An unclean plate. Photo: doc(q)man on Flickr

You probably had a similar experience, although exactly where those hungry children were supposed to live likely has changed over the decades. For me in the fifties I think they were in India; my grandfather used to talk about “the starving Armenians”; my own children remember hearing about famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s, and for my parents’ generation, brought up in Europe in the Depression, they could have been just about anywhere.  And I suspect that children have reacted with the same skepticism for a long, long time, knowing that their eating all their dinner would do nothing to prevent starvation.

But actually, the idea underlying that perennial parental message has gotten stronger  in recent years. It’s not that there have been amazing technological advances in food teleportation, but the global food system has changed in a way that does link the plates of children around the world a bit more closely. The kids are still all right, but maybe the parents are right too.

Here’s why. The share of food production that is traded internationally has become a larger and larger share of total food production, particularly for meat, feed grains and oilseeds. Many of our basic foodstuffs — corn from the U.S., soy from the Amazon and palm oil from southeast Asia — are shipped around the world in increasingly large quantities. This has created a global world food market, in which consumption in one country affects prices in all the others.

Thus, when 30% of the U.S. corn crop goes into ethanol, it pushes prices upward and makes tortillas more expensive in Mexico. And when Americans eat 225 pounds of meat annually, it creates demand for corn, soy and other feeds, pulling up their prices as well as those of meat all around the world.

This isn’t anything complicated; it’s what economists have been explaining about supply and demand for centuries. It’s just that now, what matters is global supply and demand.

In this way, children’s dinner plates all around the planet are connected by the global food market. What we eat is part of the total demand for food that makes it cheaper or more expensive for other parents in other countries to give their kids three square meals a day.

Now, I don’t see this as reason to feel guilty, and as I’ve said in a previous post, I don’t think guilt is a very useful motivation for deciding what to eat. Anyhow, my mother’s message wasn’t that I should feel guilty about starving children elsewhere. It was that I was fortunate to be well-fed and shouldn’t be wasteful, about food or anything else. A valuable lesson to remember as we consider our country’s food policies. Happy Mother’s Day, Mom!

Herbicide-tolerant crops, the Trojan Horse of agriculture. (Photo Source: Darcy McCarty, via Flickr.)

Leafing through “Bitter Harvest” brings to mind Cassandra, the Trojan princess to whom Apollo gave the gift of prophecy and, then, retaliating because she spurned his love, placed a curse on her, ensuring that no one would believe her predictions. Cassandra warned against the gift of the Trojan horse and predicted the fall of Troy, but no one believed her. Instead of avoiding the calamities she foresaw, the Trojans marched forward to disaster.

“Bitter Harvest” looked into the wondrous gift horse of biotechnology—which in the late 1980s was supposed to deliver an agriculture without any chemicals at all—to document at least 30 crop and forest tree species modified to withstand otherwise lethal doses of herbicides. According to the report, 27 corporations had initiated HTC research. Not surprisingly, chemical pesticide companies like Monsanto and Dupont led the pack.

The early proponents of HTC’s understood that tolerant crops would shackle farmers to ongoing herbicide use, but argued that the products would contain “environmentally benign” chemicals such as glyphosate, glufosinate and bromoxynil. “Bitter Harvest” challenged the notion of benign herbicides, noting that their active and so-called inert ingredients were often toxic. More telling, the biotechnology industry was in no way restricting itself to the so-called benign herbicides. Even in the 1980s, researchers were developing crops resistant to the older, more toxic herbicides, including atrazine, metalachlor and 2,4-D.

The report nailed the resistance issue from the get go:  “Once in widespread use, the exchange of herbicide-tolerance genes between the domesticated crops and weedy relatives could ultimately result in the need for more herbicides to control herbicide-resistant weeds” and that increased chemical use would “likely increase the severity and incidence of ground and surface water contamination.”

