Getting at the roots of unsustainable U.S. ag policy
by Paula Crossfield
16 Dec 2009
LINK TO FULL ARTICLE BELOW
Around one third of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the way we produce, process, distribute, and consume the food we eat according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Meanwhile, farmers the world over will be the most affected by climate change, as higher carbon in the atmosphere and higher temperatures increase erratic weather patterns, pests, and disease occurrence, while decreasing water availability, disrupting relationships with pollinators and lowering yield and the efficacy of herbicides like glyphosate (aka Round-Up)—all detailed in a revealing new report from the USDA called The Effects of Climate Change on U.S. Ecosystems [pdf].
We should all give the USDA credit for keeping the ties between agriculture, food, and climate change at the forefront of the discussion. Even in Copenhagen, where agriculture is getting less attention than it arguably should be considering its impact and potential for mitigating climate change, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack spoke about the need for research, and seeing agriculture as an opportunity for climate change mitigation. He even said to the delegates in Copenhagen, “We need to develop cropping and livestock systems that are resilient to climate change.” While I agree on the surface with these statements, taking a deeper look reveals potentially problematic ideas for just how to do this.
TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE: http://www.grist.org/article/2009-12-16-getting-at-the-roots-of-unsustainable-us-ag-policy
Showing posts with label issue: industrial agriculture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label issue: industrial agriculture. Show all posts
Friday, December 18, 2009
Friday, October 30, 2009
What's So Scary About Michael Pollan?
What's So Scary About Michael Pollan?
Why Corporate Agriculture Tried to Censor His University Speech
By Martha Rosenberg, AlterNet
October 28, 2009 Link to full article below
Even if agribusiness could shut Michael Pollan up, the outspoken author of Omnivore's Dilemma and a journalism professor at University of California, Berkeley, it still has the Los Angeles Times to contend with.
Last week, the Times blasted California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo for downgrading a scheduled Pollan lecture because it received pressure from David E. Wood, a university donor who happens to be chairman of the Harris Ranch Beef Co.
"Agribusiness gets plenty of opportunities to preach its point of view at agriculture schools such as Cal Poly, where the likes of Monsanto and Cargill fund research," the Times wrote, calling the 800-acre Harris Ranch, near Coalinga, whose "smell assaults passersby long before the panorama of thousands of cattle packed atop layers of their own manure,"--"Cowschwitz." Ouch.
And agribusiness has the University of Wisconsin-Madison to deal with.
The land grant, ag-based university, in the middle of dairyland, clearly doesn't remember its roots. It gave Pollan's In Defense of Food, another anti-agbiz screed according to industry, free to all incoming freshmen as part of its common book read program where everyone reads the same book, Go Big Read, in August.
To read the full article: http://www.alternet.org/story/143519/
Why Corporate Agriculture Tried to Censor His University Speech
By Martha Rosenberg, AlterNet
October 28, 2009 Link to full article below
Even if agribusiness could shut Michael Pollan up, the outspoken author of Omnivore's Dilemma and a journalism professor at University of California, Berkeley, it still has the Los Angeles Times to contend with.
Last week, the Times blasted California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo for downgrading a scheduled Pollan lecture because it received pressure from David E. Wood, a university donor who happens to be chairman of the Harris Ranch Beef Co.
"Agribusiness gets plenty of opportunities to preach its point of view at agriculture schools such as Cal Poly, where the likes of Monsanto and Cargill fund research," the Times wrote, calling the 800-acre Harris Ranch, near Coalinga, whose "smell assaults passersby long before the panorama of thousands of cattle packed atop layers of their own manure,"--"Cowschwitz." Ouch.
And agribusiness has the University of Wisconsin-Madison to deal with.
The land grant, ag-based university, in the middle of dairyland, clearly doesn't remember its roots. It gave Pollan's In Defense of Food, another anti-agbiz screed according to industry, free to all incoming freshmen as part of its common book read program where everyone reads the same book, Go Big Read, in August.
To read the full article: http://www.alternet.org/story/143519/
Friday, June 5, 2009
IMPORTANT article: Big Food Under Fire
Big Food Under Fire
Industrial agriculture shouldn't worry about the government. Mother Nature is a far more potent foe.
