The first of the much anticipated agricultural competition workshops are underway right now in Iowa. Hosted jointly by the USDA and the Department of Justice, the workshops aim to explore the question of consolidation in agribusiness. The workshops themselves have already come under scrutiny for initially excluding actual farmers on the panels -- and have come in for continued criticism that the farmers who have been put on are more representatives of corporations than real farmers.
It's hard not to be somewhat cynical about our government's claim that they're shocked, shocked to discover there's anti-competitive behavior in agriculture. On the other hand, for the last twenty or so years, consolidation has been -- in Washington at least -- the crime that dare not speak its name. So the fact that it's the USDA and DOJ running these workshops is nothing short of astonishing.
And while the whole of the industry will get attention, much of the focus so far has been on Monsanto, which thanks to its aggressive practices -- along with support from the USDA -- now controls up to 90% of the seed business in some markets. It's to the point that in many parts of the country non-Monsanto (and thus non genetically engineered seed) are simply unavailable to farmers.
The Justice Department is already investigating the company and it will undoubtedly get a lot of attention during these workshops. But knowing the Obama administration's support for biotechnology generally and reading between the lines in this NY Times article on the issues involved with Monsanto, I'm starting to get concerned.
The way the article characterizes the debate, the goal appears to be to broaden access to Monsanto's intellectual property, i.e. the herbicide-tolerant genetic traits in its seeds, rather than to broaden access to conventional seeds:
Monsanto sells its own branded seed varieties, like Dekalb in corn and Asgrow in soybeans, to farmers. But it has expanded its influence and profits by licensing those traits to hundreds of small seed companies, allowing them to incorporate the traits in the seeds they sell. It has also granted licenses to the other large trait developers, allowing them to create combinations of engineered traits in a process known as stacking.
Monsanto says that its licensing shows it is the opposite of a monopolist, encouraging rather than hampering competition.
But critics say the licenses give Monsanto excessive control. Seed company executives said the licenses were sometimes worded in a way that compelled them to sell Monsanto traits over those of its competitors. Mr. Quarles denied that, saying the contracts contain sales incentives typical of the industry.
The rest of the article focuses on the legal battles between Monsanto and Dupont, another biotech giant, over access to Monsanto's patents. It may very well be that the anti-competitive behavior the government punishes is that which prevents even greater adoption of biotech seeds -- the opposite of what many progressives want out of anti-trust enforcement.
Until we can displace agricultural productivity as the only measure of success of government policy, even this new attention to anti-competitive practices is unlikely to lead to meaningful reform. To me the focus must be on finding ways to increase farmers' share of consumers' spending without threatening significant increases in food prices -- there is, after all, no government that likes to champion policies that increase the cost of food. Nothing puts a damper on electoral prospects like bread riots.
Keep in mind that a mere 7 cents of the consumer's food dollar gets to the farmer, while 73 cents goes to distribution costs. The only way we can get to a win-win -- and not be forced to choose between higher farmer income or higher retail prices -- is to let the middleman, i.e. the processors and yes, the retailers -- take the hit. Sadly, I don't think Walmart, Safeway or Whole Foods are on the agenda at the moment, even though some experts believe the real squeeze on farmers comes from them.
It's when we start having discussions like that and start recognizing that a relentless focus on agricultural production simply is not consistent with helping rural economies that I'll believe we might just be getting somewhere.
Mayor Nutter wants to treat the city's weight and wallet problems in his 2010-11 budget with the same remedy: the nation's highest tax on all sweetened beverages including soda, energy drinks, ice tea, even chocolate milk.
Nutter's plan would put Philadelphia at the front of the movement to tax sweet drinks, an effort that the beverage industry already opposes and that could encounter resistance in City Council.
The tax rate would be 2 cents per ounce, 40 cents on a 20-ounce bottle of soda. The levy would cover fountain-drink syrups and powders, based on the number of liquid ounces they produce. Diet drinks without added sugar and baby formula would be excluded.
City officials said they could raise $77 million a year. Health Commissioner Donald F. Schwarz estimated that a typical city resident drinks a half-liter of sweet beverages a day.
Not mentioned above, but confirmed is that the tax would also apply to flavored, sweetened milk. At 2 cents an ounce, it's about double the most commonly discussed tax and would add $1.34 to the price of a two-liter bottle of soda. If enacted, there's no question it will affect consumption.
Look, nobody likes taxes, but Philly already consumes above average amounts of soda and has high rates of obesity. Plus, for any arguments about regressivity of a soda tax (since it would theoretically hit low-income folks harder), it's important to remember that this is all about preserving services that help those low-income folks the most. I don't agree that a reduction in soda consumption because of price is on par with that same person losing access to vital city services -- we need to have some sense of perspective.
It will be very interesting to see if this tax can make it into law. Meanwhile, Democrats everywhere could learn something from Mayor Michael Nutter. Even if the City Council halves his tax to a penny per ounce, it's still going to be effective. Somehow, Dems seem to think that negotiating with oneself is the best strategy. Nuttter seems to be coming in high to make sure he gets something meaningful out of it. Anyway, stay tuned. The fight over this will no doubt be something to see.
GMOs as Big Ag's Version of "Financial Innovation"
(Photoillustration by Grist)Financial blogger Felix Salmon has an essay in Foreign Policy called "How Locavores Can Save the World" -- expanded, by the way, from a wonderful blog post he wrote after attending a panel discussion on world hunger at the Davos World Economic Forum in the company of Blue Hill Farm's Dan Barber. Salmon usually focuses on issues involving economic crises, monetary policy, complex derivatives, macro-economics and governmental oversight of the financial markets, but here he's talking monocultures, sustainable agriculture, and transgenic seeds. Tom Philpott has in the past opined on the similarities between financial and food crises, so I suppose this turn of events is not too surprising.
But the bit I found most striking was how Salmon characterized Big Ag's claim that genetically modified organisms are an "answer" to the problem of world hunger:
[It] is the agricultural equivalent of creating triple-A-rated mortgage bonds, fabricated precisely to prevent the problem of credit risk. It doesn't make the problem go away: It just makes the problem rarer and much more dangerous when it does occur because no one is -- or even can be -- prepared for such a high-impact, low-probability event.
Junk Food Taxes May Be Better than Healthy Food Subsidies
An interesting new study was just published in Psychological Science, about a lab experiment at SUNY Buffalo that suggests junk-food taxes increase the overall nutritional quality of a shopping trip, while subsidies on healthy foods actually decrease the nutritionally quality (via Science Daily).
[Study author and clinical psychologist Dr. Leonard] Epstein and colleagues simulated a grocery store, "stocked" with images of everything from bananas and whole wheat bread to Dr. Pepper and nachos. A group of volunteers -- all mothers -- were given laboratory "money" to shop for a week's groceries for the family. Each food item was priced the same as groceries at a real grocery nearby, and each food came with basic nutritional information.
The mother-volunteers went shopping several times in the simulated grocery. First they shopped with the regular prices, but afterward the researchers imposed either taxes or subsidies on the foods. That is, they either raised the prices of unhealthy foods by 12.5 percent, and then by 25 percent; or they discounted the price of healthy foods comparably. Then they watched what the mothers purchased.
The study authors separated food into two categories, "high calorie for nutrient" food and "low calorie for nutrient" food -- i.e. junk food and healthy food. They did this so that they could specifically measure the effect pricing changes had on the nutritional content of a participant's shopping basket. As you might expect, taxing junk food reduced junk food purchases, and subsidizing healthy food increased healthy food purchases. But the story does not end there. The researchers discovered that taxing the bad stuff was far more effective from a nutritional standpoint than subsidizing the good stuff -- and not just because prices affected sales.