The Road Not Taken—Sustainable Weed Management

“Bitter Harvest” also pointed to a sophisticated alternative to the HTC treadmill: sustainable weed management—smart combinations of tillage, crop rotation, cultural methods and, yes, in some cases, chemical herbicides. Sustainable weed management can keep weeds down without the inevitable generation of costly new weeds. But the approach is knowledge-dependent and would require a very different research agenda at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. With a seemingly miraculous weed control technology at hand, no one seriously considered such an alternative in the early 1990s.

But where would we be if we had developed a scientifically sound, integrated weed management system built around crop rotations, tillage systems and cover crops, and sparing use of chemicals over the last 22 years?

It’s not an easy question, especially without any predictive gifts from Apollo. But one thing is for sure, we would not be facing an inexorable explosion of super weeds and skyrocketing use of the very herbicides the tolerant crops were supposed to replace. And the National Academy of Sciences wouldn’t be holding a national weed summit to respond to this unprecedented crisis in U.S. agriculture.

We now know that inside the Trojan horse of biotechnology are just more herbicides and stronger weeds. The frustration of seeing the future but being unable to change drove Cassandra mad. I can relate.

* The report was produced by the Biotechnology Working Group, an informal coalition of environmental and agricultural groups. The authors were Rebecca Goldburg at the Environmental Defense Fund, Jane Rissler at the National Wildlife Federation, Hope Shand at Rural Advancement Fund International, and Chuck Hassebrook at the Center for Rural Affairs.

UCS has long advocated for more and better data on antibiotic use in agriculture. Frustrated with the lack of official data, we produced Hogging It more than a decade ago to fill the gap and make the point that the government wasn’t doing its job.

But UCS did not want to be in the drug data business. The major recommendations of the report were pleas for the FDA and the USDA to set up badly-needed systems to collect, compile and publish comprehensive antibiotic use data.

Ten years later we are somewhat better off. The FDA, ordered by Congress, has published two years of drug sales and distribution data, which seem to validate our use estimates. But the government has no program to comprehensively compile and regularly publish data on how those drugs are used. So, we still don’t know for sure which animals are getting which antibiotics for what purpose, or whether uses are going up or down.

The Apley report, like Hogging It  before it, steps into the breach and attempts to do what the government isn’t—calculating quantities of on-farm use. The Apley team uses methodology developed by Hogging It author Chuck Benbrook and plugs in information based on responses to a 2006 survey conducted by the National Animal Health Monitoring System (NAHMS).  It then supplements NAHMS data with survey responses from 27 veterinarians with expertise on swine.

The Apley group came up with an estimate of 2.8 million pounds per year for all uses of medically important antibiotics in swine compared to the Hogging It estimate of 10.3 million pounds for nontherapeutic use of medically important antibiotics.

The Apley report does not compare its estimates to the Hogging It, but others have. The National Pork Producers Council says the study shows “opponents of antibiotic use in livestock wildly overestimate the amount given to food animals” and suggests that Hogging It be renamed Fabricating It.

But scientifically, just because the estimates are different doesn’t mean one or the other is correct.

Both estimates are admittedly imperfect. UCS was very upfront about the limits of the numbers in Hogging It. And so is the Apley paper. The authors of the paper (admirably) check for accuracy by consulting three companies of swine-only feed additives. Two said their sales in 2006 were close to the numbers calculated by the paper, but one said that the study’s estimate represented only 40 percent of its sales–off by more than 100 percent. If the estimates for any heavily used drug are off by that much, it would make a big difference in the total estimate.

The differences in the two estimates could also reflect changes in industry use from the late 1990s to 2006. I have been told privately for years that pork producers have reduced antibiotic use. Maybe it’s true.

On the other hand, very low numbers for use in the swine industry are hard to square with the sales figures compiled by FDA, which report 28 million pounds of animal antimicrobials in 2009. That number, which covers both medically important and non-medically important antimicrobials for all uses, is consistent with the Hogging  It number of 24 million pounds for swine, poultry and beef for non-therapeutic purposes.

