It can be argued it’s really too early in the process to be so cynical. In fact, on the day this is being written, every Web site in the federal government touts President George W. Bush’s plans for cutting gasoline consumption by 20 percent in 10 years. However, when it comes to what the agriculture committees can do to accelerate the development of renewable fuels, the available options are limited to research and loans. You see, the ag committees are “authorizing” committees, meaning they can come up with whatever program they want, but they have no authority to actually fund the programs. All jurisdiction over taxes, credits, incentives, and so forth rests solely with the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee, sandboxes in which the ag panels are rarely allowed to play.
Research dollars and low-interest loans are nothing to sneeze at, but the big, big problem is how to pay for these programs. The House budget powers that be have put tight spending restrictions on the dollars available for new programs in the farm bill, and when all is said and done, in order to pay for a new program, the rules say you have to cut an old program to offset the cost.
Expect to see a big push on cellulosic ethanol research and incentives. Cellulosic basically translates into any feedstock that isn’t corn, including waste from fruits and vegetables, switch grass, corn stover, straw, and “woody biomass,” as the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) describes it. The Capitol Hill approach will not be flat payments to producers, but applied and basic research and likely loan and loan guarantees to share the risk in these new ventures between private enterprise and the federal government.
USDA has provided details on how it would approach the energy section of the farm bill. Among several proposals, USDA would set up a temporary $100 million direct support (Uncle Sam writes a check) program for producers of cellulosic ethanol. This would replace the USDA Bioenergy Program that expired at the end of 2006. It was this program, originally an administrative initiative and then a congressionally mandated program as part of the 2002 farm bill, that paid out $150 million a year to nascent biofuels producers who demonstrated year-to-year increases in production.
Another monster proposal from USDA is a $210 million guaranteed loan program that would support $2.17 billion in loans over 10 years. Loans per cellulosic ethanol project would be capped at $100 million, and this program would be rolled into the USDA Business and Industry Loan and Loan Guarantee Program, with priority funding going to “biorefinery projects.” A $500 million, 10-year grant program would be reauthorized to support smaller alternative and energy efficiency projects. The Conservation Reserve Program would include a biomass reserve program to give priority to whole-field enrollment of lands producing biomass (plants) for energy production, as well as another $800 million in alternative fuels research, both public and private. All of these programs are either mandatory funding or will presumably be paid for by savings in other programs recommended by USDA.
Expect the House and Senate committees to cherry pick this list of recommendations, but also expect a fair amount of “current law” language, meaning some programs will remain in place as written in the 2002 farm bill – if they haven’t expired already.
Is There a Recall in the House?
If you call the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM) right about now and ask anyone who answers the phone, “So what are you folks up to?” the answer you’ll get, no matter to whom you speak, is, “Pet food recall, pet food recall, pet food recall.” This has myriad implications for everything from rendered ingredients destined for pet foods and livestock feeds to any processed food product bought in a supermarket.
The culprits in the pet food contamination at this point appear to be melamine – the chemical that, for those old enough to remember, was the building block for plastic dishes back in the 1960s, and overseas, apparently makes for a swell fertilizer – and cyanuric acid, a related chemical to melamine allegedly intentionally added to vegetable proteins imported from China. I say it “appears to be” because there’s still no smoking gun science showing it’s the unholy marriage of these two compounds that caused what some contend are thousands of pet deaths across the United States.
Congress continues to debate just how the pet food recall, coupled with recent recalls of peanut butter and spinach, adds up to the conclusion that FDA can’t protect the food supply. This latest incident of adulterated pet foods is the new club with which folks on the Hill, none too happy with FDA, can beat the agency over lax enforcement. All of this, of course, ignores the fact that no regulation or requirement would ever have contemplated testing vegetable proteins for a chemical used to make plastic dinnerware.
In the Senate, the Prescription Drug User Fee Act was approved in mid-May. This bill reauthorizes the law that lets human pharmaceutical companies pay user fees to FDA to speed up new drug approvals. This bill also carries language by Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL), arguably one of FDA’s biggest critics and the so-far-unsuccessful champion of a super-sized single federal food agency, to create ingredient and product processing control standards for pet foods based on the American Association of Feed Control Officials ingredient review system now in place. It would also create for all feeds and foods under FDA regulation an “early warning system” for adulteration of the products, similar to that used by the Centers for Disease Control when there’s an outbreak of human illness, and would set up an “adulterated food registry” where companies and private citizens could report incidents to the agency, which FDA would then verify before negotiating a product recall. Durbin stopped just short of giving FDA mandatory recall authority, though he remains committed to a system under which a company would be “invited” to recall an agency-designated adulterated product, and if the company refused, order the recall and fine the company up to $10,000 per day/per occurrence.
The House is moving more slowly, and it’s becoming more apparent that action in that chamber will be broader than just pet food. The House is more interested in FDA’s broad food safety protection authority. There have been hearings in the House Agriculture Committee on pet food and feed ingredients, and the House Energy and Commerce Committee subcommittee on oversight and investigations has held one hearing and will hold more on FDA food safety performance. Other panels, chaired by FDA critics, are also threatening hearings.
If there’s a silver lining to this big, dark cloud it’s the prospects for publishing the much-criticized FDA proposed changes to the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) feed rule. Given that just about any and all FDA/CVM resources are dedicated to the pet food recall right now and for the foreseeable future, and that the draft final BSE rule is still within the agency and has yet to go through Health and Human Services or White House review, it looks more and more like some time in 2008 before a proposed final rule is published.
View from Washington - June 2007 Render