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Sustainable food (and over-regulation)
Paul Andersen, Aspen Times (Colorado)
When I read last week that Sustainable Settings, an organic farm outside Carbondale, might have to close down, I thought of the empty produce aisles at City Market a couple years ago.
That’s when I-70 was closed because of a rock slide and food trucks couldn’t get through. Within two days, the produce bins at City Market were bare. If the trucks hadn’t come soon, other shelves would have been stripped.
A lack of food at the grocery store makes you appreciate the wisdom of supporting local agriculture, which Sustainable Settings practices with organic, grass-fed cattle, sheep and yaks – yes yaks! – those big, furry ruminants from Asia – plus produce, eggs, chickens, milk and cream.
Brook LeVan, who runs the nonprofit 244-acre ranch, said he’s being priced out of the Crystal Valley by the high overhead that comes from requirements and fees from Pitkin County, where the ranch is located. What the newspaper called a “failed experiment” seems doomed, not by agricultural challenges, but by bureaucracy.
(10 March 2008)
Background: Nonprofit plans to leave for greener pastures.
UK Honey bees ‘wiped out in 10 years’
Robin McKie, The Observer
Beekeepers have warned that most of the country’s honey bees could be wiped out by disease in 10 years unless an urgent research programme is launched to find new treatments and drugs. They are to launch a nationwide campaign, including protests, to force the government to fund the £8m research project which they say is needed to save the nation’s bees.
Ministers say they have no budget for such a programme, a claim rejected by keepers, who are to lobby MPs, gather at the House of Commons for a protest meeting and begin a letter campaign to raise support for research funds.
‘Beekeeping is still reeling from the varroa mite, which carries a number of viruses and which devastated thousands of hives across the country when it reached Britain 10 years ago,’ said Tim Lovett, president of the British Beekeeping Association.
(9 March 2008)
The Greenhorns: A New Breed Of American Idol?
Kerry Trueman, Huffington Post
While some of us moan and groan about the unmitigated awfulness of industrial agriculture and our craptastic food chain, others are literally sowing the seeds of an agrarian revival. The idealistic young farmers and gardeners fueling this ag-revolt have been christened “The Greenhorns” by one extraordinary, exuberant young farmer/filmmaker, Severine von Tscharner Fleming, who’s documenting their horticultural heroics in a film by the same name.
America’s got more prisoners than farmers these days, and the average age of the farmers we do have is over 60 years old. Strip mall sprawl has displaced the small family farmers who once nourished our nation. Monocrop madness is sucking the life out of our precious topsoil, poisoning our air and water, and giving us really lousy food, to boot.
But Severine sees salvation in the Greenhorns:
(10 March 2008)
Original has a video clip and links. Film website for “The Greenhorns.”
UN warns on food price inflation
BBC News
The head of the UN World Food Programme has warned that the rise in basic food costs could continue until 2010.
Josette Sheeran blamed soaring energy and grain prices, the effects of climate change and demand for biofuels.
Miss Sheeran has already warned that the WFP is considering plans to ration food aid due to a shortage of funds.
Some food prices rose 40% last year, and the WFP fears the world’s poorest will buy less food, less nutritious food or be forced to rely on aid.
(6 March 2008)
Food crisis will take hold before climate change, warns chief scientist
James Randerson, Guardian
Food security and the rapid rise in food prices make up the “elephant in the room” that politicians must face up to quickly, according to the government’s new chief scientific adviser.
In his first major speech since taking over, Professor John Beddington said the global rush to grow biofuels was compounding the problem, and cutting down rainforest to produce biofuel crops was “profoundly stupid”.
He told the Govnet Sustainable Development UK Conference in Westminster: “There is progress on climate change. But out there is another major problem. It is very hard to imagine how we can see a world growing enough crops to produce renewable energy and at the same time meet the enormous increase in the demand for food which is quite properly going to happen as we alleviate poverty.”
He predicted that price rises in staples such as rice, maize and wheat would continue because of increased demand caused by population growth and increasing wealth in developing nations. He also said that climate change would lead to pressure on food supplies because of decreased rainfall in many areas and crop failures related to climate. “The agriculture industry needs to double its food production, using less water than today,” he said. The food crisis would bite more quickly than climate change, he added.
(7 March 2008)
