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

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Ever since evolution of the swine flu virus accelerated in 1998, virologists and veterinary-science have warned (PDF) that factory hog farms create the ideal conditions for generating novel viruses. They worried that three things would happen:

Last spring, with the onset of the HINI pandemic, the first two fears came two pass. As for the third one, well ....

Epidemic experts say they are investigating the apparent spread of Tamiflu-resistant swine flu virus among four patients at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., and five in a hospital in Wales. These clusters appear to be the first in which a virus resistant to the antiviral Tamiflu, a mainstay of flu treat, has spread from person to person, researchers said Friday.

...

In Wales, doctors have confirmed five Tamiflu-resistant swine flu cases in one ward of an unidentified hospital. Three more patients on the ward are being tested for drug-resistant virus; a ninth patient is infected with virus that is still susceptible to Tamiflu.

And that's not good.

if Tamiflu-resistant virus spreads widely, swine flu will become tougher to treat and may cost more lives, says Duke's Daniel Sexton, who is leading the hospital's investigation.

Now is it time to start seriously investigating the CAFO-swine flu link?

Related Links:

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

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

A parable on the National School Lunch Program

Image: Tom Twigg for GristThere are those who would like us to believe that industrialized farming is the only way to feed the earth's growing population. Disinformation comes daily from powerful industrial agricultural companies whose profits depend entirely on the sale of chemicals, genetically modified (GM) seeds, and food processing. Furthermore, they maintain that massive-scale farming methods are key to adapting to climate change.

This is just not so.

Contrary to what the propaganda tells us, yields from industrial crops do not consistently produce more food. It's an industry-generated myth that ecologically-safe organic agriculture yields less than conventional agriculture. In fact, a comprehensive study comparing 293 crops from industrial and organic growers demonstrates that organic farm yields are roughly comparable to industrial farms in developed countries; and result in much higher yields in the developing world.

Numerous studies unequivocally state that our survival depends on resilient and biodiverse farm systems that are free of fossil fuel and chemical dependencies. The 2008 World Bank and United Nations International Assessment on Knowledge, Science and Technology concluded that a fundamental overhaul of the current food and farming system is needed to get us out of both the food and fuel crises. The report's findings indicated that small-scale farmers and agro-ecological methods are the way forward.

This assessment dovetails with a 2002 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report, which found that organic farming enables ecosystems to better adjust to the effects of climate change and has major potential for reducing agricultural GHG emissions. The FAO report also found that organic agriculture performs better than conventional agriculture in terms of both direct energy consumption (fuel and oil) and indirect consumption (synthetic fertilizers and pesticides).

Large-scale agriculture-dependent upon commercial seeds (including GM seeds), chemical sprays, and petroleum-based fertilizers-can only reliably feed one thing: company profits. These profits come at the expense of our climate as well as farmers who become wholly dependent upon these companies for their livelihood.

And it's farmers who are realizing through hard experience that this system doesn't work. Monsanto, a major proponent of GM seeds, agro-chemicals and industrialized methods, this week reports a massive $283 billion loss in the third quarter-quite a hit.

Monsanto and others in the industry are scrambling for a foothold in developing nations to save a failed agricultural and business model in the U.S. They're trying to convince foundations, aid agencies, and foreign governments that they hold the only key to staving off starvation. And, the way to do this is by smearing organic farming - which is the only truly dependable way to feed the world - and by ignoring climate change.

They're putting their shareholders' bottom line before a sick and hungry planet. It's time we held them to the truth.

Related Links:

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

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

A parable on the National School Lunch Program

This post marks the launch of "Plate Tectonics," a new feature that highlights ways that citizen action can move the food system in more sustainable directions.

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How do we stop this thing?Like many people, I applauded when Michelle Obama broke ground on her organic garden--and jeered when Croplife America, the pesticide industry's main lobby group, chided her to spray "crop protection" (i.e., poison) on her family's veggies. I was proud of the First Lady for shrugging off that absurd appeal.

That's one reason I came down with whiplash when Michelle's husband nominated a top Croplife America functionary to the post of chief agricultural negotiator at the U.S. Trade Office. Instead of handing the guy a powerful post, shouldn't the President have punched him in the jaw for the insult to the family spinach?

Normally, the appointee--Isi Siddiqui--wouldn't run into much trouble in the Senate, most of whose members rather like the agrichemical industry. But as I reported a while back, sustainable ag and green groups are rallying against the appointment. At this point, some 80 groups have gone on record opposing the appointment. 

According to an account in the New York Times, Siddiqui has already made clear what that agenda will be:

Both [WTO ambassador Michael] Punke and Islam "Isi" Siddiqui, nominee for chief U.S. agricultural negotiator, have said they will not send a deal to Congress for approval unless it clearly gives U.S. companies and farmers greater market access to developing nations.

"I can assure you that the administration will not conclude a Doha deal that does not work for U.S. farmers, ranchers and agribusinesses," Siddiqui said in his written comments.

That's the same agenda we've seen for 30 years; decades of flooding markets in the global south with cheap U.S. ag products has undermined farmers there, making entire nations utterly dependent on U.S. grain. Last year, when commodity prices spiked and millions of additional people found themselves priced out of food markets, the full viciousness of the Siddiqui agenda became clear. As for free trade in U.S. agrichemicals, ask the folks in India's breadbasket, the Punjab region, how that has gone.

So educate yourself. And then let Obama know that we don't want an agrichemical-industry rep forming our agricultural trade agenda.

• I lived in New York City in the early 2000s, during which time Mayor Giuliani essentially issued a fatwa against community gardens, declaring them "communiism." He tried to sell them off for development; citizen activism, with a major assist from then attorney general Elliot Spitzer, for the most part stymied the small-minded mayor's designs, though he did manage to pave dozens of gardens in some of the city's lowest-income areas.

During the battle over the gardens, pro-development forces tried to frame the issue in terms of affordable housing. Garden activists, they claimed, were hurting the poor by holding back new development. The logic was flawed for several reasons, but here is the main one: gardens occupied a fraction of he city's vacant lots.

If the developers wanted to build more affordable housing, why didn't they choose lots that were actually vacant? The reason, I think, was that the gardens tended to revitalize the city streets around them. They brought people out, beautified the area, and lowered crime. Naturally, developers wanted to plunk their projects down into those spots, and not in some grim, desolate lot a few blocks away.

I bring all of this up because, like a zombie, Mayor Giuliani's discredited garden agenda has popped back up again in Brooklyn's glorious, storied Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, where developers are scheming to bulldoze a a highly productive community garden called Bed-Stuy farm. Check out this post by Kerry Trueman on Green Fork blog; watch the above video; and sign this petition.

• For a look at citizen activism in full flower--Wendell Berry's "agrarian responsibility" illustrated--check out Bonnie Powell's account on Ethicurean about how the Bay Area food community rallied to save Soul Food Farm after it experienced a devastating fire.

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

Crap: it's what's for school lunch. But does it have to be? Not long ago or far away, there was a great and mighty kingdom that was the envy of all other kingdoms in the world. The kingdom was home to two groups of people, the Big People and the Little People. The Big People had many jobs and responsibilities, but foremost among these was their unalterable duty to care for the wellbeing of the Little People above all else. The Little People had only one responsibility, to follow the advice of the Big People so that they, too, could grow up to be Big.

For many, many years, the Big People diligently watched over the Little People and looked out for their interests, while the Little People followed their examples and grew strong. The kingdom thrived and prospered.

Alas, as time passed, more and more Big People seemed to have forgotten their duty to the Little People. The Big Corn People began to grow so much royally-subsidized GMO corn that they turned it into millions of gallons of high fructose corn syrup. The Big Cereal People began telling Little People that their highly processed breakfast products were "smart choices" for their health and would help boost their immunity. The Big Meat People started injecting their livestock with antibiotics that compromised the immune systems of the Little People who ate the meat. The Big Beverage People ominously warned that Little People would die if they didn't consume the electrolytes in their calorie-filled sports drinks. And the Big Milk People menacingly insisted that Little People would suffer grave calcium deficiencies unless served sugar-laden chocolate milk at every school meal.

Long gone were the days in which the Big People encouraged the Little People to eat appropriate sized portions of fresh, whole, sustainably-raised cooked-from-scratch real foods. Instead, the Big People invented "Little People Foods," and loaded them with hormones, antibiotics, chemical preservatives, artificial colors and flavors, and added sugars. They formed the Little People Foods into fun shapes, put them in convenient packages, and decorated them with colorful cartoon characters. Then the Big People ran multi-billion dollar advertising campaigns telling the Little People that they were "lovin' it" and to "raise their hands" for more.

In an Orwellian contortion of reality, saboteurs portrayed themselves as stewards, and napalm masqueraded as nourishment.

Before long, all the added sugars and chemicals in the Little People's food began to take a dire toll. Little People who had once been fit and healthy became overweight and sick. They could no longer focus in their classrooms because of all the added sugar in their diets, and they fell further and further behind in their studies. One in three of the Little People developed Type 2 Diabetes, a deadly disease previously suffered only by the oldest of the Big People. They even began to develop signs of cardiovascular disease before reaching middle school. And, worst of all, the Little People began to die at younger and younger ages because of diet-related illnesses, and no longer outlived the Big People.

