Washington Insider - Friday

Second Phase of Great Lakes Environmental Plan

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

U.S-Japan Talks on Trans-Pacific Trade Deal Remain Stalled

This week's talks between the United States and Japan regarding the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement apparently went nowhere. Japan's Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Akira Amari, who was in Washington for the discussions, said his country put forward a new offer, but that his counterpart, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman, apparently wasn't buying.

The two major trading partners have been searching for common ground that will allow the TPP to go forward, but so far have been unable to close a deal that would overcome Japan's reluctance to ease barriers to imports of autos, pork, beef, rice, wheat, dairy and sugar from the United States.

President Obama had hoped to conclude TPP trade negotiations by the end of this year, but representatives from the 12 participating countries in the Asia Pacific failed to reach a deal in the past months, amid the continuing disagreements between the United States and Japan.

Both sides now will huddle with their respective governments in preparation for another attempt to overcome what has up till now been an insurmountable barrier.

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National Research Council to Conduct Largest-Ever Study of Biotech Crops

The National Research Council is working on a comprehensive study into the advantages and disadvantages of genetically modified crops, calling it the largest such study to date. USDA wants NRC to complete the report next year, but it will more likely be completed in 2016.

"Consumers in the United States and abroad get conflicting information about GM crops," says the NRC. "There is a need for an independent, objective study that examines what has been learned about GM crops, assesses whether initial concerns and promises were realized since their introduction, and investigates new concerns and recent claims."

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The council will use the results of its study to make policy recommendations to USDA and other government agencies regarding future approaches to approving and regulating bioengineered crops. Whether the findings will change the minds of either proponents or opponents of GM crops remains to be seen. But a study by the prestigious NRC should carry significant weight as the discussion surrounding genetic technology moves forward.

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Washington Insider: Second Phase of Great Lakes Environmental Plan

Following the recent Toledo, Ohio, case where drinking water was declared toxic, observers felt it was only a matter of time before the Environmental Protection Agency took stronger steps to further clean up the massive Great Lakes watershed. As a result, few were surprised when the agency issued a new blueprint this week to guide future efforts to restore the Great Lakes, including plans to clean up 10 contaminated rivers and harbors and step up its attack on poisonous algae blooms that coat parts of three lakes each summer.

In addition, the program will include a new attempt to buffer the lakes against the effects of climate change. It will require, for example, that new wetlands include plants that can thrive in warmer temperatures.

The new effort is to be called the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative Action Plan II — a wonderful bureaucratic handle — and was announced by EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy at a Chicago meeting of Great Lakes mayors. It builds on a four-year initiative that began in the president's first term, an effort that already has spent $1.6 billion on more than 2,100 restoration projects on the lakes' U.S. side. The added initiative, which extends through 2019, is expected to cost roughly the same.

EPA proudly noted that the project is the largest conservation program in the nation's history, involving 15 federal agencies and the eight Great Lakes states.

Certainly, the program's goals are ambitious. Among other efforts, it seeks an eightfold increase in the amount of urban runoff that its projects capture or treat, and a doubling of wetlands and wildlife habitat that is restored. It would more than double the acreage covered by efforts to control invasive species, from plants to insects to the bighead carp. And it would try to reduce phosphorus fertilizer runoff by more than 1,400 tons by 2019.

The five lakes constitute the largest group of freshwater bodies in the world and they have grown much healthier since the 1970s, when the new environmental movement led to limits on pollution that rescued dying fisheries and made once-fouled shores once again safe for swimming, a fact that suggests political support for the environmental efforts.

However, growing cities are increasingly crowding marshes that hosted wildlife and filtered runoff, and intensive farming has filled rivers with fertilizer that spawns vast algae blooms, EPA says. The lakes' ecological balance also is threatened by zebra mussels, lampreys and other invasive species that crowd out or kill native fish and other creatures.

EPA says that this latest phase will target the most serious problems, including scores of areas of concern that the United States and Canada identified in 1987, but that went largely ignored until the restoration initiative began in 2010. These concerns include several old industrial rivers and harbors with polluted water and contaminated sediment.

"There are areas with the worst legacies of toxic pollution in the days before laws like the Clean Water Act," Susan Hedman, the EPA's regional administrator for the Great Lakes region told the press. "Frankly, not much was being done on the U.S. side." Before 2010, only one of the areas had been cleaned up. Since then, five more have been addressed, and 10 more are slated for cleanup by 2019.

The proposed increases in activity are substantial in some cases, but appear more modest when measured against the sheer size of the lakes and the scope of their problems, EPA notes. The five-year plan acknowledges that much of the restoration effort will take decades to complete, and gauging its success will require years of monitoring.

While remediation of industrial sites will be an important aspect of the cleanup plan, observers suggest, what the EPA calls "intensified farming" is expected to come in for its share of attention, as well. In the Chesapeake Bay watershed cleanup, the only other large scale watershed now in the process of an intense restoration effort, new standards and rules for agricultural runoff have been the focus of both controversy and litigation. And, in the case of the Toledo "toxic water" case earlier this year, agriculture was quickly tagged as an important pollution source and restrictions on fertilizer use are being imposed.

The Great Lakes effort is expected to be both larger and more intrusive than any EPA effort to date — and, it certainly will affect agriculture. Producers, through their state and national conservation agencies, have a leg up in terms of technical assistance in efforts to pass muster toward reducing pollution runoff and in compliance with possible new management rules. This is not an easy process, though, and it can change operating realities for many operations.

Still, since the Toledo "problem," it is fair to say that efforts to clean up rivers and lakes have a new and growing urgency and need to be taken seriously by producers as they make future production and operations plans, Washington Insider believes.


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