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On October 5, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack came to Minneapolis to deliver the fifth and last Freeman Lecture at the University of Minnesota. The lecture’s namesake, Orville Freeman, was governor of Minnesota and then Secretary of Agriculture during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations (1960–68). About a thousand people came on a rainy night to hear Secretary Vilsack speak and then engage in a “Great Conversation” program with University Deans Brian Atwood and Allen Levine. The audience included former Vice President Walter Mondale, former Secretary of Agriculture Bob Bergland, Jane Freeman (Governor Freeman’s widow and political partner), and Senator Amy Klobuchar, who introduced Secretary Vilsack. IATP board member, Rod Leonard, Governor and Secretary Freeman’s aide, helped to organize the lecture.



However, before Secretary Vilsack arrived at the Ted Mann Concert Hall, he had to run a media gauntlet instigated by a New York Times story published the day before that recounted how a 22-year-old Minnesota woman had been paralyzed by consuming contaminated hamburger produced by Cargill, the Minnesota-headquartered, global agribusiness giant. As is usual with stories of alleged corporate malfeasance, the lawyers and public relations experts had told Cargill executives not to talk to the media, leaving Secretary Vilsack with the unhappy task of explaining why the USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) is unable to require slaughterhouses to test for meat pathogens on carcasses before they are shipped to meat processors, such as Cargill. On the way from the airport, he was interviewed by Minnesota Public Radio, and parried questions about how both Cargill and FSIS had failed to detect the contamination and withdraw the hamburger from commerce before it could sicken Minnesotans and other consumers.



Secretary Vilsack had to walk an explanatory tight rope between USDA’s mandate, under different laws, both to protect public health and to advance agribusiness interests. Dr. Kenneth Peterson, FSIS’s assistant administrator, did not make the Secretary’s task any easier by telling the Times that FSIS “could mandate testing, but that it needed to consider the impact on companies as well as on consumers. ‘I have to look at the entire industry, not just what is best for public health.’” Dr. Peterson interprets FSIS’s statutory responsibility under the Meat and Poultry Inspection Acts as protecting the industry’s reputation and bottom line. So if mandatory testing would harm either, FSIS would not insist on testing. At the Freeman lecture, Secretary Vilsack didn’t clean up Peterson’s statutory confusion, but asserted correctly in a press release the following day, "Protecting public health is the sole mission of the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service.” And yet the damage had been done—again, not only to consumer health, but to USDA’s reputation for continuing to allow the meat industry to self-regulate in fact, if not in law.



The Secretary walked other USDA tightropes more artfully and eloquently, aided by the recently published "Agricultural Census 2007." First, he noted that he would deliver a eulogy today for Dr. Norman Borlaug, a former University of Minnesota plant breeder and Nobel prize winner for his work to “feed the world.” Then the Secretary followed with a series of paradoxes shaped by facts and the programs that he is required to oversee.



Recalling the loss of millions of U.S. farmers since President Woodrow Wilson exhorted the nation to plant victory gardens to aid the World War I effort, Secretary Vilsack sang the praises of how the remaining 200,000 farms of more than a thousand acres, aided by biotechnological research, had doubled and tripled crop yields to feed the U.S.—and the world. But the loss of 80,000 mid-size farms in the last five years is something that the Obama administration would seek to prevent from re-occurring.



More than a billion people still don’t have enough to eat, so the Obama administration will help private companies to export not only U.S. crops but U.S. technology—especially genetically modified seeds—to enable the world to feed itself, said Vilsack. The President’s new global food security initiative would start in Afghanistan by deploying 64 former and current USDA staffers to help Afghan agriculture. Vilsack emphasized support for the 5 percent of U.S. farmers who produce 70 percent of U.S. agricultural production. He promised to cut subsidies to U.S. farmers, if U.S. trading partners open market access to U.S. exports under World Trade Organization rules.



Although two-thirds of USDA’s budget goes to feed an increasing number of hungry Americans, 35 percent of U.S. children are obese, so USDA would work to improve nutrition, remove the stigma of free school lunches and breakfasts, and work with the National Football League on an exercise program for school children, said Vilsack.



The average age of farmers is 57-years-old, and getting older. More than 50 percent of all farmers work off-farm jobs more than 200 days a year (with 90 percent working off farm jobs at some point in the year) to enable them to stay on their farms. USDA’s new Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food program would support the small-scale farmers—108,000 new farmers from 2003–2008 alone—who would satisfy the demand (13 percent increase in local farmers markets in 2008) for local, largely organic food. USDA’s support for rural internet service would help them market that food and help rural people develop new businesses.



While the Secretary's presentation has been rearranged above, my overwhelming impression of him is that of a compassionate and politically adroit man trying to manage conflicting duties. The Secretary spoke about his visit to a Kenyan orphanage (he too was an orphan) and how his question “What do you like most about school?” to a child was met with the response, “Our meal.” He recalled how Secretary Freeman had initiated the first pilot project in federal food assistance and how it had grown to feed 38 million (climbing to 40 million due to growing unemployment or under-employment) Americans today. He clearly aspires to do something similarly great.



Jane Freeman closed the evening by thanking Secretary Vilsack, the University of Minnesota and the advisory group to the Freeman Lecture. Ever the politician to issue a challenge, she remarked that in Secretary Vilsack, the USDA has leadership to regain what had been lost during the previous administration.

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