Sometimes gratitude feels like a stretch. Foxys_forest_manufacture / iStock / Getty Images Plus
By Karen Perry Stillerman
Sometimes gratitude feels like a stretch, and this fall has been one of those times. We're in the home stretch of a difficult year. Bad news abounds, and even the holiday that many of us will celebrate this week is complicated — a day of thanks that also evokes loss and grief for many Native people, along with expressions of resilience. With Thanksgiving approaching, I went looking for hopeful stories, scanning the news of food and agriculture for signs of progress and promise.
<p>And though I'm sure I've only scratched the surface, I actually found quite a lot. Here's a roundup of good news food and <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/farming">farming</a> stories.</p><p>And happy Thanksgiving.</p>
<h2>1. The story of the first Thanksgiving feast is being retold — more truthfully. </h2><p>The Thanksgiving story most of us were taught as children was … well, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/25/the-invention-of-thanksgiving" target="_blank">it was a lie</a>. It papered over a genocide that included the systematic <a href="https://blog.ucsusa.org/ricardo-salvador/on-indigenous-peoples-day-a-look-at-the-movement-to-revive-native-foodways-and-how-western-science-might-support-for-a-change" target="_blank">destruction of indigenous food systems</a> that had kept Native American peoples nourished for centuries (and which are <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/feb/03/indigenous-diets-fight-modern-illnesses" target="_blank">healthier and more sustainable</a> than modern diets). But <a href="https://time.com/5725168/thanksgiving-history-lesson/" target="_blank">a story in Time this week</a> explores how and why teachers across the country are (at last) updating the Thanksgiving curriculum from false feel-good stories and cultural appropriation to helping students grapple with a difficult history. In an <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/11/24/782403538/teaching-thanksgiving" target="_blank">NPR feature</a> this past weekend, teachers shared their stories, including this one from a kindergarten teacher in Colorado: "I spend the whole month of November talking about the different Native American groups. I make it a point to tell them and show them books and videos that are current and have Native American representation so they don't think they were just in history. And then the week before Thanksgiving, we talk about how the colonists came over. And I call them colonists instead of pilgrims." We have a lot more work to do, but that's a start.</p>
<h2>2. Farmers are agitating — and organizing — for the climate. </h2><p>As 2019's <a href="https://blog.ucsusa.org/marcia-delonge/facing-climate-change-on-us-farms-an-urgent-need-for-science-based-policy" target="_blank">crazy Midwest weather</a> made clear, <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/climate-change">climate change</a> is here and it's <a href="https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/climate-change-and-agriculture" target="_blank">bad news for farmers and our food system</a>. A spate of <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/Soil4Climate/permalink/2539253286346410/" target="_blank">recent news articles</a> has focused on ways farmers can <a href="https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2019/08/23/soil-health-can-combat-climate-change-from-the-ground-up" target="_blank">build resilience</a> and become <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/can-farmers-sow-their-way-out-of-climate-change/" target="_blank">part of the climate solution</a>. Now, as more and more farmers <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/04/impeachment-is-not-the-issue-voters-in-iowa-care-about" target="_blank">recognize the dangers</a> of more frequent <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/flooding">floods</a> and <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/drought">droughts</a>, they're speaking up, with thousands <a href="https://grist.org/article/why-10000-farmers-have-gotten-behind-the-green-new-deal/" target="_blank">organizing behind the Green New Deal</a> and one fifth-generation Iowa farmer <a href="https://www.today.com/video/inside-the-growing-shift-toward-eco-friendly-and-sustainable-farming-73992773539" target="_blank">educating presidential candidates</a> on the issue as they traipse through the state on the campaign trail.</p>
<h2>3. Some big food companies are also calling for climate action. </h2><p>If you heard that a coalition of huge multinational companies was weighing in on President Trump's decision to initiate the process of pulling the U.S. out of the <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/paris-agreement">Paris agreement</a> on climate change, you might not expect them to be taking him to task for it. But that's what Unilever, Mars, Danone and Nestle — major players in the food industry that came together in 2018 as the <a href="https://foodpolicyalliance.org/" target="_blank">Sustainable Food Policy Alliance</a> — did last month. See their <a href="https://foodpolicyalliance.org/news/response-paris-climate-agreement/" target="_blank">press release</a> on the need to stay in the Paris agreement, and also their <a href="https://foodpolicyalliance.org/news/sfpa-climate-policy-principles/" target="_blank">climate policy principles</a>, which include "partnering with farms to reduce emissions and promote regenerative soil health management."</p>
<h2><br>4. States are banning a dangerous pesticide in the face of EPA inaction … and it's about time. </h2><p>I've followed the saga of the brain-damaging insecticide <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/chlorpyrifos">chlorpyrifos</a> since the Trump <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/epa">EPA</a>'s disturbing <a href="https://blog.ucsusa.org/karen-perry-stillerman/disregarding-science-trump-administration-trades-kids-brains-for-dow-profit" target="_blank">about-face on a national ban in 2017</a>. This year, states started taking matters into their own hands to protect children from <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51464370_Chlorpyrifos_residues_levels_in_fruits_and_vegetables_after_field_treatment" target="_blank">chlorpyrifos residues on fruits</a> and other common foods and <a href="http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/widely-used-pesticide-one-year-later/" target="_blank">farmworkers from exposure in the field</a>. Following a <a href="https://apnews.com/4af87a8210474f1a97d2dc6e73ba9344/New-Hawaii-law-bans-use-of-widely-used-pesticide" target="_blank">2018 ban in Hawaii</a> and <a href="https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/new-york-approves-ban-on-chlorpyrifos-pesticide" target="_blank">another in New York</a> in early 2019, this fall <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/10/09/768795666/california-bans-popular-pesticide-linked-to-brain-damage-in-children" target="_blank">California became the third state</a> to act to protect public health.</p>
<h2>5. Soil-protecting, pollution-preventing solutions are gaining ground. </h2><p>Cover crops are a <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-15/u-s-farmers-plant-crops-you-won-t-eat-in-climate-change-fight" target="_blank">powerful tool</a> for building healthy, living <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/soil">soil</a> that is resilient to <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/extreme-weather">extreme weather</a>, thwarts pests and weeds with fewer chemicals, prevents fertilizer runoff into water and stores carbon. As we reported on this blog earlier this year, adoption of cover crops on U.S. farms <a href="https://blog.ucsusa.org/marcia-delonge/key-questions-answered-in-the-usdas-new-census-of-agriculture" target="_blank">grew by 50 percent</a> over five years, from 10 million acres in 2012 to 15 million acres in 2017. Led by Iowa <a href="https://www.agriculture.com/news/crops/ag-census-cover-crop-acres-surge-from-2012-to-2017" target="_blank">(which saw a whopping 156% jump)</a>, every state in the Midwest increased its cover crop plantings, and <a href="https://www.agdaily.com/crops/census-cover-crops-acreage-surged/" target="_blank">seven states saw at least a doubling</a> of acreage in cover crops. Moreover, more farmers may soon get insurance discounts for planting them, if a three-year, $3 million <a href="https://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/government/should-there-be-a-good-farmer-discount-for-cover-crops-iowa-demo-program-could-gather-data-20191121" target="_blank">Iowa demonstration project</a> shows they reduce farmers' risk.</p>
<h2>6. New research shows how farmers can grow crops under solar panels for a win-win. </h2><p>The emerging field of "agrivoltaics" can help farmers boost revenue, generate clean energy and use less water. In a <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0364-5" target="_blank">study published in September</a>, researchers in Arizona showed all those benefits for cherry tomatoes grown in agrivoltaic systems in that hot, dry and sunny state. Dual-use <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/solar">solar</a> systems also seem to <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190729123751.htm" target="_blank">work with leafy greens</a>, which benefit from the cooling shade of the panels. Now, cranberry growers in Massachusetts are now <a href="https://www.kenoshanews.com/agriculture/consider-solar-cranberry-partnership/article_88b61f3d-c8a7-53f7-bd17-5827c57c9ff9.html" target="_blank">experimenting with the system</a>, which — if it's successful — could make everyone's "<a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/sns-tns-bc-hdy-canned-cranberry-sauce-20191125-story.html" target="_blank">favorite</a>" holiday condiment more sustainable (no matter <a href="https://www.foodandwine.com/lifestyle/cranberry-sauce-debate-canned-homemade" target="_blank">how you like it prepared</a>).</p>
<h2>7. Obesity rates are falling for young children enrolled in a federal nutrition program. </h2><p>In recent years, public health practitioners have fought an uphill battle to counter <a href="https://stateofchildhoodobesity.org/" target="_blank">rising childhood obesity</a>, which impacts nearly 1 in 5 children and costs an estimated $14 billion in direct medical expenses each year. A <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2019/p1121-decline-childhood-obesity-wic-families.html" target="_blank">new report</a> from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows promising declines in obesity among young children ages two to four whose families are enrolled in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (commonly known as WIC). These declines, which occurred across 41 states and territories, may be a reflection of program changes back in 2009 that brought WIC food packages into closer alignment with the <a href="https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/2020-dietary-guidelines-americans" target="_blank">Dietary Guidelines for Americans</a>, but it's likely that other concurrent efforts happening at federal, state and local levels helped.</p>
<h2>8. Food can help revitalize communities — both in cities and in rural areas. </h2><p>With a new book, author Mark Winne argues for the power of "good food" to spark community development. In <a href="https://islandpress.org/books/food-town-usa" target="_blank">Food Town USA</a> (see also a <a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/slideshows/author-of-food-town-usa-says-food-may-bring-back-struggling-us-cities?slide=7" target="_blank">book review</a> in slideshow form), Winne points to seven cities and towns across the country — from Sitka, Alaska to Jacksonville, Florida — where local entrepreneurs and activists are reshaping food landscapes for the better, addressing racial inequities, climate challenges and urban decay. And it's not just cities that can benefit from local food system development. A <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/05/us/rural-farm-market.html" target="_blank">recent New York Times story</a> puts a spotlight on rural areas that have lost grocery stores, documenting how residents have launched cooperative markets and other creative solutions to bring back fresh food and a sense of community for their neighbors.</p><p>Now, pass the cranberry sauce …</p>
<p><em>Karen Perry Stillerman is a senior communication strategist and senior analyst in the Food & Environment Program at <a href="https://www.ucsusa.org" target="_blank">UCS</a>.</em></p>From Your Site Articles
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The prices farmers receive for crops do not cover all the costs of keeping farms viable, not to mention the extra costs of ecological or regenerative farming systems. The farm crisis is not over. Pixabay / Pexels
By Elizabeth Henderson
For almost five decades, organic farming associations like the Northeast Organic Farming Association, the Maine Organic Farming and Gardening Association and others across the country have been dedicated to supporting and expanding the community of farmers, homesteaders and conscious eaters who build their lives and livelihoods through agroecology — growing and consuming food, forage and other crops in as much harmony with natural processes and rhythms as we can muster.
<p>To enable shoppers to identify organically grown food, these organizations put a lot of time and energy into developing local markets for direct sales, and creating and maintaining organic certification and the integrity of the organic label. But direct sales and that label are not enough to keep family-scale farms viable.</p><p>Under relentless and steadily increasing financial pressures, talented young farmers are <a href="https://www.salon.com/2015/02/10/what_nobody_told_me_about_small_farming_i_cant_make_a_living/" target="_blank">giving farming their all for five to 10 years</a>, then quitting. Experienced farmers, including organic farmers, are admitting defeat, <a href="https://civileats.com/2016/02/12/quitting-season-why-farmers-walk-away-from-their-farms/" target="_blank">selling what they can and finding "real" jobs</a>. The prices farmers receive for crops do not cover all the costs of keeping farms viable, not to mention the extra costs of ecological or regenerative farming systems. The farm crisis is not over.</p>
Can we find solutions?
<p>"The problem that has impoverished and destroyed farmers nearly always is that of low prices resulting from surplus production," poet and environmentalist Wendell Berry <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/opinion/wendell-berry-agriculture-farm-bill.html" target="_blank">told</a> the New York Times in a 2018 interview. "That is also, obviously, a land-destroying problem. The only solution to that problem that can sustain the small farmers is the combination of production control and price supports as exemplified by the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association as it was reorganized in my region under the New Deal in 1941."</p>What does production control plus price supports mean and how did it work under the New Deal?
