Mike Taylor for Food Safety Coordinator

by Natasha Chart

categories: Corporate Kneebiters, Food Safety, Policy

Published July 02, 2009 @ 09:59PM PT

Obama's considering appointing a former Monsanto vice president, Mike Taylor, to head the Food Safety Working Group at the FDA.

As Jill Richardson writes at LaVidaLocavore at the link above, Taylor thinks the FDA wastes too much time on food safety inspections at meat packing plants. Further, he believes that one of their main problems is that they have to slow down their line speed too much.

Everyone who's read anything about the horrendous working conditions at US meatpacking plants knows that incomplete kills before slaughter and worker injuries increase dramatically when line speeds increase.

As also noted at the Ethicurean, Taylor is the reason milk from rBGH/rBST cows doesn't have to be labeled. Bovine growth hormone is perfectly safe, after all. Except for cows, or humans who drink its breakdown products in milk.

So yes, Mike Taylor is the person we have to thank for putting pus from mastitis-infected cows into the milk supply, and exposing milk-drinking Americans by the millions to greater cancer risks.

This guy is heading up a food safety working group.

I'm just swimming in the changeiness.

World According to Monsanto, pt 9, Contamination

by Natasha Chart

categories: Biodiversity, Corporate Kneebiters, Gene Modification, Indigenous Rights, International

Published July 02, 2009 @ 08:30AM PT

A traditional Mexican corn farmer speaks in this portion of the "World According to Monsanto" documentary about the transgenic corn conquest of the ancient home of corn and the center of its greatest biodiversity: "... If they succeed, we'll be dependent on multinationals. We'll be forced to buy the fertilizer and insecticides they sell, because without them, their corn won't grow. Whereas the local corn grows very well without fertilizer or herbicide. Look at it, it's very beautiful. ..."

Now that NAFTA has made import controls on artificially cheap US corn difficult, and as much US corn contains transgenic traits, it's been impossible to keep contamination of this wind-pollinated plant at bay. Even in fields where farmers have been saving their own seed and sharing only with neighbors who do the same for centuries.

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Ending Childhood Hunger by 2015

by Natasha Chart

categories: childhood nutrition, Community Development, Distribution, Health, Hunger

Published July 01, 2009 @ 01:50PM PT

Guest editorial by Jim Weill, FRAC president

It’s always shocking to hear how many Americans can’t afford enough healthy food to get through the month – 36.2 million people live in such households at last count – but it’s especially troubling when you consider how many of the hungry are children. More than 12 million children – nearly 17 percent of all children in the country – live in homes that are struggling with hunger, hindering them from growing, learning and succeeding in school.

During the presidential campaign, President Obama pledged to end childhood hunger in America by 2015. It’s an ambitious pledge and one that he’s clearly standing behind. According to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, the president instructed him that “what I want you to do first, the most important thing in this job, is to make sure America’s kids are well fed.”

As a nation we have only six years to reach this goal of ending childhood hunger and it will not be easy. But the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) has described the essential strategies needed to make the 2015 pledge a reality. They are the measures required if we’re serious about ending the scandal of childhood hunger in the U.S. and bolstering the health and futures of our children.

FRAC’s seven step plan:

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The Fertilizer Divide

by Natasha Chart

categories: Climate, Community Development, Distribution, Farm Economics, International, Livestock, Policy

Published July 01, 2009 @ 12:19PM PT

While plant breeding has done its part, and irrigation a lion's share, in bringing global crop productivity up over this last century, synthetic and mineral fertilizers sealed the deal.

Plants need more than nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (N-P-K), but an abundance of those three key, limiting nutrients will get them growing well, usually even if there are micronutrient deficiencies. So the prominent N-P-K listings on fertilizer bags are generally most crucial, and arguably the most critical of these is nitrogen.

While the Green Revolution is attributed in large part to hybrid crop varieties, these do poorly when not supplied with the abundant irrigation and nutrient resources provided through the industrial agriculture system. As much as the biotech industry claims to be overcoming these input requirements, they have yet to do so, and hope is not a plan.

Industrial agriculture uses fertilizer synthesized from natural gas, which is running into price and availability constraints similar to that found with other fossil fuels. Further, using nitrogen fertilizer in excess of what can be absorbed by plants and organisms residing in the soil are a significant source of water pollution and the formation of nitrous oxides, which are powerful greenhouse gases.

Now, a new study has quantified the global fertilizer use divide, with the not-too-surprising findings that industrialized countries use too much and African agriculture may be in need of a lot more. From the press release:

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Beetles and Monoculture

by Natasha Chart

categories: Biodiversity, Climate, International

Published June 30, 2009 @ 07:39PM PT

Julian Siddle of the BBC doesn't seem aware that a pine beetle infestation has already spread to the United States, devastating forests all the way into southern California, but nonetheless provided some interesting reporting on how Canada is addressing the pine beetle decimation of their forests and the environmental circumstances shaping their thinking on the matter:

... Cold winters usually kill off the beetle larvae, but the region has been warmer than usual in recent years.

