To understand how food companies are able to exert disproportionate influence on government nutrition policy, we must begin with a discussion of lobbying and its integral position in American political processes. Lobbying is any legal attempt by individuals or groups to influence government policy or action, a definition that explicitly excludes bribery. Historically, lobbying always has involved three elements: (1) promoting the views of special-interest groups, (2) attempting to influence government laws, rules, or policies that might affect those groups, and (3) communicating with government officials or their representatives about laws, rules, or policies of interest. Food lobbyists, therefore, are people who ask government officials to make rules or laws that will benefit their clients’ companies, whether or not they benefit anyone else.
At their best, lobbyists provide federal officials with well-researched technical advice about proposed legislation, regulation, and public education. The value of this expertise has been the ostensible reason for congressional reluctance to limit lobbying activities. Offering expertise, however, is only one strategy. More important are personal contacts established through meetings and social occasions. Other lobbying methods include arranging campaign contributions, staging media events, organizing public demonstrations, harassing critics, and encouraging lawsuits. Such efforts have been—and are—so successful that lobbyists have sometimes been considered to constitute their own branch of government.
Lobbyists, however, are hired, not elected. They differ from advocates and independent experts in that they are paid to represent private—not public—interests, and many of their activities are hidden from public view. Thus lobbying raises questions about undue influence and misuse of power. Our political system must balance the rights of individuals and groups against the rights of society as a whole, and it requires elected officials to listen to groups demanding self-interested actions. What concerns us here is the differential ability of food companies to obtain laws and rules that act in their favor at the expense of public health.
That food lobbies are permitted to do what they do derives directly from the long tradition of acceptance of lobbying as an integral part of the American political system. That lobbying would create tensions in that system was known from the outset. In 1787 James Madison wrote of the “dangerous vice” of factions—his term for lobbying groups. He viewed factions as an inevitable result of basic human nature, as well as of the unequal distribution of property. He believed that the “mischiefs” caused by special-interest groups would be controlled inevitably as a natural outcome of majority rule: “There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects . . . [a faction] may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution.”
As Madison predicted, public exposures of excessive and dishonest lobbying were followed by investigations and demands for its regulation. For the next 150 years, various states and Congress made sporadic but unsuccessful attempts to control lobbying—so much so that beginning in 1911, nearly every session of Congress involved some attempt to address lobbying abuses. When Congress finally did act on the matter, it made lobbying legal. It required only that persons paid to lobby register and disclose their sources of funds. Furthermore, Congress did not specify enforcement procedures, which may be one reason why the law resulted in only a single conviction—and that in 1959. Lobbying regulations were universally viewed as unenforceable and, therefore, ineffective.
Legislation passed in 1995 closed some, but by no means all, of the loopholes. That law defines lobbyists as people who spend at least 20% of their time on such activities, have contact with government officials or staff, and are paid more than $5,000 in a six-month period for this work. Because all three of these criteria had to be met, people whose activities met just one or two did not need to register. At about the same time, amendments to federal election laws limited the value of gifts and meals that legislators could accept from lobbyists. The House rule barred lobbyists from buying meals for members and aides except at stand-up receptions attended by 25 people (the “toothpick” rule), although small gift items were still permissible. The Senate’s rules were somewhat less restrictive. Senators and aides, for example, could not accept paid travel to recreational events, or gifts or meals worth more than $100 from any one individual in a year. Such restrictions were easily evaded.
Those rules not only led to an increase in registration of lobbyists (which was their intention) but also to an increase in overall lobbying activity. According to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics, a public-interest group that goes to a great deal of effort to track this sort of information, the number of registered lobbyists increased from 15,000 to more than 20,000 just between 1997 and 1999.
The Center estimated that lobbyists spent more than $1.42 billion on behalf of clients in 1998; it calculated that if this amount went just for lobbying Congress, then each of the country’s 100 senators and 435 representatives would be contacted by an average of 38 paid lobbyists spending $2.7 million on each legislator to do so. It must be understood that this army of largessedispensing lobbyists represents every conceivable component of American corporate and private enterprise; no industry is too small, no group too isolated, and no opinion too extreme to forgo paying for its own professional lobbyist. With billion-dollar expenditures, lobbying is a huge industry unto itself. At this point, we can now examine how food lobbies fit into the broader political picture.
