Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
The new food crusade
Carol Ness, SF Chronicle
Organic farms, conservation, fruits and veggies in schools — the Bay Area leads the charge to change how Congress subsidizes farming
—-
It was almost accidental activism. Acme Bread’s Steve Sullivan was on a class trip to Washington, D.C., with his 13-year-old daughter when their flight home was canceled. A scramble to rebook ended with the Berkeley food artisan and his family seated almost across the aisle from California Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
So he handed her a copy of his new favorite book, “Food Fight,” by Sonoma County author Daniel Imhoff. The book is a call to arms, urging Congress to use the 2007 farm bill to put more healthful food on people’s plates.
The bill, which in recent years has totaled about $70 billion annually, comes up about once every five years. Although the farm bill has far-reaching consequences for the food supply, most people outside the Midwestern Farm Belt, which gets huge farm bill subsidies, have ignored it.
This year, things are different. Sullivan’s trip down the aisle, and the book, are part of a wave of populist activism, much of it centered in the Bay Area, that is trying to change how a big chunk of farm bill money is spent.
The short version of the argument — and nothing is short when it comes to the mind-numbing, complex farm bill — is that the bill subsidizes the overproduction of corn and soy in the Midwest, which is driving up obesity and diabetes and polluting the land. Instead, they say, the farm bill should put more money into sustainable and organic food production, agricultural conservation and efforts to put a higher priority on fresh, local fruits and vegetables.
Their slogan: It’s the food, health and farm bill.
…What happens to the farm bill this time around could turn on such moments. This year’s burst of activism rises from the national trend toward local, sustainable and conscious eating — consumers who want to know what they’re eating, where it comes from and how it is produced.
…The juicy prize that’s arousing new appetites is the subsidy program, which has totaled about $30 billion a year in recent years. Nutrition programs, including food stamps, consume another $30 billion-plus of the bill’s funding. Conservation’s share has risen to $8 billion. Champions of sustainability, organics and the like have always found themselves competing for crumbs around the edges.
Farm Belt politicians defend the subsidies as necessary to keep family farmers in business, secure the food supply, fuel the engines of trade, and keep the agribusiness economy revving high.
The reformers argue that the subsidies amount to price supports for junk food. They say subsidies encourage commodity growers to plant an oversupply of low-priced corn and soy, which is processed into high-calorie high-fructose corn syrup and soybean oil and fed to feedlot animals bound for burgerville. The result: cheap food full of added sugar and fat.
(10 July 2007)
Related from the SF Chronicle: California group pushes for conservation to be added to farm subsidies.
How to stop cows burping is the new field work on climate change
Lewis Smith, UK Times
They have become the fashionable target for environmentalists, but four-wheel-drive vehicles may be less damaging to the environment than the cows and sheep essential to the rural economy.
The methane emissions from both ends of cattle and sheep are causing so much concern in government that it has ordered researchers to find ways to cut down on the emissions from livestock, which account for about a quarter of the methane – a greenhouse gas 20 times more powerful at driving global warming than carbon dioxide – pumped into the atmosphere in Britain. Each day every one of Britain’s 10 million cows pumps out an estimated 100-200 litres of methane.
This is the equivalent of up to 4,000 grams of carbon dioxide and compares with the 3,419g of carbon dioxide pumped out by a Land Rover Freelander on an average day’s drive of 33 miles.
With the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation predicting that methane emissions from livestock could increase by as 60 per cent by 2030, the issue is being treated with some urgency.
Scientists attempting to find new foods for cattle have already exploded the myth that most bovine emissions come from the rear. They have found the majority come from belching.
Attempts to find a diet for cattle that will result in less flatulence are being made by researchers as part of a government-backed project.
A study in New Zealand suggested that the methane output could be reduced by up to 50 per cent and small-scale research in Britain has found that “significant quantities” could be prevented from getting into the atmosphere. A Department for Enivonment, Food and Rural Affairs spokesman said: “Recent research suggests that substantial methane reductions could be achieved by changes to feed regimes in farm animals.
(10 July 2007)
Related: Guardian
Reuters
End of cheap-food era bad news for poor
Gwynne Dyer, North Bay Nugget (Ontario)
The era of cheap food is over. The price of corn (maize) has doubled in a year, and wheat futures are at their highest in a decade. The food price index in India has risen 11 per cent in one year, and in Mexico in January there were riots after the price of corn flour (used in making the staple food of the poor, tortillas) went up fourfold. Even in the developed countries food prices are going up, and they are not going to come down again.
Cheap food lasted for only 50 years. Before the Second World War most families in the developed countries spent a third or more of their income on food (as the poor majority in developing countries still do). But after the war a series of radical changes, from mechanization to the Green Revolution, raised agricultural productivity hugely and caused a long, steep fall in the real price of food. For the global middle class, it was the Good Old Days, with food taking only one-tenth of their income.
It will probably be back up to a quarter within a decade, and it may go much higher than that, because we are entering a period when three separate factors are converging to drive food prices up. The first is simply demand. Not only is the global population continuing to grow (about an extra Turkey or Vietnam every year), but as Asian economies race ahead more and more people in those populous countries are starting to eat significant amounts of meat. … [second factor] “bio-fuels” is shifting huge amounts of land out of food production. … [third factor] Global warming hits crop yields, but only recently has anybody quantified how hard.
