International
World According to Monsanto, pt 4, rBGH and Bt Crops
Published June 18, 2009 @ 03:37PM PT
This installment of the World According To Monsanto documentary (and a big shout out to Robert Wager, who convinced me that I wasn't taking a nearly hard enough line on biotech) starts out talking about rBGH, recombinant bovine growth hormone.
Understand that this hormone is a mimic of a hormone naturally found in cows' bodies during a certain stage of their development. It's nothing very strange.
Nonetheless, rBGH use in adult milk cows causes painful, continuous udder infections and other health problems. This requires the use of constant, elevated doses of antibiotics, and there still ends up being pus in the resulting milk. The hormone isn't reactive in human bodies; not directly, not until it breaks down, and then it seems to promote reproductive cancers.
It's extremely important to understand that protein and hormone interactions in living bodies are very complex. Introducing a hormone at the wrong developmental stage can prove a disaster. Introducing a normally safe protein or compound at high doses, or to the wrong person, or with the wrong chemical companions, can be a disaster.
This is why controlled, independent safety testing is important when introducing novel compounds to the food system or medical repertoire.
Even though rBGH is ostensibly natural, it isn't normally present in adult cows at these artificial levels, or in food that we've had a chance to try over the long term for safety. This is where the equivalence arguments fall down, because even a cursory understanding of the problems inherent in the safety testing of medicinal and food compounds reveals cases where assumptions of safety were badly misplaced because one compound seemed to be 'just like' some other, normally encountered compound.
Sometimes, problems don't reveal themselves for decades.
With Bt crops, not only are they far more expensive and higher input than traditional crop varieties, but it still requires plenty of pesticides and may cause allergic reactions.
The Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) toxin comes from a bacteria and no amount of garden-variety plant breeding or typical food preparation technique would ever add significant quantities of it to the human diet. Yet Bt crops produce this toxin throughout their tissues, including the edible portions.
Perhaps stories of animals dying after foraging on crop remains, something that rarely happens in the US because of the separation of animal and crop agriculture, are anecdotal and not related. I want a public, independent, well-controlled study to prove it.
Perhaps stories of field workers getting allergic reactions from handling Bt cotton are anecdotal, maybe they were reacting to some crop chemical or other unknown allergen. Prove it. Run proper studies and make the data public.
'It's safe because we said so,' whether the 'we' at this point is the biotech firms or their cowering minions at USDA and the land grant universities, cuts no ice.
There's very little in the history of industrial agriculture that leads me to believe they should get the benefit of the doubt.
World According to Monsanto, pt 3
Published June 18, 2009 @ 06:35AM PT
This segment starts out with a heavy emphasis on the safety angle. Monsanto's genetically engineered crops (and everyone else's genetically modified organisms) haven't been tested for safety, they were just declared to be safe.
We've been eating them for years, so they're safe. This is medically unsound, unscientific reasoning.
But Congress doesn't give a damn about safety until people are actually dropping dead from your product, so, on to the next thing. Biotech representatives will insist that depriving poor countries of biotech seeds is a hateful, possibly racist act, spawned of a lack of concern for the starving and poverty-stricken.
Erm, about that, from the Center for Food Safety:
Washington D.C., February 11, 2009 - A new report released today by the Center for Food Safety and Friends of the Earth International warned that genetically modified (GM) crops are benefiting biotech food giants instead of the worldís hungry population, which is projected to increase to 1.2 billion by the year 2025 due to the global food crisis.
The report explains how biotech firms like Monsanto are exploiting the dramatic rise in world grain prices that are responsible for the global food crisis by sharply increasing the prices of GM seeds and chemicals they sell to farmers, even as hundreds of millions go hungry.
The findings of the report support a comprehensive United Nationsí assessment of world agriculture ñ the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) - which in 2008 concluded that GM crops have little potential to alleviate poverty and hunger in the world. IAASTD experts recommended instead low-cost, low-input agroecological farming methods.
... "GM seeds and the pesticides used with them are much too expensive for Africaís small farmers. Those who promote this technology in developing countries are completely out of touch with reality," he added.
"U.S. farmers are facing dramatic increases in the price of GM seeds and the chemicals used with them," said Bill Freese, science policy analyst at the US-based Center for Food Safety and co-author of the report. "Farmers in any developing country that welcomes Monsanto and other biotech companies can expect the same fate - sharply rising seed and pesticide costs, and a radical decline in the availability of conventional seeds," he added.
GM seeds cost from two to over four times as much as conventional, non-GM seeds, and the price disparity is increasing. From 80% to over 90% of the soybean, corn and cotton seeds planted in the U.S. are GM varieties. Thanks to GM trait fee increases, average U.S. seed prices for these crops have risen by over 50% in just the past two to three years. ...
The world's poor can't afford this. They need low cost solutions that have a chance at profitability even when the fertilizer budget runs low.
World According to Monsanto, pt 2
Published June 17, 2009 @ 02:44PM PT
At CivilEats, Paula Crossfield deals, ever so much more patiently than I, with the pointlessness of promoting our failed biotechnology models abroad:
... Instead of teaching poor countries to fish, so to speak, we are selling them the fish with the hook still in its mouth.
