Norman Borlaug (Photo courtesy FAO)In the early 1940s, Mexico was a fraught region for U.S. geopolitical strategists. Not so long before -- 1939 -- a revolutionary government had nationalized the Mexican oil supply, dealing a sharp blow to U.S. oil interests, especially the Rockefeller family's dominant Standard Oil. Meanwhile, as war raged in Europe, there was doubt about which side the Mexican government would take -- the Allies or the Axis. What if Mexico chose to supply the Germans with oil?

Into that tense milieu, the Rockefeller family's foundation dispatched a team of agricultural scientists into the Mexican countryside on a mission of goodwill: to bring Mexican farmers the seed varieties, knowledge, and inputs necessary to "modernize" crop production.

As the University of Texas economist Harry Cleaver put it in a 1972 paper in American Economic Review, "The friendly gesture of a development project would not only help soften rising nationalism but might also help hang onto wartime friends."

One of the junior scientists on that mission would become the best known, eventually netting a Nobel Peace Prize for his work: Norman Borlaug, who died Sunday at the age of 95.

Borlaug is widely hailed as the father of the Green Revolution -- the grand effort, which started in Mexican wheat and corn fields in the 1940s, to bring industrial agriculture to the global South.

There's no evidence that Borlaug thought much about geopolitics during his career as a plant pathologist and evangelist for industrial agriculture. In their book Enough -- largely a Borlaug hagiography--the Wall Street Journal reporters Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman portray him as a man almost innocent of politics: He started out with a narrow scientific interest in wheat rust and a desire to "secure a steady job where he could work outdoors"; by the '60s and for the rest of his long life, he wanted merely to "do what was best for the hungry," the authors write.

Rather than focusing on the social relations around agriculture, Borlaug honed in on one thing: increasing yield. For him, the complexities of poverty and hunger could be reduced to a single problem: not enough food. From there, the answer was simple: grow as much as possible, using whatever technology available.

For Thurow and Kilman, Borlaug stands as an "international hero, an example of what an individual can accomplish in the quest to end hunger." That view is conventional, nearly universal. Borlaug's accomplishments inspire a kind of awe -- and rhetorical flights. "A towering scientist" and a "great benefactor of humankind," declared the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization in a communique after Borlaug's death. The New York Times called him "the plant scientist who did more than anyone else in the 20th century to teach the world to feed itself and whose work was credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives."

But it may be that Borlaug's blindness to politics -- his refusal to consider the power relations at work in the countries whose hungry he set out to save -- undermined his legacy. His tireless effort to boost grain yields, while no doubt resulting in a flood of cheap grain, created all manner of problems that won't be easily solved.

In Mexico, to be sure, yields of corn and wheat rose dramatically in the areas where Borlaug's techniques took hold. But while Thurow and Kilman convincingly argue that Borlaug's main intent was to "help poor farmers," Mexico's smallholders have been in a state of severe crisis for more than a generation. The so-called "immigrant crisis" here in the United States is better viewed as an agrarian crisis in Mexico. Since the the advent of NAFTA alone, more than 1.5 million Mexican farmers have been forced off of their land. Since the Mexican manufacturing economy has been nowhere near robust enough to absorb them, a huge portion of one-time Mexican farmers now wash our dishes and harvest our crops.

While the factors contributing to Mexico's agrarian disaster are multiple and complex -- including neoliberal trade policy and U.S. crop subsidies -- the zeal to increase yield certainly factors in. In Borlaug's Green Revolution paradigm, farmers are urged to specialize in one or two commodity crops -- say, corn or wheat. To grow them, they were to buy hybridized seeds and ample doses of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation. (Borlaug's celebrated "dwarf" varieties can thrive only with plenty of water and lots of synthetic nitrogen, and face serious pest pressure, requiring heavy pesticide doses.) The award for buying into the "Green Revolution package" was a bumper crop. The problem was that when everyone did the same thing and yields spiked, the price farmers received for their crops plunged.

The result is a kind of vicious cycle: farmers scramble to produce more to offset losses, leading to yet more downward pressure on prices. Of course, there's the temptation to boost yields with yet more inputs like fertilizer -- meaning that farmers' costs could continue creeping up even as the prices they received in the marketplace fell steadily. The result is a kind of structural economic crisis in farming.

The winners in the game are not farmers, but rather the buyers of the cheap commodities (mainly transnational grain processors like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill) as well as input suppliers (like Monsanto, Dupont, and, again, Cargill) that sell the needed seeds and agrichemicals. As I've written before, Mexico's grain trade -- both corn and wheat -- has fallen largely under the control of U.S. agribusiness giants, and its culinary staple, the tortilla, has succumbed to a kind of vapid industrialization.

Urban residents do benefit from cheaper food prices, to be sure; but it's worth emphasizing that in post-Green Revolution Mexico, urban poverty and malnutrition has remained stubbornly persistent, as anyone who has visited Mexico City in the past 20 years can verify.

One of the most ironic things I see in Borlaug obits is the idea that his innovations made countries like Mexico and India "self-sufficient" in food production. Actually, these nations became perilously dependent on foreign input suppliers for their food security. 

In India, site of the Green Revolution's greatest putative triumph, the legacy is even more mixed.

