Support Grows for Agriculture Secretary

When she left the clubby suites of an influential Washington law firm last year to plunge into the scandal-racked state Department of Food and Agriculture, Ann M. Veneman was greeted by a hostile bunch of California farmers.

Never mind that she was a native from the crop-rich Central Valley. Or that her resume included a stint as second-in-command at the sprawling U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington. And it didn’t seem to matter that she was an agricultural trade expert at a time when the state’s growers were desperately seeking new overseas markets.

“We wanted a working farmer,” complained the president of one California farm organization at the time. “You’ve got to get your fingernails dirty.” It was a criticism also voiced by the powerful California Farm Bureau.

One year later, Veneman, 46, reared on a San Joaquin Valley peach ranch as the daughter of a once-prominent California politician, seems to have disarmed her critics and is firmly in charge as California secretary of agriculture.

The most powerful regulator in the state’s $20-billion-a-year agricultural industry, Veneman finds herself working to restore public confidence in the department amid a conflict-of-interest investigation.

At the same time, her far-flung responsibilities have her promoting the overseas export of California farm products--from shipments of cheese to Korean pizzerias to tons of chicken feet to Hong Kong restaurants.

And if criticism of Gov. Pete Wilson’s choice has not vanished, “it has definitely dissipated,” the plain-spoken Veneman said of the unfriendly welcome she received. “I don’t have any problem at all with the Farm Bureau or anybody else.”

A year after taking the $110,000-a-year post, Veneman is winning support not only from her early critics, but from Harry Snyder of Consumers Union, who led the campaign to depose her predecessor, Henry J. Voss.

“On balance, I think she is doing a good job,” Snyder said. “Of course, we will continue to complain about things that we think are not being done right.”

In fact, Snyder’s complaints about Voss are still under investigation. In an interview, as Veneman discussed expanding farm exports, privatizing local fairs and the rapidly changing face of agriculture, investigators from the Fair Political Practices Commission were combing through department records relating to Voss.

Voss resigned in April 1995 amid charges by Consumers Union and California Common Cause that he had violated political reform laws by failing to report income his farming businesses received from companies he regulated as secretary of agriculture.

Voss agreed that he had failed to report at least $420,000 but denied he had engaged in conflicts of interest. In April, the commission dismissed the allegations of conflict, but reversed itself May 2 and agreed to reopen the investigation when the two consumer organizations found Department of Agriculture records that had not been turned over to investigators.

Veneman blamed the failure to provide the documents on an “unfortunate oversight.” She promised full cooperation in the second investigation, including whether the documents had been deliberately withheld, a potential criminal offense.

“I think what we are going to find is we didn’t have any intentional misbehavior on the part of employees, but I am going to wait to get a full report on that,” Veneman said in an interview.

In the meantime, Veneman ordered a tightening of procedures to avoid another scandal. “We don’t want anything like this to happen again,” Veneman said.

The overhaul included adoption of a formal procedure in which officials must disqualify themselves from participating in any decision that might affect their own economic interests.

Workers also must attend regular seminars on proper conduct and on avoiding even the appearance of questionable performance.

As an attorney in Washington, Veneman represented corporate clients, including the Dole Food Co. She said that, although she was not required to do so, she has disqualified herself from any actions involving Dole or other businesses she had dealt with.

She said she also has left the board of directors of Calgene, a Davis-based company that grows genetically altered tomatoes, even though it not regulated by her department.

“To avoid the appearance of conflict . . . I tried to make sure I covered myself from every angle,” Veneman said. She said she owns no farm property.

As an undergraduate at UC Davis in the late 1960s, Veneman was an intern for then-Assemblyman Pete Wilson, who was a colleague of her father, Assemblyman John G. Veneman, who grew peaches on the family farm near Modesto.

John Veneman, a moderate Republican who died in 1982, served in the first Nixon administration as deputy undersecretary of Health, Education and Welfare.

Ann Veneman received a master’s and law degree from UC Berkeley. She practiced law and joined the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s foreign agricultural service in 1986.

Later, she was promoted to deputy undersecretary for international affairs and commodity programs. She was a negotiator at the Uruguay round of talks on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement and the North American Free Trade Agreement. She was deputy undersecretary of the USDA from 1991-93.

Moving with unusual speed, Wilson appointed Veneman only 10 days after Voss resigned. Some analysts said the quick action prevented “production” agriculture from offering its own candidate.

Veneman said that her appointment to a post traditionally held by men may have been discomforting to “the people who didn’t know me. The farmer types kind of wondered who is this woman coming in here.” But she said that after a year on the job, “I’ve been pretty universally accepted.”

Veneman said she believes she has even won over Harry Kubo, the former president of the Nisei Farmers League, who spoke out publicly for an agriculture secretary with dirt under the fingernails. He recently commended Veneman as versed in foreign trade and the global economy.

Kubo shows up these days in Sacramento giving visitors from Japan tours of her department, Veneman said.

Another early critic, Bob L. Vice, president of the California Farm Bureau, said his members still favor a grower as secretary of agriculture.

But he praised Veneman as a “very capable person, who can analyze situations very quickly, always see the big picture. . . . We will always be comfortable with someone who has a great deal of ability, whether it is a farmer--or a non-farmer like Ann.”