On Wednesday, the Senate passed a continuing resolution to fund the federal government through September and avoid a government shutdown — and tucked into the 587-page bill are two brief provisions worth millions of dollars for large agribusinesses. The first blocks basic protections for livestock farmers already passed in the 2008 Farm Bill, effectively giving large meatpacking corporations free rein to manipulate the livestock market. The second exempts biotechnology giants like Monsanto and Dow from judicial review, allowing them to sell and plant genetically engineered crops even if a court of law orders them to stop.

These so-called “riders” often have little to do with the bill they piggyback, but special interests deploy them to avoid the scrutiny of the legislative process. A similar rider to deregulate the biotech industry quietly appeared in the stalled House Farm Bill last year. This time, agribusinesses took advantage of the urgency of averting the impending government shutdown on March 27. No lawmaker has come forward to claim responsibility for the riders.

Sen. Jon Tester (D-MO), the Senate’s only working farmer, introduced two amendments to remove these “corporate giveaways,” but was not allowed to bring his amendments to a vote. Last week, Tester gave a fiery speech eviscerating the backdoor move to further consolidate power among a handful of corporations:

The House inserted a provision in the bill that gives enormous market power to America’s three largest meatpacking corporations while stiffing family farmers and ranchers. Family-run production agriculture faces tremendous market manipulation. Chicken farmers, hog farmers, and cattle ranchers all struggle to get a fair price from meatpackers. And if they fight back, they risk angering corporate representatives and being shut out of the market. Thanks to this provision, the Agriculture Department will not be able to ensure a fair, open market that puts the brakes on the worst abuses by the meatpacking industry. What’s worse is that the USDA took Congressionally-mandated steps to protect ranchers from market manipulation over the last few years. That’s what we told them to do in the 2008 Farm Bill. And this provision will actually overturn rules that USDA has already put in place. But apparently intense behind-the-scenes lobbying won out in the House of Representatives, and now we’re back to square one with big meatpackers calling the shots.

The second provision sent over from the House tells USDA to ignore any judicial ruling regarding the planting of genetically-modified crops. Its supporters are calling it the “farmer assurance” provision, but all it really assures is a lack of corporate liability. The provision says that when a judge finds that the USDA approved a crop illegally, the department must re-approve the crop and allow it to continue to be planted – regardless of what the judge says.

The “farmer assurance” rider addresses a 2010 controversy, in which a judge ordered a halt on planting Monsanto’s Roundup Ready beets until an environmental study could be conducted. The USDA ignored the judge’s ruling and allowed farmers to keep planting the beets without an environmental study. Nevertheless, the company unleashed a lobbying blitz of almost 6 million dollars on Washington. In summer of 2012, the farmer assurance rider popped up in the appropriations bill.

A group of major grocery retailers — including Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, and Aldi — have pledged not to sell genetically engineered (GE) seafood if it’s approved in the U.S., Friends of the Earth announced Wednesday. The retailers are among more than 2,000 national and local grocery stores that have signed a pledge as part of the environmental group’s new campaign to push grocery stores to refuse to sell GE seafood.

The announcement comes as the Food and Drug Administration appears poised to approve what would be the first non-plant GE food to enter the U.S. market. AquAdvantage Salmon — which contain a Chinook salmon gene allowing the fish to grow about twice as fast as a wild Atlantic salmon — passed the FDA’s environmental assessment, which was released last year. Along with salmon, the Center for Food Safety reports that there are at least 34 other species of fish undergoing GE development around the world, including tilapia, trout and flounder.

The debate surrounding genetically modified foods, or GMOs, has intensified in recent months. Whole Foods announced earlier this month that it would label all GMO foods sold in Whole Foods stores by 2018, becoming the first national grocery store to set a timeline on GMO labeling. California’s Proposition 37, which would have mandated GMO labeling in the state, was narrowly defeated in November, after food industry giants like Monsanto and Hershey poured $44 million dollars into an anti-Prop 37 campaign. Polling shows that more than 90 percent of consumers support GMO labeling, and a 91 percent of Americans don’t want GE meat and fish in the U.S. marketplace.

