Palm-oil trees in the making, Ivory Coast.In his Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis teases out the mechanisms of famine in British-ruled 19th century India.

When a drought would wipe out a grain harvest in one region of India, the price of grain would spike. People all over the subcontinent would suddenly find themselves priced out of grain markets--even in places where grain harvests went well. Grain would then flow out of India to the "mother country," where people could afford it, and literally millions of Indians would starve. That's one way relatively minor natural disasters become vast human catastrophes.

Devastatingly, Davis details how the British Empire (wittingly or not) used these eminently avoidable famines to consolidate its grip over the Indian Raj.

I got to thinking of Davis' dark masterpiece while reading Andrew Rice's excellent, nuanced report, "Is There Such a Thing as Agro-Imperialism?,"  in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

Rice follows the gusher of money flowing from cash-rich, arable-land-poor countries like Saudi Arabia to buy up or lease farmland in Africa.

One thing that strikes me is the disconnect in what we hear about the quality of African farmland from rich investors, and what we hear about it from rich philanthropists.

Gates Foundation rhetoric makes Africa sound like a basket case, land-wise: references to "depleted" or "degraded" soils.

We hear relatively little about the continent's vast agricultural assets--which wealthy investors are now busily snapping up. Andrew Rice visits Africa's "billion-acre Guinea Savannah zone," which he describes as "a crescent-shaped swath that runs east across Africa all the way to Ethiopia, and southward to Congo and Angola. "The World Bank and the FAO have declared the tract "one of the earth's last large reserves of underused land," Rice reports.

It evidently won't be for long. A stampede of investors, ranging from governments like Saudi Arabia's to U.S. hedge funds, are moving in. And many of the region's pro-Westen, "modernizing" governments are inviting them. Ethiopia, for example, is planning to lease out 3.5 million acres of prime farmland to foreign interests for 50 cents an acre, Rice reports.

Rice interviews an executive of a Saudi agribusiness firm operating there.

"For a grower, this is heaven on earth," says Jan Prins, managing director of the subsidiary company that is running the venture for Al Amoudi. Originally from the Netherlands, Prins says he assumed that Ethiopia was arid but was surprised to learn when he came to the country that much of it was fertile, with diverse microclimates. The Awassa farm is one of four that Prins is getting up and running. Using computerized irrigation systems, the farms will grow tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, melons and other fresh produce, the vast majority of it to be shipped to Saudi Arabia and Dubai.

My first reaction is: At those prices, maybe well-heeled Western foundations should start investing in farmland as part of a land-reform scheme. One of the many problems faced by Africa's beleaguered smallholder farmers is land tenure.

But first we'd have to convince the Western anti-poverty/development establishment that smallholder farmers count. As Rice points out, the influential British economist Paul Collier has questioned whether small-scale farmers are part of the solution to the hunger crisis at all:

Last fall, Paul Collier of Oxford University, an influential voice on issues of world poverty, published a provocative article in Foreign Affairs in which he argued that a "middle- and upper-class love affair with peasant agriculture" has clouded the African development debate with "romanticism." Approvingly citing the example of Brazil - where masses of indigenous landholders were displaced in favor of large-scale farms - Collier concluded that "to ignore commercial agriculture as a force for rural development and enhanced food supply is surely ideological."

Brazil was indeed a provocative example for Collier to cite. That country has aggressively ramped up ag production, opening its vast (and incredibly biodiverse) savanna to monocrop soy production. U.S. agribusiness interests operate highly profitable subsidiaries there; U.S. farmers own and run huge soy farms there. Brazil is now one of the globe's industrial-ag superpowers, a top-two exporter of soy, beef, sugar, coffee, and more.

Yet even with its supercharged agricultural sector humming, millions of Brazilians live in conditions of extreme poverty and food insecurity.As the FAO puts it:

Despite its relative prosperity (US$3500 GDP per head), 44 million Brazilians, a quarter of the population, lives in extreme poverty on a daily income which is less than US$1.06 a day.

If I'm reading Rice correctly, the play is to turn Africa into a kind of new Brazil: an export-minded agriculture superpower, smallholder farmers be damned. The high-minded case for the African land grab goes like this: Sure, huge swaths of land will be put to use to supply foreign markets; and food crops will leave a continent struggling mightily with hunger; but there will be a trickle down effect. And surely, in the event of a real hunger crisis, enough food would be kept within Africa to feed everyone.

Robert Zeigler, a U.S. botanist who heads the International Rice Research Institute, a classic Green Revolution group, made this precise case in the New York Times Magazine piece.

The idea that one country would go to another country ... and lease some land, and expect that the rice produced there would be made available to them if there's a food crisis in that host country, is ludicrous.

When I read that, I thought of the 44 million impoverished Brazilians, scraping by while huge amounts of food leave their country; and of those late-Victorian holocausts, when millions of Indians starved while grain flowed to Mother England.

And then, thankfully, I remembered that Milwaukee-based Growing Power will soon be operating in Africa, working with smallholder farmers and urban dwellers to build self-suffiency through low-input farming. A happy thought ahead of Thanksgiving. 

Related Links:

No to Obama’s agrichemical industry man, yes to Bed-Stuy Farm

Disappearing slave history

Corporate agribusiness divides farmers

Why is conventional agriculture so wound up? Are they afraid of organic agriculture? What's all the fuss about? After all, a recent study by the Lieberman Research Group showed that organic food sales account for only 3.5 percent of all food product sales in the U.S.

A September 2009 Prairie Farmer article , "Here is what's not sustainable," leads me to believe that the author, a spokesperson for conventional agriculture, dislikes and even fears organic farming and its supporters.

The author admits to feeling self-satisfaction in knowing that organic farmers are suffering in a falling economy, I doubt many people share her sentiments. Farmers generally have the attitude that "we are all in this together", no matter what farming practices we use.

Still, Michael Pollan has conventional agriculture circling its wagons, Michelle Obama has an organic garden, and organic farmers are accused of riding the backs of conventional farmers.

Most farmers I know, (not all but most), see organic farming as just another way to farm, curious, perhaps a bit backward, but to most conventional farmers organic farming doesn't even register. With agribusiness however, it's another story. They're not content with just 96.5 percent of the food system, they want it all.

Those who have their priorities confused, need to figure out who their enemies really are.

Conventional farm milk prices have dropped by nearly 50 percent over the past year. Dean Foods controls 80 percent of the fluid milk market in some states and 40 percent of the market in the U.S.; their net profits more than doubled in the last year.

Conventional hog farmers have experienced losses for two straight years. Tyson, the second largest food company in the U.S., controls 40 percent of the U.S. meat market. They reported a profitable third quarter for every segment of their business, including pork.

When the farm price for beef cattle dropped 8 cents per pound, consumers were paying 17 cents more per pound at the supermarket. Average retail beef processing margins across all companies, increased 13 percent over 2008.

And guess what, none of that was caused by organic farmers.

Corporate agribusiness has a problem with organic farmers because they haven't yet figured out a way to totally bleed them like they have conventional farmers. But as surely as corporate agriculture is working its way into the organic market, we suffer from their growing control.

While farm prices have trended downward for the past couple of years, food price decline has lagged far behind. As farm input costs have continued to climb, so have corporate profits.

Even in the toughest of economic times, the corporate buyers and sellers profit while farmers loose. A recent New York Times editorial points out the dangers of powerful corporations (specifically Monsanto); controlling seed supplies, their market control, and their anticompetitive behavior.

Agribusiness spends multi-millions on lobbyists. Their lobbying efforts are aimed at increasing their profits, not farmer income or benefits to the consumer. They lobby for more cheap raw imports, less labeling, less restrictions on pesticide use, and weaker environmental standards.

The Prairie Farmer tells us anyone who believes organic, sustainable, and locally grown is the only way to feed the world is wrong. Contrary to their opinion, there is plenty of evidence that organic production is a viable means of producing food and that organic farming may be the best way for the world to feed itself.

Since we are all in this together, perhaps we can dismiss the ill will of the Prairie Farmer editorial and agree that there is more than enough room for all responsible farmers to do their thing, conventional or organic?

Corporate agribusiness is riding roughshod over all farmers and it's time farmers recognized their real enemy.

Related Links:

Will Africa’s farmland become a ‘resource curse’?

Sen. Inhofe and U.S. Farm Bureau chief casually chat about destroying the climate bill

Six months after the outbreak, who’s investigating the CAFO-swine flu link?

Break out the heavy artillery: Sen. Inhofe leads the denier brigades. Photo: U.S. ArmyPaging Michael Specter: I've got some live ones for you. Deniers, that is--folks who irrationally cling to faith-based beliefs, despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary.

I'm not talking fear-mongering Internet bandits here--guys who amplify their dubious screeds on large-type blogs. I'm talking about Sen. James Inhofe, ranking Republican on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works; and Bob Stallman, President of the American Farm Bureau Federation, probably the nation's most potent agribusiness interest group.

The two have opened an assault on the Senate climate bill--on the assumption that human-induced climate change is a hoax. Click here (via Farm Policy blog) to hear the two chat about how the real threat to agriculture going forward isn't climate change, but rather climate change legislation.

Their exchange is most notable for its utter banality--just a couple of regular guys shooting the breeze about kiboshing the government's first serious effort to avert climate calamity.

DTN Ag Policy Editor Chris Clayton (via Farm Policy blog) gave the following summary of Stallman's testimony before the committee.

Scientists and officials who believe climate change is caused by human industrial emissions make the claim that agriculture will be one of the most affected sectors because farming and livestock production are sensitive to weather changes. Stallman questions the logic.

"‘Before you ask that question, implicit is the assumption that all of that [climate change] is going to happen,' Stallman said."

Clayton added:

Stallman said the organization [the Farm Bureau] has a lot of skepticism about the science and the process the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change used to come to its conclusions on climate change. Congress should at least hold hearings to consider the scientists and climatologists who disagree with the IPCC data and analysis, Stallman said.

The Farm Bureau’s Bob Stallman: Climate what? Hey, let’s grow more corn and meat!Now, this is not just idle denialist banter. Stallman worked closely with House Ag Committee chair Collin Peterson to turn the House climate bill into yet another sop for Big Ag. He has vowed to do the same with the Senate bill--if he can't kill it outright.

As for Stallman's dear friend Sen. Inhofe, he's reportedly preparing to trip up the climate bill by leading a boycott of the Environment and Public Works committee's vote.

But then again, maybe Michael Specter doesn't have any special problem with these two distinguished gentlemen. In his book Denialism, Specter ignores climate-change deniers and instead attacks critics of GMO agriculture, which he presents as the solution to climate change. With the climate crisis so neatly solved, I suppose, there's no need to curb GHG emissions. Specter envisions a future in which "genetically engineered organisms .. propel our cars and sustain our factories" amid melted ice sheets and rising seas.

