Indigenous Rights
World According to Monsanto, pt 10, Taking Over
Published July 09, 2009 @ 07:43AM PT
This last episode of the documentary covers the GMO-mediated takeover of South American farmland, replacing small, diverse farms with a desert of genetically engineered soybeans that will be fed mainly to livestock in wealthier nations.
But, but, but ... we need to feed the world, right? Yes. And there are much better ways to do that.
Dr. Doug Gurian-Sherman, an expert in genetic engineering, explains as much in an interview at The Ethicurean.
First, he explains the difference between types of yield. There's intrinsic yield increase, higher food production capacity mediated by the genes and environmental interactions of the plant. Then, there's operational yield increase, where losses from pests and weed competition are cut, therefore boosting net yield.
Gurian-Sherman worked on the Union of Concerned Scientists' report demonstrating only very slight operational yield increases due to the introduction of GMO crops in the US. But they don't have any traits on the market that can increase intrinsic yield. He explains the problem with trying to do that, specifically recent obstacles to realizing the company's claim that they can 'get more out of every raindrop':
... In the report we cover an interesting case. One problem with some drought-tolerant crop varieties is that under normal moisture conditions, the variety doesn’t yield as well as varieties without drought tolerance. The New York Times recently covered a potential breakthrough with a particular gene that reportedly conferred drought tolerance but didn’t show that downside. But then a few months later, another lab working on the gene for different reasons found that it made plants more susceptible to various plant diseases. So the same gene that confers drought tolerance makes plants more susceptible to disease. Farmers may have to use pesticides to control these diseases if this drought tolerance gene is approved. How will this balance out in terms of benefit and risk?
Such unintended effects are not publicized because companies don’t like to talk about failures. The bottom line is that there has been a huge amount of effort to produce a lot of crops over the years with success of only a few traits: Bt and herbicide tolerance. They have not resulted in significant yield gains at all in the U.S. And we also have to put any yield gains in the context of the expense and other factors and compare GE technology to other technologies and production methods. ...
Gurian-Sherman also details more of the things that can go wrong when trying to boost yield through adjusting complex, multi-variable traits. There are often unintended consequences, such as the increased lignin production in the cell walls of Bt corn plants. Lignin isn't harmful, to my knowledge, but it's not edible either to us or the majority of microorganisms, so it would probably take longer to break down.
What would the effects be of having corn residue that's less digestible to the soil microfauna? I don't know, though it could conceivably reduce biodiversity and the available food supply for communities of organisms that make soil healthy. It might considerably alter the makeup of soil ecosystems by favoring different microbes, or not have any effects.
Though it would be nice if we could know for sure. Especially nice if our food was labeled so that we knew if we were participating in the experiment.
World According to Monsanto, pt 9, Contamination
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.
Supper Buffet: Grown in a Raised Bed
Published June 09, 2009 @ 03:42PM PT
Raiding the internet fridge for your intellectual delectation ...
- Paula Crossfield walks through the first phase of setting up a raised bed roof garden at CivilEats.
- The Ethicurean catches a story on the emerging field of biopesticide research, which aims to protect crops without toxic side effects. Hopefully, this won't go the way of Bt.
- Writing at the Green Fork, Kerry Trueman tells us that farming is all the rage these days. Which dooms me to hopeless uncoolness, as we don't even get enough sun to grow eats on the deck of my yardless apartment.
- Ali Savino at the new blog, Gastronomalies, points to a TED talk about a seed saving program that can save endangered plant species for the bargain basement price of $2800. You can be sure it would cost more than that to create a replacement.
- At LaVidaLocavore, Jill Richardson highlights the massacre of indigenous free trade protestors in Peru, whose complaints about their government's theft of their land for corporate use include biofuel plantations.
Major Beef Recall
Published May 22, 2009 @ 04:46AM PT
These complaints about food safety just never get old. I guess it's more work for me, but look, I'd just rather live in a country where this kind of thing wasn't a running story.
From Leila Atassi at the Plain Dealer, via Ellinorianne on DailyKos, who provides a link to the USDA list of affected products:
.... A 7-year-old Cleveland girl died Sunday from an E. coli infection that local health officials say could be linked to a massive ground-beef recall issued Thursday from an Illinois-based company.
Health officials did not identify the girl or provide details of the circumstances that led to her death. But Cleveland Health Director Matthew Carroll said the case might be the latest in a cluster of E. coli infections traced to Valley Meats LLC of Coal Valley, Ill.
The company pulled nearly 100,000 pounds of hamburger patties Thursday after a U.S. Department of Agriculture investigation confirmed that three Cleveland-area residents were infected by eating the same tainted ground beef. ...
There's also currently a beef recall from a Houston-area store, and in New York, a recall of Alex & George (A&G) brand beef patties.
As the article about the New York recall notes, the strain E. coli 0157:H7 is a particularly dangerous variety of a very common gut bacteria in humans and animals. There's evidence that cows kept on pasture have less to negligible traces of this strain compared to cows kept indoors. And as a bovine literature review demonstrates (pdf), in general, feeding cows barley, corn or distillers grains seems to increase the presence of E. coli 0157:H7 as opposed to forage grass feeding which tends to reduce that bacterial population for reasons that aren't yet clear. (Giving the animals probiotics and adding a modest amount of citrus peel to their diet seems to help, also.)