The kingdom itself fared no better. Increasingly populated by overweight and sick Little People, its royal treasury was rapidly depleted to cover calamitous healthcare expenses. Without enough healthy Little People to grow into healthy Big People, the kingdom could no longer raise an army strong enough to defend itself against invaders. And with a food supply that was so reliant on industrial agriculture and processing, the kingdom became more and more dependent on foreign oil, its once beautiful valleys became landfills for discarded food packaging, and its skies became toxic with emissions from long distribution chains and factory-farmed animals.

Although the warning signs portended the kingdom's ultimate destruction, the Most Powerful Big People used their wealth to persuade the legislature to pass laws allowing them to exploit the kingdom's progeny in unbridled pursuit of hallowed profits. The Less Powerful Big People exhibited an air of complacency, either too ashamed to admit to their own complicity or too ignorant to recognize it.

And the Little People, helpless and innocent victims of the rapacious greed of so many Big People, lived their shortened and sickened lives unhappily ever after.

The End?

Related Links:

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

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

"The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon Earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings."
-- Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

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In the late 18th century, Edward Gibbon fretted about getting into trouble for his blunt take on the early Christians. Short summary: their intolerance and stupidity unwittingly helped bring down Rome. In the above-quoted passage of his Decline and Fall, Gibbon tried to prepare the gentle reader for his coming exposé of early-church idiocy.

Like the great institutions of European Christianity, modern science has amassed tremendous power--and not always lived up to its founding creeds. Science needs a Gibbon--someone who appreciates its intellectual grandeur and potential, but who also can train a cold eye on the "inevitable mixture of error and corruption" that has accompanied its tenure since the Enlightenment.

That Gibbon is not Michael Specter, a New Yorker staff writer and author of the new book Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives. His book purports to defend science from its philistine critics--people who, in Specter's view, reflexively deny the validity of the scientific process.

In his intro, Specter sets up the defining focus of the book. He contrasts the "rigorous and open-minded skepticism of science" with "the inflexible certainty of ideological commitment" (i.e., "denialism"). Already, we're on thin intellectual ice; Specter evidently believes in a pure science, one that exists completely apart from ideology. In Gibbon's phrasing, he's defending a science as "she descended from Heaven [read: the Enlightenment], arrayed in her native purity."

Menace to society? An organic farmer, with bounty. According to Denialism, organic farming threatens millions in Africa. According to the UN, not so much. But science doesn't exist in an ideal state. Like the arts, it lives on its patrons--and their interests shape its contours. Here in the United States, public funding for universities and research has plummeted since the Reagan era. Into that void have stepped monied interests--corporations more inclined to finance the generation of proprietary knowledge than the sort of pure science Specter so values.

Does this factor automatically invalidate the scientific enterprise? Of course not. But anyone who takes on the topic of modern science has to account for it--or risk playing the fool. Specter blithely ignores the political economy of science as it is practiced. That oversight severely limits the value of his book.

But there's another, even more glaring oversight at work here. In a book devoted to "denialism," and "how irrational thinking hinders scientific progress, harms the planet, and threatens our lives," there is almost no discussion of the most powerful and successful of all the denier cliques: those who insist human-induced climate change is a hoax.

So what do we find in these pages? We get a chapter defending the pharmaceutical industry against critics who question its wares--an industry with nearly $300 billion in sales in the U.S. alone, and fast-growing markets overseas. Specter's defense aside, Big Pharma typically vies with "oil and mining" and "commercial banks" for the title of most profitable industry in the United States.

There's a chapter decrying those who question the necessity of vaccinations--even as global child vaccine rates continue to rise. (Indeed, according to a recent report, the main factor holding vaccines back isn't denialism, but rather their heightened cost.)

We get a chapter lambasting what Specter calls the "organic fetish"--even though organic food sales remain less than 5 percent of the U.S. market (as Specter acknowledges). But really, this chapter (more on which below) amounts to a ringing defense of genetically modified organisms--which can now be found in 75 percent+ of the offerings on supermarket shelves.

Another chapter blasts the herbal remedy and supplement market--substantial at $23 billion in sales per year (according to this report), but still a fraction of the pharma market's size.

In other words, Specter mainly trains his sights on unsuccessful or marginally empowered "deniers," such as those challenging the pharma behemoth or vaccines for children.

But what about the successful deniers--the ones who have managed to block any meaningful response to climate change from the federal government, and are even now fouling up the effort to pass an effective climate bill? These folks, part of a loosely concerted movement funded largely by the oil and coal industries, get barely a mention in Denialism; they certainly don't rate a chapter.

The book's index has no entry for "climate change." The entry for "Global warming" cites just one page--a reference to genetically modified foods as a "solution" to global warming. 

Does this mean that Specter thinks Monsanto's critics--of whom I am one--pose more of threat to humanity than the likes of Sen. James Inhofe, who airs his views not in a blog but on the floor of the U.S. Senate? Monsanto has certainly shaken off its deniers; it now dominates the U.S. corn, soy, and cotton seed markets. The movement to mitigate climate change hasn't been so lucky.

Specter's failure to consider this most successful foray into denialism just astounds me. Did an author really just publish a book about "denialism"--and forget to address climate-change deniers? It's like writing a book about the British invasion of the 1960s, and neglecting to mention the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

OK, so what's in Specter's chapter on organics and GMOs? Astonishingly, not very much science. Two major assumptions underlie it: organic agriculture delivers frightfully low yields, and GMO agriculture delivers reassuringly high yields. He doesn't deliver data to back up either of those claims. Here are two studies, both of which came out in time for consideration in Denialism, that Specter really should have grappled with: 1) a 2009 study by the Union of Concerned Scientists showing that after decades of research, transgenic seeds have yet to deliver yield increases; and 2) a 2005 study in Bioscience (summary here) showing that yields of organically grown corn and soy match those of their conventional counterparts--with dramatically lower energy inputs.

Straddling his two wobbly, undefended givens about GMO and organic yields, Specter leaps to the conclusion that proponents of organic agriculture are dooming millions to starvation. Or as he puts it:

An organic universe sounds delightful, but it would consign millions in Africa and in much of Asia to malnutrition and death.

To hear Specter tell it, the only thing standing between the African continent and a future marked by widespread famine is a complete surrender to GMO technology. But in declaring that vision, he's brazenly denying the conclusions of the largest and most comprehensive study on the future of agriculture in the global south, the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD).

Under the auspices of the United Nations, World Bank, WHO, and other institutions, the IAASTD gathered 400 scientists and development experts from dozens of nations to assess the very problems that concern Specter. A three-year project, it has been called the IPCC of agriculture. Its conclusion: agroecological practices--including the very organic-farming techniques Specter finds so frightful--are at least as important as biotechnology in terms of "feeding the world" in the decades to come.

The study [PDF] is at best lukewarm on GMOs. It openly doubts whether GMOs actually increase yields; and deplores the patent regime that now governs them. The IAASTD states:

In developing countries especially, instruments such as patents may drive up costs, restrict experimentation by the individual farmers or public researchers while also potentially undermining local practices that enhance food security and economic sustainability. In this regard, there is particular concern about present IPR instruments eventually inhibiting seed-saving, exchange, sale and access to proprietary materials necessary for the independent research community to conduct analyses and long term experimentation on impacts. Farmers face new liabilities: GM farmers may become liable for adventitious presence if it causes loss of market certification and income to neighboring organic farmers, and conventional farmers may become liable to GM seed producers if transgenes are detected in their crops.

The IAASTD turned out to be so unenthusiastic about GMOs, in fact, that Croplife International, the trade group for the globe's dominant GMO/agrichemical purveyors, angrily pulled out of participation shortly before its release.

I'm not blasting Specter for refusing to agree with the IAASTD's conclusions; but I do find it inexcusable that he failed to grapple with this vast scientific undertaking. In doing so, he lurches toward a kind of denialism of his own.

Generally, he might have more fully engaged the major literature on ag development in the global south. He glancingly refers to the FAO's 2003-'04 "State of Food and Agriculture" paper that gave tepid support for GMOs among poor farmers (while stressing that they're "not a panacea"). Yet Specter ignores a more recent paper (this one from 2008, by the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development) that's directly relevant to the topic of his chapter: its on the potential of organic ag in Africa. The paper concludes:

Organic agriculture can increase agricultural productivity and can raise incomes with low-cost, locally available and appropriate technologies, without causing environmental damage. Furthermore, evidence shows that organic agriculture can build up natural resources, strengthen communities and improve human capacity, thus improving food security by addressing many different causal factors simultaneously ... Organic and near-organic agricultural methods and technologies are ideally suited for many poor, marginalized smallholder farmers in Africa, as they require minimal or no external inputs, use locally and naturally available materials to produce high-quality products, and encourage a whole systemic approach to farming that is more diverse and resistant to stress.

