Yet, because of the broad authority she would be handed as agriculture secretary and because of her extreme politics, Veneman could well turn out to be Bush’s most dangerous pick. Veneman’s track record suggests that, if confirmed, she will use her position as head of a powerful agency with responsibility for implementing federal farm policy, protecting food safety and managing public lands to advance what farm activist Mark Ritchie describes as "strictly pro-agribusiness, pro-pesticide company, pro-pharmaceutical company positions."

While the Clinton administration practiced malignant neglect as farm income plummeted to record lows in the late 1990s, a Bush Department of Agriculture under Veneman’s leadership would in the view of savvy farm activists mount a full frontal assault on the future of family farming, food safety standards and the undeveloped wilderness.

Veneman has served as a key member of the Reagan and Bush administration farm teams, as director of the California Department of Food and Agriculture during the gubernatorial administration of agribusiness favorite Pete Wilson, as an agribusiness lawyer and as a member of the national steering committee of Farmers and Ranchers for Bush. In those positions she has rarely missed an opportunity to promote a free-trade regimen that advances the interests of international food production and processing conglomerates, to encourage policies that lead to the displacement of family farms with huge factory farms, to open public lands for mineral extraction and timbering, to support genetic modification of food and to defend biotech experimentation with agriculture. Indeed, Veneman is a biotech absolutist who served on the board of Calgene, the corporation that launched the first genetically engineered food in 1994. Veneman told a forum last year, "We simply will not be able to feed the world without biotechnology."

Most Americans still imagine farms as family-run ventures where a measure of environmental stewardship is practiced, but that sort of farming is rapidly being displaced as family farmers find they no longer can compete in a global market dominated by corporate agribusiness monopolies. Veneman has for the better part of two decades served as the point person for a so-called "modern" vision of farming that has more to do with global-positioning satellites and genetic engineering of the food supply than the tending of fields and the care of animals. With Veneman’s encouragement, California developed a conglomerated, big-farm, chemically enhanced version of food production that Iowa Farmers Union President John Whitaker describes as "an entirely different face of agriculture" from that practiced or desired by most working farmers in places like Iowa and Wisconsin.

"I don’t want to see that face transferred to Iowa," says Whitaker. But if Veneman gets the reins of the Department of Agriculture as the Congress is preparing to rewrite the dismally flawed Freedom to Farm Act — which U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., aptly dubbed the "Freedom to Fail Act" — the transfer may be unavoidable. While it is true that members of the House will drive the process, this will be the first time since the 1950s that a Republican Congress and a Republican agriculture secretary will be working in unison to implement "reforms" that are likely to further tip the balance in favor of agribusiness conglomerates.

But a Secretary Veneman would not merely be hustling to deliver for Bush’s corporate contributors on domestic farm policy and land use issues; she’d also be working for them on the international stage. A militant free trader with decades-old ties to the masters of the new global economy, Veneman helped negotiate the Uruguay round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which cleared the way for development of the World Trade Organization.

In addition, she was actively involved in negotiating the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement and the North American Free Trade Agreement. So determined is Veneman to advance the free-trade agenda that Bush transition team aides briefly considered her as a candidate for the position of U.S. trade representative before handing the keys to the Department of Agriculture, with its 100,000-member staff and $100 billion budget, to the woman who has already proven her willingness to sacrifice the interests of American farmers on the altar of trade liberalization. Even as family farmers from Wisconsin and Minnesota were marching in the streets of Seattle to protest WTO interference with agricultural supports and food safety standards, Veneman was in Seattle to tell the WTO to move more aggressively to remove so-called "technical barriers to trade."

"(Veneman) has taken the most shrill, ideologically driven positions on trade and agriculture," says Ritchie, the president of the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. "She seems to be coming in with the notion that her job is to be as extreme as possible in parroting the agribusiness line. The problem is that that line is completely out of sync with what farmers want, what consumers want, and what we know to be scientifically, ecologically and economically right."

Copyright 2001 The Capital Times

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