Clipboard in hand, Debra Anderson spent three hours one recent sunny morning trooping through a field of romaine lettuce looking for trouble.
Workers harvest romaine lettuce at a Church Brothers field in Huron, Calif. Increasingly, auditors below the federal level are inspecting produce fields and other farms.
In anticipation of a global summit on the food crisis, the United Nations called on world leaders on Wednesday to agree to urgent measures to ease demand for grains and alleviate high food prices.
The idea of turning farms into fuel plants seemed, for a time, like one of the answers to high global oil prices and supply worries. That strategy seemed to reach a high point last year when Congress mandated a fivefold increase in the use of biofuels.