Again, no need to agree with every science-based report that praises organic ag. But to pretend such papers don't exist is poor journalism. Judging from his organic chapter, Specter spent a lot of time trolling the aisles at Whole Foods, marvelling at the simplistic comments of the shoppers. Fine. I have no doubt that he heard silly, science-denying things there. But where is the push to find the intersections between organic and science--such at the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania, which has for years been running a test organic farm, complete with control farm? The results of its work, often in conjunction with USDA researchers, show that innovative organic techniques have at least as much promise for mitigating and surviving climate change as some patent-protected transgenic seed cooked up in a Monsanto lab.

Scientific output is messy and full of contradictions. And that brings me back to my broader critique of this book: that Specter defends an ideal, objective science that doesn't exist in this world. There is no greater case study of the grubbiness of real-world science than the rise of Specter's beloved GMOs.

(I'm still marveling at this statement, from the introduction: "I wonder, as the ice sheet in Greenland disappears, the seas rise, and our sense of planetary foreboding grows, will denialists consider the genetically engineered organisms that propel our cars and sustain our factories as a continuation of what [organic champion] Lord Melchett described as a war against nature?")

GMOs are hardly a product of the kind of pure and objective science that Specter celebrates. Indeed, the few companies involved in GMO seed production have been accorded such extraordinary intellectual property power by the U.S. government that research scientists have risen up in rebellion.

In an article published in February of this year--maybe too late for consideration by Specter--The New York Times reported that 26 corn-insect specialists signed a letter to the EPA complaining that "no truly independent research [on GMOS] can be legally conducted on many critical questions" because the patent-holding companies have so much power over research. From the Times:

The problem, the scientists say, is that farmers and other buyers of genetically engineered seeds have to sign an agreement meant to ensure that growers honor company patent rights and environmental regulations. But the agreements also prohibit growing the crops for research purposes.

Shockingly, "The researchers ... withheld their names [from the EPA letter] because they feared being cut off from research by the companies." Now there's an example of scientists who are free to pursue the path of truth!

I'd also urge Specter to read a paper by Don Lotter, published early this year in the International Journal of the Sociology of Food and Agriculture. Lotter's paper, provocatively titled "The Genetic Engineering of Food and The Failure of Science," shows how the collapse of biology's "central dogma"--the one-gene, one-trait thesis that fell apart with the mapping of the human genome--exposed GM plant breeding as a rather crude tool. He traces the rise of GMOs, convincingly arguing that political and economic power, not scientific rigor, have driven the technology's ascent.

But political and economic power are precisely what elude Specter's gaze. This great defender of science appears to be cursed with something that a love of science should have cured: naiveté. To be sure, the kind of know-nothing, reflexive anti-scienticism that Specter deplores certainly exists; and its adherents need a kick in the pants. Specter's boot misses the target. Moreover, he sees deniers everywhere, except where they are actually powerful and effective: denying climate change.

Related Links:

AP: Since 1997 “climate change has worsened and accelerated”

Here’s what we know so far

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

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.

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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.

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

As it has come to dominate the agenda for reshaping African agriculture over the years, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been very careful not to associate itself too closely with patent-protected biotechnology as a panacea for African farmers.

True, the foundation named 25-year Monsanto veteran Rob Horsch to the position of "senior program officer, focusing on improving crop yields in sub-Saharan Africa."

Yet its flagship program for African ag, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), explicitly distances itself from GMOs. "AGRA does not fund the development of GMOs," the organization's Web site states.

But AGRA -- co-funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, proud sponsor of the original Green Revolution -- is just part of what Gates does around African ag. What precisely is the foundation getting up to over there? Is it pushing GMOs on African smallholder farms?

[I have a call into the foundation to ask directly about the role GMOs play in its efforts. I'll report on the response.]

It has been surprisingly hard to say. Until now.

In a speech at the World Food Prize gathering last week (see video below), Bill Gates himself chided the critics of GMOs -- and shed some sunshine on the foundation leadership's philosophy on ag development. At one point, he declared, "some of our grants [in Africa] do include transgenic approaches, because we believe they have the potential to address farmers' challenges more efficiently than conventional techniques."

Gates' speech seems like a significant event to me -- the World Food Prize website describes it as his "first major address on agriculture." One of the major knocks on the foundation's Africa efforts is the lack of democratic accountability and transparency. Since the foundation's careful message management makes it hard to figure out precisely what it's getting up to, I'm glad to see its leading light airing his views freely.

Gates opened with a standard-issue awestruck paean to Norman Borluag, recently deceased architect of the original Green Revolution. Gates delivered a rather unnuanced assessment of Borlaug's legacy. Gates declared: "He [Borlaug] proved that farming has the power to lift up the lives of the poor."

Really? To be sure, Borlaug's "dwarf" hybrid seed varieties, when coupled with the heavy fertilizer and pesticide doses they need to thrive, dramatically increased yields in the places where the Green Revolution took root -- the main success story being India.

But higher yields drive down crop prices -- and increased use of imported inputs requires the taking on of debt. Rather than boosting the fortunes of most farmers in its purview, the Green Revolution drove hundreds of thousands into ruin. The survivors consolidated land holdings. The big got bigger and the poor tended to leave the land -- too many of them ending up as excess labor in urban slum zones.

Maybe Gates didn't mean that Borlaug's efforts improved the lives of farmers, but rather the lives of non-farming urban dwellers. As he later says in the speech, also in the context of Borluag's legacy, "better farming can end hunger and poverty and lift whole countries out of poverty."

To be sure, many people were predicting famine for India in the 1960s, and the availability of cheap grain engendered by the Green Revolution no doubt forestalled widespread starvation. But it's demonstrably wrong to claim that the Green Revolution ended hunger and poverty in India.

Indeed, hunger rates remain appalling in India -- site of the Green Revolution's greatest putative success. From a 2008 report by the International Food Policy Research Institute:

According to the 2008 Global Hunger Index, India ranks 66 out of 88 nations (developing countries and countries in transition). Despite years of robust economic growth, India scored worse than nearly 25 Sub-Saharan African countries and all of South Asia, except Bangladesh.[Emphasis added.]

The bit about India faring worse than "nearly 25 Sub-Saharan African countries" is particularly noteworthy, given that the Gates Foundation is explicitly spearheading a "new Green Revolution for Africa." Of course, the original Green Revolution in India lies in shambles -- the water table has been tapped near dry by massive irrigation projects in the zones where the Borlaug program took hold, and the remaining farmers there are struggling mightily with crushing debt loads and heightened pesticide-related cancer rates.

To be fair, Gates did point to "excesses" of the first Green Revolution, naming "too much irrigation and fertilizer" as examples. He vowed to avoid those mistakes in Africa. He insisted, more than once, that ecological sustainability was critical to the foundation's project. Yet he repeatedly emphasized that increasing gross production--the Borlaug project of squeezing as much yield out of a piece of land as possible -- was the key.

And that led him to the most fiery moment of his speech (if this dour man's demeanor can ever be described as "fiery"): the part where he denounced unnamed "environmentalists" who are somehow blocking GMO seeds from entering Africa.

"This global effort to help small farmers is endangered by an ideological wedge that threatens to split the movement in two," Gates declared. He decried what he called a "false choice" between a "technological" approach geared to boosting productivity and an "environmental" one geared to sustainability. "We can have both," he said.

He went on: "Some people insist on an ideal vision of the environment which is divorced from people and their circumstances. They have tried to restrict the spread of biotechnology into sub-Saharan Africa without regard to how much hunger and poverty might be reduced by it, or what the farmers themselves might want."

The Gates Foundation, by contrast, isn't so demure. In an apparent reference to this project with GMO seed giant Monsanto, Gates allowed that "one of our [unnamed] private-sector partners" is working on a genetically modified drought-tolerant corn variety for African farmers. The seeds will be available to farmers royalty-free -- meaning that farmers will pay market price for the seeds themselves, but not pay the hefty biotech premium Monsanto normally slaps on top. It's unclear whether seed-saving will be allowed under the arrangement.

According to the above-linked press release, the magic seeds are expected to come online in 2018. Gates emphasized repeatedly that as climate change proceeds apace, greater and greater swaths of Africa will face persistent drought conditions. In pushing for drought-tolerant seeds, Gates is swinging for the fences -- looking for a single big solution to feed Africa's drought-stricken areas.

For me, this deal raises questions that cut to the heart of the Bill Gates approach to African ag.

First of all, it can't be noted often enough that a) GM agriculture's much-hyped ability to boost yields, taken as a given by Gates, has thus far proven purely spectral; b) there's serious evidence, despite a paucity of cash for critical research and heavy-handed control of research by seed companies, that GMOs cause health problems; and c) GMOs have so far proven quite proficient at generating unintended ecological consequences, such as the rise of "superweeds."

There's no room for any of that in Gates' discourse.

