Community Development
4 Reasons Why 'Modern' Agriculture Is Bad For You
Published May 07, 2009 @ 10:35AM PT
The agribusiness and crop chemical companies are enamored of the word "sustainability" these days because, I guess, they think it's a magic word that can wipe the slate clean.
I just don't think anything can be considered sustainable that has such obviously bad effects on our health, and the health of the world around us. Swine flu's all the rage these days, but industrial agriculture didn't start being bad for us just this year.
So here are four of the negative effects of industrial agriculture on the well-being of people and the ecosystems we depend on, things that I don't think we can afford to keep doing in the long-term:
Genital feminization of male humans and animals: This one always gets them where it hurts, but the industrial pesticides used in agriculture are among the class of chemicals that mimics or stimulates estrogenic activity in the body and are linked, or suspected of being linked, to decreased sperm counts and genital abnormalities in male animals up and down the food chain.
Herbicides linked to cancer, neurological disorders: Nanaimo, British Columbia, has recently banned the use of herbicides on residential lawns based on the growing body of evidence that they're linked to a host of cancers, reproductive problems, respiratory illness and neurological effects from learning disorders to full-blown Parkinson's disease. The herbicides used on lawns are often just repackaged versions of the same chemicals, like Roundup, sold in bulk to farmers.
Antibiotics fed to livestock have created antibiotic-resistant bacteria: Called MRSA, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, these difficult to treat infections commonly only attack people with compromised immune systems and were once more commonly associated with hospital environments. They don't seem to have developed forms that are very easily transmissible, but they keep showing up in farm environments where low-dose antibiotics are used as growth promoters and infection preventives.
Plants absorb antibiotics from soil amendments: If you use manure from an animal that's been given lots of antibiotics as a plant fertilizer, the plants will incorporate those antibiotics into their tissue. Even people who eat organic food, even people who have a totally vegan diet, can thus get our livestock antibiotics passed on to them in low, irregular doses - just about the worst possible way to take antibiotics. The genes that confer antibiotic resistance in bacteria don't necessarily help them survive any better in the environment at large; which is why penicillin has become useful again, because the resistance genes faded from the active bacterial population after it fell into disuse. Maintaining regular exposure of bacterial populations to antibiotics puts positive selection pressure on antibiotic resistance genes.
And these are just a few of the lowlights of factory farm and livestock production. I could go on.
Sustainability very specifically means something we can afford to keep doing for the forseeable future, but this ... How much more poison can the living things on this planet, including us, take? How much more endocrine system damage, how many more birth defects, can be incurred without risking the most basic means of continuing animal life on Earth? How many more superbug evolutions can we encourage without setting off a global pandemic that our rapid international travel can spread around the entire planet in days?
Any single one of these practices poses serious health threats if continued, in fact, poses serious health threats now. Is becoming steadily sicker and weaker as a population a sustainable proposition? Is our food going to literally kill us, and not just because of the diabetes and heart disease?
Truly sustainable agriculture needs to take into account not only issues such as phosphorus scarcity, but the injury limits on the health reserves of living beings.
Three Generations in Brooklyn
Published May 04, 2009 @ 04:19PM PT
This past Saturday, I attended the Brooklyn Food Conference (on Twitter here, hashtag #bfc) to speak on a panel about online organizing for food politics, as reported by Gillian Reagan in the New York Observer.
You can also read writeups by Paula Crossfield at CivilEats and Kim Severson at the New York Times.
While I was generally familiar with the issues that were raised, I was particularly touched by two aspects of the conference.
First, the scale of the hunger problem in New York City. As the economy grinds down, it's becoming an issue everywhere, but New York has a higher rate of hunger than the national average - and most of the people looking for food bank aid have jobs and places to live, they just can't reliably afford food. Need has increased across the board and many have to be turned away. The city is seeing these problems now, when it's lost 100,000 jobs, but another 200,000 are expected to vanish over the course of the recession.
We ain't seen nothin' yet as to how bad things be.
