Farm Economics
U.S. Farmers Love Biotech...Apparently
Published July 16, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
Farmers in the United States are continuing to plant genetically engineered crops at unprecedented levels according to a report released recently by the USDA's Economic Research Service.
The report found that the adoption (the percentage of farmers planting a certain kind of crop) of GE soybeans reached 91 percent; the adoption of GE cotton reached 88 percent; and the adoption of all biotech corn climbed to 85 percent in 2009.
Farmers are doing this despite claims that growing biotech crops in the U.S. has done little to increase yields. According to the Failure to Yield (pdf) report (previously cited on this blog) conducted by the Union of Concerned Scientist's Doug Gurian-Sherman:
...genetically engineering herbicide-tolerant soybeans and herbicide-tolerant corn has not increased yields. Insect-resistant corn, meanwhile, has improved yields only marginally. The increase in yields for both crops over the last 13 years, the report found, was largely due to traditional breeding or improvements in agricultural practices.
So why are U.S. farmers continuing to plant biotech crops?
Nation's Food Policy Pro-Pus, Pro-E. Coli, Pro-Bribery, Pro-GMOs
Published July 10, 2009 @ 05:19PM PT
Practices that were infuriating to me under Republicans have simply become disheartening under Democrats. I will explain.
Pro-Pus
So Michael Taylor, Monsanto's former lawyer and a fan of adding extra pus to the nation's milk supply by way of giving all our dairy cows chronic mastitis from rBST/rBGH, has indeed been hired to the newly created position of Deputy Commissioner of Food with the Food Safety Working Group at the FDA.
In theory, Taylor might not be as bad as all that, he shilled for rBST as a young, impressionable executive and he seems to have grown as a person.
Though adding insult to injury, Pennsylvania's Dennis Wolff is a finalist for Undersecretary of Food Safety. A willing and enthusiastic participant in Monsanto's campaign to prevent rBST-free labeling on milk, Wolff tried to sneak a 2008 ban on the labels under the noses of Pennsylvania citizens who were outraged and forced the governor to overturn the policy.
But really, two, TWO people appointed or being considered to head food safety in the Obama administration who opposed the public's right to know when their milk came from cows being treated with a hormone that gives them chronically inflamed and infected udders!?
(BTW, people would have heard about the bovine growth hormone controversy more widely as of the year 2000, perhaps, if Monsanto hadn't instigated the firing of two journalists who tried to expose rBST/rBGH for the carcinogenic, bovine mastitis-causing health disaster that it is. Though also, and this is funny, ha-ha, as part of the resolution of the ensuing litigation, a judge ruled that it wasn't illegal for a news station to lie. F*ers!)
So, I think we can safely say that there are those in our national food safety leadership who don't consider pus a worrying contaminant in the milk supply. Even if they don't hire Wolff, that this didn't immediately disqualify him, that they'd consider adding to the shame of hiring Taylor, is a mark of some serious concern.
Pro-E. coli
As reported, again at ObamaFoodorama, this is another of goals of the Obama administration's food policy:
The Fertilizer Divide
Published July 01, 2009 @ 12:19PM PT
While plant breeding has done its part, and irrigation a lion's share, in bringing global crop productivity up over this last century, synthetic and mineral fertilizers sealed the deal.
Plants need more than nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (N-P-K), but an abundance of those three key, limiting nutrients will get them growing well, usually even if there are micronutrient deficiencies. So the prominent N-P-K listings on fertilizer bags are generally most crucial, and arguably the most critical of these is nitrogen.
While the Green Revolution is attributed in large part to hybrid crop varieties, these do poorly when not supplied with the abundant irrigation and nutrient resources provided through the industrial agriculture system. As much as the biotech industry claims to be overcoming these input requirements, they have yet to do so, and hope is not a plan.
Industrial agriculture uses fertilizer synthesized from natural gas, which is running into price and availability constraints similar to that found with other fossil fuels. Further, using nitrogen fertilizer in excess of what can be absorbed by plants and organisms residing in the soil are a significant source of water pollution and the formation of nitrous oxides, which are powerful greenhouse gases.
