Corporate Kneebiters
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.
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.
Problems With Georgia's New Food Safety Law
Published May 04, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
After recent food safety scares involving tainted pistachios from California, contaminated spinach from Wisconsin and infected peanuts from Georgia, it seems as though everyone is becoming more concerned with ensuring that what we eat doesn’t make us sick.
This commitment, as well as the recent embarrassment associated with the massive peanut recall at the Blakely, Georgia-based plant of Peanut Corporation of America (PCA), is likely the rational behind the new food safety bill (S.B. 80) (pdf) that Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue signed this past week.
Among other provisions, the new bill establishes food safety regulations that will:
“require hundreds of food processors to alert state inspectors if internal tests show their products are tainted within 24 hours. It also gives Georgia agriculture officials the power to order the manufacturer to conduct more tests.”
While it seems logical to require food processors to report suspected cases of food-borne illnesses in their plants, prior to the passage of this bill, companies in Georgia were not required to do so.
Swine Flu From Factory Farm
Published May 02, 2009 @ 10:33PM PT
Is it from that factory farm, though, the one in Mexico? We may never know precisely, but we do know at the least that its parent strain comes from a factory hog farm in the US:
... H3N2 — the letters denote specific gene variants that code for replication-enhancing enzymes — is the name of a hybrid first identified in North Carolina in 1998, the tail end of a decade which saw the state’s hog production rise from two million to 10 million, even as the number of farms dropped.
... At an environmental level, the conditions which shaped H3N2 and H1N2 evolution, and increased the variants’ chances of taking a human-contagious form, are well understood. High-density animal production facilities came to dominate the U.S. pork industry during the late 20th century, and have been adopted around the world. Inside them, pigs are packed so tightly that they cannot turn, and literally stand in their own waste.
Diseases travel rapidly through such immunologically stressed populations, and travel with the animals as they are shuttled throughout the United States between birth and slaughter. That provides ample opportunity for strains to mingle and recombine. An ever-escalating array of industry-developed vaccines confer short-term protection, but at the expense of provoking flu to evolve in unpredictable ways.
... It may well prove impossible to pinpoint exactly where [the new swine flu] first emerged or became infectious to people. But most of its genes are almost certainly part of a North American industrial virus lineage long expected to produce pandemic variants like this one. ...
Read the whole thing, the article goes on to describe the reason the flu has been mutating so fast in recent years, chief being the flu vaccines they give the animals to stop the spread of a sickness that's mainly a problem because of how they're raised.
Biological principles are more complicated than the ones that govern the manufacture of screwdrivers, cars and lampshades. They are, however, reasonably well understood.
Do predictably stupid things, you will get predictably bad results.
And I understand if people want to point out that hunger kills and hurts a lot more people than this outbreak has done. I won't argue that. It's just that the entire food system is broken, and part of that breakage is the mass, monocrop cultivation of grains and legumes solely for the sake of maintaining these animals in extremely unhealthy conditions. That's just stupid.
People need a larger variety of food, these animals need forage, and no animals are healthier when they're packed into tiny crates and forced to stand in their own waste.
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.)
CropLife America
Published April 30, 2009 @ 04:00PM PT
A new nonprofit was recommended to the Change.org Sustainable Food community today, CropLife America, let's hear a little about them from their website:
"Established in 1933 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., CropLife America is the nation’s largest trade organization for agriculture and pest management. We represent more than 80 developers, manufacturers, formulators and distributors of virtually all the crop protection products used by American farmers and growers. We are the voice of the industry that ensures the safe and responsible use of pesticides in order to provide a safe, affordable and abundant food supply. ..."
One of their regional partners is the Mid America CropLife Association, and you may remember this one-hit-wonder organization as the group whose director got the shudders when she heard that the Obama's White House garden would be organic and sent Michelle Obama a letter that read in part as follows:
... Much of the food considered not wholesome or tasty is the result of how it is stored or prepared rather than how it is grown. Fresh foods grown conventionally are wholesome and flavorful yet more economical. ...
In other words, they're genetically modified crop, chemical fertilizer and poisonous pesticide pushers trying to paste a big, PR-friendly poster of the faces of America's farmers over the political agendas of companies like DuPont and Monsanto. They shamelessly endorse policies that force developing nations to accept biotech crops in order to get food aid. Here's their expression of sincere disappointment that they couldn't hold up the EPA's screening program for endocrine disruptors:
In response to CropLife America’s (CLA) July 2008 petition, filed by the association to help ensure that the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program (EDSP) is successfully implemented and to reduce potential financial, time, and resource burdens on both industry and the agency, the EPA has formally responded by denying CLA’s petition.
“We’re disappointed with the EPA’s decision to deny our petition which was intended to help keep the EDSP on schedule,” said Jay Vroom, CLA president and CEO. “In arriving at this formal response, we worry EPA have not taken into account the unique aspects of pesticide regulatory requirements as they intersect with the overarching, new endocrine screening process. ..."
Worried about keeping this on schedule, my toenails. Nothing terrifies these companies more than that the toxins they dump into our air, food and water by the ton might start getting independent scientific scrutiny.
This was recommender Aaron Smethurst's suggested description for CropLife America:
CropLife supports sustainable food for the world. They believe that farmers everywhere deserve the right to choose the best technologies for the challenges they face in providing for food security.
Words fail. Application denied.
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.
