Food & agriculture - Jan 25

NOTE: Images in this archived article have been removed.

Click on the headline (link) for the full text.

Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage

Eco-Farm: Eric Schlosser on Florida pickers and fair wages
Tom Philpott, Gristmill
Fast Food Nation author regales organic-farmer audience

Note: For the next few days I’ll be reporting from Eco-Farm, the annual conference held by the Ecological Farming Association of California. At Eco-Farm, some 1,400-1,500 organic farmers, Big Organic marketers, and sundry sustainable-ag enthusiasts pack into a rustic, beautiful seaside conference hall an hour-and-a-half south of San Francisco to talk farming amid the dunes.

The ever-excellent investigative writer Eric Schlosser kicked off Eco-Farm with a hard-hitting keynote. He noted the stark fact that “without agricultural surpluses, there can be no leisure — and no writers.” And he thanked the assembled for their work in the fields and groves.

Echoing the unsparing analysis in his landmark Fast Food Nation, Schlosser teased out the fascist elements inherent in industrial food: the worship of regimentation and control, the fetishization of “uniformity and conformity.” He summarized the mentality by citing an old McDonald’s corporate slogan: “One world, one taste.”

Schlosser argued that the whole edifice of fast food rests on the mass production of ignorance: The food industry spends some $3 billion per year marketing a scrubbed vision of “happy meals,” masking a system that relies on animal cruelty, environmental devastation, and exploitation of workers.

To drive that point home, he noted that working conditions in Florida’s fruit and vegetable fields, source of much winter produce throughout the U.S., have gotten so dreadful that even the Bush Administration’s Justice Department has seen fit to intervene.

Just last week, federal officials charged a large-scale Florida farmer with enslaving immigrant farm workers — systematically “underpaying the workers, forcing them into debt, and physically threatening them if the workers left their jobs before paying off the debts,” according to one press account.

Even when they’re not being literally chained to farm trucks, tomato pickers in Florida are ruthlessly exploited, Schlosser said. “They’ve been getting paid the same wage since the ’70s … That amounts to a huge pay cut.” He added a bit of good news: a hard-won raise is imminent for Florida’s tomato pickers.
(25 January 2008)

Gates hopes his money can help poorest farmers
Tom Paulson, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Bill Gates, heeding his call for “creative capitalism” made to a gathering of the world’s economic elite, announced $306 million in grants Friday aimed at tweaking the marketplace to help not banks or stockholders, but poor farmers.

“If we are serious about ending extreme hunger and poverty around the world, we must be serious about transforming agriculture for small farmers — most of whom are women,” said Gates, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

The day before, he talked about the need for a new kind of capitalism that serves the world’s poorest people.

“The world is getting better, but it’s not getting better fast enough, and it’s not getting better for everyone,” he said.

The needs of the extremely poor, Gates said, need to be factored into market strategies along with today’s standard calculations about profits, jobs and services for those already at the top of the economic pile.

…Global health issues remain the primary mission of the Gates Foundation, but it recently expanded into agricultural issues of the developing world. It has said its goal is to launch a new “Green Revolution” for Africa.

That phrase has raised hackles among those who remember the economic and environmental downsides of the last such revolution in Asia and Latin America from the late 1950s into the ’70s.

Critics have attacked Gates for apparently following the “techno-fix” approach of the previous Green Revolution, which relied heavily on chemical pesticides and fertilizers.

…The first Green Revolution produced more food and fed more people, but many critics say that it did so by displacing small family farms and local, ecologically balanced agriculture in favor of the Western industrialized model.

Shah said Gates recognizes this and has based this approach entirely on the desires and designs of local farmers and communities. These grants clearly indicate the philanthropy’s focus on the needs of farmers rather than agri-business, he said.
(24 January 2008)
The right subject, but will it be the right approach? -BA

Faraway food production
Ben Parfitt, Georgia Straight (BC, Canada)
High energy and land costs raise the stakes for B.C. farmers.
—
…Until contained by dikes, the lower Fraser’s rich lands were a constantly shifting series of islands. Fecund as they were, though, they were risky to farm and homestead due to the constant threat of flooding. The construction of dikes in the late 1800s changed all that, sparking a century-long surge in modern agriculture.

Over the past several decades, however, British Columbia’s rapidly urbanizing Lower Mainland region has cut dramatically into the province’s limited agricultural base. Skyrocketing land values have driven the expansion, resulting in more and more pressure to convert lands from pasture to pavement. Which is one reason why, from the air, Westham jumps out. With the exception of a lone truss bridge completed in 1912 and spanning the waters of Canoe Pass to the south, Westham is cut off from the suburban world around it. Renowned as the stop-off point for thousands of migrating snow geese and other birds, it is also all farmland and actively farmed.

In evolutionary terms, islands are where we have witnessed the most fantastic die-offs and emergences of unique animal and plant life on the planet. They are both extremely vulnerable to change-human-induced or not-and capable of the most extraordinary recoveries. They are also, literally and figuratively, places where ideas germinate and take root, with the success of Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon’s book The 100-Mile Diet being a case in point. Within the confines of an artificial construct-a circular “island” with a 100-mile radius and Vancouver at its centre-how easy or difficult would it be for the resident human population to sustain itself with the local production, distribution, and consumption of food? Much, as it turns out, may depend on what we learn from the experience at Westham Island and elsewhere on the rural-urban divide.

That we “eat” a lot of oil is without question. As Smith and MacKinnon note, citing an Iowa State University study, the food we consume “now typically travels between 1,500 and 3,000 miles from farm to plate”, with the distance increasing in the 1980s and 1990s by about 25 percent.

Without doubt, there are enormous implications for our warming world as we move foodstuffs farther and farther. There are also economic consequences, as highlighted in recent weeks when oil prices temporarily broke past US$100 per barrel, a psychologically important event that many energy analysts believe signals the beginning of an inexorable climb in fossil-fuel prices as we approach peak oil. Higher gas prices mean higher costs to bring goods to market.

But transportation isn’t the half of it when it comes to oil and most present-day food production, as Sharon Ellis will tell you. Seed costs are climbing because of both the distance the seeds are transported and the fuel used to grow them, whether it’s the fuel burned in the machines that cultivate the land and bring in the crops or the petroleum-based fertilizers used in so much present-day crop production.
(24 January 2008)

Peak Moment: Mendocino Renegade
Janaia Donaldson, Peak Moment via Global Public Media
Els Cooperrider is an energetic lady. She co-founded the Mendocino Organic Network, which began an organic peer-certification service for local growers. Their Mendocino Renegade label means products are “beyond organic” and local. She also led Mendocino to become the first U.S. county to be GMO-free — genetically-modified organisms cannot be grown there. Her restaurant is America’s first certified organic brew pub, with mostly local ingredients. Episode 93.
(24 January 2008)