We're not at "largest beef recall in history" territory yet, as we were last year, (and more on that later today), but the cows mostly have sick gut bacteria for the same reasons people are sick in this country: too much sugar (grain feed for cows is the equivalent of humans eating table sugar by the spoonful) in all our diets, too much meat in ours.
If consumption could be curbed to where factory feedlots weren't seen as a business necessity anymore, it'd be healthier for everyone. I know there are people who will say, well, it was just one kid and thank goodness she didn't starve to death. The same excuse gets trotted out when you point to people with cancer or birth defects from pesticide poisoning.
And if it's you, or your kid, that always just sounds like bunk. It should sound like bunk to all of us.
'You can't kill people with your product' shouldn't be considered an unreasonable restriction on doing business, yeah?
(Photo credit: elecnix on Flickr.)
Outsourcing Disease, Destruction
Published May 01, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
As linked to previously, wealthy countries whose own farmland is losing productivity are buying farmland in poor nations where the population may be illiterate and unaware of its rights when their governments approve selling their land out from under them.
Some of the countries have insisted that they'll hire locals, though industrial agriculture often explicitly employs fewer people, substituting fossil fuels and machinery for human labor. Some of them have promised to sell part of the crop locally, hopefully their will be jobs available for now-landless subsistence households that pay enough for them to buy a sufficiency of food.
Would it help if they promised to mitigate ecological damage? If industrial farming could really do that, countries practicing it probably wouldn't be so worried about losing farmland at home. I mean, it seems like it'd be less hassle to just take care of what you've got?
Would it help if they promised to be less polluting? Well, industrial agriculture needs a lot of chemicals in order to manage that prized workforce reduction. Biotech crops are notorious for having been most frequently engineered to tolerate pesticides, and for mainly being successful and a tremendous sales tool for chemicals like glyphosate, aka Roundup.
Do poor nations need their populations to have increased risks of birth defects during spraying season? I would submit that no one needs that.
Would it help if they promised to follow the highest standards of sanitary livestock practice? Well, look what a mess industrial livestock farming has made wherever it's been allowed. Let's take, say, hog farming.
The picture up at the top of this post is, obviously, of a family of pigs running around in a grass-covered pasture. To the immediate left is a picture of pigs in a confinement barn.
Which one of those lifestyles looks more sanitary for the pigs?
As it happens, the obvious answer is the correct one..
Factory farms are known breeding grounds for pathogens that regularly violate US environmental standards. So they've moved South, to countries where regulations are less stringent. Some bloggers are calling this the NAFTA flu, because NAFTA has a lot more to do with the spread of this farming method and its diseases than any pigs, as Robert Wallace writes at Farming Pathogens:
... There is, then, another reason why the ’swine flu’ tag fails. It detracts from an obvious point: pigs have very little to do with how influenza emerges. They didn’t organize themselves into cities of thousands of immuno-compromised pigs. They didn’t artificially select out the genetic variation that could have helped reduce the transmission rates at which the most virulent influenza strains spread. They weren’t organized into livestock ghettos alongside thousands of industrial poultry. They don’t ship themselves thousands of miles by truck, train or air. Pigs do not naturally fly.
The onus must be placed on the decisions we humans made to organize them this way. And when we say ‘we’, let’s be clear, we’re talking how agribusinesses have organized pigs and poultry.
Although considerable attention is being paid to the role of a particular company in the emergence of the new influenza, and rightfully so, we might better focus on the deregulation that allowed such porcinopolises to grow to the point that whole human communities are pushed off the land pigs now occupy. ...
As Wallace goes on to note, it was reported in Science that swine flus of the H1N1 variants got a jumpstart in their evolution in 1998, mixing with human flus in the hog barns of North Carolina. Ever since, they've been mutating like crazy, incorporating new strains and regularly tossing off new variants.
Should Smithfield's Granjas Carroll subsidiary not be directly to blame, this flu got its start in the livestock production model they've profited from and spread.
But ... this mess sounds like a good idea to keep exporting to even more countries. International officials think it'll be a win-win. Right, right.
And someday, pigs will fly.
(Photo credit: Grongar on Flickr and the Wikipedia Commons, via Answer.com's factory farming information page.)
Three Sisters: Corn, Beans and Squash
Published April 23, 2009 @ 08:21AM PT
Yesterday, the US Dept. of Agriculture made an announcement about their work on the expanded People's Garden at USDA:
... Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan officially kicked off the Earth Day event at the Whitten Building with Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Chairman Brings Plenty who performed a traditional song and planted seeds at a ceremonial Three Sisters Garden to celebrate American Indians' contribution to American agriculture. Merrigan led volunteers and USDA staffers in planting vegetables, herbs and flowers to complete the first phase of The People's Garden. Eventually, the garden will include organic raised vegetable beds, organic transition plots, an organic urban container garden, an organic kitchen pollinator garden, rain gardens and a bat house.