To understand how food lobbying works, we need to know something about the relationships between Congress and the federal agency most responsible for food and agriculture, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). By the end of World War II, a period during which government and food producers worked together in the national interest, farmers and food producers had come to view USDA as their department and its secretary as their spokesman. Food producers, together with USDA officials and members of the House and Senate Agricultural Committees, constituted what was universally understood to be the “agricultural establishment”—an entity so strongly united in purpose that it could ensure that any federal policy related to land use, commodity distribution, or prices would promote the interests of food producers.
The control exercised by producer groups over USDA and congressional actions was so complete that this “establishment” virtually excluded the Secretary of Agriculture and even the President of the United States from any significant role in policy decisions. Their jobs, after all, were temporary. Guaranteeing the perpetuation of this system were congressional seniority and the strong representation on agriculture committees of members from farm states. Membership on such committees gave the appearance of lifetime tenure. Allen Ellender (Dem-LA), for example, chaired the Senate Agriculture Committee for 18 years; his successor, Herman Talmadge (Dem-GA), held the position for 10 more. Most remarkably, Representative Jamie Whitten (Dem-MS) chaired House Agriculture Committees from 1949 to 1992, accumulating so much power during this 43-year period that he was referred to as the permanent Secretary of Agriculture.
In the early 1970s, this system began to break down as new constituencies began to demand influence over agriculture policies. Consumers, for example, complained when a combination of bad weather, poor harvests in foreign countries, and massive purchases of U.S. grain by the Soviet Union caused an increase in food costs. Large processing and marketing companies formed as agriculture gained importance in the U.S. economy, and the interests of these new entities differed from those of smaller food producers. Even more, the expansion of food assistance programs following the 1969 White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health meant that an increasingly large proportion of USDA’s funding went for Food Stamps and other such activities.
Advocates for the poor became a new agricultural interest group. In response to these new demands, the House expanded agricultural committee membership in 1974 to include representatives from urban as well as rural areas. In 1977 Congress gave the agriculture committees of both houses jurisdiction over policies and programs related not only to agricultural production, marketing, research, and development but also to a wide range of new areas: rural development, forestry, domestic food assistance; some aspects of foreign trade, international relations, market regulation, and taxes; and, as we have seen, nutrition advice to the public. These changes stimulated a huge proliferation of lobbying activities related to the expanded functions of federal agriculture committees.
In the 1950s just 25 groups of food producers dominated agricultural lobbying, but by the mid-1980s there were 84 such groups, and by the late 1990s there were hundreds—if not thousands—of businesses, associations, and individuals attempting to influence federal decisions related to every conceivable aspect of food and beverage production, manufacture, sales, service, and trade. Although the total number of lobbyists and groups working on food and nutrition issues is uncertain, a 1977 study identified 612 individuals and 460 groups in this category. A cursory review of the list of all registered lobbyists suggests that less than 5% might be concerned with such issues—perhaps about 1,000 individuals, law firms, and associations representing widely diverse groups with interests in federal policies on food, nutrition, and agriculture.
Advocacy groups, professional societies, and universities with agriculture programs also retain lobbyists to work for them, but these groups are usually acting on behalf of public interest or nonprofit goals. Like all lobbyists, those for food companies gain access to federal officials and staff in ways that extend far beyond technical expertise, although such expertise provides an excuse for regular contact. Among these ways, two are worth particular attention: (1) the evident and not so evident transfer of funds from lobbyists to federal officials through federally sanctioned donations of “hard” money, legal but unsanctioned “soft” money, and gifts and (2) the frequent job exchanges between lobbyists and federal officials known as the “revolving door.” Both practices raise questions about undue influence. Because the revolving door sets the scene for later discussion of more obviously commercial transactions, let’s examine that method first.
Recruiting Lobbyists: The “Revolving Door”
Charges of undue influence cannot help but arise from the realization that lobbyists and government officials are not always distinct populations. Today’s public servant is tomorrow’s lobbyist, and vice versa. The revolving-door transformation of government officials into lobbyists and of lobbyists into government officials is not a new phenomenon. In 1968, for example, at least 23 former senators and 90 former representatives had registered as lobbyists for private organizations.