The grocery retailers’ pledges are encouraging, but they don’t make up for the FDA’s oversight in labeling GE salmon as environmentally sound. Opponents of GE seafood stress that not enough research has been done on its health effects, and that GE fish could pose an environmental threat if they escape into open waters. With their ability to grow more quickly than other salmon, GE salmon could out-compete wild salmon for food and space, and could potentially mate with wild seafood, weakening the wild species’ gene pool. AquAdvantage’s developer AquaBounty maintains that all of its salmon are grown as sterile females, but during a 2010 FDA hearing, AquaBounty clarified that 95 to 99 percent of its salmon were sterile — which means up to 750,000 of the eggs AquaBounty plans to grow could be fertile. On top of that, even farmed salmon that aren’t genetically modified pose potential health and environmental risks — they typically contain higher concentrations of PCBs, pesticides and other toxins; generate vast amounts of waste, which pollutes the water surrounding their pens and can harbor disease; and emit nearly as much greenhouse gasses as pork. GE farmed salmon will also carry all those risks.

There are still many other grocery retailers in the U.S. that haven’t signed the pledge, which means that if AquAdvantage salmon are approved, they will still find their way into the American market. The FDA hasn’t had much success with encouraging the food industry to self-regulate on its own, so the federal government will need a broader policy to limit Americans’ exposure to GMO foods — by labeling them or, in the case of GE salmon, by keeping them off shelves altogether.

Two more states are considering bills that would prevent whistleblowers from exposing cruel or unsafe practices in factory farms, joining five other states with similar “ag gag” bills. If passed, the pending legislation in Tennessee and California would require that evidence of animal abuse be turned over to law enforcement authorities within 24 to 48 hours.

Such bills are touted — and, in some cases, sponsored — by agriculture industry officials as a lawful attempt to stop animal cruelty in farming operations. But they actually undermine advocates’ work to develop animal cruelty or food safety cases against the agricultural industry.

And it turns out the real basis for the bills has its origins in the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative think tank that has been behind such legislative pushes as “stand your ground” gun laws, voter ID laws and laws mandating states teach climate change denial in schools. Several of the lawmakers who are pushing ag gag laws have agriculture industry ties and ties to ALEC — nearly one in four Iowa lawmakers who voted for Iowa’s ag gag law, for example, are members of ALEC.

In 2002, ALEC introduced a piece of mock legislation titled the Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act, which labels people who interfere with any animal operations “terrorists” and made it illegal for anyone to enter “an animal or research facility to take pictures by photograph, video camera, or other means with the intent to commit criminal activities or defame the facility or its owner.” ALEC began pushing the legislation in 2004, and several of the bills currently being considered borrow language from AETA — Indiana’s bill aims to keep farming operations “free from the threat of terrorism and interference from unauthorized third persons,” for instance. And ALEC continues to support these bills, as an ALEC spokesman told the AP:

“At the end of the day it’s about personal property rights or the individual right to privacy,” said spokesman Bill Meierling. “You wouldn’t want me coming into your home with a hidden camera.“

In fact, these proposed laws aren’t about personal property or privacy rights: they’re about consumers’ rights to know where their food comes from versus the agriculture industry’s desire to protect itself from negative press. Undercover videos have played a key role in exposing cruelty in some of the nation’s most well-known agriculture companies, and videos of sows crammed in gestation crates helped garner enough public outcry that McDonald’s announced it would phase-out gestation crates from its supply chain. But ag gag laws that require videos and photos to be immediately turned over to law enforcement, instead of delivered to the press, makes it doubtful that the public — the people who are consuming the meat, eggs and milk from these factory farms — will ever see them.