... Without interference from man, mature lodge pole pine would be regularly destroyed by forest fires. But, [Staffan Lindgren, professor of entomology at the University of Northern British Columbia,] explained, the species has evolved to use fire to aid regeneration.

... The damage caused by the beetle, combined with the downturn in the demand for wood due to the global recession, has brought about a rethink on forest policy in British Columbia.

Mixed forests, rather than monocultures, are now seen as healthier both for the trees and other plant and animal life - even though a lack of uniformity makes them more difficult to harvest. ...

First, warming temperatures have helped pests proliferate. Not only would a sufficiently cold winter kill more beetles off, but as we've covered before, insect life cycles are governed by what are called degree days. That is, they need a certain minimum heat input within their tolerable range before they can progress to the next stage of their life or reproduce. It's a fascinating biological clock mechanism that allows them to be very responsive to limiting environmental constraints.

Second, the natural cycle of ecosystem renewal and regeneration has been disrupted without adequate replacement. Having spread ourselves out so widely, and having such rigorous fire supression knowledge, we left the trees without a means to clear out the competition and literal dead wood so that new, healthy seedlings could periodically get a decent chance to establish themselves.

Third, human ecosystem management techniques have decreased biodiversity. If even one pest organism can take advantage of a fatal flaw in the dominant species, the monoculture ecosystem can collapse.

Making ecosystems work properly is hard. We don't always understand all the necessary inputs and interactions.

Though we do know of a few surefire ways to break an ecosystem, some of which we might be directly or indirectly responsible for. Global warming and the monoculture are our fault, and these stressors give an opportunistic organism like the pine beetle the chance to take over and do its worst.

In this case, it's why the western portion of North America is increasingly covered in large stands of dead kindling. In the case of our artificial agricultural ecosystems, it's why when a pest develops resistance to whatever method we're using to combat it, it can devastate food production across a wide region.

Hard to create, easier to destroy. It's going to be true of any complex system, and certainly the living systems we depend on for life support. Though we can learn to interact positively with our environment, we tamper at our peril.

(Photo credit: tomsaint11 on Flickr.)

Robyn O'Brien: The Unhealthy Truth

by Natasha Chart

categories: Corporate Kneebiters, Gene Modification, Health, Recommended Reading

Published June 30, 2009 @ 12:00AM PT

I can't call in queer to work today, they don't excuse you for that kind of thing around here, but hopefully I can plead wedding madness in re my brevity of posting. I'm sure at least Robert Wager misses me ;)

Anyway, go read Civil Eats, where Naomi Starkman has interviewed Robyn O'Brien, author of "The Unhealthy Truth," and explainer of why we a) don't need biotech to feed the world and b) would really like to know what we're eating.

You could also check out Jill Richardson's sampler platter of food news. You know you'll like it.

The Banana Republic of Honduras

by Natasha Chart

Published June 29, 2009 @ 10:40AM PT

From the Encarta entry on Honduras, a brief backstory on how Honduras came to be the original "Banana Republic":

At the start of the 20th century, Honduras was the poorest of the Central American nations. In the early 1900s U.S. fruit companies began growing bananas along the Caribbean coast of Honduras. They competed ruthlessly for grants of land from the government under favorable terms and often promised political support in return. The banana companies soon became the dominant force in the country’s political and economic life.

By 1910 U.S. firms controlled 80 percent of all banana lands, and bananas had become the mainstay of the economy. Honduras became known as a “banana republic.” When revolutions broke out in 1911 and 1913, the United States intervened on the side of the ruling elite to restore order and protect U.S. property. ...

By US firms, they mean United Fruit (Chiquita) and Standard Fruit (Dole), who abused their workers, backed military dictatorships, and seemed at all times to be fully supported in their ruthless land and power grabs.

As the previous century continued, the US continued training Central American military and paramilitary forces at the School of the Americas*, and, in what I'm sure is entirely a coincidence, these individuals replicated the brutal repression of democracy in service of corporate profits throughout the region and the world. Its graduates, trained in "torture, extortion, blackmail and the targeting of civilian populations," have been implicated in numerous coups, murders, kidnappings, rapes and incidents of torture directed at social workers, union organizers, labor activists, and even nuns or priests advocating for social justice reforms.

Via RandomNonviolence, it's worth noting that graduates of the School of the Americas are responsible for the weekend coup in Honduras.

While you may want to go to Chavez Code (via Xcroc) for breaking news, I think it's worth remembering that in Honduras' bloody, recent history, a direct line can be drawn from banana monoculture, extreme economic inequality and overweening corporate power to torture and political repression. And perhaps more to the point, these tragedies spring from an unstated belief in the right of businesses to profit at the expense of all else, to privatize productivity gains and impose costs and losses on the public.

There's nothing unique about Honduras that couldn't be replicated elsewhere.

* The School of the Americas went through a PR exercise in which its name was changed to “The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation” (WHINSEC).

(Photo credit: Arpana Sanjay on Flickr.)