More recently, among congressional representatives defeated in the 1992 election, 40% became lobbyists. So did their staff; from 1988 to 1993, 42% of Senate committee staff directors and 34% of those on the House side became lobbyists. By 1998, 128 former members of Congress were listed as lobbyists— 12% of all senators and representatives who had left office since 1970. As an example of what is at stake, the firm to which former senator (Rep-KS) and presidential candidate Robert Dole belonged earned $19 million in lobbying fees in 1997. In the food industry, job exchanges between lobbyists and the USDA are especially common because as many as 500 agency heads and staff are political appointees chosen on the basis of party affiliation and support. Some examples are especially striking. In 1971, USDA Secretary Clifford Hardin traded places with Earl Butz, who was then director of Ralston Purina; Mr. Butz became Secretary of Agriculture, and Mr. Hardin went to Ralston Purina. The chief USDA negotiator who arranged for private companies to sell grain to the Soviet Union in 1972 resigned to work for the very company that gained the most from the transaction.
A report in 1974 listed numerous assistant secretaries, administrators, and advisors who had joined USDA from positions with meat, grain, and marketing firms or, on the other hand, had left the agency to take positions with food producers. Later, in the early 1990s, the appointment of a former president of the National Cattlemen’s Association, JoAnn Smith, as chief of the USDA’s Food Marketing and Inspection Division, raised questions about two of her decisions that seemed to favor the interests of meat producers over those of consumers: she approved the euphemistic designation “fat-reduced beef” for bits of meat that had been processed from otherwise unusable slaughtering by-products, and she opposed an American Heart Association proposal to put a seal of approval on certain meat products that were low in fat, an action that might suggest that low-fat meats were more healthful. The changing administration in 2001 continued this tradition. The new Secretary of Agriculture, Ann Veneman, appointed a lobbyist for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association as her chief of staff, while the former secretary Dan Glickman, went to work for a law firm that lobbies for agriculture and food companies.
Similar exchanges apply to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In the mid-1990s, Dr. John Hathcock, a senior researcher at FDA and an expert on nutritional toxicology, accepted a high-level position with the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a leading trade association for the dietary supplement industry. In 1999 Dr. Fred Shank, former director of the agency’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, became director of government relations at the Institute of Food Technology, a trade organization for academic and professional developers of food products and ingredients.
Also in 1999 Dr. Morris Potter left his FDA position as director of the Food Safety Initiative to work for the International Life Science Institute, an organization that represents concerns and interests of the food industry. In 2000 Joseph Betz, an FDA expert on the pharmacological properties of plants, joined the American Herbal Products Association, thereby ensuring that this organization would “continue to play a leadership role in addressing the unique challenges confronting botanical products.”
When officials of regulatory agencies go to work for industry, they are almost certain to be paid better than they were in their government jobs, and they contribute to industry the valuable expertise that they acquired at the expense of taxpayers. The practice of recruiting industry executives to government work raises questions of conflict of interest, even when they accept lower salaries to do so, because it is difficult to imagine that they can make decisions without keeping their former employer’s interests in mind. Revolving-door issues are not always easy to categorize, however, as is perhaps best illustrated by the career of Michael Taylor. Mr. Taylor is a lawyer who began his revolving-door adventures as counsel to FDA. He then moved to King & Spalding, a private-sector law firm representing Monsanto, a leading agricultural biotechnology company. In 1991 he returned to the FDA as Deputy Commissioner for Policy, where he was part of the team that issued the agency’s decidedly industry-friendly policy on food biotechnology and that approved the use of Monsanto’s genetically engineered growth hormone in dairy cows. His questionable role in these decisions led to an investigation by the federal General Accounting Office, which eventually exonerated him of all conflict-of-interest charges. In 1994 Mr. Taylor moved to USDA to become administrator of its Food Safety and Inspection Service. In this position, he became the hero of food-safety activists for his courageous development of the agency’s groundbreaking policies for controlling dangerous microbial contaminants in meat and poultry.
After another stint in private legal practice with King & Spalding, Mr. Taylor again joined Monsanto as Vice President for Public Policy in 1998. He resigned that position late in 1999 during the height of public controversy over Monsanto’s aggressive promotion of its genetically engineered foods. At the time of this writing, he had returned to the private sector, this time to Resources for the Future, a nonprofit think tank on environmental and natural resource issues in Washington, DC.