Today in India's grain belt, less than 40 years after Borlaug's Nobel triumph, the water table has been nearly completely tapped out by massive irrigation projects, farmers are in severe economic crisis, and cancer rates, seemingly related to agrichemical use, are tragically high.

In other words, to generate the massive yield gains that won Borlaug his Nobel, the nation sacrificed its most productive farmland and a generation of farmers. Meanwhile, as in Mexico, urban poverty and malnutrition in India's urban centers remained stubbornly persistent.
 
For me, the point isn't that Borlaug is a villain and that crop yields don't matter; rather, it's that boosting yield alone can't solve hunger problems in any but the most fleeting way. Farmers' economic well-being; biodiversity; ecology; local knowledge, buy-in, and food traditions -- all of these things matter, too.

As the U.S. and European governments, along with the Gates Foundation, turn their attention to Africa's hunger crisis, I hope those lessons are heeded -- despite Borlaug's near-canonization as a modern-day saint.

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At a North American summit Monday in Guadalajara, Mexico, U.S. President Barack Obama, Mexican President Felipe Calderon, and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper released a statement on climate change:

North American Leaders’ Declaration on Climate Change and Clean Energy

We, the leaders of North America, reaffirm the urgency and necessity of taking aggressive action on climate change.  We stress that the experience developed during the last 15 years in the North American region on environmental cooperation, sustainable development, and clean energy research, development, and deployment constitutes a valuable platform for climate change action, and we resolve to make use of the opportunities offered by existing bilateral and trilateral institutions.

We recognize the broad scientific view that the increase in global average temperature above pre-industrial levels ought not to exceed 2 degrees C, we support a global goal of reducing global emissions by at least 50% compared to 1990 or more recent years by 2050, with developed countries reducing emissions by at least 80% compared to 1990 or more recent years by 2050.

We share a vision for a low-carbon North America, which we believe will strengthen the political momentum behind a successful outcome at the 15th Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC meeting this December, and support our national and global efforts to combat climate change.  To achieve our low-carbon development goals, and consistent with our respective circumstances and capacities, we agree to the following:

In order to facilitate these actions, we will work cooperatively to develop and follow up on a Trilateral Working Plan and submit a report of results at our next North American Leaders Summit in 2010.

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Here’s one thing citizens of the United States, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories have in common: According to a new 19-country public opinion poll on climate change, they’re the least likely to want more action on the issue from their governments.

American citizens showed the least interest of all the countries in response to this question: “How high a priority do you think the government should place on addressing climate change?”

The poll released today by WorldPublicOpinion.org covered 19 nations that include the world’s largest greenhouse-gas emitters and together comprise 60 percent of the world’s population. A total of 18,578 respondents were asked about what their government is already doing, what it should be doing, and how high a priority their fellow citizens consider addressing climate change to be.

The U.S. respondents also scored lowest when they were asked to rank from 1 to 10, “How high a priority does the government [currently] place on addressing climate change?”

Taken together, the two questions suggest that 52 percent of Americans want their government to do more than it currently is on the issue. In 15 of the 19 nations, majorities said their government should make addressing climate change a higher priority.

The survey also found most people underestimate the amount of support their peers have for addressing the shared threat of climate change. In other words, your neighbors are probably more willing than you think to support a climate plan. Respondents across all countries estimated that their peers gave climate change a 6.42 priority (10 being the highest priority). In fact, the average priority was higher—7.33.

Worldpublicopinion.org director Steven Kull says the sociological term for this common phenomenon is “pluralistic ignorance.”

“This is a sort of general tendency people have to underestimate others in terms of readiness to take action to address collective problems” said Kull, a political psychologist who leads the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. “It makes people feel good to think that they are more advanced than others, socially and intellectually. That they can better see the need for addressing long-term problems.”

While this poll focused on average citizens (see the full results methodology [PDF]), previous polls found that political leaders consistently underestimate the support of their citizens for addressing complex, long-term problems such as climate change. The same group’s 2004 Hall of Mirrors study [PDF] found that 71 percent of the public favored ratifying the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. However, only 38 percents of U.S. leaders (senior congressional staffers, Bush administration officials, and leaders in business, labor, and media) estimated that a majority of the public would support it. Only 28 percent of leaders estimated that it would be a large majority.

Leaders may be making the same miscalculation about this year’s climate and energy debate, Kull said. He took issue with polls that ask participants to rank a series of issues from most to least important, such as a Pew Research Center project in January.

“Americans consistently say that more should be done [on climate change],” he said. “At the same time if you give them a list of priorities [to rank] climate tends not to be one that they rank as one of the most important.”

Prioritization polls don’t account for the fact that Americans may want significant action on a lot of issues, he said.

China’s strong interest in government climate action is consistent with the findings of other research, said Kull, who has conducted focus-group polling in the country. Even when told by their government that climate change is the responsibility of industrialized nations, Chinese tend to support national action, he said.

“They generally have a kind of can-do attitude,” he said. “They also perceive that their economy is growing so much that they feel like they can afford the costs related to addressing climate change.”

Mexico’s position as the most supportive of government action surprised Kull, and he said he didn’t have a ready interpretation for it.

German participants had the strongest perception that their government was doing a lot on climate. Only 46 percent of Germans wanted their government to do more. Respondents from two other leading emitters--India and Russia--fell in the middle on support for government action.