A Three Sisters Garden is a traditional garden consisting of corn, beans and squash that has been planted by American Indians for centuries. Stories of the Three Sisters refers to a tradition of interplanting corn, beans and squash in the same mound. It is a sophisticated, sustainable planting system that has provided long term soil fertility and a healthy diet to generations of American Indians. ...
My former botany teacher would be very disappointed in me if I could not still, cold, tell you a bit about why the Three Sisters planting is so damn nifty.
It's sheer luck that I found a photo with such a clear look at the leaves (thank you, Abri Beluga!), but if you're not familiar with these plants from experience (if you are, skip to the next paragraph), you can make them out in their respective layers and see what I'm talking about. Of course the corn has the tall, narrow leaves that stick up from the center. Next down, you can make out the bean leaves, in their arrow-shaped pairs that are the first you see as your eyes travel down the corn stalks. The squash leaves are lower down and spreading along the ground, broad and bumpy with scalloped edges.
When it comes to soil nutrients, the bean plants provide nitrogen through the symbiotic, nitrogen-fixing bacteria that live in their roots. Corn is a heavy nitrogen user, so that comes in handy. All of them draw a different enough profile of soil nutrients that they don't hinder each other.
Then there's the structure of the plants. Bean vines need things to cling to so they can get high enough to reach the light when there are other plants around, while corn stalks make good beanpoles. The broad squash leaves overshade weeds, as well as cool and retain moisture in the soil.
One could also marvel at the nutritional complementarity for humans. The beans and corn give you all your essential amino acids, the squash provides a good number of vitamins. The beans and squash are also high in fiber and yield some fats. A diet with these crops as the centerpiece fed the Native Americans in North and Mesoamerica pretty well.
Before the disease epidemics hit (the earliest and worst of which were accidental*, see 1491 by Charles C. Mann,) they were reported by explorers to be tall and robust by European standards, where malnutrition and poor public health were common at the time.
Some early agriculturist, or agriculturists, figured this out after the development of the corn plant from teosinte - in itself a truly remarkable achievement - and their discovery fed, still feeds, many millions. It's a good tradition for the USDA to honor.
If you'd like to try planting the Three Sisters at home, check out Renee's Garden and their Three Sisters Garden Pack. It isn't that I've tried their seeds in particular, it's that they include Scarlet Runner beans, so I had to recommend them. Have you tried Scarlet Runners? They impart an incredible, smoky, BBQ sort of flavor to foods. They're also, I've read, a really excellent green manure.
I'll say no more about them. I'm still sad that I can't find delicious Scarlet Runners canned anymore, not even when I splurge and go to the very nice organic groceries. Must get a yard ...
Supporting, Undermining Global Food Security
Published April 16, 2009 @ 09:16AM PT
It's the case in the world of federal legislation that many people have their hands in any given legislative pie. A large bill has numerous parents, and the process is difficult and time-consuming enough that in general, if you get a thing or two that you want in the final product, you take your win and go home.
I get that. It's the way business is done.
Indeed, when you can get a strong Senate coalition to approve a measure that will ease global hunger, an aim that's strongly supported by the president, hey, celebrate.
Though somebody, somewhere, needs to keep an eye on the bigger picture.
The Global Food Security Act of 2009, S. 384, will mandate the acceptance of genetically modified crops as part of US foreign assistance. Which unfortunately means that what it gives to Africa and S. Asia with one hand, it likely takes away with the other.
That part of the bill needs to come out.
Now it must be admitted that traditional farming, while it's had notable achievements and fed all the people we descended from for many generations, had the occasional total collapse. Old school crossbreeding gave us many wonderful foods, but mobility and information sharing weren't what they are now and they were far more at the mercy of the weather.
Though the Green Revolution, where high-yield hybrids were added to new well-drilling, irrigation and synthetic fertilizer technology has in many cases tossed the baby out with the bath water.
Consider that India's current elections in Punjab, where the Green Revolution was embraced wholeheartedly, have as a major campaign issue the ongoing farmer suicides in the region. It's being reported that 4 kill themselves every day, with the toll having reached 1,600 in 2007.
They can't get proper loans for capital intensive farming, for the new seeds, new chemicals, and new wells that need to be dug as the water table drops ever lower, so they have to go to loan sharks. Green Revolution crops are good producers, though only if they're pampered. Then if anything goes wrong, like the rains aren't great or prices collapse, they end up deep in debt with no way out.
Farmers who don't commit suicide may lose their land to developers or government fiat. They move to some slum in a city where there's little hope of work for them and have to buy what they might once have grown. One way or another, small farmers stop farming and their expertise is lost along with any unique crop breeds they once cared for.
Every indication is that genetically modified seeds are an advantage over Green Revolution hybrids only in that they make a lot more money for their producers.
Now countries that have tried to keep genetically modified organisms out of their borders may be blackmailed into giving up. Even if you approve of genetically engineered crops, is it really the US' business to make that decision for other countries? I don't think so.
Which is why I'd appreciate it if you'd read up on this bill and contact your representatives to ask them to remove the biotechnology section from S. 384, even if you've already written them in support of it. There's no good argument for forcing this on the unwilling.
(Photo credit: visualpanic on Flickr.)