This example illustrates the dilemma posed by revolving-door issues. Although former government officials provide expertise useful to food companies, it is also true that former food company employees provide expertise that can help government agencies do a better job of regulation. Mr. Taylor’s career demonstrates that the revolving door does not always favor industry, even though it invariably gives the appearance of doing so.
Funding Elected Officials
Less ambiguous is the role of money in interactions between lobbyists and government officials. One of the most unsettling ways in which lobbyists exert influence over federal decisions is by spending money and, insofar as can be determined, lots of it. Despite reporting requirements, it is difficult to find out precisely how much money lobbyists spend on federal officials. A great deal of lobbying takes place in unreportable gray areas of social transaction, such as dinner parties, receptions, meetings, golf games, birthday parties, and weddings. The Center for Responsive Politics estimates that food and agriculture lobbyists spent $52 million in 1998 on issues other than tobacco (on which they spent another $67 million).
For example, lobbyists for the Grocery Manufacturers of America reported spending more than $1.4 million, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association $400,000, the National Pork Producers Council $200,000, Kraft General Foods $120,000, and the Cheese Importers Association $20,000 in 1998. These are reported amounts, required by law to be revealed. Donations are conveniently classified into two categories of money: “hard” and “soft.”
Like other industries, food companies disburse most funds to individual members of Congress through Political Action Committees (PACs). PACs began in the early 1940s when Congress prohibited labor unions from contributing to political campaigns; the unions got around this restriction by collecting voluntary contributions from members to support the reelection of President Franklin D.Roosevelt. In 1974, soon after the scandals of Watergate, amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act authorized formation of PACs by unions, corporations, and other groups for the purpose of collecting and allocating voluntary campaign contributions. These funds are governed by legislation and for this reason are known as “hard”—legally sanctioned—money. Although the law limited the amount of money any one individual could contribute to federal candidates to $1,000 each for each election, it permitted PACs to donate up to $5,000 to each candidate. Because the act did not restrict either the number of candidates to whom contributions could be made or the number of PACs to which any one donor could contribute, individuals could contribute quite large amounts of money. Within just one year, 608 PACs formed and contributed $12.5 million to the 1974–1975 election campaigns. The number of PACs grew rapidly. In 1982, 3,400 PACs contributed $83 million, and in 1990, 4,700 PACs contributed more than $370 million. Late in 2002, Congress passed new campaign finance laws to increase the amounts individuals and committees could give to federal candidates.
Most PACs represent businesses, but in the greater scheme of Washington lobbying, relatively few represent food and agriculture interests. A survey in 1978 identified 82 such PACs, 46 of them representing producer groups.10 Data from the Center for Responsive Politics indicate that 211 agribusiness PACs contributed $4.3 million to federal candidates in the 1999–2000 election cycle. For example, the American Meat Institute PAC contributed $56,500, PepsiCo $66,825, ConAgra $86,750, and the Food Marketing Institute $133,308 to various candidates.
Agribusiness PAC money is remarkable for its unequal distribution among Democrats and Republicans; $1.5 million went to Democrats but $2.8 million to Republicans in that cycle. Although some types of PACs contribute almost equally to Democratic and Republican candidates, most do not. Republican candidates received nearly 64% of the funds from egg and poultry PACs, 78% from livestock producers, and 84% from food processors, which suggests that PAC money preferentially goes to candidates most likely to favor particular corporate interests.
PAC funds also go to where they seem most likely to benefit the donors. Not surprisingly, agribusiness contributions go preferentially to members of House and Senate Agriculture Committees. From 1987 to 1996, 18 of the 25 leading Senate recipients of contributions from meat and poultry processor PACs—and 17 of the 25 leading House recipients— were members of agriculture committees, as were about half of the top 25 recipients of contributions from grocery distributors, wholesalers, and retailers. As just one example, provides a partial listing of food and agriculture PACs that made contributions to Richard Lugar (Rep-IN) in 1997–1998 when he chaired the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry. Mr. Lugar received $316,300 in total PAC contributions, of which 36% came from food and agriculture groups, most of them corporate. Among the few noncorporate exceptions were the American Dietetic Association, which represents nutritionists who hold credentials as Registered Dietitians ($1,000), and the American School Food Service Association, whose members work in school cafeterias that provide federally supported meals to low-income children ($750).4 In general, PACs that represent consumer, health, or public interest groups are very much in the minority.
