Policy
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WTF Obama! Get Big Ag Players Out of Government
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World Summit on Food Security Set to Disappoint
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Why Women's Rights Matter to Our Food
Ag in Africa: Foreign 'Feudal Lords' and 'Diabolical' Seed Companies
Published November 18, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
In looking at the world leaders gathered at this week's World Summit on Food Security in Rome, one does not except to see the eccentric Muammar Gaddafi as a beacon of logic in the storm. The unusual ruler, after all, spent part of his weekend in Italy's capital trying to convert 500 women he hired from an escort service to Islam — after, that is, he arrived in a white limo to speak to them, reports the UK's Mail Online.
He might not have persuaded very many of his female quarry to convert — "I thought we were going to a party - we didn't even get a glass of water or some salty snack," one woman reportedly said — but on the issue of global agriculture he was entirely convincing. He warned the other assembled leaders that foreign companies that are procuring massive tracts of farmland in Africa are becoming the continent's “new feudal lords," reports Reuters.
“In Africa, foreign investors buy farmland, transforming themselves into new feudal lords against whom we must fight,” Gaddafi said at the summit. Indeed many are calling the ominous development a massive "land grab," and the UK's Times Online went so far as to dub it "modern imperialism."
How You Can Help Women Get Land Rights
Published November 12, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
Earlier this week I wrote about how women grow the majority of the world's food but own a tiny fraction of the world's land. This major imbalance makes women — and thus families — more insecure and effectively leaves a major segment of daily natural resource users out of our global conversations on issues such as global warming, sustainable agriculture and food crises.
Alert reader David Mastroianni asked what we can all do to help fix this situation. Here are some ideas.
Global Warming's Evil Twin: Agricultural Land Use
Published November 06, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
The world is stuck on the tracks and there are trains coming in both directions. One headlight represents climate change. The other light is us, a booming global population that needs more and more food every year. One train demands that we preserve our forests, the other that we slash and burn them. One demands that we decrease pollution, the other that we add more and more fossil fuels to our soil.
At least unless we change things -- a lot of things -- very drastically. We are already yanking on the brake of the climate train, though not nearly hard enough. The other train, though, is barreling forward unfettered. Few of us realize the train is being driven by a madman. Few of us realize the massive crisis our global society's inattention to agricultural priorities promises to become unless something is done.
The problem, according to a new essay by Jonathan Foley, professor and director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, is that we will need to double or even triple our agricultural output over the next several decades unless we want a whole heck of a lot of starving people on our hands. But we have to do that without completely destroying our environment.
Science Front and Center at USDA
Published November 02, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
Change is in the air at the USDA; the agency has taken it upon itself, in the words of President Obama, "to restore science to its rightful place" with the creation of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), according to a USDA press release.
The new Institute, a product of the 2008 farm bill, replaces the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service (CSREES), and is intended, in the words of Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, to "be the Department's extramural research enterprise."
While science should indeed be incorporated back into the fold in all aspects of life, its application to agriculture is a particularly hot-button tonic, as I discussed on Friday. For those concerned with the advancement of the use of genetically modified organisms, the formation of this new Institute should hold kernels of concern.
FDA Hits Back Against Stupid Food Labeling
Published October 23, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
UPDATE: Smart choices labeling scheme gets the axe!
Thank goodness, the FDA has sat up and noticed that someone is trying to pass Froot Loops off as health food. The agency's target is the Smart Choices front-of-package (FOP) labeling scheme, an effort by industry players to claim that experts say their foods, including some high-sugar and high-fat items, are better-for-you selections.
The program has drawn widespread ridicule, consternation and resistance, including a petition organized by Change.org in which 4,000+ signatories prevailed on The American Dietetic Association, the American Diabetes Association and Tufts University to request that the Smart Choices board remove their names from the initiative's Website. In September, Representative Rosa L. DeLauro, Chairwoman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Agricultural Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies, called for the FDA to launch an investigation into the program.
You know things are bad when the box with the blatant misspelling is the one labeled “smart” and members of congress are up in arms.
School Lunch Momentum of Sorts
Published August 21, 2009 @ 09:47AM PT
The New York Times ran a piece this week on the policy momentum behind giving children healthier school lunch options, which has champions in the White House and the Senate pushing to add $0.70 per lunch to the federal lunch budget. They highlight the work of Sen. Gillibrand (D-NY), who's gone beyond asking only for more to be spent to asking that it be spent better:
... “If you feed a kid chicken nuggets and canned peas and Doritos and canned fruit as a school lunch or you feed him grilled chicken, steamed broccoli and fresh fruits and a whole grain roll, the difference is night and day,” Senator Gillibrand said.
As part of this year’s work on the Child Nutrition Act, Senator Gillibrand is co-sponsoring legislation that would ban trans fat in cafeteria kitchens and give the Department of Agriculture more power to set tougher federal nutrition requirements for the lightly regulated à la carte program in schools. ...
