Law Commons^™

Whose Food Security?: Confronting Expanding Commodity Production And The Obesity And Diabetes Epidemics, David V. Fazzino

David V Fazzino II

No abstract provided.

Corn, Carbon, And Conservation: Rethinking U.S. Agricultural Policy In A Changing Global Environment, Mary Jane Angelo

Mary Jane Angelo

ABSTRACT

CORN, CARBON AND CONSERVATION: RETHINKING U.S. AGRICULTURAL POLICY IN A CHANGING GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT

Mary Jane Angelo

In the past few years, the public has renewed its interest in ensuring that the food it eats is healthy and is grown in ways that are environmentally and economically sustainable. The immense popularity of books such as The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the widespread “locavore” movement, First Lady Michelle Obama’s White House lawn vegetable garden, concerns over genetically modified crops, rising food prices, growing concerns over the government’s misguided policy to promote corn ethanol, and the climate change crisis have refocused the public’s attention …

Leveling The Playing Field In Gmo Risk Assessment: Importers, Exporters And The Limits Of Science, Alison Peck

Alison Peck

The WTO system requires that trade restrictions to protect health and safety be based on a risk assessment supported by “sufficient scientific evidence.” Scholars and international standards organizations have pointed out, however, that science is not capable of providing answers to questions of health and safety without incorporation of value judgments and assumptions by the risk assessors. Before GMO-importing countries conduct risk assessments, GMO-producing and -exporting countries have already conducted separate risk assessments that led to the decision to produce and market the products in the first place. Both risk assessments – of exporting and importing countries – employ science …

A Horse Of A Different Color: A Study Of Color Bias, Anti-Trust, And Restraint Of Trade Violations In The Equine Indsutry, Mary W. Craig

Mary W Craig

In 2000, Kay Floyd sued the American Quarter Horse Association, and changed not only the way the Association did business, but changed the law as it applied to voluntary associations. The court ruled that an association cannot economically discriminate against some of its members and artificially devalue the property held by those members. Subsequently, the American Quarter Horse Association has changed its own registration rules to reflect the principle behind the Floyd suit, even though the parties settled and dismissed the case. A sister equine association in Texas, however, has refused to amend its rules concerning equine registration, resulting in …

A Troubled Path To Private Property: Agricultural Land Law In Russia, Ira Kenneth Lindsay

Ira Kenneth Lindsay

When the Soviet Union collapsed many observers hoped that decollectivization would improve the infamously inefficient Soviet agricultural sector and raise collective farm workers out of poverty. The initial results of market reform in Russian agriculture were a severe disappointment in both respects. Under Putin, Russia has finally allowed agricultural land to be bought and sold. The effects of this latest reform have been less than was hoped by supporters or feared by opponents. Russia’s experience with land reform suggests that while private ownership of farmland may offer significant advantages, successful land reform requires much more than the creation of legal …

Antibiotics In Food Animals: The Convergence Of Animal And Public Health, Science, Policy, Politics And The Law, Nancy Halpern

Nancy E Halpern D.V.M.

ANTIBIOTICS IN FOOD ANIMALS: THE CONVERGENCE OF ANIMAL AND PUBLIC HEALTH, SCIENCE, POLICY, POLITICS AND THE LAW

BY NANCY E HALPERN, DVM

MAY 3, 2009

ABSTRACT

The use of antibiotics in food animals, to prevent and/or control disease in these animals, has been a subject of discussion between the medical and veterinary and animal agricultural sectors and related national and international government entities for decades, because of concerns about the resulting increase in antibiotic resistance such practices facilitate. The underlying premise is that use of antibiotics in food animals leads to resistance of the bacteria consumed by humans, and reducing …

Trampling The Public Trust, Debra Donahue

Debra L. Donahue

Many ecological problems in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem can be traced to livestock production politics. Federal land managers and state wildlife agencies refuse to address the root causes of these problems and seek ecological solutions. They pursue management policies driven, not by science or law, but by an institutionalized relationship with livestock interests. This article describes three pressing ecological issues--predator control, elk and bison supplemental feeding, and climate change--and explains how public land grazing causes or contributes to each problem and frustrates solutions. The article argues that current management policies violate state duties as trustee for the people’s wildlife and …