…In the early stages of this process, higher food prices will help millions of farmers who have been scraping along on poor returns for their effort because political power lies in the cities, but later it gets uglier. The price of food relative to average income is heading for levels that have not been seen since the early 19th century, and it will not come down again in our lifetimes.
Gwynne Dyer’s new book, The Mess They Made: The Middle East After Iraq, was published in Canada recently by McClelland and Stewart.
(10 July 2007)
Where have all the bees gone? Blame people, not cellphones
Kevin Berger, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The buzz about the alarming disappearance of bees has been all about people food. Honeybees pollinate one-third of the fruits, nuts and vegetables that end up in our homey kitchen baskets. If the tireless apian workers didn’t fly from one flower to the next, depositing pollen grains so that fruit trees can bloom, America could well be asking where its next meal would come from. Last fall, the nation’s beekeepers watched in horror as more than a quarter of their 2.4 million colonies collapsed, killing billions of nature’s little fertilizers.
But as a Salon round table discussion with bee experts revealed, the mass exodus of bees to the great hive in the sky forebodes a bigger story. The faltering dance between honeybees and trees is symptomatic of industrial disease. As the scientists outlined some of the biological agents behind “colony collapse disorder,” and dismissed the ones that are not — sorry, friends, the Rapture is out — they sketched a picture of how we are forever altering the planet’s delicate web of life.
The scientists: Jeffery Pettis, research leader of the USDA’s honeybee lab, told us the current collapse is one of the worst ever. Eric Mussen, of the Honey Bee Research Facility at the University of California-Davis, maintained it may only be cyclical. Wayne Esaias, of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, an amateur beekeeper, outlined his compelling views about the impact of climate change on bees. John McDonald, a biologist, beekeeper and gentleman farmer in rural Pennsylvania, reminded us, if at times sardonically, of the poetry in agriculture.
(8 July 2007)
Eco-Kosher Movement Aims To Heed Tradition, Conscience
Alan Cooperman, Washington Post
First she had to find an organic cattle farm near Washington. Then a shochet, a person trained in kosher slaughtering, who was willing to do a freelance job. Then a kosher butcher to carve the beef into various cuts and other families from her synagogue to share it.
All told, it took Devora Kimelman-Block of Silver Spring 10 months to obtain 450 pounds of meat that is local, grass-fed, organic and strictly kosher. Which is a lot of effort — and a lot of meat — for someone who keeps a kosher vegetarian household.
“Here I am, leading this meat thing, and we don’t even eat meat in our house,” she said.
The only way to make sense of Kimelman-Block’s effort is to understand that she is part of a budding movement, sometimes called “eco-kosher,” that combines traditional Jewish dietary laws with new concerns about industrial agriculture, global warming and fair treatment of workers. Eco-kosher, in turn, is part of the greening of American religion — the rapid infusion of environmental issues into the mainstream of religious life.
(7 July 2007)
Expert Says Rising Sea Levels Pose Threat to Rice
AFP via Common Dreams
MANILA – Rising sea levels triggered by climate change pose an “ominous” threat to some of the world’s most productive rice-growing areas, the International Rice Research Institute has warned.
The Philippines-based institution is devoting fresh efforts to mitigating the coming threat, but senior climate scientist Reiner Wassman said adequate funding had yet to materialise.0709 05
“Some of Asia’s most important rice-growing areas are located in low-lying deltas, which play a vital role in regional food security and supplying export markets,” Wassman told the IRRI magazine Rice Today.
“With Vietnam so dependent on rice grown in and around low-lying river deltas, the implications of a sea-level rise are ominous indeed.”
Rice is the staple cereal of nearly half the world’s 6.6 billion people.
(9 July 2007)
The Dark Side of Soy
Mary Vance, Terrain via Alternet
..”Studies showing the dark side of soy date back 100 years,” says clinical nutritionist Kaayla Daniel, author of The Whole Soy Story (New Trends, 2005). “The 1999 FDA-approved health claim pleased big business, despite massive evidence showing risks associated with soy, and against the protest of the FDA’s own top scientists. Soy is a $4 billion [U.S.] industry that’s taken these health claims to the bank.” Besides promoting heart health, the industry says, soy can alleviate symptoms associated with menopause, reduce the risk of certain cancers, and lower levels of LDL, the “bad” cholesterol.
Epidemiological studies have shown that Asians, particularly in Japan and China, have a lower incidence of breast and prostate cancer than people in the United States, and many of these studies credit a traditional diet that includes soy. But Asian diets include small amounts — about nine grams a day — of primarily fermented soy products, such as miso, natto, and tempeh, and some tofu.
Fermenting soy creates health-promoting probiotics, the good bacteria our bodies need to maintain digestive and overall wellness. By contrast, in the United States, processed soy food snacks or shakes can contain over 20 grams of nonfermented soy protein in one serving.
“There is important information on the cancer-protective values of soy,” says clinical nutritionist Ed Bauman, head of Bauman Clinic in Sebastopol, California, and director of Bauman College. Bauman cautions against painting the bean with a broad brush. “As with any food, it can have benefits in one system and detriments in another. [An individual who is sensitive to it] may have an adverse response to soy. And not all soy is alike,” he adds, referring to processing methods and quality.
“Soy is not a food that is native to North America or Europe, and you have issues when you move food from one part of the world to another,” Bauman says. “We fare better when we eat according to our ethnicity. Soy is a viable food, but we need to look at how it’s used.” ..
(9 July 2007)