Stallman and Inhofe, too, bow before the awesome power of GMOs.

So heave away, boys! Let us move bravely into the future, knowing that our political system can't deal with climate change, but that guys in white lab coats working for Monsanto can. Or so they assure us!

Related Links:

Prelude to COP15: Climate Justice actions sweep the US before Copenhagen talks

Washington Times: “Obama digs in on global warming”

Where is all the damn climate data?

Not hogging the H1N1 spotlight: A "state of the art" pig CAFO in Georgia.Photo courtesy of USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service."When respiratory viruses get into these confinement facilities, they have continual opportunity to replicate, mutate, reassort, and recombine into novel strains ... The best surrogates we can find in the human population are prisons, military bases, ships, or schools. But respiratory viruses can run quickly through these [human] populations and then burn out, whereas in CAFOs -- which often have continual introductions of [unexposed] animals -- there's a much greater potential for the viruses to spread and become endemic."
-- Gregory Gray, director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Iowa College of Public Health, quoted in "Swine CAFOs & Novel H1N1 Viruses," Environmental Health Perspectives, September 2009, by Charles W. Schmidt.

-------------------

Almost exactly six months ago, I caused a stir by suggesting a possible link between CAFOs and the new strain of H1N1 swine flu that had just broken out. (See here and here.)

My position generated a certain amount of outrage, even among some commentators not linked to the meat industry. How dare I point to a possible link based on indirect, circumstantial, evidence?

Half a year later, I would love to be able to review results of a rigorous set of tests on CAFOs. I wish I could report that USDA researchers had been showing up on hog confinements and taking swabs; that CAFO workers were being monitored for H1N1 infections or antibodies; that the EPA was looking hard at CAFO cesspools -- known as lagoons -- to see if they could be possible vectors of infection.

From what I can tell, though, none of that is happening -- even with the novel H1N1 virus spreading rapidly and vaccines still in short supply.

Check out this jaw-dropping Washington Post article from last weekend. Reporter David Brown buried his lead -- more on that below -- but here's the bombshell:

The search for influenza in pigs [on CAFOs] has actually decreased in the six months since the H1N1 strain was discovered in California and Mexico in April. Diagnostic labs in Minnesota, Kansas and Iowa report a decline in samples submitted by veterinarians; the lab at Iowa State University recently eliminated three positions because of "decreases in overall case revenue." [Emphasis added.]

Did you get that? Since the global flu pandemic broke out, testing of pigs for H1N1 has dropped. Why? Here's the Post:

Most American pig farmers -- who have been losing money since the fourth quarter of 2007 -- don't want to know whether the new strain is in their herds. ... "People are really scared if their farm is the first one to find an outbreak of pandemic H1N1," said ... [a] Kansas State microbiologist. "They are afraid they will lose their livelihood."

A "state of the art" cesspool at a hog confinement in Georgia. "The facility is completely automated and temperature controlled," the NRCS reports. Photo courtesy of USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service.Okay, so no individual hog grower has an interest in knowing whether a particular confinement house is incubating novel strains of swine flu. I can understand that. As I've written before, the industry is hyper-consolidated; four companies slaughter and process 65 percent of the hogs raised in the United States. Farmers operate under such tight profit margins -- and often, as now, negative profit margins -- that swine flu becomes just another threat to their fragile livelihoods.

Thus we've got a gaping market failure on our hands; the industry has demonstrated its inability to regulate itself on this issue.

Given the vast public-health threat, one might expect the government to step in and perform tests. Is it happening? Stunningly, no. All the USDA has done is to create a voluntary program -- which, as noted above, no hog grower has an interest in using.

Well, if no one's testing the hogs, someone must be testing the workers, right? You know, the people who come into contact with the hogs daily, breathe in air full of their fecal particles and breath exhalations, and then head into the surrounding community?

Wrong again. In fact, the government has thus far even declined to make CAFO workers a "priority group" for H1N1 vaccines, the Post reports.

Well, maybe I'm being alarmist. Maybe there's no rational reason to suspect that the practice of confining thousands of animals into buildings over their own waste gives novel viruses a wonderful habitat in which to flow from host to host, mutate, and jump species to humans. Maybe the industry's much ballyhooed safety efforts, in which hog confinements are treated like biosecurity time bombs, are successfully keeping pigs and the workers who watch over them from swapping virus strains.

But that's simply not the case, according to the Post piece. Are CAFO conditions keeping swine free of swine flu? No. "A survey done in 2006 found that 58 percent of pig farms had at least one animal with antibodies to influenza," the Post reports. Moreover, there have been several instances of swine herds testing positive for the current novel strain. For example:

Scientists at the University of Minnesota and the University of Iowa revealed last week they had identified the H1N1 strain in seven pigs at the Minnesota State Fair in late summer as part of a study of virus exchange between swine and people. Some of those animals may have caught the bug from the hordes of visitors at the 12-day event. But not all: One infected animal was swabbed while being unloaded and almost certainly arrived with the virus.

Now, let's think about this. These were randomly selected animals tested as part of a study, and not obviously sick ones a farmer brought in for testing. If a random study picked up novel H1N1 among CAFO pigs, how many more out there, among the 20 million-strong U.S. swine herd, also have it?

Well, perhaps CAFO conditions aren't actually conducive to the generation of new strains. Wrong again. The Post:

Oh dear. Well, maybe the factory style of hog rearing creates a barrier between infected swine and their human handlers. But again, no. Here's the Post:

In 2006, a team of researchers at the University of Iowa examined blood samples from 111 [hog] farmers, 65 veterinarians and 97 meat-processing workers, and compared them with 79 university employees and students who had no contact with pigs. The scientists looked for antibodies to two common swine influenza viruses. They found that 17 to 20 percent of farmers and 11 to 19 percent of veterinarians had evidence of previous infection by the two strains. None of the meatpackers or students did.

And those who do pick up swine flu from the swine they have contact with are fully capable of passing it on. "Another study by the same research team found that the wives of half of infected pig farmers had the antibodies -- suggesting that person-to-person transmission of the viruses was possible," The Post adds.

So, amid the scramble to mass-produce a vaccine, factory swine farms are indisputably a major possible source of novel viruses -- and there's virtually no organized effort to scrutinize them. The best analogy I can think of is this: A town full of suspected arsonists with access to gasoline and matches has an outbreak of mysterious fires. In response, the town dismisses its cops and beefs up its fire department.

The question becomes, why is the government failing so willfully to investigate the possible link between CAFOs and the outbreak of a novel swine flu? I think we can find a clue in the very Washington Post article under discussion. For all the important and damning information contained in it, it opens on a CAFO, which it describes as a paragon of biosafety.

It may be crowded and carpeted in manure, but the long, white building beside State Route 38 is one of the most pathogen-free homes a pig could have.

Really? Several paragraphs later, we get this: "CAFOs such as Schott's are inherently safer than backyard pig farms, where the animals mingle with people and birds fly overhead." In an otherwise lavishly sourced article, there's absolutely no scientific evidence presented to back up this claim.

My thesis is this: the pork industry is so powerful and entrenched that the Post didn't dare publish such an explosive article without these spurious hedges about the "inherent" safety of CAFOs.

And the same factor has the federal government scrambling to put out fires, while willfully ignoring a key arson suspect.

My guess is that the CAFO system would not survive a rigorous public-health assessment. If federal authorities began to seriously examine the risk-reward balance between cheap pork and novel flu pandemics, cheap industrial pork would start to look like a pretty trivial reward. But that would lead to the collapse of a multi-billion dollar industry -- and a bitter fight with the corporate giants -- Cargill, Smithfield, and Tyson -- that dominate the pork trade.

From the start of the outbreak, USDA chief Tom Vilsack has cravenly leapt to the defense of the swine industry. Check out this Wall Street Journal article from May -- the early days of the crisis.

While Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack says there is "no evidence" of the new swine flu in U.S. pigs, the federal government doesn't aggressively search for it on farms.

Mr. Vilsack's statement is designed to bolster the Obama administration's argument that U.S. consumers and trading partners haven't any reason to shy away from eating U.S. pork. But the observation isn't based on any extensive sampling program of the sort that is used by the federal government to alert it to other animal diseases, such as mad-cow disease and bird flu.

Indeed, only in recent months has the Agriculture Department begun organizing a federal pilot program for screening pigs for flu. And that move came at the prodding of officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC officials have been worried that pigs might serve as a "mixing vessel" for a flu virus capable of sweeping through the human population. The pilot program has yet to begin to collect samples. [Emphasis added.]

Well, as novel swine flu continues its rapid spread, things have evidently changed little with regard to the USDA's zeal to track down the source of swine flu.

If the Post article opens with a bow to the pork industry, it closes on a chilling note:

Most of the flu viruses already in American pigs contain genes derived from human, pig and bird strains. Such mongrelized viruses, scientists believe, are more likely than others to reassort again, setting the stage for another pandemic.

And the place they'll likely do it, it seems reasonably clear, is within CAFOs.

Related Links:

Will Africa’s farmland become a ‘resource curse’?

Uh-oh: Tamiflu-resistant swine flu rears up in the U.S., U.K.

Ecological farms: the only real way to feed an increasingly hungry world

While in charge of governmental affairs at Croplife America, Isi Siddiqui, second from left, talks global patent law with U.S. Trade Office officials on April 22, 2009. But don't use the "L" word! Photo: U.S. State Department

"[Croplife America] was relentless in its pursuit of monitoring and actively engaging with key influencers in its attempts to make certain that the Farm Bill was beneficial to members of [Croplife America] and ensuring it did not contain language detrimental or discriminatory to pesticides."
-- Jacob Secor, Director, Federal Government Affairs, Dow AgroSciences, quoted in Croplife America's 2008 Annual Report (PDF)

----

Last month, President Obama nominated Islam "Isi" Siddiqui, vice president for governmental affairs at pesticide industry trade group Croplife America, to the post of chief agricultural negotiator at the U.S. Trade Office.

If Siddiqui takes office, he will solidify his position as a textbook case of the "revolving door" between government and industry. Before going to work for the nation's most prominent agrichemical trade group, he had spent a long career as an ag official, first for the state of California, later with the Clinton USDA, where he served as Under Secretary for Marketing and Regulatory Programs.

At the time of his nomination last month, I cynically assumed that Siddiqui would skate through Congress and take his post--and promptly begin battering down global trade barriers, making the world safe for U.S. agrichemicals and cheap ag commodities. "Once the Senate's conservative stalwarts recover from the shock of supporting a man named Islam," I wrote, "they'll surely wave Siddiqui right through." 

Now I'm not so sure. Obama may have a confirmation crisis here--from his left. My colleague Tom Laskawy pointed out in conversation that Obama recently made a similarly dodgy pick: he tapped Joe Pizarchik, a Pennsylvania official with a track record of coddling coal interests, to head the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. And that didn't go as smoothly as planned.