In a letter to Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, FDA broke out the total data  for 2009  by mode of administration, reporting that 22 million pounds of antimicrobials were being used in feed; the rest was being given by water or injection. If only 13 percent (2.8 of 22 million) of the total in feed drugs sold in the United States is being used in swine, what is happening to the other 87 percent? What are those poultry and beef folks up to?

Moreover, the Apley team reported that growth promotion and disease prevention account for only 57 percent of the in-feed use in swine—much lower than earlier estimates of 90 percent for those uses.

Long term, neither the Union of Concerned Scientists nor Kansas State University ought to be in the data collection business. Neither has the resources or mission to collect data year after year, employing a standard methodology and sophisticated surveying techniques. This is a job for the federal government, specifically the USDA and FDA working together.

We won’t know whether the Apley or the UCS estimates are more representative of actual use until we can compare them to comprehensive, government-generated data. Rather than throwing around epithets, we should all be united behind that goal.

The risky business of farming

More than most businesses, farming is chock-full of risks—from crazy spring freezes to killer summer droughts and late season floods, not to mention the occasional plague of locusts. Crop insurance is how farmers protect their businesses and their families from bankruptcy in the face of such devastating risks. But it turns out that farmers who grow fruits and vegetables—the most beneficial foods for our health and well-being—by and large can’t get crop insurance.

That’s because Congress and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) offer federally subsidized crop insurance primarily for big commodity crops including corn and soybeans, which are grown in large part as ingredients for processed foods. A small number of large-scale fruit and vegetable producers, including California tomato growers and Florida citrus growers, can also get insurance. But most small farmers growing fruits and vegetables—as well as many organic farmers—are out of luck. And USDA-backed crop insurance is the only game in town.

Does it seem crazy to subsidize processed foods rather than healthy food and farms? UCS thinks so. That’s why this week we released Ensuring the Harvest: Crop Insurance and Credit for a Healthy Farm and Food Future.

Insuring the whole plate

Our report finds that lack of access to crop insurance is a major barrier for farmers across the country who want to grow more of the very foods the USDA’s nutrition experts tell us should fill up half our plates every day. One such farmer is Jack Hedin, who owns and operates Featherstone Farm near Rushford, Minnesota. This certified organic farm produces a diverse mix of vegetables—45 different crops in all—for sale to produce wholesalers, natural food stores, and direct to consumers as part of a community based agriculture (CSA) arrangement. Since its founding in the mid-90s, the farm has grown from three acres to more than 160, and now generates sales of about $1.5 million per year.

But as Jack wrote in an op-ed this week, USDA’s restrictions mean that all 45 of Featherstone Farm’s valuable crops will be uninsured this growing season, as they have been every previous year. That includes 2007, when massive flooding nearly wiped out Jack’s operation while nearby corn growers got insurance checks to cover their losses.

I asked my colleague Jeffrey O’Hara, economist and author of our report, whether there’s any downside to insure crops on diversified, “healthy food farms” like Jack’s.

His answer:

Absolutely not! These kinds of farmers actually pose a lower insurance risk than farmers who grow just one crop. That’s because diversification on the farm—just like in the stock market—protects against risk. In this case, the risks are crop-specific pests and diseases and weather damage at particular times in the growing season.

And there are real nutrition and economic benefits to be gained by leveling the crop insurance for small- and medium-sized “healthy food” farms—the kinds of farms responsible for the salad greens, asparagus, and strawberries popping up at local farmers markets right now. Studies (like this one) have shown that people eat more fruits and vegetables when they shop at farmers markets, so expanding those systems is an important step to help Americans eat better. And Ensuring the Harvest found that if we all ate enough fruits and vegetables to meet the USDA’s dietary guidelines, local food sales could increase to as much as $14.5 billion a year (from $5 billion currently) and generate as many as 189,000 new jobs.

Would you drive an uninsurable car?

With apologies to my automotive-minded UCS colleagues, just imagine if today’s crop insurance logic were applied to car insurance. I drive a hybrid because I believe it’s important to conserve fuel and minimize pollution. But what if drivers of hybrid and electric cars were denied auto insurance? Could I afford to drive my Prius if couldn’t insure it against damage or theft? Why would we penalize cleaner, healthier cars?

