Agribusiness Update for Monday 07/01/14

According to the Washington Post - lawmakers on both sides of the immigration reform issue have said immigration is effectively dead until after President Obama leaves office - even though the President called immigration reform his top priority for his second term. Friday marked a year since the Senate approved a comprehensive immigration bill on a bipartisan vote with no progress evident in the House and few working days left to approve legislation. Representative Eric Cantor's loss in his primary election and a new crisis on the Mexican border are partly to blame for the inevitable delay of immigration reform.

During the Aspen Ideas Festival - Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack spoke in a U.S. food policy discussion about GMO labeling. Vilsack says the challenge of the labeling debate is that food labels have either provided nutritional information or warned about possible allergies - but GMO labeling doesn't fit into either category. Vilsack believes putting information about genetically modified ingredients through barcodes on food labels - like Nestle does - could resolve the issue of labeling foods with GMOs.

That's today's Agribusiness Update from the Ag Information Network.