This week, Congress approved a five-year $307 billion dollar farm bill with extensive bipartisan support, which, says the NY Times, virtually seals President Bush’s defeat in this ongoing battle over agricultural policy. There’s been a lot of debate over the bill – whom it benefits, and what its greater effects will be over time. Of course, a $307 billion dollar plan for anything can’t, at least in most cases, simply be labeled good or bad. The complexity of the bill is introduced below by Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the senior Republican on the agriculture panel:

“Obviously, I have been very disappointed in the comments coming out of the White House,” Mr. Chambliss said. “But we do have a strong vote in both the House and the Senate, and I think that shows you that in a complex piece of legislation like this, and it truly is because it touches so many different areas of so many different aspects of agriculture and food production, as well as nutrition and conservation and energy, that there is something in this bill for every member of the House and every member of the Senate.” [NY Times]

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 By Kerry TruemanBrits are not amused by this laughable billboard promoting American cotton as “soft, sensual and sustainable.” Setting aside the absurdity of the National Cotton Council’s cotton-pickin’ poster girl–a blue-eyed, blonde babe with a bushel of freshly picked cotton bolls””there’s the slogan. As British blogger Jack Thurston sputtered:

Sustainable??!…Try telling that to the millions of impoverished cotton farmers in West Africa whose livelihoods are decimated by the flood of heavily subsidised US cotton on the world market, driving down prices and stealing markets. Try telling that to US taxpayers who foot the bill for more than $2 billion a year in handouts to US cotton farmers. Much of the US cotton industry is a creature of government subsidy, including some $264 million in illegal export subsidies in 2004. Try telling that to the people who live in cotton producing areas and see their water courses sucked dry by thirsty cotton plantations and face dangerous levels of pesticide runoff in their water supplies.

But Thurston didn’t stop there. He’s filed a complaint against the US Cotton Council International, on the grounds that this misleading ad violates the UK’s Code of Advertising. Thurston’s complaint makes the compelling case that American cotton production is neither environmentally nor economically sustainable. You can second his indignation by e-mailing Stephanie Thiers, European Representative of the Cotton Council International, at sthiers@cotton.org. Ask the Cotton Council to come clean and cut out the green washing.