Climate Food and Agriculture

Could small farms provide fresh food year-round, even in northern climes?

Is the sustainable-agriculture movement essentially Luddite? It’s a common charge — and a fair enough question. The Nobel Laureate Norman Borlaug, perhaps industrial agriculture’s greatest living apologist, deplores at every opportunity the organic movement’s supposedly technophobic ways. Addressing a graduating class a few years ago at Texas A&M — that factory for future big-ag farmers […]

Like Blight on Rice

U.S. commercial rice crop contaminated with GM strain The U.S. government admitted last week that its commercial supply of long-grain rice has been contaminated by an illegal, untested, genetically modified strain with the warm-and-fuzzy name of LLRICE 601. The European Union, the biggest importer of U.S. long-grain rice, may decide to delay or ban imports; […]

Do the Hempty Hemp

Hemp farming could be legalized in California Farmers could legally grow industrial hemp under a bill approved by the state Senate of, obviously, California. But isn’t hemp, like, totally marijuana? Didn’t Nancy Reagan warn us about this? No, no, says (Republican!) state Sen. Tom McClintock, in the best analogy we’ve ever heard: Hemp “bears no […]

I’d like to buy the world a Coke … er, maybe not

The Times reports:

INDIA'S highest court yesterday demanded that Coca-Cola should reveal its secret formula for the first time in 120 years.

Why?

While demand for frozen food booms, processing plants head to China and Mexico

Farmers markets may be fashionable, but the U.S. appetite for convenience food remains insatiable. "Retail sales of frozen foods in the U.S. in 2005 reached a record $29 billion, up from nearly $26 billion in 2001," declares a news report.

Meanwhile, the U.S. food-processing giants are shuttering domestic plants and heading to Mexico and China, where labor and produce costs are cheaper than California's central coast, once the U.S. frozen food capital.

In an age of broad energy and climate uncertainty, market forces are conspiring to make our food system ever more energy intensive. How can this be? How can it make economic sense to not only haul food from China and Mexico, but to keep its temperature below the freezing point throughout the process?

Why the late, lamented Doha round wasn’t really the answer for ag policy.

Harvesting a bit of vintage Reagan-era rhetoric, L.A. Times columnist Jonah Goldberg recently denounced what he called "welfare queens on tractors."

The right-winger's target was clear: The U.S. farm subsidy program, which doles out around $14.5 billion per year (depending on market fluctuations), mainly to large producers of corn, cotton, wheat, soybeans, and rice. As Congress opens debate on the 2007 Farm Bill -- the omnibus five-year legislation that governs agricultural support -- the subsidy program has drawn a chorus of critics.

Goldberg gets it about right when he lists the program's opponents: "Right-wing economists, left-wing environmentalists and almost anybody in-between who doesn't receive a check from the Department of Agriculture or depend on a political donation."

To be sure, the subsidy-haters have a point. A vast literature shows that the real beneficiaries of U.S. ag subsidies aren't farmers at all, but rather agribusiness giants. Direct government payments encourage farmers to produce as much as possible, which pushes down the prices of ag commodities.

For years now, ag subsidies have helped enable Archer Daniels Midland to buy the corn it transforms into high-fructose corn syrup at well below corn's production costs. Meat producers like Smithfield Foods use cheap corn as fodder to run their profitable -- and socially and environmentally ruinous -- feedlot operations.

As China’s exports boom, its farmland shrinks and food imports rise. Coincidence?

The philosopher Slavoj Zizek once remarked that the United States does still have a working class -- it's simply in China.

With the U.S. manufacturing base shriveling (Ford Explorer, anyone?) and imports from China booming (set to surpass a quarter trillion dollars this year), it's hard to contradict that trendy Slovenian academic.

China's manufacturing miracle means (among many other things) that even in a period of stagnant wage growth, U.S. consumers can march into Wal-Mart and fill their carts with lots and lots of stuff.

The most famous environmental impact of China's boom has to do with crude oil: As China's economy surges (it grew at an annualized 11 percent in the second quarter), it burns more and more crude, burdening the environment with greenhouse gases. While we ramble from strip mall to strip mall in SUVs stuffed with Chinese goods, Chinese factory smokestacks send plumes of black gunk into the air.

But here's another way to look at the situation: While China expands its industrial base to supply the world with everything from mops to electronics, it's cutting drastically into its farmland. Might some wag soon be moved to remark, "China does have farmers -- they're just in Brazil"?

The case for boycotting factory-farmed ‘organic’ milk

Of all the environmental gaffes the species homo sapien commits in the process of feeding itself, the practice of cramming megafauna into huge pens and plying them with corn may rank as the most imbecilic.

The excellent web site Eat Wild documents the environmental ills of confinement dairy and meat production; here are a few. Cows evolved to eat prairie grass, not grain, which makes them sick. Huge concentrations of large ravenous animals create huge concentrations of shit -- which is a critical resource for maintaining soil health in reasonable amounts, but a fetid nightmare when produced at mountainous levels. Industrial corn production requires titantic annual lashings of natural gas-based fertilizers, much of which leaks into groundwater and wreaks havoc clear down to the Gulf. And so on.

Appallingly -- though not surprisingly, given its habitual fealty to agribiz interests -- the USDA has not seen fit to demand that organic dairy production be pasture-based. The agency's organic code stipulates that cows be given "access to pasture," but its bureaucrats tend to give that rule a lackadaisical reading -- one fully exploited by Dean Foods and Aurora Organic, the dairy giants that together produce more than half of U.S. organic milk.

In response to such official laxity and corporate opportunism, the scrappy Organic Consumers Association has launched a boycott against companies that sell "organic" milk from factory-style farms.

Workers on organic farms are treated as poorly as their conventional counterparts

When Elena Ortiz found a job on an organic raspberry farm after working for nine years in conventionally farmed fields, she was glad for the change. The best part about her new job was that she no longer had to work just feet away from tractors spraying chemical herbicides and pesticides. An added bonus was […]

Vegetarians Are Ruining the Planet

Cargill pushes soy farming that’s obliterating the Amazon Soy production has overtaken logging and cattle ranching as the main source of Amazon rainforest destruction. In the past three years, nearly 27,000 square miles of the Amazon have been destroyed, nearly three-quarters of it illegally. Much of the acreage was sold to soy producers, financed in […]