Washington Insider - Wednesday

By DTN's Washington Insider

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

New Climate Report Says Data Do Not Lead to Clear Conclusions

A new report by the American Meteorological Society likely will give ammunition to all sides in the ongoing debate about global climate change, its causes and effects. The report says the data indicate that human-caused climate change clearly increased the severity and likelihood of 2013 heat waves in Australia and other parts of the world. However, it is less clear that the droughts, heavy rainfall events and storms in 2013 were the result of climate change. Human influence — primarily through the burning of fossil fuels — was sometimes evident for these kinds of events but often less clear, suggesting that natural variability may have played a stronger role, the report said.

Scientists generally caution against attributing individual extreme weather events to climate change, though certain types of extreme events, including heat waves, are expected to become more frequent and intense in a warming world.

The report looked at 22 studies examining the causes of 16 different extreme weather events that occurred in 2013. All of the analyses of extreme heat events in Australia, Europe, China, Japan and Korea "overwhelmingly" showed that human-caused climate change is having an influence, in some cases making heat waves as much as 10 times more likely, the report said.

The study's findings will undoubtedly be a subject for discussion during congressional hearings next year. Whether this or any other study will change anyone's belief that climate change is a threat that should be met or a naturally occurring phenomenon that should be ignored is less certain.

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USDA to Resume Reports Dropped by Commerce Department

A number of so-called industrial reports that were discontinued by the Commerce Department in 2011 have been revived by USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) and will be published in 2015. As the name implies, the reports were of interest to industries that use agricultural commodities for things such as wet and dry corn milling, flour milling and oilseed crushing, among others.

The Commerce Department began publishing the reports in 1904, but discontinued them due to budget cuts. NASS now will collect data and publish the industrial reports, with the data collection portion likely starting this month. Among other things, a planned NASS report on ethanol production, including updated information from ethanol plants could be used to make any needed adjustments to ethanol production such as extraction rates per bushel of corn used for ethanol production.

The effort by NASS started nearly as soon as the Census Bureau announced it would halt production of the reports, but a spokesman for NASS told Reuters the agency would not likely start publishing the information gathered until sometime in 2015. It is to be hoped that after all the work that has gone into the transfer of reports from Commerce to USDA, Congress will provide NASS with the funding necessary to continue the industrial reports series.

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Washington Insider: Rogue Wheats Plague USDA

A new discovery of an unapproved genetically modified wheat has been made, this time in research fields at Montana State University. This is the second case of that sort in the last year or so, and it is raising questions of how carefully USDA and the genetics companies are keeping track of biotech crops that are still in the evaluation process.

USDA said it began investigating the appearance of an unapproved GMO wheat developed by Monsanto last July after Monsanto reported that the variety had been found at the Montana research center. Fairly long ago, between 2000 and 2003, the company had been authorized to conduct field trials there on wheat modified to resist the Roundup pesticide, a trait present in the rogue variety found earlier this year, USDA told the press. It also said the rogue variety hasn't entered the market and is unlikely to affect the $8 billion wheat business

The agency also is struggling to put the best face on an even more embarrassing fact concerning an earlier rogue event — that after a 10-month investigation it does not know how the wheat –– which had not been deregulated –– was planted and grown in Oregon. That discovery in May 2013 caused some U.S. trading partners like Japan to temporarily suspend wheat imports until USDA confirmed the GMO variety didn't enter into commerce.

This time, USDA was willing to claim that the situation in Montana is "very different from what happened in Oregon" because this case occurred at a location that had once been used for closed field trials. "It's difficult to compare the two."

USDA also says that the rogue wheat in Montana isn't the source of the plants found in Oregon and that there are no food safety concerns involved because the Food and Drug Administration earlier assessed the situation and concluded that is so.

Monsanto treated the event somewhat oddly, and did not succeed in rebuilding much confidence in the testing process. "As a company, product stewardship and regulatory compliance are at the heart of everything we do," Phil Miller, global regulatory affairs lead for Monsanto, said last week. "While we believe our compliance program is best in class, we continuously review our processes and procedures to improve them, including site selection, field trial isolation and verification and auditing of field trial locations."

GMO critics rushed to argue that the new development shows a fundamental weakness in the system. George Kimbrell, a staff attorney for the Center for Food Safety, said USDA claims it can contain GMO crops but continues to fail. "This is not just with wheat," Kimbrell told the press last week. "You can go back through commodities like rice, corn, alfalfa where there's been a lack of control of contamination."

Kimbrell said he found it alarming that the USDA investigations were inconclusive. His organization, a public interest and environmental group that promotes sustainable agriculture, believes there should be agriculture zones free of GMO crops and more transparent investigations.

The CFS and other groups in July 2013 responded to the incident in Oregon, outlining weaknesses in the USDA's policy regarding GMO field testing. "Companies devise the specific procedures by which they will try to 'confine' the experimental genetic traits and thereby attempt to reduce effects on surrounding crops and the environment, but USDA fails to assess the adequacy of these procedures," CFS said.

CFS also said USDA lacks site-specific information, making it difficult to monitor trials. The organization also argues that crop genes move in the environment and cannot be fully contained. Kimbrell said testing in a greenhouse rather than an open air field would be a better model.

USDA promised that it will do better to prevent unapproved GMO wheat from growing in other locations in the United States. "APHIS will inspect field trials planted in 2014, and follow-up with post-harvest inspections to ensure those conducting the field trials adhere to requirements to monitor for, and remove, volunteer plants," the agency said. It also plans to assess requirements for testing GMO wheat and the frequency of inspections.

Observers suggest that USDA has been lucky so far in the fact that unapproved wheat varieties have not been found contaminating the commercial wheat supply and severely damaging markets and sales, as happened recently with rice. It will be even luckier if it escapes with only a few red faces from these episodes — and, if no more cases of "rogue" plants are found.

At the same time, it is fair to observe that USDA is central to the GMO approval process and that the systems used for testing were USDA-designed and -approved. If they are not as fool-proof as possible, and if an unapproved GMO variety contaminates the commercial wheat supply, damage to the credibility of U.S. exports could be huge.

Congress and USDA need to jointly review the system to insure that the department really takes the potential "rogue" variety threat seriously and takes more effective steps to prevent the accidental growth of volunteer GMO crops than it has in the past, Washington insider believes.

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