<p><br>In 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression, so many family farms were going bankrupt that the federal government stepped in to help them avoid eviction and to increase prices for their crops. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) <a href="https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/archival/1341/item/457089" target="_blank">declared an economic emergency</a>, justifying action as being in "the national public interest." The AAA set out to re-establish farmers' purchasing power, taking the years just before WWI as the base period when the proper balance existed.</p><p>To raise prices for farm products, the AAA reduced the oversupply by setting limits in the form of marketing quotas on the acreage farmers could use for basic commodities, and that first year, some crops were even plowed under. There were also marketing agreements that controlled the quantity, quality, and rate of shipment to market to limit some fruit and vegetable crops. Although agribusiness successfully brought suit against the first version of this parity system, the revised approach set up by the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of February 29, 1936, proved more durable and lasted through the 1960s.</p><p>Farm income in 1935 was more than <a href="https://archive.org/stream/CAT31056120/CAT31056120_djvu.txt" target="_blank">50 percent higher</a> than farm income during 1932, due in part to the farm programs. From 1935 through 1974, legislation each year set the level of the price supports from 50 to 90 percent of parity, depending on the supply of each commodity and the changing economic conditions through the years of WWII.</p><p>In "<a href="https://www.iatp.org/sites/default/files/258_2_97261.pdf" target="_blank">Crisis by Design: A Brief Review of U.S, Farm Policy</a>," a paper written by Mark Ritchie and Kevin Ristau and published by the League of Rural Voters Education Project in the midst of the 1980s farm crisis, the three central features of the parity system are summarized:</p><ol><li>It established the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), which made loans to farmers whenever prices offered by the food processors or grain corporations fell below the cost of production. This allowed farmers to hold their crops off the market, eventually forcing prices back up. Once prices returned to fair levels, farmers sold their crops and repaid the CCC with interest. By allowing farmers to control their marketing, the CCC loan program made it possible for them to receive a fair price from the marketplace without relying on subsidies.</li><li>It regulated farm production in order to balance supply with demand, thereby preventing surpluses. Since government storage of surpluses was expensive, this feature was crucial to reducing government costs.</li><li>It created a national grain reserve to prevent consumer prices from skyrocketing in times of drought or other natural disasters. When prices rose above a predetermined level, grain was released from government reserves onto the market, driving prices back down to normal levels. From 1933 to 1953 this parity legislation remained in effect and was extremely successful. Farmers received fair prices for their crops, production was controlled to prevent costly surpluses, and consumer prices remained low and stable. At the same time, the number of new farmers increased, soil and water conservation practices expanded dramatically, and overall farm debt declined. What is even more important is that this parity program was not a burden to the taxpayers."</li></ol>
<p>In the 1960s however, according to Mark Ritchie in <em><a href="https://www.iatp.org/sites/default/files/2018-01/The%20Loss%20of%20Our%20Family%20Farms.%20By%20Mark%20Ritchie.%20League%20of%20Rural%20Voters.%201979.pdf" target="_blank">The Loss of Our Family Farms: Inevitable Results or Conscious Policies?</a> </em>a consortium of agribusiness, banking and university leaders deliberately set in place policies that cut farm prices to drive excess "resources" (that is, farmers and their families) out of the countryside.By the mid-'70s, farm prices were dropping below parity. Instead of a system that had provided stability for family-scale farms, farm numbers were decreasing rapidly and the cheap food policies that we have today were set in place.</p><p>The combination of subsidy and emergency payments to farmers along with the program of crop insurance in the 2018 Farm Bill actually <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/bradwilson581525/the-hidden-farm-bill-37959389" target="_blank">guarantees low prices that mainly benefit the biggest ag corporations.</a> With production control and price supports, those corporations had to pay farmers decent prices in the marketplace. Just to take a couple of commodities for illustration purposes, according to the National Agriculture Statistics Service, the parity price for <a href="https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/c821gj76b/r494vw17c/sq87c499d/agpr0619.pdf" target="_blank">100 pounds of milk in May 2019 would be $52.80</a>, a bushel of corn would be $13.20. Instead, conventional farmers were getting $18 for a hundredweight of milk and $3.63 for a bushel of corn. Since the 1970s, it is the taxpayer who covers the costs of cheap food. This adds up to a major transfer of wealth from the farmers and the public to the likes of Walmart, Amazon and Archer Daniels Midland, a global food processing and commodities trading corporation.</p><p>Although a few farming organizations — in particular, the National Family Farm Coalition — have continued to demand a <a href="https://nffc.net/index.php/fffa/" target="_blank">return to parity and supply management</a>, for 20 years or more it has been deemed too unlikely to gain any traction in Washington, D.C. Then in a flash of light, the <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolution/109/text" target="_blank">Green New Deal resolution</a> by Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a crash program to mobilize all possible forces to prevent climate disaster, has made it "realistic" once again to <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2019/04/green-new-deal-agriculture-farm-workers" target="_blank">consider this set of root solutions to the food and farm crisis</a>.</p><p>While we can learn a lot from the old New Deal — both from its strengths and also its failures, especially in regard to farmers of color — we will have to design a new version for the 21st century that includes racial justice and equity in the safety net it provides for farms. I can imagine an exciting public process where groups of stakeholders all over the country hammer out the details.</p><p>The challenge we face now is to pull together a big enough movement of farmers, farmworkers, labor unions, environmentalists, faith communities, youth and rural and urban activists of all kinds to transform this climate emergency into an all-out campaign to save human life on this planet.</p>
<p><em>Elizabeth Henderson farmed at Peacework Farm in Wayne County, New York, for more than 30 years. Peacework CSA was one of the <a href="https://www.oeffa.org/news/" target="_blank">first community-supported agriculture farms</a> in New York State. She is a member of the Board the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) of New York, and represents the NOFA Interstate Council on the Board of the Agricultural Justice Project. Elizabeth is the lead author of <a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Sharing-Harvest-Community-Supported-Agriculture/dp/193339210X/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Sharing+the+Harvest%3A+A+Citizen%E2%80%99s+Guide+to+Community+Supported+Agriculture&qid=1561933054&s=books&sr=1-1" target="_blank">Sharing the Harvest: A Citizen's Guide to Community Supported Agriculture</a> (Chelsea Green, 2007), with a Spanish language e-book edition in 2017. She maintains the blog <a href="https://thepryingmantis.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">The Prying Mantis</a>.</em><br/></p><p><em>This article was produced by <a href="https://www.independentmediainstitute.org/earth-food-life/" target="_blank">Earth | Food | Life</a>, a project of the Independent Media Institute.</em></p>From Your Site Articles
- The Key to Saving Family Farms Is in the Soil - EcoWatch ›
- Unfair Food Pricing Is Killing Family Farms and Regenerative Farming ›
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Organic carrots and radishes at a farmers' market. carterdayne / iStock / Getty Images Plus
By Brian Barth
There's something of a civil war brewing in the organic movement.
<p>On one side are industry boosters boasting about how organic has gone mainstream. These folks are fine with a <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/big-food" rel="noopener noreferrer">Big Ag</a> version of organic <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/agriculture" rel="noopener noreferrer">agriculture</a> — enormous monocrop fields and global distribution to every Walmart across the land. On the other side are purists who feel that the spirit of organic — building healthy <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/soil" rel="noopener noreferrer">soil</a>, promoting <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/biodiversity" rel="noopener noreferrer">biodiversity</a>, focusing on small producers and distributing regionally — is no longer represented by the USDA certified organic label (hence the various alternative organic labels popping up).</p><p>The USDA certification has never explicitly required any of those things, however. Instead, organic rules focus primarily on substituting natural fertilizers and pest control methods for chemical ones. But even here things aren't quite as they seem.</p>
<p><strong>Does Organic Mean Toxin-Free?</strong></p><p>Not entirely. USDA standards allow the use of several dozen synthetic <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/chemicals">chemicals</a> on certified organic farms, although most are fairly benign substances, and those that aren't tend to be heavily restricted in the ways that they can be applied (certain synthetic fertilizers are also permitted in limited circumstances). More of an issue is that some of the naturally derived substances permitted for use as <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/pesticides" rel="noopener noreferrer">pesticides</a> are used in unnatural concentrations that make them highly toxic (to creatures such as <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/bees" rel="noopener noreferrer">bees</a>, for example). Rotenone, a notoriously toxic but naturally derived pesticide, was on the list of permitted substances until last year.</p>
<p><strong>Does Organic Mean Local?</strong></p><p>Not at all. Organic products constitute around five percent of <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/food/" rel="noopener noreferrer">food</a> sales in the U.S., but only about one percent of U.S. farmland is organic, suggesting that most organic food is imported. Organic certification does not take carbon footprints into account — and it's fairly clear that organic grapes flown in from Chile have a larger environmental impact than their locally grown but conventional counterparts.</p>
<p><strong>Does Organic Mean Grown on a Small, Diversified Farm?</strong></p><p>The organic standards say nothing about size and little about diversity. Things such as hedgerows for habitat are encouraged by the standards, but there is nothing in the rules that prevents organic farmers from planting monocultures fence line to fence line.</p>
<p><strong>Does Organic Mean Livestock Roam Free and Forage on Grass?</strong></p><p>This is an extremely contentious topic between Big Organic and the purists. Organic livestock must be provided access to the outdoors and, depending on the species, must receive a portion of their diet from foraging. But there are a lot of convoluted rules — some would call them loopholes— regarding how those requirements can be met. The bottom line is that it's possible to stick to the letter of the organic law and run a livestock operation that differs little from a confined animal feeding operation, aka <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/factory-farming" rel="noopener noreferrer">factory farming</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Does Organic Mean Topsoil is Restored?</strong></p><p>Rebuilding topsoil that teems with microbial life was the foundation of the organic movement in the 1960s. This was a response to the sterile, eroded soil that 20th-century conventional agriculture methods left across the planet. The inconvenient truth is that organic agriculture requires frequent cultivation to control weeds, leaving it bare and susceptible to erosion. In the 21st century, conventional agriculture is increasingly based on the use of herbicide-tolerant GMO crops that have vastly reduced the amount of tillage required, cutting down significantly on erosion (at the cost of greater herbicide use, however). Erosion as a result of frequent cultivation isn't much of an issue on a small diversified farm, but large monocultures of organic produce are likely to lose more topsoil each year than well-managed conventional ones.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Organic Farms Are Under Attack From Agribusiness, Weakened Standards <a href="https://t.co/2S3xWUmlCl">https://t.co/2S3xWUmlCl</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Organic?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Organic</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Farming?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Farming</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Agriculture?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Agriculture</a> <a href="https://t.co/VsubeM7rFs">pic.twitter.com/VsubeM7rFs</a></p>— Renewable Search (@RenewableSearch) <a href="https://twitter.com/RenewableSearch/status/1109788973650460674?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 24, 2019</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<p><em>Reposted with permission from our media associate <a href="https://modernfarmer.com/2019/09/does-certified-organic-mean-what-we-think-it-does/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Modern Farmer</a>.</em><br/></p>
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Kirill Kukhmar / TASS / Getty Images
By Stacy Malkan
The International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) is a corporate-funded nonprofit group with chapters around the world that claim to conduct "science for the public good," but documents released in a new study reveal that the influential ILSI science group is a actually a lobby group that protects the interests of the food industry, not public health.
<p>The <a href="https://globalizationandhealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12992-019-0478-6" target="_blank">June 2019 paper in Globalization and Health</a> describes internal emails that were obtained by the public interest group U.S. Right to Know via state public records laws. The documents reveal clear examples of how ILSI advances the interests of the food industry, especially by promoting industry-friendly science and arguments to policymakers. "Researchers have labelled the International Life Sciences Institute an industry front group, after studying thousands of documents," <a href="https://twitter.com/bmj_latest/status/1135908825935024130" target="_blank">reported the BMJ</a>. </p><p>As one example, the paper quotes an <a href="https://usrtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Alex-Malaspina-ILSI-Mexico.pdf" target="_blank">email from Alex Malaspina</a>, the former Coca-Cola executive who founded ILSI, lamenting the failure of ILSI Mexico to follow the industry position on soda taxes. Malaspina describes "the mess ILSI Mexico is in because they sponsored in September a sweeteners conference when the subject of soft drinks taxation was discussed. ILSI is now suspending ILSI Mexico, until they correct their ways. A real mess." </p>
<p><em>Stacy Malkan is co-director of U.S. Right to Know, a nonprofit investigative research group focused on the food industry. She is author of the book, "Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry" (New Society 2007).</em><br/></p>
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xOTU4MzgxOS9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY0MzM2NTYzNH0.dTfAbvcL7WSlCF98pVgqKbrViDS0mtjaYGQqrlQ1RBY/img.png?width=980" id="afd14" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="c0d76beba18fdbb61abd855ae872b150" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
2015 email from Alex Malaspina, founder of ILSI.
ILSI Undermined Obesity Fight in China
<p>In January 2019, two papers by <a href="https://susan-greenhalgh.com/coca-cola-goes-to-china/" target="_blank">Harvard Prof. Susan Greenhalgh</a> revealed ILSI's powerful influence on the Chinese government on issues related to obesity. Prof. Geenhalgh's articles in the <a href="https://www.bmj.com/content/364/bmj.k5050" target="_blank">Journal of Public Health Policy</a> and <a href="https://www.bmj.com/content/364/bmj.k5050" target="_blank">the BMJ</a> document how Coca-Cola and other corporations worked through the China branch of ILSI to influence decades of Chinese science and public policy on obesity and diet-related illnesses such as Type 2 diabetes and hypertension. </p><img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xOTU4MzgyMi9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY0MzI4MTYwMn0.r6FyhQVMns2_otbOh2mFGUR9_PJefpT4gbrhCHjGG1U/img.png?width=980" id="606ae" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="e986dfa13e3df64b6079411f2a1a4eda" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Jan. 9 article in New York Times.
