm programs do not cover SNAP).

Even with the reduction, this is an expensive program and it’s no surprise that Republicans want to cut it.

SNAP is under constant criticism and not only because of cost.  Advocates want it to do a better job of promoting nutrition and health, as shown in two recent reports.

Advocacy Report #1.  Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program as a health intervention (by Jerry Mande and Grace Flaherty)

After reviewing the evidence on SNAP’s impacts on food insecurity, dietary quality, and health as well as research on the health impacts of other more successful federal food assistance programs, we provide three policy recommendations to strengthen SNAP’s effectiveness as a health intervention for children and families.

These are:

• Make diet quality a core SNAP objective.
• Srengthen requirements for SNAP-authorized retailers to promote healthier retail food environments.
• Pair incentives for purchasing fruits, vegetables, and other healthy foods with restrictions on unhealthy foods and sweetened 2beverages.

Advocacy Report #2.  Making Food and Nutrition Security a SNAP: Recommendations for the 2023 Farm Bill (from the  Bipartisan Policy Center’s Food and Nutrition Security Task Force.

Some of its major recommendations:

• Make sure benefit levels are adequate to achieve healthy diets.
• Make sure eligibility and work requirements do not preent undue barriers to participation.
• Encourage consumption of nutritious foods through existing and demonstration projects.

If I read this right, “demonstration projects” is a euphemism for not permitting sugar-sweetened beverages to be purchased with SNAP benefits.

The USDA is trying to improve nutrition standards for school meals.  I wish it the best of luck.

It is proposing over the next several years to:

• Limit added sugars in certain high-sugar products and, later, across the weekly menu;
• Allow flavored milk in certain circumstances and with reasonable limits on added sugars;
• Incrementally reduce weekly sodium limits over many school years; and
• Emphasize products that are primarily whole grain, with the option for occasional non-whole grain products.

This does not make it sound as if USDA is in much of a hurry.  Or that it is doing anything particularly radical.

Take the sugar proposals, for example.  Currently, the re are no limits on sugars in school meals, which means that any limits ought to be an improvement.  The USDA proposal sugar limits in two phases:

1. Product-based limits: Beginning in school year (SY) 2025-26, the rule proposes limits on products that are the leading sources of added sugars in school meals:
   1. Grain-based desserts (cereal bars, doughnuts, sweet rolls, toaster pastries, coffee cakes, and fruit turnovers) would be limited to no more than 2 ounce equivalents per week in school breakfast, consistent with the current limit for school lunch.
   2. Breakfast cereals would be limited to no more than 6 grams of added sugars per dry ounce. This would apply to CACFP [Child and Adult Care Food Program] as well, replacing the current total sugars limit.
   3. Yogurts would be limited to no more than 12 grams of added sugars per 6 ounces.
   4. Flavored milks would be limited to no more than 10 grams of added sugars per 8 fluid ounces for milk served with school lunch or breakfast. For flavored milk sold outside of the meal (as a competitive beverage for middle and high school students), the limit would be 15 grams of added sugars per 12 fluid ounces.
2. Overall weekly limit: Beginning in SY 2027-28, this rule proposes limiting added sugars to an average of less than 10% of calories per meal, for both school breakfasts and lunches. This weekly limit would be in addition to the product-based limits described above.

Sugary products will still be allowed.  And schools have 4-5 years to comply (by that time, today’s elementary school children will be in high school).

Why the pussy-footing?  The USDA must be expecting ferocious pushback, and for good reason.  Anything, no matter how small, that threatens sales of foods commonly sold in schools will incite fights to the death.

• The dairy industry is gearing up to complain about restrictions on chocolate milk, which accounts for substantial revenues.
• The industry-funded School Nutrition Association, which represents school food serrvice personnel, strongly opposes the proposals, deeming them “unachievable.”

This, of course, was  precisely the reaction to Obama Administration immprovements to school meals, most of which were implemented with little difficulty.  Even so, Congress yielded to lobbying pressure and caved in on rules about potatoes, ketchup (a vegetable!), and whole grains.

I will never understand why everyone isn’t behind healthier foods for kids, but I’m not trying to get them to eat junk food.

As for why school meals matter so much to kids’ health, see Healthy Eating Research: Rapid Health Impact Assessment on Changes to School Nutrition Standards to Align with 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

• Download the full report here.
• Download the executive summary here.
• Read the Press Release.

As for the gory details of the USDA’s proposals, see:

• Details of the proposed standards
• Comparison Chart: Current Standards vs. Proposed Standards
• Infographic: Proposed Rule for School Meal Standards
• Infographic: Proposed Timeline for Implementation
• Infographic: The Road Ahead – Building Back Better with School Meals
• Media Toolkit

Care to say something about this? FNS encourages all interested parties to comment on the proposed school meal standards rule during the 60-day comment period that begins February 7, 2023.

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One of the great tragedies of the Trump Administration was its attempt to thoroughly destroy the Economic Research Service by moving it out of Washington DC to Kansas City, Kansas.

I wrote about this repeatedly a few years ago (see links at end)) as did—and does–AgriPulse.

USDA should have planned better for staff attrition when it moved the Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture to Kansas City,  in 2019, the Government Accountability Office says in a new report that notes the department “minimally involved employees, Congress, and other key stakeholders in relocating the agencies.”  The controversial moves during the Trump administration were vocally opposed by many employees and outside groups that said USDA had not adequately justified its decision.

