ConAgra Recalls Pot Pies

Business Week reports:

ConAgra Foods Inc. recalled all its Banquet pot pies and store brand varieties Thursday after the products were linked to a nationwide salmonella outbreak.

The company included beef pot pies in the recall after initially saying only the chicken and turkey pot pies should not be eaten.

ConAgra issued a consumer alert Tuesday and asked stores nationwide to stop selling the poultry pot pies, but the company stopped short of a recall until Thursday evening.

ConAgra spokeswoman Stephanie Childs said the decision to recall the pies wasn't based on new information, but an abundance of caution.

"We want to make sure there's no confusion with consumers, that these pot pies shouldn't be eaten," Childs said.

She said she knew of no indication of a link between cases of salmonella and the beef pot pies, but the company wanted to be careful as it collects information.

The pot pies made by ConAgra have been linked to at least 165 cases of salmonella in 31 states. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said at least 30 people have been hospitalized as part of the ongoing outbreak, but so far no deaths have been linked to the pot pies.

The company and federal officials warned customers not to eat the pot pies and to throw them away, and ConAgra is offering refunds. The store brand versions are sold under the names of Albertson's, Hill Country Fare, Food Lion, Great Value (sold at Wal-Mart stores), Kirkwood, Kroger, Meijer and Western Family.

Childs said she could not say how many pot pies are affected by the recall or how many ConAgra produces.

ConAgra officials have said some of the illnesses may be linked to undercooked pot pies, but Childs said the pot pies should not be eaten even if consumers think they have cooked them correctly. The company is revising the cooking directions on its pot pie packages to clarify how long the pies should be cooked in different microwaves.

Amanda Eamich, a spokeswoman for the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service, said three investigators are at the ConAgra plant looking for problems with a specific product or production date. ConAgra's recall is voluntary, and Eamich said without a specific connection, a recall wouldn't be ordered.

ConAgra shut down the pot pie production line at its Marshall, Mo., plant, but the rest of the plant, which employs about 650 people, has continued operating, Childs said Wednesday.

Salmonella sickens about 40,000 people a year in the U.S. and kills about 600. Most of the deaths are among people with weaker immune systems such as the elderly or very young.

Salmonella poisoning can cause diarrhea, fever, dehydration, abdominal pain and vomiting. Most cases are caused by undercooked eggs and chicken.

A Minnesota couple sued ConAgra Foods Inc. Thursday for selling the pot pies they believe made their young daughter ill with salmonella. The federal suit, filed in U.S. District Court in St. Paul, seeks damages of more than $75,000 and reimbursement for medical costs.

Consumers who want a refund for their pot pie should send the side panel of the package that contains the UPC code to the following address: ConAgra Foods, Dept. BQPP, P.O. Box 3768, Omaha, NE 68103-0768. Consumers with questions can call the company toll free at 866-484-8671.

ConAgra Refuses to Recall Pot Pies

Despite pleas from Oregon and Minnesota, the company issues consumer alerts for poultry, but not beef, varieties

The Oregonian reports:

ConAgra Foods Inc. is refusing to recall Banquet-brand and other potpies tied to a national salmonella outbreak, rejecting direct pleas by Oregon and Minnesota health officials.

The state officials say the company needs to recall all of its potpies because the source of the salmonella has not been identified. Doing anything less, they say, allows potentially dangerous food to remain on the market and confuses consumers.

The company says a recall is unnecessary. It contends that contamination is limited to its poultry potpies. Risks can be eliminated, the company says, by instructing consumers to cook the pies thoroughly enough to kill salmonella bacteria.

The dispute highlights a long-standing limitation in America's system for safeguarding the food supply: State officials who most frequently unearth the cause of foodborne illness have no regulatory authority over food makers. Federal officials can ask companies to recall food, but that process can take days or weeks.

For example, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has come under fire for waiting 18 days last month to request a recall after E. coli was discovered in Topps Meat Co. ground beef.