Polls were conducted by different research centers in each country, and Kull cautioned against making too much of country-to-country comparisons. “We can’t exactly say that everybody relates to this 0-10 scale in the same way,” he said.

The survey relied on respondents’ current knowledge of the issue--each of the three questions used the phrase “addressing climate change” without explaining the threats of climate change or the benefits of stopping it. The survey was conducted from April to early July and had a margin of error of 3 to 4 percentage points.

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The past week, the Netiverse has erupted with stories linking the Granjas Carroll confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) near La Gloria, Vera Cruz, Mexico, with the outbreak of a strain of H1N1 influenza, commonly called "swine flu," that has triggered concerns about possible flu pandemic reminiscent of the one that claimed tens of millions of lives between 1918 and 1920. Outlets such as Grist, Huffington Post, and Daily Kos have contributed to the eruption, as have some members of the old-line print and broadcast media, but I find much of the reportage at this point troubling.

Why? Because I don't see any beef -- or pork -- yet.

What I see is proximity, coincidence, and correlation being confused with causality, but without any evidence that the virus has been present in any of Granjas Carroll's CAFO sites, we have nothing to support the hypothesis that the current outbreak started there.

Granjas Carroll is a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods, which is based in my current home state of Virginia (full disclosure). Smithfield Foods is notorious for its CAFO operations, which I am firmly convinced by a substantial amount of evidence is responsible for a lot of environmental problems in the regions where they occur. The CAFO operations may even be "breeding grounds" for a variety of diseases. This is not the question at hand.

The question at hand is whether the Granjas Carroll CAFO operations in Vera Cruz are responsible for this disease outbreak. The distinction is important. Our highest priority -- in the immediate term -- is not eliminating the possibility of any possible disease outbreak in the future. The highest priority is in stopping the potential pandemic in front of us now -- the outbreak that is spreading and sickening and killing. To do that, it helps to know where and how it started.

Mind you, the Granjas Carroll CAFOs are legitimate suspects. It is possible that the H1N1 strain of concern emerged there and spread to the surrounding human population via sick workers, contaminated waste, or flies that pick up virus particles from fecal matter in waste pools and deposit them on someone's dinner nearby. The fact that Patient Zero, 4-year-old Edgar Hernandez, lives in a town near one of the suspect CAFOs adds a plausible connection. In addition the fact that hundreds of people came down with a flu-like illness in the past two months likewise lend credence to the Smithfield connection. The hypothesis looks about as solid as any hypothesis can be.

Nevertheless, in science and medicine, a researcher has to put his pet hypothesis to the test. Hypotheses are tested against evidence, and those that don't fit -- cannot explain -- the evidence must be cast aside. A researcher has to reject all alternative hypotheses before being able to accept, or at least get other researchers to accept, his or her preferred hypothesis. Journalists covering scientific and medical matters should keep this fact in mind.

What are some alternative hypotheses here?

* The outbreak may not have originated in La Gloria, Vera Cruz, or Mexico. Hernandez can only retain his Patient Zero title as long as no earlier case of this strain of virus can be found. Given that these searches for Patient Zero are conducted after the fact, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to identify the index (first) case. Hernandez's mother said that dozens, if not hundreds, of people in the La Gloria area fell ill before Hernandez did. It is likely, then that he is merely the first confirmed case, not the first case. If we cannot be sure he is the first person to be infected by this particular strain of influenza, we likewise cannot be sure that anyone in La Gloria was the first person infected. The search thus expands throughout Vera Cruz, throughout Mexico, throughout the world. Only time and a lot of detective work will tell if the outbreak started in Smithfield's neighborhood.

* Despite the moniker "swine" flu, this particular strain may not have originated in swine. Reports about the genetic characteristics of this strain are rather confusing, but reports from people actually sequencing the virus (and posting their data on the mailing list ProMED-mail) suggest a mix of swine viruses only -- with an mixture of genetic material from both North American strains and Eurasian strains. (This information is subject to change, though, as more samples are sequenced.) So far, the evidence seems to point solely toward pork, except for a basic fact of influenza biology. The flu viruses can often infect multiple species -- such as pigs, birds, and humans -- and the have a tendency to swap genetic material with other viruses also present in host cells. It is entirely possible that the mutations that produced the H1N1 strain involved in this outbreak originated in a species other than swine. We could be the source.

There is also some contrary evidence to consider. Smithfield Foods officials and Mexican agriculture officials all say there has been no evidence of swine flu in either the animals or the workers at the Granjas Carroll CAFOs. This leads to the following hypotheses: 1) they are lying; 2) they are telling the truth, but they had not been looking for the right evidence; or 3) they are telling the truth.

Personally, I'm not inclined to embrace hypothesis No. 1 until someone finds evidence of deceit. I could accept No. 2, but it is pretty damned unlikely that a flu outbreak could happen at operations as large as the ones near La Gloria without somebody noticing something. If hypothesis No. 3 survives all challenges, it rules out any connection with this particular flu outbreak.

Finally, why is this important?