Now, a new study has quantified the global fertilizer use divide, with the not-too-surprising findings that industrialized countries use too much and African agriculture may be in need of a lot more. From the press release:
Total(ish) Recall
Published June 28, 2009 @ 11:55PM PT
ObamaFoodorama discusses the ineffectual food safety measure known as a voluntary recall. LaVidaLocavore has more on the food inspection details
The FDA can't even make food processing plants show them their customer complaint records, their pest control records, or their contamination control plans. Let's contrast that toothlessnes towards large corporations with the micromanagement the federal government is trying to impose on individual ranchers in the form of the National Animal ID System.
... Mr. [Jay Platt, the third-generation proprietor of Platt Ranch,] called the extra $2 cost of the electronic tags an onerous burden for a teetering industry and said he often moved horses and some of his 1,000 head of cattle among three ranches here and in Arizona. Small groups of cattle are often rounded up in distant spots and herded into a truck by a single person, who could not simultaneously wield the hand-held scanner needed to record individual animal identities, Mr. Platt said. And there is no Internet connection on the ranch for filing to a regional database.
... “My main beef is that these proposed rules were developed by people sitting in their offices with no real knowledge of animal husbandry and small farms,” said Genell Pridgen, an owner of Rainbow Meadow Farms in Snow Hill, N.C., which rotates sheep, cattle, pigs, turkeys and chickens among three properties and sells directly to consumers and co-ops.
“I feel these regulations are draconian,” Ms. Pridgen said, “and that lobbyists from corporate mega-agribusiness designed this program to destroy traditional small sustainable agriculture.” ...
Why would the FDA have virtually no power to compel the food production and distribution industries to prevent people from dying of E. coli contamination, all while it's on the verge of having draconian authority over every aspect of animal movement on small farms and ranches?
Consider it a map of public power - Nestlé has it, Platt and Pridgen don't. It's obvious whose side the government is on.
World According to Monsanto, pt 8, Control
Published June 27, 2009 @ 08:58AM PT
This installment starts off talking to a pair of Indian cotton farmers explaining that not only does Monsanto's Bt cotton still need to be sprayed, they can no longer find non-Bt cotton to buy. The narrator sums up:
"Today in India, Monsanto controls nearly all of the cotton seed market, forcing the locals to buy its seeds at prices four times higher than conventional varieties. Small farmers must turn to money lenders, who charge high interest rates. If the harvest is poor, it means bankruptcy."
The entire microcredit movement, started by Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus, tried to fix the exploitive finance infrastructure available to the poor, who tend not to have collateral or cash reserves that traditional banks are interested in. Yet even microcredit has run into trouble, as noted at Yunus' website:
BALI, July 28 - In an effort to head off a potential crisis in the fast-expanding microfinance industry, its leaders are adopting global truth-in-lending standards and creating a system for comparing loan terms offered by competing lenders. To manage the effort, a new self-monitoring organization, MicroFinance Transparency, is being set up as the industry's policeman. The goal is to prevent companies from taking advantage of poor people with high interest rates and misleading credit offers.
The initiative was announced on July 28 at a microcredit conference in Bali by Chuck Waterfield, a professor at Columbia University who spearheaded the initiative, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, who launched the microcredit revolution in Bangladesh 30 years ago with his Grameen Bank. "Microfinance emerged as a struggle against loan sharks, so we don't want to see new loan sharks created in the name of microcredit," Yunus tells BusinessWeek.
If the industry doesn't curtail abuses and confusion, it faces the prospect of government crackdowns and donor funds drying up. Since Yunus pioneered the idea of lending small amounts of money to poor people without demanding collateral, the phenomenon has spread worldwide. These days, thousands of organizations are making loans to tens of millions of borrowers—usually to help them set up or expand small businesses. ...
