thomas vilsack

Thomas Vilsack, Obama's appointed secretary of agriculture, served three terms as mayor of Mount Pleasant, Iowa and later became the state's governor. Since 2005, he has chaired the Democratic Leadership Council, a group largely funded by oil companies, military contractors, and corporate interests.

The Democratic Leadership Council drafts policy reports and support biotechnology research and development. Not surprisingly, Vilsack has demonstrated a clear preference for large industrial farms and genetically modified crops. As Iowa's governor, he originated the 2005 seed pre-emption bill, blocking local communities from regulating where GM crops could be grown.

Organic Consumers Association and Greenpeace worked tirelessly to prevent Vilsack from being appointed head of the Department of Agriculture. 100,000 emails were sent to Obama's staff urging him to reconsider, but to no avail. There are a few reasons to be concerned about Tom Vilsack heading the USDA, an organization whose mission statement includes providing leadership on food and agriculture that is based on sound public policy and the best available science.

In 2001, Thomas Vilsack was named Governor of the Year by the biggest biotechnology industry group in America. He also founded the Governor's Biotechnology Partnership, an alliance between biotech companies and 13 governors from America's farm belt. As governor of Iowa, Vilsack lobbied for Trans Ova, a company dedicated to bovine genetic improvement and cloning, to build a lab in his state. After a run for presidency in 2007, Vilsack also worked as an attorney for a corporate law firm that represents food giants like Cargill and ConAgra.

Vilsack's record of favoring industrial corporate farming and genetically modified crops is significant in the face of a 2008 global report on the use of agricultural technology to meet the world's food needs. The report, called the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development or, IAASTD, was commissioned by the World Bank and United Nations, and involved the research of over 400 scientists and 30 governments. It is described as the single largest research effort on this topic in human history and the most authoritative statement on current knowledge.

The report's findings reject modern biotechnology as the key to solving the world's food crisis and found questionable evidence for the benefits of genetically modified crops. Agroecological and organic farming methods were found to be competitive or superior to our current, conventional industrial farming methods which the report asserts have degraded the natural resource base on which human survival depends and now consequently threaten water, energy and climate security.

Agribusiness and biotechnology giants Syngenta and Monsanto resigned from their participation in the project after their inability to gain support for genetically modified crops. The Pesticide Action Network reports that the US rejected the IAASTD's findings which present an 'inconvenient truth' for Washington and the industrial agricultural establishment.

The Obama government continues to ignore the comprehensive peer-reviewed IAASTD as the government instead aligns itself with policies that favor industrial agriculture and the genetic engineering of our food. Again, the USDA is an organization that promises to provide leadership using the best available science.

So can we trust Vilsack in his position as the head of this organization to embrace the cutting edge scientific findings of the IAASTD and to provide the big changes it recommends? Or will he advocate for and shape policies in accordance with his sympathetic stance toward big agribusiness and agricultural biotechnology?

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