My colleague Merritt Clifton, in an essay published yesterday, discussed the importance of credibility among journalists. If all the hype proves a bust -- if Granjas Carroll is exonerated -- the journalists look like unethical, scandal-mongering, can't-get-their-facts-right fools. In addition, environmental and animal-rights activists who talk up the story -- even if motivated by sincere concern about the environmental effects of CAFOs -- will look like a bunch of Chicken Littles crying out "The Sky is Falling!" and passing the hat for contributions from the faithful, or at least the very, very nervous.

Michael Crichton, in his book, "State of Fear," made a lot of money making environmentalists look like greenie-weenie-psycho-terrorists bent on the destruction of civilization as we know it. Far too many people in our society believe that, too. Those concerned about the environmental effect of CAFOs should not reinforce that impression. If the accusations turn out to be wrong now, people are less likely to listen to legitimate allegations in the future.

Some of my colleagues have argued that journalists could use the flu outbreak as a peg to discuss the perils of CAFOs. I argue, however, that if the news peg proves to be faulty, then readers will question everything else in the story that follows. Personally, I would rather not have mistakes in my work inoculate an industry against legitimate criticism for its environmental malpractice.

Journalists should investigate. Journalists should ask hard, unpleasant questions. But journalists should retain (and display) a healthy dose of skepticism until they turn up evidence to back up a connection between an industry practice and an environmental or health problem in question.

Consider this analogy: Anyone can call a politician a crook. It means nothing. A good journalist, however, waits until he catches the politician paying for private expenses with public funds - and runs a photo of the paycheck on the front page. The journalist won't even need to use the "c" word. The appropriate conclusion will be obvious.

The worst consequence has nothing to do with credibility, however. It has to do with lives. Preoccupation with a false lead in a disease outbreak like this distracts researchers from finding the source of the illness.

Preoccupation with a false lead delays adequate or appropriate actions that could slow or stop the outbreak; likewise it may prompts people to take inadequate or inappropriate defense measures that may make the outbreak worse. I'll close with a cautionary example.

In 1854, a cholera outbreak that sickened hundreds in a matter of days terrified the city of London. A physician, Dr. John Snow, and clergyman, the Rev. Henry Whitehead, determined -- with damning evidence -- that the outbreak was triggered by contaminated water from a pump in the Soho neighborhood. Most public health officials at the time, however, were convinced that cholera was caused by miasma -- "bad air." Acting under the belief that "all smell is disease," they blamed living conditions (and moral failings) of the working poor -- the group most heavily affected by the epidemic -- for the epidemic. The emphasis on smell placed the focus on obvious nuisances rather than the more subtle, actual cause.

Unfortunately, policies designed to remove the smelly air -- by collecting sewage and dumping it into the Thames -- made cholera outbreaks more likely by contaminating the drinking water of millions of city residents.

Let's not make a similar mistake in Vera Cruz. Millions of lives may be at stake.

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Editor's Note: Tom Philpott's April 28 piece on the swine flu pandemic, which raised the question of whether there is a link between the virus' emergence in Mexico and the presence nearby of factory-scale pork farms, sparked a vigorous debate on the Society for Environmental Journalists listserv. Merritt Clifton was one of several writers to take issue with Tom's piece. At Grist's invitation, he put his critique into an essay form, which is posted below:

--

Thirty years ago this month I knelt beside the Yamaska River in southern Quebec with a test kit -- downstream from several of the then-largest, factory-type pig farms in North America (which happened to lie upstream from the water intakes for the cities of Farnham and St. Hyacinthe) -- and found that the Yamaska literally contained more extraneous chemicals from pig excrement than H2O.

The predictable happened as the weather warmed. By midsummer thousands of people were ill. My exposés helped to bring the construction of new water filtration and treatment plants--but did not slow the growth of factory farming. Three out of every five Quebec farmers sold out to the mega-conglomerates or were forced out of business during the next 10 years.

Twenty-three years ago this month I was the first volunteer firefighter to arrive at burning factory farrowing barn. Ten minutes ahead of the trucks with the equipment, I found no way to free any sows and piglets before all roasted alive in their steel farrowing crates, squealing in terror and agony.

As a lifelong second-generation vegetarian, and longtime vegan, I would like nothing more, for both humane and environmental reasons, than to see an end to factory farming.

Yet in exposing and attacking the many and often grotesquely obvious excesses of factory farms, I believe it is essential at all times to be fair, be accurate, and not amplify allegations which may be unsubstantiated--not least because amplifying an unfounded or premature allegation tends to erode the credibility of the critic.

As of the moment, about two weeks into formal medical forensic investigation, no one knows just what the source of the mutant H1N1 virus first discovered in the Vera Cruz region of Mexico might have been.

Much attention has been given to the case of five-year-old Edgar Hernandez, of the La Gloria hamlet in Perote, near the Granjas Carroll factory pig farm. Hernandez--who survived--is the earliest victim of the mutant H1N1 virus from whom a sample was preserved. La Gloria residents blamed Granjas Carroll for an outbreak of illness in February and March 2009. Officially attributed to biting flies, the illness produced flu-like symptoms.

Granjas Carroll is half-owned by Smithfield, the world's largest factory pig producer, involved in pollution incidents at multiple sites on several continents. As the mutant H1N1 virus is a variant of an illness that is generically if somewhat inaccurately termed "swine flu," one might be tempted to presume that this disease, often lethal in Mexico, has incubated and emerged as result of the intensely unnatural manner in which Smithfield raises pigs for slaughter.