<p>ILSI is so well-placed in China that it operates from inside the government's Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing. Dr. Greenhalgh's papers document how Coca-Cola and other Western food and beverage giants "helped shape decades of Chinese science and public policy on obesity and diet-related diseases" by operating through ILSI to cultivate key Chinese officials "in an effort to stave off the growing movement for food regulation and soda taxes that has been sweeping the west," <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/health/obesity-china-coke.html" target="_blank">reported Andrew Jacobs in the New York Times</a>.</p><p>Recent studies on ILSI's influence and approach can also be found in <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09581596.2017.1371844" target="_blank">Critical Public Health</a> and the <a href="https://www.milbank.org/quarterly/articles/public-meets-private-conversations-between-coca-cola-" target="_blank">Milbank Quarterly</a>.</p>ILSI Sugar Study “Right Out of the Tobacco Industry’s Playbook”
<p>In 2016, public health experts denounced an ILSI-funded <a href="https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/2593601/scientific-basis-guideline-recommendations-sugar-intake-systematic-review" target="_blank">sugar study</a> published in a prominent medical journal that presented a "scathing attack on global health advice to eat less sugar," <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/well/eat/a-food-industry-study-tries-to-discredit-advice-about-sugar.html" target="_blank">reported Anahad O'Connor in The New York Times</a>. The ILSI-funded study argued that warnings to cut sugar are based on weak evidence and cannot be trusted.</p><p>The Times story quoted Marion Nestle, a professor at New York University who studies conflicts of interest in nutrition research, on the ILSI study: "This comes right out of the tobacco industry's playbook: cast doubt on the science," Nestle said. "This is a classic example of how industry funding biases opinion. It's shameful." </p><p>ILSI has also been accused of working directly on the tobacco industry playbook to thwart public safety measures to reduce smoking. A <a href="https://www.who.int/tobacco/en/who_inquiry.pdf" target="_blank">July 2000 report by an independent committee of the World Health Organization</a> outlined a number of ways in which the tobacco industry attempted to undermine WHO tobacco control efforts, including using scientific groups to influence WHO's decision-making and to manipulate scientific debate surrounding the health effects of tobacco. ILSI played a key role in these efforts, according to a <a href="https://www.who.int/tobacco/media/en/ILSI.pdf" target="_blank">case study about ILSI from the WHO Tobacco Free Initiative</a>. "Findings indicate that ILSI was used by certain tobacco companies to thwart tobacco control policies. Senior office bearers in ILSI were directly involved in these actions," according to the case study. </p>ILSI Leaders Played Key Role in Defending Glyphosate as Chairs of WHO Panel
<p>In May 2016, ILSI was caught "in a conflict of interest row over glyphosate cancer risk," <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/17/unwho-panel-in-conflict-of-interest-row-over-glyphosates-cancer-risk" target="_blank">reported Arthur Neslen</a> in the Guardian, <a href="http://usrtk.org/pesticides/conflict-of-interest-concerns-cloud-meeting-as-international-experts-review-herbicide-risks/" target="_blank">after revelations</a> that the vice president of ILSI Europe, Prof. Alan Boobis, was also chairman of the UN Joint Meeting on Pesticide Residues <a href="https://www.who.int/foodsafety/jmprsummary2016.pdf" target="_blank">(JMPR) panel</a> that found Monsanto's chemical <a href="https://usrtk.org/pesticides/glyphosate-health-concerns/" target="_blank">glyphosate</a> was unlikely to pose a cancer risk through diet. The co-chair of the JMPR panel, Prof. Angelo Moretto, was a board member of ILSI's Health and Environment Services Institute. Neither of the chairs declared their ILSI leadership roles as conflicts of interest, despite the <a href="https://www.usrtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ILSI2012donors.pdf" target="_blank">significant financial contributions ILSI has received</a> from Monsanto and the pesticide industry trade group. </p>ILSI’s Cozy Ties at U.S. CDC
<p>In June 2016, <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/carey-gillam/beverage-industry-finds-f_b_10715584.html" target="_blank">U.S. Right to Know reported</a> that Dr. Barbara Bowman, director of a U.S. Centers for Disease Control division charged with preventing heart disease and stroke, tried to help ILSI's founder Alex Malaspina influence World Health Organization officials to back off policies to reduce sugar consumption. Bowman suggested people and groups for Malaspina to talk to, and solicited his comments on some CDC summaries of reports, the emails show. (Bowman <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/carey-gillam/cdc-official-exits-agency_b_10760490.html" target="_blank">stepped down</a> after our first article was published reporting on these ties.)</p><p>A January 2019 <a href="https://www.milbank.org/quarterly/articles/public-meets-private-conversations-between-coca-cola-and-the-cdc/" target="_blank">study in the Milbank Quarterly</a> describes key emails of Malaspina cozying up to Dr. Bowman. </p>ILSI Influence in India
<p>ILSI has close ties to some Indian government officials and, as in China, the nonprofit has pushed similar messaging and policy proposals as Coca-Cola — downplaying the role of sugar and diet as a cause of obesity, and promoting increased physical activity as the solution, <a href="http://www.indiaresource.org/news/2019/1011.html" target="_blank">according to the India Resource Center</a>. Members of ILSI India's board of trustees include Coca-Cola India's director of regulatory affairs and representatives from Nestlé and Ajinomoto, a food additive company, along with government officials who serve on scientific panels that are tasked with deciding about food safety issues. </p>Longstanding Concerns About ILSI
<p>ILSI insists it is not an industry lobby group, but concerns and complaints are longstanding about the group's pro-industry stances and conflicts of interest among the organization's leaders.</p><p>In 2010, Nature reported on concerns about conflicts of interest between ILSI and the European Food Safety Authority, and noted that the<a href="https://www.nature.com/news/2010/101005/full/news.2010.513.html" target="_blank"> industry ties may taint the reputation of the European regulatory body</a>. </p><p>A 2019 book by Dr. Tim Noakes and Marika Sboros, <a href="http://www.realfoodontrial.com/" target="_blank">Real Food on Trial</a> (Columbus Publishing), recounts the "unprecedented prosecution" of Dr. Noakes "in a multimillion rand case that stretched over more than four years. All for a single tweet giving his opinion on nutrition." Russ Greene reported on the controversy in a 2017 <a href="https://keepfitnesslegal.crossfit.com/2017/01/05/big-food-vs-tim-noakes-the-final-crusade/" target="_blank">article for Keep Fitness Legal</a>. "The Food Industry is attempting to use Dr. Noakes in order to set an example to anyone who dares challenge its authority in nutrition," Greene wrote.</p>Related Articles Around the Web
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Worldwide, industrial agriculture is pushing into grasslands, wetlands and forests. Jan Fidler / CC BY. 2.0
By Ronnie Cummins
A new study calling for a "radical rethink" of the relationship between policymakers and corporations reinforces what Organic Consumers Association and other public interest groups have been saying for years: Our triple global health crises of deteriorating public health, world hunger and global warming share common root causes—and that the best way to address these crises is to address what they all have in common: an unhealthy, inequitable food system perpetuated by a political and economic system largely driven by corporate profit.
<p>The study, the result of three years of work by 26 commissioners from several countries, was released this week by the <a href="https://www.worldobesity.org/what-we-do/projects/lancet-commission-on-obesity" target="_blank">Lancet Commission on Obesity</a>. Boyd Swinburn, a University of Auckland professor and co-chair of the commission, as <a href="https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/world/lancet-report-obesity-hunger-climate-change-health-major-rethink-11174206" target="_blank">reported</a> by Channel News Asia, said:</p><p>"Until now, undernutrition and obesity have been seen as polar opposites of either too few or too many calories. In reality, they are both driven by the same unhealthy, inequitable food systems, underpinned by the same political economy."</p><p>According to the report, nearly a billion people are hungry and another 2 billion are eating too much of the wrong foods, causing epidemics of obesity, heart disease and diabetes.</p><p>Boyd said that malnutrition in all its forms, including undernutrition and obesity, is by far the biggest cause of ill health and premature death globally, and that both are expected to be made "significantly worse" by <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/climate-change">climate change</a>.</p><h2>A Familiar, But Welcome Call for Reform</h2><p>We have long called for the reform of our <a href="https://www.organicconsumers.org/essays/degeneration-nation-connecting-dots-between-factory-farms-roundup-gmos-and-fake-natural-foods" target="_blank">degenerative</a> industrial agriculture system. We've drawn attention to the impact of industrial agriculture on global warming and deteriorating health. And we've highlighted the remarkable <a href="https://regenerationinternational.org/2018/10/09/reversing-climate-change-through-regenerative-agriculture/" target="_blank">potential</a> for organic <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/regenerative-agriculture">regenerative agriculture</a> to naturally draw down and sequester carbon, through nature's own photosynthesis.</p><p>We've also called on global policymakers to connect the dots between <a href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/25012019/climate-change-agriculture-farming-consolidation-corn-soybeans-meat-crop-subsidies?utm_source=InsideClimate+News&utm_campaign=3ef9f9564e-&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_29c928ffb5-3ef9f9564e-327914821" target="_blank">degenerative agriculture</a>, poor health and climate change.</p><p>We've said all along that the influence of self-serving corporations over policy is largely to blame for U.S. and global policymakers' collective failure to address our degenerative food and <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/farming">farming</a> system, and the devastation that system has wrought on human health and the environment.</p><p>This latest study comes at a time when climate scientists have sounded their most urgent and alarming <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/08/global-warming-must-not-exceed-15c-warns-landmark-un-report" target="_blank">warnings</a> to date. It also comes at a time of keen interest in a <a href="https://www.organicconsumers.org/essays/why-we-endorse-greennewdeal-and-how-we-plan-support-it" target="_blank">Green New Deal</a>, whose backers are calling for nothing less than radical solutions to the most pressing issues of our time.</p><h2>Degeneration Nation: The Frightening Truth</h2><p>Welcome to Degeneration Nation, where the frightening truth is this: <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/big-food">Big Food</a> companies, fast food chains, chemical and seed giants such as <a href="https://www.organicconsumers.org/campaigns/millions-against-monsanto" target="_blank">Bayer/Monsanto</a>, and corporate <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/agribusiness">agribusiness</a>, aided and abetted by indentured politicians in both the Republican and Democratic parties, are slowly but surely poisoning us with unhealthy, nutrient-deficient, contaminated food.</p><p>The <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/pesticides">pesticides</a>, <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/gmo-genetically-modified-organism/">GMOs</a>, hormone disruptors and antibiotic residues in non-<a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/organic">organic</a> produce, grains and meat, coupled with the excessive sugar, salt and bad fats in the processed foods and beverages that make up the majority of the American diet, have supersized and degenerated the body politic. An epidemic of chronic diseases directly related to our toxic food and environment has spread across the U.S. and much of the world.</p><p>The overwhelming evidence is that human health is seriously deteriorating, and that the underlying causes of this health crisis are directly related not only to our highly toxic industrial practices, but also to our degenerate food, farming and land-management practices.</p><p>In the agricultural sector alone, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/pesticides/" target="_blank">identifies</a> more than 1,400 pesticides and 1,800 so-called "inerts" chemicals in use, in addition to a toxic stew of animal drugs, antibiotics, synthetic fertilizers and GMOs. Few of these have been properly tested, singly or in combination, for safety.</p><p>The public health and economic consequences of our degraded environment and food system are alarming. A recent Rand Corporation <a href="https://www.rand.org/blog/rand-review/2017/07/chronic-conditions-in-america-price-and-prevalence.html" target="_blank">study</a> found that 60 percent of Americans suffer from at least one chronic health condition, such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity and arthritis; 42 percent have two or more; and that these chronic diseases now account for more than 40 percent of the entire U.S. health care spending of $3.5 trillion. </p><p>One out of every two Americans will get <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/cancer">cancer</a> at least once in their lifetime. According to recent <a href="https://www.menshealth.com/health/1-in-2-people-will-get-cancer" target="_blank">research</a>, U.S. men born in 1960 have a lifetime cancer risk of 53.5 percent. For women, it's 47.5 percent. </p><p>Seventy percent of U.S. <a href="http://www.care2.com/greenliving/monsantos-roundup-found-in-70-of-drinking-water.html" target="_blank">drinking water</a> is contaminated with <a href="https://www.organicconsumers.org/campaigns/millions-against-monsanto" target="_blank">Monsanto</a>'s top-selling herbicide, <a href="https://www.organicconsumers.org/news/monsantos-roundup-enough-make-you-sick" target="_blank">Roundup</a>, while <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/glyphosate-found-in-urine-of-93-percent-of-americans-tested-1891146755.html" target="_self">93 percent</a> of consumers now have traces of this toxic poison (active ingredient <a href="https://www.organicconsumers.org/news/glyphosate-fact-sheet" target="_blank">glyphosate</a>) in our urine. </p><p>The authors of "What's Making Our Children Sick?" <a href="https://www.organicconsumers.org/blog/can-food-focused-medicine-cure-food-related-disease" target="_blank">report</a> that one in 13 U.S. children have serious food allergies; 6 to 24 percent have serious intestinal problems; 20 percent are obese; 60 percent have chronic headaches; 20 percent suffer from mental disorders and depression. One in every 41 boys and one in every 68 girls are now diagnosed with autism.</p><p>Beyond destroying our health, chemical and fossil fuel-intensive factory farms and GMO monocultures are polluting our <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/farms-more-productive-than-ever-are-poisoning-drinking-water-in-rural-america-11547826031" target="_blank">water</a> and <a href="http://environmentalintegrity.org/wp-content/uploads/FACT-SHEET-on-air-pollution-from-factory-farms.pdf" target="_blank">air</a>, degrading our <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/12/third-of-earths-soil-acutely-degraded-due-to-agriculture-study" target="_blank">soils</a>, forests and wetlands, killing off biodiversity and heating up the planet.</p><p>The delicate rhythms of nature—the Earth's carbon cycle circulating between the atmosphere, oceans, soils and forests, the water or hydrological cycle and the climate—are unraveling.</p><h2>Cook Organic, Not the Planet</h2><p>The Lancet Obesity Commission study is clear: Climate change, obesity and poor nutrition can all be linked in some way to the mass production of processed, nutrient-poor food. This is an idea that doesn't get as much attention as it should.