The junk food taxes caused a real shift in nutritional quality because the money saved on junk food was spent on healthy food, which has more nutrients per calories. However, when the researchers subsidized healthy food in their test, many participants spent the savings on -- wait for it -- junk food. A subsidy for health foods actually increased the amount of fat, protein, and carbohydrates from that simulated shopping trip by about 10 percent each.
Another entry in the New York Times fantastic "Toxic Waters" series came out Sunday. This latest one is about the slow but tragically effective weakening of the Clean Water Act:
Thousands of the nation's largest water polluters are outside the Clean Water Act's reach because the Supreme Court has left uncertain which waterways are protected by that law, according to interviews with regulators.
As a result, some businesses are declaring that the law no longer applies to them. And pollution rates are rising.
Companies that have spilled oil, carcinogens and dangerous bacteria into lakes, rivers and other waters are not being prosecuted, according to Environmental Protection Agency regulators working on those cases, who estimate that more than 1,500 major pollution investigations have been discontinued or shelved in the last four years.
The Clean Water Act was intended to end dangerous water pollution by regulating every major polluter. But today, regulators may be unable to prosecute as many as half of the nation's largest known polluters because officials lack jurisdiction or because proving jurisdiction would be overwhelmingly difficult or time consuming, according to midlevel officials.
"We are, in essence, shutting down our Clean Water programs in some states," said Douglas F. Mundrick, an E.P.A. lawyer in Atlanta. "This is a huge step backward. When companies figure out the cops can’t operate, they start remembering how much cheaper it is to just dump stuff in a nearby creek."
"This is a huge deal," James M. Tierney, the New York State assistant commissioner for water resources, said of the new constraints. "There are whole watersheds that feed into New York's drinking water supply that are, as of now, unprotected."
All this despite the dangerous rise in pollutants in our drinking water. Meanwhile, Congress has been trying to engineer a fix in the form of the Clean Water Restoration Act, specifically by removing the word "navigable" from a description of waterways subject to regulation under the CWA. But guess who is among the lobbying groups leading the charge against reform? Our good friends in industrial agriculture, the American Farm Bureau. They are lobbying directly and through corporate front groups like the perniciously named Waters Advocacy Coalition. And here's what an AFB spokesman had to say to the New York Times:
"If you erase the word 'navigable' from the law, it erases any limitation on the federal government's reach," said Mr. Parrish of the American Farm Bureau Federation. "It could be a gutter, a roadside ditch or a rain puddle. But under the new law, the government gets control over it."
The article also suggests that EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson could issue a ruling that would clear up some of the confusion regarding the EPA's jurisdiction. She has so far refused, preferring to wait for Congress to act. But with the GOP doing an awesome impersonation of a brick wall, it's hard to see the legislation moving forward any time soon. Perhaps Ms. Jackson might reconsider. It's only our water, after all.
The industry talks a good game, but keeps churning out the same old junk. It's no mystery that Michelle Obama's Let's Move anti-obesity campaign is built on industry cooperation. It's also true that many experts are skeptical of the wisdom behind it; nutritionist Marion Nestle has been particularly critical both of the government's food industry "health" partnerships as well as of the administration's unwillingness to fight the industry's relentless media advertising.
I tend to agree. While the Let's Move initiative is full of worthy proposals, especially in the area of addressing food deserts and promoting farm-to-city initiatives, the idea of leaving restrictions on junk food television advertising -- not to mention junk food taxes -- out of the equation seems to base the pitch just a bit too much as an appeal to our better angels. It's hard to see public service announcements and educational campaigns counteracting those hundreds of millions of dollars work of junk food ads Americans of all ages submit to every time they turn on their televisions.
And it certainly doesn't help when star athletes, some of whom will no doubt participate in Let's Move, continue to flack for junk food (from Petyon and Eli Manning and Oreos to Derek Jeter and Gatorade). Meanwhile, anyone who's been watching the Olympics knows that NBC's coverage of this ultimate athletic event has been awash in ads for soda and other junk food. Even the Olympians themselves are in on the act -- Alternet noted that snowboarder Brad Martin is featured prominently in a McDonald's ad shown repeatedly during the Olympics.
Let's go back to the co-op theme, shall we? Tom Philpott of Grist wrote some time ago about the need for a "less efficient and more robust food system." He sketched a vision, based on his experience with his own farm, of small interrelated businesses benefiting communities via the local multiplier effect and generating jobs, good wages and affordable, healthy food far beyond what globalized multinational corporations have been able to manage for most American regions. It's a vision that without doubt shouldn't be restricted to the food system. Philpott closed the piece with a question: "How do we get there?"
Well, Cleveland, Ohio -- of all places -- has attempted an answer which caused Philpott to review the Nation's coverage of this "new" phenomenon of large scale cooperatives:
In a must-read article in the March 1 issue of The Nation, Gar Alperovitz, Ted Howard, and Thad Williamson lay out what they call the "Cleveland Model," a reference to that city's emerging complex of worker-owned businesses under the Evergreen Cooperatives umbrella.
The key enterprise in the Cleveland initiative is the Evergreen Cooperative laundry, "a worker-owned, industrial-size, thoroughly 'green' operation" that "opened its doors late last fall in Glenville, a neighborhood with a median income hovering around $18,000," The Nation reports. Overall in Cleveland, the poverty rate stands at about 30 percent; the population has halved since 1950. The hollowed-out city, like Detroit, Pittsburgh, and other rust-belt metropolises, stands as a stark rebuke to 30-plus years of de-industrialization and corporate-dominated globalization.
While these are "not your traditional small-scale co-ops," the authors report, they are also not faceless entities that turn workers into cogs in a vast machine. The authors write:
The Evergreen model draws heavily on the experience of the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation in the Basque Country of Spain, the world's most successful large-scale cooperative effort (now employing 100,000 workers in an integrated network of more than 120 high-tech, industrial, service, construction, financial and other largely cooperatively owned businesses).
...To fund the Evergreen initiatives, the project's founders have been resourceful: they've cobbled together funds from a combination of local foundations, banks, and city government, The Nation reports. And get this:
An important aspect of the plan is that each of the Evergreen co-operatives is obligated to pay 10 percent of its pre-tax profits back into the fund to help seed the development of new jobs through additional co-ops. Thus, each business has a commitment to its workers (through living-wage jobs, affordable health benefits and asset accumulation) and to the general community (by creating businesses that can provide stability to neighborhoods).
Besides the laundry, Evergreen also runs Ohio Solar Cooperative, which installs PV solar panels on commercial and government buildings and provides weatherization to homes. The group will soon roll out Green City Growers Cooperative, "a 100% worker-owned, hydroponic, food production greenhouse."
That's change we can believe in. Sadly, I question how much commitment there will be from the administration for this kind of thing. From the federal government's perch in DC it's easy to mistake what Cleveland is doing as "too small" to address the jobs crisis that we face. But that is nothing more than a failure of imagination. Still, the leadership on this will likely come from cities. Even so, we should all be thinking about how we might be able to get something like the Cleveland model to take root in our own communities.
I love my food co-op. It's not a secret. Heck, I blog for it. And what works for consumers works for farmers like Sam Simon of upstate New York, too (via the NYT):
He began his dairy operation in 1999, more as a labor of love than a business venture. But he soon realized that the economics were unsustainable: Farmers couldn't survive being paid roughly the same price for milk that they were in the 1970s. "This is nuts," he thought.
So he looked for an alternative in which a farm could produce premium milk, process it and sell it on its own label. The farms he looked at that had tried it weren’t succeeding, so he came up with the idea of a nonprofit co-op selling premium-quality milk, without artificial hormones, traveling 80 or so miles instead of 1,200, to customers in the Northeast. The hope was that people would pay more for locally produced, higher-quality milk, and that the extra cost would be passed on directly to the farmers.