As Kate Sheppard reported last week in Mother Jones:

When President Obama nominated Joseph Pizarchik to head the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, critics blasted the choice, charging that Pizarchik has a history of favoring coal industry interests over the well-being of local residents. Still, it appeared Pizarchik would sail to confirmation this week--until an unknown senator placed a hold on his appointment. [Emphasis added.]

Kate reports that after Pizarchik's confirmation had glided through the Senate Finance Commitee with just two "no" votes, a "mystery senator" placed a two-month block on a vote before the full Senate. Pizarchik now languishes in limbo--and Obama has time to think hard about replacing him with a regulator with a record of standing up to coal interests.

Now U.S. sustainable ag-related NGOs are trying to repeat that trick with regard to the Siddiqui nomination. In an op-ed published on Minute Man, Kathy Ozer, executive director of the National Family Farm Coalition and Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, senior scientist at the Pesticide Action Network North America, lambasted the pick.

They wrote: "It's crucial that the Senate Finance Committee hears from public witnesses while investigating his past roles." That's code for: "We know he'll sail though the committee; but won't someone please have the guts to block this egregious pick?"

They have a strong case, I think. As they point out, Obama did vow to end the corrupt old practice of letting former lobbyists from a given industry make policy for that industry. Siddiqui evidently somehow meets the letter of that vow--he's not currently a registered lobbyist (though he has been one in the past.) But let me repeat: he's the executive in charge of "government affairs" for the nation's main pesticide-industry trade group.

Read through Croplife's 2008 and 2009 annual reports (PDFs), and you'll note the group is very proud of the work Siddiqui has done in "governmental affairs": everything from pushing to reduce "trade irritants" around pesticides under NAFTA to making sure "agricultural interests" are accounted for when assessing pesticide's role in the collapse of honeybee populations.

The latter was a huge issue in 2008. Several European nations had banned certain insecticides on the suspicion that they were contributing to colony collapse disorder. Determined to stem a similar tide here, Siddiqui's office shifted into high gear, actively framing honeybee collapse as a problem fixable by pesticides. According to the 2009 annual report:

In June of [2008], CropLife delivered written testimony to the House Agriculture Subcommittee on Horticulture and Organic Agriculture detailing... the many benefits to pollinator health attributable to the careful use of pesticides, i.e. miticides, used to protect bees from known natural threats.

Siddiqui and staff forgot to mention that widespread use of miticides in bee management had already given rise to pesticide-resistant supermites--which might themselves contribute to colony collapse.

Over on Politico, veteran food reporter Marian Burros published a good piece Monday detailing the backlash among sustainable-ag groups to to Siddiqui pick. Burros also dug up some good background. For example:

While Siddiqui was at CropLife, the company took part closed-door negotiations with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Office of Management and Budget to find ways to permit pesticide testing in children. The firm also was instrumental in securing an exemption for American farmers from the 2006 worldwide ban of the highly controversial chemical methyl bromide, a pesticide that depletes the ozone layer.

Burros also got an interesting statement from a White House official defending the pick. She quotes spokesman Benjamin LaBolt like this:

During his time at USDA, Dr. Siddiqui led the first phase of development for national organic natural food standards in the United States.

So despite his Croplife stint, Siddiqui is really a champion of sustainable ag, right? Well, it's true that the USDA first rolled organic standards way back in 1998, when Siddiqui served as Under Secretary for Marketing and Regulatory Programs. But those with long memories will recall that the ageny's initial stab at codifying organic standards was not one of its finest moments. As a refresher, here's a vintage 1998 Mother Jones piece that details that unhappy episode. Here's the money bit:

When the USDA finally released its national standards proposal last December, it not only included the use of genetically engineered products but also allowed for irradiation and fertilization with sewage sludge--which can contain metals and toxic chemicals.

The proposed standards also would prohibit organic certifiers from requiring higher standards than those of the USDA. "This means that if the government insists on allowing sewage sludge, irradiation, genetically engineered organisms, piperonyl butoxide, and other materials and technologies that the NOSB specifically rejected for use in organic production, then no one can certify that any product is free of these practices," says organic farmer and NOSB [National Organic Standards Board] member Fred Kirschenmann. [Emphasis added.]

So even before going on the Croplife payroll, Siddiqui was evidently already pushing the interests of the agrichemical industry--and trying to decorate some of their wares with the organic label.

This is the guy we want leading agriculture negotiations on trade talks? Mystery senator who blocked the coal guy from overseeing coal clean-up, whomever you are: please work your magic once more.

Related Links:

Approaching Copenhagen with a Portfolio of Domestic Commitments

Will Africa’s farmland become a ‘resource curse’?

Obama administration officials grateful for early spring

I really really really didn't want to write another post on Michael Pollan. Don't get me wrong -- I'm a big fan. It's just that reducing the whole of the food movement to Pollan's work naturally ignores so much else that's going on. But don't blame me for this post. Blame Big Ag. These guys just can't leave him alone -- it's verging on an unhealthy obsession. They seem to think that if they can just share a stage with him wherever he pops up, they'll show him (and the audience) how wrong he really is. It's happening all over the country.

First came the brouhaha over Ominvore's Dilemma at Washington State University. Then it happened again at the Univesity of Wisconsin at Madison. In that case, the very presence of Pollan was enough to bring out hundreds of protesting farmers. Now we get word that an industrial livestock producer threatened to withdraw a $500,000 donation to Cal Poly until Pollan's speech to students was transformed into a panel discussion so Big Ag interests could respond.

Big Ag has clearly decided that Pollan is a latter-day Lenin (or perhaps Trotsky?) leading a cadre of food revolutionaries who threaten to overthrow its hard-fought hegemony -- rebut his arguments and perhaps the whole movement will collapse like a bad soufflé. All in reaction to a relatively unassuming guy who's written some articles and a few books. Isn't this all, like, a bit much?

But maybe Big Ag is right in viewing journalism as the gravest threat to the status quo. It's not coming from the USDA. And Congress? Fuggedaboutit. Big Ag's proxies on the Ag committees along with its ample lobbying dollars keeps reform at the margins. But jeezapete, those investigative reports really hit an oligopolist where it hurts! Michael Moss's recent NYT exposé on ground beef has dominated the news cycle, given new momentum to stalled food safety reforms and single-handedly led to capitualtion by Tyson Foods on E. coli testing (at least in its dealings with Costco). Mind you, Costco -- one of the most powerful retailers in the country -- couldn't on its own convince Tyson to test its meat. But a few thousand words from Michael Moss? Done and done.

Though it's certainly not just Michael Pollan bringing the hurt to Big Ag; let's not forget Eric Schlosser as the fast food industry's thorn -- he's probably cut industry sales more than any transfat ban or anti-obesity campaign to date. And of course, one of the great 20th century pioneers of food system reform was Upton Sinclair, a journalist.

Still, despite Big Ag's insistence -- as in a storyline out of pro wrestling -- on meeting its nemesis anywhere, any time and in any forum, it starts to seem like their obsession with Pollan isn't getting them anywhere.

More and more, agribiz reps come out of some Pollan event sounding oddly mollified by what they hear. La Vida Locavore documented this phenomenon in Madison, Wis. Indeed Pollan himself in his latest Big Ag debate -- this time on NPR's Talk of the Nation -- said much the same thing about Madison:

What happened there? They bused in several hundred farmers, all wearing green T-shirts that said, In Defense of Farmers. And they were expecting to hear a very different Michael Pollan ... [T]hey were surprised that what I said didn't conform to what the Farm Bureau was telling them I said … which is to say, I was talking about how to build new agricultural markets, so that they could diversify. I was talking about figuring out ways to get more of the consumers' food dollar into their pockets. Right now, 90 percent of the consumers' food dollar goes to middlemen, processors, marketers. And that in the kinds of alternative agriculture that we're beginning to be talked about in this country, there are great opportunities for farmers...

And you know, when the farmers left that hall, they were kind of surprised, and I talked to some ag-journalists who said, yeah, we were on the bus with them going back, and they said they really didn't find as much to disagree with in what you said than they expected.

Even Blake Hurst, the farmer and author of The Omnivore's Delusion and Pollan's ostensible antagonist on Talk of the Nation, could find common ground:

So I think Mr. Pollan is correct ... I think that farm subsidies, the way they are now, probably do make the price of grain lower than it would be without them...

On the one hand, perhaps it isn't so surprising that Big Ag has singled out Michael Pollan as their Public Enemy Number One -- they have witnessed time and time again the power of the journalist's pen, something that continues to elude their otherwise inescapable sphere of influence. But Big Ag has taken on a writer who -- as a professor first at Yale and now at Berkeley -- has long experience with public speaking, is pithy, quick-witted, not easily flustered and, it turns out, interested in amiably driving a wedge between farmers and agribiz interests. All Big Ag's efforts accomplish is to give Pollan high-profile forums to broadcast his ideas (and punch holes in its own). I'm starting to wonder when Big Ag will figure this out.

And because too much Michael Pollan is never enough, I'll leave you with the next phase in his plot to be the Tsar of all the Media: PollanTV. PBS has adapted Pollan's wonderful Botany of Desire as a documentary mini-series. I guess Big Ag can't escape him even if they wanted to:

Related Links:

Will Africa’s farmland become a ‘resource curse’?

More NYC farmers markets accept food stamps and sales soar

No to Obama’s agrichemical industry man, yes to Bed-Stuy Farm

Michael Pollan (left) and Tom Philpott talk food.Celebrated food and ag author Michael Pollan debunked some myths about organic agriculture Tuesday night at a Grist event in San Francisco, in a conversation with Grist food writer Tom Philpott and the audience.

In response to a question about whether we can really feed the world without industrialized ag (ah yes, a perennial), Pollan pointed out that we're not feeding the world with it now.  He said we wouldn't be doing developing nations a favor by exporting a fossil fuel–dependent ag system to them when it's clear that fossil fuels are only going to become more scarce and expensive.  And overproducing government-subsidized food in the U.S. is certainly not the way to solve world hunger -- it just exacerbates it by putting small-scale farmers in developing countries out of business.  Give people in the developing world the tools to do sophisticated organic ag and it will help solve many problems, including undocumented immigration, Pollan argues.

And yes, sophisticated organic ag does exist.  Pollan disputed the idea that organic techniques are anti-technology.  Philpott agreed, pointing out that renowned farmers Joel Salatin and Will Allen use advanced technology to produce organic food -- it's just not the type of technology that Big Ag promotes and profits from.

Asked what the Obama administration is thinking on ag -- sometimes veering in the direction of progressive change, other times whipping back toward the agrichemical status quo, as Philpott puts it -- Pollan said the admin appears to be playing both sides of the street. Pollan related an anecdote in which the president implied that there needs to be a popular political movement for sustainable food before he can make big change -- and suggested to his wife that this might be her issue.  