Second, there was Anna Lappé's short but moving speech during the closing session. As Crossfield reported at CivilEats, the pregnant Lappé was stunned by the lack of outrage in the pregnancy books she read that included lists of foods and actions that expectant mothers were supposed to avoid in order to reduce exposure to toxins. "Why do I, as an individual, have to find the fish with no mercury? Why is there mercury in our fish?," she said.
Lappé, who's expecting a daughter, realized while talking to her doctor that her unborn child already carried her full, lifetime complement of eggs. It occurred to her that right now, she's also carrying her grandchildren. What poisons her now poisons her grandchildren before their mother has even been born.
That's really not a state of affairs that one person, alone, is capable of effectively responding to. And that was the real message of the Brooklyn Food Conference.
There's an extent to which the food and agricultural industries are correct, in some measure, our health as it relates to our food is our responsibility. It's just that our responsibility doesn't end at doing our best to feed ourselves and our families healthy food. The more important responsibility is to take the political actions necessary to ensure that it's easy for everyone to access healthy food.
There shouldn't be mercury in our fish from our electricity production. There shouldn't be companies that are allowed to purposely release known toxins for public sale and use or dump toxic waste into our water and air. Yet as an individual, it may often be impossible even to buy alternatives to industrial products that generate all these ills, that force a hapless public to pay for their crimes, and put good food out of reach of all too many households worldwide.
Our actions matter to our grandchildren, and not later, but now. Our votes matter, and not just those votes with our wallets, but most of all, our votes at the ballot box.
Which is handy, because lots of our wallets are damn thin right now.
What Sustainability Means
Published May 04, 2009 @ 03:18PM PT
As Michael Pollan and many other people have repeatedly said, sustainability refers to things that can go on for a very long time. (The temptation to say forever is strong, but look, even the sun is going to burn out eventually.)
Sustainable practices are ones that can continue for the forseeable future without diminshment, at the least.
The official definition is more of an economic argument about not disadvantaging the future for the sake of the present, nor disadvantaging those in the present for the future. Yet the economy exists within the context of the environment and its capacity to support life; which should be obvious, but apparently isn't to everyone.
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.)
Washing Our Hands
Published April 29, 2009 @ 10:03PM PT
President Obama told the nation, twice, during tonight's press conference, that the best way for people to protect themselves from this flu epidemic is to cover coughs, stay home if we get sick, and wash our hands frequently.
Clearly, some sensible person at Health & Human Services got down on their knees and said something like, 'Look, I know it'll feel goofy, some people might make fun of you, but for the love of butterflies and little kittens, it'll probably save lives, so please do it anyway.'
And it seems pedestrian, boring even, but people didn't always know that it was a good idea. In fact, it wasn't understood as an important hygenic measure even in hospitals until the research of Ignaz Semmelweis in 1846 revealed its value in preventing childbed fever mortality in his maternity wards.
It's great when our immune systems can fight off diseases. But the best thing to do is prevent pathogen exposure in the first place. That's just good sense.
And while crazy people are still preoccupied with blaming immigrants and closing the border (and they aren't worried about the Canadians,) they forget that even if we could keep all Mexicans out of the United States (why we'd want to do that, I can't understand at all,) that ending all transit between our two neighboring countries would have to mean an end to American trips to Mexico?
Tijuana and Acapulco are, in their way, the Orlando and Miami of the Western US. It's where people go for a sun-drenched, not-too-distant vacation by the sea. It's where college kids go for Spring Break. Not to mention, there are a lot of bona fide US citizens who have relatives in Mexico, and an actually sealed border would mean keeping families from visiting each other.
And it wouldn't keep the flu out anyway. It's already in. Air travel technology has been around for a long, long time now. It was common before I was born.
What seems to be responsible for this outbreak is a serious failure of hygiene in a farming practice that was pioneered and instigated right here in the US. Even if the flu didn't come from the pigs themselves.
Can we all agree that enormous ponds of untreated pig shit constitute a public health threat? I hope so.
