Green Options

President Obama has nominated Kathleen Merrigan for deputy secretary of agriculture. Merrigan, helped develop the USDA’s rules on organic food during the Clinton era. Merrigan has been hailed by sustainable agriculture advocates; however, Senate Republicans are concerned with her organic ties.

Several bits of news trickled out this week that, when put together, indicate great confusion even among experts about whether or not corn ethanol government subsidies are helping or hurting.

To start with, researchers at Iowa State University have found that, even though $1.3 billion was given to the corn ethanol farming industry in the form of subsidies in 2007, the government saved $3.45 billion on what are called loan deficiency payments as a direct result of these ethanol subsidies.

Loan deficiency payments were established in 1985 as a way to ensure farmers’ incomes remained steady even when prices for commodities such as corn were abnormally low. Since 1998 the loan deficiency payment program has cost taxpayers more than $29 billion.

It looks like ethanol subsidies may impede efforts to reduce the size of the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico. A draft report from the EPA Science Advisory Board says that ethanol subsidies could lead to a dramatic increase in nutrient loading in the Mississippi river basin, due to diverting cropland to corn production.

Recent energy policies, combined with pre-existing crop subsidies, tax policies, global market conditions and trade barriers all provide economic

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Editor's note: In today's Red, Green and Blue, our political commentators Jimmy Hogan and Shirley Siluk Gregory weigh in on the U.S. Farm Bill and its related subsidies, due for reauthorization this year.

Shirley: If Congress is serious about solving the host of problems it claims it wants to fix — rising obesity and diet-related illnesses, polluted stormwater runoff and environmental degradation, food insecurity and overdependence on fossil fuels — it should

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