Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy has opposed the use of zero carbon nuclear energy. ¹

Background

Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy was created in 1987 by Mark Ritchie, a bureaucrat for the Minnesota Department of Agriculture after he attended a farming policy conference in Geneva, Switzerland. ²

Ritchie has characterized the conference as a meeting of “leaders of rural and farm movements from around the world.” ³ Originally IATP was organized to provide international organizations, such as the meetings of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the global trade organization of the time, with research and analysis on how their policies impact rural communities. ³ However, in the 1990s, IATP expanded its mission to include environmentalist and race-focused policies related to rural agricultural policy. ⁴

Funding

In 2020, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy received $1,104,738 in contributions, ⁵ $1,121,533 in total revenue, ⁶ incurred $1,459,332 in total expenses, ⁷ and $1,435,208 in net assets. ⁸

In 2020, IATP received contributions from several left-of-center grantmaking organizations, including the Communitas Charitable Trust ($15,000), ⁹ I & G Charitable Foundation ($3,000), ¹⁰ Schwab Charitable Fund ($5,200), ¹¹ Tides Foundation ($40,000), ¹² and the Tiny Beam Fund ($5,000). ¹³

Climate Policy

In 2022, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy praised the Biden administration for signing the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and endorsing its provisions, namely the allocation of billions of dollars to shift the American economy to weather-dependent forms of energy. ¹⁴ In particular, IATP praised the IRA for providing tax incentives and credits to private producers of weather-dependent energy. ¹⁵  However, IATP has also expressed skepticism as to whether IRA goes far enough in subsidizing weather-dependent energy producers. ¹⁶

IATP claims that because the United States has not met its targets for reducing GHG emissions under the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) rubric (noting that the IPCC requires the United States to reduce its emissions relative to 2005 levels by 50 percent by 2030), IATP claims that IRA may not have gone as far as it should have. ¹⁶

Opposition to Nuclear Energy

Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy was one of more than 600 co-signing organizations on a January 2019 open letter to Congress titled “Legislation to Address the Urgent Threat of Climate Change.” The signatories declared their support for new laws to bring about “100 percent decarbonization” of the transportation sector but denounced nuclear power as an example of “dirty energy” that should not be included in any legislation promoting the use of so-called “renewable energy.” ¹

Nuclear power plants produce no carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gas emissions, and as of 2021 accounted for 19 percent of American electricity production—the largest source of zero carbon electricity in the United States. ¹⁷ An October 2018 proposal from The Nature Conservancy noted that zero-carbon nuclear plants produced 7.8 percent of total world energy output and recommended reducing carbon emissions by increasing nuclear capacity to 33 percent of total world energy output. ¹⁸

Fertilizer

Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy has a long history of opposing industrial-scale agriculture, favoring the use of non-industrial farming methods for food production. ¹⁹ IATP has criticized industrial farming for its use of chemically enriched fertilizer, ²⁰ a necessary component of mass-scale food production. IATP has highlighted the growing cost of producing chemical fertilizer given that the price of chemical fertilizer is tied to methane prices. ²¹

IATP has also attempted to assuage concerns related to how removing chemical fertilizer from food production will reduce the total amount of food produced across the world. ²²

Methane

Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy opposes the use of industrial-scale farming because it is the primary source of methane, a greenhouse gas targeted for reduced emission requirements under the IPCC’s recommendations. ²³ IATP recognizes risks that de-industrializing food production poses for net global food production levels, ²³ but has stated that a shift to non-industrial scale farming is necessary to reduce methane levels by 40-45 percent by 2030. ²³

The IATP has also criticized the United States, Brazil, China, New Zealand, and the Netherlands for violating their commitments under the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference’s Conference of Parties (COP 26) “Global Methane Pledge” to reduce methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030. The stated nations increased rather than decreased their overall methane production levels between 2021 and 2022. ²³

Leadership

Sophia Murphy is the executive director of IATP. ²⁴ Before joining IATP in 2020, Murphy was the senior specialist for agricultural and investment for the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, ²⁴ a left-of-center organization that seeks to strengthen environmentalist laws in the United States ²⁵ and develop top-down international environmentalist treaties. ²⁶