Where, asked Pollan, are the members of Congress who will take up this issue as their own?  For now, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is letting Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) and other Big Ag–oriented reps run the show on food and ag policy.  The recent farm-bill fight was a loss, but during the debate the sustainable food movement started to get its message heard in D.C. and rattle some of the vested interests.  The next fight on Capitol Hill will be over the school lunch program reauthorization, Pollan said.  

Though the sustainable food movement seems to be thriving in oases like the Bay Area, Philpott pointed out that still only 3 to 4 percent of food consumed in the U.S. is organic or local.  How do we grow that number and include more people?  Pollan said the movement, like many social movements, was started by elites, but is spreading to other parts of society.  He sees encouraging signs in the heartland and among young people.  But if in 20 years people are still talking about this as an elitist movement, we'll know we really screwed up.  

Grist offers a big thanks to Pollan, host Tony Conrad and the rest of our host committee, our caterer Dominique Salomon (the food was scrumptious!), and everyone who attended and helped to make the evening a success.  Let's keep the conversation rolling.

Related Links:

Do diesel-based farmers dream of electric tractors?

Soil carbon—a blind spot in the debate on carbon

GoodGuide scanner makes healthy food shopping point and click

"... I will mention that I support organic and sustainable agriculture. In fact, Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution and from my home state of Iowa, is credited for creating a sustainable agriculture system decades ago."

-- Sen. Chuck Grassley (R.-Iowa), in a blustery, error-laden attack on Bryan Walsh's Time Magazine article "The Real Cost of Cheap Food"

Related Links:

Will Africa’s farmland become a ‘resource curse’?

Corporate agribusiness divides farmers

Sen. Inhofe and U.S. Farm Bureau chief casually chat about destroying the climate bill

Like a tractor driven by a drunk, the Obama administration keeps zigzagging on food/ag policy--sometimes veering in the direction of progressive change, other times whipping back toward the agrichemical status quo.

In the last couple of days, there's been a sharp turn toward the status quo. As I reported yesterday, Obama plucked Islam “Isi” Siddiqui from the nation's most powerful agrichemical lobby group and made him our chief negotiator on ag issues in global trade talks. This is a major coup for Big Ag. Ramming open foreign markets for our cheap food commodities and pricey ag inputs is critical to the industry's future profits--and perilous for global food security and the environment.

And today, Obama's Big Ag side got the best of him again. He tapped Roger Beachy, long-time president of the Danforth Plant Science Center, as chief of the USDA's newly created National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA).

A creation of the 2008 Farm Bill, the NIFA "replaces the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service, which distributes $200 million in competitive grants and about $280 million in 'formula funding' to land-grant universities," Science blog reports.

Science continues:

The Farm Bill adds another $106 million annually of competitive funding for research into organic farming, biomass, and fruits and vegetables. It also calls for a "distinguished scientist" to be appointed for a 6-year term as director.

So this is a critical post. If the sustainable farming movement is going to scale up and really start providing a large portion of the nation's calories--and deliver on its potentially huge environmental promises--than we're going to need a significant commitment of federal research dollars.

Roger BeachyPhoto: Courtesy of the Danforth CenterAnd what are we getting with the appointment of Beachy? The Danforth Plant Science Center, nestled in Monsanto's St. Louis home town, is essentially that company's NGO research and PR arm. According to its website, the center "was founded in 1998 through gifts from the St. Louis-based Danforth Foundation, the Monsanto Fund (a philanthropic foundation), and a tax credit from the State of Missouri."

Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant sits on the center's board of trustees, along with execs from defense giant McDonnell Douglas and pharma titan Merck. Another notable board member is Alfonso Romo, a Mexican magnate who cashed in big during his country's notoriously corrupt privatization /liberalization bonanza in the early '90s.

Romo used his connections to build a company called Seminis into the globe's biggest vegetable-seed concern, with dreams (as yet unrealized) of loads of new GMO veggie varieties. Monsanto bought Seminis in 2005. Here's a revealing Wall Street Journal profile of Romo from 1999; and here's what I wrote about him and the Monsanto/Seminis tie up back in 2005. (Interesting tidbit: Romo claims credit for innovating those insipid and ubiquitous "baby carrots"; and for reducing the spiciness of jalepeno peppers.)

On its short list of "partners" we find several research-oriented universities and one corporation: Monsanto. In the Danforth Center's 2007 annual report (PDF), Monsanto is mentioned no fewer than ten times funding this or that project.

So essentially, the public face of Monsanto's research efforts now has his fingers on the USDA's research purse strings. Score a big one for agribusiness!

So Obama has become an agribiz shill, right? Well, it's not nearly so simple.

Last winter, the administration tapped Kathleen Merrigan as deputy USDA secretary. This is traditionally a powerful position within the agency; under Bush, a paid-up industrial corn man held the post. Merrigan has pristine credentials as an organic advocate--and from the whispers I've heard, has been pushing that agenda within USDA.

I'm told she's met with many prominent sustainable-ag advocates--folks who were completely frozen out by the Bush USDA. The latest: On Twitter, Michel Dimock of California's Roots of Change recently announced he has "4 mtngs w/ USDA nxt 2 days." That sort of access simply wasn't available at Bush's USDA.

Then there's Merrigan's brainchild, "The Know Your Farmer Know Your Food" initiative (complete with splashy new web site). It's essentially an attempt to alert players in the sustainable food movement to possibilities of getting existing USDA funding. (I wrote briefly about its limits and promise lat week.) Again, you can call the initiative largely symbolic, but nothing remotely like it was happening under Bush.

It's certainly energizing sustainable ag NGO chiefs. On Chews Wise blog, Sam Fromartz reports that such folks are "pumped" by the initiative. He asked several for their reactions. Words like "fantastic," "thrilling," and "quite encouraging" tripped off their tongues.

Meanwhile, Michelle Obama--and her food ambassador, White House assistant chef/gardener Sam Kass--continues to push sustainable ag from the East Wing. One can assume she has some influence in the Oval Office.

So what's going on here? Whither the Obama administration on food and ag--toward a food future that seeks big, top-down, corporate-led answers, always straining to leapfrog ecological limits--and creating new sets of problems to be (lucratively) solved? Or toward one that works within ecological limits, builds resilience, and generates wealth and health within communities?

Right now, we're getting a kind of policy whiplash. But I have a conjecture--based completely on my own observation, not on any inside info. I'll give it here; and I urge readers to give their own conjectures below.

My conjecture is this: Obama likes cutting-edge ideas. You look at the ag landscape, and you see two distinct areas with great innovation, energy, and movement: biotech and organic/sustainable. So he's coming out strong behind both camps, and plans to sit back and see which one develops the best ideas.

The problem is that the biotech side has a massive advantage in terms of resources; and, as I've shown before, has benefitted from years of government cronyism and coddling. Moreover, it utterly dominates the university research agenda, aided by the draconian intellectual rights the government has awarded it.

So if Obama is setting up a kind of contest between the two camps, the game is rigged in advance.

That's what I think. Please write what you think below.

Related Links:

Washington Times: “Obama digs in on global warming”

Approaching Copenhagen with a Portfolio of Domestic Commitments

GoodGuide scanner makes healthy food shopping point and click

Agribiz: flying high ... or comiing down? If you run a globe-spanning, U.S.-centered agribusiness firm, you're probably not sure whether to cry in your Krug or toast with it this week.*

The bad news for the GMO/fertilizer/pesticide set: A federal court in San Francisco rebuked the USDA for greenlighting genetically modified sugar beets without rigorous testing of the novel crop's environmental impact. And that could have a major impact on the GMO seed industry, because there's never been a real reckoning among federal agencies about the impact of GMOs.

Want to know who came with the official rationale that GMOs are "substantially equivalent" to conventional crops--and this worthy of a regulatory free ride? It was that noted beautiful minder Dan Quayle, sitting on an Bush I's Council on Competitiveness in the early '90s.

The sugar beet ruling, coming on the heels of a similar one on GMO alfafa, may mark the beginning of the end of that free ride.

Fully 30 percent of the globe's refined sugar comes from beets--and the U.S. is a major producer. In 2005, the USDA ruled that the use of Monsanto's new line of Roundup Ready sugar beets--genetically rigged to withstand application of Monsanto's flagship herbicide--had "no significant impact" on the environment.

Trouble is, the agency did so without issuing a detailed "environmental impact statement," as it's arguably required to under the National Environmental Protection Act--and that's why the Center for Food Safety and other sustainable-food NGOs sued the USDA.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey S. White ruled (PDF here) in favor of the Center for Food Safety argument.

The ruling hinged on the argument that GMO sugar beets can cross-pollinate with and genetically contaminate non-GMO beets--and even with related species like Swiss chard and table beets. (In Willamette County, Ore., epicenter of industrial sugar-beet production, these other beet types are grown commonly, too.)

"In light of the large distances pollen can travel by wind and the context that seed for sugar beets, Swiss chard, and table beets are primarily grown in one valley in Oregon, Plaintiffs have demonstrated that deregulation [of GMO sugar beets] may significantly effect the environment," the Judge White declared.

So now he's ordering a detailed environmental impact statement (EIS) from the USDA on GMO sugar beets. But any rigorous EIS will include not only the cross-contamination problem, but also the  growing specter of Roundup-tolerant "superweeds," which are already rampant in many parts of the country where Roundup Ready seeds are commonly used.

The agency might even have to reckon with the recent study that showed that so-called "inert" ingredients in Roundup quite actively damage human cells.

In other words, this ruling--if it stands up under an imminent round of appeals--could be a slippery slope for Monsanto. Investors, for their part, seem a bit concerned--since the ruling was announced Tuesday, the company's shares are down about 2 percent.

Now for the good news for the great masters of the corn field: President Obama has nominated one of their own as the chief agricultural negotiator at the U.S. Trade Office.

To take the post, Islam "Isi" Siddiqui will have to leave his current perch as vice president for agricultural biotechnology and trade at CropLife America, the trade group representing the U.S. agrichemical industry (member list here). Its mission: to hip the public (and the government)  to the ""benefits of pesticides and crop-protection chemicals."

This is the crew that chided Michelle Obama for daring to opt not to use "crop protection" (i.e., toxic pesticides) in the White House Garden.

Once the Senate's conservative stalwarts recover from the shock of supporting a man named Islam, they'll surely wave Siddiqui right through.

As the Doha round of global trade talks lurches on, Siddiqui's position will be an important one. Southerm-hemisphere nations like India and Brazil are pushing for lower U.S. crop subsidies, while the U.S. is demanding wide-open markets for U.S. goods--everything from foodstuffs like industrial corn to agrichemicals. Siddiqui can be counted on to push that agenda hard.