</p><p>When most people think about climate-destabilizing greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, the first thing that usually comes to mind is the impact of <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/fossil-fuels">fossil fuels</a>—our non-renewable fossil fuel-based energy system for transportation and for utilities and manufacturing, including the construction and the heating and cooling of our homes, offices and buildings.</p><p>What few people understand is that a full <a href="http://grain.org/e/5102" target="_blank">44 to 57 percent</a> of all global GHG emissions are generated by chemical- and fossil fuel-intensive industrial farm production, food processing, packaging, refrigeration, transportation and destructive land-use practices, such as <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/deforestation">deforestation</a>, heavy plowing, lack of cover crops and wetlands destruction. </p><p>Let's take a closer look at the 44 to 57 percent of human GHG emissions coming from our industrial, GMO, <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/factory-farming">factory farm</a> food system, and compare how transitioning to <a href="http://regenerationinternational.org/why-regenerative-agriculture/" target="_blank">regenerative</a> food, farming and land-management practices would not only drastically reduce these emissions, but actually draw down excess atmospheric carbon and sequester it in our soils, trees and wetlands—and in the process, produce more nutrient-dense, chemical-free food.</p><h2>Direct Use of Oil and Gas in Farming: 11 to 15 Percent</h2><p>Most climate analysts agree that fossil fuel use on farms and ranches, including chemical farm inputs (fertilizers and pesticides), is responsible for at least 11 to 15 percent of all global CO2, <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/methane">methane</a> and nitrous oxide emissions. Most of these emissions come from the use of fossil fuel-powered farm and irrigation equipment and petroleum-derived <a href="https://www.organicconsumers.org/essays/monsanto%E2%80%99s-evil-twin-disturbing-facts-about-fertilizer-industry" target="_blank">chemical fertilizers</a> and pesticides.</p><p>In addition, the excess manure generated by factory farms, or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) as the industry calls them, releases significant quantities of methane and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere and the <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/oceans">oceans</a>.</p><p>How can we reduce these on-farm emissions? By converting chemical- and energy-intensive farms to organic and regenerative crop production and planned rotational grazing and free range livestock production. This will require a combination of conscious consumers and farmers working together, on a local-to-global scale to reject factory farm, GMO, chemically tainted, highly processed food, and radical changes in public policy and investment practices.</p><h2>Food- and Farming-Derived Deforestation: 15 to 18 Percent</h2><p>Global "land use change" or deforestation is generally recognized as contributing to approximately 20 percent of all GHG emissions over the past 200 years.</p><p>The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization says that expansion of agriculture, especially for export crops such as GMO soybeans (primarily for animal feed) in Latin America, or <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/palm-oil">palm oil</a> (for biofuels and processed food) in Asia, accounts for 70 to 90 percent of global deforestation.</p><p>Worldwide, industrial agriculture is pushing into grasslands, wetlands and <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/forests">forests</a>, destroying what were previously carbon-sequestering forests and grasslands. Food and farming's contribution to deforestation thus accounts for 15 to 18 percent of global GHG emissions.</p><p>Over the next 50 years we need to preserve the forests we have left, and plant and nurture a trillion or more new trees. Since the areas of tropical forest deforestation are also the areas of greatest poverty and unemployment, reforestation and forest restoration can provide several hundred million jobs to those local residents and forest dwellers who need them most.</p><h2>Food Transport / Food Miles: 5 to 6 Percent</h2><p>Globally it is generally agreed that transportation accounts for 20 to 25 percent of all GHG emissions. According to the <a href="https://www.organicconsumers.org/sites/default/files/etc-whowillfeedus.pdf" target="_blank">ETC group</a>, "we can conservatively estimate that the transportation of food accounts for a quarter of global GHG emissions linked to transportation, or 5-6 percent of all global GHG emissions." In the U.S. it is commonly estimated that the average food item in your grocery store or restaurant has travelled 1,500 miles before it reaches its final destination. Multi-ingredient processed foods burn up even more food miles.</p><p>If we are to significantly reduce global emissions we will need to drastically reduce the food miles and carbon footprint of our food purchases and focus on fresh non-processed or minimally processed and packaged food produced locally and regionally, including food produced through <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/urban-farming">urban agriculture</a>. Before the second World War most food consumed in the U.S. and other industrialized nations came from a 100-mile radius of where people lived. During the Second World War, 40 to 50 percent of all food consumed by Americans came from urban "Victory Gardens," while 30 percent of all food in Great Britain similarly came from urban gardens.</p><h2>Food Processing / Packaging: 8 to 10 Percent</h2><p>Food processing has become a major part of the industrial food chain. In the U.S., the overwhelming majority of food purchased in grocery stores or restaurants (<a href="https://www.marketplace.org/2013/03/12/life/big-book/processed-foods-make-70-percent-us-diet" target="_blank">70 percent</a>) is processed food. </p><p>ETC group <a href="https://www.organicconsumers.org/sites/default/files/etc-whowillfeedus.pdf" target="_blank">states</a> that the " ... transformation of foods into ready-made meals, snacks and beverages requires an enormous amount of energy, mostly in the form of carbon. So does the packaging and canning of these foods. Processing and packaging enables the food industry to stack the shelves of supermarkets and convenience stores with hundreds of different formats and brands, but it also generates a huge amount of greenhouse gas emissions—some 8 to 10 percent of the global total."</p><p>More and more consumers are recognizing that highly processed food, whether served at home or in fast food restaurants is bad for our health, and that wasteful packaging, misleading advertising and plastic bags and packages are harmful both to our health (especially <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/23/well/chemicals-food-children-health.html" target="_blank">children's health</a>) and to our environment, including the oceans.</p><p>This awareness has caused a boom in sales of fresh organic produce and animal products in natural and organic food stores and farmer's markets. Many cities and even entire nations are now moving toward banning plastic bags. Unfortunately, U.S. consumers still spend almost half of their food dollars eating in restaurants and fast food outlets where highly processed, packaged foods dominate the menu. Similarly, in schools and cafeterias pre-cooked processed foods delivered by food service conglomerates have displayed hand-cooked meals prepared from fresh ingredients.</p><p>If we are to reduce the 8 to 10 percent of global fossil fuel emissions coming from food processing and packaging we will need to get back to healthy, organic, regionally produced foods, cooked from scratch with natural ingredients. This will not only benefit our health but will also be better for the health of the climate and the environment.</p><h2>Food Refrigeration & Retail: 2 to 4 Percent</h2><p>Approximately 15 percent of all global electricity consumption is for cooling and refrigeration. Of course global food sourcing depends upon keeping fresh produce and animal products cold.</p><p>As ETC group <a href="https://www.organicconsumers.org/sites/default/files/etc-whowillfeedus.pdf" target="_blank">says</a>: "Considering that cooling is responsible for 15 percent of all electricity consumption worldwide, and that leaks of chemical refrigerants are a major source of GHGs, we can safely say that the refrigeration of foods accounts for some 1-2 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions. The retailing of foods accounts for another 1-2 percent."</p><p>Again, reducing our food miles, buying locally and regionally—this is not only good for the planet, but good for our health and the economic well-being of our local farmers and ranchers as well. Until the electricity grid is converted over to <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/renewable-energy/">renewable energy</a>, food refrigeration, and refrigeration in general (especially air conditioning), will continue to belch out an unsustainable amount of greenhouse gases.</p><p>In the meantime we can all do our part, not only by turning down our thermostats, but by buying fresh foods produced locally and regionally, pressuring politicians to require local purchasing for schools and institutions, or better yet, by growing some of our own.</p><h2>Throwing Food Into Landfills Instead of Composting: 3 to 4 Percent</h2><p>Our industrial food and farming system currently discards 30 to 50 percent of all the crops and the food that is produced. Not only is this a prodigious waste of the fossil fuel energy and labor involved in producing this food, but the food waste itself generally ends up in garbage dumps and landfills, (rather than being converted into compost) releasing substantial amounts of methane and other GHGs.</p><p>Quoting again from ETC Group: "Between 3.5-4.5 percent of global GHG emissions come from waste, and over 90 percent of these are produced by materials originating within the food system."</p><p>Our planet has five pools or repositories where greenhouse gases are absorbed and stored: the oceans, the atmosphere, the <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/soil">soils</a>, vegetation (plants, especially perennial plants, grasses, and forests) and hydrocarbon deposits.</p><p>Our global challenge over the next 25 years is to stop putting more carbon into the atmosphere and the oceans, leave the remaining fossil fuels (oil, coal, uranium and natural gas) in the ground, and move a critical mass of excess atmospheric carbon (250 billion tons of carbon) back into the soil, by transitioning to regenerative food, farming and land-use practices. By doing this we will not only be able to reverse global warming—we'll also produce healthier food and healthier people.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-twitter_embed">
</p><div id="52f67" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="E6XPDI1576661820"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1086055569646071808" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">A Call for the Food Movement to Rally Behind the Green New Deal https://t.co/RrxyYDJUmH</div> — Non-GMO Project (@Non-GMO Project)<a href="https://twitter.com/NonGMOProject/statuses/1086055569646071808">1547770800.0</a></blockquote></div>
<p></p><p><em>Reposted with permission from our media associate <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/01/28/new-study-confirms-degenerative-food-farming-system-poses-mortal-threat" target="_blank">Common Dreams</a>.</em><br></p>
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By Helena Norberg-Hodge
If you're seeking some good news during these troubled times, look at the ecologically sound ways of producing food that have percolated up from the grassroots in recent years. Small farmers, environmentalists, academic researchers and food and farming activists have given us agroecology, holistic resource management, permaculture, regenerative agriculture and other methods that can alleviate or perhaps even eliminate the global food system's worst impacts: biodiversity loss, energy depletion, toxic pollution, food insecurity and massive carbon emissions.
<p>These inspiring testaments to human ingenuity and goodwill have two things in common: They involve smaller-scale farms adapted to local conditions, and they depend more on human attention and care than on energy and technology. In other words, they are the opposite of industrial monocultures—huge farms that grow just one crop.</p><p>But to significantly reduce the many negative impacts of the food system, these small-scale initiatives need to spread all over the world. Unfortunately, this has not happened, because the transformation of farming requires shifting not just how food is produced, but also how it is marketed and distributed. The food system is inextricably linked to an economic system that, for decades, has been fundamentally biased against the kinds of changes we need.</p><p>Put simply, economic policies almost everywhere have systematically promoted ever-larger scale and monocultural production. Those policies include:</p><ul class="ee-ul"> <li>Massive subsidies for globally traded commodities. Most farm subsidies in the U.S., for example, <a href="https://farm.ewg.org/subsidyprimer.php" target="_blank">go to just five commodities</a>—corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and rice—that are the centerpieces of global food trade. At the same time, government programs—like the U.S. <a href="https://www.fas.usda.gov/programs/market-access-program-map" target="_blank">Market Access Program</a>—provide hundreds of millions of dollars to expand international markets for agriculture products.</li></ul><ul class="ee-ul"> <li>Direct and hidden subsidies for global transport infrastructures and fossil fuels. The IMF estimates these subsidies and ignored environmental costs at <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/18/fossil-fuel-companies-getting-10m-a-minute-in-subsidies-says-imf" target="_blank">$5.3 trillion per year</a>—the equivalent of $10 million every minute.</li></ul><ul class="ee-ul"> <li>"Free trade" policies that open up food markets in virtually every country to global agribusinesses. The 1994 NAFTA agreement, for example, forced <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/08/07/541671747/nafta-s-broken-promises-these-farmers-say-they-got-the-raw-end-of-trade-deal" target="_blank">Mexico's small corn producers to compete with heavily-subsidized large-scale farms</a> in the U.S.; the recent <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trade-nafta/canada-ready-to-allow-u-s-dairy-access-in-nafta-talks-sources-idUSKCN1LR21E" target="_blank">re-negotiation of NAFTA</a> will do the same to Canadian dairy farmers.</li></ul><ul class="ee-ul"><li>Health and safety regulations. Most of these have been made necessary by large-scale production and distribution—but they make it impossible for smaller-scale producers and marketers to compete and survive. In France, for example, <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/2014/08/29/french-cheesemakers-crippled-eu-health-measures-266799.html" target="_blank">the number of small producers of cheese has shrunk by 90%</a> thanks in large measure to EU food safety laws.</li></ul><p>These policies provide a huge competitive advantage to large monocultural producers and corporate processors and marketers, which is why industrially produced food that has been shipped from the other side of the world is often less expensive than food from the farm next door.</p><p>The environmental costs of this bias are huge. Monocultures rely heavily on chemical inputs—fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides and pesticides—which pollute the immediate environment, put wildlife at risk and—through nutrient runoff—create "<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/corporate-food-brands-driving-the-massive-dead-zone-in-gulf-of-mexico/" target="_blank">dead zones" in waters hundreds or thousands of miles away</a>. Monocultures are also heavily dependent on fossil fuels to run large-scale equipment and to transport raw and processed foods across the world, making them a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, scientists estimate the greenhouse gas toll of the global food system at <a href="https://www.nature.com/news/one-third-of-our-greenhouse-gas-emissions-come-from-agriculture-1.11708" target="_blank">one-third of total emissions</a>.