He signed up eight family farms in Dutchess and Columbia Counties that produce 1.6 million pounds of milk a month, 200,000 of it sold through Hudson Valley Fresh. So far it's working. The farmers get paid a price, now $21 per hundredweight of milk, based on their cost of production, not on the fixed commodity price, now about $16, up from as low as $11 last year. That can be the difference between breaking even and not. Hudson Valley Fresh sells a third of it in New York City, in places like Whole Foods, and the rest in the Hudson Valley and Connecticut and on Long Island.
Milk is a troubled commodity, of course, but much of that trouble comes from the fact that, thanks to Ronald Reagan, its price is set on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where large speculators can (and have) manipulated the price. Even though fluid milk is a perishable commodity, for some reason commodity traders get to determine the wholesale cost, which now has no relation to the actual cost of production. That's capitalism for you!
Meanwhile, the Philly area also has a great example of another kind of successful farmer co-op in Lancaster Farm Fresh, which joins fifty farmers into an entity that can efficiently distribute tons of produce into urban markets from New York City to Washington, DC.
And small scale co-ops may even provide the way forward for ethanol as well -- not as a means to produce fuel for cars on a massive scale, but as an alternative to diesel fuel for farm equipment.
Co-ops have a long history in agriculture but have struggled since corporate consolidation became the watchword in Washington DC and state capitals nationwide. To this day, the USDA remains far more interested in low retail prices of commodities, irrespective of the impact it has on farmers themselves or rural communities. But with its new Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative, there seems to be a bit more momentum coming from the USDA for helping farmers establish co-ops. Hoping corporations behave benevolently is not a plan. Giving farmers the ability to act as a countervailing force to corporate control of agricultural markets? Now that's a plan.
Did the President Just Create a National Food Policy Council?
Michelle Obama kicked off her campaign against childhood obesity today. Among the provisions are a revamping of the school lunch program, a small boost in funding for farmers markets, a major initiative to "end" food deserts by 2017, a focus on maintaining children's exercise levels, a set of broad public-private partnerships, along with reforms to front-of-package nutrition labeling and the food pyramid (see the WaPo's Jane Black for a good summary).
But the most intriguing element may have been the creation of The Presidential Task Force on Childhood Obesity. According to the White House blog:
The new task force is charged with developing an interagency action plan to solve the problem of obesity among our Nation's children as part of the First Lady’s Let's Move campaign. The campaign will take a comprehensive approach to engage both public and private sectors to help children become more active and eat healthier within a generation, so that children born today will reach adulthood at a healthy weight.
Members of the task force include: the Secretary of the Interior; the Secretary of Agriculture; Secretary of Health and Human Services; Secretary of Education; Director of the Office of Management and Budget; Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff to the First Lady; Assistant to the President for Economic Policy; and heads of other executive departments, agencies, or offices as the Chair may designate.
By their nature, food policy councils are designed to circumvent the parochial interests and often "captured" status of regulatory agencies. By making people who don't normally talk sit together and consider the broader impact of their policies, food policy councils have the potential to keep special interests from dominating policy debates.
Most state-level food policy councils, such as New York's or Iowa's (created by then Gov. Tom Vilsack), include nutrition and access to health food as their core mission. And many find themselves moving towards involvement in local food and expansion of farmers markets and the like as a result of the inevitable conclusion that food production and food access are inexorably linked.
...The Nutter Administration is considering a tax on soda to help close the city's massive deficit. But the mayor himself claims that the real goal of such a tax would be to improve your health.
"What we're focused on primarily is obesity."
Mayor Nutter insists that his consideration of levying a tax on all sodas and sweetened drinks has a noble goal that goes beyond solving an economic crisis. He wants to encourage people to avoid sodas:
"It's something that we're taking a look at it, because we care very deeply about the issue of obesity, not only for children, type-2 diabetes, but also adults as well."
It's still unclear if Nutter will include a soda tax in the budget that he presents to city council in one month. Also unclear -- the rate of the tax, and who would pay directly -- distributors, retailers or consumers.
The Philly Daily News suggests a penny-an-ounce tax on soda and other sugary drinks might be a possibility -- though we won't find out until March 4 when the Mayor unveils his budget. In the unlikely event a Philly city soda tax could survive the vicious and inevitable blowback from the beverage industry, it would -- according to Yale's Rudd Center dead useful soda tax calculator -- generate up to $68 million dollars for the cash-strapped city. I say, go for it, Mike!
Register Receipts Are [Really] Hazardous to Your Health
Because coating everyday objects in endocrine disrupting chemicals is just plain fun! From HuffPo:
Amazingly, the greatest threat of BPA exposure may be something we handle nearly every day: receipts. According to the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry's John Warner in a Science Newsarticle last year, "The average cash register receipt that's out there and uses the BPA technology will have 60 to 100 milligrams of free BPA." Milligrams? By comparison, the amount deemed worrisome enough by reusable water bottle manufacturer Nalgene to eliminate the chemical from its polycarbonate bottles was measured in nanograms (that's one-millionth of a milligram).
What's especially scary about the receipt scenario is that there's no way to control all the possibilities for exposure -- picture waiters delivering plates of food after handling customers' checks, or shaking hands with someone who just put a receipt in his wallet. What you can control: Decline a receipt if you don't need one (save more trees, too), and wash your hands frequently (good hygiene during flu season, anyway).
Sadly, as far as I know, none of the pending BPA bans on the state or federal level address the use of bisphenol-A in register receipts. And yet that may be how many of us get our largest dose of that nasty chemical (here's more background on BPA). Too bad the FDA thinks its hands are tied when it comes to regulating it.
The "Question Time" format -- Republican legislators vs. Democratic President -- turns out to suit Obama perfectly. He listens carefully to the question/statement. He prefaces his answer with a brief courtesy of some sort. Then he analyzes the question, calmly picking it apart and vaporizing its premises. Then he explains (a) why his policy is preferable and (b) how it has already incorporated Republican ideas to the degree that they make sense.
He occupies the position of authority: he's President; he has the podium; the format makes it awkward for his questioners to interrupt or hector him. He sets the rhythm, and the rhythm suits him. There's a leisurely arc to his answers. In the campaign debates, the stingy time limits -- "one-minute answer!" "lightning round!" "Bzzzz!" -- and the preening "moderators" cramped his style. Sometimes he'd barely get started. In Baltimore, he didn’t have to rush. Each answer became an essay with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It helped that his questioners were politically hostile public officials pretending to be policy wonks, because that freed him to unleash his own, greatly superior wonkery without sounding overly technical or condescending.
My fear is that all that will resonate from Obama's appearance will be its tone and scorekeeping -- meta-analysis will prevail over policy analysis. The actual content of his proposals and his explanations for why the GOP's alternatives are useless will get lost in the noise. As Paul Krugman pointed out today, the GOP has no ideas and to date that appears to be a winning electoral strategy.
My hope is that this event will encourage the GOP to flog their ideas more vocally. If today's "alternative" GOP budget document is any indication -- with its massive cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security -- the GOP is probably better off sticking to their familiar, well-worn one word answer.
With all the excitement over fracking -- the process of freeing huge amount of natural gas trapped within rock formations such as the Marcellus Shale by injecting water and chemicals at high pressure -- in Pennsylvania and New York, it's tempting to forget that the environmental cost to getting the gas out of the ground may turn out to be severe. In NY, the concern is radioactive contamination of New York City's upstate water supply. In Pennsylvania, the problem is more mundane -- constant industrial accidents (via Pro Publica):
Earlier this month, Pennsylvania's environmental officials fined Pennsylvania-based Atlas Resources after a series of violations at 13 wells, including spills of fracturing fluids and other contaminants onto the ground around the sites. And just last week the agency fined M.R. Dirt, a company that removes waste from drilling sites, $6,000 for spilling more than seven tons of drilling dirt along a public road.
