progressive involvement

An answer to the age-old question: What do sheepherders do in their spare time?

ht: Dan

A Farm for the Future

The Coming Water Crisis

More than 20,000 policy-makers and industry representatives are meeting in Istanbul, Turkey for the fifth international plenary session of the World Water Council.  The purpose of the Council is to address the world's growing water crisis.  By the Fault:

The world’s population, currently more than 6.5 billion, is expected to rise to nine billion by mid-century, placing further massive demands on water supplies that are already under strain.

According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the number of people living under severe water stress is expected to rise to 3.9 billion by 2030, amounting to nearly half the world’s population. Most of these will live in China and South Asia.

That tally does not include the impacts of climate change. Global warming may already be affecting weather patterns, changing the time and place where rain and snow fall, say some experts.

Around 2.5 billion people today do not have access to decent sanitation, defying one of the targets of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.

Hydrologists say the crisis is rooted in excessive irrigation, leakage of urban water supplies, pollution of river water and unbridled extraction of water from nearly every type of source.

We eat junk and wonder why we're sick

I belong to the Robert Kennedy branch of progressivism.  Generally speaking, we RFK progressives want to avoid large, statist programs.  We prefer local solutions and local control.  Sometimes, it is true, large programs are needed, such as in health care, for example, where the main problem is too much fragmentation resulting in higher costs, particularly in administration.

In other areas, such as agriculture and food policy, we need to move away from an oil-based subsidized national agricultural monoculture, and toward a sun-based local and regional agricultural "polyculture," as Michael Pollan argues in a recent article in the New York Times. 

The monoculture is oriented toward the subsidized production of only certain crops and uses massive amounts of petroleum, fertilizer, and pest control chemicals to get there.  Cheap energy made this possible.  Cheap energy encouraged Alaskan salmon to be shipped to China to be filleted before going to Virginia where it would be eaten.  It encouraged New Yorkers to get their vegetables from California rather than from the "Garden State" of next-door New Jersey.

If it ever made sense, it no longer does.  In 1940, the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy.  Today, it takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce one calorie of food energy.  Moreover, the energy involved in food production accounts for as much as 37% of greenhouse gases and contributes significantly to global warming. 

Besides, it's bad for your health.  Pollan argues that it is no accident that four of the top ten killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet:  heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and cancer.  (I read just yesterday that one in three American children are at risk for diabetes.)  Pollan:  "You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet."

How did we get here?  Government policy encouraged it.

After World War II, the government encouraged the conversion of the munitions industry to fertilizer — ammonium nitrate being the main ingredient of both bombs and chemical fertilizer — and the conversion of nerve-gas research to pesticides. The government also began subsidizing commodity crops, paying farmers by the bushel for all the corn, soybeans, wheat and rice they could produce. One secretary of agriculture after another implored them to plant “fence row to fence row” and to “get big or get out.”

The chief result, especially after the Earl Butz years, was a flood of cheap grain that could be sold for substantially less than it cost farmers to grow because a government check helped make up the difference. As this artificially cheap grain worked its way up the food chain, it drove down the price of all the calories derived from that grain: the high-fructose corn syrup in the Coke, the soy oil in which the potatoes were fried, the meat and cheese in the burger.

Pollan argues for more farmers, raising more crops.  Under current policy, grain farmers are discouraged from growing vegetables.  Farmers who receive grain subsidies are prohibited from growing "specialty crops"--fruits and vegetables, in other words.  (Produce growers worked that into the law to save themselves from competition in exchange for their support for subsidizing commodity crops.)

In fact, well-designed polyculture systems, incorporating not just grains but vegetables and animals, can produce more food per acre than conventional monocultures, and food of a much higher nutritional value. But this kind of farming is complicated and needs many more hands on the land to make it work. Farming without fossil fuels — performing complex rotations of plants and animals and managing pests without petrochemicals — is labor intensive and takes more skill than merely “driving and spraying,” which is how corn-belt farmers describe what they do for a living.

The switch to sun-based agriculture will require more farmers.  When was the last time you thought of agriculture as an area of job growth?  1790?  Agriculture will also need to become more regional--Iowans producing food more for the upper midwest and less for Florida--which will also increase the freshness and nutritional value of the food.

His other specific policy recommendations include:  more farmers' markets, agricultural enterprize zones, local meat inspection, a national strategic grain reserve, and a regional federal food procurement policy.

The new president could set the tone by putting a vegetable garden on the south lawn of the White House.  Eleanor Roosevelt planted a "victory garden" there during World War II.  (The USDA opposed the victory garden because they feared home gardening would hurt the food industry.)  By the end of the war, Americans had more than 20 million gardens at their homes, and produced 40% of the fruits and vegetables consumed in the country.