</p><p>There are social and economic costs as well. In the industrialized world, smaller producers can't survive, their land amalgamated into the <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/big-farms-are-getting-bigger-and-most-small-farms-arent-really-farms-at-all/" target="_blank">holdings of ever larger farms</a>—in the process <a href="https://sraproject.org/factory-farms-destroy-communities/" target="_blank">decimating rural and small town economies and threatening public health</a>. In the Global South, the same forces pull people off the land <a href="https://libcom.org/library/global-industrial-working-class" target="_blank">by the hundreds of millions</a>, <a href="https://orionmagazine.org/article/slum-ecology/" target="_blank">leading to poverty</a>, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-un-cities/worlds-slums-grow-despite-rapid-economy-growth-u-n-idUSTRE62I46020100319?sp=true" target="_blank">rapidly swelling urban slums</a> and <a href="https://tinyurl.com/yalcfwv2" target="_blank">waves of economic refugees</a>. In both North and South, uprooted small farmers easily spiral into unemployment, poverty, resentment and anger.</p><p>There are also risks to food security. With global economic policies homogenizing the world's food supply, the 7,000 species of plants used as food crops in the past have been <a href="https://tinyurl.com/y8ak9hj8" target="_blank">reduced to 150 commercially important crops</a>, with rice, wheat and maize accounting for 60 percent of the global food supply. Varieties within those few crops have been chosen for their responsiveness to chemical fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation water—and for their ability to withstand long-distance transport. A similar calculus is applied to livestock and poultry breeds, which are <a href="https://tinyurl.com/y8rufksr" target="_blank">skewed toward those that can grow rapidly</a> with inputs of grain and antibiotics in confined animal feeding operations. The loss of diversity even extends to the size and shape of food products: harvesting machinery, transport systems and supermarket chains all require standardization. The end result is that more than <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2011/07/food-ark/" target="_blank">half of the world's food varieties have been lost</a> over the past century; in countries like the U.S., the loss is <a href="https://rafiusa.org/blog/protecting-the-food-ark/" target="_blank">more than 90 percent</a>. The global food system rests on a dangerously narrow base: without the genetic variety that can supply resilience, the food system is vulnerable to catastrophic losses from disease and the disruptions of a changing climate. </p><p><strong>The Benefits of Local Food</strong></p><p>The solution to these problems involves more than a commitment to ecological models of food production: it also requires a commitment to local food economies. Localization systematically alleviates a number of environmental problems inherent in the global food system, by:</p><ul class="ee-ul"> <li>reducing the distance that food travels, thereby lessening the energy needed for transport, as well as the attendant greenhouse gas emissions;</li></ul><ul class="ee-ul"> <li>reducing the need for packaging, processing and refrigeration (which all but disappears when producers sell direct to consumers, thus reducing waste and energy use);</li></ul><ul class="ee-ul"> <li>reducing monoculture, as farms producing for local or regional markets have an incentive to diversify their production, which makes organic production more feasible, in turn reducing the toxic load on surrounding ecosystems;</li></ul><ul class="ee-ul"> <li>providing more niches for wildlife to occupy through diversified organic farms;</li></ul><ul class="ee-ul"><li>and supporting the principle of diversity on which ecological farming—and life itself—is based, by favoring production methods that are best suited to particular climates, soils and resources.</li></ul><p>Local food provides many other benefits. The smaller-scale farms that produce for local and regional markets require more human intelligence, care and work than monocultures, thus providing more employment opportunities. In the Global South, in particular, a commitment to local food would stem the pressures that are driving millions of farmers off the land.</p><p>Local food is also good for rural and small-town economies, providing not only more on-farm employment, but supporting the many local businesses on which farmers depend.</p><p>Food security is also strengthened because varieties are chosen based on their suitability to diverse locales, not the demands of supermarket chains or the requirements of long-distance transport. This strengthens agricultural biodiversity.</p><p>Local food is also healthier. Since it doesn't need to travel so far, local food is far fresher than global food; and since it doesn't rely on monocultural production, it can be produced without toxic chemicals that can contaminate food.</p><p><strong>Countering the Myths</strong></p><p>Although local food is an incredibly effective solution-multiplier, <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/agribusiness">agribusiness</a> has gone to great lengths to convince the public that large-scale industrial food production is the only way to feed the world. But the fact is that the global food economy is massively inefficient.</p><p>The global system's need for standardized products means that tons of edible food are destroyed or left to rot. This is one reason why more than one-third of the global food supply is wasted or lost; for the US, the figure is <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/american-food-waste/491513/" target="_blank">closer to one-half</a>.</p><p>The logic of global trade results in massive quantities of identical products being simultaneously imported <em>and</em> exported—a needless waste of fossil fuels and a huge addition to greenhouse gas emissions. In a typical year, for example, the U.S. imports <a href="https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/livestock-and-meat-international-trade-data/" target="_blank">more than </a><a href="https://data.ers.usda.gov/reports.aspx?programArea=veg&groupName=Vegetables&commodityName=Potatoes&ID=17858#Pb63812f352e3419792c39497a2ee20d4_2_292" target="_blank">400,000 tons of potatoes</a> and <a href="https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/livestock-and-meat-international-trade-data/" target="_blank">1 million tons of beef</a>, while exporting almost the same tonnage of each. The same is true of many other food commodities, and many other countries.</p><p>The same logic leads to shipping foods across the world simply to reduce labor costs for processing. Shrimp harvested off the coast of Scotland, for example, are shipped 6,000 miles to Thailand to be peeled, then <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1534286/12000-mile-trip-to-have-seafood-shelled.html" target="_blank">shipped 6,000 miles back to the UK to be sold to consumers</a>.</p><p>The supposed efficiency of monocultural production is based on output per unit of labor, which is maximized by replacing jobs with chemical- and energy-intensive technology. Measured by output per acre, however—a far more relevant metric—smaller-scale farms are typically <a href="https://foodfirst.org/publication/on-the-benefits-of-small-farms/" target="_blank">8-20 times more productive</a>. This is partly because monocultures, by definition, produce just one crop on a given plot of land, while smaller, diversified farms allow <a href="https://foodfirst.org/publication/on-the-benefits-of-small-farms/" target="_blank">intercropping</a>—using the spaces between rows of one crop to grow another. What's more, the labor 'efficiencies' of monocultural production are linked to the use of large-scale equipment, which limit <a href="https://www.localfutures.org/7-billion-for-dinner-heres-how-to-feed-them/" target="_blank">the farmer's ability to tend to or harvest small portions of a crop</a> and thereby increase yields. </p><p><strong>Making the Shift</strong></p><p>For more than a generation, now, the message to farmers has been to "get big or get out" of farming, and a great number of the farmers who remain have tailored their methods to what makes short-term economic sense within a deeply flawed system. To avoid bankrupting those farmers, the shift from global to local would need to take place with care, providing incentives for farmers to diversify their production, reduce their reliance on chemical inputs and fossil fuel energy, and to seek markets closer to home. Those incentives would go hand-in-hand with reductions in subsidies for the industrial food system.</p><p>After decades of policy bias toward global food, some steps in this direction are being taken by local and regional governments. In the U.S., for example, most states have enacted "cottage food laws" that relax the restrictions on the small-scale production of jams, pickles and other preserved foods, allowing them to be <a href="https://www.chlpi.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/FINAL_Cottage-Food-Laws-Report_2013.pdf" target="_blank">processed and sold locally without the need for expensive commercial kitchens</a>.</p><p>Several towns in the state of Maine have gone even further. Seeking to bypass the restrictive regulations that make it difficult to market local foods, they have declared "food sovereignty" by passing ordinances that give their citizens the right "<a href="https://localfoodrules.org/ordinance-template/" target="_blank">to produce, process, sell, purchase, and consume local foods of their choosing</a>."</p><p>In 2013, the government of Ontario, Canada, <a href="https://news.ontario.ca/omafra/en/2013/11/bill-to-promote-local-food-passes-final-vote.html" target="_blank">passed a Local Food Act</a> aimed at increasing access to local food, improving local food literacy and providing tax credits for farmers who donate a portion of their produce to nearby food banks.</p><p>Even bolder action is needed if there is to be any hope of eliminating the damage done by the global food system. A crucial first step is to raise awareness of the costs of the current system, and the multiple benefits of local food. No matter how many studies demonstrate the virtues of alternative ways of producing and distributing food, the destructive global food system is unlikely to change unless there is heavy pressure from the grassroots to change the entire system. That needs to start now.</p><p><em>Helena Norberg-Hodge is the founder and director of <a href="https://www.localfutures.org/" target="_blank">Local Futures</a>. She is the author of the book <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Futures" target="_blank">Ancient Futures</a> (Chelsea Green, 2016) and the producer and director of the award-winning 2011 documentary <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economics_of_Happiness" target="_blank">The Economics of Happiness</a>.</em><em> Helena is the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, the Goi Peace Prize and the Arthur Morgan Award.</em></p><p><em></em><em>This article was produced by <a href="https://independentmediainstitute.org/earth-food-life/" target="_blank">Earth | Food | Life</a>, a project of the Independent Media Institute, and originally published by <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/unlike-a-globalized-food-system-local-food-wont-destroy-the-environment/" target="_blank">Truthout</a></em><em>.</em></p>
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200+ Groups Call on Senate to Reject 'Pesticide Industry Loyalist' as USDA's Top Scientist
14 November 2018
Politics
Agricultural workers in Salinas, California. Michael Davidson / Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
By Andrea Germanos
Denouncing his "strong ties to corporate agribusiness and pesticide companies," more than 240 groups urged the Senate on Wednesday to reject the nomination of Scott Hutchins, President Donald Trump's pick for chief scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
<p>"The <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/election-2018" target="_blank">election last week</a> demonstrates that people across the country are tired of this administration's dangerous anti-science, pro-industry agenda," declared Tiffany Finck-Haynes, pesticides and pollinators program manager with <a href="https://foe.org/" target="_blank">Friends of the Earth</a>. "We urge the Senate to listen to the American people and reject this pesticide industry loyalist who will put corporate profits over farmers, public health, and our environment."</p><p>If appointed Under Secretary of Agriculture for Research, Education, and Economics—a position with "<a href="https://qz.com/1332086/trump-nominates-dow-pesticide-executive-scott-hutchins-to-top-usda-post/" target="_blank">broad implications for the future of American agricultural science and policy-making</a>"—Hutchins would be the third Dow executive at the USDA, making the <a href="https://blog.ucsusa.org/karen-perry-stillerman/at-the-trump-usda-the-d-stands-for-dow" target="_blank">cozy relationship</a> between the Trump administration and the <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/agribusiness">agribusiness</a> giant even more clear.</p><p>In a letter to Senate Agriculture Committee chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) and ranking member Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), the massive coalition opposed to Hutchins warns that by appointing someone that "spent over 30 years of his career working at Dow Agro Sciences with a focus on pesticides," the Trump administration has once more demonstrated its willingness to put its "unhealthy relationship" with Dow Chemical ahead of the "health and safety of the American public and our environment."</p><p>The letter from the coalition—which includes ActionAid USA, Family Farm Defenders and Interfaith Worker Justice—states:</p><blockquote>Scott Hutchins has a history of defending the toxic pesticide chlorpyrifos. In 2001, Hutchins expressed disappointment that Dow needed to limit uses of the pesticide, complaining that the Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA) put Dow's organophosphates under scrutiny.<br><br>Hutchins encourages growers to use pesticides, even when less toxic alternatives are available. In a 2006 presentation, Hutchins claimed, "Integrative Pest Management does/should NOT advocate avoidance of technology." While many practitioners of Integrative Pest Management view the practice as a way to significantly reduce synthetic pesticide use and utilize them as a "last resort," Hutchins has co-opted the term to encourage pesticide application.<br></blockquote><p>"Should Scott Hutchins gain control of USDA's research programs," the letter continues, "he could use the agency's infrastructure and grant making to advance his harmful vision of chemical intensive agriculture under the guise of ecologically sustainable practices."</p><p>According to Jim Goodman, board president of the <a href="http://nffc.net/" target="_blank">National Family Farm Coalition</a>, one of the signatory groups, "In nominating Scott Hutchins to the position of Chief Scientist at USDA, the Trump Administration has, again, proven that they are more interested in promoting the agenda and profit of industrial agribusiness over scientific integrity, the protection of public health, and the well-being of farmers, farm workers, and rural communities."</p><p>The Senate Agriculture Committee announced Tuesday that Hutchins' <a href="https://www.agriculture.senate.gov/hearings/nomination-of-mindy-brashears-naomi-earp-and-scott-hutchins" target="_blank">hearing</a> would be held Nov. 28.</p><p> <em>Reposted with permission from our media associate <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/11/14/200-groups-call-senate-reject-pesticide-industry-loyalist-scott-hutchins-usdas-top" target="_blank">Common Dreams</a>.</em><em></em></p>
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Organic Farming With Gene Editing: An Oxymoron or a Tool for Sustainable Agriculture?
10 October 2018
GMO
Christopher Paquette / CC BY 2.0
By Rebecca Mackelprang
A University of California, Berkeley professor stands at the front of the room, delivering her invited talk about the potential of genetic engineering. Her audience, full of organic farming advocates, listens uneasily. She notices a man get up from his seat and move toward the front of the room. Confused, the speaker pauses mid-sentence as she watches him bend over, reach for the power cord, and unplug the projector. The room darkens and silence falls. So much for listening to the ideas of others.
