THE FINAL WORD
Our man in Baghdad; News you may have missed; "I weep for my profession": Part 2

By Alan Guebert, April 25, 2003

1. Our man in Baghdad

One axiom in agriculture seems to become more accurate by the day: In a world of 6 billion people, why do we keep running into the same 10.

The most recent proof arrived Monday, April 21, when U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman named Dan Amstutz America’s senior ministry advisor for agriculture to Iraq.

Veneman explained Amstutz’s role as a “liaison” between USDA and “military officials overseeing the rebuilding effort in Iraq.”
Amstutz has been a fixture in American agriculture for more than 30 years, passing through the public service-private industry revolving door several times. Amstutz has spent time at Cargill, Inc., Goldman Sachs & Co., the International Wheat Council and the North American Grain Export Assoc.

His foray into public began as the under secretary of agriculture for international affairs and commodity programs in the Reagan Administration (1983-1987). Amstutz then was appointed special ambassador and chief negotiator for agriculture during the Uruguay Round of General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade talks (1987-1989).

Before Veneman selected him as USDA’s man in Baghdad, Amstutz was serving as president of his Washington, D.C. consulting firm that specializes in agbiz and international trade issues. A web search shows he regularly testifies before government panels to promote cuts in federal farm price support programs, increased decoupling, tariff elimination and free agricultural trade.

Veneman’s Monday selection of American master of the ag universe Amstutz was upstaged Tuesday by Australia’s selection of its man in Baghdad: Trevor Flugge, the former chairman of the Australian Wheat Board (AWB), the country’s monopoly wheat seller to the world. Unlike Amstutz, Flugge is a farmer.

The Flugge appointment ups the fattening food ante both the U.S. and Australia believe is at stake in the soon-to-be-remade Iraq. Before the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq was a 1 million metric ton per year importer of American wheat. Since then, however, no direct sales of American ag products have occurred.

(USDA undersecretary J.B. Penn noted in a Monday briefing that Iraq owes the department’s Commodity Credit Corp. $2 billion on loans that facilitated pre-1991 ag sales and nearly $2 billion in interest on the loans.)

After the U.S. left Iraq in 1991, Australia stepped into the breach. Currently the AWB holds contracts, signed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Grain Board, to deliver more than 1 mmt of wheat in 2003. In 2002, Australia sold $484 million of wheat to Iraq.

Part of Flugge’s portfolio will include his insistence that those contracts be honored despite the fall of Hussein. Flugge will also attempt to position Australia as the natural source for much of the anticipated food aid flowing to Iraq during the country’s rebuilding because of its geographic closeness and long-standing trade ties. His hands-on, dry land farming knowledge also makes him the credible source to assist efforts to re-establish the country’s once prosperous farm sector.

Amstutz faces a stiffer task. America’s 12-year absence from Iraq, its delay in backing the United Nations’ food-for-oil relief efforts between the Gulf wars and the current power vacuum in the country will hamper him in establishing an American ag presence in Iraq.

Amstutz also must take care not to appear to undercut Australia in any food fights that may emerge between the two nations because Australia was an early backer of U.S. intervention in Iraq and the Bush Administration wants to begin bilateral free trade talks with the Aussies late this year. Both political considerations will hamper American efforts to sell food in the war-torn country.

Working in his favor is America’s request to quickly lift all UN trade sanctions with Iraq and the American preservation of Iraq’s oil infrastructure--which began pumping crude Wednesday. As such, food imports, paid for with oil, should begin within weeks.

However, while coalition partners agree that Iraq’s 27 million citizens need vast amounts of imported food now and in the foreseeable future, no hard estimates on the quantity and mix of food have been offered.

Under the United Nations’ food-for-oil relief program, 60 percent of Iraq’s population, or 16 million people, received direct food aid. According to UN data, that aid amounted to about 480,000 metric tons of grain per month.

2. News you may have missed

Some of our favorite under-reported April news items include:

Say, weren’t you Secretary of Agriculture, too? “The Chicago Mercantile Exchange today announced election results from its annual meeting. Elected director was Daniel R. Glickman, 58, Director, Institute of Politics, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; Senior Advisor and Consultant, Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld LLP.” CME press release, April 22.

Grab your wallets. “The federal government ran a deficit of about $252.7 billion in the first half of fiscal 2003, nearly twice the amount of red ink it had incurred in the same period last year.” Wall Street Journal, April 21.

Round up the usual suspects. “Secretary of Agriculture Ann M. Veneman today announced appointments to the new Advisory Committee on Biotechnology and 21st Century Agriculture. (They) include ... Carol Cramer, chief scientific officer, CropTech Corp.; Richard T Crowder, ceo, American Seed Trade Assoc.; Michael D. Dykes, vice president, government affairs, Monsanto Co.; Randal W. Giroux, staff scientist, Cargill, Inc.; Terry Medley, vice president, global regulatory affairs, DuPont; Ronald Olson, vice president, General Mills’ and Lisa W. Zannoni, global regulatory affairs and government relations, BASF.” USDA press release, April 8.

This little piggie went to Iowa. “Iowa imported a record number of feeder pigs, 14.5 million, last year, according to the Iowa Dept. of Agriculture ... The loss of sow farmers due to the imports means fewer jobs in Iowa’s rural areas because sow farmers employ more workers than hog finishing operations. “ Des Moines Register, April 19.