"Stationarity Is Dead" -- Long Live Transformation: Five Principles For Climate Change Adaptation Law, Robin K. Craig

Robin K. Craig

While there is no question that successful mitigation strategies remain critical in the quest to avoid worst-case climate change scenarios, we’ve passed the point where mitigation efforts alone can deal with the problems that climate change is creating. Because of “committed” warming – climate change that will occur regardless of mitigation measures, a result of the already-accumulated greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – what happens to social-ecological systems over the next decades, and most likely over the next few centuries, will largely be beyond human control. The time to start preparing for these changes is now, by making adaptation part …

Homeland Security Planning: What Victory Gardens And Fidel Castro Can Teach Us In Preparing For Food Crises In The U.S., A. Bryan Endres, Jody M. Endres

A. Bryan Endres

Food security is an essential element of comprehensive government crisis response plans. The absence of a terrorist attack on the agricultural sector, however, has been “more by luck than design” and the American public has a false sense of food security due to the invisibility of its complicated food supply chain. Current planning efforts, grounded in the Bioterrorism Act of 2002 and a series of Presidential Directives, rely exclusively on the status quo of conventional agriculture and neglect the potential security benefits of regional and local food networks. Two historical examples, the World War II Victory Garden program and Cuba’s …

The Legal Needs Of Farmers: An Analysis Of The Family Farm Legal Needs Survey, A. Bryan Endres, Stephanie B. Johnson, Donald L. Uchtmann, Anne H. Silvis

A. Bryan Endres

In post-modern agriculture's increasingly complex operating environment, the literature lacks a comprehensive analysis of the legal issues facing today's farm operators from the perspective of the farmer. Numerous scholars (included the authors) have analyzed various specific legal/policy issues and their impact on the agricultural community. This article, however, adopts a unique bottom-up approach in which the family farmers, rather than scholars or practitioners, identify their actual legal needs. Derived from the Family Farm Legal Needs Survey conducted by the authors with the support of the Illinois Bar Foundation, this article fills a critical gap in the literature and will enable …

Water Markets As A Tragedy Of The Anticommons, Stephen N. Bretsen, Peter J. Hill

Stephen N. Bretsen

In much of the American West water shortages are becoming an important concern. With increasing demands for water for municipal, industrial, and environmental uses, transfers of water from the currently predominant agricultural uses to these other uses should produce economic gains. Even though most commodity markets respond rapidly to price differentials and reduce those differentials over time, water transfers out of agriculture into higher value uses are not occurring very rapidly. The existence of multiple rights of exclusion unbundled from the rights of use under the prior appropriation doctrine in the American West creates an anticommons that has impeded water …

Organophosphates, Friend And Foe: The Promise Of Medical Monitoring For Farm Workers And Their Families, Gabriel Eckstein, Adriane Busby

Gabriel Eckstein

Millions of farm workers nation-wide who load, mix and/or apply pesticides are exposed to incredible amounts of pesticides on a daily basis. Various inefficiencies and inconsistencies in the regulatory system – including insufficient illness reporting data systems, lack of regulatory compliance and enforcement, and inadequate data and information on the chronic effects of exposure and overexposure to various pesticides – increase the likelihood that these workers will continue to be exposed to dangerous amounts of pesticides.

This article assesses the existing mechanisms designed to protect farm workers from occupational exposure to pesticides and identifies and analyzes some of the shortcomings …

A Proposal To Regulate Farm Animal Confinement And Overview Of Current And Proposed Laws, Elizabeth Rumley

Elizabeth Rumley

No abstract provided.

Biofuels, Subsidies, And Dispute Settlement In The Wto, Bryant Walker Smith

Bryant Walker Smith

The first WTO panels to tackle a biofuels dispute under the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures will navigate a murky sea of conflict, gridlock, and uncertainty that the subsidies agreement did not contemplate and that the failed Doha round did not resolve. This article charts these waters. It identifies both the values that the panels will confront and the interpretive tools that they will wield. It further argues that dispute settlement may become the primary driver of an otherwise stagnant regime, and it sketches three competing visions for protecting the “legally binding security of expectations” that underscores that regime.