Such a tradeoff sounds ridiculous, but it’s one farmers across America face every year.

Back at Featherstone Farm, Jack Hedin reports that even after years of double-digit growth, he still can’t meet regional demand for his fresh organic vegetables. He’d like to scale up—which would create local jobs and keep more Minnesota food dollars in the state. But without whole farm revenue insurance, he can’t do it. It’s just too risky.

Just like the world needs less pollution from our tailpipes, it also needs less processed junk food, and by extension, more healthy foods. We should subsidize—and insure—the healthy harvest we need.

Are farmers markets opening for the season in your community? Leave us a comment about the healthy foods you’re buying there, and why you think they should get crop insurance in the farm bill Congress will write this year. You can also weigh in directly with your members of Congress here.

Cooler Smarter urges all Americans to cut back on their global warming emissions by 20 percent this year and offers a menu of practical steps to reach that goal. As the book points out, you can make the biggest difference by first choosing to drive a fuel-efficient car and reduce home energy use. Next on the list, however, is what you eat—and when it comes to food, meat is the biggest climate offender.

Meat and Global Warming Emissions

It turns that the food sector accounts for 14 percent of U.S. global warming emissions and most of that is due to meat. Why is meat such a problem? Let’s start with beef, a trifecta of bad news on the warming front.

Happy cows grazing at the boyhood home of President Thomas Jefferson in Virgina. (Photo by Lance Cheung. Courtesy of USDA)

First, the stomach design that allows cows to digest raw plant materials makes them belch out methane, a gas that has 21 times more heat-trapping potential than carbon dioxide.

Second, although capable of thriving on grass, cows are are often gathered into confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and fed corn to fatten them up quickly. It takes about 7 pounds of grain to produce one pound of grain-fed beef and the emissions generated in corn production are part of the global warming tally for cows.

Finally, cows in CAFOs produce huge amounts of manure stored on site in piles or lagoons. When manure breaks down, even more methane is produced—yes, by a process similar to what goes on in a cow’s stomach.

Add all that up and it’s no surprise that cows have an outsized impact on global warming. In fact, a pound of beef is responsible for some 18 times the climate emissions of a pound of pasta.

Other meats, chicken and pork, are better choices than beef. Poultry and swine consume grain or other plant food but convert it into meat more efficiently than can cows. Also, their digestive systems don’t produce methane, a big climate plus. Poultry and swine, like cows, are often raised in CAFO’s where stored manure can generate methane, but on balance they are probably “cooler” choices than beef.

You Don’t Need to Become a Vegetarian

We Americans eat a lot of meat…on average 270 pounds per year, nearly 4 times the global average. You don’t need to become a vegetarian or a vegan to make a difference to the climate, just cut down on the amount of meat you eat. Think about something like meatless Mondays. They’ll add up.

What About Pasture-Raised Animals?

Since stored manure produces methane, you might wonder about choosing pasture-raised animals as a climate strategy.

While climate benefits fall on the positive side of the ledger, they may not be the most dramatic environmental benefits of pasture-based operations. According to Raising the Steaks, a recent report by my colleague Doug Gurian-Sherman, pasture-raised animals spread their own manure and so avoid the methane emission produced by stored manure. And well-managed pastures have the potential to sequester substantial amounts of carbon in soil, reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

But whether on pasture or in a feedlot, cows belch methane. In addition, cows (and pigs and chickens) raised in pasture-based systems often take somewhat longer to get to market, and so may generate more climate gasses per pound of meat.

Pasture-raised animals have other benefits. They are so healthy they rarely need antibiotics, providing compelling benefits to public health, and pasture systems can also substantially reduce air and water pollution. (Raising the Steaks)

So yes, pasture-raised beef, pork and chicken are probably cooler choices than CAFO-raised beef. But, sad to say for carnivores, the best way to take a bite out of climate change is to reduce meat consumption, especially beef.