Prudence dictates waiting for substantial medical evidence. Though the Hernandez sample is the oldest that exists, flu-like illnesses had already been reported throughout the region for weeks. Granjas Carroll, however, reported no unusual disease outbreaks among either pigs or staff. Biting insects associated with pig waste may have infected La Gloria residents with something, but many insect-borne illnesses produce flu-like symptoms, including the malarial and rickettsial disease families, which are of protozoan and bacterial rather than viral origin, and are known to occur in the vicinity.

There are reports that at least one migrant worker returned to La Gloria with a flu-like illness contracted in the U.S., and spread it, before Hernandez fell ill. The nature of influenza is that a new strain may be quite widely distributed before it turns deadly. Often the deadly turn comes in a place where environmental conditions, weather, or a population already weakened by some other disease produce unique susceptibility. La Gloria may be such a place, and the presence of the pig farm may be a factor.

Yet even this would be far from indicting the pig farm for the disease itself, which may have emerged thousands of miles away, and might as easily have arrived with the migrant worker as it appears to have spread outward from Mexico, once people started looking for it.

By then the mutant H1N1 virus might already have been distributed worldwide. But only in the right--or wrong--conditions would it behave differently enough from any other flu to be identified.

Perhaps the migrant worker, or some other person who was the actual Vector One, contracted the disease while working at a U.S. factory farm. Or perhaps Vector One wrapped sandwiches at a fast food restaurant, and picked up the various reassorted "swine flu" strains that comprise this new variant of H1N1 from co-workers who had other versions of common flus.

Until the medical evidence is in, we just don't know. And focusing prematurely on the presumed factory-farm connection could prove a dangerous distraction from identifying and responding to the actual source of a potential pandemic.

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Several days after news broke of a possible link between Mexico-based hog CAFOs and the rapid spread of a novel swine-flu strain, what have we learned?

• Clarifying details about respiratory ailments in the Perote area of Vera Cruz State -- where U.S. pork behemoth Smithfield Foods raises nearly a million hogs a year in large confinement buildings, under a subsidiary called Granjas Carroll -- have emerged. In my original post on this topic, I didn't fully understand that the outbreak of a virulent respiratory condition in the town of La Gloria -- located near Smithfield's farming operations -- wasn't initially identified as swine flu. The disease emerged as early as February and infected 60 percent of the town's 1,800 inhabitants, according to the widely cited blog Biosurveillance, run by the U.S. disease-tracking consultancy Veratract (which claims the CDC, the World Health Organization, and the Pan-American Health Organization as clients). Three children died during the outbreak, Veratract reports. Residents blamed the Granjas Carroll confinements for the outbreak; and local authorities evidently agreed. "Health workers soon intervened, sealing off the town and spraying chemicals to kill the flies [which grew in swarms on Granjas Caroll's manure lagoons] that were reportedly swarming through people’s homes," according to a Monday account in the Guardian.

There was evidently much confusion about the cause of the disease. "According to residents, the [Granjas Carroll] denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to 'flu,'" Veratract reports. And "State health officials also implemented a vaccination campaign against influenza." However, "physicians ruled out influenza as the cause of the outbreak." Yet the symptoms experienced in La Gloria closely resemble those that would later be diagnosed as swine flu, according to several accounts. The Guardian quotes a La Gloria resident:

The symptoms were exactly like the ones they talk about now [with swine flu] .... High fevers, pain in the muscles and the joints, terrible headaches, some vomiting and diarrhoea. The illness came on very quickly and whole families were laid up.

• On Monday, Mexican authorities revealed that at least one victim of the original outbreak definitely had the same strain of swine flu now wreaking havoc in Mexico City -- and his is the earliest known case of the disease. The Associated Press reported Monday that:

Mexican Health Secretary Jose Angel Cordova said tests now show that a 4-year-old boy contracted swine flu in Veracruz state, where a community has been protesting pollution from a large pig farm, at least two weeks before the first death confirmed by the Mexican government. The farm is run by Granjas Carroll de Mexico.

The question now becomes: Did the outbreak that started in February and killed three kids involve swine flu -- or was the 4-year-old boy's infection an isolated case? If not -- if the La Gloria epidemic turns out to be ground zero of the infection -- could the swine-flu outbreak have originated literally in the shadows of Granjas Carroll's hog confinements, and not have some tie to intensive hog farming? That's a question that health authorities have to vigorously pursue.

• In a statement issued late Sunday, Smithfield said it had "found no clinical signs or symptoms of the presence of swine influenza in the company's swine herd or its employees at its joint ventures in Mexico." The wording is interesting here -- "no signs or symptoms," but no information about actual testing of pigs for flu strains. Could pigs carry a flu virus without being visibly ill? Tara Smith, an epidemiologist at the University of Iowa who has done groundbreaking work around hog confinements and the emergence of the deadly, antibiotic-resistant MRSA staph infection, told me in an interview that one would expect to see at least some sign of sickness in hogs carrying a flu bug. Of course, precisely for biosecurity reasons, CAFO operators rabidly resist visitors. When I toured a CAFO-intense county in Iowa a couple of years ago and approached a massive, reeking hog building, an employee rushed to intercept me, claiming that germs from a single healthy human could wipe out an entire 10,000-hog confinement. Confined hogs, you see, are extremely immune-compromised. One hopes that health authorities have been allowed to inspect the Granjas Carroll facilities. 