Six states already have ag gag laws on the books, and these laws have led to a chilling effect on advocacy groups’ investigations. If these new bills are passed, they would further close off the agriculture industry from the public eye — and we’ll have ALEC to partially thank for that.

As of Friday, Chinese officials have pulled 8,354 rotting pig carcasses out of the Huangpu River, eliciting fears of contamination of one of Shanghai’s major water sources. The cause of this dead pig flood is still a mystery, but many of the pigs have tested positive for a porcine circovirus, which does not affect humans. It seems likely that farmers upriver dumped the pigs in the river after they fell ill or died.

China has been cracking down on sick pigs in the food supply since two massively destructive outbreaks of diseased pork put the nation on alert. Farmers will sometimes sell diseased pigs to the black market in order to recoup some of their losses. On Wednesday, 46 men were jailed for selling diseased meat. This is far from rare; as the New York Times documents, 17 people were sent to prison in December for processing and selling meat from roughly 77,000 diseased pigs. In May, 4 others were arrested for selling dead pigs to slaughterhouses.

If farmers did indeed dump the sick pigs in the river, they may have been trying to avoid similar fates. While the dead pigs do not seem to pose a serious threat to the drinking water, they may indicate China’s food safety crackdown needs redirection. The sheer number of pigs suggests they were suffering from an epidemic. Since China has no system to compensate farmers for losses from disease, they are left to cope with the aftermath in whatever way they can afford:

“There is no mechanism by which, whenever diseases are found among pigs, the government compensates pig breeders so as to control the spread of diseases or compensate pig breeders for losses,” said Feng Yonghui, general manager at pig-industry research organization Soozhu.com.

To make matters worse, Feng said insurance companies were unwilling to insure pig breeders because the risks were so high.

While authorities have not confirmed a disease, or the death of unusually large numbers of pigs, talk of pigs dying would seem to suggest an outbreak of some sort.

One farmer in the Jiaxing area near Shanghai, 69-year-old Jiang Lie, said about 30 percent of his pigs had died of disease since January.

Reuters witnesses visited three reeking swine disposal pits in Jiaxing which appeared to have been just filled up and had signs saying they were at capacity.

In order to avoid such conditions, the U.S. established a Livestock Indemnity Program (LIP) that compensates farmers if their livestock falls prey to disease or extreme weather. The program is meant to encourage farmers to report diseases to the government rather than try to pass sick animals off as healthy. Payments range from $1 for a dead duckling to $1,000 for a dead dairy bull, at 65 percent of the market rate.

However, since the 2008 Farm Bill expired, LIP and 4 other farmer compensation programs ceased to exist after October 1. Farmers who lost livestock to Hurricane Sandy at the end of October were simply instructed by the USDA to keep good records of the losses in case disaster relief funding became available. The memo states, “Production losses due to disasters occurring after Sept. 30, 2011, are not eligible for disaster program coverage.” The Senate version of the 2012 Farm Bill included these programs, but the House’s refusal to pass the bill stymied renewal. The so-called fiscal cliff deal passed in January temporarily funded some livestock assistance programs for nine months, but efforts to secure this safety net through 2018 have stalled.

Conservatives attacked the inclusion of the livestock compensation programs as “wasteful” and called for their complete elimination in the next Farm Bill. China provides a grim example of the kinds of tactics farmers may turn to if conservatives get their way.

As state legislatures begin their 2013 sessions, a flurry of new “ag gag” bills to protect factory farms from potential undercover whistleblowers have been introduced in 5 states. This week, the Indiana Senate is debating a proposal to criminalize taking photographs or videos inside an agricultural or industrial operation without permission.

Senate Bill 373 is the first of two ag gag bills introduced during Indiana’s 2013 session. New Hampshire, Nebraska, Wyoming and Arkansas are also considering them.