Another critical ag-related trade issue is GMOs. Many nations have opted to ban GMOs on the precautionary principle. The few companies who dominate the GMO seed market--Monsanto, Dupont, Syngenta, and BASF, all Croplife America--find that attitude abhorrent. Siddiqui can be expected to play hardball in using trade talks as a blunt instrument to knock those precautions down.

* Since I'm an acolyte of the wine writer Alice Feiring, you should read my casual assumption that agribiz execs quaff Krug, an insipid status-brand Champagne, as a stinging insult.

Related Links:

Do diesel-based farmers dream of electric tractors?

Will Africa’s farmland become a ‘resource curse’?

Top 25 reasons to give a damn about climate change

In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries.

------

Correction: In the chart to the right, Tyson's share of the beef market should read 28 percent, not 38 percent. We are working on a corrected version of the chart. I regret the error. --T.P.

Well, Brazil-based beef behemoth JBS has announced a deal to take a two-thirds stake of struggling U.S. poultry titan Pilgrim's. (Evidently, company founder "Bo" Pilgrim couldn't stand to sever all ties with the company that he drove into bankruptcy with his relentless zeal to grow bigger and bigger.)

JBS also announced a surprise deal to buy one of its biggest Brazilian rivals, the beef processor Bertin. Before the deals, JBS was already the globe's largest beef processor, with a jaw-dropping 10 percent of the worldwide beef market. If the two deals make it past U.S. and Brazilian antitrust authorities, JBS will leapfrog Tyson as the globe's largest meat company; it will have about $30 billion in annual revenue, compared to Tyson's $26.7 billion, Reuters reports. (Cargill has $120 billion in annual revenue, but its interests extend well beyond meat to grain trading, fertilizer, biofuel, and even a hedge fund).

And thus, four gigantic companies now dominate meat production here.

Well, not quite yet. There is that matter of antitrust. But while the Obama Administration has rattled its sword at unchecked agribiz consolidation, hardly anyone expects it to block this tie-up. Before the deal, JBS had huge positions (see chart) in the U.S. beef and pork markets; but none in chicken. So the logic goes like this: by taking out Pilgrim's, JBS isn't reducing the number of players in the chicken market--and thus there are no grounds for blocking the deal.

The Obama Justice Department will likely buy that line. I don't, though. The deal would leave two companies--JBS and Tyson--with enormous positions in beef, pork, and chicken, the crown jewels of the supermarket meat case. Both companies will be able to offer huge retailers like Wal-Mart and Safeway the full range of meat options, giving them an advantage over smaller players focused on a single commodity. (Two other companies, Cargill and Smithfield, have massive positions in at least two meat commodities, but can't boast the beef-pork-chicken triple play.)

And to grab prime shelf space for its product line, JBS and Tyson might be tempted to sacrifice profits in one commodity in hopes of gaining higher profits in another. JBS could, say, entice Wal-Mart to prominently feature its whole line of products by slashing beef prices in hopes of booking profits on chicken and pork. Such a strategy might work for JBS's own bottom line-- but be a disaster for the ranchers who supply it with beef cows.

As market consolidation in the meat industry proceeds apace, the surviving independent livestock farmers (they're really CAFO operators) face ever-heavier downward pressure on the prices offered by the few remaining big processors. That means more pressure to stuff as many animals as possible into confinement facilities, and more pressure to dispose as cheaply as possible of the vast mountains of waste generated thereby.

Thus, likely, more public-health troubles like MRSA and antibiotic-resistant salmonella (see below); and more contribution to slow-motion environmental disasters like polluted rivers, fouled drinking water, and--granddaddy of all--climate change.

*

Info for chart comes from the following sources:
-- Brazilians Bid for U.S. Meat Titan, The Wall Street Journal
-- U.S. seen approving a JBS-Pilgrim's Pride deal, Reuters
-- Concentration of Agriculture Markets, April 2007 [PDF], by Mary Hendrickson and William Heffernan
-- JBS Eyes Top Spot with Pilgrim's, Bertin Deals, Reuters

• Yet the U.S. meat industry is in crisis--demand growth is slack because of the bad economy, and profits are now low, at best, for the meat giants. Why is JBS moving so aggressively into the U.S.? (Its U.S. buying spree started last year, when its snapped up Swift's beef and pork assets and Smithfield's beef operations.) Why buy a struggling chicken giant?

One reason is that Pilgrim's Pride was so damned cheap. The company's hard-driving founder, "Bo" Pilgrim, had taken on a mountain of debt to propel the company to the top of the poultry pecking order. As recently as last year, Pilgrim's was the globe's largest poultry processor, with more than 20 percent of the U.S. market (a few percentage points more than arch-rival Tyson) and a robust export business.

But when the financial crisis hit last year, chicken prices plunged, and Pilgrim's creditors grew antsy about refinancing debt. Engulfed in a cash crunch, Pilgrim's had to declare bankruptcy and shutter some plants. (There was widespread speculation that Tyson intentionally held down chicken prices to push Pilgrim's over a cliff.) Pilgrim's Pride's market share fell to below 20 percent; Tyson regained the crown of U.S. chicken king.

Meanwhile, investors rushed to sell PP's stock, which has since traded at pennies on the dollar from 2007 levels. So in stepped deep-pocketed JBS. For about $2.8 billion, the company is getting about a fifth of the U.S. chicken market--a bargain, especially if chicken prices recover along with the economy. JBS is betting that when the U.S.--and perhaps more important, the global--economy picks up, a fifth of the chicken market will be worth a lot more than $2.8 billion.

• Really, this deal seems to be about exports--a play on rising global demand for cheap meat. Even in the best of times, overall demand for meat in the U.S. is stagnant, rising only at the sluggish rate of population growth. Meat companies boost profits in two ways: 1) by squeezing their suppliers (farmers) on price and slaughterhouse workers on wages; and 2) expanding into foreign markets. At this point, the real cash is to be made through access to places like Asia and Eastern Europe, where demand is rising rapidly. And U.S. companies have been masterful at gaining access to those markets--which is probably why JBS is so interested in alighting here.

"In terms of benefits, it [the JBS-Pilgrim's deal] is a global story rather than a U.S. story," one analyst told Reuters. "They well understand the international focus. When (about) 20 percent (of U.S. chicken) is exported, they see some potential in that poultry complex from a global demand perspective."

Bright lights, Big ChickenSo the deal is really about globalizing the disastrous U.S. relationship with meat--making sure that the rest of the world, too, comes to see it as a cheap everyday commodity to be raised under ecologically and socially devastating conditions.

 • Sometimes, U.S. meat and dairy companies focus on exporting their dubious wares to countries in the developing world; other times, they focus on establishing vast, largely unregulated facilities there, as pork giant Smithfield has done to disastrous effect (unless you own Smithfield shares) in Mexico and Poland.

Then there's companies that peddle their wares as consultants, selling their expertise in setting up huge industrial-scale livestock operations in places where small farmers still do things outdoors on pasture. That's what the Wisconsin firm Cooperative Resources International is getting up to in China.

From an account in the Milwaukee Business Journal:

Cooperative Resources International, a dairy and beef genetics agricultural cooperative, has entered into a long-term agreement with Flying Crane Dairy, one of China's largest producers and distributors of premium infant formula and milk powder.

Cooperative Resources (CRI) has worked extensively with the state of Wisconsin to develop international relationships and trade. It is one of the largest U.S. suppliers of cattle semen to China.

So we've got a tie-up between a Wisconsin cattle-semen outfit and a Chinese infant formula supplier here, facilitated by the state of Wisconsin and its taxpayers. What's the plan?

Under the agreement, CRI will advise Flying Crane, which intends to construct 10 additional dairy farms to house 10,000 dairy cows at each facility in order to increase its milk processing capacity to a goal of 5,000 tons per day.

Nice! That's what the world needs now--ten more gigantic dairy feedlots. Way to use that Wisconsin ingenuity to export industrial dairy production to a country with no dairy tradition!

• Finally, Meat Wagon takes a detour from the bleaker regions of industrial agriculture and lurches down the uncharted path toward hope. Rep. Louise Slaughter (D.-New York) has formally petitioned the GAO to review how the federal government tracks antibiotic use on factory farms.

This is potentially a huge deal. Animals that live crammed together over their own waste tend to see their immune systems flag and become vulnerable to disease. Today's CAFOs rely on steady doses of antibiotics just to keep animals alive. Moreover, scientists discovered a generation or so ago that regular doses of antibiotics make animals grow faster--a key consideration for livestock farmers facing chronically low prices for their goods.

The problem is obvious: where antibiotics are used routinely, antibiotic-resistant "superbugs" thrive.

As it stands now, information on factory-animal farm antibiotic use is maddeningly opaque. A tangle of agencies--the FDA, CDC, and USDA--ostensibly monitor the topic; but none has direct responsibility for measuring and reporting it. As a result, no one has more than the vaguest estimate of overall use.

A couple of years ago, the Union of Concerned Scientists stepped into the void and ventured a guess. Extrapolating from raw data, the group estimated that as much as 70 percent of antibiotics used in the U.S. go into animal factories. The meat industry shrieked in protest, rushing out a rival study with a much lower number.

Meanwhile, the federal agencies kept quiet--and evidence of links between antibiotic-dependent CAFOs and antibiotic-resistant pathogens (MRSA and salmonella) has mounted.

As Slaughter's letter points out, the GAO has chastised the federal government for its failure to track antibiotics before. Writes Slaughter:

[I]n a 2005 report entitled Antibiotic Resistance: Federal Agencies Need to Better Focus Efforts to Address Risk to Humans from Antibiotic Use in Animals, GAO found that data were not being collected on the types and amounts of antibiotics used in different species of food animals or whether they were used to promote growth, prevent disease, or treat disease.

So now, Slaughter is demanding followup. Any progress since 2005? If not, why not--and when?

Slaughter is also sponsoring an important bill called HR 1549, which would ban routine use of antibiotics on farms. Predictably, the meat industry is using all its lobbying might to fight it.

Of course, the federal government's know-nothing response to antibiotic levels plays to the industry's interests. It's difficult to address a problem when your unclear as to it scope. For a solid understanding of why we need to know how much antibiotics are being guzzled by CAFOs--and why we need to stop their routine use as livestock feed supplements--see the fantastic article "Farmocology" in a recent issue of Johns Hopkins Magazine.

Here's a sample:

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that livestock and poultry produce 335 million tons of manure per year, which is one way [antibiotic-]resistant pathogens get out of animals and into the environment. That's 40 times as much fecal waste as humans produce annually. Farms use it for fertilizer and collect it in sheds and manure lagoons, but those containment measures do not prevent infectious microbes from getting into the air, soil, and water. They can be transported off the farms by the animals themselves, houseflies, farm trucks, and farm workers, and by spreading manure on other fields. Out in the environment, they form a sort of bank of genetic material that enables the spread of [antibiotic] resistance.