Further, I absolutely agree with Bill Gates that there's no zero-sum tradeoff between productivity and sustainability. But I urge him to tear his gaze away from the biotech lab and train it toward the field, where the best research on organic ag is being done. Indeed, one of the great benefits of organic farming is its long-term focus on soil health -- and healthy soils can increase productivity over time without massive ecological externalities.

Here's a summary of a 2005 paper published in Bioscience comparing yields of organic and conventional corn. The 22-year study compared yields of corn and soy for the following systems: 1) conventional chemical-based agriculture; 2) organic ag using manure for soil fertility; and 3) organic ag using "green manure" (nitrogen-fixing cover crops) for fertility. From the summary, here's the key nugget of the study:

"First and foremost, we found that corn and soybean yields were the same across the three systems," said [researcher David] Pimentel, who noted that although organic corn yields were about one-third lower during the first four years of the study, over time the organic systems produced higher yields, especially under drought conditions. The reason was that wind and water erosion degraded the soil on the conventional farm while the soil on the organic farms steadily improved in organic matter, moisture, microbial activity and other soil quality indicators. [Emphasis added.]

Note well the "especially under drought conditions" bit. Here is a technology for "drought-tolerant" corn that's ready right now -- no need to wait until 2018. It doesn't rely on the benevolence of Monsanto to waive a technology fee; and there are no questions about seed-saving. It asks no one to accept a drop in long-term productivity as the price paid for sustainability. And not only does it help farmers adapt to climate change with its drought-tolerant qualities, but it helps mitigate climate change by sequestering carbon. From the summary:

The fact that organic agriculture systems also absorb and retain significant amounts of carbon in the soil has implications for global warming, Pimentel said, pointing out that soil carbon in the organic systems increased by 15 to 28 percent, the equivalent of taking about 3,500 pounds of carbon dioxide per hectare out of the air.

Moreover, in a 2008 paper (PDF), the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) endorsed organic ag as a way to boost food security and improve farmer livelihoods in Africa. Concluded the FAO:

Organic agriculture can increase agricultural productivity and can raise incomes with low-cost, locally available and appropriate technologies, without causing environmental damage. Furthermore, evidence shows that organic agriculture can build up natural resources, strengthen communities and improve human capacity, thus improving food security by addressing many different causal factors simultaneously ... Organic and near-organic agricultural methods and technologies are ideally suited for many poor, marginalized smallholder farmers in Africa, as they require minimal or no external inputs, use locally and naturally available materials to produce high-quality products, and encourage a whole systemic approach to farming that is more diverse and resistant to stress. [Emphasis added.]

Gates cash could go a long way in dispersing the skills and (relatively low-cost) equipment needed for effective organic farming in Africa. Why not, for example, fund a dramatic expansion of the Soil, Food, and Healthy Communities project that's proving so successful in Malawi?

So where's the Gates cash, and the fiery speech from the foundation's leader defending organic ag from its critics? Now, it's true that the Gates Foundation does fund research into alternative, low-input agriculture. Just this past spring, the foundation awarded $1.3 million to World Watch to study such techniques for improving ag productivity in Africa.

But let's look at funding levels. The above-mentioned Monsanto GMO corn project got $42 million from Gates -- and an additional $5 million from the Howard Buffet Foundation, run by the son of investor/insurance magnate Warren Buffet. The Worldwatch grant is loose change in comparison. (When I get a Gates official on the phone, i'll ask about other organic-style programs they're funding.)

Given the pro-high-technology thrust of Gates' speech, this imbalance is hardly surprising. As I took in the video of Gates' speech and heard him go on about the "needs of small farmers" and the critical role of biotech in serving those needs, I couldn't help but think of him as a kind of unelected agriculture commissioner for the African continent. And I wondered how many African farms will survive the embrace of the great software magnate.

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

Eat a slice of fresh tomato from the supermarket or at a restaurant this winter, and chances are it will have come from a field in south-central Florida, site of 90 percent of U.S. winter tomato production.

And this year, there's a fighting chance that the worker who picked it might have made something close to a living wage. That's because huge Florida farm called East Coast Growers and Packers--one of the state's four largest tomato tomato growers--has agreed to deliver a penny-per-pound raise to farm workers, representing a pay boost of about 64 percent. With East Coast committed to making sure the raise end's up in farm workers' pockets, the state's other large growers may soon follow suit.

The movement to improve conditions for Florida's pickers has been a long and difficult one. The scrappy worker-led Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has been pushing for decades to improve conditions and pay in tomato country. I visited the the area myself last spring--and was stunned to see that despite all the progress and publicity, living conditions remain dismal and pay absurdly low. Given that level of normal, everyday exploitation, it's not surprising that in extreme situations, cases of modern-day slavery regularly crop up in the area.

Years ago, the CIW realized that merely demanding raises from the area's large-scale tomato growers wasn't likely to improve conditions much. The growers themselves operate in a highly competitive market, dominated by large-scale food industry buyers like Wal-Mart and McDonald's. Those companies used their market power to keep tomato prices low--if Florida's growers don't like the prices they were offering, they could threaten to buy their tomatoes from Mexico.

Squeezed from the top by their buyers, the growers eked out profit by in turn squeezing their workers--keeping wages as low as possible.

The CIW realized that the only way to wriggle free from this double squeeze was to go around the growers and straight to the companies at the top of the food chain.

And that's what CIW did, starting with fast-food operations. Of course, the business model of the fast food industry is to buy ingredients as cheaply as possible, tweak them into products with mass appeal, and sell those products at attractively cheap prices. Profits margins are low, but great profits can be made at high volume. In other words, McDonald's might make only a few dimes off of each $3.50 Big Mac, but if you can sell many millions of them of them, you're rolling in dough.

So fast-food companies had little initial interest in complying with the CIW's request for a penny-per-pound raise. When your profitability depends on high volume and low prices, pinching pennies rises to the level of business creed.

So the CIW went to the public, methodically targeting the fast-food giants with boycotts. One by one they fell: First Taco Bell (owned by Yum Brands), then McDonald's, and then Burger King. They all eventually agreed, kicking and screaming, to pay the extra penny to tomato pickers.

Then things got weird. Two years ago, the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, a cooperative representing the state's industrial-scale tomato farms, balked. Perhaps stung by the workers' success and emerging sense of power, the FTGE slammed the door shut on the raise. The group announced it would impose a draconian fine on any grower who passed on the penny per pound raise.

Since then, workers have been getting the same old wage--about 50 cents for every 32-pound bucket they harvest. Adjusted for inflation, their wages have fallen steadily over the decades and remain firmly below the poverty line. The extra penny per pound paid by the CIW signees languished in an escrow account. Meanwhile, other, non-fast food tomato buyers like Bon Appetit Management and Whole Foods signed the CIW agreement. Those pennies, too, went into escrow.

And this is why the agreement with East Coast Growers and Packers is so significant. The operation is defying the FTGE and passing the raise directly to the workers. And the raise is significant. It will push the per-bucket rate from 50 cents to 82 cents--a 64 percent raise.

And with mega-companies like McDonald's directing their business to East Coast because of the deal, it seems likely that other growers will relent, too--and the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange's absurd campaign to block the raise will collapse.

Meanwhile, the CIW is turning up pressure on those other huge buyers in the tomato market--the mass-scale grocery chains.

Once all workers in the area retain basic human rights including decent working/living conditions, it will be time to focus on another massive problem in Florida's vast mono-criopped tomato fields: widespread use of highly toxic pesticides.

A note on Chipotle Grill, which announced in a Tuesday press release that it had "reached an agreement with East Coast Farms, one of Florida's largest tomato growers, under which workers who harvest tomatoes for Chipotle will receive an additional penny per pound."

Chipotle had come under fire, including from me, for its refusal to sign an agreement with the CIW. While the burrito chain should be commended for joining CIW and its previuos signees' efforts to push East Coast into accepting the raise, it's puzzling that Chipotle would present this important agreement as a one-off deal between a large grower and one company. Happily, the East Coast agreement is much larger than that.

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

Cows on pasture: potential solution, or menace to society? What is just food? One might answer: food produced without causing undue ecological damage, food grown under production systems that allow workers and farmers to earn livable wages, food that's healthy, accessible, and affordable to everyone who eats.

To James E. McWilliams, author of the new book Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, just food is certainly much more than food produced and purchased locally, and his book wags a contrarian finger at the "locavores" who believe purchasing food grown close to home somehow makes it more just, fair, or better for society and the planet.

"The locavore approach to reforming our broken food system has serious limits-limits that our exuberant acceptance of eating local has obscured," McWilliams writes. In their application of a simplistic valuing methodology (judging food purely by how far away from one's plate it originated), he claims, these 100-mile dieters could potentially do more harm than good, if they succeeded in their apparent mission to force the entire world's eaters to choose food grown within a short drive of their kitchen table.

The problem with this argument is its irrelevance. The few truly orthodox locavores who presumably exist (do you know even one?) aren't close to persuading the world to eat the way they do. To devote an entire book to debunking the impulse to eat closer to home doesn't address the points raised by food and farm activists. At their most relevant, today's alternative eaters illuminate the systemic problems created by industrialized food provisioning: negative impacts on the global climate as well as significant deterioration in water quality, soil quality, local economies, worker justice, and human health.