Since trespassing is already illegal, ag gag laws can only have one clear motive: to punish whistleblowers, advocates, and investigative reporters who use undercover recordings to reveal the abysmal conditions in which our food is produced. Undercover investigations have captured factory farms all over the country abusing livestock, passing off sick cattle as healthy, and discharging unregulated amounts of animal manure, which the US Geological Survey identified as the largest source of nitrogen pollution in the country.

The bill’s author, Sen. Travis Holdman (R), added a provision exempting anyone who turns over their video or photos to law enforcement within 48 hours — as long as they do not also share the footage with non-law enforcement, such as media or an animal rights group. But, as the Indy Star points out, many exposés are “undertaken precisely because the authorities failed to do their job. Sometimes, they have spotlighted conditions that were not illegal but were disturbing enough to inspire new laws.”

Indeed, factory farms have largely escaped regulatory and legal scrutiny. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency abandoned an effort to require these operations to report even basic information like location, number of animals, and amount of manure discharged. Meanwhile, the meat lobby’s grip on lawmakers is so powerful that the USDA was pressured into apologizing for an internal “Meatless Monday” last year by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Rep. Steve King (R-IA), who claimed the optional vegetarian day was a full-scale attack on agriculture.

One USDA inspector even had his job threatened after he tried to report egregious violations at a California slaughterhouse. He then tipped off the Humane Society, which released an infamous video of employees torturing and slaughtering downer cows (sick cows deemed “unfit for human food” by the USDA). The video triggered the largest beef recall in U.S. history and resulted in an unprecedented $500 million penalty.
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Food regulators recently uncovered horsemeat masquerading as beef in Burger Kings, school cafeterias, and hospitals across Europe and the UK, prompting multiple product recalls and widespread horror. The horsemeat scandal has not touched the US, and many experts and journalists have rushed to reassure Americans that their burgers are safe from horse contamination. But compared to the dangerous pathogens hiding in US-produced meat, Americans might want to consider replacing their beef patties with European horsemeat.

The debacle has exposed weaknesses in the EU’s food safety procedures. However, horsemeat poses a negligible health risk. There have been no reported deaths or illnesses caused by this contamination. Though a harmful horse painkiller called bute was found in 8 of the 206 horses, a human would have to eat more than 500 burgers made entirely of horsemeat to ingest a human dose.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the average American consumes roughly 270 pounds of meat per year, and it’s unlikely that horsemeat is in the mix. There is, however, plenty of evidence that many Americans are inadvertently eating a side of deadly bacteria like salmonella or e. coli with their burgers. According to Center for Disease Control estimates, 48 million Americans get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die from foodborne illnesses every year. In comparison, the entire European Union had roughly 45,000 illnesses and 32 deaths from contaminated food in 2008. That means foodborne illness strikes 15 percent of Americans each year, but only .00009 percent of Europeans.

American meat also often exceeds levels of contamination considered unacceptable in most of the developed world. Mexico refused a shipment of American beef in 2008 because it exceeded Mexico’s upper regulatory limit for copper contamination. Because the US has no such restrictions, the beef returned to the US to be sold to Americans instead.

The most common culprits behind foodborne illness are salmonella, norovirus, Campylobacter, toxoplasma gondii, and E. coli 0157, which are carried through feces. These pathogens have also been discovered in some fruit and vegetables that have soaked up infected waste runoff from nearby factory farms. But food safety regulators continue to avert their eyes when confronted with the appalling conditions in which the vast majority of American meat is produced. The New York Times highlighted the regulatory failure after a 2007 e. coli outbreak:

Within weeks of the Cargill outbreak in 2007, U.S.D.A. officials swept across the country, conducting spot checks at 224 meat plants to assess their efforts to combat E. coli. Although inspectors had been monitoring these plants all along, officials found serious problems at 55 that were failing to follow their own safety plans. [...] In the weeks before [an e. coli outbreak], federal inspectors had repeatedly found that Cargill was violating its own safety procedures in handling ground beef, but they imposed no fines or sanctions, records show. After the outbreak, the department threatened to withhold the seal of approval that declares “U.S. Inspected and Passed by the Department of Agriculture.”