Related Links:

Will Africa’s farmland become a ‘resource curse’?

Uh-oh: Tamiflu-resistant swine flu rears up in the U.S., U.K.

Why the USDA has no business overseeing conditions on factory farms, and more

Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Brazilian firm JBS--the globe's largest beef processor--was on the verge of buying U.S. chicken giant Pilgrim's Pride. Although the companies have since remained mum on the tie-up, rumors of an imminent deal continue to swirl.

While we await and announcement, it's worth considering what the U.S. meat industry would look like if JBS swallowed Pilgrim's Pride. Essentially, it would look like this: four giants (JBS, Tyson, Cargill, and Smithfield) lumbering across the landscape, towering over and stepping on their farmer suppliers.

As it stands today, JBS processes 10 percent of the beef consumed worldwide. If the Pilgrim's deal goes through, it will have large positions in the U.S. beef, pork, and chicken markets.

The move seems like a play to go toe-to-toe with Tyson, the only other company with large positions in those three commodities. As one industry observer put it on the AgWeb blog, wielding such large positions across commodities gives Tyson leverage with big retailers for shelf space. He writes:

I know that Tyson's multi-meat capabilities give them an advantage over competitors who lack their diversified market exposure and can't offer big retailers a full line of meat case products.

JBS's move, if it goes through, augurs fierce competition between the few remaining meat processors--which means severe downward pressure on the prices received by farmers, fewer and yet larger factory animal farms, and yet more incentives to take short cuts and compromise worker safety and public health.

It's too early to say whether the Obama Justice Department is serious about reigning in the unchecked market power of our few remaining meat processors. If JBS and Pilgrim's Pride finalize this deal, we'll have our first real test.

*

More info:
-- Brazilians Bid for U.S. Meat Titan, The Wall Street Journal
-- U.S. seen approving a JBS-Pilgrim's Pride deal, Reuters
-- Concentration of Agriculture Markets, April 2007 [PDF], by Mary Hendrickson and William Heffernan

Related Links:

EU pushes China further after pledge to slow carbon intensity

Do diesel-based farmers dream of electric tractors?

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Michael PollanNPR’s Guy Raz: What if health care is overhauled and it doesn’t change the American diet in any way?

Michael Pollan: We’ll go broke. If we don’t get a handle on these health care costs, the new system or the old system, we’ll go broke. And that’s why I think that really food is the elephant in the room when we’re talking about health care.

First in The New York Times last week and then on NPR this weekend, Michael Pollan made that point that if we want to fix our health-care system, we have to fix our food system.

From his op-ed in the Times:

[T]he fact that the United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on health care can be substantially explained, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter. ...

That’s why our success in bringing health care costs under control ultimately depends on whether Washington can summon the political will to take on and reform a second, even more powerful industry: the food industry. ...

Cheap food is going to be popular as long as the social and environmental costs of that food are charged to the future. There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry.

But even with that grim diagnosis, Pollan is optimistic about the future, arguing that if insurance companies are required to accept everyone, as called for by even weak health-reform legislation now in Congress, then the insurance industry will become a powerful ally in fight for better food and against the agribusiness lobby.

Grist’s Tom Laskawy is less optimistic, noting that the poor and the elderly—the most unhealthy groups—are likely to keep getting their health coverage from the government (Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA) and not the insurance industry.

Still, both Pollan and Laskawy are encouraged by New York City’s new anti-soda ad campaign, which Laskawy says is supported by health insurance companies.  Will we see more such public-health campaigns around the country, no matter what happens with health-care reform in Washington, D.C.?

Here’s an ad from NYC’s campaign:

Related Links:

Do diesel-based farmers dream of electric tractors?

Ask Umbra on ditching dirty things

Will Africa’s farmland become a ‘resource curse’?

As suspected, agribusiness is indeed turning cartwheels over the news that Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln is now chairman of the Senate Ag Committee. The public policy director for the retrograde American Farm Bureau told The Hill, "We couldn’t have handpicked a chairman better than this." The giant sucking sound you're hearing is agricultural reform rushing down the drain.

The headline of The Hill's piece tells you all you need to know:  "K Street welcomes Lincoln as the new head of Ag committee" -- K Street being the center of the lobbying biz. If you read on, however, you'll discover all sorts of lovely little Lincolnian tidbits. Did you know that in 2007 Lincoln tried to exempt agribusiness from toxic waste lawsuits? The fact that Tyson Foods, the nation's largest chicken (and chickensh*t) producer, is based in Arkansas and is a major campaign contributor to her is, of course, a total coincidence.

Oh, and all that oil and gas money she gets is entirely unrelated to her strident opposition to climate change legislation -- opposition that is so strong, The Hill speculated she could single-handedly derail it.

Indeed, there is no good news here. Some (including me) have speculated that Lincoln had little hope of reelection come 2010. But now, with money flowing into her coffers and local industry fully aware that, should Lincoln lose, Michigan's Debbie Stabenow would be in charge of ag in the Senate, Lincoln's reelection propsects have suddenly brightened.

Meanwhile, Lincoln submitted her first bill related to the school lunch program reauthorization scheduled for early next year -- a top administration priority and an area which seemed poised for a significant overhaul. This bill, though minor, offers some insight into exactly how much reform we can expect from her. The answer: Very little.

The bill would require the development of "model product specifications and practices for foods offered in school nutrition programs" such that they meet federal dietary guidelines. I don't know what's more depressing. The fact that many school food programs don't already meet federal dietary guidelines or the fact that even meals that met those guidelines are the opposite of healthy. Either way, it doesn't appear that we can expect much reform from Lincoln on that front either.

And while we can continue to work to get money out of politics so that our politicians have one less reason to listen to corporate interests, the Supreme Court is about to ensure such an eventuallity never happens.

The only hope for reform, as I see it, is to take the favored GOP strategy and wait for the agribusiness over-reach -- in other words, wait for a policy endorsed by the House and Senate ag committees that's so extreme other congressional players decide they have no choice but to act. A hint of how this might work came in the House food safety bill, which the congressional leadership declined to submit officially to the House Ag Committe because they knew those committeemembers would tear it to pieces.

Is it possible that Lincoln and Rep. Collin Peterson -- her counterpart in the House -- can misbehave so badly that it finally causes normally lily-livered representatives on other House and Senate committees to take a stand against agribusiness? I have my doubts. But with agribusiness now as well positioned as they've ever been to get their way on the big issues facing food and agriculture, it's pretty much all we've got.

Related Links:

Will Africa’s farmland become a ‘resource curse’?

Corporate agribusiness divides farmers

Newsweek partners with oil lobby to raise ad cash

Blanche Lincoln: bully for industrial cotton growers; bad for climate change mitigation.

[Note: This post has been updated to reflect confirmation that Blanche Lincoln will take the top Senate Agriculture Committee post. Additional updates at bottom of post--including information about Lincoln's status as a favorite of agribusiness funders.]

Late yesterday afternoon marked a dark moment for sustainable-ag advocates. Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) announced he had decided against taking over Teddy Kennedy's chairmanship of the Senate's health committee, setting in motion a game of musical chairs that has propelled Blanche Lincoln (D.-Ark) to the top spot on the Senate agriculture committee. Current ag chair Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) will vacate the seat to take up the health committee chair.

For people hoping for progressive change in U.S. ag policy, this is dismal news. True, Harkin is somewhat sold out to agribusiness interests. For example, he vowed to push an agenda for the climate bill that's even more agribusiness-friendly than that of his House counterpart, Collin Peterson (D.-Minn.).

But he's a relatively progressive politician--and he's been a reliable supporter of important conservation programs, and has been (by today's standards) a champion of enforcing antitrust principles in highly consolidated agriculture markets. And he might have been expected, for example, to be a positive force in the upcoming fight over the reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Law, which funds the National School Lunch Program. The current version expires Sept. 30; reports suggest it will be extended as is and not taken up until the spring.

By that time, Lincoln will have settled in as committee chair. If Harkin is relatively progressive, Linclon spells unmitigated disaster for ag reform. Here's how Des Moines Register ag writer Philip Brasher describes her:

Lincoln is as vigorous a proponent for large farms and livestock interests (think Arkansas-based Tyson Foods) as there is in Congress. Pair her with the panel's senior Republican, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, and you have a powerful one-two punch for the southern perspective on agricultural policy.

By "southern perspective on agricultural policy," Brasher means not only a laissez-faire attitude toward meat giants like Tyson, but also generous subsidies for mass-scale cotton farms.

Perhaps worse, Lincoln is in deep political trouble in Arkansas. A solidly conservative Democrat, she nevertheless finds herself a target of right-wing rage for her support of healthcare reform. (Under pressure, she recently withdrew her support for the "public option.")

She faces re-election in 2010--and until her move to the ag committee chair became imminent, her reelection prospects looked dim. But from her perch at atop the powerful ag committee, she'll be much more likely to win support of the rural right, an Arkansas political observer speculated this morning.

To do so, she'll likely make her ag agenda even more regressive. One trembles at what's in store for the climate bill under her leadership. For her state's ascending loony right, supporting solid climate-change legislation is tantamount to signing a pact with the Devil and the KGB. Already, she's taken a hard line on ensuring that the climate bill will either toe the agribusiness line, or not pass at all. Kate Sheppard reports at the Washington Independent:

Lincoln recently called the House climate and energy bill "a complete non-starter," pledging that the Senate would move more slowly on legislation do more to address regional concerns. Her own concerns have been potential rises in energy costs and impacts on agriculture. As a member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, she agreed to support a renewable electricity standard only after it was lowered from 20 percent by 2020 to 15 percent.

Meanwhile, Arkansas-based Tyson Foods has benefitted greatly from the de facto privatization of school lunches--its prefab chicken nuggets are perfect for public schools with tiny lunch budgets and no cafeteria kitchens. Can we count on Lincoln to champion a Child Nutrition Law that mandates fresh, healthy food in schools?

Weirdly, the sustainable-ag movement finds itself in the position of hoping that Arkansas' birthers, tea baggers, and Glenn Beck acolytes manage to take out a Democratic Senator. Such are these surreal political times.

UPDATE: In a phone conversation, Kate Fitzgerald, a senior policy analyst at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, told me that Sen. Lincoln has demonstrated that she "understands the importance" of a robust school-lunch program--and even of one that connects schools to nearby farmers. Fitzgerald told me that during the 2007-'08 Farm Bill debate, Lincoln did support the principle of "geographical preference"--the idea that school districts can buy locally grown food in when it's not cheaper. Whether that means Lincoln will champion the budget increases necessary to create such an improved program is a different question--one Fitzgerald had no answer for. Given the furor of the  tea-bagger wing of her constituency, for whom spending on public programs amounts to Bolshevism, it seems doubtful that Lincoln will push for much-needed budget increases.

