Corporate Kneebiters
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.
Same Old Pesticide Game With Glyphosate, Roundup
Published June 09, 2009 @ 01:36PM PT
Proponents of GMO crops, the untested, unlabeled genetically engineered foodstuffs flooding our supermarket aisles, will tell you that Monsanto's Roundup Ready (TM) products are an environmental success story because they reduce pesticide use. Not the use of Roundup, whose prime active ingredient is glyphosate, but that's beside the point.
It reduces the use of pesticides that have been around long enough to have gotten as much bad press as the pesticides they replaced, which were claimed to be perfectly fine and dandy until that story collapsed under the weight of evidence. Are we seeing a pattern, here?
Though indeed, looking over the carefully done glyphosate wikipedia entry, you can see why its supporters are so enthusiastic about it. It doesn't bioaccumulate, it seems to break down in soil when it isn't adsorbed to soil particles (though it adheres fairly tenaciously to soil, fwiw) and it results in fewer hospitalizations than older pesticides.
But it's not without health effects, as noted by even the notoriously risk-declaration-averse EPA. In combination with other chemicals ('inactive' or 'inert' ingredients) that may be included in Roundup, or other generic formulations, it may even become more harmful than indicated. So while glyphosate itself is not considered a particular risk to aquatic organisms, it may become very toxic to fish and amphibians in combination with a common type of surfactant used in Roundup.
And is pure glyphosate generally used alone? No, no it isn't. Therefore safety data on glyphosate alone presents an incomplete picture of its health effects.
Consider that a surfactant is a chemical, natural or lab-created, whose effect is to increase solubility in water. Which is to say that one of glyphosate's main claims to fame - that it's unlikely to show up in water and pose a threat to aquatic organisms - is immediately undercut by the fact that it's commonly mixed with a surfactant.
Pat Thomas, writing in The Ecologist covers not only additional of these suspected health effects that have shown up in various studies, including a possible cancer link, but touches on the innate problem with pesticide-based agriculture:
... This irresponsible type of agriculture has led to increased resistance to the herbicide and the emergence of ‘superweeds’ – and thus increased sales of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, which farmers have to use more and more of in order to get the same effect. For instance, according to a new report by the US Center for Food Safety, per-acre applications of Roundup on soybeans rose by a factor of 2.5 (250 per cent) between 1994 and 2006. It took until 2002 for corn farmers truly to embrace GM, but between 2002 and 2005, glyphosate use on corn rose from 0.71 to 0.96lb/acre/year – a 35 per cent increase in just three years (see also box, opposite page). Thanks to Roundup, farmers worldwide are on a chemical treadmill they are finding it increasingly difficult to get off. ...
So not only have there been indications that it's unhealthier than suspected, it's already becoming less effective. Which means it will have to be replaced later on with some other as-yet-unknown chemical, though before that, not only is Roundup application likely to be stepped up, all the old pesticides Roundup was supposed to replace are going to have to be used alongside it to pick up the slack. The wikipedia entry provides this summary, taking it that next step, direct links to references added by me:
... The first documented cases of weed resistance to glyphosate were found in Australia, involving rigid ryegrass near Orange, New South Wales.[69] Some farmers in the United States have expressed concern that weeds are now developing with glyphosate resistance, with 13 states now reporting resistance, and this poses a problem to many farmers, including cotton farmers, that are now heavily dependent on glyphosate to control weeds.[70][71] Farmers associations are now reporting 103 biotypes of weeds within 63 weed species with herbicide resistance[70][71]. This problem is likely to be exacerbated by the use of roundup-ready crops [72]. ...
This story never seems to change. Though like a partner in an abusive relationship, the pesticide industry keeps coming back and saying that really, really honey, it's different this time. And their behavior in trying to gin up sympathy for these toxins hasn't changed since the publication of Silent Spring. The 1999 book, "Toxic Deception: How the chemical industry manipulates science, bends the law and endangers your health", has more:
"The Largest Diet Experiment In History"
Published June 05, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
That's how Dr. Don Lotter describes GMOs in two new papers on genetic food crop science, as summarized by Bonnie Powell at the Ethicurean.
The first paper, The Genetic Engineering of Food and the Failure of Science – Part 1: The Development of a Flawed Enterprise, covers the flawed research and scientific assumptions that have produced genetically modified food crops. In it, he points to research revealing that transgenic yields are no better than that of the crops they replaced, eliminating their main claim to usefulness. He explains how the very imprecise art of genetic engineering actually works, and highlights the total lack of oversight and caution in the roll out of these products, as well as their unwanted side effects.
