By Stephen J. Hedges

New federal grain production estimates released Monday are certain to stir more debate over the use of corn and soybeans for food or fuel.

Despite wash-out flooding in the Midwest, corn will remain king among crops in 2008, according to harvest forecasts released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Monday. Fueled by high prices and increased demand due to ethanol production, U.S. farmers planted more than 87.3 million acres of corn this spring, down from a record 93.6 million in 2007, the USDA found.

That 2008 figure is higher than USDA predicted as recently as March. Corn prices declined slightly with Monday's higher production estimate.

Flooding will cut the number of acres actually harvested down to about 79 million, USDA said. But the department states that it will conduct follow-up interviews with 9,000 farmers in grain states affected by flooding -- Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Wisconsin and Missouri - before it completes a harvest report due out Aug. 12.

Even after the flooding, USDA stated, the amount of corn acres planted is the second largest since 1946.

The soybean harvest is also expected to be large. Farmers have planted 74.5 million acres of soybeans, the third largest amount on record, "and up 17 percent from last year," according to USDA.

Both corn and soybean prices have been running high due to increased demand from the biofuels industry and increased exports prompted by a weak dollar.

Futures contracts for corn have traded from $7- to-$8-a-bushel in recent days, compared to prices of about $2.25-a-bushel just a few years ago. Soybeans prices have
also jumped to more than $15-a-bushel, compared to about $8-a-bushel just a year ago.

Cattle ranchers and dairy farmers, among others, complain that the corn-based feed they use has become too costy, driving up food costs. Many of them blame those higher prices on ethanol production, which distills fuel from corn. Congress and the Bush administration have enthusiastically backed ethanol, and biodiesel made from soybeans, as altenatives to gasoline.

By Stephen J. Hedges

A year ago, federal food safety experts from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture were scrambling to figure out how they'd missed so many food contamination warning signs. People and pets nationwide were falling ill and even dying from salmonella contamination in spinach and peanut butter, bad seafood, contaminated pet food ingredients from China and an alarmingly high number of cases involving E coli bacteria in ground beef.

Both agencies have spent the past year promising reforms and even making some. The FDA, which regulates everything but meat, poultry and egg products, has launched a new food safety plan. After a string of meat recalls, including the largest recall ever - 143 million pounds in February -- the USDA has conducted a review of meat packing plants.

But in the past year, contamination cases have continued, and some remain unsolved.

E coli cases are down this year, though a recall by Kroger supermarkets last week after illnesses were reported in Ohio and Michigan raised new questions about the effectiveness of the USDA's reforms..

The same can be said of the FDA, and new confusion over recent salmonella poisoning caused by the consumption of some tomatoes. The FDA back-peddled on the tomato contamination theory Friday, telling reporters that there's a chance that tomatoes may not be to blame at all. The more than 800 illnesses reported due to salmonella could have been caused by something else that's still out there.

By Stephen J. Hedges

What do bees have to do with ice cream and politics? A lot, as it turns out.

Bee populations are in decline, and no one is sure why. Theories include pesticides and a voracious tiny mite that can bring illness into bee hives.

Significant portions of the food industry rely on bees to pollinate fruit, nuts and other foods. Fewer bees to do that work could mean fewer and higher priced ingredients. Bees are rented by California almond growers, for example, to pollinate their crop every year.

That's where politics comes in. A group of businesses and bee enthusiasts who make up the Pollinator Partnership are appearing before a House of Representatives agriculture subcommittee today to discuss the plight of bees, and the impact on the foods that rely on bee pollination.

The group says that a third of the human food supply comes from pollinated plants. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 80 percent of that pollination is due to honey bees.

That's a lot of food. And a continued lack of bees could bring a notable drop in available fruits, vegetables and nuts, as well as higher prices for those items.

by Stephen J. Hedges

If it is confusing to Americans to see thousands of South Koreans marching in protests over U.S. beef imports, no one is more perplexed than the U.S. beef industry.

Just a few months ago cattle producers in the U.S. thought they at long last had a green light to begin Korean exports again. Their beef has been banned in South Korea since the 2003 discovery of mad cow disease in the U.S.