The reports come on the heels of a string of other incidents that have killed fish in one of the state's most prized recreational lakes and released toxic chemicals into the environment.
The Atlas spills are significant because they are among the latest and because they happened repeatedly during the routine transfer of fluids. Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection fined [1] Atlas Resources $85,000 for the offenses, which took place between May and December of 2009. Many of the spills were discovered by DEP inspectors.
..."If you look at this series of violations -- it's not only that there are multiple violations," said DEP spokeswoman Helen Humphreys, pointing to the fact that the same three violations were turning up at each site. "This is a pattern, and it's a problem."
Newsweek has a nice piece on the dangers of fracking fluids -- the stuff they inject into rock to bust the natural gas out -- and the fact that, despite their highly toxic, often corrosive, nature, such fluids were exempted from clean water regulations by Congress back in 2005. The NYT also covered a series of drilling-related spills in Pennsylvania a month ago.
But no matter the technique, Pennsylvanians should know by now that extractive industries have a tendency to poison the environments they exploit. The state has been actively cheerleading the industry (although given the potential windfall also strangely resistant to taxing it -- Gov. Rendell seems to prefer putting the tax burden on casino gamblers). But there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, especially where hydrocholoric acid, benzene and diesel fuel (favorite ingredients for frackers everywhere) are concerned. Like the saying goes, frack around too much and there's sure to be trouble in the end.
Tonight, when President Obama gives his State of the Union address, he's expected to acknowledge a fourth-generation New Jersey grocer who builds supermarkets in poor neighborhoods, including four in Philadelphia.
Jeff Brown, 46, who runs Brown's Super Stores Inc. of Westville, Gloucester County, acknowledged yesterday that he would be a guest of honor seated in Michelle Obama's box in the House of Representatives during the speech.
"It's cool," Brown said. "So cool."
Obama is expected to mention the idea of building more supermarkets in impoverished areas, commonly called supermarket deserts because of the dearth of stores large enough to sell fresh food.
It's great news that addressing food access for low-income folks truly is a priority in the White House. Brown operates several Shop-Rite's in struggling Philly neighborhoods and deserves credit for his efforts. The only thing I'll ding him for is his vocal and influential opposition to Philly's failed plastic bag ban of last summer. Still, net net, he's one of the good guys so good for him for getting his work (and Philly) some much-needed attention.
And the Winner of the USDA's Food Safety Sweepstakes Is...
Dr. Elizabeth Hagen! No, you're not expected to know who she is. Suffice it to say that, as anticipated, USDA Chief Tom Vilsack turned to an under-the-radar choice for Under Secretary of Food Safety. Hagen, currently the USDA's Chief Medical Officer, will, if confirmed, take charge of the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), which is responsible for the safety of meat and poultry products.
The interesting aspect of this pick is that she is an infectious disease doc and public health specialist who has been working at USDA for several years -- and thus should have a good grounding in food safety methods. It also means both the Under Secretary of Food Safety as well as the administrator of FSIS itself, Dr. Jerold Mande, will be medical doctors. One can hope we will on longer hear things like "I have to look at the entire industry, not just what is best for public health," coming from top FSIS administrators.
Hagen joined the USDA during the Bush administration so she's neither a fresh face nor someone who is untainted by the food safety failings of the last few years. But neither does she appear to be an industry flunky. While I would have preferred an outsider who might come in and shake up the ossified USDA food safety culture, that was clearly too much to ask. It's also true that no one outside of USDA seems to have had many dealings with Hagen, but hope abounds (via Food Safety News):
Carol Tucker-Foreman, a distinguished fellow at The Food Policy Institute at Consumer Federation of America, responded to the announcement with guarded optimism.
"Consumer advocates who work closely with the FSIS on policy issues have had limited direct experience with Dr. Hagen. We have been told, however, that she has been a strong advocate for improved food safety policies and has urged the agency to be more aggressive in asking companies to initiate recalls."
Better recalls are certainly a start (if for no other reason than to give bloggers a break). Yet it strikes me that nothing in the pick undermines the argument that the FDA's newly minted deputy commissioner for foods Michael Taylor is the true "national" head of food safety right now. That's neither a good nor a bad thing, just political reality. And with the top jobs now filled, there's no further excuse for inaction.
At some point soon, in the course of fixing our broken system, Hagen and Taylor will have to take a stand: Is the future of meat safety in this country one of decontamination and post-hoc treatments for routinely infected products (aka "Zap the Crap")? Or will the USDA attack the root causes of pathogens in our meat -- an unrelenting focus on low quality, high quantity production methods. Dr. Hagen, please surprise us.
Reporter Ed Bruske spent a week working in a Washington, D.C. public school lunchroom. His series of articles (1, 2, 3) that resulted are fantastic reading for anyone following the ongoing debate regarding school lunches and the challenges for enacting real reform. Today's entry looked at how sugar is used in school food.
Bruske lists the multiple ways schools find to sugar up our kids -- Pop-Tarts, sugar cereal, canned fruit in syrup, flavored milk, cookies and other desserts and even juice. Yes, juice is part of the problem, too. By weight, it has just as much sugar as Coke. Bruske observes that a 4 oz cup of apple juice has the equivalent of 3 tsp of sugar. As for flavored milk, an 8 oz carton of the brand served in the DC school contains 6 tsp of sugar. It's the same percentage of sugar as juice but at twice the service size, it's almost the same amount of sugar as a can of Coke -- and handed out to many of our kids for free. Got diabetes?
I recommend an experiment. Take a cup measure and put in 4 oz (1/2 cup) of water. Then add 3 tsp of sugar. If you’re feeling saucy, double the amount of both. Now drink. That’s what we serve to our kids at school? Yuck.
Journalist Merrill Goozner highlights some commentary from an FDA Insider who claims that the FDA is "more pro-industry than any time in 35 Years":
So says Jim Dickinson, editor of FDAWebview, an industry newsletter that closely follows enforcement issues at the agency. After reviewing the deregulatory shifts at the Food and Drug Administration since the Carter administration, he writes:
It has taken almost a generation, but by now, the pro-industry infiltration of FDA's culture is firmly entrenched. Not only is collaboration in product reviews officially encouraged, but good relationships across the regulatory fence hold the prospect of a possible future career in a well-paid industry job - a connection that is less likely to be publicly noticed in news media that now have to line up for information that has been filtered through agency press offices. The arm's-length relationship that formerly ruled every contact between agency and industry has become a fading memory.
He says the shift in culture accelerated after the 1992 passage of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, which made the agency dependent on industry funding. He concludes there's nothing that Margaret Hamburg, the new commissioner, and Joshua Sharfstein, her deputy, can do about it. Quoting a former chief of enforcement, he writes:
User fees at FDA are the primary villain, because they "allowed the industry to dictate the changes at the FDA in programs, procedures and practices. It will be impossible for the Obama administration to reverse the trend because as long as the user fees are in place the industry has the upper hand."
Radical stuff from an unexpected source.
It's hard to talk about the creeping takeover of the federal government by corporate interests without sounds like a conspiracy-minded crackpot. And yet, when presented with evidence like this, what other conclusion can you draw? There's no question that the "collaboration" Dickinson refers to continues to this day -- and not just for drugs. It's an established fact that the FDA relied heavily on chemical industry lobbyists to draw up the (hopefully) now infamous 2008 FDA bisphenol-A report that declared the plastics ingredient totally safe, despite all evidence to the contrary. And with concerns over the budget deficit now front and center any attempt to eliminate what is a legitimate funding source (by that I mean those drug company fees) will likely fail. In a word: Ugh.
With Obesity It's Not Just the Calories. It's the Chemicals
Michelle Obama's anti-childhood obesity agenda would have kids a little less round 'round the middle.White House Flickr streamWhile we await Michelle Obama's speech this Wednesday to the United States Conference of Mayors that will likely launch her new campaign against childhood obesity, I thought I'd offer a little perspective as well as a few bits of research that shed light on the enormity and complexity of the obesity epidemic.