When Smithfield says that you can't get flu from eating pork, and that they don't know of any sick pigs or plant workers, even if they aren't lying, it's beside the point. They moved to Mexico specifically to get away with things they couldn't get away with in the US, to do to Mexican communities things they couldn't do to communities in the United States.
They violated health measures so common sense that they're codified into law in a country where pork producers have so much pull that even the AP thinks they got Obama to call the flu H1N1 instead of swine flu at the press conference:
... The news conference lasted an hour and covered topics ranging from the outbreak of swine flu — which Obama referred to as the H1N1 virus, evidently in deference to U.S. pork producers — to abortion and the recent flare-up in violence in Iraq. ...
I understand if journalists want to hold off accusing Smithfield of starting the flu, as says Curtis Brainard at CJR.
But it seems to me that they're missing all the other things that they rightfully need to be accusing them of. Brainard notes that tough questions need to be asked, but it seems that the media hasn't gotten around to asking them often enough. They just wash their hands.
Flu Incubators
Published April 28, 2009 @ 02:40PM PT
Firstly, from what will undoubtedly go down as one of the most ironic statements New York's Democratic Senator Charles Schumer has ever publicly made, he describes pandemic preparedness spending as pork that the Senate version of the stimulus bill was well shut of:
An MSNBC reporter, whose name I apologize for not catching, reported just after 2pm ET from Mexico that analysis of a viral sample from a little boy in La Gloria, Mexico, where a widespread, unspecified respiratory illness epidemic was reported in late 2008, matches the strain showing up in the US.
The gist of the segment seemed to be that Mexican officials were coming under harsh criticism for their handling of the illness. However, while the reporters mentioned that the little boy "lived near a pig farm," and not even on one, completely glosses over the fact the 'farm' is an enormous factory confinement operation that's contaminated the entire town's water supply with hog sewage.
That's just not what most people think of when they hear 'pig farm.' Because what they should be thinking of is a small city, a slum for pigs, with extremely poor waste management.
They have around a million pigs on some of Mexico's Smithfield farms. Because a pig produces about three times as much waste per day as a human, you could be miles away and still all too near one of these things.
Pigs, themselves, can be all too near these things. As Tom Philpott reports, CAFO animals are highly immune-compromised and some of them can carry illnesses through the herd without symptoms.
Pigs left to roam in pasture may wallow in mud to cool themselves off because they can't sweat, but mud is just, you know, wet dirt. It's messy, not inherently repulsive. What pigs don't do is wallow around of their own accord in pig crap. They have to be forced to do that by farm managers who put them in cages too small to turn around in. Pigs are actually pretty clean animals, way fussier than their more adorable distant cousins, dogs and rabbits.
Infectious disease experts have been deeply concerned about factory hog farm conditions spawning a pandemic like the deadly 1918 Spanish flu for a long time now. They've considered it a question, as noted at the link, of when, not if.
At BoingBoing, Maggie Koerth-Baker talks about how chimeric viruses like human-infectious swine flu happen, which that 1918 pandemic was an example of. However, I disagree with her conclusion that small, open-air farms are more likely places for the genesis of an epidemic. More is needed for an epidemic to spread than a sick animal or person, and in the absence of an especially virulent form of disease as shown in movies, that something is usually a high concentration of new potential hosts. Even better if the hosts are in poor health or crowded conditions.
That applies whether the hosts are swine or humans. A good public health infrastructure is the best pandemic preventive, and compromised immune systems are an epidemic's best friend.
As an example, I recently talked with a friend with a hospitalized elderly relative who seems to have a flesh-eating bacterial infection. The doctor told her that around half the population are carriers, but most people can fight it off easily. It sounds scary but isn't usually a robust infectious agent. Same with systemic yeast (candidiasis) infections, which are the bane of AIDS patients and the very old, the best defense against them is to have a normally functioning immune system.