So what else is new? “Consumers' willingness to pay for food products decreases when the food label indicates that a food product is produced with the aid of modern biotechnology. This bulletin presents empirical evidence ... (that) shows labels matter. In particular, under all information treatments, consumers discounted food items labeled ‘GM’ by an average of 14 percent. While gender, income, and other demographic characteristics appeared to have only a slight impact on consumers' willingness to pay for biotech foods, information from interested parties and third-party (independent) sources was found to have a strong impact.” USDA, The Effects of Information on Consumer Demand for Biotech Foods: Evidence from Experimental Auctions, Technical Bulletin No. TB1903, 32 pp, April 2003 (www.ers.usda.gov/publications/tb1903).

Your money or your health insurance. “So why should tax cuts take priority over health care? I know the party line: tax cuts for high earners are the key to economic growth, and a rising tide lifts all boats. But there's not a shred of evidence supporting that claim. More than two decades after the supply-siders launched their tax-cut crusade, ordinary workers have yet to see a rising tide. The median real wage is only 7 percent higher now than it was in 1979, with all of that increase achieved after Bill Clinton raised taxes for the top bracket.” Paul Krugman, New York Times, April 25.

Do we have to? USDA Undersecretary for Marketing and Regulatory Program “Bill Hawks pledged that even though USDA does not support country-of-origin labeling (COOL), the department is committed to implementing the law approved by Congress in the 2002 Farm Bill ‘to the best of its abilities’ ” OsterDowJones, April 23.

3. “I weep for my profession’: Part 2

When the poet decried April as the cruelest month he didn’t have ag publishing in mind. Yet April is the cruelest month to ag journalists because it’s the season for pink slips in my profession.

Why April? Most general circulation ag magazines depend on the winter December-through-March farm reading season for a substantial chunk of their advertising business. In general, half of a magazine’s yearly revenue comes through those thick, ad-packed winter issues. That means by April 1 magazine publishers can estimate the year’s income. A good winter and editors keep their jobs; a bad winter, adios editors.

Two weeks ago--even as the internet’s electrons were relaying my lament on the sad state of ag journalism (“I weep for my profession,” Issue 44)--Farm Progress Publications admitted its winter had been cold and lean: it fired six experienced writers and editors.

Chuck Roth, FPP president and publisher, described the cutbacks, amounting to 19 percent of the company’s full-time staff, as “painful,” in an interview with Agweek, a weekly farm newspaper in Grand Forks, ND.

Painful as it might have been, FPP should ready itself for more pain; so should readers. How will FPP’s 18 ag magazines--including such venerable publications as Illinois’ Prairie Farmer, Iowa’s Wallaces Farmer, Nebraska Farmer and the Missouri Ruralist--cover American agriculture with but 26 editors?

“We’re still in the process of evaluating how we’ll pick up the slack,” explained Roth, adding that the company will look to its “regular contributors,” editor-speak for free-lance writers, to assist.

It’s an old story in ag publishing, even for FPP which is owned by Rural Press, an Australian media giant that publishes 150 newspapers and magazines in Australia and more than 70 ag newspapers and magazines in Australia, New Zealand and the U.S.

The old story is about money. Free-lancers save magazines buckets of the stuff. Most work by the piece at subsistence wages; most are prodigious, generating several stories a month just to survive and all are corporate freebies--no company-sponsored retirement plans, medical insurance, travel budgets or paid vacations.

And free-lancers rarely complain; complain and the magazine cuts your rate or cuts you from their stable.

In short, free-lance writers have become the contract poultry growers or the contract hog farmers of the farm publishing industry. I know. I’ve been a ag free-lance writer for 19 years. It’s a tough gig best described by paraphrasing the old joke about farming: If you want to make a small fortune free-lancing, start with a large fortune.

But free-lancers carry a steep price for magazines, too. A largely free-lance written magazine is a “soft” magazine that contains few tough or controversial stories. Softness encourages readers, then advertisers, to go somewhere else.

Also, many ag free-lance writers work both sides of the editorial street, often writing for ag publications and ag public relations agencies simultaneously. Most have to just to make a living. But the divided loyalties often yield stories that resemble corporate press releases more than journalism.

A case in point. When I began my free-lance career nearly 20 years ago, an ad agency flack offered me $800 to write a single page story on a post-emergence corn herbicide. I could bang the story out in a day, the agency guy suggested, and the magazines would print it because “Alan Guebert, one of their own, had written it.”

OK, I said, but put the deal in writing. Sure, sure said the p.r. man.

When the contract arrived a few days later, it stated that I had agreed to do five stories--on the same chemical, but with five different Land Grant university weed specialists so five different “state” ag magazines would publish it--at $800 per story.

I telephoned the p.r. weasel. That wasn’t the deal, I told him.
“What, you don’t want to make four grand next week?” he asked.
No, the money is fantastic, more than twice what any magazine would pay.

“Then write the stories.”

I did, and then the real wrangling began. I was told I hadn’t mentioned “the product” enough in the stories; hadn’t used the chemical company’s experts enough; hadn’t listed the product’s “benefits” enough. I rewrote all five stories several times until the agency was satisfied their client’s message had been clearly related.

The following winter all five stories appeared in the targeted state magazines. The magazines knew the stories were fake, the ad agency knew they were fake and I knew they were fake.
Indeed, the only people who didn’t know the fix was in were the magazines’ tens of thousands of “valued” readers.

© 2003 ag comm

The Final Word comes to you by special arrangement. Alan Guebert's regular column, the Farm and Food File, is published weekly in more than 70 newspapers around the US and Canada. Contact him at AGuebert@worldnet.att.net.