This has been a year of a number of high-profile domestic food recalls, as well as food and consumer-product warnings on imports from China. In the spring, ConAgra issued a massive recall of its Peter Pan and Great Value peanut butter brands after a multistate salmonella outbreak.

Public-health officers in both Oregon and Minnesota said they urged a potpie recall in phone conversations with ConAgra executives Monday and Tuesday. Instead, the Nebraska-based company, with annual sales of more than $12 billion, halted production and issued a consumer alert for its frozen potpies containing chicken and turkey.

States, on the other hand, are telling consumers to throw out every potpie under the Banquet brand as well as store brands including Great Value (sold at Wal-Mart) and Kroger. All are made at ConAgra's Marshall, Mo., plant.

Pies tied to illness

In a conference call Wednesday among state and federal health officials, several state representatives said potpies could still be found in stores, said Dr. William E. Keene, a senior communicable disease epidemiologist at the Oregon Public Health Division.

"A lot of people were saying that this alert was not adequate because consumers were not getting the kind of unambiguous message they'd get if there was a recall," Keene said.

The potpies have been tied to at least 139 illnesses in 30 states, including two confirmed Oregon cases. Keene said a third Oregon case is suspected but not confirmed and for every confirmed case, two dozen or more go unreported.

Salmonella infections can cause severe diarrhea and fever.

In Oregon and across the country, health investigators had searched in vain since May for the outbreak's cause.

But last Thursday, a Minnesota state epidemiologist, Steph Meyer, tied three salmonella cases to the potpies. Two previous victims were re-interviewed and recalled eating the pies, which are enormously popular because they are cheap (50 cents or so), can stay in the freezer for ages and be microwaved in a few minutes.

The same day, Minnesota health officials notified other states and the federal government of their findings.

On Monday, after federal officials said it might take a day or more to go through channels and ask ConAgra for a recall -- nearly all food recalls are voluntary -- Meyer's boss and Keene of Oregon decided to take their concerns directly to the source.

In conference calls Monday and Tuesday, Keene and Dr. Kirk Smith, supervisor of the foodborne diseases unit of the Minnesota Department of Health, made their case for a recall.

"In effect, they turned us down," Keene said.

Smith said the company did not want to include its beef products in the consumer alert it elected to send, instead arguing that poultry -- notorious for salmonella problems -- was to blame. ConAgra said the solution would be to ensure that consumers cooked the pies longer.

"A fear out there"

Smith and Keene contended, though, that all pies are at risk because the source of contamination remains unclear.

"We don't know if it's in the uncooked dough or where it is," Smith said. "What we tried to impress on them was that we thought they'd want to be as inclusive as possible."

In other words, a total recall, which Smith and Keene say remains warranted.

"I don't think it was a good decision on their part," Keene said. "But it's their decision."

In the meantime, a ConAgra spokeswoman said the company is cooperating with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to determine the cause.

Spokeswoman Stephanie Childs said ConAgra's decision to alert consumers and not recall all potpies was consistent with the company's plans to change labeling on how to cook the pies.

"All of the information provided to us indicates that this is related to a certain type of potpie," she said. "We're moving forward with plans to enhance our cooking directions."

The company has not decided exactly how to change those directions, she said. Instructions vary depending upon microwave power, for example. In any case, the pie's interior temperature must reach 165 degrees to be fully cooked.

Childs said she was unsure what information ConAgra had pointing to poultry as the contamination source.

At Portland-area grocery stores, consumers started returning potpies early Wednesday morning. James Grant, manager of Gresham's Food 4 Less, said employees first removed turkey and chicken pies from freezers after a supplier notice was sent out.

Later, Grant said, he had the meat pies removed as consumers asked about whether they were safe.

"There's a fear out there because of what has happened in spinach and other foods," Grant said, referring to an E. coli outbreak last year. "We took all the potpies out basically just to not have to field the questions."