It's important to note as well that non-symptomatic pigs can carry flu. Here is a line from the World Health Organization's recently posted FAQ on swine flu: "The virus is spread among pigs by aerosols, direct and indirect contact, and asymptomatic carrier pigs" (emphasis mine).

• Citizens of La Gloria, as well as some Mexican public-health workers, have pointed to flies congregating on manure piles as a possible vector for the flu, as I reported in my earlier post. Several commenters dismissed that possibility, denying that flies can carry flu viruses. From what I can tell, those folks are wrong. I recently got my hands on a paper by an international team of scientists -- including Jay Graham and Ellen Silbergeld of Johns Hopkins -- published in the May-June 2008 Public Health Reports. The paper, "The Animal-Human Interface and Infectious Disease in Industrial Food Animal Production: Rethinking Biosecurity and Biocontainment" (PDF), points to a concrete example of flies acting as a flu vector:

• The public-health scientific community has been sounding the alarm for years about the potential for bio-catastrophe brewing on industrial animal farms. The Graham/Sibergeld paper crystallizes those concerns. I'll tease out a few key themes.

Untreated manure in lagoons, pointed to by La Gloria residents as a health hazard, can indeed contain flu strains.

Regulatory regimes, in the U.S. and elsewhere, tend to be lax. Sanitary laws demand the treatment of human sewage; animal waste is a different story:

The amount of untreated waste allowed to fester in CAFOs globally is stunning.

And of course, this vast amount of manure is highly concentrated geographically. For example, the bulk of pork consumed in the United States comes from a handful of counties in Iowa and North Carolina. In Mexico, the Perote region of Vera Cruz carries the burden of intensive hog production. The relatively few workers who staff these industrial farms, as well as the residents who live nearby, are vulnerable to the pathogens -- and can carry them to far-flung populations.

Regulations for protecting those workers tend to be ... not so strict.

• Vera Cruz authorities are suddenly scrambling to deny any link between the Granjas Carroll confinements and the outbreak. Instead, they claim, the flu came from Asia. Say they're right and the outbreak near the Granjas Carroll confinements is traced directly to an Asian source. Even under that scenario, as the Graham/Silbergeld paper shows, the globe's rapidly growing meat industry is creating conditions for virulent pathogens, both viral and microbrial, to thrive. As they write:

The results of this trend -- in Chinese pork production, at least, driven in large part by Smithfield -- threaten to be dire.

For more background on confinement operations, see my 2007 special report -- "Sow what? On food and farming."

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Mexico on Thursday pledged to cut its greenhouse-gas emissions 50 percent from 2002 levels by 2050, making it one of only a handful of developing nations to set a concrete emissions-reduction goal. Mexico aims to hit its climate target through big investments in solar, wind, and other clean technologies. A cap-and-trade system is also in the works, which could be operational by 2012.

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Once upon a time in Mexico, a study estimated that residents would live 2.4 months longer on average if the air they breathe wasn't so smoggy. According to the research, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, cleaning up Mexicans' drinking water and household fuels as well could increase their life expectancy by nearly five months.

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The hastily built new fence along the U.S.-Mexico border has apparently exacerbated flooding in parts of Arizona and Mexico due to poor fence design. Environmentalists and others had warned the Department of Homeland Security that rushing border-fence construction could cause eco-troubles, but Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff nonetheless waived applicable environmental laws last year in order to speed the fence's construction. On July 12, a flash flood at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and surrounding areas was made worse by water redirected from debris-laden mesh fences that backed up natural water flows and caused substantial erosion to some of the fence's foundation. Earlier this month, a report by Organ Pipe monument's staff found that the fence didn't meet Army Corps of Engineers hydrologic standards, but environmentalists said that the poor design was self-evident even before the report. "It doesn't take an expert hydrologist to anticipate the potential for these walls to become like dams," said Matt Clark of Defenders of Wildlife.

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In Mexico, a milpa is a garden patch, usually kept by several families, to grow a substantial portion of a year's sustenance. Milpas are typically dominated by corn -- first domesticated in present-day Mexico thousands of years ago -- but also contain stunning agricultural and nutritional diversity.

In addition to corn for tortillas, traditional milpas grow squash and beans of many varieties, avocados, melon, tomatoes, chile pepper, sweet potato, jicama, amaranth, and a medicinal herb called mucana, claims journalist Charles C. Mann in his 2005 book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. "Milpa crops are nutritionally and environmentally complementary," Mann writes. "Maize lacks the amino acids lysine and tryptophan, which the body needs to make proteins and niacin ... Beans have both lysine and tryptophan ... Squashes, for their part, provide an array of vitamins; avocados, fats." Agriculturally, beans fix nitrogen from the air into the soil, helping fertilize corn, which requires large amounts of nitrogen. Quoting H. Garrison Wilkes, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, Mann calls the milpa "one of the most successful human inventions ever created."

