Tuesday, May 8th, 2012
By Alan D. McNarie
“The issue of boosting food farming in this state is not going to be taken
seriously until Clift Tsuji ceases to be chair of the Agriculture Committee and indeed until the leadership of the house changes,” fumed Anthony Aalto. “For a large segment of the not-for-profit and environmental communities, this has become obvious.”
Aalto was the Hawaii Sierra Club’s representative in a hui of environmental and agricultural organizations that had authored House Bill 2703, which would have made the doubling of local food production within the state an established priority. The bill had passed all the required committees of both the House and Senate, including the House Agriculture Committee headed by Rep. Clift Tsuji (D- South Hilo, Panaewa, Puna, Keaau, Kurtistown). But between the time that the bill passed out of its last House committee hearing and reached the House/Senate conference, which would have reconciled any differences in language between the House and Senate versions, Tsuji added a series of amendments that had appeared in none of the versions that the committees had voted on.
The bill had garnered numerous co-sponsors and drew overwhelming support from those testifying, who pointed out that by most estimates, Hawai’i currently imports all but about 8-10 percent of its food, and had only a week’s worth of food stockpiled, making the state, as testifier Ileana Haunani Ruelas pointed out, “incredibly vulnerable to supply disruptions.” Aalto pointed out that cargo ships that brought food here needed to refuel in order to get back, so if a
tsunami or storm surge knocked out Honolulu’s refineries, the ships simply couldn’t come. Others noted that as the price of oil increased, the cost of imported food was likely to skyrocket, and that the increasing reliance on processed foods was contributing to health problems such as diabetes and obesity. O’ahu testifiers also noted that more than half of their island’s remaining 3,500 acres of land suitable for food farming was threatened by two proposed developments, Hono’ulu’uli farmlands and Koa Ridge.
But the bill also garnered some opposition, particularly from those in the land development business, who objected to a clause that would have placed a temporary moratorium on the reclassification of agricultural lands if the goals of increased food production weren’t met. That clause was deleted by Tsuji’s Agriculture Committee, which then passed the bill with no “nays.” But apparently someone in the House leadership had second thoughts afterward.
The original bill called for the state to increase the amount of food grown locally in the year 2014 by the year 2020. Tsuji’s revision replaced that requirement with a “benchmark” that the state grow 30 percent of its food by 2020, but made that benchmark “non-binding.” The original bill had called for the Department of Agriculture to measure and analyze “the amount of food livestock, dairy, and edible crop commodities grown and sold in the State on an annual basis,” to make that information public, and to make recommendations aimed at meeting the target for 2030. But the version that Tsuji brought to the conference committee added another mandate: that the department study the
“feasibility” of the goal itself, and recommend a lower benchmark if it found it more feasible. In other words, Aalto told Big Island Weekly, “They said that if the DOA doesn’t like it [the benchmark] they can ignore it anyway.” And a new clause was added to the “guidelines” of the study: “There is no state or county prohibition on the growing, raising, possession, or consumption by people of
genetically engineered agricultural products within the state if the products are grown or raised in compliance with federal law.”
The new draft also contained added language that established “other goals of equal priority” including “the goal of meeting the renewable energy portfolio standard in 2020, partly with biofuels and biomass crops at the volume estimated by the department of business, economic development, and tourism”; “the goal of increasing agricultural products for export and livestock feed at a rate determined by the department of agriculture…,” and goals for new housing construction in each county.
Another new clause, Aalto claims, would have “effectively undermined the public trust doctrine on water. What they basically said was that major landowners should have equal access to water.”
Aalto calls those additions “poison pills”; he believes they were
deliberately added in order to make the bill unacceptable to its original supporters, thus killing it. That was certainly their effect. Within hours after the new draft was revealed, a multiple messages were streaming through the Facebook and via e-mail, urging former supporters to oppose the new language.
The added language also stuck in the throat, apparently, of Senate
Agriculture Committee Chair Clarence Nishihara.
“We didn’t have to fight against our own bill, because they came back to the conference committee and Nishihara said, this is unacceptable,” recounted Aalto. “And Tsuji looked at him innocently and said, ‘Why?’ And Nishihara said, ‘I think you understand.’”
Nishihara was unable to return BIW’s calls before the deadline for this
article.
“There are many ways to kill a bill. You can do so simply by not scheduling it. You can choose not to appropriate funds. You can also insert language so hideous and appalling that the very communities who organized for the bill suddenly stand up against it,” wrote Hawaii Food Policy Group founder Ashley Lukins. “Representative Tsuji (the House Ag Committee Chair) chose option three, which fortunately for us, clearly exposes the forces who have challenged the passage of this bill all along. In the final hours of HB2703, Big Land, Big Ag, and GMO Seed Companies reared their ugly heads in the context of a bill aimed at committing the state to supporting local food production. Rather than kill it quietly, these forces killed HB2703 with an arrogance I never would have expected.
