By Philip Brasher
Associated Press
Friday, August 31, 2001; Page A10
online story

Congress needs to look beyond traditional support programs for grain and cotton in overhauling federal farm policy and devote more money to food safety, pest prevention, nutrition and the environment, Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman said yesterday.

"We really need to look at the whole food system and the agriculture system much differently than we have in the past," Veneman said.

"If you don't look at the food and farm system today through a more holistic approach, you're leaving out much of agriculture and much of our production," she said.

The Bush administration is developing principles for farm policy to guide Congress as it rewrites laws governing a host of spending and regulatory programs that expire next year.

Legislation approved by the House Agriculture Committee in July would guarantee a steady flow of money to the same grain and cotton farmers who have gotten the lion's share of federal farm spending.

Grain and cotton account for about 20 percent of the nation's food production, said Veneman, who grew up on a California peach farm.

Veneman declined to judge the bill, which the House is expected to take up the second week of September.

"It has some good things and some things that people are going to have different reactions to," she said.

But she said the administration's agricultural policy will emphasize a number of issues besides farm subsidies, including food safety programs and efforts to prevent the introduction of mad cow and foot-and-mouth diseases.

Many food-borne pathogens now confronting the food industry, such as E. coli O157:H7, were virtually unheard of a few years ago, she said.

Environmental issues and the food-stamp program also will be addressed, she said.

Veneman rose through the ranks of the Agriculture Department in the 1980s and early 1990s to take the department's No. 2 post in the previous Bush administration. She later served as California's agriculture commissioner.

She has generally received high marks from consumer advocates for sticking with food safety initiatives taken by the Clinton administration over the opposition of the meat industry.

Her first action on food regulation was to move forward with bacterial testing requirements for processed meat.

Industry groups say the rules, which could still be revised, go too far.

Later, she junked industry-sought changes in standards for meat that the government supplies to schools.

She said the administration will continue a legal battle with the meat industry over testing requirements for salmonella bacteria. A Texas judge last year agreed with the industry that the tests were not an adequate indication of plant sanitation and blocked USDA from closing a plant that had flunked them.

She said the chances of mad-cow disease reaching the United States from Europe were "very, very slim to none."

However, she said the government needs to do more research on the disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and develop tests that could detect it in live cattle.

This week, she sent the department's budget director and her top deputies for research and regulation to USDA's main mad-cow research laboratory in Ames, Iowa, to assess its needs.

The department also is trying to find money to computerize an antiquated record-keeping system used by inspectors to keep track of prohibited food products at ports, she said.

At the height of the foot-and-mouth crisis in Europe, the department had trouble finding prohibited meat products that were being held in quarantine, according to a report by USDA's inspector general.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company