First off, let's be clear: The First Lady will, of course, do everything she can to avoid picking a fight with Big Food -- I wouldn't be surprised to see corporate partnerships coming out of her efforts. Indeed, her team's first foray into the food policy arena, which included rumors of a White House embrace of former FDA Commissioner David Kessler's "junk food addiction" model for obesity, the president himself raising the possibility of a soda tax and the somewhat defensive posture of her policy team in an interview with NPR, were overshadowed by industry objections.
Even the most common-sense advice from her (drink water not soda, eat less processed food) prompted howls of outrage from food companies. We'll know for sure next week, but school food will probably be the focus of all her efforts. After all, school food is already the government's responsibility and even in the "reform-proof" Senate there is a fair amount of momentum for reducing access to junk food in the lunchroom and improving the quality of school food.
Unfortunately, the school environment is not the only one at issue for kids...
A story in Politico describes the soul-searching on Capitol Hill prompted by the sad, sudden death of Rep. John Boehner's 46-year-old chief of staff Paula Nowakowski:
"For a lot of us, this was a mortality check," said Justin Harding, 34, who's often on call seven days a week as chief of staff for Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and frequently gets home from work after his kids have gone to sleep. "It's causing us all to reflect and sort of check our own circumstances."
Hill staffers say Nowakowski's lifestyle mirrored much of their own. She smoked, she didn’t always eat well, and she often worked seven days a week.
A toxic combination, to be sure. Stressful jobs that require long hours are certainly unhealthy. But it's only recently that you could add diabetes to the list of job-related illnesses:
After working on George W. Bush's 2000 campaign in Michigan and enduring a lifestyle of horrible food and little sleep, Roe developed Type 1 diabetes [ed note: the reporter meant Type 2 since Type 1 doesn't "develop" in adults]. He knew he was getting ill, but he ignored the signs until he collapsed right after Bush's Inauguration and nearly died. He was hospitalized for a week and barely avoided a diabetic coma.
Other Hill staffers have also developed diabetes and high blood pressure.
And there's more:
One longtime Democratic committee staffer and former staff director, who asked not to be identified, got his wake-up moment when he crashed his car driving back to the Capitol after working until 5 a.m. the night before.
"I must've fallen asleep at the wheel," the staffer said. "I banged the car into a curb and blew both tires."
Soon afterward, he discovered he had developed high blood pressure and was battling diabetes. He later bowed out of his position, taking a lower-key spot on the committee.
Meanwhile, Rep. Joe Barton blamed his heart problems on "eating too many chicken-fried steaks."
"In the long run, I'd say this lifestyle could certainly be detrimental to your health," said Rep. Kathleen Dahlkemper (D-Pa.), a freshman who previously worked as a dietitian and spoke with POLITICO by phone from the Blue Dog retreat on Tuesday. "I'm sitting here watching them bring out trays of snacks: cheeses and sweets. We just ate lunch, which was huge. And before that, we had a very big breakfast. I can't get over how much food they put in front of us."
...Those who worked around the clock on last year's stimulus package and, now, on the health care bill admit to getting the majority of their meals from the Capitol vending machines.
While Speaker Nancy Pelosi moved to upgrade the food choices in the House cafeterias, the value meal in Longworth still includes a fountain drink and choices like chicken wings, burritos and popcorn chicken salad.
The focus in the obesity epidemic is often on low-income communities and their food deserts and swamps. But for many farther up the income chain, the work environment is just as toxic. It's not just Congressional workers who indulge in vending machine lunches, pastry and candy-strewn conference room spreads and bottomless cups of soda.
I can only hope that Capitol Hill denizens realize why addressing obesity and the associated problems in the food system requires going far beyond demands of personal responsibility and virtue. They would, I imagine, agree that they eat what's available. And if it's junk that's available, that's what they eat -- they don't have a choice. And as a result that junk makes them sick.
It's an interesting experiment going on up there -- how much more do they themselves have to suffer before they take steps to clean up their own food environment? And if they do act to protect themselves (or even if they don't), one hopes they now see the value of fixing public school cafeterias if not the rest of American workplaces.
In 2004, Colorado became the first state to pass a renewable energy standard (RES) by popular vote, a measure requiring large utilities to produce 10 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2015.
Three years later, after it became clear the RES goal of 10 percent was going to be achieved nearly eight years ahead of schedule, the state legislature doubled down with a new 20 percent mandate by 2020.
The point is that these targets often prove much easier to achieve than corporations like to admit. We have a corporate community that by and large provides kneejerk resistance to regulation so it's good to be reminded (again) that their predictions of doom/failure are usually unfounded and frequently just plain wrong.
There is no doubt in my mind that the same will prove true in the case of cap and trade. Industry, as it has countless times in the past, will discover how easy it is to function, even thrive, in a world where carbon comes with a price tag. But Colorado's experience also suggests that, in the event a climate bill fails this year or, as the WSJ speculates, is scrapped, Congress should indeed go ahead and enact an ambitious renewable energy standard -- something even cap-and-trade hating folks like Sen. Blanche Lincoln and American Farm Bureau President Bob Stallman are on record supporting. In the end, success with renewables might make coming back and enacting cap-and-trade that much easier.
Yale's Environment360 has a new must-read report by Sonia Shah linking pesticides to the high-profile die-offs among amphibians, bees and bats. What makes this news timely isn't necessarily the toxicity of the pesticides per se, it's the indirect effects on these animals of chronic, low-dose exposure to chemicals:
In the past dozen years, no fewer than three never-before-seen diseases have decimated populations of amphibians, bees, and -- most recently -- bats. A growing body of evidence indicates that pesticide exposure may be playing an important role in the decline of the first two species, and scientists are investigating whether such exposures may be involved in the deaths of more than 1 million bats in the northeastern United States over the past several years.
...The recent spate of widespread die-offs began in amphibians. Scientists discovered the culprit — an aquatic fungus called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, of a class of fungi called “chytrids” — in 1998. Its devastation, says amphibian expert Kevin Zippel, is “unlike anything we’ve seen since the extinction of the dinosaurs.” Over 1,800 species of amphibians currently face extinction.
It may be, as many experts believe, that the chytrid fungus is a novel pathogen, decimating species that have no armor against it, much as Europe’s smallpox and measles decimated Native Americans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But “there is a really good plausible story of chemicals affecting the immune system and making animals more susceptible,” as well, says San Francisco State University conservation biologist Carlos Davidson.
Shah goes on to explain a mechanism whereby pesticides applied to fields in California's Central Valley drift into the Sierra Nevada mountains "where they settle in the air, snow, and surface waters, and inside the tissues of amphibians." A scientist who studied the matter "found a strong correlation between upwind pesticide use... and declining amphibian populations."
Meanwhile, bees and bats have suffered a similar fate -- killed off by powerful pathogens that in theory could be novel but in practice seem to have taken advantage of animal populations immuno-compromised by pesticides.
One of the most interesting aspects of the piece was the description of an Italian scientists unpublished research that suggests the "missing link" between neonicotinoids, a powerful pesticide already banned in Europe but still in use in the US, and bee colony collapse. It relates to the practices of using neonicotinoids-coated seeds planted by machines that kick up clouds of pesticide as they work...
The NYT has another piece encouraging a flare-up in the cage match between organic farmers and those in favor of genetic engineering as the solution to future food needs. This one is centered on the "unlikely" but happy marriage of a plant geneticist and an organic farmer:
Pamela Ronald and Raoul Adamchak have every reason not to get along.
