When you think of Washington lobbyists, the image may be of tassel-loafered slicksters doing the dirty deeds of Fortune 500 goliaths.
Please, then, meet Wayne Watkinson, lawyer for the dark golden force of Big Honey. He has just completed, with apparent aplomb and scant attention, an important mission for an industry dripping in nectar.
To be honest, as dissembling politicians here always put it, Big Honey is actually Pretty Small Honey. And given rising imports from China, Argentina, Canada and Mexico, it’s getting smaller, which is why Watkinson was beckoned two years ago by the American Beekeeping Federation.
“The industry had some concerns, and so all the big players came together in Washington and we met for 2 1/2 hours,” he explained Friday.
In that room were representatives of the federation, various importers, the American Honey Producers Association, the Honey Packers and Dealers Association, and Sioux Bee Honey of Sioux City, Iowa, a cooperative. They all knew the sweet and viscous basic facts about Pretty Small Honey.
There are 125,000 beekeepers, most of them hobbyists, and 3 million colonies (technically,”colony” refers to the bees themselves). Annual domestic honey production is 200 million pounds. Total domestic revenues are about $250 million, including from honey production and pollination rentals (remember, students, bee pollination is critical for many crops), and the typical commercial beekeeper operates about 1,500 colonies.
Beekeepers are declining rapidly (there were 210,000 of them 20 years ago) and imports are rising, with 55 percent of our honey coming from overseas, mostly China and Argentina. Many family-run concerns are feeling the pinch and after those 2 1/2 hours, Watkinson had scribbled down 26 issues of concern.
Every consumer probably knows those television and print ads for milk, beef and pork, like the ones with celebrities sporting milk mustaches. Those result from government-sanctioned industrywide efforts, uniting even the fiercest of competitors, to promote a product.
A decade ago, Pretty Small Honey was allowed to create its own Honey Board, somewhat improbably based in Longmont, Colo., because that’s where the board’s first head preferred living. It assesses honey producers and importers one penny per pound to promote consumption of and research into the product.
Watkinson, ultimately acting as de facto industry attorney, sought to amend the existing legislation relevant to the board, the Honey Research Promotion and Consumer Information Act. Among other matters, he wanted to allow the firms that pack honey, not just producers and importers, to be allowed into the program by also paying a penny a pound; create a policing program to combat a rise in adulterated honey; and permit the penny assessment to go partly for beekeeping research.
It wasn’t easy, even if precious few people in Congress cared enough to put up roadblocks. There was friction among key industry players and doubts from certain other parties, including the Department of Agriculture. Watkinson had to keep everybody together.
As he did, he had an ally in Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), whose state produces a fair amount of honey but is far from being a major producer (California, Florida, the Dakotas, Minnesota and Texas are the biggest). And while the subject was of virtually no immediacy to other senators and congressmen, some staff members joined the Agriculture Department with some qualms.
For example, early on the industry wanted to redistribute some of the money from its promotion pool to individual firms for branded, not generic, advertising. That raised eyebrows and was later dropped because it seemed to violate the whole premise of the several dozen government-approved industry promotion programs.
In addition, congressional aides raised questions about the seeming underrepresentation of honey importers in the board’s decision-making process. Since importers were hit with the levy and are an increasingly significant force, they should have a commensurate say in how the money got spent, argued staffers.
Finally, there were doubts, voiced especially at the Department of Agriculture, involving the best way to achieve the worthy aim of assuring greater purity in the honey we eat (half of which comes in the form of a topping in a jar, half used as ingredients in cereals, breads, etc.). Current monitoring and testing is minimal. The industry wanted to set new standards and police them. The department said: Sorry, you can’t be the cop.
“While you’re right that the honey industry is but one very small part of the economy, to the producers these are very important issues,” said Ken Clayton, associate administrator for the agricultural marketing service of the Agriculture Department.
Clayton and Sharon Bomer, associate deputy administrator for fruit and vegetable programs, went out of their way Friday to downplay friction in their negotiations. But it was also clear that, inevitably, there were some, including the matter of monitoring and testing imported honey.
After two years of back and forth, key issues were generally resolved. Money will not be used for individual firms’ advertising. The importers will get a greater say and the packers will be part of the program, whose total budget will rise to $4.5 million a year from $3 million. The industry will develop new purity-monitoring strategies, but the exact nature of those and policing them will be up to the government.
The final deal was quietly incorporated by Santorum into a generally unrelated piece of legislation called the Agricultural Research, Extension and Education Reform Act of 1998. That legislation mostly deals with reauthorizing $2 billion a year in research funds but, in addition, includes $2 billion for crop insurance and food stamps for legal immigrants, the latter being an issue that did get much media attention.
The industry will have a referendum on this but it should pass, at least according to Troy Fore Jr., executive director of the American Beekeepers Federation, which is him and two assistants in Jesup, Ga. Its members are almost all in very rural areas but apparently should be happy with the handiwork of city lawyer Watkinson.
“Yeah, we’re content,” Fore said. “If it was up to me, it wouldn’t have taken so long. But that’s not any of his doin’.”
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Drudge watch
Matt Drudge, the self-styled Walter Winchell of the Web, is in an egomaniac’s seventh heaven. Not only was he the subject of a puffy interview last week in Time magazine but the object of cable talk host Keith Olbermann’s wrath.
Olbermann, a droll, even acidic, former ESPN sports anchor, is host of cable channel MSNBC’s “The Big Show,” whose guests have included Tribune staffers, including yours truly.
“I can forgive him that he has gone from being an idiot with a modem to an idiot with a modem and a television show,” said Olbermann, alluding to the fact that Drudge has a new show on the Fox News Channel, which in and of itself underscores that no level of notoriety can preclude one from attaining B-list celebrity status in America.
But what Olbermann couldn’t tolerate was Drudge making a factual error on his first Fox show, having asserted that the Monica Lewinsky mess surfaced six months ago when it was actually five months.
“Drudge cannot add and subtract single-digit numbers!” Olbermann said, apparently summoning ample mock rage.
Drudge, who can himself be droll, responded, “He should have stayed in sports, reading scores,” proving himself a failed verbal pugilist on this occasion, albeit one with a modem.