______________________________________

California Senate leadership revamps agriculture committee

By WES SANDER
For the Capital Press

Democratic senate leaders gathered in California's Capitol Tuesday morning to announce a shake-up of the senate's agriculture committee to reflect modern concerns.

The former Senate Agriculture Committee has traditionally focused on production agriculture. Now, the restructured and renamed Senate Committee on Food and Agriculture will address a range of issues surrounding food production, chief among them food safety and security, sustainable farming and animal welfare.

The committee will create a forum wherein, for the first time, consumers have a say in creating food policy, said Sen. Dean Florez (D-Shafter), the Senate's majority leader and the committee's new chairman.

"For the first time, this committee is not just going to look at the production of food, we're going to look at the distribution of food, and we're also going to look at the consumption of food," Florez said at Tuesday's event.

The committee's new makeup reflects a shift toward urban voices in formulating food and ag policy. The shift showed namely in the appointments of Sen. Fran Pavley (D-Agoura Hills), who represents much of the Los Angeles area, and Sen. Loni Hancock (D-Berkeley), whose district lies mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area.

"I represent an urban constituency that cares passionately about its food safety, its food security, and both the human and environmental (impacts from the) way that we feed ourselves," Hancock said.

Proposition 2, the new rule on confinement of pigs and chickens that voters approved overwhelmingly in November, was mentioned several times at Tuesday's event. The initiative illustrated the depth of public concern about the state's food-production system, and showed that such issues will continue to appear on public ballots if legislators don't address them more forcefully, Florez said.

"I can tell you that animal welfare issues will be very much at the forefront of this committee," Florez said. "There's no doubt Prop 2 was a wake-up call for Californians."

As part of the change, leadership of the committee, traditionally a Republican post, is switched to Democratic control. While outgoing chairman Sen. Abel Maldonado (R-Santa Maria) portrayed the switch as retaliation for his criticism of Senate leadership, Florez described it as part of the committee's shift of focus.

"The reason for it is I think that we want to change direction," Florez said. "We want to focus on not just production, but consumption and also distribution. I wouldn't necessarily say that this is some sort of slight to our Republican colleagues."

Maldonado will remain on the committee as vice-chair.

"In expanding the scope of the ag committee, Sen. Florez will add a new and immediate consumer perspective to the legislature's oversight of how California's food goes from our farms to our tables," said Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), at Tuesday's event.

The revamped committee's first oversight hearing is scheduled for Feb. 3, Florez said. It will investigate the Department of Food and Agriculture's failure to prevent an organic fertilizer manufacturer from selling synthetic fertilizers between 2004 and 2007.

In a press release, California Farm Bureau President Doug Mosebar said his organization was ready to work with the reorganized committee.

"Healthy families depend on healthy farms and we have always supported farm policy to promote both healthy families and sustainable farms," he said. "Sustainability is not just limited to the farm. There is a host of external factors that need to coalesce for our local food production systems to thrive."