Science Policy Report

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27 January 2016

In This Issue:

Policy News

International Corner

Research, Education, Extension Funding Opportunities

Science News

Policy News

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its annual budget and economic outlook this week. CBO projects that the federal budget deficit will increase to 2.9 percent of GDP this year, the first time that the deficit has risen in relation to the size of the economy since peaking at 9.8 percent in 2009. If current laws generally remained unchanged, the deficit would grow over the next 10 years, and by 2026 it would be considerably larger than its average over the past 50 years, CBO projects. Debt held by the public would also grow significantly from its already high level. A summary and the complete report, including baseline tables and supplemental data, can be viewed here.

A trio of recent sexual harassment cases involving university scientists is drawing extensive attention from at least one lawmaker in Congress. In the wake of the cases, Representative Jackie Speier (D–CA) says she wants to strengthen a federal antidiscrimination law to help solve the problem. But it’s not clear how her proposed solution—still in the formative stage—would work, or whether it can be enacted into law. Speier spurred headlines last week when she took to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives to reveal the lurid details of an investigation into sexual harassment by astronomer Timothy Slater, then at the University of Arizona in Tucson, more than a decade ago. Read the full article.

President Obama delivered an expected veto of a congressional resolution that would kill the administration's “waters of the United States” rule redefining the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act. “Because this resolution seeks to block the progress represented by this rule and deny businesses and communities the regulatory certainty and clarity needed to invest in projects that rely on clean water, I cannot support it,” Obama said in his veto message. Republicans were unable to muster veto-proof, two-thirds majorities in either the House and Senate, but GOP leaders believe the measure will serve to highlight election-year differences between the parties. The WOTUS rule took effect last August, but courts have put it on hold nationwide while legal challenges are considered. Read the full article.

Deputy Agriculture Secretary Krysta Harden, who led the implementation of the 2014 farm bill, says she's leaving USDA at the end of February. Michael Scuse, the current under secretary for Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services, has been tapped as acting deputy. “Today is bittersweet for me,” Harden said in a release announcing her planned departure. “I am proud of what our department has accomplished since 2009 to bring economic opportunity that will help rural America thrive for generations to come. And although I will not be part of the many great and transformational things USDA will accomplish over the next year, I am more committed than ever to USDA's mission.” Read the full article.

International Corner

The head of the UN said that the warring parties in Syria were committing war crimes by withholding food from civilians. He called for all sides to lift their sieges immediately as a confidence-building gesture ahead of peace talks. The statement came as aid convoys delivered food and medicine for the second time to three besieged Syrian towns. UN officials have said that it took more than three months to secure access to the towns, and that many residents, including children, had died of hunger and disease in that time. Read the full article.

The International Rice Research Institute is working to develop seeds for new rice varieties that will be able to resist climate stresses such as floods, drought, and soil salinity that are expected to become more frequent due to global warming. Flood-resistant rice strains are already paying off in India, Bangladesh, and Nepal, where millions of farmers now grow rice that can survive submergence in water for 14 to 20 days. Previously popular high-yielding rice varieties would be destroyed after just four or five days under water. Read the full article.

Turkish academics who have openly criticized Turkey’s military crackdown on ethnic Kurdish communities are now feeling the wrath of their government. In recent days, the government arrested 33 academics. Although all have since been released, 15 have been fired from their university posts. Last week, Turkey’s Science Academy released a statement objecting to the government’s “wrong and disturbing” reaction in what is mushrooming into yet another crisis for the nation’s academic community. Read the full article.

The head of Europe's food safety watchdog has written to a group of nearly 100 senior scientists strongly rejecting their criticisms in a row about the safety of weed-killer ingredient glyphosate. The European Food Safety Authority, which advises EU policymakers, issued an opinion that glyphosate is unlikely to cause cancer. That was at odds with a view from the WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer, sparking outrage among environmental campaigners and dividing the scientific community. Read the full article.

India’s government has approved a $1.3 billion insurance scheme for farmers to protect against crop failures, saying it was intended to put a halt to a spate of suicides. Under the new scheme, farmers will pay premiums of as little as 1.5% of the value of their crops, allowing them to reclaim their full value in case of natural damage. Two successive years of drought have battered the country’s already struggling rural heartland, with farmer suicides in rural areas regularly hitting the headlines. Read the full article.