Meanwhile, I checked out the Blanche Lincoln page at the campaign-finance watchdog Open Secrets website. Agribiz donors have apparently been expecting Lincoln to rise to the top spot--or just really like her work. For the 2009-2010 election cycle, Lincoln ranks as the number-one recipient of donations among all Senatorial candidates from the following ag-related industries: Agricultural Svcs, Crop Production, Food Process/Sales, Forest Products, Poultry & Eggs. For good measure, she's number two in the cold heart of the dairy industry. Chillingly, given the Senate ag committee's sway over the climate bill, she's the top recipient of cash from the Oil & Gas industry.

Related Links:

Will Africa’s farmland become a ‘resource curse’?

NYT: U.S. Chamber has not expressed support for any proposals to cap emissions

Winning the clean energy race: a new strategy for American leadership

Not  many "green shoots" in the Central Valley. California's severe drought--which could well be related to climate change--isn't just menacing Los Angeles.

The drought has helped tip the state's Central Valley, epicenter of U.S. fruit and vegetable production, into a severe crisis, The Wall Street Journal reports. Hammered by dry weather, the weak economy, and new restrictions on irrigation, the area's vast farms are scaling down production and firing workers. The result is a full-on economic depression--one that falls hardest on the most vulnerable workers. From the Journal article:

"We either have money for gas and medicine, or food -- not both," Helen Hernandez, a 51-year-old mother of four, said after collecting a pallet of food from the relief drive. Ms. Hernandez said her husband, David, 49, has been out of work since losing his $1,200-a-month job at a tomato-packing house last year.

In a Wednesday editorial, the Journal's right-wing editorial page blamed the situation on the federal government, which has restricted the diversion of water into the Central Valley to protect the coastal ecosystem to the west. Over the last several decades, water has regularly been diverted en masse from the area's rivers to irrigate the Valley's vast vegetable farms. As a reuslt, the amount of freshwater entering the coast had plunged--causing coastal fish populations to plunge as well. In response, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service imposed water reductions on the area--just as the drought was settling in.

For the Journal editorial page, the solution is simple--let the water flow freely into the Central Valley, fish be damned.

But should we really be sacrificing a once-robust, highly productive coastal ecosystem so that a few counties in California can go on supplying the entire nation with vegetables? (To see just how dependent we are on California for our veggies, see page 25 of this document [PDF]--or read my post on the topic from last spring.)

It's hard to see why the Delta fishery should be allowed to die to save the Valley's massive industrial farms. Moreover--this should register with the ultra-libertarians at the Journal editorial page--the diversion of irrigation water to Central Valley farmers has traditionally been subsidized to the tune of $100 million per year in taxpayer cash, according to Environmental Working Group.

I have lots of sympathy for the thousands of unemployed, struggling workers in the Central Valley. State and federal aid should flow their way. But the way forward is not a return to agribusiness as usual there. The Central Valley needs to diversify its economy in a way that works not only for area residents, but also for the surrounding ecosystem. (Besides industrial agriculture, the area's other main industry was, until recently, construction--the very kind of sprawling development that is now itself mired in a deep crisis.)

As to the question of where we're going to get vegetables as agriculture in the Central Valley withers, it's time to get serious about rebuilding local and regional food production.

Related Links:

Will Africa’s farmland become a ‘resource curse’?

Is there a tradeoff between economics and the environment?

A Penny Saved Is…

In the ongoing debate about whether sustainable agriculture can "feed the world," it's important not to lose sight of what industrial agriculture is doing to ecosystems--both in specific areas and on a grand scale.

Producing and distributing lots and lots of calories, leveraged by fossil fuel and synthetic fertilizers and poisons, may solve certain short-term problems; but the practice also creates long-term ones that won't be easily solved.

In June, a study emerged showing that so-called inert ingredients in Roundup, Monsanto's widely used flagship herbicide, can kill human cells even at low levels--"particularly embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells," reports Scientific American. This is an herbicide that's used on virtually all of our nation's corn and soy fields, covering tens of millions of acres of cropland. (It's also widely used by landscapers and on home lawns.)

Then there was the recent atrazine imbroglio. For years, the EPA has been assuring the public that the highly toxic herbicide, still widely used in the Corn Belt, wasn't showing up in drinking water in worrisome levels. Turns out that was a lie, as some excellent muckraking by the Huffington Post Investigative Fund revealed. Atrazine exposure has been strongly associated with reproductive health maladies, including a rise in hermaphroditism among frog populations.

Note that corn and soy production, as practiced today, is completely reliant on these two broad-spectrum herbicides.

Now comes news about the hazards of another input critical to the project of industrial agricultire: synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. When farmers apply nitrogen to farm fields, a certain amount enters the atmosphere as nitrous oxide. And according to a study conducted by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and published in Science, human-generated nitrous oxide is now the No. 1 contributor to ozone-layer depletion.

The study is the first ever to look closely at nitrous oxide's role as an ozone destroyer. The results are alarming. From a summary of the study on the NOAA website:

For the first time, this study has evaluated nitrous oxide emissions from human activities in terms of their potential impact on Earth's ozone layer. As chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which have been phased out by international agreement, ebb in the atmosphere, nitrous oxide will remain a significant ozone-destroyer, the study found. Today, nitrous oxide emissions from human activities are more than twice as high as the next leading ozone-depleting gas.

The withering away of the ozone layer, which was slowed but not stopped by the 1987 Montreal Protocol phasing out CFCs, is no trivial matter. As the NOAA summary puts it:

The ozone layer serves to shield plants, animals and people from excessive ultraviolet light from the sun. Thinning of the ozone layer allows more ultraviolet light to reach the Earth's surface where it can damage crops and aquatic life and harm human health.

Moreover, the Montreal Protocol does not regulate nitrous oxide.

Of course, agriculture-induced nitrous oxide isn't just eating the ozone layer. It's also a greenhouse gas with 300 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide.

Thus the implications of agriculture's reliance on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer are literally earth-shaking: The way we're feeding ourselves is contributing dramatically to two processes--climate change and ozone depletion--that could literally make the planet uninhabitable by humans.

Worse still, we my be seriously underestimating industrial agriculture's nitrous oxide emissions. When considering agriculture's contribution of nitrous oxide to the atmosphere, scientists have assumed that about 1 percent of the nitrogen fertilizer applied by farmers ends up in the atmosphere as nitrous oxide. The EPA operates under that assumption, as did the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But the real number may be considerably higher. A 2008 study [PDF] by the Nobel-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen found that as much as 5 percent of nitrogen fertilizer applied by farmers turns into nitrous oxide--which would make agriculture a much larger contributor to climate change (and ozone depletion) than is currently assumed.

On top of all of that, nitrogen runoff from agriculture is also strongly implicated in the creation of coastal dead zones--large algae blooms that suck oxygen out of the sea and snuff out marine life.

What all of this points to is the need to bring ecological considerations into agriculture. And in fact, there's already a budding field known as agroecology. Agrocecology is now at best a fringe field in academia; as public funding for university research dries up, giant agribusiness firms like Monsanto increasingly finance--and control--the research agenda. They have little interest in ecology and vested interests in pushing their own proprietary products.

Related Links:

Do diesel-based farmers dream of electric tractors?

Will Africa’s farmland become a ‘resource curse’?

Top 25 reasons to give a damn about climate change

TIME Magazine's current cover story wants you to know that our fossil-fueled, chemically intensive industrial food system is destined to fail. Granted, the second part of that sentence isn't news to Grist readers. But the first part of that sentence is news. Personally, I wouldn't have expected to read the following positively Philpottian (if not Pollan-esque) prose in a national newsweekly cover story:

With the exhaustion of the soil, the impact of global warming and the inevitably rising price of oil — which will affect everything from fertilizer to supermarket electricity bills — our industrial style of food production will end sooner or later. As the developing world grows richer, hundreds of millions of people will want to shift to the same calorie-heavy, protein-rich diet that has made Americans so unhealthy — demand for meat and poultry worldwide is set to rise 25% by 2015 — but the earth can no longer deliver. Unless Americans radically rethink the way they grow and consume food, they face a future of eroded farmland, hollowed-out countryside, scarier germs, higher health costs — and bland taste. Sustainable food has an élitist reputation, but each of us depends on the soil, animals and plants — and as every farmer knows, if you don't take care of your land, it can't take care of you.

TIME Magazine talking about exhausted soil? Whooda thunkit? The importance of Bryan Walsh's piece, of course, isn't in the particulars of its insights or its prescriptions. The importance (aside from its very existence as a cover story) is in its declarative nature.  For openers, Walsh offers a whirlwind tour of industrial ag practices which covers swine tail docking, sub-therapeutic antibiotic use, manure lagoons, ag subsidies, nitrogen fertilizer run-off and the Gulf of Mexico deadzone -- all in the first paragraph. And better yet, Walsh doesn't fall back on that tired journalistic trope of the "third party fact." "Experts" don't "claim" nor do "critics" "observe" nor even does "Michael Pollan" "relate" this or that fact of industrial ag's excesses: they are instead plainly stated as established, if awful, truth. How refreshing.

Indeed, in these two paragraphs Walsh brings into stark relief the very issues over which Big Ag willfully and relentlessly refuses to engage. One of the more surprising aspects of the article is a total lack of any boilerplate denials from Big Ag of all responsibility for the ills of industrial food that typically get some play whenever the topic of food production gets attention from the MSM. I don't think it's an oversight that we didn't hear from the National Corn Growers Association or the American Farm Bureau or Monsanto or Smithfield or any other Big Ag mouthpiece in this article -- it's likely that nothing they said was worth repeating.

Honestly, the best you can expect to hear from them is some paean to American agricultural ingenuity and productivity such as in soy farmer and AFM official Blake Hurst's Omnivore's Delusion (though after you read it, be sure to rinse your brain with Tom Philpott's able riposte). Hurst, as it happens, manages to ignore or elide just about every damaging issue regarding industrial agriculture that TIME Magazine has so pointedly raised. And it's no coincidence -- the fact is that Big Ag doesn't have the answers to sustainability. What they do know about is succeeding in a status quo of abundant oil, chemicals and subsidies. Change the rules of the game -- spiking fuel prices, fertilizer shortages, superweeds, superbugs, etc. -- and they no longer know how to play.