"My Beef About Bad Beef & Weak Regulations"

At NJVoices, Drew Harris writes:

If you think good regulations are too expensive, try bad regulations. The Topps Meat Company is recalling a year's worth of ground beef -- 21.7 million pounds -- produced in it's Elizabeth, New Jersey processing plant because they can't be sure it wasn't contaminated with the deadly bacteria, E. coli O157. Assuming ground beef is $2.50 a pound, this recall could cost Topps over $54 million in refunds to consumers. Several aspects of this story illustrate how a weak regulatory system not only threatens public health but is also bad for business.

A published report says it was over 18 days from the time the contamination was confirmed by the USDA laboratory before Topps went public and began the voluntary recall. Unfortunately, it wasn't the company or USDA that discovered the problem. People up and down the east coast had been getting sick for months, but until the E. coli was found in hamburger patties taken from a victim's refrigerator no one knew the source. Only later were samples from the plant checked.

We have a crazy-quilt food safety system. The Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) oversees most foods except meat, poultry and eggs, which fall under the purview of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) unless meat, poultry or eggs are less than 2 to 3 percent of the product's content.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is responsible for tracking diseases caused by food consumption. State agencies are responsible for regulating businesses that sell directly to consumers. Our food safety net is full of holes.

USDA is also the federal agency that helps promotes the consumption of US farm products, supports farmers, and ensures international regulations favorable to these products. It has been said that this is an inherent conflict of interest leading to lax oversight and an unwillingness to aggressively regulate an industry the agency is supposed to promote.

Topps had a USDA inspector on site every day like every meat processing plant. When an additional inspection was ordered in the wake of the mass recall, the new inspectors found violations so severe that they suspended the plant's ground beef processing. Why did the regular inspector miss these problems? Because the bad practices went back for months, there was no way to be sure the meat packaged on any given day was safe.

Amazingly, even when a problem is discovered, the USDA can only ask a meat processor to recall its product. Once the processor sends out the press release about the recall, they notify their primary customers who may be many steps removed from the actual consumer. You -- pardon the expression -- are at the end of the food chain and could be the last to know.

I have no doubt that Topps will be severely punished for this episode. The recall will cost them. Attorneys are already putting together the class-action law suits. They are subject to heightened scrutiny and are sure to lose market share. All of this was so unnecessary.

With stronger regulations, there would be tougher inspections, 100% testing of the end product for bacterial contamination, and better tracking of the product in the food distribution system. Thus, the harm could have been limited or even eliminated. Instead of recalling a year's worth of production, it might have been a day or two. Instead of dozens sickened, it could have been no one.

It's time to beef up weak regulations.

UPDATE: 10/5/07 2:11
Topps Meat Company announced today that it is closing its doors. The 67 year-old Elizabeth firm will lay off 77 workers in the wake of the massive recall of its frozen hamburger patties linked to an E. coli outbreak.

This is a cautionary tale for any business that doesn't pay strict attention to proper public health procedures. Shortchanging health and safety is bad for business, while appropriate and effective public health regulations are good for the bottom line.

Despite Democratic Promises of Reform, Big Ag Wins Again

In the San Jose Mercury News, Daniel Weintraub writes:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could have listened to Berkeley chef Alice Waters, or to the University of California-Berkeley's Michael Pollan, author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma." Instead, she went with the Farmers Rice Co-op, King Ranch and Buttonwillow Land and Cattle Co.

Waters and Pollan were among those urging Pelosi and the House of Representatives she leads to overhaul the nation's farm policy, shifting billions of dollars from subsidies for corporate agribusiness to a means-tested safety net for real family farmers, plus policies to promote healthier foods and sound stewardship of the land.

But Pelosi last week turned back their pleas and sided with big agriculture - and her political instincts. She is supporting a farm bill that would preserve the worst parts of U.S. policy and, perhaps, help farm-state Democratic incumbents maintain their tenuous hold on districts they captured in the 2006 elections.

Pelosi says that the bill she supports includes the "first steps" toward reform. But at best those steps are tiny. And since the United States sets farm policy only once every five years, this was a rare opportunity for Democrats to show that their newly ascendant leadership in Congress will fight for real change. They've failed that test.

U.S. farm policy is a remnant from the Great Depression, when more than a quarter of Americans made their living from the land and were vulnerable to changes in the weather and market conditions.