Most of Mr. Lugar’s PAC contributions amounted to $1,000 or $2,000 and ranged from $250 (National Confectioners Association) to $5,000 (Archer Daniels Midland)—amounts too small to seem likely to influence anyone, especially compared to the annual income and advertising budgets of food corporations. The contributions can add up to substantial amounts, however. In 1997–1998, for example, the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Agriculture, Charles Stenholm (Dem-TX), received $862,000 in PAC contributions— all, as required by law, in amounts no greater than $5,000; to this total, 133 food and agriculture PACs contributed $330,000 (38%).
Because it is not certain whether PAC money goes to candidates who already share corporate interests or to candidates who change their opinions in response to the contributions, observers differ on whether PAC contributions “buy” influence. Some believe the power of PACs to be vastly overrated, whereas others view PACs as an insidious system that makes legislators “more beholden to the economic interests of their committee constituents than to the interests of their district residents or to the President or party.”
Although research on the effects of PACs does not prove that they buy influence, it certainly suggests a strong correlation between contributions and desired outcomes. About 95% of the funds from agricultural PACs go to incumbents. Thus PAC money follows voting records and reinforces them. In the 1980s, researchers demonstrated that members of the House of Representatives who received PAC funds from dairy industry groups were almost twice as likely to vote for dairy price supports as those who did not.
Legislators who favored price supports received 2.5 times more PAC funds than those in opposition, and the more money the members received from dairy PACs, the more likely they were to back price-support legislation. More recently, a study of the connection between PAC contributions and congressional votes on sugar subsidies indicated that the largest contributions from sugar PACs had gone to members who voted for the subsidies and that the larger the PAC contribution, the more likely the members were to support industry positions.
Month-by-month analyses of the history of legislation on sugar and peanut subsidies demonstrate an increase in contributions to both parties just prior to votes. Because PACs give more money to legislators who are more likely to vote for their interests, researchers conclude that PAC contributions do have a significant effect on voting decisions. Given the costs of election campaigns, the lack of public funding for them, and the resistance of Congress to reform campaign finance laws, it is no mystery why legislators might not want to make decisions that displease PAC contributors.
Provisions of the Election Campaign Act apply to federal elections; they do not limit the amounts of money that can be contributed to state or national political organizations. This loophole allows for contributions of “soft” money for administrative and other expenses involved in supporting issues that political parties and candidates might favor. This money supports elections indirectly, can come from any source, is unrestricted in amount, and does not need to be disclosed. Unlike PAC funds, soft-money donations can be substantial; in 1991, for example, several food and agriculture corporations made $100,000 contributions to the Republican Party, and in the 1997–1998 election cycle, agribusiness corporations made softmoney donations of $1.3 million to Democrats and $1.4 million to Republicans.
As just one example, the Flo-Sun Sugar Company and its subsidiaries made 21 donations of amounts ranging from $2,500 to $25,000 to congressional campaign committees in 1997–1999, for a total of $202,500 to Democrats and $147,500 to Republicans. Flo-Sun is unusual in distributing more money to Democrats than to Republicans—and to good effect, as I shall soon explain. As I mentioned earlier, most food corporations favor Republicans because members of this party are more likely than Democrats to protect and promote business interests. Dole Food, for example, gave $15,000 in soft money to Democratic committees in 1998 but gave $382,000 to Republican committees. In 1997–1999, food retailers gave nearly $1.1 million to Democrats but more than $3.8 million to Republicans—for example, Coca-Cola (Democrats $215,500 versus Republicans $394,000), the American Meat Institute ($4,000 versus $142,000), and the Grocery Manufacturers of America ($30,000 versus $290,000). The tangible rewards of such generosity
Giving Presents
Election laws have long permitted lobbyists to give members of Congress small gifts such as lunches, books, awards, liquor, samples, and theater tickets. The lobbying reform law that went into effect in 1996 was designed to limit the value of such gifts. It prohibited House members from accepting all but the smallest gifts from lobbyists and firmly excluded meals and entertainment; it allowed Senate members to accept individual gifts worth no more than $50 each and totaling no more than $100 during any one year. As might be expected, this law caused much consternation in Congress over how members might continue business as usual while adhering to the letter—if not to the spirit— of the law.