The great invention is increasingly marginal to modern Mexican life. The Revolution-era land-reform programs that once gave rural life a measure of stability have been gutted over the past 20 years. Promising a manufacturing boom and a new era of prosperity, Mexico's leaders beckoned campesinos (smallholder farmers, mostly ethnically indigenous) from the countryside into the cities. The boom never quite materialized, at least not in powerful enough form to provide sufficient jobs for the rural exodus. As a result, the country now has a devastated rural economy and swelling shanty towns on the edges of its cities, housing millions of workers in the "informal economy" (i.e., chewing gum salespeople, windshield washers, etc.). It has also, of course, exported millions of excess farmers north of the border, where they staff our farms, meatpacking plants, restaurant kitchens, and construction sites.

I've been traveling to Mexico for years now. I lived in Mexico City in from 1997 to 1999, working first as an English teacher and then as a financial journalist. This summer I went back, spending several weeks in central Mexico tagging along with my girlfriend, a PhD student on a research trip. I spent most of my time keeping up with my duties for Grist, but I did get to accompany her on some of her research endeavors.

In my time there, I began to think of milpas -- those teemingly diverse garden patches -- as a metaphor for a country in which several worlds seem to coexist in the same time and place. And also as a way forward at a time of stagnant economic growth and rising food prices.

In the Mexico that I know, food is a hodgepodge. Industrial food abounds. When I lived in Mexico 10 years ago, Wal-Mart was just dipping its toe into the market. Today, its Mexico subsidiary is the nation's largest private company after the state-run oil giant Pemex, and its largest employer. Between Wal-Mart Supercenters, Sam's Clubs, and its supermarket chain Superama, Wal-Mart is by far the nation's largest grocer, its shelves crammed with the same convenience food you find in the states. On this last trip, I was deflated to find Mexico City dotted with Starbucks outlets, boasting African coffee in a country that produces plenty of fantastic coffee itself. U.S. fast-food chains, which seemed concentrated in tony malls when I lived there before, now seemed much more present. They hawk 10-peso ($1) menu items -- which, as prices rise for traditional tortilla-based fare, is an increasingly competitive price.

And yet, if Mexico's food culture is rapidly industrializing, it retains plenty of its old vigor. Hulking Wal-Marts may now dot Mexico City and much of the country, but I'm happy to report that the city still boasts well-trafficked neighborhood markets offering a dizzying cornucopia of unprocessed fruits, vegetables, beans, and meats, as well as delicious, traditional cooked fare. And the street food remains one of the city's great jewels. In our time in Mexico City during this last trip, we largely sustained ourselves on the tlacoyos from a stand across the (extremely busy) street from our apartment.

Delicious tlacoyos on the Mexico City street.

Photo: Tom Philpott

Not visibly different from literally hundreds if not thousands if similar stands across the city, this one served some of the best food I've ever had. Tlacoyos are oblong pancakes made of masa -- the same ground corn paste that makes up tortillas -- and stuffed with refried beans before being toasted on a griddle. When you order one, you specify which guisado (cooked topping) you want. This stand offered several meat guisados, which I avoided in my general campaign to steer clear of meat whose provenance I don't know. Instead, I stuck to tangy nopales (chunks of cooked cactus); earthy, deep-flavored huitlacoche (a mind-blowingly delicious fungus that colonizes corn cobs); quelitas (a sauteed, spinach-like green known in the United States as lamb's quarters); and rajas con papas (strips of roasted poblano chiles sauteed with potatoes). Once toasted, tlacoyos are topped with a guidsado, dusted with grated hard cheese, and drizzled with a spicy salsa (red or green). Each one cost 10 pesos (the same as a fast-food burger), and two is a filling breakfast. My stomach rumbles just thinking of them. Every time I went there, no matter what time of day, there were at least three or four diners huddled around the stand, sitting at small plastic chairs, savoring these little masterpieces.

Next to that tlacoyo stand, a woman ran a small vegetable stand focusing on traditional, milpa-grown fare. She had laid out piles of beautiful wild mushrooms, nopales, huitlacoche, purlsane (a highly nutritious weed), and several other things I couldn't identify.

Within three blocks of this little bubble of glorious food is a giant mall containing a Starbucks, a Ben & Jerry's, and an Olive Garden-like Italian chain restaurant; two U.S.-style supermarkets; and an old-school food market. Like most of central Mexico City, all of those disparate spaces pulse with locals. Munching fast food at the mall food court over a latté is just as "authentic" as getting down with a bowl of pozole -- a delectable, chile-laced corn stew -- in the market. But unlike in the United States, where by a generation ago most interesting food traditions had been paved over, Mexico still has plenty to lose -- and much worth preserving.

If Mexico City showed me how Mexico's culinary past interacts with a highly industrialized version of a culinary future, I found new visions of that interaction in Guadalajara, a city of 1.6 million people a few hours northwest of the capital.

Eva Robles and Pepe Godoy at Pan Arte
in Guadalajara.

Photo: Tom Philpott

There, I met Eva Robles and Pepe Godoy of La Coa Collective -- a group on the avant-garde of Mexico's version of the local-food movement. (Coa is a kind of pointed hoe used by pre-Colombian farmers.) Godoy runs the small artisinal bakery Pan Arte in downtown Guadalajara; it wholesales to local restaurants and cafés. The bakery, along with a separate cafe project, funds La Coa's activist work, which is to defend the land rights of campesino smallholders against the claims of wealthy landlords. Robles, a trained lawyer, spearheads that task. Coa is also active in Defensa de Maiz, a broad-based movement to protect the biodiversity of Mexico's corn agriculture against encroachment from the large agribusiness firms that increasingly control the country's corn trade.