Today, farming is a big business increasingly dominated by large corporations. But the subsidies originally adopted for the family farmer continue and have been warped to favor the largest companies at the expense of the little guy.

According to Environmental Defense, 10 percent of farming operations now collect more than 60 percent of direct subsidies paid under the farm bill. And according to OxFam America, a non-profit organization working to end world hunger, 92 percent of the subsidies go to the growers of just five commodities: corn, wheat, cotton, soybeans and rice.

California ranked 10th in the nation in payments received from 1995-2005, but 91 percent of California farmers and ranchers do not get any payments at all, according to the Environmental Working Group, which tracks the subsidies and publishes a database of the recipients. The Rice Co-op was the biggest California recipient last year, with payments of more than $5 million spread among its members. Texas-based King Ranch, with operations in California, and the Buttonwillow Land and Cattle Co. were not far behind.

The subsidies encourage farmers to grow big-volume crops, flooding world markets at the expense of small farmers in other countries and drawing complaints against U.S. policy at the World Trade Organization. The current subsidies also lower the cost of raw materials for the processed food companies that rely on corn syrup and soy, while doing almost nothing for the growers of fresh fruits and vegetables and the consumers who want to buy them.

While it would be better to phase out all subsidies, that isn't feasible in today's political climate. The next best thing might be the idea pushed by the movement Waters and Pollan helped lead. Their coalition is pushing for a third way - not ending the subsidies but overhauling them to put them in the service of a different set of policy goals.

Those goals were reflected in an amendment offered by Wisconsin Democrat Ron Kind and Arizona Republican Jeff Flake. Their proposal would have replaced price guarantees and direct payments with a safety net to protect farmers from declines in prices and crop yields. It would have denied subsidies to farms making more than $500,000 a year (or $250,000 per person), and it would have shifted some of that money into programs to preserve fragile land and promote specialty crops, organic foods and farmers' markets.
But with the House Agriculture committee dominated by farm-state Democrats, including nine freshmen looking to strengthen their holds on their seats, it would have taken strong leadership from Pelosi to steer the debate toward reform. Kind's proposal failed, and the bill that resulted protects the status quo. While it purports to limit payments to $1 million per person or $2 million per farm, critics say that it opens new loopholes that will actually let some operations collect more than ever.

The irony is that the reform proposal would have distributed more money than current policy to the vast majority of congressional districts. That's because the farmers in just 20 districts now collect more than half the subsidies. According to Environmental Defense, 36 of 55 freshmen would have seen their farmers do better under the Kind amendment, with only seven doing worse. For the others it would have been a wash.

But in each district, large and powerful farm operations would have suffered at the expense of smaller, less influential growers. Thus the vote in favor of Big Ag.

Fortunately, the House won't have the last word on this matter. The Senate has yet to act, and House Democrats might have overreached when they included a last-minute tax increase to help pay for programs they added to their bill to buy off the opposition. This is one food fight that is likely to continue all summer.

We Are What We Eat

Michael Pollan writes:

If you are what you eat, and especially if you eat industrial food, as 99 percent of Americans do, what you are is corn. During the last year I've been following a bushel of corn through the industrial food system. What I keep finding in case after case, if you follow the food back to the farm — if you follow the nutrients, if you follow the carbon — you end up in a corn field in Iowa, over and over and over again.

Take a typical fast food meal. Corn is the sweetener in the soda. It's in the corn-fed beef Big Mac patty, and in the high-fructose syrup in the bun, and in the secret sauce. Slim Jims are full of corn syrup, dextrose, cornstarch, and a great many additives. The “four different fuels” in a Lunchables meal, are all essentially corn-based. The chicken nugget—including feed for the chicken, fillers, binders, coating, and dipping sauce—is all corn. The french fries are made from potatoes, but odds are they're fried in corn oil, the source of 50 percent of their calories. Even the salads at McDonald's are full of high-fructose corn syrup and thickeners made from corn.

