Corporate Kneebiters
Forces of Counter-Revolution
Published June 03, 2009 @ 09:13AM PT
The anti-Green Revolution is on:
Indian farmer Amarjit Sharma grows wheat and other crops on five acres in the heart of the region known as "the breadbasket of India," the fertile fields of Punjab.
Until four years ago, he was the kind of farmer whom government leaders and agricultural scientists hailed as a model in the developing world.
But now, he has gone organic and is part of a quiet but growing rebellion, which could affect the world's food crisis. ...
The article notes that Sharma initially profited from Green Revolution methods. Until the pesticides stopped working and the soil was stripped so badly that without ever-increasing quantities of fertilizer, he couldn't grow a good crop.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Yet though the article portrays Sharma's story in some detail, including the diversified cropping, nutrient and pest management steps he's taken, I have some quibbles. Such as uncritical inclusion of the statement by "Monsanto's India spokesman, Christopher Samuel, [who] says the company's advances will double the yields of major crops over the next 20 years, while reducing the amount of land, water, fertilizer and pesticides needed."
Because the question that needs to be asked when they make assertions like that is, 'Will they, really?' How do they know that? I'm sure they'd like to, but it isn't clear that they can. Yield gains often come at the price of other essential features of plant chemistry and physiology.
Can they actually produce nutritionally sound crops with doubled yields, from plants that need less water, less nutrients, less pest protection?
No one knows the answer to this question. It's a goal, not a certainty.
Sustainability
Published May 29, 2009 @ 11:42AM PT
A refresher for the interested:
... Since the 1980s, the idea of sustainable human well-being has become increasingly associated with the integration of economic, social and environmental spheres. In 1989, the World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission) articulated what has now become a widely accepted definition of sustainability: "[to meet] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” ...
What does this mean for food? At its simplest, that we should feed ourselves today without compromising the ability of future generations to feed themselves, or otherwise meet their basic needs.
As I wrote yesterday, it also seems a very contrary to the basic human instinct to create a better future for one's children to leave future generations with a diminished ability to care for themselves. In political terms, to leave them with a worse standard of living than we now enjoy. It seems worth drawing attention again to Lakoff's point about the dominant corporate perspective:
... Finally, for those in the business world: Corporate interests are constantly putting forth arguments based on cost-benefit analysis. But the very mathematics of cost-benefit analysis is anti-ecological; the equations themselves are destructive of the earth.
The basic math uses subtraction: the benefits minus the costs summed over time indefinitely. Now those "benefits" and "costs" are seen in monetary terms, as if all values involving the future of the earth were monetary.
As any economist knows, future money is worth less than present money. How much less? The equation has a factor that tells you how much: e (2.781828...) to the power minus-d times t, where t is time and d is the discount rate. Now e to a negative power gets very small very fast. Just how fast depends on the exact discount rate (that is, interest rate), but any reasonable one is a disaster. The equation says that, in a fairly short time, any monetary benefits compared to costs will tend to zero. That says there are no long-term benefits to saving the earth! ...
The presumption that future people will be, in essence, infinitely richer than we are and capable of solving any problems we leave behind seems overly optimistic.
In regards, once again to agriculture, industrial agriculture promotes erosion and degradation of the soil. It promotes the rapid drawdown of fossil water and surface water supplies in regions where the overall trend is towards increasing droughts, as well as maintaining soil conditions such that water is more likely to immediately be drained to open waterways. It continues to put chemicals that we haven't evolved to metabolize or excrete into the food chain, where they circulate and bioaccumulate - chemicals and heavy metals whose lifetime burden for an adult human may only markedly decrease in women who breastfeed, as they pass their toxins on to their helpless infants. It's made farming such an unappealing profession that its median age has steadily climbed in the US, depriving us slowly but surely of the human capital needed to maintain a diverse food supply.
In the decades since the industrialization of agriculture, a system of practice relating as much to distribution and purchasing concentration as to means of production, US citizens' health has flatlined, then declined. We are already worse off than our parents, but there are those who want to stick with this disastrous present course and see how it goes. Maybe even more profits can be had by making the next generation sicker than the present.
The best that defenders of industrial agriculture can say is that people aren't always made worse off by it. Oh, only some people get cancer and diabetes from what we're doing. Only some ecosystems are ruined. We can't do any better, they say.
How sorry, unimaginative, uninspired, and morose a perspective.
I'd rather like to think that we could have a future where our food system was an aid to maximum attainable health, for ourselves as well as the habitat we depend on for clean air and water. I like to think that we could preserve our current biodiversity, with all its many beauties and benefits, and still eat well.
I like to think that we're creative and intelligent enough to overcome the obstacles in the way of achieving these goals. We did figure out how to land people on the Moon, build the Internet, map the genome, put up skyscrapers, maintain satellite broadcast and cell phone networks, etc. I think we're up to the challenge.