But the main message is simple; transgenic seed companies have no idea what they're doing:
It's Farmers Who Don't Like CAFOs
Published June 04, 2009 @ 01:57PM PT
With a hat tip to FarmAid on Twitter, this Columbia Daily Tribune article busts the myth that it's mainly urban transplants that complain about confinement operations:
You know all of those claims by proponents of agribusinesses about how “urban move-ins” are filing the lawsuits against concentrated animal feeding operations because they aren’t accustomed to smelling fresh country air?
It is all made up, a total fabrication, stemming from the fertile imaginations of public relations people in the employ of agribusinesses such as Smithfield/Premium Standard Farms, Tyson, Seaboard and MOARK/Land O’ Lakes.
The lawsuits are being filed — and won — by longtime rural residents, most of them farmers[, ...] those who have lived in the area for a long, long time and know the country air isn’t supposed to smell like thousands of hogs or millions of chickens. ...
What a surprise. Corporate employees who lie for a living convincing the public that the only objections to their extremely unsanitary factory farming practices are transplants who don't like farmers.
How unsanitary?
Regular readers will remember that one of the current H1N1 swine flu virus' publicly identified ancestors came from a factory hog farm in North Carolina in 1998, "where it spread and mutated at an alarming rate. Experts warned then that a pocket of the virus would someday evolve to infect humans, perhaps setting off a global pandemic."
Success!
The World Health Organization is moving closer to classing the current H1N1 outbreak as a pandemic, with the virus circulating in all 50 states of the US and 63 other countries.
Meanwhile, Tom Philpott illustrates the likelihood that no links have been found between this current line of virus and a current factory farming operation because no one is looking, even if those pesky Europeans are demanding further investigation of a possible link:
... Meanwhile, no one with authority seems to be investigating obvious possible links with industrial-scale hog farming. As I reported a while back, the only scientists swarming around La Gloria, Mexico—where the flu evidently broke out in the shadow of massive Smithfield hog operations—are from the biotech industry, not the World Health Organization. And they’re training their testtubes on backyard hog farms, not Smithfield’s huge confinement facilities! ...
And if you don't find any evidence that factory farming is, right now, right this minute, responsible for dozens of deaths and thousands of illnesses in an evolving global pandemic, and if every resident of every rural community doesn't regard CAFOs as an absolute evil, all must be well.
All must, indeed, be perfectly safe and hunky dory. Says so on the label.
(Aerial photography of a typical confinement hog farm with attendant lagoons of pig manure courtesy of friendsoffamilyfarmers on Flickr.)
Melamine from Pesticide in Baby Food
Published June 04, 2009 @ 10:59AM PT
Here's another reason that industrial agricultural chemicals need more extensive testing than they get now; because even if they don't stay around as persistent organic pollutants, their breakdown products may be toxic:
... Chemists with Health Canada in Ottawa report they have yet to identify the source of the pollutant they’ve just turned up in 71 of 94 samples of infant formula. In a report of their findings, however, just published online ahead of print in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, Sheryl Tittlemier and her colleagues do finger one key suspect: the insecticide cyromazine. It's legal for use on food crops and animal forage — and melamine is one of its breakdown products. ...
The article goes on to note that traces of contamination are very low, below the allowable 'safe' dosages of contaminant. And how are those determined? I refer again to Dr. Sandra Steingraber's 1997 work, "Living Downstream," emphasis mine:
... In 1993, the National Research Council concluded that the current regulatory arrangement permits pesticide levels in food that are too high for children and infants. Tolerances are insufficiently protective, according to the council's report, for two basic reasons. First, they are not based solely or even primarily on health considerations. The actual values chosen as legal limits reflect the results of field trials designed to measure the highest residue concentrations likely under normal agricultural practice.
Second, the safety margins supposedly ensured by tolerances assume adult eating habits. However, children eat far fewer types of food in proportionally greater quantities. A nonnursing infant consumes fifteen times more pears than the average adult, for example. And pears, as we have seen, are one of the most heavily sprayed fruits on the market. Children also differ sharply in their ability to activate, detoxify, and excrete contaminants. Finally, childhood exposures to pesticides may lead to greater risks of cancer and immune dysfunction than exposures later in life.
... Rachel Carson once remarked how strange it was to live in an age where carcinogens were a basic element of our system of food production. This is still a strange notion. ...
Just, remember that every single time you hear someone talking about contamination being less than the legal limit.