The GAO has now documented exactly what critics predicted.

Coinciding with the loss of staff in fiscal years 2019 and 2020, ERS produced fewer key reports, and NIFA took longer to process grants…Two years after the relocation, the agencies’ workforce was composed mostly of new employees with less experience at ERS and NIFA than the prior workforce.

In addition, a decline in the number of employees in certain protected groups persisted. For example, the proportion of Black or African American staff at NIFA declined from 47 percent to 19 percent (see fig.).

The report says ERS has recovered.  I disagree.  As far as I can tell, ERS still produces basic reports on farming but is no longer producing the kind of hard-hitting critical analyses of food and farming issues that it used to.  I miss it.  A lot.

Some (not all) previous comments on the ERS move

• We now have a chance to repair the damage done to the Economic Research Service
• One more time: the Economic Research Service tragedy
• The tragic destruction of the Economic Research Service, Continued
• USDA’s destruction of the Economic Research Service: A National Tragedy

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I’m indebted to Politico for this one: Federal government won’t stop buying food from meatpacker tied to bribery case.

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President Biden signed H.R. 2617, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023.  

I’m interested in what the $1.7 trillion , 1600-page bill does for food issues.  It mentions the word “food” 786 times.  It mentions “agriculture” 213 times.  Fortunately, most of this is in Division A.  Even so, one longs for summaries. For whatever they are worth, here are a few I’ve collected.

• Senate Appropriations committee summary
• Sen. Patrick Leahy’s bill highlights
• Sen. Patrick Leahy’s highlights for USDA and FDA funding 
• Rep. Sanford Bishop’s summary for USDA and FDA funding 
• Rep. Sanford Bishop’s fact sheet 
• Congressional explanation of intent about Division A funding

Let me see if I can make some sense of this.

USDA highlights

• $25.48 billion in discretionary spending (more than last year, less than what Biden asked for).
• $3.7 billion for research ($1.74 billion for the Agricultural Reseach Service and $1.7 billion for the National Institute of Food and Agriculture
• $1.17 billion for Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), more than $60 million above last year’s.
• $1.15 billion for the Food Safety and Inspection Service, including funding to reduce user fees and to retain veterinarians.
• Nutrition programs: $154 billion for SNAP; $6 billion for WIC; an increase of $6.6 million for commodities; an increase of $11 million for emergency food assistance.
• International food assistance: $1.75 billion for Food for Peace grants (an increase), and $243 million for the McGovern-Dole education program (an increase).

FDA 

• $6.56 billion for everything (but this includes a large percentage to be derived from food, drug, and tobacco user fee revenues).  These include increases for food safety and  some core functions.

The bill does some other things worth mentioning.  It includes: funds to:

• Expand the Summer EBT program and makes it permanent as of 2024.
• Addresses SNAP EBT skimming (stealing benefits across state lines).
• Test for testing for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS—forever chemicals)
• Make sure lobster and crab fisheries are in compliance with rules about whales.

It takes a lot of expertise to analyze all of this.  Here are two reactions.

Heritage Action: This omnibus package represents the very worst of Washington: back-room deals, $1.85 trillion dollar spending bills full of pet projects and partisan priorities, and an Establishment more interested in their own power than the wellbeing of the American people. The GOP must stand united in their opposition to this bill.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: The biggest disappointment of the year-end bill by far is the failure to expand the Child Tax Credit. The American Rescue Plan’s expanded credit and other relief measures drove the child poverty rate to a record low of 5.2 percent in 2021. But with the expansion’s expiration, that record progress in reducing child poverty in 2021 has sharply reversed.

There are lots of other criticisms of this bill floating around, mainly having to do with what the Biden Administration asked for but did not get, and concerns about inadequate funding of FDA for food safety.

On this last point, let me again say that the perennially underfunded FDA gets its appropriations from agriculture committees, even though it is an agency of the public health service.  Agriculture subcommittees could not care less about FDA.  FDA needs a mandated home in Congress and much better support than it now gets.

Happy new year.

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The USDA has just published its latest food dollar series.  (And see below for international data.)

And here’s how all that is distributed.

If you are a farmer, you get an average of just over 7 cents on the dollar.

The real money is in processing, retail, and food service—added value, indeed.

The Food and Agriculture Organization is now providing this information for other countries at its new Food Value Chain domain.  This is an interactive site that is not particularly intuitive to use; it will take some fiddling to lmake it work.

The new FAOSTAT domain, which will steadily expand coverage, has information for 65 countries from 2005 through 2015. It shows that around 20 percent of expenditure on food at home accrues to the farmer, around one-fourth to processing, and nearly half to retail and wholesale trade.

Meanwhile, only around 6.7 percent of consumer expenditure on food away from home accrues to the farmer. That figure is steadily decreasing even, highlighting the need to pay attention to the post farm-gate dimension of the food value chains.

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TODAY: San Francisco, Omnivore Books on Food, 3885 Cesar Chavez at Church.  Information is here.

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I was happy to see this press release from the USDA: Biden-Harris Administration Invests $80 Million to Improve Nutrition in School.

School districts can use the funds to purchase upgraded equipment that will support:

• Serving healthier meals, including those sourced from local foods;
• Implementing scratch cooking;
• Establishing or expanding school breakfast;
• Storing fresh food;
• Improving food safety.

This adds to what this administration is already doing for school meals.  It’s an impressive list.

What’s next?  Universal school meals, please.

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