Lots of tourists visit Washington in the spring, and many of them visit the White House, the Capitol, the famous monuments or the Smithsonian museums. But few do as much good for the planet as did Girl Scouts Rhiannon Tomtishen and Madison Vorva. Supported by UCS and Climate Advisers, they talked about their campaign to influential members of Congress, State Department negotiators, and the Director of the Environmental Protection Agency — all in a single day.

Rhiannon and Madi visited Senator Carl Levin, who was very impressed with their campaign

They started with their Michigan Senators, Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow (who chairs the Agriculture Committee) and with their Representatives John Dingell and Thaddeus McCotter and were met with great praise for their hard work and the honor they brought to Michigan with their accomplishments. They also met with staffers and members of Congress from the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to raise more awareness about the environmental and social aspects of palm oil production around the globe.

The girls also made a special stop by some of the offices of the members of Girl Scout Troop Capitol Hill to share their story and offer them the chance to earn “Rainforest Hero” badges for their vests.

At the State Department, Rhiannon and Madi met with US climate/forest negotiator Christine Dragisic (far left) and other officials

Following their meetings on Capitol Hill, the girls then traveled to the State Department to talk with staffers covering Indonesia, Malaysia, Colombia, international environmental issues, forests, and human rights. This group included Christine Dragisic, who negotiates forest issues and REDD+ for the U.S. in the international climate talks.

Rhiannon and Madi met with EPA Director Lisa Jackson at her office

The girls ended the day by sitting down with EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to receive her congratulations and discuss palm oil with her in more detail. This was an especially timely meeting because the EPA is in the process of finalizing its analysis of palm oil-based biofuels, and its draft analysis shows that because of the deforestation and draining of peat land, palm oil-based biofuels do not meet even the basic requirements for the U.S. renewable fuels program.

However, the palm oil industry is making a strong effort to reverse this in the final EPA decision. UCS got a taste of their tactics when our outreach coordinator Sarah Roquemore nominated Rhiannon and Madi for the United Nations’ first ever Forest Hero award — and they won!

In response, the “American Palm Oil Council” — which despite its red-white-and-blue-sounding name, actually is the DC lobbying arm of the Malaysian palm oil industry — wrote our Executive Director Kathy Rest a letter in which they claimed flatly that “Palm oil plantations are not the cause of deforestation.” Concerning Madi and Rhiannon, they complained that “These Girl Scouts have been nominated for bringing international attention to the alleged threat palm oil production in Indonesia and Malaysia poses to orangutans and tropical forests. These individuals have suggested that Malaysia does not produce sustainable palm oil. This inaccurately represents the Malaysia palm oil industry.”

So who’s right — the Michigan Girl Scouts or the palm oil industry’s lobbyists? Well, a new scientific paper just published in Global Change Biology – Bioenergy,  based on detailed satellite monitoring, makes the answer pretty clear. The authors, using detailed satellite photos going back over 20 years, showed how industrial plantations in southeast Asia — 69% of which are for palm oil — have expanded rapidly in recent years.

This is particularly bad when the plantations are established by clearing forests on peat soils, because peat contains very large amounts of carbon, which is released to the atmosphere and causes global warming. The new Mietennen et al. paper shows that in the Malaysian part of Borneo (Sabah and Sarawak), about a third of the peat swamps have already been lost to plantations. The rate of loss has actually been increasing in the overall region, so that between 233 and 311 million tons of CO2 annually are now being emitted because of plantation expansion onto peat. The authors also point out that “This deforestation rate of nearly 4% per year substantially exceeds earlier analyses of historical and projected forest losses (e.g. Hooijer et al., 2006) and is indeed dramatically higher than deforestation levels generally around the world ….”

Looks like the science is on the side of the Girl Scouts. You can support their campaign, and for more information, see our recent report on how the vegetable oil industry can and should become deforestation-free. And if you’d like to find out more about palm oil biodiesel and weigh in on the EPA’s decision, click here to submit comments.