The industry responsible for Agent Orange and DDT thinks that this is an unserious and irresponsible view. They have shareholders to think of, after all.
(Photo credit: Brooke on Flickr.)
The Dead Zone
Published May 28, 2009 @ 01:58PM PT
No, not the TV series. The fish kill:
... Wilma [Subra] explains, “Nitrogen and phosphorous from fertilizers travel down the Mississippi River and into the Gulf of Mexico. This makes algae blossom like crazy. As the algae grow, they use up all the oxygen. When they die off, they sink to the bottom of the ocean and use up more oxygen there, too. So there’s this layer of water in the Gulf that is void of oxygen—that means nothing can live there.” ...
As they explain over at Twilight Earth, the fertilizer used to grow plants on land (including and especially the corn used for animal feed) is killing off ocean fisheries near the mouths of our rivers, pitting one food sector against another.
Fishing is particularly dependent on the health and vibrancy of wild ecosystems, and humans are very dependent on fishing. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, fish make up 15 percent of the world population's protein intake. That's a fairly sizable supply of food for which there isn't a ready replacement.
Nor is that the only threat to our fishy food supply. Along with overfishing, other agricultural chemicals threaten the continuity of safe seafood consumption, such as direct pesticide fish kills and the tissue accumulation of organochlorine pesticides (including those that have been banned in the US but are still used abroad,) and mercury from coal plants.
Who The Bleep Do You Think You Are?
Published May 27, 2009 @ 11:40AM PT
If you read the comments here, you may have noticed a lot of pro-pesticide trolls showing up, the sort of people who think Michelle Obama's organic garden is an affront to Western Civilization.
You may have read comments from them on the order of, 'well, if you really cared about the (hungry/poor), you'd love pesticide,' or 'who are (any of you/these people) to raise these questions?' I'll get to the suitable response in a moment, but these questions are good at preying on the kinds of doubts and self-doubts that people can have coming up against all sorts of large, corporate lobbies who clearly don't mean well by us in spite of the Cheshire Cat grins.
Even Mark Bittman falls prey to these doubts, but as Ezra Klein said:
... If amateurs leave teaching physics to the experts, then physics gets taught by the experts. That's a good thing. And in the perfect world, we'd leave farm policy to the experts too, and the experts would make our farm policy. But we don't live in the perfect world. And so when we leave farm policy to the experts, we actually leave it to the lobbyists. And this is true for a lot of second or third-tier issues. The only people who spend their days bugging Washington to implement their policy preferences are the people who are paid to do so. Most people don't care about those issues. Others care a bit but spend their time elsewhere. And others care a lot but don't feel they possess the technical expertise.
That's true, they don't. They shouldn't be policy czar. But no one is offering them that position. And providing expertise to policymakers is just one of many roles. Another is to provide a non-industry perspective. Another is to provide evidence of a grassroots constituency for proper action. Another is to communicate basic ideas clearly (Congressmen are not always experts themselves). ...
And I think what people owe these smiling defenders of the status quo isn't more doubt and self-effacement, it's their own question right back at them.
Because who the bleep are they besides the very people who gave us the the unredressed Union Carbide pesticide plant disaster in Bhopal and Agent Orange. That's their credential, their expertise, their experience. Don't let them suggest otherwise and play the big altruists when they say that they just want to help.
They're in business to sell poison. They hire PR people to discredit those who raise questions about how poisonous their products actually are. They even come up with ingenious strategies to enlist national governments in marketing their poisons to farmers and getting them hooked.
A drunk driver has more moral credibility than CropLife America, Monsanto and Dow Chemical at this point, though they'll try to intimidate you into thinking otherwise.
(Photo credit: Laenulfean on Flickr.)
School Lunch: Bad On Purpose
Published May 27, 2009 @ 08:58AM PT
This Los Angeles Times article does a decent job laying out the hurdles schools face in providing healthy meals for students, but I've got a little quibble:
... The U.S. government spends about $11.7 billion a year on school programs that provide lunch for over 30 million children and breakfast for more than 10 million -- but has not updated nutritional standards and meal requirements since 1995.
States have tried to act without waiting for the federal government. As of last August, 18 states had adopted tougher nutritional standards than the U.S. government -- but most lack enforcement power and cannot punish noncompliance, says the Trust for America's Health, a nonprofit organization that works to raise community health standards. ...
When I wrote about the garbage in school lunches last week, I linked to a Mother Jones article that tells the story of that mid-1990s standards process, and the railroading of Ellen Haas, nutritional reformer appointed by President Clinton, by food service industry lobbyists and commodity groups:
... Haas soon found herself frozen out by legislators and abandoned by the Clinton administration. Says a key USDA staffer, "We were told by the White House, ‘You have to live with this.'"
