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SACRAMENTO – Ann Veneman, an attorney who is the daughter of peach farmers, emphasized foreign trade, food safety and education during her tenure as California’s agriculture director. 

Veneman, 51, a Modesto native, was expected to be named U.S. agriculture secretary Wednesday by President-elect Bush, The Associated Press has learned. 

“We have a very high regard for secretary Veneman,” Bill Pauli, president of the 90,000-member California Farm Bureau, said Tuesday. “What we’re really encouraged by is not only does she understand California agriculture, which is really important to us, but she understands national agriculture.” 

She was California’s agriculture director from 1995 until January 1999, appointed by former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson. She is the only woman to have held that cabinet post as the governor’s top farm adviser. 

Wilson sent her on trade missions to Asia and South America to try to increase California’s agriculture exports, which range from cotton to table grapes. 

From 1986 to 1993, she dealt with international trade issues in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She rose to deputy secretary, the number-two job in that office, under Bush’s father and was the highest-ranking woman to serve in that department. 

During her time in the federal department, Veneman helped negotiate the Uruguay round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade talks. 

“When you talk to agriculture people about what government can do to help, it’s ’help us open markets that are closed to us,”’ Veneman said in a 1995 interview. “I think that’s a real legitimate role that we can play.” 

Since Wilson left office, Veneman has been practicing law in Sacramento, but still keeping farm connections. In her firm of Nossaman, Guthner, Knox and Elliott, she has specialized in food, agriculture, environment, technology and trade issues. 

This month, she spoke at a University of California, Davis, seminar on agriculture in an Internet world. 

She said e-commerce will bring “fundamental changes” to farming, as farms begin exploring business-to-business Internet transactions, buying and selling everything from seeds to farm equipment. 

In October, she told an agriculture biotechnology conference in Monterey, “We simply will not be able to feed the world without biotechnology.” 

In 1999, she was hired by Nugget Distributors of Stockton to promote a new food safety training program on CD-ROMs for restaurant workers. A 1998 state law requires businesses selling unpackaged foods to have at least one worker certified in safe food handling. 

Pauli said Veneman’s background in agricultural trade agreements is “a really strong positive for California agriculture and for the nation’s agriculture.” 

Picking Veneman “was a really good start” for the Bush administration as far as food and agriculture policy is concerned, said Carol Tucker Foreman, director of the Consumer Federation of America’s Food Policy Institute. 

Veneman understands that USDA, which regulates meat processing and operates the government’s food assistance programs, is concerned about more than farming, Foreman said. She “will bring a modern view of the Department of Agriculture into that job.” 

Her roots are both in farming and politics. Her parents were peach growers in Stanislaus County in the San Joaquin Valley south of Sacramento. Her father, John Veneman, was a Republican state assemblyman and undersecretary of health, education and welfare in the Nixon administration. 

Veneman was an early Bush supporter and was one of six California Republicans named in mid-1999 to his exploratory committee in the state. At the GOP convention last summer, she was on the national steering committee of Farmers and Ranchers for Bush. 

She has a bachelor’s degree from UC Davis in political science, a master’s in public policy from UC Berkeley and a law degree from Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. 

She spent time during her tenure as state agriculture director visiting urban schools to talk about how food gets from the farm to them. 

“The big problem is children simply do not know where food comes from. They go to the grocery store and think milk just comes out of a carton, or fruit and vegetables just appear on that shelf,” she said a 1997 interview.