Well before he was the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Tim Walz sat down with Agri-Pulse to talk about his district, the virtues of bipartisanship in crafting a farm bill, and the U.S. relationship with China.
In a 2016 Meet the Lawmaker interview two years before he left Congress and was elected governor of Minnesota, Walz said he had been working on risk management tools for the 2018 farm bill. “I'm absolutely committed to making sure those tools remain solid. I think we need to build on them,” Walz said.
He also said he had learned that “our agricultural districts trump politics. So, Midwestern folks, sometimes we have some heated arguments with the rice and cotton guys, and the Western producers have issues with us over things. But I think that's a healthy dynamic, and that's why we get farm bills done.
“In this day and age, getting anything that big done is virtually impossible. We find a way to get farm bills done,” he said. That shows “what's possible when we work together for a common good.”
On China: Walz, who was then a member of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which focuses exclusively on human rights issues there, also spoke about relations with that country, where he spent a year teaching in 1989.
China needs “to play by the rules, both from an environmental, from a fair trade, and also from a human rights perspective,” he said. But Walz added that much more can be done to work with the communist nation.
“I don't fall into the category that China necessarily needs to be an adversarial relationship,” Walz said. “I totally disagree, and I think we need to stand firm on what they're doing in the South China Sea. But there's many areas of cooperation that we can work on.” Find the interview here.
Smith: Maybe after the election we can get a farm bill
Senate Ag Committee member Tina Smith, D-Minn., isn’t giving up getting a farm bill done by the end of the year. Speaking at Minnesota Farmfest on Wednesday, she said she’s not ready to talk about extending the 2018 farm bill into 2025.
“There’s too much that can’t sit in abeyance for that many months.” She added, “I think there’s a path to reaching a conclusion after the election after people know what the lay of the land is going to be politically.”
She didn’t describe the path that she sees, and her committee hasn’t even taken up a bill. Lawmakers in both chambers remain at odds over how to pay for making changes to commodity programs, including higher reference prices for the Price Loss Coverage program.
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Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., at Minnesota Farmfest Tuesday (Photo: Lydia Johnson)Keep in mind: Senate Ag Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and ranking member John Boozman, R-Ark., have released rival outlines of a farm bill, but not text. Democrats control the committee by just one vote, and one Democrat, Raphael Warnock of Georgia, says Stabenow’s proposal doesn’t do enough for commodity programs.
EPA bans Dacthal, herbicide used mostly in vegetables
EPA has used its emergency authority under FIFRA for the first time in almost 40 years to ban the sale and use of the herbicide DCPA, or Dacthal, because of effects on fetal development.
The agency plans to propose to cancel all registrations, but said that it needed to take the emergency action to prevent “imminent harm” to “unborn babies.”
Read more in our story at www.Agri-Pulse.com
State AG’s seek pesticide labeling change for glyphosate
Eleven state attorneys general are trying to force EPA to prevent states from issuing their own pesticide warning labels if they contradict EPA findings on human health.
The issue is central to legal disputes brought by plaintiffs alleging that they were not adequately warned of the dangers of using Roundup, which they say caused their non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Bayer, which makes glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, has made the same argument in the courts and has also sought similar language in state and federal legislation to specify that the federal pesticide law, FIFRA, pre-empts state authority.
Specifically, the states led by Iowa and Nebraska want EPA to determine a pesticide label is misbranded if it contains “statements or conclusions regarding the product’s human health effects, including the likelihood of causing cancer, birth defects, or reproductive harm, that are different from EPA’s findings and conclusions stated in its human health risk assessment conducted during the registration review of the product’s principal active ingredients.”
Center for Food Safety lawyer Amy van Saun says the petition is the latest “in a string of attempts to prevent people suffering from cancer caused by pesticides” from getting restitution from manufacturers. “The regulation they want amended is already clear as to what constitutes misbranding of pesticides, and Congress has already spoken as to what states cannot do, i.e. change pesticide labels approved by EPA,” she says.
Final word: “I'm a teacher, a father, a retired soldier, a bad golfer.” – Then-Rep. Tim Walz describing himself in the 2016 Agri-Pulse interview