Corn is the keystone species of the industrial food system, along with its sidekick, soybeans, with which it shares a rotation on most of the farms in the Midwest. I'm really talking about cheap corn — overproduced, subsidized, industrial corn — the biggest legal cash crop in America. Eighty million acres — an area twice the size of New York State — is blanketed by a vast corn monoculture like a second great American lawn.

I believe very strongly that our overproduction of cheap grain in general, and corn in particular, has a lot to do with the fact that three-fifths of Americans are now overweight. The obesity crisis is complicated in some ways, but it's very simple in another way. Basically, Americans are on average eating 200 more calories a day than they were in the 1970s. If you do that and don't get correspondingly more exercise, you're going to get a lot fatter. Many demographers are predicting that this is the first generation of Americans whose life span may be shorter than their parents'. The reason for that is obesity, essentially, and diabetes specifically.

Where do those calories come from? Except for seafood, all our calories come from the farm. Compared with the mid-to-late 1970s, American farms are producing 500 more calories of food a day per American. We're managing to pack away 200 of them, which is pretty heroic on our part. A lot of the rest is being dumped overseas, or wasted, or burned in our cars. (That's really how we're trying to get rid of it now: in ethanol. The problem is that it takes almost as much, or even more, energy to make a gallon of ethanol than you get from that ethanol. People think it's a very green fuel, but the process for making it is not green at all.)

Overproduction sooner or later leads to overconsumption, because we’re very good at figuring out how to turn surpluses into inexpensive, portable new products. Our cheap, value-added, portable corn commodity is corn sweetener, specifically high-fructose corn syrup. But we also dispose of overproduction in corn-fed beef, pork, and chicken. And now we're even teaching salmon to eat corn, because there's so much of it to get rid of.

There is a powerful industrial logic at work here, the logic of processing. We discovered that corn is this big, fat packet of starch that can be broken down into almost any basic organic molecules and reassembled as sweeteners and many other food additives. Of the 37 ingredients in chicken nuggets, something like 30 are made, directly or indirectly, from corn.

Now, how do you get people to eat so much of this reengineered surplus corn? That took the ingenuity of American marketing. One example is supersizing. When I was a kid, Coke came in these lovely little eight-ounce glass containers. Today, a 20-ounce container is the standard size for soda. The idea that you could sell soda that way was an invention. It has a history, and you can find the individual responsible, an ingenious movie theater manager named David Wallerstein, who invented the idea of supersizing and sold it to Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald's.

Before you go out and sue McDonald's over the size of your waistline, consider that overproduction of cheap corn is government policy. It's done in the name of the public interest, using our taxpayer dollars. American taxpayers subsidize every bushel of industrial corn produced in this country, at a cost of some four billion dollars a year (out of a total of 19 billion dollars in direct payments to farmers).

But before you blame subsidies for all these problems keep in mind that agricultural overproduction is an ancient problem that long predates subsidies. In any other business, when the price of the commodity you're selling falls, the smart thing to do is to curtail production until demand raises prices. But farmers don't do that, because there are so many of them, and because they all operate as individuals, without any coordination. So when prices fall farmers actually expand production, in order to keep their cash flow from falling. This economically and environmentally disastrous phenomenon has resulted in an increase in the American corn harvest from four billion to ten billion bushels since the 1970s.

How do we begin to change this system? First, we all need to begin to pay attention to the Farm Bill, working to develop farm programs that allow farmers to stay in business without falling into the trap of overproduction. Most city people don't realize the stake they have in it. They assume it's a parochial concern of members of Congress from farm states, but it's not. If it were called the Food Bill, I think we would all pay a lot more attention to it, and get a saner result. The Farm Bill sets out the rules of the game that everyone is playing in, whether you're an industrial or an organic farmer, whether you're eating industrially or not.

The other thing we can do is become responsible consumers. I’ve never liked the word "consumer." It sounds like a character who’s using up the world, rather than creating anything. I was at a gathering in Italy last October where Carlos Petrini, the founder and president of Slow Food International, offered a wonderful redefinition of the word. He called the consumer a “cocreator.” I think that’s exactly right, and we’ve seen why: with the organic movement, consumers and farmers have shown how they can work together as cocreators of an alternative food system. We need to join together now, to recruit a larger and larger army of cocreators, to rewrite the rules of the game — and “cocreate” a different kind of food system.