Although Congress did set fat limits for school lunches, it created no effective mechanism for reaching those standards -- and no penalty for failing. ...
The crappy food that kids are served at school is not an accident. The crappy food that's advertised to them (and everyone) on television and any other waking moment by people with psychology and marketing PhDs, that's not an accident, either. The proliferation of cheap burgers and nachos, the banishment of carrots and leafy greens to the upscale neighborhoods, this is not an accident either.
Our food system is the way that it is on purpose and it can only get better the same way: on purpose.
As fellow Change.org blogger, Clay Burell, noted on the Education blog, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has a petition going to ask for more vegetarian and vegan options in school lunches.
They don't mean fries, cheese pizza and mushy, canned green beans, either. (Good grief, I hated the canned green beans when I was a kid.)
I'm not one to insist that people swear off meat and cheese, but the stuff they serve at most schools ... whatever people can eat, they need fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, food that very obviously came from a recently living plant. For kids, doubly so.
Please ask for more vegetarian and vegan options in school lunches, today.
(Photo credit: Marshall Astor on Flickr.
A Corporate Calculation
Published May 24, 2009 @ 04:04PM PT
What is the price of bad PR over cruel treatment of laying hens to a fast food joint? What is the value of protesters outside restaurants or negative newspaper articles? And how does that compare to the cost of switching from eggs laid in battery cages to cage-free eggs? That is the calculation that nearly every fast food chain in the country is considering.
HSUS - the Humane Society of the United States - calls battery caged hens "the most abused animals in all agribusiness" and has managed to have battery cages banned in some states, most famously in California. They are currently working to have a law passed banning them in New York and Ohio, and threatening to take the question to the public in a ballot initiative in Ohio (the #2 state in the US for egg production next to Iowa) if a law does not pass.
Agribusiness, in the meantime, is going NUTS over this. Abso-freakin-lutely bonkers. If you want to read something REALLY FUNNY, check this out, where a Big Ag radio show asks a Baptist preacher what the Bible says about animal rights. They apparently found the one guy in the church who firmly believes in evolution, and he says: "If you believe in evolution, then we won... If dolphins don't like it they can grow opposing thumbs and farm us maybe a million years from now."
I'm personally a fan of ballot measures not only because they get good laws passed (like CA's prop 2 which bans veal crates, farrowing crates for sows, and battery cages for hens), but they also get these issues played up prominently in the media. While the message isn't a blatant call for consumers to go vegetarian or buy from their local farmers' markets, when they see how their food is produced they begin to ask how they can find food from animals treated more humanely. (One of my friends decided to go veg after seeing Sarah Palin's photo op in front of turkeys being killed for Thanksgiving, in fact.)
But back to the fast food joints... here's where they came down on the issue. Burger King, Hardee's, Carl's Jr, Quizno's, and Denny's will each buy roughly 5% of their eggs from cage free hens. That's pretty pathetic. If you believe that hens in battery cages are treated cruelly and should not be kept in cages, then you believe ALL the hens should not be treated cruelly - not just 5% of them. This is clearly just to get HSUS off their backs and to perhaps get some good headlines in the process. But it goes down hill from there. Wendy's is only buying 2% of its eggs from cage-free hens. And McDonald's? They'll "study" the issue for 2 years and then decide. I guess the value of bad PR from animal cruelty is not that great to them. They're hoping this issue gets swept under the rug and that HSUS will not dare speak out against the other 95% of what they are doing in fear of upsetting the current 5% agreements. LAME.
I dunno about you, but I think I'll send these restaurants some mail. Here are the links to do so:
- McDonalds
- Wendys
- Hardees
- Dennys
- Burger King: 305-378-3535 (call M-F, 9am-5pm EDT)
- Quiznos
- Carl's, Jr.
Photo of Egg McMuffin by admiller on Flickr.com
Food Companies Shirk Safety Responsibilities
Published May 16, 2009 @ 02:08PM PT
As the global food supply increases in complexity and length, food companies are leaving food safety to their customers. Michael Moss in the New York Times describes ConAgra's solution to a salmonella outbreak caused by their pot pies, after their attempts to identify the contaminated ingredient(s) failed:
... So ConAgra — which sold more than 100 million pot pies last year under its popular Banquet label — decided to make the consumer responsible for the kill step. The “food safety” instructions and four-step diagram on the 69-cent pies offer this guidance: “Internal temperature needs to reach 165° F as measured by a food thermometer in several spots.”
Increasingly, the corporations that supply Americans with processed foods are unable to guarantee the safety of their ingredients. In this case, ConAgra could not pinpoint which of the more than 25 ingredients in its pies was carrying salmonella. ...
This is the food system that's supposed to be so much safer and more sanitary. Breathtaking.
(Photo credit: inuyaki on Flickr.)