McWilliams reduces the message of the food movement to a simple prescription--eat local--and proceeds to debunk it. Yet it's hard to believe any thoughtful person could imagine that eating locally would address this multitude of issues. One imagines, rather, that consumers, when faced with a system they don't support, are voting with their dollars for the only alternatives they can find-local food at the farmers market and organic products at the store. What McWilliams seems to miss is that these purchasing choices don't make people fundamentalist locavores or organic purists. The locavores I know don't view shopping consciously as a solution; they view it as a protest.

The author often categorizes proponents of alternative food systems--first locavores, then organic advocates, then those who object to genetically modified crops--as wild-eyed extremists in need of some firm schooling on "a golden mean of producing food." McWilliams' vision of this agricultural golden mean promotes lifecycle assessments over food miles, and judicious pesticide use over organics. He preaches the potential of genetically modified cassava to feed starving Africans, dismisses grass-fed beef because it can't be scaled up to meet current demand, and advocates a drastic increase in freshwater aquaculture to meet demands for animal protein.

Again and again, one gets the uncomfortable feeling that McWilliams creates fanatical straw men in order to make his own presentation of facts seem like a rational alternative. "The problems that I have with organic agriculture have less to do with how it is currently practiced than with the inflated claim that it's the only alternative to today's wasteful conventional production," he writes. But do any serious proponents seeking more sustainable alternatives to conventional agriculture claim this?

As he continues on his mission to disabuse the ecological faithful of their trust in growing organically, McWilliams uses the fact that sometimes organic growers use toxic natural compounds to knock organic off what he perceives to be its high horse of purity, and then cites the work of Bruce Ames, a controversial Berkeley scientist, to support the view that many modern pesticides don't hold the same risks as their older counterparts. Despite devoting pages to each of these points, they do little to move McWilliams towards his chapter's supposed conclusion: that organic should fall within a "continuum of farming systems." A discussion of the pros and cons of organic and conventional production, and a studied evaluation of other farming systems along such a continuum, would have been a good start.

McWilliams' defense of modern pesticides leads him to a contradiction. If pesticides aren't so bad, one wonders why the author's measured support for GMO crops hinges in part with the argument that they allow for a reduction in pesticide use. Or do they? "To be sure, there are many studies that show the exact opposite-that is, that GM crops have done nothing to reduce pesticide use," McWilliams writes.

Paying little heed to such inconvenient tangles in this chapter or others, McWilliams hurtles forward down the path of measured (the man loves his middle ground) support for GM crops. In his rush to the middle, though, the author misses some important facets of the GM debate. For example, he glosses over evidence that GM technology hasn't managed to boost yields, much industry hype to the contrary; and he ignores the vested interest in today's crop of herbicide-tolerant genetically modified seeds: namely, that the companies that sell seeds with herbicide resistance also peddle the herbicides that must accompany their product.

This blithe obliviousness to the profit-seeking motives of the GM seed industry allows McWillams to argue for development of GM technology for "subsistence oriented" crops so they might thrive in dry or salty soils. This argument falls short on economic and theoretical grounds. While Monsanto can make billions of dollars per year selling Roundup Ready corn and soy (and Roundup) to industrial-scale farmers, there's little cash to be made selling, say, drought-tolerant cassava to African smallholders. So what entity is going to develop such seeds? McWilliams' answer: the Gates Foundation. But while the aims of the foundation are admirable, there's plenty of evidence that Gates, like McWilliams, doesn't really understand hunger in Africa.

Gates and McWilliams, in promoting biotechnology as the solution to Africa's food troubles, take a shortsighted view of hunger, seeing it only through the lens of yield shortages and disregarding the ample historical evidence that hunger in developing countries has at least as much to do with world trade, democratic failures, poverty, and conflict as they do with the lack of a salt-tolerant sorghum seed.

McWilliams: courageously manning the middle of the road. The most sensible recommendation McWilliams makes is that if we want to lesson agriculture's impact on natural systems, we need to eat less meat. In forming this argument, he relies heavily on a 2006 report from the Food and Agriculture Organization, almost to the point where one felt reading the report and getting data firsthand might have been a better use of time. McWilliams' also hypes the importance of life-cycle analyses (LCAs) in pointing out inefficiencies in the food system. LCAs are good tools, but they hardly represent the sort of radical approach that's "off the public radar screen," as the author claims, ignored by locavores the world over as they persist in stubbornly clinging to food miles as their shortcut solution for determining a food's ecological footprint.

McWilliams' stated goal in writing Just Food was to lay a blueprint for "how we can truly eat responsibly." He's right in pointing out that eating locally and organically alone won't result in the creation of a just food system, and that there's much work left to do if the aim is sustainability in food provisioning. Yet his book fails to outline any sort of considered analysis of what a "truly" responsible food system might look like. Instead, the author wastes time promoting himself as the arbiter of rational thinking about the food system, an antidote to those rabid locavores and organic purists crowding the aisles of Whole Foods and farmers markets who vainly believe they've found the solution to our food systems' problems.

One imagines McWilliams, a historian at Texas State University, might have written a book more in tune with his academic training, perhaps an examination of the rise of the varied movements of local eating, organic growing, fair trade, and healthy food access. He could have combined this historical survey with an analysis of what these movements mean in the greater context of our increasingly globalizing food system, and concluded with how they might be woven together into a forward-thinking approach that moves us toward the "just food" he claims to care so much about. Instead, we're left with a treatise that focuses more on taking Alice Waters and Slow Food advocates down a peg than on putting forth innovative solutions to the problems within our food system. While this might be the author's idea of fun, it's ultimately a childish way to make a point, and a disappointing strategy on which to hinge a book.

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On July 13, Chipotle Mexican Grill announced it was throwing its marketing weight behind Food, Inc., a documentary that takes a highly critical look at the food system.

The fast-food chain would be sponsoring free screenings of the film at 32 theaters nationwide. It would also be distributing material promoting the film at all its restaurants--thus exposing people in search of a tasty burrito to a film quite different from the super-hero blockbusters that get promoted in typical fast-food chains. In addition, there'd be a Chipotle-related "bonus feature" in the film's upcoming DVD.

The Chipotle/Food, Inc. tie-up caught my eye, because just a month before, a group of food writers and activists signed a letter to Chipotle CEO Steve Ells sharply criticizing the chain for its inaction on farm worker rights. The two signees who topped the list were Food, Inc. director Robert Kenner and co-producer Eric Schlosser, who is also prominently featured in the film. (I signed the letter as well.)

The letter was written on behalf of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a farm-worker-led group that has been fighting to improve sub-poverty wages, dismal living conditions, and sometimes outright slavery in Florida tomato country--source of 90 percent of the winter tomatoes consumed in the United States. The CIW wants Chipotle to commit to pay an extra penny per pound for tomatoes, in an arrangement that would ultimately deliver the hike directly to workers. Chipotle claims it supports the penny-per-pound principle, but refuses to sign an agreement with the CIW.

Off-screen drama at a Food, Inc. showing."We view the CIW's struggle for dignity as a non-negotiable part of the struggle for a sustainable food system," the letter states. "Therefore, we strongly urge you to enter into an agreement with this worker-led organization that has been fighting tirelessly to improve conditions in tomato country since 1993."

When Chipotle announced it was sponsoring Food, Inc., I assumed an agreement with the CIW was imminent. In its uphill fight to get decent wages for tomato pickers, the CIW has won agreements from some of the most profit-focused companies in the food industry, including Burger King, McDonald's, and Yum Brands, owner of Taco Bell. More recently, two sustainability-minded companies--Whole Foods and Bon Appetit Management--have signed agreements with the CIW. Surely Chipotle, which strives to serve "food with integrity" and has a history of working with mid-sized sustainable farmers, couldn't be far behind ... right?

But then I checked the CIW's Web site --and it turned out there was just as much distance as ever between the farm-worker group and the burrito chain. (Ironically, the Mission-style burritos served by Chipotle probably evolved from a hearty lunch staple developed for Mexican farm workers in California's Central Valley in the 1950s.)

I found that activists from a CIW-allied group, the Campaign for Fair Food, had been attending the Chipotle-sponsored free screenings and handing out copies of the letter signed by Kenner and Schlosser. They held up a banner reading "Food, Inc.: great film/Chipotle: Don't believe the hype."

Chipotle clearly resents such critical statements at events designed to demonstrate its sustainability cred. At one of its screenings in Denver, Chipotle employees barred people from the Campaign for Fair Food to speak after the screening--overturning an arrangement that had been made with Food, Inc's public-education campaign.

I asked Chipotle communications director Chris Arnold about the incident. He referred me to Matt Cowal of Magnolia Pictures, which is distributing the film. "What happened with the Campaign for Fair Food was a mixup," he told me. "The Chipotle screenings and what we're doing with our social-action partnerships were always meant to be separate initiatives. Chipotle was under the correct impression that their screening was intended to be exclusively for their guests and what happened was a scheduling error on our part."