In recent years however, federal reimbursement hasn't kept up with rising costs associated with providing school lunches, meaning that schools are often taking a loss on lousy food.
School lunches also have to vie for student's attention with 'competitive' foods of minimal nutritional value, such as candy bars. If the cafeteria staff get creative, they must face a student body that's been acclimated to lousy fast food, rarely get home cooked meals, and consequently don't recognize even a freshly made blackberry cobbler as food. Student rejection of prepared lunch options puts lunch budgets deeper in the red, pressuring menus to look more like the fast food restaurant menus that form the template of expectation when children think of 'food.'
In short, the foods marketed to children in general, and offered as competitive options in schools in particular, range from the nutritionally destructive to the merely low quality. But they've been engineered to taste good and hit all the right food addiction buttons, so there's that.
Further, as Tom Laskawy writes at Beyond Green, there's a structural impediment in the USDA to offering healthy lunches, and that impediment is a commodity purchase program whose main dumping ground is the nation's captive audience of school children.
These discussions always remind me of a classmate and fairly recent high school graduate, let's call him Joe, from four years back when I returned to college. My mom was a homemaker who cooked from a fairly traditional template that she picked up from her grandmother and most of my acquaintances now are either of the slightly older demographic who were more likely to have similar food choices at home and foodies (both urban and rural) who can be revolted by the mere mention of a McDonald's. Which is to say that turning down blackberry cobbler without a good reason is just strange to me and so I turn to Joe as a reminder that not everyone grew up that way.
Joe had been raised on pizza (cheese or pepperoni only, please), tater tots, fries, hamburgers and iirc, macaroni and cheese. He was afraid of other types of food and wouldn't try them. I remember suggesting a taco at one point, a ground beef taco with lettuce and tomatoes, that I'd wrongly thought was close enough to having a hamburger as to make no particular difference. Well, Joe would have none of it. Tacos were just too strange sounding.
As a kid, I was also rather fond of the hamburgers and cheese pizza served at school. They beat the heck out of mushy, canned green beans, anyway. But having tried other kinds of food, they weren't all I would agree to eat, nor what I'd have always preferred to eat. I'd had options Joe never dreamed of. Options that made our tastes in food mutually incomprehensible, indeed, almost incommensurable, to each other.
Are the values of finding markets for US farm products and feeding children good food equally hard to translate into a common goal? Are good intentions at the federal level going to be consumed by mere price inflation? Are school kids going to be doomed to choosing between canned fruit and a 'fresh' fruit option that consists of the battery acid oranges and mealy apples that even I remember turning my nose up at? (The fresh fruit at school was never as good as what my mom brought home from the grocery store. I never realized how lucky that made me.)
I don't know. But I do know that it's going to take years, if ever, to fix school food. Kids can't vote and their parents often have a hard enough time trying to make sure they're well served educationally and have roofs over their heads to consistently take on the lousy food they're given. Particularly concerned parents often just opt out and do what they can to send their kids to school with a decent lunchbag.
All of which makes this a paramount political problem that transcends any 'consumer choice' response to a gross market failure. And I do mean gross in the literal sense.
(Photo credit: erin.kkr on Flickr.)
Agriculture's Nitrogen Fix
Published August 19, 2009 @ 01:43PM PT
Everybody involved in mainstream agriculture wants a piece of the glory for increased yields over the last half century, but the share of credit that's left over after irrigation and heterozygous, conventional hybrids goes mainly to a plant nutrient: nitrogen.
In 1918, Dr. Fritz Haber figured out a way to use natural gas and heat do something only bacteria had ever been able to manage, which was to turn inert atmospheric nitrogen into solid nitrogen compounds that are available to the terrestrial food chain. This process, whether performed in a lab or by a bacterium, is referred to as nitrogen fixation.
Atmospheric nitrogen, which exists mainly in the form of N2, is an extremely stable compound, non-reactive in almost all cases. N2 makes up around 70 percent of the atmosphere and acts as an effective fire retardant. If there were much more oxygen gas and much less nitrogen gas in the atmosphere, the entire atmosphere could ignite.
Terrestrial nitrogen, existing in many forms, is one of the most important nutrients available to living beings. It's the backbone of all RNA, DNA and protein. It's referred to in some cases as a limiting nutrient, one that puts a fixed limit to the growth potential of an ecosystem's biomass. It can also be referred to, in agriculture and horticulture as a macronutrient, something necessary in large amounts relative to other trace or micronutrients.
Nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, and the greatest of these is nitrogen. As they might say.
Though one can have too much of any good thing. For example, the use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is likely the culprit in high levels of carcinogenic nitrates in conventionally grown food, as noted by Tom Philpott at Grist. As Philpott also points out, nitrates have also been linked to Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Type II diabetes.