The USDA is not the only agency that has dropped the regulatory ball. The Environmental Protection Agency recently abandoned an effort that would require factory farms to report basic information, such as their location, number of animals, and the amount of manure they discharge. Congress would go even further; the stalled House Farm Bill included provisions banning all state regulation of nearly any agricultural product. The fast-approaching sequester cuts will also eliminate roughly 600 food inspector positions at meat and poultry plants.

Several states have also passed “ag gag laws” to criminalize whistleblowers who secretly film inside facilities or take a job under false pretenses. These laws became popular after a Humane Society video documented a California slaughterhouse routinely abusing and killing sick cattle in 2008. The video triggered the largest beef recall in US history and resulted in a $500 million settlement, the largest penalty ever awarded for an animal abuse case. In response to the video, President Obama also banned the slaughter of these so-called “downer” cows, which have an increased risk of contracting mad cow disease and bacterial infections like e. coli. He did, however, lift the ban on horsemeat in the US last year.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a 75-year-old soybean farmer’s appeal against biotech giant Monsanto, in a case that could permanently reshape the genetically modified (GM) crop industry. Victor “Hugh” Bowman has been battling the corporation since 2007, when Monsanto sued him for violating their patent protection by purchasing second-generation GM seeds from a grain elevator. An appeals court ruled in favor of Monsanto, and despite the Obama administration’s urging to let the decision stand, the nine justices will hear Bowman make his case today.

Monsanto is notorious among farmers for the company’s aggressive investigations and pursuit of farmers they believe have infringed on Monsanto’s patents. In the past 13 years, Monsanto has sued 410 farmers and 56 small farm businesses, almost always settling out of court (the few farmers that can afford to go to trial are always defeated). These farmers were usually sued for saving second-generation seeds for the next harvest — a basic farming practice rendered illegal because seeds generated by GM crops contain Monsanto’s patented genes.

Monsanto’s winning streak hinges on a controversial Supreme Court decision from 1981, which ruled on a 5-4 split that living organisms could be patented as private property. As a result of that decision, every new generation of GM seeds — and their self-replicating technology — is considered Monsanto’s property.

Unfortunately, second- and third-generation seeds are very hard to track, which may explain why Monsanto devotes $10 million a year and 75 staffers to investigating farmers for possible patent violations. Seeds are easily carried by birds or blown by the wind into fields of non-GM seeds, exposing farmers who have never bought seeds from Monsanto to lawsuits. Organic and conventional seeds are fast becoming extinct — 93 percent of soybeans, 88 percent of cotton, and 86 percent of corn in the US are grown from Monsanto’s patented seeds. A recent study discovered that at least half of the organic seeds in the US are contaminated with some genetically modified material.

Bowman’s appeal gives the Supreme Court an opportunity to determine whether or not Monsanto is using patent enforcement to control their monopoly on a vital resource. As GM seeds become more ubiquitous, farmers who want to avoid Monsanto’s strict patents have few alternatives. As a recently released Center for Food Safety report notes, the concentration of market power among Monsanto and a handful of other companies has led to skyrocketing seed prices and less innovation by smaller firms:

USDA data show that since the introduction of GE seed, the average cost of soybean seed to plant one acre has risen by a dramatic 325 percent, from $13.32 to $56.58. Similar trends exist for corn and cotton seeds: cotton seeds spiked 516 percent from 1995-2011 and corn seed costs rose 259 percent over the same period.
[...] USDA economists have found that seed industry consolidation has reduced research and likely resulted in fewer crop varieties on offer: “Those companies that survived seed industry consolidation appear to be sponsoring less research relative to the size of their individual markets than when more companies were involved… Also, fewer companies developing crops and marketing seeds may translate into fewer varieties offered.”

