Members of the International Fresh Produce Association headed to Capitol Hill today to try to counter some of the points made in the Make America Healthy Again report and to try to stop Congress from cutting fruit and vegetable benefits for low-income Americans.

“Anytime health is part of the conversation we should win,” IFPA President and CEO Cathy Burns told her members this morning.

“Fruits and vegetables sit hand in glove with MAHA goals to improve public health,” she added, referring to the report from the MAHA commission chaired by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

But Burns noted that, while the MAHA report says people should eat more fruits and vegetables and other whole foods, it also criticizes the herbicides that farmers, including fruit and vegetable growers, use to protect their crops from insects and disease, and says that consumers should buy their food from smaller producers rather than the bigger operations that produce most of the fruit and vegetables sold in grocery stores around the country. 

“MAHA is the topic of the day,” said Rebeckah Adcock, the IFPA vice president for U.S. government relations, explaining that the report has influence with members of Congress, the news media and consumers.

Adcock, who was a USDA official in the first Trump administration, said, “We have to make sure this administration doesn’t cut our nose off to spite our face.”

Burns also said that IFPA is once again involved in a battle over the fruit and vegetable benefits in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children.

IFPA successfully fought an attempt two years ago to cut that benefit, but the House version of the fiscal year 2026 agriculture appropriations bill, which will be considered by the full House Appropriations Committee on Wednesday, would cut it again.

In addition to putting low-income mothers and small children on a path to eat fruits and vegetables for a lifetime, the benefit is worth $1 billion to the industry, Burns said.

A panel of other agricultural lobbyists joined Adcock to explain to IFPA members that the MAHA report causes problems for other agricultural sectors as well.

The American Farm Bureau Federation “is concerned about the opportunities that were missed and the misperceptions that came out in the report,” said Joby Young, the Farm Bureau executive vice president who also served in the Trump administration.

Kip Tom, an Indiana farmer and the vice chair of rural policy for the pro-Trump America First Policy Institute who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations agriculture and food agencies in Rome in the first Trump administration, said he believes that for the most part American farmers’ production methods are “doing everything right.”

Devin Mogler, president and CEO of the National Oilseed Processors Association, said the report has convinced people to think that seed oils are bad, when the science shows that they are low in saturated fats.

Peter Lurie, president and executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, who has often been critical of the Food and Drug Administration, said that the MAHA report has no scientific integrity. The MAHA Commission took on 27 different issues, too many for serious scientific inquiry in the three months that it sat, he said.

Besides recommending fruits and vegetables, the only thing the report got right, Lurie said, was criticizing the “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) system that allows companies to put additives in food and later inform FDA. There is an “overemphasis” on chemicals in the report, he said.

Lurie also noted that the report does not mention that the Trump administration is “decimating” federal agencies by firing the employees. “It’s important to stand up for federal workers,” he said.

IFPA is one of the agriculture groups invited today to the White House for a listening session on the MAHA report. Row crop groups were invited to the White House on Friday, and other agriculture groups have meetings scheduled.

But one lobbyist who attended the meeting Friday described it as “checking a box” while another said the meetings are “a pat on the head.”

Meanwhile, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and Kennedy have scheduled a roundtable with Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, R-Ark., and Mike Braun, R-Ind., today to discuss state waivers to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. In a news advisory, Rollins said she would sign three new SNAP waivers.

The state waivers will prevent SNAP beneficiaries from using their benefits to buy soda, candy and perhaps other products deemed unhealthy, but Burns said she thinks it would be a “leap” to think that SNAP beneficiaries who can’t use their benefits to buy candy and soda will make a trip to the produce aisle to buy fruits and vegetables instead.

Burns said she thinks incentives — additional purchasing power for fruits and vegetables — are much more effective in convincing low-income people to buy more produce.