In other words, people wanting to discuss the CIW issue aren't to be given stage time at the Chipotle-sponsored Food, Inc. screenings. Damara Luce of Just Harvest USA tells me that after the Denver screenings, Chipotle representatives were equally inhospitable to CIW allies at showings in Kansas City, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore.

So what gives? How did a film made by Kenner and Schlosser end up being sponsored by a company being called out by Kenner and Schlosser? I contacted all the principal actors in this drama to find answers.

Food, Inc. director Robert Kenner

Standing with the farm workers
Schlosser and Kenner, for their part, stand by their support of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. As the film's co-producer and director, they have limited say over how it's marketed and distributed. Those decisions ultimately lie with the film's production company, Participant Media, and its distributor, Magnolia Pictures.

Participant declined to comment for this article. Cowal of Magnolia Pictures told me he was unaware of the situation in Florida's tomato fields when he linked up with Chipotle, which he called a leading player in the movement to reform the food system. "They're doing a lot of great things around sustainability," he said. He added: "We do hope something positive will come of this--that it [the controversy] will inspire Chipotle to rethink their position on the Coalition."

As for Schlosser and Kenner, as you might expect from writer/filmmaker types, they have strong opinions. Schlosser wrote the following in an email:

I like the food at Chipotle. I think their efforts on behalf of sustainability, animal welfare, and the misuse of antibiotics are terrific. But I care more about human rights than any of those things.

If Taco Bell, Subway, Burger King, and McDonald's can reach agreement with the CIW, I don't see why Chipotle can't. It will not cost much--and it will help to end human trafficking in Florida.

Although I'm grateful for the support that Chipotle has given to Food, Inc., my views haven't changed since I signed that letter.

Kenner took a similar position in a phone conversation. He said he admires Chipotle's commitment to sustainability--in fact, he seriously considered featuring it in Food, Inc. as an example of a large player that's "moving in the right direction." "I don't regret that they're sponsoring the film," he emphasized.

But he made clear that he disagreed with the company's position on the CIW. "The film is really about fair food," he said. "People are aware that animals are being abused [in the food system]. There's a lot less consciousness about workers."

In fact, just as Kenner nearly included a section on Chipotle, he also seriously considered honing in on the situation in Immokalee. If the film hadn't ended up shining a light on harsh working conditions in the pork-proccessing industry, "we would have gone to Immokalee and told that story."

"I was hopeful that by associating itself with a film that promotes workers' rights, [Chipotle] might be inclined to sign with the Coalition," he said. "And now I'm not confident they will."

He repeated: "Frankly, I don't understand their position."

In the heat of the grill
So what exactly is Chipotle's position on Florida's ruthlessly exploited tomato-field workers? (I visited Immokalee myself last spring, and filed two reports--here and here.)

First, a little setup. Florida's tomato pickers are currently locked in a battle with the area's farm owners over the penny-per-pound raise the CIW wrung out of McDonald's, Burger King, and Yum Brands. The Florida Tomato Growers Exchange is refusing to pass on the raise to workers, whose real wages have plunged to well below poverty level in the past two decades. So the CIW is locked in a bitter fight with the Growers Exchange.

Whole Foods and Bon Appetit recently intervened by signing on to the CIW's penny-per-pound pledge, while also working with the Coalition to identify sustainable tomato growers who pay their workers decently. Chipotle has chosen to chart its own path--it has set up its own escrow account to hold an extra penny-per-pound for workers. And, like the CIW, it claims to be looking for growers willing to pass it on.

"We are escrowing a penny per pound for any tomatoes we buy from Florida, with that money earmarked for the farm workers," Chipotle's Arnold wrote in an email message. He continued:

But we would rather have that money get to the workers rather than simply amassing in an escrow account. That is why we are working (with assistance from the CIW) to try to find growers who will actually pay the additional money to the workers, rather than support the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange in blocking payments to the workers.

That last bit doesn't make any sense to me. If they want to help break through the Growers Exchange and get the workers their much-needed raise, why not join McDonald's. Burger King, Whole Foods, etc, and work hand-in-hand with the CIW?

I asked CIW staffer Greg Asbed about the situation. Why aren't Chipotle's efforts sufficient? "Chipotle has made no commitment, signed no enforceable agreement, behind their decision to pay the penny per pound." he wrote in an email. He added:

All our agreements, from Yum Brands to Bon Appetit, are signed, enforceable agreements with no fixed term for the penny per pound-- and so the agreement to pay the surcharge is not dependent on the whim of the company. Chipotle, on the other hand, could rescind its decision to pay the penny more tomorrow (even assuming they are really paying it today) and we would have no recourse but to protest.

Asbed also points out a stark contrast in Chipotle CEO Steven Ells's approach to food issues. "Ells is clearly, for whatever reason known only to him, far more comfortable walking arm in arm with a small farmer than embracing farmworkers leading the fight for human rights in the fields," Asbed wrote. "And that disparity, that contradiction, is what is so very wrong about Chipotle and its efforts to position itself at the forefront of the sustainable food movement."

Ironically, by embracing Food, Inc., Chipotle is highlighting the whole vexed issue of how America treats the people who harvest and prepare its food--which is exactly what Kenner intended the film to do in the first place.

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

A proven climate solution. Not since Earl Butz's famous "hedgerow to hedgerow" comment of the 1970s have America's farmers been at such a turning point. Food and farming policy in the United States is largely determined by the Farm Bill, behemoth legislation that comes around once every five years.  Yet, the current climate legislation--The American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES)--offers an unprecedented opportunity to rethink the way America farms. 

Since the start of ACES, agriculture interests have had an unspoken, yet powerful voice in the bill. Ag was explicitly exempted from the "capped" sector, which meanth that from the beginning, agriculture was always intended to receive offset benefits in ACES.  But the question remains whether agricultural offsets will be awarded to the types of practices and systems that are scientifically proven to actually reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and sequester carbon.

With the bill now firmly in the grasp of Chairman Peterson of the House Agriculture Committee it will surely be riddled with agriculture handouts when it emerges. But while Peterson may attempt to load the bill, the quality--not the quantity--of such offsets will determine how effective the legislation is at reducing GHG emissions.  Agricultural offsets and programs that fail to recognize the proven ability of organic practices and systems to reduce GHG emissions and sequester carbon will offer few real benefits for the climate, the environment, or a progressive farm future.  

An increasing amount of peer-reviewed science demonstrates the true ability of organic practices and systems to not only sequester more carbon than conventional and no-till agriculture (yes, even no-till, the industry's exalted climate change solution), but to inherently produce fewer GHG emissions overall.  This is a point I can't emphasize enough-climate legislation can not simply hope to sequester its way out of a looming environmental crisis.  Unless ACES makes actual and verified reductions in GHG emissions it will be ineffective.  And the best agricultural solution that has the science to back up such reductions is organic agriculture, with agroecological practices including abstaining from synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use, cover cropping, pasture-based animal production, incorporation of compost and manures into soils, and prevention of fallow fields. 

So what does the science say?  The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization concluded "[w]ith lower energy inputs, organic systems contribute less to GHG emissions and have a greater potential to sequester carbon in biomass than conventional systems." Research published by Pelletier et al. last year in Environmental Management found that organic cropping systems required half the fossil fuel inputs and generated three-fourths the GHG emissions of conventional agriculture.  Additional studies shared similar results, largely because organic agriculture abstains from using synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, which require vast quantities of fossil fuels to produce.  If we are really aiming for "energy independence" why aren't we directing our farm policies to organic practices?

Still more scientific studies are finding that organic pasture raised animals offer a variety of climate benefits.  The United Nations estimates that animal production contributes nearly one fifth of all global GHG emissions, making it not only a significant source of emissions but a significant opportunity for reductions and mitigation.  Research by Flessa et. al. (2002) published in Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment suggested that transitioning to pasture agriculture is the single best way to cut GHG emissions in animal production.  Additional studies (Boadi et.al., 2004 and DeRamus et. al., 2003) determined that feeding livestock on pasture compared to feedlot diets usually consisting of corn and soy reduced methane emissions about 20%. 

The EPA has also determined that when manures are stored or treated in liquid storage systems commonly found on factory farms, the decomposition of manure produces great amounts of methane, unlike when manure is handled as a solid or deposited on pasture, range or paddock lands.  Manures spread appropriately on pastures and paddocks produce minimal amounts of methane.  Research has also documented that manure stores on conventional farms emitted about twenty-five percent more methane gas than organic farms.

So that's the first part- inherently fewer emissions because of the way that organic agriculture abstains from chemicals and synthetic ingredients and utilizes natural amendments which help store carbon.  This leads me to my next point- sequestration.  It's true that all agriculture can sequester carbon, but if it's doing so while simultaneously being doused in chemical fertilizers and pesticides the benefits are quickly lost.  The new current trend promoted by the agricultural industry is no-till or conservation agriculture, which leaves crop residues on the surface and cuts down on tilling the soil.  The supposed perks of no-till include increased sequestration, but recent evidence suggests otherwise.