10% of the 277 million people living in the 15-nation Southern African Development Community will probably need food aid after cereal production dropped to record lows. South Africa, the continent’s biggest corn producer, will have to import about half the grain it needs, volumes that may prove to be too big for the ports to handle. The El Niño phenomenon disrupted normal rainfall rates in the region, bearing the brunt of the blame for the failed harvest of staples such as corn, soy, sorghum, and cassava. Read the full article.

Research, Education, Extension Funding Opportunities

The Climate Trust (The Trust) is launching a first-of-its-kind fund to channel large volumes of financing into carbon offset projects to help mitigate climate change. The Trust’s fund will make investments in carbon mitigation projects at an early stage in their development. We are beginning with a pilot fund of $5.5 million that will be deployed in 2016. This pilot will prove our concept and unlock further rounds of increased financing for deployment in 2018, allowing us to offer financing to more sectors and developers. We invite project owners and developers with experience in developing Improved Forest Management, Avoided Conversion forestry, livestock manure digester and Avoided Conversion of Grasslands projects to apply for our initial round of financing. Deadline, Feb. 26. Read the full announcement.

The Secondary Education, Two-Year Postsecondary Education, and Agriculture in the K-12 Classroom Challenge Grants (SPECA) program seeks to: (a) promote and strengthen secondary education and two-year postsecondary education in the food, agriculture, natural resources and human (FANH) sciences in order to help ensure the existence in the United States of a qualified workforce to serve the FANH sciences system; and (b) promote complementary and synergistic linkages among secondary, two-year postsecondary, and higher education programs in the FANH sciences in order to advance excellence in education and encourage more young Americans to pursue and complete a baccalaureate or higher degree in the FANH sciences. Deadline, March 18. Read the full announcement.

Under this FOA, BETO’s Advanced Algal Systems Program seeks projects that will develop technologies that are likely to succeed in producing 3,700 gallons of algal biofuel intermediate (or equivalent dry weight basis) per acre per year (gal/acre/yr) on an annualized average basis (not peak or projected) through multiple batch campaigns or on a semi-continuous or continuous basis, in an outdoor test environment by 2020. In general, “biofuel intermediates” are biomass-based feedstocks that can replace petroleum-based feedstocks in downstream refining. Deadline, March 25. Read the full announcement.

AGI is seeking quality candidates for Outstanding Contribution to the Public Understanding of the Geosciences. The award is presented to a person, organization, or institution in recognition of an outstanding contribution to the public understanding of geology. The contribution may be in geology as a science or in geology as it relates to economic or environmental aspects of modern civilization. The award may be given to a geologist or non-geologist, or to an organization or an institution that is geologic or non-geologic in character. Up to three letters of support may be sent for each nominee and, if provided, will be included in the package sent to the 2016 Nominating Committee. Deadline, March 31. Read the full announcement.

Science News

A potato genetically engineered to resist the pathogen that caused the Irish potato famine is as safe as any other potato on the market, the FDA says. There is no evidence that GMOs are unsafe to eat, but for some people, altering the genetic code of foods presents an ethical issue. The food industry has faced pressure from retailers as consumer awareness of genetically modified foods has increased. Read the full article.

To solve the problems standing between us and a well-fed future, agricultural science will need to attract the best and brightest, but that simply won’t happen when future career prospects in agriculture are funded at 25%. The next generation may well be made of top quality students, and organizations across the agricultural spectrum do much to invest in and promote those students. But the reality remains stark: our universities may have quality, but they don’t have quantity. Read the full article.

Robert Fraley, Monsanto's chief technology officer, admitted that his company has “done a lousy job” of selling the public on genetically modified (GM) seeds and other agricultural products. “We've done a lousy job communicating about science and what these (GM) technologies can do,” Fraley said at a talk hosted by the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. “As important as science is, it's not enough. We have to be able to communicate science to the public better than we are today.” Monsanto made a big mistake in 1996 when it released the world's first agriculture-specific product made with a genetically modified organism (GMO) - Roundup Ready soybeans - and marketed them solely to the farmers that would use them instead of the public that would consume them, he said. Read the full article.