That lobbyists might be paying for legislators’ vacations particularly attracts scrutiny. Under the terms of pre-1996 ethics rules, members of Congress could take trips and accept speaking fees paid for by lobbyists. An analysis of the travel practices of members of the House of Representatives in 1989–1990, for example, found that collectively they had taken nearly 4,000 sponsored trips, two-thirds of them courtesy of corporations or trade associations; they also had accepted more than $500,000 in honoraria. Agriculture interest groups sponsored 390 trips, 239 of them taken by members of agriculture or appropriations committees. Charles Stenholm (Dem-TX), a senior member of the House Agriculture Committee, for example, had taken 50 trips, 37 of them sponsored by agricultural lobbying groups, and had earned $38,250 in honoraria for these efforts.
The 1996 law attempted to bar elected officials and their staff from accepting vacations paid for by special-interest groups, but loopholes remained: members of Congress could take trips paid for by corporate lobbyists if the event was sponsored by a political party, was a factfinding mission, or was a conference at which the member was an invited speaker. In 1996–1997, 87 senators, 356 representatives, and 2,020 of their staff employees took paid trips worth about $8.6 million. The leading recipient of trips paid for by the meat industry, for example, had gone on 26 of them worth $18,550.Two agriculture concerns—the Florida Sugar Cane League and the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida—were ranked 9th (44 trips) and 11th (39 trips), respectively, among the 20 leading sponsors of congressional travel that year.
BUYING ACCESS AND INFLUENCE
Do campaign contributions, trips, and presents buy corporate influence over government decisions? Much evidence suggests that they do, and in proportion to the amounts spent. Here, I present just two especially intriguing examples that involve food companies.
Bananas are the most popular fruit among Americans; per capita consumption is about 75 annually, and nearly all are imported from Central America by Chiquita Brands International. This company, formerly known as United Fruit, has dominated global trade in bananas for a century and has an exceptionally rich history of influence over the U.S. government. The head of Chiquita Brands, Carl H. Lindner, gives generously to both political parties. In 1998, he gave $176,000 in soft money to Democrats and $360,000 to Republicans, ranking him fourth on the Mother Jones list of the top 400 political contributors that year.
In 1999–2000, his contribution of $500,000 placed him second among the leading donors of soft money to Republicans, but he also gave $250,000 to Democrats. He contributed both donations through the American Financial Group, an insurance business. All told, Mr. Lindner’s enterprises were worth at least $14 billion at the turn of the twenty-first century.
In the late 1990s, Chiquita Brands encountered a problem with the European Union (EU). In an effort to strengthen the economies of former colonies, the EU had imposed limits on imports of bananas from everywhere else, a policy that Chiquita Brands believed was responsible for some of its financial difficulties. In response to pressure from Chiquita’s sympathetic allies in Congress, the U.S. trade representative filed a formal complaint with the World Trade Organization (WTO), arguing that quotas on bananas violated international trade agreements. When, in retaliation, the United States imposed high tariffs on certain European luxury goods, the WTO supported that action and ordered the EU to comply with trade accords.
The methods through which Chiquita Brands achieved this remarkable victory have been described by investigative reporters for Time magazine who “followed the money” and documented how “$5.5 million in campaign contributions . . . bought Chiquita access in Washington” and got the Clinton administration to “mount a global trade war on Lindner’s behalf.” The reporters noted that the government’s decision to wage a trade war over bananas differed significantly from its handling of issues related to other agricultural products and was especially noteworthy because Chiquita already controlled 20% of the European banana market, even with the trade restrictions. They considered the unusual intervention an attempt to strengthen the WTO’s ability to negotiate international trade disputes.
Alternatively, it seemed possible that the White House was engaging in a collegial effort to help the company compensate for having lost $350 million in income from 1999 to 2000 and more than $1.3 billion since the EU imposed the quotas. Late in 2000, the EU offered to drop the colonial preference and establish import quotas, but Chiquita rejected that proposal, blamed the Clinton administration for the company’s financial difficulties, threatened bankruptcy, and sued the EU for $525 million. Soon after the Republican administration of George W. Bush took office in 2001, its trade negotiators pushed the Europeans to make concessions to Chiquita, saving it from threatened bankruptcy and, for the moment, ending a nine-year conflict—the latest episode in the company’s long history of success in influencing the U.S. government to solve its problems.