<p>Many organic advocates claim that genetically engineered crops are <a href="https://www.downtoearth.org/label-gmos/risks-genetic-engineering" target="_blank">harmful</a> to human health, the environment and the farmers who work with them. Biotechnology advocates fire back that genetically engineered crops are <a href="https://doi.org/10.17226/23395" target="_blank">safe</a>, reduce insecticide use, and allow farmers in developing countries to produce enough <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/food/">food</a> to feed themselves and their families.<br></p><p>Now, sides are being chosen about whether the new gene editing technology, CRISPR, is really just "<a href="https://usrtk.org/gmo/gmo-2-0-foods-coming-your-way-will-they-be-labeled/" target="_blank">GMO 2.0</a>" or a helpful <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbi.2018.04.013" target="_blank">new tool</a> to speed up the plant breeding process. In July, the European Union's Court of Justice <a href="http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=204387&pageIndex=0&doclang=EN&mode=req&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=44391" target="_blank">ruled</a> that crops made with CRISPR will be classified as genetically engineered. In the U.S., meanwhile, the regulatory system is <a href="https://www.usda.gov/media/press-releases/2018/03/28/secretary-perdue-issues-usda-statement-plant-breeding-innovation" target="_blank">drawing distinctions</a> between genetic engineering and specific uses of genome editing.</p><p>I am a plant molecular biologist and appreciate the awesome potential of both CRISPR and genetic engineering technologies. But I don't believe that pits me against the goals of organic agriculture. In fact, biotechnology can help meet these goals. And while rehashing the arguments about genetic engineering seems counterproductive, genome editing may draw both sides to the table for a healthy conversation. To understand why, it's worth digging into the differences between genome editing with CRISPR and genetic engineering.</p><p><strong>What's the Difference Between Genetic Engineering, CRISPR and Mutation Breeding?</strong></p><p>Opponents argue that CRISPR is a <a href="https://foe.org/news/2017-01-usda-proposal-for-biotech-regulations-falls-short/" target="_blank">sneaky way</a> to trick the public into eating genetically engineered foods. It is tempting to toss CRISPR and genetic engineering into the same bucket. But even "genetic engineering" and "CRISPR" are too broad to convey what is happening on the genetic level, so let's look closer.</p><p>In one type of genetic engineering, a gene from an unrelated organism can be introduced into a plant's genome. For example, much of the <a href="http://bteggplant.cornell.edu/content/news/blog/director-general-bari-remarks-about-bt-brinjal" target="_blank">eggplant grown in Bangladesh</a> incorporates a gene from a common bacterium. This gene makes a protein called Bt that is harmful to insects. By putting that gene inside the eggplant's DNA, the plant itself becomes lethal to eggplant-eating insects and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1600850" target="_blank">decreases the need for insecticides</a>. Bt is safe for humans. It's like how chocolate makes dogs sick, but doesn't affect us.</p><p>Another type of genetic engineering can move a gene from one variety of a plant species into another variety of that same species. For example, researchers identified a gene in wild apple trees that makes them resistant to <a href="https://www.apsnet.org/edcenter/intropp/lessons/prokaryotes/Pages/FireBlight.aspx" target="_blank">fire blight</a>. They <a href="https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0143980" target="_blank">moved that gene</a> into the "Gala Galaxy" apple to make it resistant to disease. However, this new apple variety has not been commercialized.</p><p>Scientists are unable to direct where in the genome a gene is inserted with traditional genetic engineering, although they use DNA sequencing to identify the location after the fact.</p><p>In contrast, CRISPR is a tool of precision.</p><p>Just like using the "find" function in a word processor to quickly jump to a word or phrase, the CRISPR molecular machinery finds a specific spot in the genome. It cuts both strands of DNA at that location. Because cut DNA is problematic for the cell, it quickly deploys a repair team to mend the break. There are two pathways for repairing the DNA. In one, which I call "CRISPR for modification," a new gene can be inserted to link the cut ends together, like pasting a new sentence into a word processor.</p><p>In "CRISPR for mutation," the cell's repair team tries to glue the cut DNA strands back together again. Scientists can direct this repair team to change a few DNA units, or base pairs (A's, T's, C's and G's), at the site that was cut, creating a small DNA change called a mutation. This technique can be used to tweak the gene's behavior inside the plant. It can also be used to silence genes inside the plant that, for example, are <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.2969" target="_blank">detrimental to plant survival</a>, like a gene that increases susceptibility to fungal infections.</p>
<p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xODcwOTI0OC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzMDg0MDgwM30.75VJ1e135g7SnFHjKoEBqq7S03JF7qQZRNvBhScSkEU/img.jpg?width=980" id="deb02" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="c22ccfc6a2da00eec2c2461cb529cb51" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="add caption...">In genetic engineering, a new gene is added to a random location in a plant's genome. CRISPR for modification also allows a new gene to be added to a plant, but targets the new gene to a specific location.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="add photo credit...">Rebecca Mackelprang, CC BY-SA</small></p>
<p><a href="https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=mDjLBAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=mutation+breeding&ots=hOXPUt2p5H&sig=qcnBWrcHGIayvZ6YifclAT2sjYk#v=onepage&q=mutation%20breeding&f=false" target="_blank">Mutation breeding</a>, which in my opinion is also a type of biotechnology, is already used in organic food production. In mutation breeding, radiation or chemicals are used to randomly make mutations in the DNA of hundreds or thousands of seeds which are then grown in the field. Breeders scan fields for plants with a desired trait such as disease resistance or increased yield. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1023/B:EUPH.0000014914.85465.4f" target="_blank">Thousands of new crop varieties</a> have been created and commercialized through this process, including everything from varieties of <a href="https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/quinoa-farmers-increase-yields-using-nuclear-derived-farming-practices" target="_blank">quinoa</a> to varieties of <a href="https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2013/11/27/popular-sweet-grapefruit-rio-red-a-product-of-unregulated-risky-process-of-mutagenesis/" target="_blank">grapefruit</a>. Mutation breeding is considered a <a href="https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/NOP-PM-13-1-CellFusion.pdf" target="_blank">traditional breeding technique</a>, and thus is not an "<a href="https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=9c79a660d1d7414c48a7e1d257b00561&mc=true&node=pt7.3.205&rgn=div5#se7.3.205_1200" target="_blank">excluded method</a>" for organic farming in the U.S.<br></p><p>CRISPR for mutation is more similar to mutation breeding than it is to genetic engineering. It creates similar end products as mutation breeding, but removes the randomness. It does not introduce new DNA. It is a controlled and predictable technique for generating helpful new plant varieties capable of resisting disease or weathering adverse environmental conditions.</p><p><strong>Opportunity Lost: Learning From Genetic Engineering</strong></p><p>Most commercialized genetically engineered traits confer herbicide tolerance or insect resistance in corn, soybean or cotton. Yet many other engineered crops exist. While a few are grown in the field, most sit all but forgotten in dark corners of research labs because of the prohibitive expense of passing regulatory hurdles. If the regulatory climate and public perception allow it, crops with valuable traits like these could be produced by CRISPR and become common in our soils and on our tables.</p>
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<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xODcwOTI1NS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxNTg2MDEwNH0.AAEDX2vMPEkzjpoUYBOuqT2kregFxorEpW3uqjGk11c/img.jpg?width=980" id="176c4" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="f8aae4a3d4c79c6a78c0efda9292d567" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="add caption...">Dr. Peggy Lemaux, holding seeds from the hypoallergenic wheat she helped develop with genetic engineering</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="add photo credit...">James Block, CC BY-SA</small></p>
<p>For example, my adviser at UC Berkeley developed, with colleagues, a <a href="https://www.foodbusinessnews.net/articles/10892-bioengineering-of-wheat-still-faces-significant-challenges" target="_blank">hypoallergenic variety of wheat</a>. Seeds for this wheat are held captive in envelopes in the basement of our building, untouched for years. A <a href="https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2017/10/11/green-technology-disease-resistant-gmo-tomato-eliminate-need-copper-pesticides-double-yields-blocked-public-fears/" target="_blank">tomato</a> that uses a sweet pepper gene to defend against a bacterial disease, eliminating the need for copper-based <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/pesticides">pesticide</a> application, has struggled to secure funding to move forward. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0709005105" target="_blank">Carrot</a>, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s11103-004-3415-9" target="_blank">cassava</a>, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s11248-009-9256-1" target="_blank">lettuce</a>, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/jxb/erm299" target="_blank">potato</a> and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt1010-1012" target="_blank">more</a> have been engineered for increased nutritional value. These varieties demonstrate the creativity and expertise of researchers in bringing beneficial new traits to life. Why, then, can't I buy bread made with hypoallergenic wheat at the grocery store?<br></p><p><strong>Loosening the Grip of Big Agriculture</strong></p><p>Research and development of a new genetically engineered crop <a href="https://croplife-r9qnrxt3qxgjra4.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Getting-a-Biotech-Crop-to-Market-Phillips-McDougall-Study.pdf" target="_blank">costs</a> around $100 million at large seed companies. Clearing the regulatory hurdles laid out by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, EPA and/or FDA (depending on the engineered trait) takes between five and seven years and an additional $35 million. Regulation is important and genetically engineered products should be carefully evaluated. But the expense allows only <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/big-food">large corporations</a> with extensive capital to compete in this arena. The price shuts small companies, academic researchers and NGOs out of the equation. To recoup their $135 million investment in crop commercialization, companies develop products to satisfy the biggest markets of seed buyers—growers of corn, soybean, sugar beet and cotton.</p><p>The costs of research and development are far lower with CRISPR due to its precision and predictability. And early indications suggest that using CRISPR for mutation will not be subject to the same regulatory hurdles and costs in the U.S. A <a href="https://www.usda.gov/media/press-releases/2018/03/28/secretary-perdue-issues-usda-statement-plant-breeding-innovation" target="_blank">press release</a> on March 28, 2018 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture says that "under its biotechnology regulations, USDA does not regulate or have any plans to regulate plants that could otherwise have been developed through traditional breeding techniques" if they are developed with approved laboratory procedures.</p><p>If the EPA and FDA follow suit with reasonable, less costly regulations, CRISPR may escape the dominant financial grasp of large seed companies. Academics, small companies and NGO researchers may see hard work and intellectual capital yield beneficial genome-edited products that are not forever relegated to the basements of research buildings.</p><p><strong>Common Ground: CRISPR for Sustainability</strong></p><p>In the six years since the genome editing capabilities of CRISPR were unlocked, academics, startups and established corporations have announced new agricultural products in the pipeline that use this technology. Some of these focus on traits for consumer health, such as <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/pbi.12837" target="_blank">low-gluten</a> or gluten-free wheat for people with celiac disease. Others, such as non-browning <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2016.19754" target="_blank">mushrooms</a>, can decrease <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/food-waste">food waste</a>.</p><p>The lingering California drought demonstrated the importance of crop varieties that use water efficiently. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/pbi.12603" target="_blank">Corn</a> with greater yield under <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/drought">drought</a> stress has already been made using CRISPR, and it is only a matter of time before CRISPR is used to increase drought tolerance in other crops. Powdery mildew-resistant <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-00578-x" target="_blank">tomatoes</a> could save billions of dollars and eliminate spraying of fungicides. A <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3733" target="_blank">tomato</a> plant that flowers and makes fruit early could be used in northern latitudes with long days and shorter growing seasons, which will become more important as <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/climate-change">climate changes</a>.</p><p><strong>The Rules Are Made, But Is the Decision Final?</strong></p><p>In <a href="https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/organic/nosb/recommendations/fall2016" target="_blank">2016</a> and <a href="https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/organic/nosb/recommendations/fall2017" target="_blank">2017</a>, the U.S. <a href="https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/organic/nosb" target="_blank">National Organic Standards Board</a> (NOSB) voted to exclude all genome-edited crops from organic certification.<br></p><p>But in my view, they should reconsider.</p><p>Some organic growers I interviewed agree. "I see circumstances under which it could be useful for short-cutting a process that for traditional breeding might take many plant generations," said Tom Willey, an organic farmer emeritus from California. The disruption of natural ecosystems is a major challenge to <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/agriculture">agriculture</a>, Willey told me, and while the problem cannot be wholly addressed by genome editing, it could lend an opportunity to "reach back into genomes of the wild ancestors of crop species to recapture genetic material" that has been lost through millennia of breeding for high yields.</p><p>Breeders have successfully used traditional breeding to reintroduce such diversity, but "in the light of the urgency posed by climate change, we might wisely employ CRISPR to accelerate such work," Willey concludes.</p><p>Bill Tracy, an organic corn breeder and professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, said, "Many CRISPR-induced changes that could happen in nature could have benefits to all kinds of farmers." But the NOSB has already voted on the issue and the rules are unlikely to change without significant pressure. "It's a question of what social activity could move the needle on that," Tracy concludes.</p><p>People on all sides of biotechnology debates want to maximize human and environmental outcomes. Collaborative problem-solving by organic (and conventional) growers, specialists in sustainable agriculture, biotechnologists and policymakers will yield greater progress than individual groups acting alone and dismissing each other. The barriers to this may seem large, but they are of our own making. Hopefully, more people will gain the courage to plug the projector back in and let the conversation continue.</p>
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</p><div id="2cd15" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="QSCJ4P1576661894"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1027205531675635713" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">Potato Company Simplot Licenses DowDuPont’s Gene Editing Tech https://t.co/CJydi02A3r @foodandwater… https://t.co/cuOsmGvaZG</div> — EcoWatch (@EcoWatch)<a href="https://twitter.com/EcoWatch/statuses/1027205531675635713">1533739857.0</a></blockquote></div>
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<p><em>Rebecca Mackelprang is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.</em><br></p><p><em><span></span>Disclosure statement: The funding for Rebecca Mackelprang's postdoctoral position comes from the Winkler Family Foundation.</em></p><p><em>Reposted with permission from our media associate <a href="https://theconversation.com/organic-farming-with-gene-editing-an-oxymoron-or-a-tool-for-sustainable-agriculture-101585" target="_blank">The Conversation</a>.</em></p>
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More than a third of Americans eat fast food on any given day.
<p style="">That's the key finding of a <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db322.htm" target="_blank">report</a> released Wednesday by the <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/" target="_blank">Centers for Disease Control and Prevention</a>'s (CDC) <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/index.htm" target="_blank">National Center for Health Statistics</a> (NCHS) that tracked the fast food consumption of Americans between 2013 and 2016. </p><p style="">"On any given day in the United States, an estimated 36.6 percent or approximately 84.8 million adults consume fast food," report first author and CDC statistician Cheryl Fryar <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2018/10/03/health/fast-food-consumption-cdc-study/index.html" target="_blank">told CNN</a>.</p><p style="">Registered dietitian at the <a href="https://wexnermedical.osu.edu/mediaroom/expertslisting/liz-weinandy" target="_blank">Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center</a> Liz Weinandy, who was not involved in the report, said that adults underestimate the risks posed by fast food, which is typically high in fat, calories, salt and sugar but low in essential nutrients. </p><p style="">"It is funny, when we see news clips of a shark swimming near a beach, it scares us into not going near that beach. However, what we should be scared of is double cheeseburgers, French fries and large amounts of sugary beverages," Weinandy told CNN.</p><p style="">Fryar said her team conducted the research because of the supersized role that fast food has come to play in U.S. eating habits.</p><p style="">"We focused on fast food for this report because fast food has played an important role in the American diet in recent decades," she said. "Fast food has been associated with poor diet and increased risk of obesity."</p><p style="">Overall, the study found that percentage of fast-food-eating adults decreased with age, with 44.9 percent of adults aged 20 to 39 indulging, 37.7 percent of adults 40 to 59 eating the stuff and only 24.1. percent of adults aged 60 or more chowing down on any given day. More men consumed fast food than women, for a difference of 37.9 percent vs. 35.4 percent.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image" style="">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xODY4OTg4MS9vcmlnaW4uZ2lmIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1MTM1Njg2N30.YBjb8pX8wRmyq3GJjzXJklB9CGzhcslUEmFtuRjJh38/img.gif?width=980" id="6f311" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="692388cb20179728b5cc4a35cd5812f8" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="add caption...">A breakdown of adult fast food consumption by age and sex.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="add photo credit...">CDC NCHS</small></p><p style="">One surprising finding was that fast food consumption actually increased with income. Only 31.7 percent of lower-income Americans, defined as those living on an income equal or less than 130 percent of the national poverty level, ate fast food on a given day compared to 36.4 percent of middle income Americans and 42 percent of higher income Americans.<br></p><p style="">"That connection or correlation is opposite of what I perhaps would have expected," Director of Clinical Research at the <a href="http://www.globalobesity.org/about-the-gopc/our-people/faculty/lawrence-cheskin.html" target="_blank">Global Obesity Prevention Center</a> at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Dr. Lawrence Cheskin told CNN. "But we need these kinds of studies and these kinds of facts and statistics to get a better understanding of what drives the use of foods that, as a nutrition expert I would say, are not your first choice for a variety of reasons."</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image" style="">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xODY4OTg4NC9vcmlnaW4uZ2lmIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY0NTczNDg2N30.2S4RnpUUxsqTnpz4LC34ZZP9-1Z38-Xbfftqm0i0-e0/img.gif?width=980" id="21f0c" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="110eef400b3e39de0a682e5d30cdcc04" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="add caption...">A breakdown of adult fast food consumption by income level, based on the federal poverty level (FPL) and sex</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="add photo credit...">CDC NCHS</small></p><p style="">When it came to race and ethnicity, the breakdown of fast-food consumption on any given day was as follows:<br></p><ul class="ee-ul"> <li>Non-Hispanic black adults: 42.4 percent</li></ul><ul class="ee-ul"> <li>Non-Hispanic white adults: 37.6 percent</li></ul><ul class="ee-ul"> <li>Hispanic adults: 35.5 percent</li></ul><ul class="ee-ul"><li>Non-Hispanic Asian Adults: 30.6 percent</li></ul>
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The Orangutans in Indonesia have been known to be on the verge of extinction as a result of deforestation and poaching.