A major pesticide harms honeybees when used on cotton and citrus but not on other big crops such as corn, berries and tobacco, the Environmental Protection Agency found. In its first scientific risk assessment of the much-debated class of pesticides called neonicotinoids and how they affect bees on a chronic long-term basis, the EPA found in some cases the chemical didn't harm bees or their hives but in other cases it posed a significant risk. It mostly depended on the crop, a nuanced answer that neither clears the way for an outright ban nor is a blanket go-ahead for continued use. Read the full article.

An Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientist in Wyndmoor, Pennsylvania, and his collaborators have developed an antimicrobial wash that reduces the risk of foodborne pathogens contaminating fresh produce. Joshua Gurtler and scientists at NatureSeal Inc. have found that a combination of lactic acid, fruit acids, and hydrogen peroxide can be used in a produce rinse for commercial food distributors. NatureSeal, based in Westport, Connecticut, already markets an anti-browning wash developed by another ARS team in the 1990's for sliced apples and 18 other types of produce. Read the full article.

Separation of church and state? When it comes to fighting food waste, the U.S. government is looking to partner up with the faithful. The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday launched the Food Steward's Pledge, an initiative to engage religious groups of all faiths to help redirect the food that ends up in landfills to hungry mouths. It's one piece of the agency's larger plan to reduce food waste by 50 percent by 2030. Food waste connects to the core values of many faith communities, particularly helping the poor and feeding the hungry, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy notes. Read the full article.

A new FAO book takes a close look at how the world's major cereals maize, rice and wheat - which together account for an estimated 42.5 percent of human calories and 37 percent of our protein - can be grown in ways that respect and even leverage natural ecosystems. Drawing on case studies from around the planet, the new book illustrates how the "Save and Grow" approach to agriculture advocated by FAO is already being successfully employed to produce staple grains, pointing the way to a more sustainable future for farming and offering practical guidance on how the world can pursue its new sustainable development agenda. Read the full article.

Once upon a time in the not-so-distant past, Mark Lynas would crawl through mud, clandestinely seeking to destroy European GMO crops. Lynas, a world-renowned environmental scientist, bought into the dogma that GMOs were bad for the environment, calling herbicide resistance – the first GMO he learned of – the “original sin of the environmental movement.” The scientist made worldwide headlines three years ago when he reversed his anti-GMO stance. Part of his recent pitch to farmers at the 97th annual American Farm Bureau Federation convention in Orlando was to assert the need for more advances in technology, adding that GMOs are critical to increased yields, food supply and food costs. Indeed, Lynas is now working with Cornell University to help develop GM crops that will help farmers in developing countries grow better crops without pesticides. Read the full article.

A coalition of scientific and engineering societies, universities, and academic organizations has created an exciting opportunity for upper-class undergraduate and graduate students in science, mathematics, and engineering disciplines to learn about science policy and advocacy. The CASE program is open to universities or professional scientific or engineering societies that would like to provide an opportunity for their students to come to Washington, DC, and learn about science policy. Students who are selected by their institution to participate in the workshop will spend a few days learning about the structure and organization of Congress, the federal budget and appropriations process, and tools for effective science communication and civic engagement. Application deadline, Feb 12. For additional details about the CASE Workshop, go here. 

Sources: USDA; AAAS; CBO; AGI; ScienceInsider; The New York Times; Agri-Pulse; The Chicago Council; FOA; NPR; Reuters; Farm Futures; Bloomberg; The Guardian; Financial Times; The Christian Science Monitor;

Vision: The Societies Washington, DC Science Policy Office (SPO) will advocate the importance and value of the agronomic, crop and soil sciences in developing national science policy and ensuring the necessary public-sector investment in the continued health of the environment for the well being of humanity. The SPO will assimilate, interpret, and disseminate in a timely manner to Society members information about relevant agricultural, natural resources and environmental legislation, rules and regulations under consideration by Congress and the Administration.

This page of the ASA-CSSA-SSSA web site will highlight current news items relevant to Science Policy. It is not an endorsement of any position.