Further, a disturbing link from a commentor at that BoingBoing piece notes that earlier this year, a batch of flu vaccine was contaminated with live bird flu. As Martha Noble pointed out on the COMFOOD listserv, it's increasingly common for confinement hogs to be vaccinated against flu, and an article (firewalled, not accessible, sry) in a 2003 issue of Science aired concern that this vaccination was the cause of a sudden jump in the emergence of new strains of swine flu. (She also noted that another area of concern was the creation of transgenic pigs with more human-compatible proteins. Yikes!)
Did contaminated vaccine get sold to the veterinary pharmaceutical market this year? That's pure speculation on my part and beyond me to verify. But offhand, it seems a lot more probable than the proposition that a tiny subsistence farm is a bigger health threat than a confinement operation right near the outbreak epicenter - and it seems like a far more serious potential threat to be thinking about in future as the world pursues a model of agriculture that requires preemptive over-medication of animals that have yet to get sick.
And I don't have to go purely on instinct on this one. A 2007 Worldwatch report noted that confinement poultry farming was a far more common cause of avian flu than the backyard farms consistently blamed by international health officials:
... In Laos, 42 of the 45 outbreaks of avian flu in the spring of 2004 occurred on factory farms, and 38 were in the capital, Vientiane (the few small farms in the city where outbreaks occurred were located close to commercial operations). In Nigeria, the first cases of avian flu were found in an industrial broiler operation; it spread from that 46,000-bird farm to 30 other factory farms, then quickly to neighboring backyard flocks, forcing already-poor farmers to kill their chickens. ...
In short, it absolutely should strain credulity to suggest that a filthy confinement hog operation somehow represents a healthier, safer way to raise pigs for market.
There are all kinds of stupid things that can be done without uniformly disastrous consequences. Everyone who gets behind the wheel drunk won't kill themselves or others; but it's distressingly likely and criminally stupid to play those odds. You won't get syphilis or AIDS every time you have sex without a condom outside a long-term relationship; but it's still a dumb ass, hazardous thing to do. Every exposure to a carcinogen won't cause cancer; but it's still negligent and dangerous to intentionally proliferate them in our air, food and water. Every low-income household cut off from public health services won't suffer a serious illness or death as a result; but for those that do, it's often catastrophic.
Continuing to do stupid things because they aren't deadly every time is, well, stupid. That goes double for playing dice with public health.
Update: As fellow Change.org blogger Alanna Shaikh notes at the Global Health blog, containment doesn't work. Stopping transit between countries in this day and age is a DOA strategy and this reality requires prevention matched with robust public health responses.
La Gloria, Mexico, Smithfield's Waste Dump
Published April 27, 2009 @ 10:56AM PT
Charles Lemos at MyDD writes about the epicenter of swine flu in Mexico, a small town called La Gloria where as much as 30 percent of the population has been stricken with flu-like illnesses. Local residents and Mexican health officials are putting the blame on Smithfield partner Granjas Carroll, Lemos translates from a report in La Marcha:
... Residents of the community of La Gloria, in the municipality of Perote, asked the state government of Veracruz to intercede with federal authorities to inspect the installations of Granjas Carroll, whom they believe is responsible for the infection that has stricken 30% of its population.
According to one of the members of the community, Eli Ferrer Cortés, the organic and fecal waste that Granjas Carroll produces are not treated properly causing a contamination of the community's water and air. ...
Lemos also points to the blog of James M. Wilson V, MD, Biosurveillance, where Wilson reports that outbreaks in the town were traced to a fly that breeds in the manure lagoons.
Smithfield's official denial said that none of their hogs were infected. That may just be a lie, the food industry is notorious for trying to cover up problems with their products as was revealed during the peanut contamination fiasco.
Though if it isn't a lie, and none of hogs are infected, should they get a pass for only putting shit in people's drinking water and creating a ripe breeding ground for insect-borne disease? I certainly don't think so.
(Aerial photography of a typical confinement hog farm with attendant lagoons of pig manure courtesy of friendsoffamilyfarmers on Flickr.)