Ulet Ifansasti / Getty Images News
Ulet Ifansasti / Getty Images News
By Edward Davey
The world is vastly underestimating the benefits of acting on climate change. Recent research from the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate finds that bold climate action could deliver at least $26 trillion in economic benefits through 2030. This ground-breaking research, produced by the Global Commission and more than 200 experts, highlights proof points of the global shift to a low-carbon economy, and identifies ways to accelerate action in five sectors: energy, cities, food and land use, water and industry. Our blog series, The $26 Trillion Opportunity, explores these economic opportunities in greater detail.
<p>There's a "<a href="https://www.theforgottensolution.org/" target="_blank">forgotten solution</a>" for achieving major economic, development and climate gains—transforming the way the world feeds itself and manages its land.</p><p>At this week's UN General Assembly, members of the <a href="https://www.foodandlandusecoalition.org/" target="_blank">Food and Land Use Coalition</a> will meet with heads of state and CEOs to raise the profile of this issue and encourage greater action. They have new research to support their case. The <a href="https://newclimateeconomy.report/2018/food-and-land-use/" target="_blank">food and land use chapter</a> of the <a href="https://newclimateeconomy.report/2018/" target="_blank">New Climate Economy's Global Opportunities Report</a> sets out how decisive action on food and land use is at the heart of the inclusive growth story of the 21st century. The report finds that more sustainable food and land use business models <a href="http://report.businesscommission.org/report" target="_blank">could be worth up to $2.3 trillion</a>, and that they're critical to delivering a more climate-secure and resilient world.</p><p>Five areas offer the most opportunity for action:</p><h3>1. Avoid deforestation and close the forest frontier.</h3><p>The first-order priority is to end deforestation by closing the "forest frontier" or intact forests, to development. If the world fails to protect its remaining tropical forests, keeping global temperature rise to 1.5 or 2 degrees C (2.7-3.6 degrees F)—the level the international community has agreed is necessary to prevent the worst climate impacts—<a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/09/news-forests-climate-summit-sustainability/" target="_blank">becomes almost impossible</a>.</p><p>Increased support for protected areas, indigenous peoples' rights and better land use planning and enforcement are fundamental steps. Securing indigenous rights to land tenure <a href="https://www.wri.org/blog/2016/10/protecting-indigenous-land-rights-makes-good-economic-sense" target="_blank">makes strong economic</a> (as well as moral) sense. <a href="https://www.wri.org/publication/ending-tropical-deforestation-elusive-impact-deforestation-free-supply-chain-movement" target="_blank">Further progress</a> on the deforestation-free supply chain movement is also urgently needed, both in terms of scaling up implementation by companies that have already made commitments, as well as in <a href="https://www.tfa2020.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/47530_Emerging-markets_consumers_and_deforestation_report_2018.pdf" target="_blank">bringing new companies and markets on board</a>.</p><h3>2. Increase agricultural productivity.</h3><p>There are significant gains to be made in increasing agricultural productivity and ensuring greater uptake of <a href="http://www.fao.org/gacsa/en/" target="_blank">climate-smart agriculture</a>. Across the world, farming practices can be made much more efficient and resilient by providing training services for farmers, strengthening smallholder cooperatives and investing in state-of-the art farming techniques. The closure of the forest frontier provides farmers with the incentive to intensify their production on existing land. Reforming global agricultural subsidies, currently worth $519 billion per year, could also lead to vastly better outcomes from the farming system. For example, incentives for cattle expansion in the Amazon <a href="http://www.zerodeforestationcattle.org/" target="_blank">could instead be reformed</a> to support investment in forest restoration or raising livestock in harmony with forests and other ecosystems.</p><h3>3. Restore forests and landscapes.</h3><p>There is a <a href="https://www.wri.org/blog/2017/12/restoration-one-most-overlooked-opportunities-economic-growth" target="_blank">major economic prize to be won</a> in restoring degraded forests and agricultural land. By allowing degraded forests to recover to natural forest, supporting agroforestry and other strategies, restoration could lead to economic gains of $35–40 billion per year within 15 years, as well as a myriad of social and environmental benefits. There are a number of measures to spur public and private sector investment in restoration, including incentives from national governments and multilateral development banks providing "first-loss guarantees" to investors committed to restoration.</p><h3>4. Reduce food loss and waste.</h3><p>One-third of all food produced is lost or wasted along the food chain, costing the global economy an estimated $940 billion annually and producing about 8 percent of global emissions. If food loss and waste were a country, it would rank as the world's third-largest emitter after China and the U.S.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xODY1NjA4MC9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTU5NDcxMTU0Nn0.bkTwyuVvXzC8JB0teixw1mJJd9P7wiTPjHw0DE8QkuA/img.png?width=980" id="801cb" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="3673d0023b15d11da32c294732445ff9" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
</p><p>Saving just one-quarter of the food currently lost or wasted would be equivalent to the amount of food needed to feed 870 million people annually. It also makes good business sense: Recent research found that companies investing in food loss and waste reduction saw a median benefit-cost ratio of 14:1. Coalitions such as <a href="https://champions123.org/" target="_blank">Champion 12.3</a>, which brings together executives from business, government and organizations, have a critical role to play here.<br></p><h3>5. Improve diets.</h3><p>A comprehensive global effort to address the double burden of malnutrition and obesity will be critical to securing better and more inclusive growth in the 21st century. Across the world, almost a billion people suffer from inadequate diets and insecure food supplies. At the same time, current trends towards diets high in processed foods, refined sugars, fats, oils and red meat have resulted in more than 2.1 billion people becoming overweight or obese. This increase in collective body mass is strongly associated with the increased incidence worldwide of chronic non-communicable diseases, especially type II diabetes, coronary heart disease and some cancers. If current trends continue, these chronic diseases are predicted to account for two-thirds of the global burden of disease. The global economic cost of obesity alone was estimated to be <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/overview/in-the-news/the-obesity-crisis" target="_blank">around $2 trillion in 2012</a>, roughly equivalent to the global cost of armed conflict or smoking.</p><p>Public policy and private sector action can deliver major changes here, whether through the use of economic instruments <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/health/obesity-chile-sugar-regulations.html" target="_blank">such as a "sugar tax,"</a> the issuance of public health guidelines such as the Chinese government's <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/overview/in-the-news/the-obesity-crisis" target="_blank">advice on reduced meat consumption</a>, or through innovative private-sector approaches such as <a href="https://www.wri.org/our-work/project/cool-food-pledge" target="_blank">The Cool Food Pledge</a>, <a href="https://www.wri.org/our-work/project/better-buying-lab" target="_blank">the Better Buying Lab</a> or <a href="https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/02/flavor-packed-burger-saves-many-emissions-taking-2-million-cars-road" target="_blank">blending mushrooms into burgers</a>.</p><h3>Better Economic Growth</h3><p>Action across these five areas would lead to better and more resilient economic growth. It would also make it more likely that the world will meet the <a href="https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/" target="_blank">Sustainable Development Goals</a> and the <a href="https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/the-paris-agreement" target="_blank">Paris Agreement on climate change</a>. Despite much progress, there is still a great deal to be done—and a massive prize to be won.</p><p><em>Main image: A worker carries a Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii) as being prepared to be released into the wild at Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme's rehabilitation center on Nov.14, 2016 in Kuta Mbelin, North Sumatra, Indonesia. The Orangutans in Indonesia have been known to be on the verge of extinction as a result of deforestation and poaching. Found mostly in South-East Asia, where they live on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo, the endangered species continue to lose their habitat as a result of corporate expansion in a developing economy. Indonesia approved palm oil concessions on nearly 15 million acres of peatlands over the past years and thousands of square miles have been cleared for plantations, including the lowland areas that are the prime habitat for orangutans. </em></p>
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Mighty Earth
By Reynard Loki
Whole Foods bills itself as "America's healthiest grocery store," but what it's doing to the environment is anything but healthy. According to a new report, the chain is helping to drive one of the nation's worst human-made environmental disasters: the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
<p>By not requiring environmental safeguards from its meat suppliers, the world's largest natural and organic foods supermarket—and most of its big-brand counterparts in the retail food industry, like McDonald's, Subway and Target—are sourcing and selling meat from some of the worst polluters in agribusiness, including Tyson Foods and Cargill. The animal waste and fertilizer runoff from their industrial farms end up in the Gulf of Mexico, where each summer, a growing marine wasteland spreads for thousands of miles, leaving countless dead wildlife in its oxygen-depleted wake.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
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<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="add caption...">Community members and environmental activists demonstrate outside Whole Foods headquarters in Austin, Texas, on August 2, 2018.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="add photo credit...">Mighty Earth</small></p><p>"The major meat producers like Tyson and Cargill that have consolidated control over the market have the leverage to dramatically improve the supply chain," according to the report, which was released by <a href="http://www.mightyearth.org/" target="_blank">Mighty Earth</a>, an environmental action group based in Washington, DC. "Yet to date they have done little," the report's authors note, "ignoring public concerns and allowing the environmentally damaging practices for feeding and raising meat to expand largely unchecked."<br></p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xODQxNzgyOS9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxMDQ5MjExNX0.ouQe8cwV_Cdox_h7s_d9Reo97brD2tIS23w0I056nw0/img.png?width=980" id="7fbda" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="7cc54b9a14082ac9d7229624879d57c6" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="add caption...">How animal feed moves through the meat supply chain.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="add photo credit...">Mighty Earth</small></p><p>On Aug. 2, the day the report was released, those public concerns found a voice as citizens, environmentalists and sustainability advocates gathered outside Whole Foods headquarters in Austin, Texas, to deliver 95,000 petition signatures demanding that the company hold its meat suppliers accountable for their role in destroying the environment.<br></p><p>"Grocery stores like Walmart and Whole Foods and meal outlets like McDonald's and Burger King have the power to set and enforce standards requiring better farming practices from suppliers," states the report, which Mighty Earth says is the "first comprehensive assessment of major US food brands on their environmental standards and performance for sourced meat."</p><h2>Feeding the Nation, Failing the Environment</h2><p>Ranking the largest food companies in the U.S. based on their sustainability policies for meat production, the report found that the biggest players in the food industry—including major fast food, grocery and food service companies—are failing to protect the environment from the impact of their supply chains. Remarkably, the researchers found that not a single one of the 23 major brands surveyed have policies in place to require "even minimal environmental protections from meat suppliers."</p><p>Even more startling is that so-called "green" brands like Whole Foods that have built their reputations on providing sustainable food options have, according to the report, "failed to commit to environmentally responsible farming practices that protect drinking water, prevent agricultural runoff and curb climate emissions."</p><p>The <a href="http://www.mightyearth.org/meat-scorecard" target="_blank">23 companies surveyed</a> were evaluated on their requirements for meat suppliers regarding where they source their animal feed, how they process their animals' manure and how they manage their greenhouse gas emissions.</p><p><a href="http://www.mightyearth.org/meat-scorecard" target="_blank">All but one of the companies scored an "F"</a> overall for their environmental policies (or lack thereof) for meat sourcing. The only company to score better than an "F" was Walmart, which received a "D" due to its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions across its supply chain, as well as the launching of programs meant to improve the management of manure and <a href="https://thinkprogress.org/is-walmart-the-key-to-making-american-farming-more-sustainable-37af74a3ce22/" target="_blank">increase the sustainability of corn and soy farming</a>.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