By Tom Laskawy
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
http://www.slate.com/id/2219686/
http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=2219686
The corporate behemoths collectively known as "Big Food"—companies like General Mills, Monsanto, Cargill, Tyson Foods, and Archer Daniels Midland—are feeling squeamish. They've watched with dismay as President Obama and his agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, have adopted "sustainability" as a top priority for the USDA and inched the department toward greater support of organic agriculture. With Kathleen Merrigan—noted sustainable agriculture advocate and former director of the USDA organic program—as the department's new second in command; more money now available for organic farmers; and a grand USDA-funded study of organic agriculture and its role in American farming in the works, Big Food feels the ground shifting beneath it. So much so that it's acting as if it could lose its grip on the American food system. But Big Food persists in battling the wrong target. While it is indeed locked in an existential struggle with an implacable foe, the
government is not the enemy. The enemy is Mother Nature.
The simple fact is that the interests of Big Ag remain well-served by a broad range of government policies from agriculture, to trade, to the environment, to nutrition, and even to commodities market regulation. To suggest, as Nebraska's Sen. Mike Johanns (a former Bush-era agriculture secretary) recently did, that the administration has "let [its] fervor for organic production cloud [its] judgment" vastly overplays the administration's ambition. And when Obama did make a substantive attempt at reform, with his proposal to cut agricultural subsidies paid to the largest farmers, Big Food's congressional allies moved quickly to kill it. Rep. Collin Peterson, the powerful chairman of the House agriculture committee and close friend of Big Ag, wasn't kidding when he declared the proposal "more than dead on arrival." No trace of the cuts made it into Congress' final budget.
And that new funding for organic farmers? At $50 million, it's no chump change. But it pales in comparison with the $11 billion conventional agriculture is estimated to receive in government payments this year—most of which, according to the Environmental Working Group, will go to the largest 10 percent of industrial farms. It's clearly not the scale of the administration's commitment to organic that's at issue, however. Small gestures may also offend—which could explain why the pesticide industry has begun a letter-writing campaign protesting Michelle Obama's much-ballyhooed organic "kitchen garden" at the White House.
Also overstated is the threat that food-borne illnesses could pose to Big Food's bottom line. With E. coli contaminating not just hamburger meat but vegetables and with salmonella-tainted peanut butter causing the recall of thousands of products, Big Food is painfully aware that it must protect its centralized yet globalized supply chain. But, while large companies might complain about the potential costs of new regulation, their deep pockets will cushion any blow Congress might land in the form of restrictive new food safety laws.
In fact, it's the small food processors and farmers who should be (and are) honestly panicking at the prospect of costly new regulations.
To read the full article: http://www.slate.com/id/2219686/
Industrial agriculture shouldn't worry about the government. Mother Nature is a far more potent foe.
By Tom Laskawy
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
http://www.slate.com/id/2219686/
http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=2219686
The corporate behemoths collectively known as "Big Food"—companies like General Mills, Monsanto, Cargill, Tyson Foods, and Archer Daniels Midland—are feeling squeamish. They've watched with dismay as President Obama and his agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, have adopted "sustainability" as a top priority for the USDA and inched the department toward greater support of organic agriculture. With Kathleen Merrigan—noted sustainable agriculture advocate and former director of the USDA organic program—as the department's new second in command; more money now available for organic farmers; and a grand USDA-funded study of organic agriculture and its role in American farming in the works, Big Food feels the ground shifting beneath it. So much so that it's acting as if it could lose its grip on the American food system. But Big Food persists in battling the wrong target. While it is indeed locked in an existential struggle with an implacable foe, the
government is not the enemy. The enemy is Mother Nature.
The simple fact is that the interests of Big Ag remain well-served by a broad range of government policies from agriculture, to trade, to the environment, to nutrition, and even to commodities market regulation. To suggest, as Nebraska's Sen. Mike Johanns (a former Bush-era agriculture secretary) recently did, that the administration has "let [its] fervor for organic production cloud [its] judgment" vastly overplays the administration's ambition. And when Obama did make a substantive attempt at reform, with his proposal to cut agricultural subsidies paid to the largest farmers, Big Food's congressional allies moved quickly to kill it. Rep. Collin Peterson, the powerful chairman of the House agriculture committee and close friend of Big Ag, wasn't kidding when he declared the proposal "more than dead on arrival." No trace of the cuts made it into Congress' final budget.
