Uprooted

Late on Sunday evening the text of the re-negotiated North American Free Trade Agreement was released, renamed the United States Mexico Canada Agreement, or USMCA. IATP will be producing detailed analysis of the new agreement's impacts on food and agriculture, but for a cursory analysis, Josh talks with IATP Senior Attorney, Sharon Treat, about how much of the text is from the failed Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the haphazard process through which this agreement came about. 

Josh talks with Tara Ritter about the rollback of the Clean Power Plan, which was proposed by the Obama administration and held up in the courts. The replacement, the Affordable Clean Energy Rule is a thinly veiled attempt to prop up the dying coal industry at the expense of the expanding clean energy sector, including the job boom it would create in rural areas. 

Josh talks with IATP Executive Director, Juliette Majot, about one of IATP's foundational documents, Crisis By Design, written by IATP's founder, Mark Ritchie, with Kevin Ristau. The piece showed how the farm crisis of the 1980's was the result of purposeful actions by corporate executives to undermine government policies that ensured family farmers get a fair price.

In a quickly put together special episode, Josh and Karen Hansen-Kuhn talk about what has happened this week with NAFTA as today's deadline looms to submit the intent to sign the deal to Congress. You can read Karen's Op-Ed in The Hill here: http://thehill.com/opinion/finance/404566-opaque-nafta-talks-leave-farmers-in-the-dark 

Josh talks with Ben Lilliston about the growth of the grass fed beef market, and how global agribusiness is using labeling loopholes to sell imported grass fed beef as "product of the U.S.A." You can read Ben's comment to USDA here. 

Josh talks with Sharon Treat about the troubling food safety aspects of the latest UK government white paper on Brexit and how it may affect trade with the U.S. and Europe. 

Josh and Steve Suppan talk about the $12 billion aid package to farmers who have been affected by tariff retaliation. We're also talking about Steve's blog on how USDA helps High Frequency Traders now; promises help for farmers later, dealing with how the release of the World Agriculture Supply and Demand Estimate has been changed by USDA to benefit high frequency Wall Street trading firms. 

In our recent report Emissions Impossible: How big meat and dairy are heating up the planet, we teamed up with GRAIN to analyze the greenhouse gas footprints of the largest meat and dairy corporations, and debunked the idea that decreasing emissions intensity would, by itself, lead to an overall reduction in emissions.

IATP hosted its annual board meeting from June 24-26. Three members of the IATP Board of Directors, Becky Glass, Sivan Kartha and Board Chair Pamela Saunders, joined Josh Wise to discuss how they got involved with IATP, the challenges facing the institute today and what gives them hope in today's world. 

Note: This podcast is being released a couple of weeks after it was recorded.