This is part of a series on Cooler Smarter: Practical Steps for Low-Carbon Living.

Take the 20% challenge at CoolerSmarter.org

 

All of the authors on the team will be blogging about our findings in the coming weeks but, to start off, I’m turning this space over to our colleague and the book’s lead author, Seth Shulman. Seth has already written five books on the politics and history of science and innovation and their effects on our lives. Read on to learn about what we found and what this latest book meant to him.

Global Warming: Do Individual Choices Matter?

Seth Shulman, senior staff writer, Union of Concerned Scientists

If you had asked me that question just a year ago, I probably would have expressed skepticism. I have covered climate change as a science journalist for more than two decades and care deeply about the issue. But I’ve always thought of it as problem to be solved on the national or international level. So, like many people, I have spent a lot of time dismayed that our leaders haven’t been taking action commensurate with what is suggested by the latest scientific evidence, but relatively little time thinking about what I might do about the problem in my own life, thinking—wrongly, it turns out—that my actions were too inconsequential to make much of a difference.

But then my colleagues at the Union of Concerned Scientists asked me to join a project they had already been working on for some time: an in-depth examination of the most effective steps individuals can take to combat global warming. The project has profoundly changed the way I think about the issue. It has opened my eyes to just how easy it is for most Americans like me to make some simple changes to use energy more efficiently and thereby significantly lower our emissions. What’s more, it has shown me what a surprisingly big difference these changes can make when adopted widely.

Reduce Your Carbon Emissions 20% This Year

Our new book, Cooler Smarter: Practical Steps for Low-Carbon Living, has just been published by Island Press, the result of UCS’s two years of research on the subject by a crack team that included climate scientists, technical experts, and economists. The book challenges each of us, no matter what our circumstances, to reduce our emissions by 20 percent in the coming year—an achievable and meaningful first step—and it offers a menu of strategies to get the job done. (We’ve even developed a website that you can use to reduce your footprint by 20 percent.)

Cooler Smarter is chock full of information including some surprises about which of our actions matter most (many details about those to come). To get the answers, our experts painstakingly tracked both the direct and indirect emissions resulting from every dollar spent by U.S. consumers, analyzing the climate impact of our decisions on hundreds of topics from home insulation to diet. But let me start by sharing the big picture results.

Your Carbon Emissions and What Matters Most

The average American is responsible for emitting a whopping 21 tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually. To give that number some perspective, that’s more for each one of us than an average car would emit driving around the world at the equator.

The average American is responsible for 21 tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide split between five major categories.

On a per capita basis, Americans emit almost four times more carbon dioxide than the global average, and twice as much as citizens do in places like France or Japan with a standard of living similar to our own. That’s a lot of carbon. But here’s the good news: There’s no question Americans can use energy more efficiently—without breaking much of a sweat. Many of the suggestions in Cooler Smarter will save you money, others are great long-term investments, and some will even improve your health. And they are easier to implement than you might think.

The figure to the right shows the breakdown of the Average American’s emissions into five major categories which pretty much boil down to: the car you drive, the way you heat and cool your home, the electricity you use, the food you eat, and the stuff you buy.

You Can Make a Real Difference

If you are skeptical that changes in these categories can make a difference (as I once was) consider this: If everyone in the country cut their overall emissions by just 20 percent, it would be like shuttering 200 of the nation’s 600 coal fired power plants. Let me say that again: It would be like saying goodbye to ONE THIRD of our nation’s most-polluting sources of energy which could make an enormous difference to global warming.

But I’ll give you another example of the kind of difference these changes can make that’s a lot more personal. Among my many former wasteful habits, I used to leave the laser printer in my home office turned on 24/7, again figuring that it didn’t make much of a difference. Cooler Smarter has taught me that just hitting that single “off button” on that single one of my many gadgets will save me more than $130 per year on my electric bill. It’s just one of many easy changes I’ve already made on my path to a 20 percent reduction in my emissions that are actually helping my wallet and the planet at the same time.