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<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="add caption...">Soil erosion and agricultural runoff are the top sources of water pollution in the U.S.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="add photo credit...">Mighty Earth</small></p><h2>Dead Cows on Your Plate, Dead Fish in the Ocean</h2><p>In oceans and large lakes across the globe, human activities are creating oxygen-depleted areas where marine life can no longer survive. These hypoxic areas, currently numbering <a href="https://theconversation.com/dead-zones-are-a-global-water-pollution-challenge-but-with-sustained-effort-they-can-come-back-to-life-96077" target="_blank">more than 400 around the globe</a>, are commonly known as "dead zones," and are caused by an increase in certain chemical nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus that drive the massive growth of algae, causing the spread of deadly "algal blooms." As the algae decomposes, their biomass consumes the oxygen in the water, suffocating fish and other marine life.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xODQxNzg1Mi9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzODgxNzUzMn0.45UR_nBUGa6FIn9kQ_VnPJ8L72HYHc7mNiDVmq43cao/img.jpg?width=980" id="2c4e8" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="ec69a8e1ecc6d5e426b539fe1e5d7241" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="add caption...">Algal blooms are harmful to ecosystems because the blooming organisms contain toxins, noxious chemicals or pathogens. They also suck up all the oxygen, killing fish and other marine life.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="add photo credit...">National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration</small></p><p>In the U.S. the largest recurring dead zone is located in the Gulf of Mexico, mainly off the coast of Louisiana, and extending east to the Mississippi River Delta and west to Texas. The Gulf acts as a massive drainage basin for polluted water containing <a href="http://www.mightyearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Meat-Pollution-in-America.pdf" target="_blank">manure and fertilizer runoff coming from the American heartland</a>, from major beef-producing states like Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska. During summer months, this area becomes a 7,000-mile-wide lifeless region—the only reminders of past life being the bodies of fish, crabs, shrimp and other marine animals that have suffocated due to a lack of oxygen. The Gulf of Mexico dead zone is the<a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180607120724.htm" target="_blank"> second-largest human-caused dead zone</a> in the world, after the hypoxic zone in the <a href="https://www.zmescience.com/science/oman-gulf-dead-zone-2924534/" target="_blank">Gulf of Oman</a>.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xODQxNzkwMi9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzMzcwNDYwMX0.bcDzLCp92jOQY7WnoNr9RyAljq7s5jZ61HZ5p3D4GL0/img.jpg?width=980" id="b726c" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="2bf6753427cecaa6f9abb99fe6c8e8f5" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="add caption...">The Mississippi-Atchafalaya River Basin drains approximately 41 percent of the contiguous United States that includes all or part of 31 states and two Canadian provinces. Map scale is approximately 2,000 miles across.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="add photo credit..."><a href="http://deq.louisiana.gov/assets/docs/Water/LA_Nutrient_Management_Strategy_FINAL_May2014.pdf" target="_blank">Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality</a></small></p><p>"Excess nutrients bleeding off fertilized crops constitute the overwhelming source—over 70 percent—of the nutrient pollution that causes the Gulf Dead Zone," Donald Boesch, a professor of marine science and former president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, told the Independent Media Institute.<br></p><p>In August 2017, scientists measured the Gulf of Mexico dead zone and found that it was at its <a href="http://www.noaa.gov/media-release/gulf-of-mexico-dead-zone-is-largest-ever-measured" target="_blank">largest since the mapping of the zone began in 1985</a>—more than 8,000 square miles. But recently, scientists reported that the area is only about 40 percent of its average size. That doesn't mean that it is no longer an issue. "Although the area is small this year, we should not think that the low-oxygen problem in the Gulf of Mexico is solved," Nancy Rabalais, a marine ecologist at Louisiana State University and the lead scientist of the study, <a href="https://www.apnews.com/622dc4fde853414a81602d56596566c6" target="_blank">told </a><a href="https://www.apnews.com/622dc4fde853414a81602d56596566c6" target="_blank">T</a><a href="https://www.apnews.com/622dc4fde853414a81602d56596566c6" target="_blank">he Associated Press</a>. "We are not close to the goal size for this hypoxic area."</p><p><a href="https://cgspace.cgiar.org/bitstream/handle/10568/10601/IssueBrief3.pdf" target="_blank">Nearly half (45 percent)</a> of the Earth's landmass is being farmed by the global industrial livestock system, which includes both the animals killed for human consumption and the crops used to feed those animals. The current human population, 7.6 billion, is <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/22/533935054/u-n-says-world-s-population-will-reach-9-8-billion-by-2050" target="_blank">expected</a> to swell to 9.8 billion by the year 2050. And if <a href="http://www.worldwatch.org/global-meat-production-and-consumption-continue-rise" target="_blank">most of </a><a href="http://www.worldwatch.org/global-meat-production-and-consumption-continue-rise" target="_blank">them</a><a href="http://www.worldwatch.org/global-meat-production-and-consumption-continue-rise" target="_blank"> will be meat-eaters</a>, the negative impact of the meat industry on marine ecosystems and coastal communities, if not addressed soon, will surely get worse. According to NASA, "The number and size of ocean dead zones is closely connected to human population density." It's basic math: More people means more meat-eaters, and more meat production means more and bigger dead zones.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xODQxNzkyMy9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1MDExODMzM30.MMHFKSCvSFsBf_Ti2MjAKElns-05UJnKCRein63yDOc/img.jpg?width=980" id="aaf97" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="7b82eaff2daee02c3af177c831ccecf0" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="add caption...">Red circles show the location and size of many dead zones. Black dots show dead zones of unknown size. The size and number of marine dead zones—areas where the deep water is so low in dissolved oxygen that sea creatures can't survive—have grown explosively in the past half-century.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="add photo credit...">NASA Earth Observatory, 2008</small></p><h2>More Pathogens, More Pollutants, Less Profit</h2><p>Dead zones could also introduce a host of public and animal health issues. Boesch points out that "various pathogenic microorganisms can thrive" in hypoxic areas. A 2012 <a href="https://academic.oup.com/femsec/article/79/3/773/493070" target="_blank">study</a> published in FEMS Microbiology Ecology discovered "sequences affiliated with Clostridium," a human pathogen that <a href="http://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/botulism" target="_blank">causes botulism and diarrhea</a>, in the hypoxic zone of China's Lake Taihu. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) warns that algal blooms contain cyanobacteria, "which are <a href="http://www.regions.noaa.gov/great-lakes/index.php/project/harmful-algal-blooms/" target="_blank">poisonous to humans and deadly to livestock and pets</a>."</p><p>Renee Dufault is a former environmental health officer for the National Institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration, as well as the founder of the Food Ingredient and Health Research Institute. Dufault told the Independent Media Institute that the antibiotics and hormones injected into animals raised for food "are pollutants themselves when they are released from manure via surface water runoff into streams that may be used as drinking water supplies."</p><p>Dead zones also have economic impacts that harm local communities. The NOAA estimates that marine dead zones cost the U.S. food and tourism industries <a href="https://coastalscience.noaa.gov/news/cscor-provides-testimony-to-congress-in-support-of-harmful-algae-and-hypoxia-law/" target="_blank">$82 </a><a href="https://coastalscience.noaa.gov/news/cscor-provides-testimony-to-congress-in-support-of-harmful-algae-and-hypoxia-law/" target="_blank">million</a><a href="https://coastalscience.noaa.gov/news/cscor-provides-testimony-to-congress-in-support-of-harmful-algae-and-hypoxia-law/" target="_blank"> every year</a>.</p><h2>Risky Business: Eating Meat</h2><p>The main source of water contamination in the U.S. is the manure and fertilizer coming from industrial farms that grow feed to raise animals to be killed for human consumption.</p><p>The production of meat isn't just one of the most polluting of all human activities, contaminating waterways and driving the growth of dead zones across the world; it's literally bulldozing the planet's landscape. By converting rainforests and prairies into industrial farms, large-scale meat producers are responsible for the <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/is-the-livestock-industry-destroying-the-planet-11308007/" target="_blank">widespread destruction of many of the planet's native ecosystems</a>, which threatens wildlife by destroying native habitats and releases stored carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, further exacerbating climate change. Animals raised for food produce 42 percent of agricultural emissions in the U.S. Two-thirds of those gases are emitted directly by those animals in the form of belches and farts. And the majority of those emissions—around <a href="http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/" target="_blank">44 percent</a>—is methane, a greenhouse gas that is <a href="https://blogs.princeton.edu/research/2014/03/26/a-more-potent-greenhouse-gas-than-co2-methane-emissions-will-leap-as-earth-warms-nature/" target="_blank">30 times more potent</a> than carbon dioxide.</p><p>A <a href="https://www.iatp.org/emissions-impossible" target="_blank">report</a> released in July by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy offers some perspective: The top five meat and dairy companies, including Tyson and Cargill, emit more greenhouse gases combined than ExxonMobil, Shell or BP.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xODQxNzk1NS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzNDU2NjY2MX0.8PHnXTmoKQ7GWutobHPZPzxSKwxuplm1XkWwOgY3ISo/img.jpg?width=980" id="b4094" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="cbc9a0dd7752670c92aaae92922e8788" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="add caption...">This NASA satellite image shows deforestation in the state of Rondonia in western Brazil, where land has been converted for cattle farming. In 2017, Brazil exported 1.3 million metric tons of beef to the United States, worth $6.2 billion.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="add photo credit...">NASA</small></p><h2>A Few Bright Spots<br></h2><p>The Mighty Earth report does note a few positive developments. Of the sectors studied, the food service industry that caters meals to universities and hospitals "is doing the most to promote plant-based diets, with Aramark reporting that 30 percent of its menus offer non-meat options and Sodexo reducing beef consumption through its mushroom-blended burger initiative." And McDonald's states that it is moving toward <a href="http://www.mightyearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/McDonalds.pdf" target="_blank">100 percent sustainably certified soy by 2020</a> to feed the chickens it sources in Europe. (Unfortunately, that requirement isn't in place for U.S. suppliers.)</p><p>"Bright spots were few and far between," the report states, "but indicate that awareness is growing and improvements are possible."</p><p>Possible, yes. But probable? The food industry has shown a reluctance to enact sustainable practices, but has sometimes responded to consumer demand for change. "Many of these companies have set requirements for meat suppliers to improve practices around animal welfare and antibiotic overuse when the public pressured them to do so," Mighty Earth campaign director Lucia von Reusner told the Independent Media Institute. Her organization is hoping that their report will help raise public awareness, and that in turn will spur change within the industry.</p><p>"The public is now waking up to the industry's polluting practices and demanding improvements," she said.</p><h2>Reforming the Meat Industry</h2><p>One of the biggest misperceptions that the general public has about dead zones, says Boesch, is that "there is nothing we can do about them." He points out that, "although experience in other parts of the world shows that while it may take years for the excess nutrients to wash out of the watershed and [be] purged from bottom sediments, we can eventually breathe life back into dead zones if we reduce nutrient pollution. We are now seeing the dead zone in the Chesapeake gradually becoming less severe and smaller."</p><p>The Mighty Earth report recommends that meat producers start employing better farming practices to help curtail the destruction. One way to reduce the need of fertilizers on crops used to feed livestock, for example, is to use cover crops, which involves planting certain species on fields that can suffocate weeds, control pests and diseases, reduce soil erosion, improve soil health, boost water availability and increase biodiversity—all of which would benefit any farm. Mighty Earth also recommends that meat producers employ better fertilizer management, conserve native vegetation and centralize manure processing.</p><p>"The environmental damage caused by the meat industry is driving some of the most urgent threats to the future of our food system—from contaminated waters to depleted soils and a destabilized climate," von Reusner said. "More sustainable farming practices are urgently needed if we are going to feed a growing population on a planet of finite resources."</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<a href="https://mighty.maphubs.com/map/public-embed/HyWMLJ68b/interactive" target="_blank"><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xODQxNzk5My9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY0NDY5NDYzMX0.2eMO-5Rt6mpcAB6e_hviy1Qpn9IEqTMENN4sIHsQ4zY/img.png?width=980" id="86c60" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="bc7fdc5310b7caaaa13233505a15d856" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image"></a>
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="add caption...">Map of nitrate levels by watersheds, 2016 overlaid with Tyson and top feed supplier facilities (<a href="https://mighty.maphubs.com/map/public-embed/HyWMLJ68b/interactive" target="_blank">View Larger Map</a>)</small></p><p>Unfortunately, there is little that the federal government is doing on this front. "Runoff pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from producing meat are largely unregulated in the US," von Reusner notes. "There need to be much stronger regulations that protect our waters and climate from the meat industry's pollution."<br></p><p>Boesch notes that an <a href="https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-03/documents/2001_04_04_msbasin_actionplan2001.pdf" target="_blank">action plan</a> agreed upon in 2001 by the Mississippi River/Gulf of Mexico Watershed Nutrient Task Force was meant to scale down the amount of nutrient pollution in the Gulf by 30 percent. But, he says the plan "lacks teeth." Consequently, he said, "not only has the Gulf's dead zone <em>not</em> shrunk, but the concentrations of polluting nutrients in the Mississippi River have not declined—and may have even increased."</p><p>In the meantime, polluting the Gulf with meat production runoff continues apace. The 2001 federal and state action plan, which was reaffirmed and amended in 2008, hasn't achieved its goal to reduce the hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico. NOAA scientists have forecasted this summer's dead zone to be "<a href="http://www.noaa.gov/media-release/average-sized-dead-zone-forecast-for-gulf-of-mexico" target="_blank">similar to the 33-year average Gulf dead zone of 5,460 square miles</a>," which the agency points out is about the size of Connecticut. "This should be getting more attention by regulators, lawmakers and industry," said Boesch. "Unfortunately, the industry has worked with politicians to prevent regulations."</p><p>He notes that the plan to revive the Chesapeake Bay has each state "allocated a certain amount of reduction in nutrient pollution and is under a legally binding agreement under the Clean Water Act to accomplish this by 2025." But there is no such legal force when it comes to the Mississippi Basin states that are polluting the Gulf. Those states, says Boesch, "have never even been assigned an amount of pollution reduction for which they are responsible, much less been bound to it. The states have resisted even this first step in accepting responsibility. All efforts are strictly voluntary. So, there can be little wonder why, despite the commitment to reduce the size of the dead zone by two-thirds, there has been virtually no reduction in polluting nutrients discharged by the river after 17 years."</p><p>While reforming the meat industry's unsustainable practices is a way to stop the spread of dead zones, change from within isn't coming quickly enough. That's where consumers can play a vital role, says von Reusner. "Consumers need to demand that their favorite food companies provide more sustainable options by requiring more sustainable farming practices from meat suppliers."</p><p><em><a href="https://truthout.org/authors/reynard-loki/" target="_blank">Reynard Loki</a> is a senior writing fellow and the editor and chief correspondent for <a href="http://independentmediainstitute.org/earth-food-life/" target="_blank">Earth | Food | Life</a>, a project of the Independent Media Institute.</em></p><p><em>This article was produced by <a href="http://independentmediainstitute.org/earth-food-life/" target="_blank">Earth | Food | Life</a>, a project of the Independent Media Institute.</em></p>
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