Dec 12
(From Mark Bittman’s blog, Bitten)
If greenhouse gases are a hazard to human health, as the EPA has declared, and the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act authorizes strict regulatory action on substances if there’s a reasonable basis to conclude that there’s “an unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment,” and industrially raised livestock causes an estimated 18 percent of greenhouse gas (some estimates are much higher), could there be a legal case for tougher regulation of animal production?
Don’t hold your breath, but in 1964, when the Surgeon General’s report appeared, no one could have predicted the kind of anti-tobacco legislation we’ve seen since then.
Nov 04
New York (CNN) — Two people have died and 28 people have fallen ill with matching strains of E. coli after an outbreak in ground beef, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
Sixteen
of those people are in hospitals and three have developed kidney
failure as a result of the contamination, the CDC said late Monday.The U.S. Department of Agriculture
announced last week that Fairbank Farms in Ashville, New York, was
recalling more than half a million pounds of fresh ground beef products
that may be contaminated with a strain of E. coli, a potentially deadly
species of bacteria.
Industrial agriculture strikes again! Its hard to believe that we would have these sorts of outbreaks if our food production was done on a local scale – all the benefits (jobs, profits) as well as the costs (outbreaks) would be small-scale.
Oct 01
When I talk to people about buying local and organic the number one argument I come up against is cost – it costs more to buy local or to buy organic. Industrial agriculture proponents like to point out that conventional farming is a "cheaper" venture than traditional (read: sustainable) farming. They posit that growing one crop means you have a smaller number of variables to deal with (variety of pests, growing conditions for different crops, etc) as well as single known entity to concentrate on (corn for instance) that will provide a fairly certain profit (hence the idea of commodity crops). By growing only one thing you can focus on that one thing, grow big, and maximize profit.
Well I call bull on that argument. Let's say you inherit $500,000 from your grandmother. How do you invest that? Do you go out and buy $500,000 worth of Microsoft stock? Do you buy a $500,000 piece of property and wait for it to rise in value? As the saying goes, do you put all your eggs in one basket? Any investment adviser worth her weight will tell you that you need to diversify. What happens when all your money is tied up in the housing market and housing starts plummet?
That, my friends, is one of the basic principles behind sustainable (and smart) agriculture. By growing a variety of crops or raising a variety of livestock you are diversifying your investment – spreading the risk. That way, when an outbreak of late blight hits (as it did up and down the East coast this summer) you don't go broke when you lose your tomato crop. You still have squash, onions, beets, eggs, and pork.
Industrial agriculture necessitates a monoculture crop – an inherently risky investment. No amount of agricultural science and know-how can prevent crop decimation from a novel fungus or chemical-resistant pest. Sustainable (diversified) agriculture gives you some insurance. Barring a catastrophe you will have a crop to bring to market.
So when people ask you why go sustainable all you need to do is tell them that its the better investment, period.
Sep 23
One of the major arguments of industrial agriculture advocates is that the problem of world hunger can be alleviated by the higher yields of industrial farming. More food, grown cheaply and quickly on a large scale, means less hunger and wider availability. Unfortunately the inverse is often true.
Take bananas for example. A great source of vitamins, bananas are oftentimes grown on huge industrial plantations in Central and South America. According to a study by Pedro Arias of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization a mere 13% of Ecuadorian banana exports between 1998 and 2000 stayed in South America. Conversely, 61% of exports in those years went to the United States, Canada, EU, and Japan. Additionally, Arias writes that "Ecuador banana workers receive the lowest wages of all Latin American banana exporting countries." Not only do a vast majority of what they grow get sent to first-world countries, but the workers who grow these bananas are barely able to feed their families on what they are paid (approximately $56 US a month in Ecuador). They spend their days cultivating food that will never reach their tables.
Across the globe food is being grown cheaply by low-wage workers to help feed the first world. The recent economic crisis saw food riots across Asia as one of the world's most important food commodities, rice, became too expensive for many people to buy. A basic staple that has played an integral role in the daily nutrition of much of the world for hundreds of years has now become too expensive for those who need it most. Huge industrial rice operations grow thousands of tons of rice that are then shipped to Europe, North America, and Japan while the workers countries like Vietnam and the Philippines who grew that rice starve.
Industrial agriculture will not feed the world, rather it has only helped to exacerbate many of the food crises that plague the poor across this planet.
Resources:
Sep 23
In my Sustainable Agriculture class at Central Carolina Community College we are using The Fatal Harvest Reader as our textbook, and the first part of the book deals with the many myths and misconceptions propagated by supporters of industrial agriculture. In conjunction with my class I'm going to address each myth week by week. I'll give a basic rundown of the myth, pose a counter-argument using my own research, and provide some links to help you learn more about the myth and how you can help stop its spread.
The Seven Deadly Myths of Industrial Agriculture are:
Stay tuned for Myth One later today!