I think it is safe to say, however, that it was our people power that
provoked their galling final act. If we had not been effective at moving the bill along, against all odds, then they might have found it sufficient simply to let it die a "more peaceful death" if you will. Instead they sent a message to all of us. A community-derived bill supporting food self-sufficiency is not the kind of food self-sufficiency those in power want to see.”
“Basically, I think, we agreed to disagree and deferred it,” Tsuji told BIW. “I don’t think this is the end of it… I do agree and I support those who are very concerned that Hawai’i is dangerously dependent on imported food.” He noted that “The Department of Agriculture along with the UH CTAHR [College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources] and the Farm Bureau have been working on this for years, and I think they have been doing good job.” (how is importing 90% of our food "doing a good job"?????????)He also claimed to support the bill’s aims: “The bottom line is, as chair of Ag, it is my view and from my advocacy, and I truly believe that sustainability and especially for the
small farmers, is very important [sic].”
Tsuji admitted that “The conference draft has been changed a little bit, but I personally feel that it’s been all for the better…. I incorporated some of the findings of the 2050 sustainability report. That report also said agriculture cannot stand alone…and we should take into consideration other aspects of the economy, including housing, biotech and water, among others.”
But Aalto wasn’t buying that explanation. “Why did he go looking for it [the additional language]? Why did he not talk to authors of the bill?” he reacted. “Where in the 2050 plan did it say that we have undermine the public trust doctrine on water? Where did that say we have to support GMOs? This is crap….Where does the chair of the Agriculture Committee get off saying that we need to plant houses on farmland? Why does he feel that it was incumbent upon
him to do that?”
Shawn ‘Alika” Leavey, who lives in Tsuji’s district, told BIW that he called
Tsuji and got a somewhat different version of what had happened: “He said a few times that these were not his ideas and it was just by virtue of the fact that he was ag chairman that he had to deal with this.”
Big Island Weekly went through the “Hawai’i 2050 Plan,” the
legislature-authorized document that Tsuji was apparently referring to. Some of the language he inserted apparently did come from the plan: the 30 percent benchmark, for instance, which the 2050 plan recommended, based on an estimate from CTAHR that that percentage of the island’s food actually could be grown. BIW didn’t find some of the other introduced language in the 2050 plan, however: We didn’t find any recommendation, for instance, that the state forbid the regulation of genetically modified food crops.
We have seen that language before, however. In 2008, after the County of Hawai’i enacted a ban on genetically modified taro and coffee, supporters of that ban tried to get a similar one enacted on the state level. But opponents of a bill succeeded in attaching an amendment that would have forbade further state or county regulation of GM crops; as with HB2703, that bill was deferred when supporters wouldn’t agree to the change. The next year, the idea of a ban on GM regulation surfaced again as House Bill 1226, but died in committee in the Senate.
Tsuji himself has been a long-time supporter of immunity from state and county regulation for GM crops. In 2010, he and House Speaker Calvin Say were named “BIO Co-Legislators of the Year” by the Hawaii Crop Improvement Association, a biotech trade association whose members include Dow AgroScience, Monsanto, Pioneer Hi-Bred International, Syngenta and BASF. Tsuji has also
benefited from campaign donations by the industry. So far during the current campaign cycle, for instance, he’s gotten $5,400 from GM giant Monsanto, which breeds genetically modified seed corn in Hawai’i. He’s also collected donations from Syngenta and another biotech giant, Dupont, in the past four years.
BIW asked him how such donations could not constitute a conflict of
interest.
“Biotech crops should be open for consideration,” he maintained. “If I felt guilty about it [biotech contributions] I would cover it up so it did not become public. I don’t think that there’s anything that prevents us from receiving it, but I do not take any preference from those contributors. I’ve supported agriculture in various areas whether a donation has been made or not. I think it’s more important to know that as a legislator personally, I have supported bills from those that have not provided any financial contributions — either that, or I am unaware of any contributions.”
Tsuji also claimed that last-minute changes to bills before they went to
conference committee were “not uncommon.”
“You don’t try to make it very different…but sometimes it goes through the effect where it’s substantially different, it may go through disagreement, and there’s a failure to pass out the legislation,” he said.
But Aalto believes that Tsuji’s last-minute draft violated the state
constitution.
“They included material in the bill that had never been discussed in the subject committees, and that did not relate to the title of the bill,” he told BIW. “The bill was totally unconstitutional. At the very least, it would have required the permission of the Speaker of House and President of Senate to move forward.”
But, in fact, Aalto believed, it was never intended to go anywhere. “The bill that he drew up at the very last minute was not designed to pass. He knows that. It was a joke.”