E301: Greg Jaffe on Food and Ag Policy Trends

Interview Transcript Kate - Welcome to the Leading Voices in Food podcast. I'm Kate Stanley, a researcher at the World Food Policy Center at Duke University. I'm joined today by my co-host, Katariina Koivusaari, a researcher at North Carolina State University. Together, we collaborate on policy research for the Bezos Center for Sustainable Proteins at NC State. Katariina - Great to have you. Greg, you have been involved in food and agriculture policy in Washington, D.C. for several decades and have worked with both Democratic and Republican administrations. Are food policy politics caught up in party differences depending on which political party is running the executive branch? A very relevant question right now. I guess it would be wrong to say that the political party in office doesn't make a big difference in the policies being carried out by the executive branch. However, in the food and agricultural space, and especially in the areas that I focus on, which is really around these new technologies in food and Ag and how do those get into the marketplace and adopted, that difference hasn't been so big. Let me give you an example or two. I'll take you back first to about 2000, and we had the Clinton administration. We have the regulation at FDA of biotech crops, and they had a voluntary consultation process and there were a number of stakeholders and others who felt that that wasn't sufficient. The Clinton administration interpreted the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to try to turn that into what they called a mandatory consultation, and they proposed a pre-market notification rule. It didn't get finished in, before the end of the administration in January of 2001. Then we had the Bush administration come in, so we went from a Democrat to a Republican. And the Bush administration looked at the same law and looked at that same proposed regulation and said, "We don't have the legal authority to do that." And they withdrew that proposal, and so we still have to this day this voluntary consultation. And I give you that example for two reasons. One, I think what we've seen when it comes to food and policy regulation by different administrations is how they interpret the law. And I can say this in very general, the Democrats have tended to be a little more expansive in how they interpreted the law to try to find more legal authority to do things that they might want to do. And the Republicans have tended to look at that language much more restrictively or look at just exactly what that language said and not try to interpret anything into it. And so, you see that difference here between what happened in the Clinton administration versus what happened in the Bush administration. I mention this example because as many of your listeners may know, right now in this administration, we have the question about voluntary GRAS and whether that's going to become mandatory or not. And some of us who have followed that know that the current FDA has submitted to OMB, to the White House, a proposed rule to make GRAS mandatory. Well, that is-- the regulatory process for those biotech crops is also a GRAS process. It's interesting now that we have a Republican administration who's finding the authority to do that, and we'll see what actually comes out and what the courts do with it. But I think this shows that sort of difference in policies between Democrats and Republicans. But overall, we haven't seen a lot of difference. In this new administration, I think one of the questions people had was what would happen with a technology like cell-cultivated meat? Where would the regulation of it go forward? There's many in the MAHA movement, I think, that felt that that wasn't consistent with what they wanted. But we've seen that those approvals continue to happen. Similarly, pesticides have been an issue in many administrations. Sometimes Democrats have argued to be much more restrictive in the use of pesticides and to make the regulations much harder. And Republicans have oftentimes said to make those easier for the agencies. But what we see is pesticides have moved forward under both administrations. People understand the need for pesticides to produce agriculture. We have some differences in policy, but on the whole, in this area, I think, whether it's Dem