South Korea is an $800 million-a-year market, so U.S. beef producers rejoiced in April when South Korean President Lee Myung Bak agreed to allow beef from all U.S. cattle - old and young -- into his country.

Scientists believe that mad cow manifests itself in cattle older than 30 months. Since his April beef decision, it has been a downhill political slide for Lee. The beef deal sparked street protests, threatened his rule and led Lee to re-arrange his cabinet.

Lee apologized Friday for the April decision, and on Saturday his government announced that it would only allow beef from U.S. cattle younger than 30 months.

The protests, which continued Saturday, have really been more about public mistrust of Lee's four-month-old government than about American beef. Still, the fear of mad cow runs deep in South Korea and in other Asian nations, including Japan, where every cow is tested.

U.S. beef producers have worked hard since 2003 to calm those fears, especially in South Korea. So has the Bush administration.

Bush's Department of Agriculture argues that testing and new precautions, such as changing cattle feed, make another mad cow case unlikely. Bush has also made regaining the South Korean beef export market a priority among his many free trade initiatives, which are designed to expand U.S. agricultural exports. (Many countries that banned U.S. beef in 2003 have since agreed to accept it).

South Korea's decision Saturday is a rare, if partial, trade victory for Bush. But it's a victory with a price. Lee's political stature is still shaky, and there's no guarantee that his latest beef compromise will be enough to calm detractors. Just a hint of another mad cow problem in the U.S. could do him in.

By Stephen J. Hedges

With flooding in the Midwest nearly certain to drive food and fuel prices higher than the current records levels, President Bush was in Europe talking about Iran. His absence during the turmoil at home - much of it afflicting Midwestern states like Illinois and Iowa (portions of both states are under water) - has caused some head shaking in rural America, just as the White House response to Hurricane Katrina did.

Indeed, the new pressure that flooding puts on the farm economy, and by extension the prices that Americans pay for food and fuel (read ethanol), will be something that Bush will have to confront on his return.

Both Sen. Barack Obama, (D-Ill.,) the presumptive Democrat nominee, and his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) have already railed against rising prices. But neither has said much about managing the perfect storm of food, fuel and flooding.

Obama pitched in filling sandbags in Illinois over the weekend - a good photo opportunity and an even better metaphor for the crisis, since sandbags rarely work. Obama even invoked the Katrina mess, stating, "We can't have a repeat of some of the problems we saw in New Orleans."

During the primary campaign, Obama pressed for rural development, recognizing that many farm families earn second incomes in town. He also backs bio-fuels, which help build up the rural economy. And he has pushed for broader rural Internet access, which won't count for much if the computers are under water.

For his part, McCain has called for a gas tax holiday for the summer. That would be a break for farmers, who use a lot of fuel. But McCain links high fuel and food prices to the government's ethanol subsidies, tariffs and trade barriers. He's for lifting those.

McCain in May also joined other Senate Republicans in a measure that calls for an easing of federal corn-based ethanol production requirements as a means of relieving price pressure on food.

But McCain and Obama have not offered a serious new direction in farm policy. Neither even cast a vote on the controversial 2007 farm bill in December and again in May, when a final version passed the Senate. The bill ignores the current high crop prices and rewards farmers with generous subsidies simply for owning land and growing crops.

Farm policy usually only gets lip service from presidential candidates who talk-the-talk to win over rural states. But rising water and fuel and food prices could prompt something different this year.

by Stephen J. Hedges

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer, who travels to a world food security conference in Rome next week, laid out the Bush administration's strategy today for meeting the current worldwide crisis of rising food costs and shortages.

The Bush plan, though, may not play well in Rome.

Speaking to reporters, Schafer said he will press the Bush administration's campaign to use bio-engineered, or genetically modified, crops as a way to help countries that now face food emergencies.

Schafer said that new crop technology can increase crop yields, especially in places where drought and harsh conditions are prevalent.

Schafer also defended the development of biofuels, arguing that they have not diverted significant amounts of the food supply to energy production.

"We think that policy-wise in the United States of America, and certainly in the rest of the world, as we see the price of oil and petroleum escalate dramatically beyond everyone's imagination, one of the ways to deal with that is biofuels," Schafer said, adding that, "In the U.S. and other countries as well, all ethanol production specifically has come from increased yields in corn corps, not pulling out of any traditional markets."

