Post
Keep your friends close…
Commentary
I was interviewed this morning by a trade press editor, and was hit with the following question: “Do you think there’s a strong relationship between industry and USDA?” My gut response was “Not so much.” The follow-up question was, “Why not?” My answer: “The trust isn’t there yet.” I wished I could have taken back the words, because with two nanoseconds of additional thought, I realized trust is one of those two-way relationships, and perhaps we in industry are just a tad too wary of the new kids on the block.
I’ve said before, I trust someone until they give me reason not to. However, I get the sense within that it believes an Obama USDA doesn’t get it yet, or as one wag put it, USDA cares if you happen to be organic, natural or a locovarian urban consumer. Certainly an outsider combing the press USDA press releases of the last year could come to that conclusion.
There’re those who contend the expertise within the department is not as deep as it’s been in the past. Then there’s this kind of wait-and-see attitude, the assumption something bad is going to happen, you just don’t know when or how bad. But – and not to put too fine a point on it – we need to lose that attitude and realize at least for the next three years, these folks are in charge, they’ve only been in office a little over a year, or as my dear mother used to say to me and my three brothers: “Don’t’ whine at me. Suck it up, make it work.”
I found myself talking to the reporter this morning about shifting from this “sky-will-fall” mindset to one of anticipating the priorities of this administration, public or not, and then objectively deciding how implementation of those priorities, if left unfettered, will affect you or your part of the food chain. Once you’ve got a worst-case scenario, step back and decide how you and yours can make lemonade out of these perceived lemons.
This takes honest introspection. A good example is the chaos that is labeling. Everyone and their uncle is trying to psych out what this Administration may or may not do when it comes to bringing some kind of rational reform to labeling. What can and should be claimed? What can and should be allowed in “labeling by exclusion?” However, do most of them sit down, figure out how they can be part of a solution and then inform whatever process may be beginning? Not so much.
Some groups and some companies get it. One group, long the beneficiary of federal farm program payments, surplus product purchases, and so on, and smartly remembering the slew of regrets issued after enactment of the last Farm Bill that reform had eluded us once again, is working with USDA and Capitol Hill (you’ll recall Congress is controlled by the same party as the President), to replace its payment scheme with an income insurance approach. They’ve joined in joint ventures with the department. This is very smart.
I’m not calling for capitulation or a mass approach to damage control. I’m suggesting honest information sharing and negotiation will generally yield a better result than one side or the other digging its heels in and refusing to budge. This means USDA is held to certain obligations as much as is industry. The department doesn’t cheerlead for one food industry segment to the detriment of another; that reality guides program evolution as much as lofty goals, as in can we actually afford to do that, and can 95% of consumers afford to buy that?
There’s whispered concern over USDA’s rhetoric about “healthier” school lunches and humanitarian food assistance. I’m not going to get into how much the poor or victimized actually think about “healthy” when getting their first decent meal in weeks, I’m talking about how we don’t have to demonize – even by implication – conventional products in pursuit of a broader or different choice of products.
View change as an opportunity, not a threat, and that goes for the department as well. Invite the challenge of working with the constituency, at the very least it may prevent some very embarrassing and costly mistakes.
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FYI
Here is a sample of the type of people involved in Organic/Sustainable/Local farming in NC.
http://www.cefs.ncsu.edu/whatwedo/foodsystems/localfoodadvisorycouncil.pdf
Organic and Local receive less than 1% of total USDA research and marketing funds, even though they represent close to 3% of the food market.
Conventional Ag is upset because other forms of Ag are starting to get a small sliver of the USDA pie.
Us organic/sustainable/Local types would be satisfied if we just received a proportional share of funding.
When Lincoln created the USDA he called it; “The Peoples Department”. The Obama administration is attempting to bring some equality to all the people in Ag.
Certainly conventional Ag cannot be against equal representation in the USDA budget.