Amending U.S. Beef Business

The Christian Science Monitorreports:

"There are two things you don't want to see being made," German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck reputedly said. "Sausage and legislation." The mad-cow episode in the United States illustrates that quip as no other story in recent memory.

Americans today are learning far more than they ever wanted to know about the process of turning cows into thousands of products that even a hard-core vegan would have trouble avoiding - cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, fire-extinguisher foam, lubricants, the glue that holds plywood together. Not to mention the steaks, roasts, hamburger, and other meat items that human carnivores regularly devour.

The process is necessarily violent and mechanical, involving slicing, grinding, and high-pressure blasting and compression. It's much safer than it was years ago - both for slaughterhouse and meat- processing workers, as well as for consumers. But it has also run the risk of mixing the potentially disease-causing parts of the cow (brain, spinal cord, and parts of the intestine) into the muscle meat and other food products - including sausage - that many Americans eat every day. Meat from the infected Holstein was mixed in with 20,000 pounds from other cows before being shipped to market.

Some doctors now suspect that people diagnosed with Alzheimer's may in fact have the human version of the neurological disease, which incubates years before appearing in the form of mental and physical degeneration. No one knows for sure if there is any possible link to animals with bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE (the scientific name for mad-cow disease), however. That's because until now the inspection system for cattle headed for the slaughterhouse has been relatively minimal.

The other part of von Bismarck's comment has also been illustrated in the mad-cow story. That's the way federal laws have been crafted to deal with a $175 million industry that feeds millions here and abroad while providing hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Cattle interests have given more than $20 million to political campaigns since 1990, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Although the GOP has received about 80 percent of this largess, Democrats and Republicans alike - most from farm and ranching states - have been recipients.

Meanwhile, many top Bush appointees in the US Agriculture Department (USDA) come from the industry. Secretary Ann Veneman's chief of staff is the former chief lobbyist for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, one of Washington's most powerful special-interest groups. The department's spokeswoman was the trade group's director of public relations.

Some say that having former beef- industry officials in senior positions brings a high level of expertise to the job. But critics claim that industry influence has led to the following: Defeats for federal-budget increases aimed at ramping up inspections. Loopholes in the Food and Drug Administration's 1997 ban on the use of cattle remains as an ingredient in feed for ruminants (cows, goats, and sheep). And a refusal - until now - to restrict the practice of allowing "downed" cattle (those injured or too sick to stand) as part of the food chain.

Five years after the 1997 ban, the General Accounting Office (the investigative arm of Congress) criticized the FDA for laxness in policing the use of cattle remains to feed other livestock.

"BSE may be silently incubating somewhere in the United States," the GAO warned in 2002. "If that is the case, then FDA's failure to enforce the feed ban may already have placed US herds and, in turn, human food supply at risk."

Critics say the USDA in particular has a conflict of interest. It's supposed to promote US agriculture while also protecting the health and safety of those who consume farm products.

Up until now, it seems the weight of this balance has favored the industry. But the USDA's quick response to the mad-cow scare is seen by all parties as moving the political scale back toward consumer protection. Last week, the USDA moved to restrict "mechanically separated beef" and ban the use of "downed" cattle for human food. And this week, federal officials announced plans to destroy 450 calves in Sunnyside, Wash., including a calf born to the heifer infected with BSE.

"Excluding cattle brains, eyes, spinal cord, and guts from the human food supply is certainly a step in the right direction," says Michael Greger, a medical doctor who studies BSE for animal rights and consumer groups. "Unfortunately," he adds, "the US still feeds those potentially risky tissues to pigs, pets, and poultry."

At the same time - more bad news for those who'd rather not know the origins of their sausage - the litter from chicken coops (grain, feathers, and manure) still can be swept up and fed to cattle under the new regulations. "The major concern in feeding rendered cattle remains to other animals," says Dr. Greger, "is that the cattle remains may directly, or indirectly, find their way back into cattle feed, which could potentially spark a British-style outbreak of mad-cow disease."