If I have a regret about this piece, it's in the conclusion. Walsh invokes the concepts of "conscious" eating on the one hand, versus "selective forgetting" of the consequences of our food choices on the other. Consumers must be open to change, he declares, if we're to move toward a more sustainable system. This is no doubt true. But I would have liked a final invocation as well of industrial agriculture's "ticking clock." Right now, consumer choice is surely a crucial factor. But if, for example, worldwide demand for meat is in fact set to rise 25% by 2015, it seems to me that we'll be having unpleasant "choices" thrust upon us much sooner than we may expect. And after 2015 things are only going to get worse (Peak Oil, anyone?) America's Food Crisis and How to Fix It may have been one of the most thorough and alarmist articles on the industrial food system ever to appear in a major magazine. Sadly, it may not have been nearly alarmist enough.

Related Links:

Do diesel-based farmers dream of electric tractors?

Will the Washington Post ever fact check a George Will column?

Ask Umbra on ditching dirty things

Photo illustration by Tom Twigg / Grist

A lot of folks have asked what I think of the essay "The Omnivore's Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals," by Missouri corn/soy farmer Blake Hurst, published in The American, the journal of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute.

My first reaction is that I'm thrilled this debate is taking place. The sustainable-food movement needs to step up and start grappling with big questions. I've said for a while that I see three big challenges for the sustainable-food movement as it scales up: 1) soil fertility--in the absence of synthesized nitrogen and mined phosphorous and potassium, how are we to build soil fertility on a larger scale?; 2) labor--sustainable farming requires more hands on the ground; who's going to work our farm fields, and at what wages?; and 3) access--in an economy built on long-term wage stagnation, how can we make sustainably grown food accessible to everyone?

Hurst's essay begins to engage these questions--sort of. I don't have the time or energy right now to take it on point by point. But I will say that the discussion would be much richer if he acknowledged a few serious questions about the industrial-farming model he champions.

For example, he barely acknowledges climate change. The EPA reckons [PDF] that half of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions from agriculture come from fertilizer-related nitrous oxide--a greenhouse gas some 300 times more potent than carbon. The Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist, has concluded [PDF] that the EPA is dramatically underestimating the amount of nitrous oxide produced by industrial farming. Given that reality and the looming climate emergency, how long can U.S. farmers keep churning out titanic corn harvests? Hurst never goes there. Of course, he's vice president of his state's branch of the American Farm Bureau Federation, which has both been vigorously fighting climate legislation (on the grounds that climate change is a myth) [PDF] and campaigning to make sure that any bill that gets though Congress has plenty of goodies for agribusiness. So maybe be doesn't consider nitrous oxide emissions a problem?

Another limiting factor is petroleum scarcity. According to Hurst's byline at the bottom of the article, "In a few days he will spend the next six weeks on a combine." A combine is a massive, diesel-sucking machine. How long does Hurst expect to be able to casually spend six weeks burning gallon after gallon of diesel amid limited global petroleum supplies (not to mention climate impacts)? Again, no mention of energy scarcity. (Cue "drill, baby, drill" plea from the Farm Bureau?)

Then there's the whole problem of ecological blowback. Hurst venerates large-scale confinement livestock operations--but he doesn't mention that these facilities rely on a prodigious cocktail of antibiotics to keep animals alive and growing. Now we're getting outbreaks of antibiotic-resistant salmonella and staph (MRSA) directly linked to factory animal farms. There's the distinct possibility that the latest novel swine flu strain emerged from the fecal mire of a vast hog operation. How long does Hurst think we can control these potentially deadly diseases? Also on the topic of ecological pushback, Hurst champions the practice known as chemical no-till--planting herbicide-tolerant GM seeds and then dousing the field with weed killer. There's little evidence that this practice sequesters carbon in the soil (see here and here)--but plenty of evidence that it's generating herbicide-resistant "superweeds." Again, what's the plan--just a steady rollout of new poison-tolerant seed combos to clean up the messes of the previous ones?

Finally--and this may be the most egregious omission, given that he's writing for a Cheneyite rag--Hurst fails to acknowledge that his farming style depends on a steady stream of government aid. I personally believe that our society should support farmers, and that our commodity-subsidy system could be re-jiggered to support sustainable farming. Indeed, for the reasons given above, I believe sustainable farming will remain forever a niche unless that happens. Yet if I were writing for a think tank that's devoted itself for decades to dismantling state spending (except for on military adventures and hardware), I might feel obliged to defend or at least acknowledge this position. Yet Hurst is silent.

Let's have a look--shall we not?--at the Environmental Working Group's commodity-subsidy database. it's the black book of right-wing Farm Bureau types. According to his bio, Hurst farms in Atchison County, Mo. EWG informs us that farmers in Atchison drew in a cool $131 million in government commodity payments between 1995 and 2006. That's good enough for 11th place among Missouri's 50 counties. Drilling down, we find that Hurst himself took home $242,600 in that period; and three close relations took in $400,000, $388,000, and $347,000, respectively. That's a cool $1.4 million in U.S. treasury cash for the family over 12 years.

Now, hold your howls of outrage. These are corn and soy farmers. They buy tremendous amounts of fertilizers and poisons; they buy pricey GMO seeds from Monsanto; they're paying huge notes on those combines, which they have to maintain and supply with diesel; and they're selling their produce into a grain market largely controlled by two companies (Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland) that for most of those years paid them less than the price of production. In other words, your $1.4 million payment to the Hursts didn't likely stay long in family bank accounts. More likely, it quickly passed into the coffers of Monsanto, John Deere, Mosaic (the fertilizer giant two-thirds owned by Cargill), and other input suppliers. (Of course, in the past couple of years, corn/soy farmers have seen lower subsidies and higher grain prices--borne up by another government program, corn ethanol.)

You see, while their friends at the American Enterprise Institute might mock them as such, it's not the Hursts who are "welfare queens" here. It's their agribusiness suppliers and buyers. And we can't really debate the food system until we acknowledge their massive vested interest in it--and their vast political power, which they're not shy about using to maintain their income streams.

I look forward to participating in this debate as it plays out.

Related Links:

Will the Washington Post ever fact check a George Will column?

Will Africa’s farmland become a ‘resource curse’?

A scientific hack job that won’t cripple climate talks

 In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries.

----------

Is antibiotic-resistant-salmonella-tainted beef what's for dinner? Standard j-school-style journalism takes a lot of lumps these days--and justifiably so. To maintain an illusion of "objectivity," traditional reporters write like above-the-fray observers merely recording "the facts"--as if choosing which facts to record weren't itself subjective. (In reality, of course, a reporter is a thinking human being trying to figure out what's going on and tell a story.)

Yet sometimes, j-school style articles have a delicious subtlety. And if you know enough about the topic in question to provide context and connect the dots (both frowned upon by j-school types), they can deliver rich information.

I'm thinking of this fantastic Associated Press article by Garance Burke on the ongoing food-poisoning outbreak associated with agribusiness giant Cargill.

As I reported last week, a large-scale California beef-packing plant owned by Cargill churned out, packaged up, and distributed widely some 830,000 pounds of ground beef tainted with antibiotic-resistant salmonella. At least 28 people in three states have been laid low by the pathogen. For salmonella, the CDC reckons that for every confirmed illness, 38 people have actually fallen ill. Thus we can assume that around 1000 people have caught the bug.

Burke's AP article delivers key additional information. To wit:
• Good thing it's summer, because the Cargill plant in question supplies the National School Lunch Program. I love the oblique way this fact comes out in Burke's story. The author writes:

Last year, in the wake of the biggest beef recall in history linked to a Southern California slaughterhouse, inspectors visited the Fresno [Cargill] facility and 17 other plants that sold meat to the National School Lunch Program.

And that's the last we hear about the school lunch program. It should be noted that among demographic groups, kids rank among the most vulnerable to food-borne illnesses.

• Here's where Burke did excellent reporting--turns out that at that inspection last year, the USDA caught Cargill up to some dodgy business, and little about it. The reporter dug up a document showing that the USDA inspectors observed workers at the plant "using electric prods to coax skittish cattle through a narrow chute leading into the slaughterhouse." The reporter continues:

When three cows refused to budge, they were stunned and rendered unconscious "so that they could be pulled through the restrainer to be shackled, hung and bled," the [USDA} records state.

Dragging knocked-out cattle across a filthy slaughterhouse floor invites contamination of the resulting meatmeat. As Burke puts it, the practice "could increase the risk for E. coli and salmonella contamination because cow hides can pick up bacteria from feces that sometimes collect in or around the chute, experts said."

The reporter gets a memorable quote from a former USDA inspector: "All kinds of feces and urine get into those chutes because they typically aren't cleaned out during the day because too many animals need to get in." Nice! And when that stuff gets caked onto an unfortunate beast's hide, chances that it will end up in the ground beef increase.

From unpacking Burke's story, it looks like the USDA somehow rebuked the Cargill plant for the dragging practice. And Cargill responded with a creative excuse: "The plant's parent company, Cargill Meat Solutions, said the animals balked because there were too many auditors present that day."

In other words, it was all the inspectors' fault! Not surprisingly, given the meat industry's power, the USDA caved. Reports Burke:

The company appealed the alleged violation. The USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service later rescinded the citation and instead sent Beef Packers a letter of concern.

Now, this is insane on its face. The company's excuse, as far-fetched as it is, might explain why the animals balked against being marched to slaughter; but it does not explain the practice of dragging knocked-out cows across a floor seething with bacterial pathogens just as they're about to be processed into burger meat.

That's like punching a kid in the face at school, and getting out of trouble by saying, "but he threw a spit wad at me!" The excuse, even if accurate, doesn't mitigate the viciousness of the response.

And Burke wasn't done. The reporter wanted to know if the USDA had done a follow-up inspection since witnessing the cow-dragging. The priceless response:

Agency spokeswoman Bryn Burkard said a Freedom of Information Act request would have to be made to learn if the plant had been inspected since.

I hope that request is in.

As great as the story is, it neglects to mention that the salmonella in question is antibiotic-resistant. And once you mention that, you have to get into the meat industry's egregious, systematic reliance on dosing animals with antibiotics as a matter of course to keep them alive under cramped, filthy conditions.

And then there's the unfortunate fact that President Obama still hasn't named a director of the food Safety Inspection Service, the USDA sub-branch responsible for monitoring the safety of U.S. meat production. And that last anyone's heard, the job's front-runner is industrial dairy man Dennis Wollff, who has scant experience in food safety.

And Cargill isn't just any meat-packing company. It's a vast, globe-spanning agribusiness firm with huge positions in everything from fertilizer production and livestock feed  to grain trading and processing. And it strides the U.S. meat industry like a colossus. According to researchers Mary Hendrickson and William Heffernan (PDF), it's the nation's third-largest beef packer, third-largest cow feeder, fourth-largest pork packer, and third-largest turkey producer.

But even without this critical context, the AP's Burke has done great reporting and written an important story. 

Related Links:

Martha Stewart blisters meat industry in Thanksgiving show

Will Africa’s farmland become a ‘resource curse’?

Grist Exclusive: Will Whole Foods’ new mobile slaughterhouses squeeze small farmers?