As the video segment goes on to note, the introduction of patented seeds sent farmer suicide numbers way up. In an interview with Navdanya founder, Vandana Shiva, she points out that the biotech firms are looking to introduce patented genes into all the seeds they sell, getting everyone used to the idea that companies can have total control over the food supply.
Shiva says, I believe rightly, that control over the food supply is more powerful than guns.
The global poor, who also grow quite a bit of its food, are squeezed by both finance systems that abandon them to loan sharks and corporations who want to be able to charge every year for what farmers used to be able (at least sometimes, if they wanted or needed) to provide for themselves.
I don't even have to stretch my imagination to posit some dire result. The suicide rate among Indian farmers has already increased dramatically.
In response, Monsanto has a very cheery and inclusive mission statement. But you know what they say about good intentions.
Market Consolidation and Anti-Trust
Published June 23, 2009 @ 08:39PM PT
There's a play on words in there somewhere, where could it be ... Oh, right, back to the task at hand. Jill Richardson explains the need for livestock competition reform:
... When [a government pricing error and evidence of industry market manipulation, including underpayment of meat producers,] came to light, the rancher mentioned above, Herman Schumacher of South Dakota, joined with two others and sued the beefpacking companies (Tyson, Excel, and Swift) to obtain the money lost during those six weeks. (Schumacher, by the way, has long been a thorn in the side of Big Beef, testifying on the injustice in the beef industry before the Senate Ag Committee in 1998.) The ranchers won - and then the case went to appeal and they lost. Whereas a jury sided with Schumacher (and awarded the class of cattle producers $9.25 million - about $40 per cow), [but the award was appealed, and the appeals court decided that it wasn't enough to have proved that the packers broke the law.]
... Now Schumacher is undergoing retaliation by Tyson, who demands that he pay their court costs - a hefty $15,881.38. And, according to R-CALF, the U.S. Marshals have been called in to enforce this by seizing Schumacher's home if he does not pay. ...
The USDA failed to enforce the Packers and Stockyards Act (PSA) of 1921 for the whole of the Bush administration and now the courts have found that ranchers don't even have standing to sue for damages over it unless they can prove 'intent.'
Such are the perks of big business-class, corporate citizenship. The law doesn't apply to you. You can harm the interests of consumers and small businesses almost with impunity.
Though it's a situation that would have disgusted the people who dreamed of a nation of laws and not men. It would have disgusted Adam Smith, the moral philosopher who invented capitalism, to see such powerful monopolies still running the show and claiming to be following the system he proposed to rid the world of mercantilism and all-powerful guilds.
This isn't democracy and it isn't capitalism. And whatever it should be called, I doubt the proper term is very polite.
(Photo credit: Sunfox on Flickr.)
Collin Peterson, Congress in Denial
Published June 23, 2009 @ 02:24PM PT
Collin Peterson may be the only person in politics who believes in global warming and is thrilled about its prospects for agriculture. Ahem. That this suggests, as Brad Johnson points out over at the Wonkroom, that he doesn't actually believe in it must remain in the realm of conjecture for now.
But seriously, Peterson said, "We’ve just had the biggest floods and coldest winters we’ve ever had. They’re saying to us [that climate change is] going to be a big problem because it’s going to be warmer than it usually is; my farmers are going to say that’s a good thing since they’ll be able to grow more corn."
Are there actually any farmers who are pro-flood and drought? That question sort of answers itself. As further noted at the Wonkroom:
The report Peterson dismissed as being good news for farmers also shows that if no action is taken to halt global warming, the U.S. grain belt could see one to two months of heat waves over 100°F and two to three months of heat waves over 90°F by the end of the century. Corn, by the way, “will fail to reproduce at temperatures above 95°F.”
Chris Bowers amply described the political situation around Peterson's hold up of the climate bill, which got around 300 pages added to the still-fluid legislation.
Peterson's getting information in hearings and political backing from people like American Farm Bureau Federation President Bob Stallman, who thinks the only agricultural implications of climate change are higher energy costs.