That hook infers dependence, but there is also another catch: depleted resources. Biotechnology as it is used right now cannot be sustainable. It relies heavily on three things that are waning: surplus water, cheap oil and a stable climate. As much as biotech proponents claim their technologies could be used for sustainable aims, we don’t have decades to wait while the technology is perfected. And what if it is never perfected? In addition, in putting all of our eggs in one basket with biotech, the problem is misrepresented, and solutions that are already out there are being ignored.
It seems, therefore, that the only real solution to hunger is to transform the food system from the ground up. In Africa, 80% of the population is rural, and there are 33 million small farms (those farming less than 2 hectares), which produce 90% of the continent’s food (Patel and Giménez, 2009). Why don’t we, then, instead of promoting an intensive agriculture that is ruining our environment, our health and is lining the pockets of a few corporations, increase aid to agriculture? ...
Again, in a place so dependent on small-scale, local agriculture, introducing dodgy and expensive biotech traits, as well as export-oriented policies that encourage people to "get big or get out", as they say in the US, is a recipe for disaster. There's no housing or employment infrastructure to turn them all into urban professionals, or even a blue-collar working class, as we would think of those things.
With many of African countries decimated by AIDS, drought or civil war, they can't bear the cost of our capital and input intensive agricultural models. They need the best modern agricultural research, the cheapest and the most effective, which happens to be ecological agriculture methods.
Anyway, here's more documentary goodness. This second part starts off talking about the PCB chemicals Monsanto has been releasing since early last century, knew were toxic in the 1930s, and continued to produce until forced to stop. They've contaminated the entire world, and these abusive liars want us to trust their word on the safety of biotech crops:
Sustainability and Hunger
Published June 16, 2009 @ 01:06PM PT
There are things people need to understand about hunger, courtesy of Food First:
... Abundance, not scarcity, best describes the world's food supply. Enough wheat, rice and other grains are produced to provide every human being with 3,200 calories a day. That doesn't even count many other commonly eaten foods - vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish. Enough food is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day worldwide: two and half pounds of grain, beans and nuts, about a pound of fruits and vegetables, and nearly another pound of meat, milk and eggs - enough to make most people fat! The problem is that many people are too poor to buy readily available food. Even most "hungry countries" have enough food for all their people right now. Many are net exporters of food and other agricultural products. ...
So remember this: we have enough food in the world to make everyone fat. Everyone.
This is a distribution problem, a social justice problem, a profit-sharing problem, an employment security problem, a land access problem ... but there's an abundance of food in the world. The people flogging scarcity and crop yields as our biggest obstacles to feeding the world are at best misinformed, at worst, deliberately lying for personal or political gain.
In the case of politicians, those of them who are generally progressive, I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt that they've been misled by hyper-slick lobbyists who make a convincing case that their corporations are doing good and really care about the public interest. The large food corporations have even bought out much of the anti-hunger lobby in the US, donating to their causes and sponsoring their DC publicity events, all for the sake of preventing anyone from looking too closely at how their management of food distribution channels actively promotes hunger.
It works really well.
Consider Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent call for support to 'sustainable agriculture'. She outlines seven principles, elaborated here, likely without realizing that the implications of the first, as commonly implemented, can readily undermine the third:
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.
Climate Change and African Agriculture
Published June 05, 2009 @ 07:14AM PT
While climate change is sadly acidifying the seas and threatening the US' northeastern coastline, it's also threatening agriculture.
African agriculture is expected to be so hard hit that there are entire regions that may become unsuitable for growing crops because the effective yearly growing season is going to shrink to 90 days or less. These regions will have to convert to livestock agriculture and maize, Africa's favorite crop since it was introduced in the colonial era, will become impossible to cultivate in much of the continent.
Jasmin Melvyn of Reuters reports:
... Climate change could cost the African continent more farmland than the United States uses to plant its eight major field crops combined, according to a study published in the June issue of Environmental Science and Policy.
Farming on up to 1 million square kilometers (247 million acres) of land in Africa could subside by 2050 as climate change makes areas too hot and dry for growing crops, the study said.
The latest U.S. Agriculture Department data puts plantings of the eight major U.S. field crops combined at 246 million acres for the coming year. ...
Bringing livestock to these areas could be, given proper grazing management, a boon to African soils even now. Healthy grasslands are supposed to be grazed and depend on the process for nutrients and cultivation. Deliberate human management of livestock grazing can significantly improve soil health and restore its fertility and could be a counterbalance to global warming (full report here, paid access).
But what do you want to bet that what they'll get is grain-hungry CAFOs, instead of good extension advice about how to get the most out of grazing livestock?
Anyway, it puts a different perspective on the rush by wealthy countries to buy up farm land in Africa that I wrote about yesterday. These issues really are all tied together with our common fates, and as Benjamin Franklin once said, we can all hang together or we will all hang separately.
(Photo credit: International Rice Research Institute on Flickr.)
