Country of Origin Labeling. Finally!
Published January 15, 2009 @ 09:40AM PT
All fresh and frozen produce, meat products and nuts must now be labeled by country of origin.
The USDA just issued the final rule, five years after it was initially passed along with the 2002 farm bill. But the large food processing and distribution outfits balked. They drug their feet and Congress was inclined to let them. This brief statement from the USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service has the highlights:
... On January 27, 2004, Public Law 108-199 delayed implementation of mandatory COOL for all covered commodities except wild and farm-raised fish and shellfish until September 30, 2006. On November 10, 2005, Public Law 109-97 delayed implementation of mandatory COOL for all covered commodities except wild and farm-raised fish and shellfish until September 30, 2008. As described in the legislation, program implementation is the responsibility of USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service. The recently enacted Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008 (2008 Farm Bill) expands the list of covered commodities to include chicken, goat meat, ginseng, pecans and macadamia nuts. ...
That's the dry version, but you can see there was a lot of stop and go. Every one of those delays represented a flurry of organizing, phone calls to volunteers to get them to call Congress or write the USDA, and strategy meetings to plan outreach in states where people could call particularly influential players as their direct constituents.
And while I'm glad we'll all be able to find out where our dinners come from now, the best thing about the implementation of COOL from my perspective is that it'll free up a lot of activists' time to focus on other things. As Bill McKibben explained in a recent editorial on how to make a positive difference in the climate change fight, each of us has the power to make a difference politically far beyond the impact we could hope to achieve by changing our personal habits:
... If people who care about climate change mobilize politically, 5 percent will be more than enough too—it will persuade senators, congressmen, and presidents to back strict legislation that will set real caps on emissions and fund real research on the technologies we need. If such laws pass, they would change the behavior of 95 percent of Americans, including reluctant in-laws. This kind of equation isn’t hypothetical. Two years ago, I helped organize a march across Vermont that called on our leaders to work for deep cuts in carbon emissions. A thousand of us walked the sixty-mile route—one Vermonter in six hundred. And yet that was enough to get all of our legislators, including the conservative Republicans, to sign on to our pledge. A year later we organized fourteen hundred demonstrations in all fifty states to call for 80 percent cuts in carbon emissions by 2050. They were the most widespread rallies about climate change to date, but even so they hardly reached one-quarter of 1 percent of the population. And yet the next week both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton put our goal at the heart of their platforms. ...
The battle for COOL has been won. On to the nutrition program reauthorization skirmish!
(Photo credit: ricardo.martins on Flickr.)
Vilsack Pro-Forest, Probably Doesn't Matter
Published January 14, 2009 @ 03:12PM PT
In his Senate confirmation hearing today for the post of Secretary of Agriculture, former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack demonstrated laudable ecological awareness when describing the role of the nation's forests in providing clean water to 60 million Americans. He further said that forests would be important to dealing with global warming, apparently in recognition of their function as a carbon sink.
He was responding to questions by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), who was concerned that the the departmental budget he'll oversee has recently been shifted from a 20 percent allocation towards firefighting towards a 50 percent allocation towards firefighting. Vilsack said that he'd do his best to ensure that forest management and fire prevention got their due.
This would seem like good news for agriculture, because it's a plan to keep more water in the soil, in streams and rivers, and trickling down to our fast-depleting aquifers.
But the problem may be largely beyond his control. The Western bark beetle infestation is likely to "kill virtually every mature lodgepole pine in Colorado", and has left patches of dead forest "from New Mexico to Canada." This means that the West is also covered in large stands of rickety, dry, dead trees. Past fire suppression has prevented natural thinning, and ensures that any eventual fire, when it comes, will be very hot and destructive - as well as very expensive to rein in. Global warming has played a part as well, with winter temperatures not getting cold enough to halt the beetles' advance.
In other words, there's a gap between what he says he'd like to do and what he'll probably be able to do.
Global Heat Stress and Crop Yields
Published January 14, 2009 @ 10:43AM PT
Add one more point to the argument for cutting carbon emissions to near-zero by 2050 ... Scientists are now worried that high global temperatures will cause a "perpetual food crisis" through crop yield decreases of popular and important grains by the middle of this century. Because the high temperatures will be spread throughout the world, there won't necessarily be regions where there are good crop yields to cover for areas where crops are under too much heat stress to grow well, or are perhaps wilted outright.
How will that work, exactly? Well, it starts with this:
6CO2 + 6H2O + Sunlight --> C6H12O6 + 6O2
The equation above is the chemical formula for what happens during photosynthesis. It's the most important process in the world for life as we know it, producing both breatheable air and food for us. Carbon is taken from the air in the form of carbon dioxide, reacts with chemical pathways in chloroplasts (specialized cell compartments in plants' leaves*) and the water pulled up from plant roots, and it turns into sugar. That sugar, or its now solid-form carbon backbone, gets turned into other kinds of molecules the plant needs.
This is known as "fixing" carbon, taking it from a gaseous form to solid form. It allows plants to produce their own food, as well as food for other creatures. Whether an animal eats plants directly, or eats animals who eat plants, nearly all the food available in the world, and so, nearly all the living creatures in the world**, come from this reaction with the sun.
Eating Animals
Published January 13, 2009 @ 03:13PM PT
When I tell people that I'm interested in sustainable food and environmental issues, a lot of them just assume right away that it means I'm a vegetarian or vegan. No.
This is why.
Protect Our Food Supply – Stop National Animal ID
Published January 13, 2009 @ 06:07AM PT
A policy posing one of the greatest threats to local and sustainable agriculture is the National Animal Identification System (NAIS). Under NAIS, anyone who owns even one livestock animal will have to register their property, tag each animal (in most cases with electronic tags), and report a long list of movements to a database within 24 hours. This issue is among the ideas being voted on for the Top 10 Ideas for Change in America:
NAIS will drive local family and organic farms out of business and impose burdens on everyone from recreational horse owners to people in poverty who are trying to raise food for themselves. It will not stop animal disease or improve food safety. NAIS will only enrich the corporations that already control most of our food supply.
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