Ronald, a plant scientist, has spent her past two decades manipulating rice from her lab bench, bending the grain's DNA to her whim. Adamchak, meanwhile, is an organic farmer, teaching college students the best practices of an environmentally gentle agriculture at his California market garden.
As Adamchak confesses, few have been more vociferously opposed to the genetic engineering practiced by Ronald than his organic movement, which has steadily grown in recent years to constitute an influential, if tiny, part of the U.S. farm system. So it can come as some surprise when Ronald and Adamchak let slip that they have been happily married for more than a decade.
Such a union should not be shocking, the couple argues. And a more modest version -- sans marriage -- must be considered by any farmer or consumer hoping for a sustainable future for agriculture.
Industrial farming, with its heavy use of pesticides, synthetic fertilizer and irrigation, is exhausting the environment, and with billions more mouths to feed in the upcoming decades, the problem will only worsen unless the efforts of organic farming and genetic engineering are combined, they say.
...To spread their message to two communities that rarely speak in measured terms, Ronald and Adamchak have written a book, "Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food," which came out in paperback last month.
What Adamchak and Ronald pursue in the book is in essence a unified theory of farming. While critical of Western seed companies that have co-opted genetically modified (GM) crops for questionable business practices, the couple argues that both current and future generations of altered crops will, if responsibly managed, allow much of the world's hungry to be fed from land already degraded by the plow's slice and the tractor's compressing wheel.
This news gets the usual contrarian suspects cheering, of course. But to read the article, you'd think there are all these fantastic genetically engineering seeds just waiting to be planted if only the "powerful" organic lobby would let it happen. Only there aren't. Not a one. And while Ronald, the plant scientist, urges open-mindedness among sustainable agriculture folks, her own major plant breeding project on flood-tolerant rice uses advanced breeding techniques and not genetic engineering.
It's worth revisiting a Newsweek article from the summer that talked about the "return" of conventional breeding as the favored technique for developing new crops:
Part of the story is that conventional breeding can still do certain things extremely well—even better than genetic manipulation. What GM techniques are best at is isolating particularly useful bits of DNA in a prized plant, and transferring that single gene to another plant that is less well endowed. (In the best-known example, Monsanto spliced a gene from naturally herbicide-tolerant grass into soybeans, so farmers could apply the chemicals without killing their crops.) Conventional breeding still does better at building up qualities that require a complex suite of genes, such as the ability to fight off certain insects or to resist drought, which involves a host of genes that determine the way plants take up and manage water.
Roland would surely agree. And the fact is that the challenges before us require more than dropping in a gene here or there. To date, genetic engineering techniques have simply not shown itself to be up to the task. The result is that the debate over GMOs as a sustainable solution remains entirely theoretical. The existing GMO seed lines require heavy doses of synthetic fertilizer and water (in the case of the Bt crops mentioned in the article) or heavy doses of synthetic pesticides, fertilizer and water (in the case of Roundup Ready crops, the only other GMO seed line), neither of which are consistent with organic -- or sustainable -- practices.
In essence, this is an argument about federal research dollars not an argument about which seeds to plant. Wake me up when Monsanto invents a seed that can actually do all the things they've been promising us for the last couple of decades. In fact, don't. It's likely to be decades and decades before someone sees fit to rouse me. I could use the sleep
The Guardian provides a helpful guide to what all these global warming trends could mean for different parts of the planet by century's end. Please note: the relatively "small" increase of 2C in global temps that's considered "acceptable" by most governments and scientists is still really really bad:
2C -- The temperature limit the scientists want
The heatwaves seen in Europe during 2003, which killed tens of thousands of people, will come back every year with a 2C global average temperature rise. Southern England will regularly see temperatures around 40C in summer. The Amazon turns into desert and grasslands, while increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere make the world's oceans too acidic for remaining coral reefs and thousands of other marine lifeforms. More than 60 million people, mainly in Africa, would be exposed to higher rates of malaria. Agricultural yields around the world will drop and half a billion people will be at greater risk of starvation. The West Antarctic ice sheet collapses, the Greenland ice sheet melts and the world's sea level begins to rise by seven metres over the next few hundred years. Glaciers all over the world will recede, reducing the fresh water supply for major cities including Los Angeles. Coastal flooding affects more than 10 million extra people. A third of the world's species will become extinct as the 2C rise changes their habitats too quickly for them to adapt.
But don't fool yourself into thinking that any of the cuts the US (or anyone else) is talking about at the moment would limit warming to 2C. The best we can probably hope for with current emissions targets (the ones the House passed and the Senate is considering, for example) would be this:
3C -- Looking increasingly likely
After a 3C global temperature rise, global warming may run out of control and efforts to mitigate it may be in vain. Millions of square kilometres of Amazon rainforest could burn down, releasing carbon from the wood, leaves and soil and thus making the warming even worse, perhaps by another 1.5C. In southern Africa, Australia and the western US, deserts take over. Billions of people are forced to move from their traditional agricultural lands, in search of scarcer food and water. Around 30-50% less water is available in Africa and around the Mediterranean. In the UK, summers of droughts are followed by winter floods. Sea levels rise to engulf small islands and low-lying areas such as Florida, New York and London. The Gulf Stream, which warms the UK all year round, will decline and changes in weather patterns will lead to higher sea levels at the Atlantic coasts.
Note also the bit about the possibility for runaway warming if we reach a 3C increase -- somewhat concerning since we're heading for that neighborhood. Gee, kinda makes all this concern trolling about the near-term effect on the economy of cap-and-trade sorta, um, stupid. Good thing our fearless leaders have everything under control! h/t Brad Plumer
Tom Philpott at Grist has a great post on Monsanto, its magic seeds and its monopoly status. In it, he reminds us that "climate change-ready" -- and non-existent -- drought tolerant GM seeds aren't the only false hopes currently being peddled by Monsanto:
Meanwhile, there also recently came a cold slap to one of Monsanto's most hyped promises: that it will soon deliver genetically engineered corn, rice, and wheat strains that demand much less nitrogen fertilizer. Nitrogen fertilizer is a major ecological liability of industrial agriculture--synthetic nitrogen pollutes streams and blots out fish life, destroys soil organic matter, and enters the atmosphere as nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than carbon.
In a recent report (PDF), the Union of Concerned Scientists' Doug Gurian-Sherman pointed out that thus far, the GM crop industry has had zero success at engineering crops with "complex traits" like improved nitrogen efficiency.
Splicing in a gene that makes corn tolerate a certain herbicide is one thing; improving a highly complex, multi-gene, not-completely-understood process like nitrogen efficiency is completely different. Despite all the hype around nitrogen-efficient GM corn, the GM seed giants are conducting relatively few trials to test crops in the field, Gurian-Sherman reports.
"Although a few genes that appear promising for improving NUE [nitrogen-use efficiency] have been identified in the public literature, they have yet to demonstrate that they can improve consistently in various environments, and without significant undesirable side effects that could harm our agriculture, environment, or public health," Gurian-Sherman writes. Meanwhile, other methods of reducing nitrogen use, like traditional breeding and ecosystem approaches, have proven track records.
So, all together now, traditional breeding paired with agro-ecological techniques work better than Monsanto's over-hyped, overpriced, over-sprayed products. That's better.
Remember NYC's anti-soda campaign "Don't Drink Yourself Fat"? Well, prepare yourself. Because the NYC Department of Health has made themselves a YouTube Video. And it's a doozy:
I think I'm going to be sick -- which is, of course, the point. So, what do you think -- will it stop people from drinking soda or is it just a cheap gag? Get it? Gag?
When Thinking about Saving the Future, Don't Forget about Family Planning
McClatchy has a big article on how the Bush administration extended its hostility to family planning to its massive multibillion dollar global anti-AIDS inititative:
On a continent where fewer than one in five married women use modern contraception, an explosion of unplanned pregnancies is threatening to bury Adongo's family and a generation of Africans under a mountain of poverty.