Those limits, as Steingraber points out in her book, don't account for cross-chemical interations any more than they're really set with health concerns in mind. Nor, as she says, is there anywhere in the world a control group of humans who haven't been heavily exposed to industrial contaminants that our bodies didn't evolve to deal with. She describes our carcinogen-heavy lifestyle as a large, uncontrolled experiment on all of us.
And the chemical industries still don't want to have to prove that their products are safe before they go in our food, in our children's food, or wind up in high concentrations in breast milk.
Just eat it anyway, they say. Just try it. What could possibly go wrong?
Reckless jerks, the lot of them.
(Photo credit: whitneybee on Flickr.)
BPA: What it Is & Why We Should Ban It
Published June 03, 2009 @ 02:46PM PT
BPA stands for Bisphenol A. You'll find it in everything from baby bottles to canned foods. Particularly canned tomatoes. And it's an endocrine disruptor. There's a bill in Congress to ban it right now.
Back in February, news came out that BPA remains in our bodies for longer than previously thought. According to blogger JayinPortland:
BPA is a known endocrine disruptor commonly used in the production of many household items, from baby bottles to plastic food containers to soup cans to dental fillings; and exposure via tap water and house dust is now also thought possible. Many studies have linked long term, low-level BPA exposure to everything from increased risks for obesity by triggering fat-cell activity, to diabetes, heart disease and an increased risk of developing breast cancer later in life from fetal exposure.
Not good, huh? Jay's been reporting on this issue regularly, writing about a study of how major companies are addressing the issue (the grades the companies got ranged from C's to F's) and about how the government has failed to protect us from it. In the latter article, he quotes the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel as saying:
In one instance, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's deputy director sought information from the BPA industry's chief lobbyist to discredit a Japanese study that found it caused miscarriages in workers who were exposed to it. This was before government scientists even had a chance to review the study.
So what's the latest? The BPA industry is banding together to fight the possibility of a ban on BPA. Major companies like Pepsi, Nestle, and Bayer have also been lobbying the U.S. government about the bills that would ban BPA. Meanwhile, food safety advocates hope that the BPA ban can be added as an amendment to a food safety bill so that they can be passed together. Please write your legislators and ask them to ban BPA!
Photo credit: eyeliam on Flickr.com
Bisphenolic A, Man!
Published June 03, 2009 @ 11:13AM PT
LaVidaLocavore got to this before I did, but you've got to read this from the report on a meeting bisphenol A manufacturing groups. Emphasis mine:
... The committee will spend approximately $500,000 to develop a survey on consumer BPA perceptions and messaging and eventually content and outreach materials. Overall, the committee seemed disorganized, and its members frustrated. Lack of direction from the committee and these associations could continue to allow other associations and environmental groups to push BPA out.
Other Points: Attendees suggested using fear tactics (e.g. “Do you want to have access to baby food anymore?”) as well as giving control back to consumers (e.g. you have a choice between the more expensive product that is frozen or fresh or foods packaged in cans) as ways to dissuade people from choosing BPA-free packaging. Attendees noted, in the past, the different associations have had a reactive strategy with the media, with very limited proactive outreach in reaching out to journalists. The committee agrees they need to promote new, relevant content to get the BPA perspective into the media mix. The committee believes industry studies are tainted from the public perspective.
The committee doubts social media outlets, such as Facebook or Twitter, will work for positive BPA outreach. The committee wants to focus on quality instead of quantity in disseminating messages (e.g. a young kid or pregnant mother providing a positive quote about BPA, a testimonial from an outside expert, providing positive video, advice from third party experts, and relevant messaging on the GMA website). Members noted traditional media outreach has become too expensive (they have already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars) and the media is starting to ignore their side. The committee doubts obtaining a scientific spokesperson is attainable. Their “holy grail” spokesperson would be a “pregnant young mother who would be willing to speak around the country about the benefits of BPA.” ...
Consider it a real life object lesson in corporate PR. Can we say it's safe? Can we get a sympathetic spokesperson to say that they don't care about the risks? Can we get sympathetic regulators to ignore the mounting scientific evidence of harm? Can we throw a few hundred thousand more dollars in the mix and protect our investment in this crappy thing that's making people sick?
It's a time-tested strategy. It often works.
Will it work on a chemical shown to promote cardiovascular disease and diabetes, which two diseases that have been blamed by industry entirely on the poor lifestyle choices of their customers? Will it work for a chemical that feminizes infant male monkeys, stifles thyroid in frogs, reduces the effectiveness of prostate cancer treatment and is more potentially damaging to young infants?
We'll find out.
(Photo credit: pfly on Flickr.)
