Southern
Crop
Production
Association
P.O. Box 7000, Dawson GA 39842
Phone (229) 995-2125
Fax (229)
995-4000
southcrop@earthlink.net
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On Guard
July 1, 2009 Thumbnail summaries prepared for Busy Executives of underreported events and information recently noted by SCPA. The views expressed in these articles are not necessarily the views of SCPA but the articles were felt to be worthy of your attention. House Struggles
to address Local Fears in Climate-Watershed Bill State sources are questioning the usefulness of the bill and flagging concerns about its imposition of overlapping federal requirements. Some stakeholders have complained that the bill employs a “heavy handed federal top-down approach towards trying to push for watershed planning. Concerns were raised that the ibll would “just overlay a whole new planning structure with a whole new bureaucracy of commissions and boards without consideration for existing structures. The yet-to-be-introduced
“sustainable Watershed Planning Act’ is intended to address ongoing concerns
that water resources need to be addressed at a regional level in concert with
water quality and ecological health n part due to changing climate patterns. Budget Rider
Sparks Argument over Fate of Chemical Security Bill House Democrats continue to push the Congress to pass their bill H.R. 2868, which would replace the interim standards. However, a number of lingering
disputes over provisions of the bill – ranging from whether to mandate the use
of inherently safer technology to the inclusion of citizen suit authority –
coupled with the tight time-line to pass something before the DHS program
expires makes it unlikely H.R. 2868 will pass thei Congress. Senate GOP Vows
to Block Clean Water Jurisdiction Bill from Floor The 12 Democrats on the
committee at the markup adopted an amendment from Chairwoman Barbara Boxer and
Sens. Max Baucus and Amy Klobuchar to the legislation, S. 787, originally
introduced by Sen. Fuss Feingold. The Buacus-Klobuchar-Boxer amendment says the
scope of the CWA will be the jurisdiction as interpreted by EPA and the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers as of Jan. 9, 2001, the day before the first of two
Supreme Court decisions that critics say have limited the water law beyond what
Congress intended when it passed in 1972. By agreeing to the amendment, Baucus
backed away from proposals to exempt pesticide spraying and hunting and shooting
activities from CWA coverage. Oberstar
Opposes “Hours of Service Ag Exemption” Leonardo
Academy Reports Progress on Sustainable Ag Standard Agricultural
Industry, Feds Spar over Source of Gulf Hypoxia The dispute comes as Gulf state governors are launching a plan to restore coastal water quality in the five-state region, amid lagging success of the state-federal Mississippi River-Gulf of Mexico Watershed Nutrient Task Force. In a June 16 report, The
National Corn Growers Assn. says that the “vast dead zones” in the Gulf
attributed to hypoxia “may be overstated.” And fishing data since 1985 “shows
no negative impact nor any clear relationship between the fish catch, the flow
of water through the Mississippi Basin or the size of the seasonal hypoxic
zone. There is no clear evidence of a relationship between nitrogen and the
size of the seasonal hypoxic zone. In recent years, as corn production has
become more efficient and yields have increased, the nitrogen removed from corn
fields in the grain may equal or exceed the amount of nitrogen applied in the
fertilizer.”
California Water Agencies Sue Feds "Environmental laws apply equally to all," said Tom Birmingham, General Manager of the Westlands Water District. "Denying this much water to California is going to do obvious, serious, and enduring damage to habitat, to wetlands, and to other endangered species. It will reduce water quality and drive up the costs of water treatment for millions of people. It will reduce the opportunities for recycling, conjunctive use, and water transfers, which are all vitally important to the state's efforts to conserve water and improve efficiency. And it will put tens of thousands of people out of work, which affects public health and safety in myriad ways." The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California recently granted a preliminary injunction in connection with a similar lawsuit that pointed to the failure of another federal agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service, to prepare an environmental assessment before imposing a set of restrictions on behalf of the delta smelt that cut California's water supply by nearly one third. Hearings on the merits of those challenges will be conducted later this year. "The Obama Administration's salmon plan mimics the smelt proposal and it suffers from the same defects," Birmingham said. In both the smelt and salmon proceedings, Westlands filed its lawsuit jointly with the San Luis and Deltla-Mendota Water Authority. The smelt cutbacks have cost California more than 660,000 acre feet of water last year and they have reduced water supplies by another 480,000 acre feet so far this year. The federal plan for salmon would continue all of those reductions and could take as much as another 500,000 acre feet of water out of the water system, according to the California Dept. of Water Resources. Those combined losses add up to enough water to serve nine million people for a year. "The federal agencies pushing this plan have refused to estimate what the total loss of water will be. And they won't say what it is going to cost taxpayers either," Birmingham said. "But the Department of Water Resources reports that the smelt and salmon restrictions will add $500 million a year to the cost for public agencies to continue delivering water. And that doesn't include the much larger capital costs for the changes that these federal agencies are demanding in existing dams and other water facilities." In announcing the salmon plan, the regional commissioner for the federal Bureau of Reclamation acknowledged that its implementation would mean that there will no longer be reliable water supplies for California agriculture and that there will not be any additional water available for growing cities.
"It is simply outrageous that federal authorities would seek to
force these restrictions on California without conducting a single public
hearing, without any public review or comment, and without any consideration of
the harm they are doing," Birmingham said. In a June 4 Federal Register notice, USDA’s Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) says it has determined that it lacks regulatory and statutory authority under the Plant Protection Act (PPA) to regulate the corn. APHIS says it has determined that neither the enzyme injected into the corn nor the corn variety itself are “living organisms” subject to PPA oversight.