The Flow Of Illegal Immigrants To The U.S.

Rich Land, Poor People: Exports vs. Food Security in Mexico

The real reason for the stream of flight northward across the border,
is that post-NAFTA the Mexican Government has leased or sold out all
the ejidos - communally owned farmlands - to American Agribusiness.
NAFTA broke the people's ability to farm. Don't blame them for trying
to survive. Global fascism has stolen their farmlands. They can't
feed themselves anymore. If you don't like Mexican immigrants then
stop buying fruits and vegetables out of season and start buying
locally. Support your local farm markets.

As Oakley Biesanz, Octavio Madigan Ruiz, Amy Sanders, and Meredith Sommers write:

Global trade is bringing U.S. and Canadian consumers a year-round supply of fresh flowers; fresh and processed fruits such as tomatoes, melons, pineapples, strawberries, and mangos; and fresh vegetables such
as artichokes, cucumbers, cabbage, cauliflower, green beans, peppers, broccoli, snow peas, and asparagus. All these are flown in daily from Mexico. In addition, there are the traditional exports that feed Mexico's northern neighbors, such as sugar, coffee, bananas and cattle. During winter and spring, more than half the fresh vegetables consumed in the United States come from Mexico.

The growth of these exports has bittersweet outcomes, depending on one's perspective. These products have proven very profitable for foreign investors, transnational food corporations, and many large-scale Mexican farmers. These exports both satisfy the appetites of North American consumers and create jobs in Mexico. On the other hand, these exports have serious economic, personal, and environmental effects, and cause grave problems for small-scale farmers, or campesinos.

Mexico's Dual Agricultural Structure
Mexico has two agricultural systems, operating parallel to each other. Producing foods as cash crops for export is the primary goal of large-scale farmers. Although only about 15% of Mexico's land is arable, or suitable for cultivation, 88% of the arable land is used for cultivation of export crops and for grazing cattle. What large-scale farmers produce is determined by what brings the highest prices in international markets. Since the 1970s, most large-scale farmers have been producing the non-traditional crops listed above. They sell to transnational corporations that process or directly transport the products to warehouses and eventually to grocers.

Among those who benefit from the large-scale agricultural system are transnational corporations such as Del Monte, Green Giant, Heinz, United Brands, Castle and Cooke, PepsiCo, Ralston Purina, Campbell's, General Foods, Beatrice Foods, Gerber, Kellogg, Kraft and Nestle.

Rarely do these corporations own land. Instead, they contract with large-scale farmers. The corporations have capital to invest in technology, seeds, fertilizers and pesticides, transport systems, and marketing.

The other agriculture system involves about 60% of Mexico's farmers who have access to the remaining 12% of arable land. This includes individual small-scale farms that produce for local markets, and farms known as ejidos. Ejidos are a system of community-owned lands which, in some cases, have been owned "in trust" by communities for centuries.

Ejido lands were protected from sale as a result of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. However, a significant amount of ejido land passed into private hands during the 1980s and 1990s due to extreme credit pressures and changes to the Mexican Constitution. These constitutional changes allow, for the first time since the Revolution, the sale of ejido land to private owners. The changes were a crucial concession by Mexico to ensure the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993.

Ejido lands rarely have been more than subsistence farms, where corn and beans are grown for the consumption of campesinos and their families. They have, however, provided a way for poor families to at least provide basic grains for themselves. With the ongoing loss of ejidos to private producers and the general inability of campesinos to gain access to other arable land, there is a growing problem of malnutrition in Mexico. The World Bank estimates that half of all rural Mexican children are malnourished.

Furthermore, small-scale farmers have considerable difficulties competing with large-scale farms because they lack access to money for seeds, water, transportation and information required for success in agribusiness. They tend to be unfamiliar with non-traditional crops and production technology. Gaining entry into the export market is very difficult for small farmers, if that is what they choose to do.