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The way we eat is trashing the fragile conditions that make human life possible
Tom Philpott, Grist
In the ongoing debate about whether sustainable agriculture can “feed the world,” it’s important not to lose sight of what industrial agriculture is doing to ecosystems—both in specific areas and on a grand scale.
Producing and distributing lots and lots of calories, leveraged by fossil fuel and synthetic fertilizers and poisons, may solve certain short-term problems; but the practice also creates long-term ones that won’t be easily solved.
In June, a study emerged showing that so-called inert ingredients in Roundup, Monsanto’s widely used flagship herbicide, can kill human cells even at low levels—“particularly embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells,” reports Scientific American. This is an herbicide that’s used on virtually all of our nation’s corn and soy fields, covering tens of millions of acres of cropland. (It’s also widely used by landscapers and on home lawns.)
Then there was the recent atrazine imbroglio. For years, the EPA has been assuring the public that the highly toxic herbicide, still widely used in the Corn Belt, wasn’t showing up in drinking water in worrisome levels. Turns out that was a lie, as some excellent muckraking by the Huffington Post Investigative Fund revealed. Atrazine exposure has been strongly associated with reproductive health maladies, including a rise in hermaphroditism among frog populations.
Note that corn and soy production, as practiced today, is completely reliant on these two broad-spectrum herbicides.
Now comes news about the hazards of another input critical to the project of industrial agricultire: synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. When farmers apply nitrogen to farm fields, a certain amount enters the atmosphere as nitrous oxide. And according to a study conducted by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and published in Science, human-generated nitrous oxide is now the No. 1 contributor to ozone-layer depletion.
(31 Aug 2009)
Syria: Drought driving farmers to the cities
IRIN
Thousands of Syrian farming families have been forced to move to cities in search of alternative work after two years of drought and failed crops followed a number of unproductive years.
“The situation has now got really severe; we are talking about desert, rather than farming land,” said Abdel Qader Abu Awad, MENA (Middle East and North Africa) disaster management coordinator for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). “People cannot live in this environment any more and their final coping mechanism is migration.”
Syria’s drought is now in its second year, affecting farming regions in the north and east of the country, especially the northeastern governorate of Hassakeh. Wheat production is just 55 percent of its usual output and barley is seriously affected, according to the UN’s drought response plan, drawn up following two recent multi-agency missions.
Blamed on a combination of climate change, man-made desertification and lack of irrigation, up to 60 percent of Syria’s land and 1.3 million people (of a population of 22 million) are affected, according to the UN. Just over 800,000 people have lost their entire livelihood, according to the UN and IFRC…
(2 Sept 2009)
Plans for White House farmers’ market move forward
Ed Pilkington, The Guardian
The quiet revolution spreading steadily across the US in the way Americans produce and consume food is about to acquire a powerful endorsement in the form of a farmers’ market planned for one of the better-known corners of the capital. It will be sited a block away on the north side of a large white house and will have the backing of its occupier, one Michelle Obama.
The plan is the latest building block in the movement the first lady has been seeking to build over food and health since she entered the White House in January. Though her office is refusing to engage with media speculation, the telltale signs are there that she plans to extend her campaign – launched in March with the opening of a food garden in the White House grounds – by backing a farmers’ market just a stone’s throw from her presidential home.
Excitement levels among web-savvy organic food enthusiasts went through the roof today in anticipation. It was disclosed that an application had been made to the local city authorities in Washington DC to close Vermont Avenue on the north flank of the White House to traffic on Thursday afternoons for six weeks until the end of October…
(9 Sept 2009)
Big Food vs. Big Insurance
Michael Pollan, The New York Times
TO listen to President Obama’s speech on Wednesday night, or to just about anyone else in the health care debate, you would think that the biggest problem with health care in America is the system itself — perverse incentives, inefficiencies, unnecessary tests and procedures, lack of competition, and greed.
No one disputes that the $2.3 trillion we devote to the health care industry is often spent unwisely, but the fact that the United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on health care can be substantially explained, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter. Even the most efficient health care system that the administration could hope to devise would still confront a rising tide of chronic disease linked to diet.
That’s why our success in bringing health care costs under control ultimately depends on whether Washington can summon the political will to take on and reform a second, even more powerful industry: the food industry.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three-quarters of health care spending now goes to treat “preventable chronic diseases.” Not all of these diseases are linked to diet — there’s smoking, for instance — but many, if not most, of them are.
We’re spending $147 billion to treat obesity, $116 billion to treat diabetes, and hundreds of billions more to treat cardiovascular disease and the many types of cancer that have been linked to the so-called Western diet. One recent study estimated that 30 percent of the increase in health care spending over the past 20 years could be attributed to the soaring rate of obesity, a condition that now accounts for nearly a tenth of all spending on health care…
(9 Sept 2009)
Food for all
The Nation
Just wanted to flag up some more good articles from this issue: -KS
Cornucopia Blues
(21 Sept issue)