And that new funding for organic farmers? At $50 million, it's no chump change. But it pales in comparison with the $11 billion conventional agriculture is estimated to receive in government payments this year—most of which, according to the Environmental Working Group, will go to the largest 10 percent of industrial farms. It's clearly not the scale of the administration's commitment to organic that's at issue, however. Small gestures may also offend—which could explain why the pesticide industry has begun a letter-writing campaign protesting Michelle Obama's much-ballyhooed organic "kitchen garden" at the White House.
Also overstated is the threat that food-borne illnesses could pose to Big Food's bottom line. With E. coli contaminating not just hamburger meat but vegetables and with salmonella-tainted peanut butter causing the recall of thousands of products, Big Food is painfully aware that it must protect its centralized yet globalized supply chain. But, while large companies might complain about the potential costs of new regulation, their deep pockets will cushion any blow Congress might land in the form of restrictive new food safety laws.
In fact, it's the small food processors and farmers who should be (and are) honestly panicking at the prospect of costly new regulations.
To read the full article: http://www.slate.com/id/2219686/
Friday, May 1, 2009
Symptom: swine flu. Diagnosis: industrial agriculture?
Symptom: swine flu. Diagnosis: industrial agriculture?
by Tom Philpott
28 Apr 2009
http://www.grist.org/article/2009-04-28-more-smithfield-swine
Several days after news broke of a possible link between Mexico-based hog CAFOs and the rapid spread of a novel swine-flu strain, what have we learned?
• Clarifying details about respiratory ailments in the Perote area of Vera Cruz State—where U.S. pork behemoth Smithfield Foods raises nearly a million hogs a year in large confinement buildings, under a subsidiary called Granjas Carroll—have emerged. In my original post on this topic, I didn’t fully understand that the outbreak of a virulent respiratory condition in the town of La Gloria—located near Smithfield’s farming operations—wasn’t initially identified as swine flu. The disease emerged as early as February and infected 60 percent of the town’s 1,800 inhabitants, according to the widely cited blog Biosurveillance, run by the U.S. disease-tracking consultancy Veratract (which claims the CDC, the World Health Organization, and the Pan-American Health Organization as clients). Three children died during the outbreak, Veratract reports. Residents blamed the Granjas Carroll confinements for the outbreak; and local authorities
evidently agreed. “Health workers soon intervened, sealing off the town and spraying chemicals to kill the flies [which grew in swarms on Granjas Caroll’s manure lagoons] that were reportedly swarming through people’s homes,” according to a Monday account in the Guardian.
To read the full article: http://www.grist.org/article/2009-04-28-more-smithfield-swine
by Tom Philpott
28 Apr 2009
http://www.grist.org/article/2009-04-28-more-smithfield-swine
Several days after news broke of a possible link between Mexico-based hog CAFOs and the rapid spread of a novel swine-flu strain, what have we learned?
• Clarifying details about respiratory ailments in the Perote area of Vera Cruz State—where U.S. pork behemoth Smithfield Foods raises nearly a million hogs a year in large confinement buildings, under a subsidiary called Granjas Carroll—have emerged. In my original post on this topic, I didn’t fully understand that the outbreak of a virulent respiratory condition in the town of La Gloria—located near Smithfield’s farming operations—wasn’t initially identified as swine flu. The disease emerged as early as February and infected 60 percent of the town’s 1,800 inhabitants, according to the widely cited blog Biosurveillance, run by the U.S. disease-tracking consultancy Veratract (which claims the CDC, the World Health Organization, and the Pan-American Health Organization as clients). Three children died during the outbreak, Veratract reports. Residents blamed the Granjas Carroll confinements for the outbreak; and local authorities
evidently agreed. “Health workers soon intervened, sealing off the town and spraying chemicals to kill the flies [which grew in swarms on Granjas Caroll’s manure lagoons] that were reportedly swarming through people’s homes,” according to a Monday account in the Guardian.
To read the full article: http://www.grist.org/article/2009-04-28-more-smithfield-swine
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