Alan Guebert is an Illinois farm journalist.
Last month, 16 citizens of Colorado became ill after eating contaminated hamburger. By the time the U.S. Department of Agriculture got its facts and act together, 11 million kilograms of possibly tainted hamburger were recalled and destroyed.
Eleven million kilograms is a whopper recall; the largest in USDA history. But in relative terms, it amounts to 54 percent of the 20 million kilograms of hamburger consumed each day in America. On an annual basis, the Hudson recall pulled 0.0014 percent of all 1997 burgers from this nation’s griddles and grills.
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Only later was it reported each of the 16 folks sickened by the beef could have avoided any ill effects – and the recall would not have occurred – had the food they consumed been properly prepared. But it wasn’t and 0.00000006 percent of the nation had its stomach churned because it flipped its burgers too quickly.
If the odds of eating an undercooked, bad burger are six out of 100,000,000, would you say that the U.S. food supply is safe, maybe even very safe?
Indeed, when many issues in agriculture are put into proper perspective an entirely different view emerges. That’s the importance of perspective: It adds depth to the traditional two-dimensional picture so the viewer can see into the issue to make more informed judgments.
Here’s another example of perspective. Most farm groups pushed Congress to make significant changes in estate tax law because, they explained, the new law would preserve family farms.
And perhaps it will; raising the death exemption from $600,000 to $1.3 million should preserve something.
That something, however, likely will be the preservation of more bigger farms than more smaller farms. According to the government, the old law didn’t snag many Americans to begin with. Only 31,564, or one percent, of all Americans who died in 1995 paid any federal estate tax. Iowa State ag economist Neil Harl estimates that fewer than 2,000 farm estates per year paid any federal death taxes under the old law.
But the new, expanded exemption virtually guarantees small farm heirs will maintain what they always had, a tax-free death in the family, and bigger farm heirs will get what they always wanted – a bigger break to preserve wealth.
From that perspective, Harl believes the estate-tax change will encourage farms to grow in size and wealth to be concentrated in fewer hands rather than encourage or preserve small farms. The on-farm economic consequences of the new estate tax provisions constitute “terrible policy,” he says.
Oftentimes, perspective involves opinion. Reid Weingarten, the attorney representing former agriculture secretary Mike Espy in his recent 39-count criminal indictment for accepting $35,000 of gifts and travel, offered his perspective on the special prosecutor who nailed Espy.
Weingarten argued that an overzealous prosecutor “has stretched criminal statutes beyond recognition and taken trivial, personal and entirely benign activities and attempted to distort them into criminal acts.”
Weingarten failed to mention that Espy is accused of breaking the law during his “trivial, personal” pursuit of the trappings of power or that Espy allegedly created false documents to cover up and mislead investigators examining the supposed misdeeds.
From Weingarten’s perspective, though – and apparently Espy’s too – it is “entirely benign” for the secretary of agriculture (as the indictment alleges) to tell a department of agriculture staffer to telephone the chair of Quaker Oats Co., in Chicago, and solicit tickets to a sold-out Chicago Bulls championship basketball game.
The cereal king, for whatever reason, took the call and coughed up two tickets.