Promoting birth control in Africa faces a host of obstacles — patriarchal customs, religious taboos, ill-equipped public health systems — but experts also blame a powerful, more distant force: the U.S. government.
Under President George W. Bush, the United States withdrew from its decades-long role as a global leader in supporting family planning, driven by a conservative ideology that favored abstinence and shied away from providing contraceptive devices in developing countries, even to married women.
Bush's mammoth global anti-AIDS initiative, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, poured billions of dollars into Africa but prohibited groups from spending any of it on family planning services or counseling programs, whose budgets flat-lined.
The restrictions flew in the face of research by international aid agencies, the U.N. World Health Organization and the U.S. government's own experts, all of whom touted contraception as a crucial method of preventing births of babies being infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
The Bush program is widely hailed as a success, having supplied lifesaving anti-retroviral drugs to more than 2 million HIV patients worldwide.
However, researchers, Africa experts and veteran U.S. health officials now think that PEPFAR also contributed to Africa's epidemic population growth by undermining efforts to help women in some of the world's poorest countries exercise greater control over their fertility.
With local economies and governments unable to absorb that kind of growth, this is a disaster in the making. While the article doesn't connect these dots, I'd point out that the debate over agricuture, GMOs, hunger -- over global warming itself -- comes down to various opinions on how to deal with a planetary population of 9 billion people by 2050.
Meanwhile, programs that focus on empowering women, including but not limited to giving them access to real family planning, could go a long way toward reducing that "Peak People" figure, which would make our goals that much more achievable. Those of us who spend a lot of time thinking and writing about food, ag and climate need to focus on the extent to which our future is linked to that of the developing world. Right now, there's a subtext of "better them than us" floating through much of the climate and food-related discourse. As a remedy, I feel compelled to paraphrase one of Bill Clinton's best lines from the 1992 campaign: when we're talking about the health of the plant there is no them -- there's only us.
One of the most important historic developments in the food economy is embodied in this statistic: in 1900, 40 percent of every dollar spent on food went to the farmer or rancher while the rest was split between inputs and distribution. Now? 7 cents on the dollar goes to the producer and 73 cents goes just to distribution. That's worth keeping in mind when you read things like this:
... Walmart, now the nation's largest supermarket chain as well as retailer, has gotten into the local scene, embarking on an effort to procure more of its produce from local growers.
Uh, oh.
Now, there is an intriguing (and concerning) wrinkle to all this. As the St Louis Dispatch piece linked above observes (and as Tom Philpott and I have observed many times before), one of the big obstacles to expanding local food systems is the collapse of local distribution infrastructure. There are often no wholesalers to buy and store, and no delivery infrastructure to move, produce locally. Conveniently, Walmart has its own regional distribution system that rivals anything that ever existed before -- why reinvent the wheel (again). So, it's only natural for them jump in.
Things are not looking good on the agriculture front at the Copenhagen climate talks. According to a representative from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a group dedicated to sustainable agriculture and trade policy, American negotiators are being , um, less than productive:
Long, long meeting this afternoon (Dec. 10) on sectoral language for agriculture. First of all, there is confusion as to what the text will end up being -- part of a comprehensive Copenhagen agreement? A separate COP decision? Something else still? Everything seems pretty much up in the air on this topic as different countries hold very different views on this matter.
And then there is the U.S. position. Arguing that the language on agriculture needs to be short and very specific, and that it should avoid any mention of food security, or of linkages between mitigation and adaptation. Hard to believe. How does the U.S. government expect this to be acceptable to developing countries where agriculture is a source of livelihoods for large shares of their populations? And, more broadly, to all stakeholders involved in discussions about agriculture, food and climate change? It has become widely accepted that Copenhagen needs to open a space to deal with agriculture and food security concerns associated with climate change -- the U.S. cannot be serious!
We are Very Serious. Unfortunately, we are also very misguided.
Americans need to 'raise their game' on climate change
Everyone should read this Matt Ygelsias post on the need for all of us to "step up our game" morally speaking as regards the climate. The climate change "debate" is a true gut check moment. And right now, we're failing:
CNN was running a climate change story yesterday with the chyron "Global Warming: Fact or Fiction." It's clearly not the case that that happened because no one at CNN is unaware that framing the story that way is nonsense. They just chose to let it happen. John McCain used to recognize the urgency of the climate threat and then, thanks to pique or something, he decided to become an opportunistic pollution-defender. Bob Corker recognizes the need to curb carbon emissions but insists that he’ll support a bill if and only if it meets his exact politically unrealistic expectations. And millions of Americans supported the ACES bill in the House but didn’t bother themselves to call their congressman about it, helping to create a situation in which phone traffic tilted heavily against the bill and progressives on the Hill now feel defensive.
All this -- and more -- is carried out by free moral agents on a daily basis. And this is simply not an issue you can solve without people raising their game, morally speaking. That means politicians, and activists, and ordinary citizens and business elites and media figures and all the rest. We've developed a public culture in the United States in which it's regarded as grossly naive to suggest that a Senator or an executive ought to do the right thing simply because it's the right thing. But if you think of any major problem this country has ever solved -- the Civil War, women's suffrage, defeating Nazism, Civil Rights -- it's always required not just smart tactics, but moral behavior, people willing to cast risky votes, people willing to risk physical harm in combat or non-violent resistance. It's been the same all around the world throughout history. If people don’t want to do the right thing, the right thing doesn't get done. On climate, in particular, a huge swathe of the American elite has simply refused to acknowledge any sort of duty or obligation.
Addressing climate change -- not Iraq, not Afghanistan, not health care reform, not even torture -- is the true moral challenge of this generation. And at the moment, the other side is succeeding in dismissing the entire enterprise as The Greatest Hoax of All Time. Societies do fail "to do the right thing" when faced with great moral decision -- and it never ends well. Indeed, we're threatening to follow in some pretty awful footsteps. What do we have to do to get this whole negotiation to "Yes"?
Still smarting over the industry's shenanigans over the "Smart Choices" label, the FDA has decided to pick up the pace of change. Marion Nestle dug up a set of proposed new front of package nutrition labels that the FDA is studying and one of which may ultimately get the agency's final approval. Here they are:
My faves are the "Nutrition Tips" label with colors and the last one, dubbed "Waitrose," with the stop light label -- they actually present meaningful information. The others just focus on calories, which is not necessarily even the most important piece of nutrition information. If I had to bet, I'd suggest that the industry will push hard against any label that tries to characterize the nutrients levels as too high. But we'll see. What do you all think? Don't just tell me! Click here to write an email to the FDA (with the recipient, subject, and required header for your message all filled out for you -- they want your feedback.
At the same time as they're working on the front of package label, the FDA is also now accepting comments on its initiative to remake the existing side-panel nutrition labels. And the suggestions are starting to roll in. A good example comes from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, shown at right. In some ways, it's got a bit of a behavioral economics, "Nudge"-y style to it -- small changes that alter the way you look at the label and possibly the way you think about the product.
I like how the red text used for nutrients that exceed the recommended daily amount as well as the increased font size for calories draw the eye. Breaking out the amount of added sugars into its own category also represents a helpful improvement. Also, note the idea of classing all the sugars together in the ingredients list, which specifically defeats food companies' technique of using a half dozen forms of sugar to hide the fact that it's often the number one ingredient by weight.
But admiring CSPI's work isn't the end of it. The FDA wants to hear from you. Go here and tell them what you think. If you want a helpful cheat sheet, check out Fooducate's 7 suggestions for labeling improvements.