Some aid groups have argued that, worldwide, the increased production of biofuels has contributed to increasing crop demand and food prices.

by Frank James

Maybe God hates the farm bill, too.

Many critics have complained about the $300 billion, give or take a few billion, farm bill being an unwarranted giveaway to wealthy farmers at a time when farm incomes are soaring.

But that didn't stop Congress from passing the bill with veto-proof majorities in both chambers, then sending it on to President Bush who vetoed it for spending too much money on those who don't need it.

It should have been a simple case of the Congress, after the veto, passing the bill again with two-thirds majorities in order to enact it into law over presidential objections.

But this is where there might've been divine intervention. It turned out that the bill the Congress sent to the president to be vetoed wasn't the bill Congress passed.

Why not? As this CQ article (subscription required) explains:

"We've worked so hard on this and then there's some clerical error?" Senate Agriculture Chairman Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, said in exasperation. "It was unbelievable."

The problem stemmed from an error by a House enrollment clerk, who dropped one of the original bill's 15 titles before sending it to the White House.

In other words, the White House got a bill missing quite a few pages. It's unclear whether the White House even noticed.

So the president vetoed a bill but it wasn't exactly the bill Congress passed. This isn't the way we were taught it was supposed to work in our "how-a-bill-becomes-law" lesson during civics class.

by Frank James

The just-passed farm bill, which is valued at $290 billion to $307 billion, depending on who's counting, is taking some heavy flak from the city slickers who comprise the editorial pages of some of the nation's largest newspapers. The biggest complaint? it subsidizes wealthy farmers and contains all kinds of goodies for the well-connected.

This is from the Washington Post:

The farm bill is the epitome of old-style Washington politics. A small number of farm-state senators from both parties demanded its most wasteful provisions, such as guaranteed payments to big cotton and rice growers and "disaster relief" for farmers in arid areas. These members of the less-representative body leveraged their right to filibuster into billions of dollars for people who are better off than the average taxpayer. The bill includes only the most tepid reforms, which, though trumpeted by the bill's advocates, deny benefits to only a tiny handful of farms.

This is from the Chicago Tribune:

Farmers are enjoying record high prices for crops. Farm income has risen 56 percent over the last two years.

Crop prices have been rising much faster than gasoline prices. (A gallon of unleaded gas in Chicago costs 35 percent more than it did two years ago.) High gas prices and record oil earnings prompted Capitol Hill hearings on price gouging and bills to limit oil industry tax breaks.

(Photo by Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images)

by Frank James

Sen. Richard Durbin knew he potentially could be stepping on a cow pie yesterday if he didn't carefully answer a reporter's question yesterday about the inflationary effect U.S. ethanol mandates might be having on food prices around the world.

The Senate's second-in-commade represents Illinois, after all, a state with large farm interests. And his party's presidential and congressional fortunes also depend on voters in states significant agricultural interests.

So Durbin was not only careful in what he said, but he was clear in asking reporters to report his answer accurately. He basically acknowledged that ethanol is part of the problem without saying much that would offend farmers. Budding politicians should study it as a great example of how to straddle an issue.

REPORTER: Senator Durbin, a lot of people, hunger experts, say that the demand for biofuels, ethanol and other biofuels, is contributing a lot to the increase in prices.

But we have to understand that it's had an impact on food prices, and let's be honest about it. Even in the corn belt, we'd better be honest about it.

(Chicago Tribune photo by Charles Osgood.)

by Steve Hedges

What a difference a day -- or even a few days -- might NOT make, at least if you're a member of Congress assigned the task of negotiating a final version of the $286 billion farm bill.

The Senate and House last week gave themselves an extra week to finish the 2007 farm bill, which both chambers passed last year. But almost nothing happened during that extra time, so now they want more.

The farm bill funds everything from farm subsidies and crop disaster assistance to the food stamp, school lunch and low income food programs. More than 60 percent of its funding goes to nutrition initiatives.

Congress literally bought itself extra time last week to work on the bill when it extended the funding for the 2002 farm bill until April 25.

But earlier today both the the Senate and House approved yet another one-week funding extension for the 2002 farm bill, the legislation that remains effective until a new bill is passed. That's the fourth extension this year.