Traditionally, EPA has regulated GE
crops that are pesticides while APHIS has regulated other GE varieties,
including plant pests. But environmentalists say the APHIS determination marks a
“startling” departure that effectively means that APHIS is ceding its authority
to regulate many GE crops entirely and that EPA may need to step in and regulate
under TSCA, which the sources describe as a “gap filling” statute.
The lawmakers also urge EPA to test a range of chemicals that have received public scrutiny for their potential endocrine impacts but which the agency has not yet targeted, including dioxins, polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB), the plastic hardener bisphenol-A (BPA), the flame retardant polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) and perfluorochemicals (PFCs). The lawmakers also urge the agency to consider a wider range of health impacts, such as effects on the metabolism and weight regulation. The language appears to respond to criticisms from public health advocates that the agency’s current testing program -- which officials finalized April 15 -- is outdated and limited. And one EPA source says the language shows Congress is ready to move forward with the program rather than stop and re-evaluate the program after the first round of tests, as the agency had considered doing in the past.
The House directive is included in
non-binding report language that accompanies EPA’s fiscal year 2010
appropriations bill, which the appropriations committee approved June 18. It is
unclear whether the Senate appropriations report, which is slated to be released
at a June 25 markup, will include a similar directive, but the agency could
choose to act on the House directive even without similar Senate language.
Pesticide Action network North
America sent a letter to EPA outlining some of the concerns they have with EPA’s
amended reregistration eligibility decisions. They said “Asking people to leave
their homes when they well be employed by the farmer is inherently coercive.”
The solution according to PANNA is to not allow buffer zones to extend over
people’s homes.
The largely partisan quarrel over
IST also extended to the provision on civil lawsuits, which says “any person may
commence a civil action” against DHS or any private party who may have violated
or failed to enforce the statute. DHS has raised concerns with the provision,
citing the worry that sensitive or classified information could be released
during civil suit court proceedings. Protesting Pipeline Permits Environmentalists are urging Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to block a slew of permits for new pipelines to transport oil sands from Canada to various parts of the United States. Activists are challenging the cross-border “presidential permits” for the pipeline projects in a public campaign, in addition to continuing to pursue at least one lawsuit in federal district court. The State Department is arguing in the case that courts do not have jurisdiction to review the permits, because they are issued under the constitutional authority of the president. The Sierra Club said “Leading up to Clinton’s decision, environmental groups will conduct a wide variety of outreach, including running newspaper ads, launching a new Web site, and asking tens of thousands of Americans, Canadians and Europeans to sign letters and petitions calling on Secretary Clinton to deny the permit.” The Natural Resources Defense Council is suing the State Department in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia over a presidential permit for the Keystone pipeline issued by the Bush administration. Environmentalists say the environmental impact review for the pipeline was insufficient.
But the State Department is asking
the court to the throw out the case because they say the court has no
jurisdiction to review the permit that was issued under executive branch
authority, which was created by a decades-old executive order. The Obama
administration appears to be initially backing the Bush administration legal
arguments, given court documents submitted over the past few months. The case is
currently awaiting a court hearing.
Crapo Stalls Bill on Water Control
The bill S. 787, which has broad opposition among
agricultural land and water users, would eliminate the term “navigable” from the
current Clean Water Act and substitute it with “waters of the United States”.
Climate Cap and Trade Bill The legislation includes an array of high-profile concessions to farm-state lawmakers, some previously announced, including an additional 0.5% of allowances to rural electric cooperatives, and language blocking EPA from going forward with methods for calculating international indirect emissions from land-use changes from biofuels production as part of a final renewable fuel standard expected this summer. The land use language – one of several deals reached between energy committee Chairman Henry Waxman and Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson in the days prior to the House vote – requires a five-year study of the issue by the National Academy of Sciences after industry and other critics argued that EPA analysis of land clearing and agriculture practices in other countries due to domestic demand for biofuels would unfairly penalize the U.S. biofuels industry. Given existing exemptions in current law for many biofuels plants, some observers say a bigger win for farm states is language granting the Dept. of Agriculture, rather than EPA, authority over the agriculture sector carbon offsets program created by the legislation. The arrangement still allows EPA a role in non-farm related domestic offsets at the domestic level as well as over the international offsets program. Other concessions to agriculture or forestry groups include provisions to grandfather biodiesel facilities from low carbon requirements in the 2007 energy law and broaden the definition of renewable biomass that is eligible for credit under the climate bill’s renewable electricity standard and an existing renewable fuels standard. For private lands, the revised definition adopts a definition used in the current farm law, and for federal lands it expands the ability to harvest biomass form dead or damaged trees on late successional stands. The bill also clarifies that agriculture and forestry sectors are exempt from the bill’s emissions cap.
Another last-minute change affecting both the
agriculture and utility sector allows companies subject to the bill’s emissions
limits to purchase time-limited, “term offset” credits under the domestic
agriculture offset program in the legislation.
Under the bill, chemical facilities would be assigned to risk-based tiers. Owners and operators of chemical plans would have to assess the vulnerability of their plans to a range of chemical facility terrorist incidents; prepare and implement site security plans; and include employees in developing the assessment and plan. Amendments focused primarily on provisions in the bill that would require chemical facilities to switch to safer chemicals or processes and that would give individuals the right to sue a chemical facility or DHS for violating chemical security regulations. The committee rejected an amendment to strip the inherently safer technology provision from the bill.
The bill now goes to the House Energy and
Commerce Committee.
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