WASHINGTON – Tom Vilsack will be confirmed as Agriculture secretary by the U.S. Senate this afternoon. In anticipation, Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter has issued the following statement:
“We can confidently predict what Tom Vilsack’s leadership of the Agriculture Department will look like, because he’s led it before. And the prediction is grim. In his previous stint at USDA, Vilsack backed mass corporate consolidation of our food system at the expense of struggling family farmers. Similarly, he readily advanced industry-driven initiatives allowing companies to inspect their own poultry processing plants, dismantling federal oversight of food and worker safety.
“This administration needs to drastically shift course from the Trump era by supporting sustainable, independent farming, halting the toxic expansion of polluting factory farms, and ultimately prioritizing consumer health and worker safety. We have little hope that Tom Vilsack cares to undertake this effort, so we will be pressuring him doggedly to see the light.”