Furthermore, emerging evidence indicates that Monsanto has hardly perfected the technology. A core argument for GM seeds in the 1990s claimed they would reduce chemical pesticide use because the plants themselves would repel pests and weeds. But studies have confirmed the spread of so-called “superweeds” that have developed a resistance to Monsanto’s gene, leading farmers to deploy even heavier doses of herbicides like Monsanto’s own product, Roundup. Another new report debunked the company’s argument that GM seeds would have higher yields; in fact, two of Monsanto’s most popular genes caused yields to drop.

Despite the mounting evidence against their products, the biotech industry enjoys a cozy relationship with government regulators. In December, the Justice Department abruptly dropped their investigation into anti-competitive practices in the industry without so much as a press release. The stalled Farm Bill also contains generous provisions that would allow these companies to put their products on the market with cursory or no review by the USDA.

Today’s oral argument is a study in these intertwined interests: the Obama administration is presenting their own defense of Monsanto, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was once a Monsanto lawyer (but will not recuse himself from Bowman’s case). Still, the same high court that enabled the current state of American agriculture in 1981 now finds itself in a position to check Monsanto’s power — or help them tighten their hold on the industry.

Secret video footage of a hog farm in Manitoba, Canada show workers body-slamming piglets into the floor, swinging them into metal posts and kicking them when they can’t stand up. The harrowing video was filmed by an investigator for animal rights group Mercy for Animals Canada, who went undercover at the Puratone farm for three months. Mercy for Animals Canada — a sister organization of the U.S. group by the same name — released the footage Monday, calling for major grocery chains that carry Puratone meat to boycott the pork producer.

As Manitoba officials prepare to inspect and possibly investigate the Puratone facility, however, an “Animal Care Review” panel has dismissed this type of abuse as a standard, “humane” practice. This panel of researchers and scientists was put together by the Center for Food Integrity, an American organization funded by agribusiness giants including Monsanto, the National Pork Producers Council, Pfizer, Cargill and Purdue. The Vancouver Sun reports:

But the Animal Care Review Panel, made up of a University of Manitoba animal sciences professor, an Ontario Veterinary College professor and a research scientist, says [body-slamming piglets is] a humane way to euthanize piglets.

The panel, formed by the Center for Food Integrity, a U.S.-based organization representing farmers, food processors and retailers, said most of what’s in the video is widely acceptable and humane. [...] The footage appears to show pigs bleeding from open wounds in tight metal cages, pregnant pigs with distended, inflamed bellies, and piglets being slammed down on the floor by staff.

Watch it (warning — contains very graphic images):

The Center for Food Integrity is in fact an industry public relations group intended to “build consumer trust and confidence in the contemporary U.S. food system by sharing accurate, balanced information, correcting misinformation, modeling best practices and engaging stakeholders to address issues that are important to consumers.” In a recent example of this “accurate, balanced information,” CFI encourages companies to justify factory farms, where overcrowding and confinement in filthy quarters often breeds disease, by telling consumers that “indoor housing systems protect food animals from bad weather and predators.”

CFI essentially exists to clean up PR messes for Big Ag. In February, an American animal rights group released an undercover video of an Iowa hog farm showing immobilized pigs in tiny crates caked with feces, workers pushing herniated intestines back inside a piglet, and other pigs being fed the intestines from dead pigs. CFI quickly convened a panel to explain the video showed “normally accepted production practices and nothing that could be considered abusive.”

Indeed, these abusive practices do seem to be standard across the industry; in July, yet another undercover video was released by Mercy for Animals at a hog farm in Minnesota documenting the same tiny “gestation” crates found at the Canadian facility. CFI’s panels try to convince consumers that “standard” practice are the same as “humane” practices.

Rather than put effort into reforming systematic cruelty, Big Ag companies prefer to invest in bending the law to suit them. Five states have passed so-called “ag-gag” laws, which criminalize undercover investigations and secret footage inside these facilities. These laws’ sole purpose is to keep consumers from discovering the conditions in which their food is produced.