La Coa Collective also keeps a small milpa just outside of the city, in a lush area under tremendous pressure from suburban-style development. One afternoon, they took me out to see the milpa. Since they're extremely busy urban folks -- in addition to their more-than-fulltime jobs, they also have a rambunctious 2-year-old son -- I wasn't surprised to see the milpa overgrown with weeds. Showing none of the guilt and shame that mark my own farming efforts when things get out of control, Robles and Godoy calmly got down to work, enlisting me and my travel companions in the effort to weed the beds.

Getting busy in a milpa, outside of Guadalajara.

Some of us hand-weeded around the plants while others came behind to cultivate with a hoe. They had sown squash and beans along with the corn in the time-tested milpa style. A bit of weeding showed that the squash and bean crops had largely failed, but healthy corn shoots poked through the dry, unirrigated dirt, struggling for sun amid the bramble. The whole patch was less than a quarter of an acre, and with all of us working, it didn't take long to liberate a big chunk of the fields from the weeds. It would be the last weeding they'd need to do; the corn would soon grow tall enough to out-compete new growth.

I asked Godoy what sort of yield he expected. He told me the patch would yield enough corn to provide the four-adult collective with tortillas for year -- an impressive yield for a small piece of unirrigated land that doesn't require much active attention. I wondered how the recent jump in corn prices had affected small farmers in Mexico. Godoy said that most of them were shut out of commodity markets and thus didn't see much benefit from the boom. But he added that with tortilla prices on the rise, more and more people are putting in milpas.

I remembered, on the bus ride from Mexico City, patches of corn poking out here and there from densely populated shanty towns.

In a country as large and complex as Mexico, there is no big-A Answer to the many problems of poverty and food insecurity. But there are many small-A answers, just as Mexico City contains a multitude of worlds at once, just as a healthy milpa teams with all manner of life.

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Homeland Security officials can continue to waive environmental laws to speed construction of a fence on the U.S.-Mexico border, after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal by Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club. The groups had argued that the eco-law-waiving power given to Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff in 2005 was unconstitutional. The fence section named specifically in the lawsuit has already been built; it runs through Arizona's San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area, which is home to more than 250 species of migratory birds.

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The air pollution in Mexico City is so bad that it could be harming residents' sense of smell, researchers say. People who live in the city, which exceeds the World Health Organization's ozone standards 300 days out of the year, did a worse job identifying common scents like coffee and orange juice than residents of a neighboring rural area. They also took longer to detect the smell of rotten food. Why the nose damage? "The olfactory receptors are very exposed [to pollutants]," says researcher Robyn Hudson. "They are just hanging out there in the mucus." To use the scientific terms.

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The U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced Tuesday that it will waive environmental laws in order to finish its 670-mile-long fence along the U.S.-Mexico border by the end of 2008. The waivers will apply to land stretching from California to Texas and will facilitate construction of fencing, towers, sensors, cameras, and roads. Homeland Security has already issued waivers for three portions of fence in Arizona and California. Green activists, who have decried the fence's impact on endangered ocelots and fragile habitat, are dismayed. Says Brian Segee of Defenders of Wildlife, "It's dangerous, it's arrogant, it's going to have pronounced environmental impacts, and it won't do a thing to address the problems of undocumented immigrants or address border security problems." But hey, other than that ...

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Mexico has taken the last step toward finalizing rules that will allow genetically modified crops to be planted in the country. That has many farmers in the so-called birthplace of corn worried that GM varieties could contaminate their fields. Under the rules, GM corn wouldn't technically be allowed in certain areas of Mexico considered "centers of origin" for unique corn plants, but critics nevertheless remain concerned for crop biodiversity. "This is a step in the government's intention to bow to pressure from Monsanto to allow the contamination of Mexico's native corn," said farmer Victor Suarez.

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Women in Mexico City have long been deterred from riding public transportation by the very real possibility of being groped or verbally harassed while packed in with other passengers. "A woman could enter a metro car a virgin and come out pregnant," says one female rider. The subway system has female-only cars during rush hour to address the problem, but now city officials are taking it a step further, introducing women's-only buses along three busy routes. Women's buses, designated by a pink sign in the window, will be added to 15 more routes by April. The city's female riders are delighted. "Otherwise, I have men sticking to me," says passenger Alejandra Lugo. "And here I am, 58 years old. Imagine how they treat the younger girls."

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Hundreds of Mexican police raided illegal sawmills near a monarch butterfly reserve yesterday in "the largest seizure of illegally logged wood in the country's history," according to the attorney general's office. Millions of butterflies travel some 2,500 miles each winter to spend the cold season in the Mexican forest, where illegal logging is rampant. The Mexican government has long pledged to crack down on logging in butterfly habitat, but previous administrations have been criticized for not following through. Within the past year, the current government has closed 59 sawmills and charged 193 people with related crimes; in yesterday's raid, agents seized some 600 truckloads of wood -- the equivalent to about 1,750 adult trees -- and detained 56 people. Suspects found guilty of illegal logging could face prison sentences of six months to nine years, fines of up to $13,650, and the eternal wrath of small, winged insects.

source:

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