The dirty little secret of no-till agriculture is that it increases pesticide use and also appears to increase emissions of nitrous oxide--310 times as strong as carbon dioxide.  In fact, the USDA acknowledged last year, "By eliminating some or all of the tillage practices under conservation tillage, growers may rely more heavily on the use of herbicides for weed control." Additional studies have concluded the same.  And, increasing research suggests that under a variety of soil and climate conditions no-till agriculture actually increases nitrous oxide emissions.  This is coupled with numerous studies including Baker et.al in 2007 that suggest no-till actually doesn't sequester more carbon than conventional systems.

Recently though, USDA scientists concluded a nine year study comparing organic, conventional and no-till agriculture for sequestration and found the organic production system sequestered more carbon.  Scientists noted, "Despite the use of tillage, soil combustible carbon and nitrogen concentrations were higher at all depth intervals to 30cm in organic agriculture compared with that in all other systems."  Further, the scientists concluded that, "these results suggest that organic agriculture can provide greater long-term soil benefits than conventional no-till, despite the use of tillage in organic agriculture."

Thursday the House Agriculture Committee holds a hearing to review ACES, providing a key opportunity to recognize and act on the science behind the benefit of organic agriculture for climate change.  Yet, the current panel line-up does not seem promising- representatives include the American Farm Bureau, the National Association of Corn Growers, National Milk Producers Federation, and even The Fertilizer Institute.  Where are the NGOs?  Where are the representatives for small family farm producers?  Where are the organic farmers? 

Progressive climate change legislation is no longer progressive when it perpetuates and rewards industrial agriculture that has been the main source of agricultural emissions for decades.  Failure to include organic practices and certified organic producers in ACES will set back our goal of reducing GHGs in the present and prevent America's farmers from economically transitioning to ecological farming.  It's not too late for the House Agriculture Committee and Chairman Peterson to realize this and set us on future farming course that not only feeds our country but cleans up the planet too.  

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

Wouldn't a bit of atrazine liven up this scene?India is a major player on the global stage--hub of the information-technology market, the world's second most populous nation, and a nuclear power to boot.

It would be a global-scale calamity if India's food security became compromised--and that is exactly what's happening, as NPR's Daniel Zwerdling showed in three excellent reports last month. 

In May, Zwerdling focused on the decay of industrial agriculture. His latest piece, which aired Monday, he turns to organic ag--which is becoming increasingly popular across the country as farmers grapple with declining soil quality and high costs for irrigation water and chemical inputs.

Zwerdling doesn't mention it, but what we know as organic farming in the west has roots in India. In the early 20th century, just as European and U.S. agriculture was moving toward a mechanized, chemical-dependent model, a British plant pathologist named Albert Howard spent time in Barbados and India. His charge was to teach the "native" farmers in the colonies how to better grow food for the Mother Country.

But the "natives" had something to teach him instead. Observing how small-scale farmers in Barbados and India built soil fertility through composting and manure, and avoided pest troubles by creating the conditions for balanced insect populations, Howard codified the practices that would soon become known as "organic" in the West. The great engine for productive agriculture, Howard concluded, was biodiversity--both among crops and literally within healthy soil, which bristles with the life of billions of microorganisms..

So in many ways, the rise of organic agriculture in India is really a return, a revival.

Zwerdling's story doesn't paper over the difficulties of switching from chemical-based to organic ag. He focuses on Amarjit Sharma, a farmer in the Punjab, India's breadbasket. There, farmers fully embraced the Green Revolution--the effort, starting in the late 1960s, to move to large-scale, mechanized farming with heavy irrigation and lots of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.

Sharma farmed that way for years, but went organic in 2005, after seeing his wheat yields stagnate and his agrichemical bills rise to crushing levels. Now, his rice yields are nearly equal to those of chemical-oriented farmers, but his wheat yields are just half. Zwerdling asks him about that, and Sharma has an excellent reply.

"I've been farming organically only for four years now. My land is still recovering from the Green Revolution. So I'm sure my yields will increase," he says.

Imagine how much organic farmers might be able to produce, Sharma says, if India's government spent even a fraction of the billions of dollars it has spent promoting chemical farming.

Zwerdling reveals that things have gotten so bad on India's conventional farms that even major players in ag policy are starting to promote organic in a serious way--and not as a trendy but ultimately frivolous niche, the way the USDA treats it here. Zwerdling quotes Gurcharan Kalkat, chair of the Punjab State Farmers Commission:

"For 70 percent of the area in the country (outside Punjab), farmers must go for organic farming," he says, because organic methods will replenish the soil and improve their productivity. As for Punjab, the report concluded that 20 percent of its farmers could go organic and remain productive, too.

That might sound timid, but imagine if the president of the American Farm Bureau called for transitioning 20 percent of the Corn Belt--and 70 percent of farmland outside it--to organic.

Already, Indian farmers are transitioning in growing numbers. In many ways, India's movement against chemical farming is stronger than ours here in the United States. According to Zwerdling:

India has about three times the population of the U.S., but 30 times more organic farmers than the U.S.

India's farmers have already taught the world plenty about low-impact, highly productive farming. Apparently, they're not done.

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David Bauer of Farm and Sparrow BakeryPhoto: April McGregerOn a recent vacation to Asheville, North Carolina, I headed to the market to get a loaf of bread. Asheville is home to a large a number of small-scale bakeries, many of which sell primarily at tailgate markets and wholesale to nearby specialty food shops.

I found the market shelves stocked with lovely loaves of ciabatta, baguette, marble rye, and challah, but I was most intrigued by a few loaves that I knew at first glance were special. Packaged in brown paper bags with a hand-stamped wood-cut logo, the loaves were not internationally known bread classics. Instead, their labels heralded unusual ingredients: "Heirloom Grit" and "Kamut." These intriguing loaves came from a bakery called Farm and Sparrow.

I couldn't resist calling up David Bauer, Farm and Sparrow's owner and baker, to arrange a visit. Through my talk with Bauer, I realized he represents a new type of baker. He sees himself as part of a larger decentralized, healthy, and diverse food system. The kamut, spelt, and buckwheat that you find in Farm and Sparrow's breads are known as landrace grains--grains that developed in the absence of modern breeding techniques. Landrace grains tend to be tougher, more resilient, and not dependent on chemical fertilizers, intense irrigation, and pesticides in order to survive.

Bauer sells his breads at the tailgate farmer's markets throughout the Asheville area. He is deeply committed to his local food community. Unlike most bakers who buy flour, Bauer sources whole grains, which he grinds himself the same day he makes his bread.

For him, the ideal would be to source grain locally. But finding locally or even regionally grown grain is nearly impossible in the United States today. The reason for this scarcity lies in the industrialization of agriculture over the last century, which went hand in hand with the consolidation of food processing.

A loaf of bread made of locally grown and stone-ground grains requires a certain kind of infrastructure that disappeared almost completely from our national landscape in the 1880s, with the introduction of the steel-roller mill and the rise hard Midwest-grown wheat. The steel-roller mill could efficiently remove the perishable germ and bran from wheat berries, creating a shelf-stable flour that could easily travel long distances.

Before this development, local mills had been necessary because flour had a shelf life of approximately one week. After, flour could be stored for months. Scalping the bran and the germ from wheat, however, meant stripping away key nutrients and fiber. This technological advance represented a nutritional step backward. 

Flour then went on to be the first food to be centrally produced and widely distributed. What essentially amounted to the dumping of cheap, Midwest-grown wheat on the rest of the country resulted in the erosion of regional grain markets as local farmers couldn't compete with the prices of cheap Midwestern wheat. The new roller mill technology also didn't work as well on the softer wheat varieties that grew in most of the rest of the country. So the disappearance of the small stone mill meant the disappearance of softer varieties of wheat as well--and the homogenization of U.S. bread making.

In the 125 years since, this transformation has been little noticed and mostly forgotten. Then in 2007-2008, global wheat prices soared for a variety of reasons, ranging from the U.S. biofuel boom to a drought in Australia's bread basket. Suddenly, bakers had to begin thinking hard about this fundamental ingredient that they had long taken for granted. Was it really worth it to pay top dollar for the same old mediocre hard-wheat flour they had been using for years? They began to see how their total reliance on Midwest wheat affected their regional food security--and, given the sudden prices volatility, their very viability as businesses. By fall 2008, high flour prices had pushed bakeries nationwide into a state of crisis.

Creative loafingPhoto: April McGregerIt was through my conversation with Bauer that I first learned of a group of bakers, millers, and farmers in North Carolina working collectively to do something about it by bringing back regional grain husbandry through the North Carolina Organic Bread Flour Project.

Jennifer Lapidus, an immensely talented and principled bread baker of the now defunct Natural Bridge Bakery, is the project manager of the grant. She brings her experience as a baker to the table in hopes that by working cooperatively the group can successfully navigate the tricky task of developing supply and demand simultaneously.

