Administration proposals to put calorie counts on menus and to reform school lunches would be delayed by one year under a bill drafted by the House Appropriations subcommittee on agriculture. The subcommittee also would restrict the 2015 update of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the government’s tips for healthy eating, “to only matters of diet and nutrient intake” – a rejection of the proposal from a panel of experts to encourage sustainable food production. The meat industry says the advisory panel strayed outside its area of expertise to dabble with sustainability.
The bill also would delay for one year a requirement for farmers to practice conservation in order to qualify for subsidized crop insurance and would cut two popular soil and water conservation programs.
The subcommittee is to vote on the bill today. It would give the Agriculture Department $143.9 billion, 3 percent less than the White House requested. The Food and Drug Administration would receive $4.6 billion, up marginally from the current year. For details about the meeting, including a video link, click here.
FDA issued the menu-label rules last November, covering restaurant and carry-out foods including popcorn at movie theaters and muffins at bakeries. Businesses would have to list calories on menus or menu boards. The rules apply to chains with at least 20 outlets. “The menu labeling requirements, set to take effect in December, are under attack from both sides of the aisle, setting up a showdown between Congress and the Obama administration,” said The Hill newspaper a month ago. Legislation to delay the label rules is pending in the House.
In a statement, the Appropriations subcommittee said its proposal to delay the rules until Dec. 1, 2016, would “give restaurants, local supermarkets, grocery stores, and similar retail establishments adequate time to comply with the law.” Businesses say they need clearer direction from the FDA about who is covered by the rules and how to satisfy them.
The bill also carries riders to prevent the USDA from reducing the amount of salt permitted in school meals and to allow an exemption for schools that say it is too expensive to use more whole wheat products in their meals or that they cannot find an adequate supply of the materials. Similar provisions were part of the current funding bill.
When it enacted the 2014 farm law, Congress made crop insurance the largest strand in the farm safety net and said producers must write plans showing how they would prevent soil erosion and protect water quality to be eligible for premium subsidies. Known as conservation compliance, the requirement has been linked to other USDA programs for years. Farmers had a June 1 deadline to file the needed documents with the USDA.
The funding bill would bar the USDA from penalizing farmers for noncompliance during fiscal 2016. “This is an unnecessarily long delay,” said the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition – two-and-a-half years after the five-year farm law was signed. The small-farm group said it vehemently opposed language in the bill to reduce funding for the Environmental Quality Incentives Program to $1.35 billion, a $300 million cut, and to limit the Conservation Security Program – the first “working lands” program at USDA – to enrolling an additional 7.7 million acres during 2016 rather than the 10 million acres authorized by law.
Some 62 million acres are enrolled in CSP, making it the largest USDA conservation program in terms of land covered; the land-idling Conservation Reserve has a larger budget. CSP pays farmers for adopting practices that preserve land, water and wildlife as part of daily farm operations.