Our agenda puts the interests of America’s farmers, families and communities ahead of the fast-food industry’s. For that industry and its apologists to imply that it is somehow more “populist” or egalitarian to hand our food dollars to Burger King or General Mills than to support a struggling local farmer is absurd. Yes, sun food costs more, but the reasons why it does only undercut the charge of elitism: cheap food is only cheap because of government handouts and regulatory indulgence (both of which we will end), not to mention the exploitation of workers, animals and the environment on which its putative “economies” depend. Cheap food is food dishonestly priced — it is in fact unconscionably expensive.

Your sun-food agenda promises to win support across the aisle. It builds on America’s agrarian past, but turns it toward a more sustainable, sophisticated future. It honors the work of American farmers and enlists them in three of the 21st century’s most urgent errands: to move into the post-oil era, to improve the health of the American people and to mitigate climate change. Indeed, it enlists all of us in this great cause by turning food consumers into part-time producers, reconnecting the American people with the American land and demonstrating that we need not choose between the welfare of our families and the health of the environment — that eating less oil and more sunlight will redound to the benefit of both.

  

 

10,000 children will die of hunger today

DUBLIN, Ireland (AP)- Wealthy nations are reneging on commitments to help feed the world's hungry and may cite the banking crisis as a reason why they cannot do more, former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan told an international conference on combating starvation Thursday.

The deputy executive director of the U.N. World Food Program, Sheila Sisulu, said leaders should view the battle against malnutrition as linked to the struggle to keep the world's financial system afloat. Both, she said, promoted peace and stability.

"This voice for the hungry and poor has to be heard simultaneously alongside the crisis of the developed world, concerned about their stock portfolios," she said.

One reason the price of wheat has doubled

Mira Kamdar, in Slate, on the challenges of food production currently facing India.  Read the whole thing.  Snippet:

When the Green Revolution arrived in Punjab, the "land of five rivers," India faced chronic food shortages. A combination of massive irrigation infrastructure mandated by the Indian state, new hybrid seeds, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides boosted yields to record levels over the following decades, saving India from the specter of mass famine. With just 1.5 percent of India's land area, Punjab produces 20 percent of the country's wheat and 12 percent of its rice. It provides 60 percent of the government's reserve stocks of wheat and 40 percent of its reserves of rice, the country's buffer against starvation.

Punjab's amazing productivity made it possible for India to feed most of a growing population that tripled from 350 million when the country became independent in 1947 to more than 1.2 billion people today. In 2001, India even began to export grain, though critics claim this impressive achievement was gained at the expense of India's poor.

Only two years later, in 2003, India had to reverse the funnel and import grain, something it had not done in decades. Every year since then, India has imported more and more of its food. Panic-buying by India is credited with helping to raise the price of wheat on global markets by more than 100 percent last year, causing prices to spike around the world, from pasta in Italy to bread in Russia.

Rice field art

You don't often get to post something at both "agriculture" and "the arts."

Each year, certain farmers in Japan make new images on their field by planting rice in different patterns making various images.  They use different sorts of rice for color.

Photo:  Here.

Why biofuels contribute to high food costs

From a confidential World Bank report published first in the Guardian (UK), then salon.com.

It (the World Bank report) argues that production of biofuels has distorted food markets in three main ways. First, it has diverted grain away from food for fuel, with over a third of US corn now used to produce ethanol and about half of vegetable oils in the EU going towards the production of biodiesel. Second, farmers have been encouraged to set land aside for biofuel production. Third, it has sparked financial speculation in grains, driving prices up higher.

You know something's up when...

the New York Times starts covering the corn harvest in Indiana--front page, no less, and above the fold!  Here's why:

In a year when global harvests need to be excellent to ease the threat of pervasive food shortages, evidence is mounting that they will be average at best. Some farmers are starting to fear disaster.

As the world clamors for more corn, wheat, soybeans and rice, farmers are trying to meet the challenge. Millions of acres are coming back into production in Europe. In Asia, planting two or three crops in a single year is becoming more common.

Administration thinks food safety no big deal

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration on Friday urged a federal appeals court to stop meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease, but a skeptical judge questioned whether the government has that authority.

The government seeks to reverse a lower court ruling that allowed Kansas-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef to conduct more comprehensive testing to satisfy demand from overseas customers in Japan and elsewhere.

But Creekstone attorney Russell Frye contended the Agriculture Department's regulations covering the treatment of domestic animals contain no prohibition against an individual company testing for mad cow disease, since the test is conducted only after a cow is slaughtered. He said the agency has no authority to prevent companies from using the test to reassure customers.

"This is the government telling the consumers, `You're not entitled to this information,"' Frye said.

Chief Judge David B. Sentelle seemed to agree with Creekstone's contention that the additional testing would not interfere with agency regulations governing the treatment of animals.

Let's try to get this straight.  A private company tries to go above-and-beyond-the-call in making sure its products are safe, and the government doesn't want them to do it?