Over at Grist, I riffed on Ezra Klein's point about our government's "overwhelming bias toward inaction." But while Congress embodies inertia, corporations and their agents are full of kinetic energy when it comes to stopping reform. Their latest reform-killing initiative: Covert operations! First came the much-reported (and overblown) "ClimateGate" theft of climate scientists' emails in East Anglia. And now, via the Wonk Room, comes this:
It has now been reported that the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Center is not the only victim of such a criminal invasion: burglars and hackers have also attacked the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis at the University of Victoria in British Columbia:
Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria scientist and key contributor to the Nobel prize-winning work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says there have been a number of attempted breaches in recent months, including two successful break-ins at his campus office in which a dead computer was stolen and papers were rummaged through.
These attacks go beyond simple burglary. University of Victoria spokeswoman Patty Pitts told the National Post "there have also been attempts to hack into climate scientists' computers, as well as incidents in which people impersonated network technicians to try to gain access to campus offices and data."
Things are getting scary out there. The other side plays by different rules, or rather, by no rules at all. You have been warned.
With David Leonhardt's piece on a new weatherization program/jobs bill nicknamed "Cash for Caulkers" generating some buzz, as well as questions, it seemed a good time to resurrect a post I wrote about a year ago on the general subject of energy efficiency improvement. I had been inspired by a lengthy post at Grist on a post-carbon economy which observed that the way to jumpstart efficiency and incentivize improvements is to copy the British and set per square foot emissions levels for building (unlikely, I know). But more practically, we should also make energy efficiency a "utility" like electricity, gas or water. Here's what I wrote:
[N]ew entities called "efficiency utilities" ... would pay for efficiency upgrades in order to bring an existing building in compliance with the limits. Owners/tenants would pay for these improvements via a monthly bill and, though they would be part of the building, the improvements' cost wouldn't require "recouping" by the owner in the form of rent hikes or higher a sales price. A particular unit would simply have a particular monthly cost for "efficiency" like it has a monthly cost for heating.
And like electric service, the "efficiency" bill can be stopped - if an apartment sits unrented, for example. Because both the utility as well as the bill itself could be subsidized in various ways it would, according to Lipow, remove a major stumbling block to making improvements in existing buildings. For the record, an efficiency utility could cover the costs associated with:
Of course an efficiency utility wouldn't just cover insulation, caulk and new windows -- it would cover heating systems, appliances, shower heads, etc. A further advantage to a utility model over the financing model that Leonhardt discusses -- the idea of adding weatherization costs to homeowner's property tax bills -- is that it addresses the fact that weatherization doesn't lend itself to one-size-fits-all solutions. As Leonhardt observes, the complexity of retrofitting old homes is enormous:
What share, say, of Midwestern homes built before 1950 could use more attic insulation? How quickly would the insulation pay for itself on average? Every home is different, obviously. But without any reference point, many people won’t be confident enough to plunge into a project.
Even if they don't ultimately perform the work themselves, a utility would have the scale to provide the expertise as well as the data for what particular homeowners should do. Obviously, this kind of program would go beyond what any stimulus bill is likely to enact. But if we want to make efficiency a goal unto itself, a utility model -- not to mention per square foot emissions limitations -- is the way to go.
Other than the gross-out factor involved with the NYT's piece on our nation's collapsing sewer systems, I was most struck by this:
The only real solution, say many lawmakers and water advocates, is extensive new spending on sewer systems largely ignored for decades. As much as $400 billion in extra spending is needed over the next decade to fix the nation’s sewer infrastructure, according to estimates by the E.P.A. and the Government Accountability Office.
This came after a nod to Philadelphia's new radical plan to address its severe rainwater runoff problem almost entirely through ecological means. The whole point of what Philadelphia is doing is that it will "only" cost $1.6 billion, doesn't involve huge infrastructure projects and will very likely solve the problem. It's true that Philly would be blazing a trail, but it's one that, if successful, other cities are ready to follow -- why was this development almost entirely downplayed?
I'm aware that local officials aren't always the most creative infrastructure thinkers at the same time as progressives are looking for promising areas for infrastructure improvements (and thus stimulus) -- water treatment systems are surely one of those. But infrastructure in the Obama era is supposed to be about both kinds of green. Let's keep that in mind, shall we?
Photo credit: Cynthia Greer, Philadelphia Inquirer
This is no good. New York City has been supporting an effort to build housing on top of what was once a garbage dump but is now a thriving urban farm. As Kerry Trueman of The Green Fork reported back in August:
[T]he Bed-Stuy Farm is a stellar example of urban agriculture that produces 7,000 pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables annually. Tomorrow? If the developer has its way, the Bed-Stuy Farm may soon be plowed under and paved over.
"The intent was always to do affordable housing on this site," Housing Preservation and Development Department official Margaret Sheffer told the New York Daily News last week. "The garden had essentially come in as a squatter." The HPD wants to sell the lot in order to pay off a debt of roughly $275,000 incurred by the developer, Neighborhood Partnership Housing Development/Direct Building Management.
Sadly, the city is still intent on this. There's a petition circulating to help save it. To inspire you, here's a short video about it. Speaking as someone who's lucky enough to get veggies from an urban farm for more than six months of the year, I can tell you that the thought of a successful one being bulldozed is just miserable.
Food safety reform is now in the hands of the Senate HELP Committee. One of the main concerns of the bill involves the extent to which it will negatively affect small and organic farms (possibly even putting FDA food safety standards and USDA Organic standards in direct conflict).
In response, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition has proposed an amendment that would ensure the safety of our food while not overly burdening small and organic farmers. But the Senators on the committee need to hear from their constitutents on this issue before Nov. 18 when they'll vote on the bill. This is of particular interest to PAers since our own Sen. Bob Casey is on the committee. So, let's hit the phones! The complete committee lineup complete with phone numbers is below.
Here are the details from the NSAC:
The bill includes several key reforms that would put real teeth into federal regulation of large-scale food processing corporations to better protect consumers. However, the bill as written would also do serious harm to family farm value added processing, local and regional food systems, conservation and wildlife protection, and organic farming.
The good news is the HELP committee could fix those problems with the adoption of some common sense provisions to retain a crack down on corporate bad actors without erecting dangerous new barriers to the growing healthy food movement based on small and mid-sized family farms, sustainable and organic production methods, and more local and regional food sourcing.
The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and the National Organic Coalition, have fashioned just such a set of common sense provisions that must be added to S 510.
We urge you to contact your Senator on the HELP Committee (list below) and urge them to support the NSAC/NOC amendments!
It's easy to call. If your Senator is on the HELP Committee (see the list below), please call or fax their office and ask to speak with the aide in charge of food safety issues. You can also call the Capitol Switchboard and ask to be directly connected to your Senator's office: 202-224-3121.
The message is simple. "I am a constituent of Senator___________ and I am calling to ask him/her to support the proposals for amendments to S 510 offered by the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and the National Organic Coalition."
Specifically, ask them to support the following key principles:
* The bill should provide small and mid-sized family farms that market value-added farm products with training and technical assistance in developing food safety plans for their farms.
* The bill should direct FDA to narrow the kinds of farm activities subject to FDA control and to base those regulations on sound risk analysis. (Current FDA rules assume, without any scientific evidence or risk analysis, that all farms which undertake any one of a long list of processing, labeling or packaging activities should be regulated.)
* The bill should direct FDA to ease compliance for organic farmers by integrating the FDA standards with the organic certification rules. FDA compliance should not jeopardize a farmer's ability to be organically certified under USDA's National Organic Program.
* The bill should insist that FDA food safety standards and guidance will not contradict federal conservation, environmental, and wildlife standards and practices, and not force the farmer to choose which federal agency to obey and which to reject.
* Farmers who sell directly to consumers should not be required to keep records and be part of a federal "traceback" system. All other farms should not be required to maintain records electronically or records beyond the first point of sale beyond the farmgate.
For more information on the Senate Food Safety bill, please see NSAC's Talking Points here and its Policy Brief Food Safety on the Farm.