Getting Sweet Attention
A second example concerns sugar, a top-of-the-Pyramid food that provides calories but no other nutrients. As explained in Part I, government dietary guidelines suggest moderation (meaning limits) in sugar consumption. Nevertheless, for more than 200 years, the United States has controlled the price of sugar, at first to raise revenue but later to protect the economic interests of domestic producers. For this commodity, the relationship between agricultural policy and health is unusually complex.
As a result of an elaborate system of price-support programs and import tariffs and quotas codified during the Depression and the early years of World War II, Americans pay artificially high prices for sugar, a practice that cost consumers $1.9 billion in 1998. Since 1985 the price of a pound of raw sugar has ranged from 8 to 14 cents higher in U.S. markets than in world markets, and by the time sugar is sold at retail prices, this difference doubles. From a nutritional standpoint, higher sugar prices might be a useful disincentive to consuming soft drinks, desserts, and candy, but from a financial standpoint, the policy is highly undesirable. Besides the harm it causes consumers, the windfall benefits a surprisingly small number of sugar producers. In 1991, for example, 1,700 farms raised sugarcane and 13,700 raised sugar beets in the United States, but 42% of the sugar subsidies went to just 1% of these growers.The owners of these few farms give generously to both political parties. The Fanjul family, for example, controls about one-third of Florida’s sugarcane production and collects at least $60 million annually in subsidies. The Fanjuls contributed more than $350,000 to the two political parties—more to Democrats than to Republicans—through their Flo-Sun companies in 1997–1998. In 2000, Alfonso Fanjul hosted a dinner attended by President Bill Clinton that raised more than a million dollars for the Florida Democratic party. Sugarcane production is concentrated in two Southern states, Florida and Louisiana, where working conditions of migrant canefield workers from Caribbean countries have raised human-rights concerns. Environmentalists view the Florida canefields as blocking the free flow of water into the Everglades. Sugarcane companies, in particular those owned by the Fanjul family, have successfully resisted attempts to mandate improvements in working conditions or the return of canefields to marshland in order to protect the Everglades. The same investigative reporters for Time magazine who were mentioned in connection with the banana wars also described how the Fanjuls used their political connections to avoid having to pay for cleaning up the Everglades. Even if their account misrepresented the family’s actions (as one critical response has claimed), the Fanjuls indisputably have unusual access to the highest levels of government. The most stunning example of such access is documented in, of all unexpected places, the Starr Report—the 1998 account by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr of the relationship of President Clinton with a young White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. According to Mr. Starr, on the afternoon of the President’s Day holiday, Monday, February 19, 1996,
'The President told her [Ms. Lewinsky] that he no longer felt right about their intimate relationship, and he had to put a stop to it . . . At one point during their conversation, the President had a call from a sugar grower in Florida whose name, according to Ms. Lewinsky, was something like “Fanuli.” In Ms. Lewinsky’s recollection, the President may have taken or returned the call just as she was leaving . . . the President talked with Alfonso Fanjul of Palm Beach, Florida, from 12:42 to 1:04 p.m. The Fanjuls are prominent sugar growers in Florida'.
Reportedly, Mr. Fanjul had called the President on a federal holiday because Vice President Gore had just announced a plan to tax Florida' sugar growers. The proposed tax would help pay for federal efforts to restore parts of the Everglades that had been polluted by sugarcane runoff. Furthermore, the House was debating whether to phase out sugar subsidies. The Time reporters noted that the tax was never passed. Their account concluded, “That’s access.”
In these two instances, financial contributions bought access to government officials and resulted in policies favorable to donors. Given that level of connection, it is understandable that agency officials would not want to do battle over a matter so seemingly trivial as the use of the verb moderate rather than limit in guidelines about sugar consumption. The job of food lobbyists is to make sure that the government (1) does nothing to impede clients from selling more of their products and (2) does as much as possible to create a supportive sales environment. We have seen that they accomplish this goal most effectively through personal contacts established through the revolving door, as well as through financial contributions. In the next chapter, we will see how food companies engage food and nutrition professionals in marketing campaigns by encouraging them to emphasize the health benefits of products or to minimize potentially adverse effects.
By Marion Nestle in the book 'Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles London, 2007, p. 95-110. Edited and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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