With the climate bill gutted by Big Ag
and stalled in the Senate, with health-care reform on the verge of
collapse, prospects for real change in national politics are looking
grim. Well, here’s some hope from what’s traditionally one of the
executive branch’s most retrograde agencies: the USDA.

USDA deputy secretary, Kathleen Merrigan recently released a memo
(PDF) called “Harnessing USDA Rural Development Programs to Build Local
and Regional Food Systems.” (Below right, see a characteristic
fragment.)

Now, this is no revolutionary document. It commits no new funds,
lays out no bold new plans. USDA officials have no power to do those
things; their funding and broad policy mandate is essentially laid out
in the farm bill.

But the memo does
signal the intention to execute policy in a smart and progressive way.
And it comes from an official with the clout to make it happen. The
deputy secretary position is traditionally a powerful one within
USDA—the person who cracks the whip and gets the agency’s vast
population of bureaucrats dancing to the same tune.

During the Bush administration, a veteran industrial corn man named
Chuck Conner held the post. Kathleen Merrigan stands in a sharp
contrast to Conner, who spent his pre-Bush Admin days doing stuff like
trying to force Mexican consumers to experience the wonders of
high-fructose corn syrup. http://www.corn.org/web/rels0200.htm

Merrigan, for her part, is a longtime champion of organic agriculture. Before joining USDA, she held a post as a academic, directing the Agriculture, Food and Environment Program at Tufts.

In her food-systems memo, Merrigan lays out an agenda for how
existing USDA programs could be used to bolster emerging local and
regional food networks.