I headed back out to Asheville a few weeks later for the Artisan Bread Festival to learn more about the NCOBFP, a major topic of discussion for this year's event. Glenn Roberts of South Carolina-based Anson Mills--which has done amazing work preserving southern grain traditions--was a featured speaker. He gave bakers some insight into the grain husbandry of yesteryear and a glimpse of our future as breadmakers.

Roberts predicted that we are moving back towards the old tradition of an average of 30 mills per county. Modern laboratory-developed wheat is failing us, he said: yields are plummeting as salt builds up in the soil from excessive irrigation. Meanwhile, new diseases pop up faster than the labs can generate resistant strands. The solution lies in biodiversity: a move back to region-appropriate, more robust wheat varieties, grown not in vast uniform fields but rather in combination with other crops.  

In order to grow wheat while maintaining the health of the land, one also has to grow buckwheat, sorghum, and cowpeas-- a legume that fixes nitrogen, suppresses a pest called nematodes, and keeps down weeds. Reviving regional grain-growing means a return to whole-system agriculture, and Roberts predicts it will happen sooner than we think.
For the health of people, of communities, and of the land, I stand with a group of micro-scale bakers like Lapidus and Bauer, who are ready to take on the challenge of developing intensely flavorful bread and pastries with unstandardized, capricious, and diverse locally produced grains.

Market Brown Bread
Making yeasted breads with small batch flours requires a bit of experimentation, scientific inquiry, careful observation, and an open mind. Anson Mills has a wonderful, informative website with lots of well tested recipes for using their products. If you are lucky enough to find a farmer growing wheat or cornmeal for sale at your farmer's market, I find it easiest to first experiment with quickbreads, biscuits, and pancakes. If you can't find locally grown grain in your area, let your favorite farmers know you would be a regular buyer if they grew it. Here's a quick and easy recipe for a very satisfying, unyeasted brown bread that was the first bread I made with 100 percent locally grown grains. Feel free to experiment with your grains since the bread is quite forgiving. Unlike most quickbreads, this one is not a dessert bread but the perfect accompaniment to dinner. With a simple carrot-ginger soup, it makes a lovely spring meal.

3 cups whole wheat flour (or rye or ground oats)
1 cup cornmeal (or other grain)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 egg
1 3/4 - 2 cups buttermilk
2 Tablespoons sorghum, molasses, honey or maple syrup
4 Tablespoons melted butter
(optional - a handful of raisins or nuts)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Grease a 1 pound loaf pan and dust it with cornmeal. Set aside. In a medium bowl, stir together the flour, cornmeal, salt, and baking soda. In a separate bowl, whisk together the egg and the buttermilk. Beat in the butter and the sorghum. Stir the buttermilk mixture into the flour mixture. Different flours absorb different amounts of liquid so you may need to add another splash or two of buttermilk to get your batter to the right consistency. It should be thick but still pourable.  Spoon it into the loaf pan and cook for 50 minutes on the middle rack. To test for doneness, insert a toothpick into the center of the bread dough, and it should come out clean. If your bread is getting too dark on top, you can cover the top loosely with foil. Let the bread cool in the tin for 5 minutes, then remove from the tin onto a rack to cool at least 30 minutes before serving. Serve warm with fresh butter.

Makes 1 loaf.
 
 

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Spraying pesticides: how green a revolution? Last month, NPR's excellent Dan Zwerdling filed two reports (here and here) on the ecological and economic upshots of industrial agriculture in India.

Starting in the 1960s, U.S. agronomists--backed by U.S. foundation cash and blessed by the Indian government--introduced farmers in India's then-fertile Punjab region to the glories of monoculture, imported petrochemical inputs, and heavy irrigation. The adoption of chemical agriculture in India became known as the "Green Revolution," and is still hailed today in some circles as a great success. But 40 years after the Green Revolution took root, Zwerdling showed in his reports, the region's agriculture stands on the verge of collapse: the water table is nearly tapped out, the soil is largely degraded, and farmers face ruin under mounting debt burdens.

This week, Zwerdling reported on the public-health implications of India's chemical-ag experiment. He takes listeners on board the "cancer train," which shows up nightly to a Punjab train hub to carry "at least 60 cancer patients who make the overnight journey with their families to the town of Bikaner for treatment at the government's regional cancer center." Zwerdling reports:

People say they never used to see so many cancer patients in this farm region. Cancer was considered an urban disease, suffered by people who lived in cities choked with industry and pollution.

But research by one of the most respected medical institutes in India recently found that farming villages using large amounts of pesticides have significantly higher rates of cancer than villages that use less of the chemicals.

Zwerdling makes clear that there's no definitive "proof" linking agrichemicals to cancer; and stress that more research needs to be done. Agrichemical companies turn out to be much more apt to throw research cash at the next killer ap than study what their potions are doing to people; that's the task of poorly funded state research institutes. But the little research that has been done points to a link between farm chemicals and not only cancer (PDF) but also impaired brain development among children (PDF).

Anyone interested in the question of agriculture policy in the global south should check out Zwerdling's reports on India. I often find NPR intolerable: the cooing baby talk of the main presenters, the fixation on trivial stories. Work like Zwerdling's redeems the whole project.

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Field of screamsIn a glowing Atlantic profile back in 1997, Greg Easterbrook declared Norman Borlaug the "Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity." Borlaug is the intellectual father of what became known as the "Green Revolution," the concerted effort by the U.S. government, leading foundations, and large agribusinesses in the 1960s and '70s to deliver the gift of industrial agriculture to the global south.

With Borlaug cheering them on and the Ford and MacArthur Foundation providing cash, farmers in the fertile Punjab state -- the subcontinent's answer to our midwest --- state turned shunned traditional crops and turned to high-yielding strains of wheat -- which required steady irrigation and heavy doses of imported synthetic fertilizer and pesticide. Grain yields boomed, and the famines that had been haunting India since the time of British rule receded.

In his Atlantic piece, Easterbrook declares India's wheat boom Borlaug's "majestic achievement." In the years since, his stature has only grown. When the great main turned 95 three weeks ago, praise rained down, particularly from the right. In the blog of libertarian Reason Magazine, science correspondent Ronald Bailey declared Borluag "One of the true giants of our time ...  the person who has saved more human lives than anyone in history." Just last week, the 95-year-old Borlaug published an op-ed in the Washington Times co-written with Sen. Richard Lugar (R.-Indiana), calling for a "new green revolution," this one adding patent-protected genetically modified seeds to the old mix of irrigation, synthetic fertilizer, and pesticides.  The piece promotes the the Lugar-Casey Global Food Security Act, which was recently approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and is under consideration in the full Senate. The bill would make launching a "second green revolution" official U.S. development policy in Africa.

While Borlaug basks in adulation and contemplates making new continents safe for Monsanto and other agribiz giants, the first Green Revolution is turning out to be an unmitigated disaster. 

Check out these two excellent recent NPR reports (here and here). In the roughly one generation since Green Revolution techniques took hold in India's Punjab, farmers in the region have succeeded in tapping out its groundwater with irrigation schemes and ruining its once-fertile soil. Activists like Vandana Shiva have been making this point for years; now, as NPR reports, the government is acknowledging the calamity. The farmers, for their part, are in despair -- wracked by falling yields, crushing debt, and spending more and more to pump less and less water out of the ground. Government officials are talking openly about agricultural "collapse" ... in the breadbasket of the world's second most populous nation.

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As debate around food safety regulation heats up -- some might say, overheats -- sublimely named Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) has introduced a House bill that would significantly affect farming practices in the United States.

Called the Preservation of Antibiotics for Human Treatment Act, the bill would effectively prevent CAFOs (confined animal feedlot operations) from dousing their animals with antibiotics as a matter of course. (Ted Kennedy has introduced similar legislation in the Senate).

Stuffing animals together by the thousands turns out to wreck their immune systems. In order to keep their animals alive until slaughter, CAFO operators give them regular lashings of antibiotics. (Antibiotics also stimulate growth.) Animal farming now consumes 70 percent of antibiotics used in the United States. Researchers are linking antibiotic use on hog CAFOs with the rise of MRSA, a flesh-eating bacteria that now kills more people each year than AIDS. That's a topic government regulators have been willfully ignoring.

Of course, the industrial-meat market is dominated by a few companies and represents billions in annual sales. A true ban on antibiotic abuse could be tantamount to a blow as deadly to meat-industry giants as the ones they deal to hundreds of thousands of animals each day.

They'll fight the legislation accordingly. As Slaughter told Reuters Tuesday:

She added, hopefully: "I do believe the chance are good, at least getting it through the House."

Meanwhile, the meat industry emitted a squeal. Reuters reported on the reaction from a National Pork Producers Council spokesperson:

I think the flack is right. The whole CAFO model does seem to rely on the free use of antibiotics. This bill, if passed, could spark a true national reckoning with how we raise and consume meat.

The Pew Center has more information on antibiotic abuse and legislation designed to stop it.

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