Cooler Smarter gives you the tools you need to lower your emissions in each of the categories above and also offers techniques to help you inspire your friends, family, neighbors, and coworkers to do the same. Individual action alone can never replace the need to press for changes on the state, national, and international levels. But our leaders won’t be compelled to change unless we as citizens show them we value a low-carbon future and take action in our own lives. In other words, I’ve rekindled my understanding that on this issue, like so many others, we need to work for change from the bottom up and the top down. You can learn more, use our tools to help you reduce your emissions by 20 percent—and pick up a copy of the book —by visiting our website www.coolersmarter.org.

Seth Shulman is senior staff writer at UCS, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, and co-author of Cooler Smarter.

However, in the last few years I’ve started to think about what I eat, and why. I’ve spent most of my scientific career studying tropical forests and agricultural ecology, and have realized that farms and forests are interdependent, and that both are intimately tied to what we eat. Food is not just necessary or tasty or an occasion for socializing; it’s also our connection to global agriculture, and through agriculture to the transformation of the planet’s ecosystems. Choosing what kind of food we eat is part of choosing what kind of world we want to live in.

So, here’s what I think are five good reasons to eat food – not just any food, but making choices to eat some kinds rather than others. And also, one reason that I don’t think is so good, at least by itself.

1. Stopping Deforestation

In a 120-page report we did last year on the drivers of deforestation, we found that today, it’s the expansion of commercial agriculture that’s the main cause of tropical deforestation. And not just any agriculture, but particular kinds – e.g. beef cattle and soybean growing in the Amazon, and palm oil plantations in southeast Asia. In our globalized world economy, eating these foods, or the foods one step further along the food chain from them (e.g. baked goods containing palm oil, or livestock that are fattened on soy meal) increases the demand for them and thus stimulates their expansion.

2. Reducing Global Warming Pollution

The tropical deforestation associated with these foods is the source of about 15% of global warming pollution, but about the same amount comes directly from agriculture. Ruminants – i.e. animals like cows that digest plants in a special digestive organ, the “rumen” – emit large amounts of methane, a global warming pollutant that is about 25 times stronger than CO₂ on a per-molecule basis. (It comes out of both the front and hind ends of the cow, and from their manure as well.) This means that beef consumption is a multiple cause of global warming – from deforestation for pasture, from deforestation for soy as a cattle feed, and from the cows themselves.

3. Improving My Health

Beef has expanded in Amazonia, causing deforestation and global warming pollution as well as a cost to human health. Photo: Rhett Butler, Mongabay.com

This is probably the best-known reason for choosing some foods over others, and there’s more and more medical evidence that backs it up. You don’t need to go exclusively organic or become a vegetarian (and I’m not); even simple changes within a conventional U.S. diet can make quite a difference. Not to pick on beef in this posting, but a 20-year study involving over 100,000 Americans was just published a few weeks ago, and showed that the more red meat you eat, the higher your risks of heart disease, cancer and dying.

4. Protecting Farmers’ and Farm Workers’ Health

Since Rachel Carson published Silent Spring fifty years ago, we’ve realized the threat from pesticides in what we eat, but sometimes we forget that if there are dangerous amounts that got into the food, there must have been a lot more applied in the fields in which that food was grown. In fact, farming is one of the most dangerous occupations there is, and pesticides are one of the reasons. As you’d expect, farm workers who apply pesticides are especially vulnerable. So to me, the biggest reason to look for organic food is not for my own health; it’s for the health of those who produced the food for me.

Birds like coffee that is made in the shade. Photo: biodiversitywind on Flickr.com

5. Protecting Habitat for Birds

So far most of this has been about foods I’m eating less of, but there are also positive choices you can make. Shade-grown coffee, which creates a habitat similar to a forest, has a lot more biodiversity than coffee grown without shade. It’s a habitat where many of the songbirds that are now appearing at our feeders have been spending the winter. If it’s not only certified as “bird-friendly” but organic and fair-trade too, then buying it helps not just warblers but people too.

And a not-so-good reason

And finally, a reason that I’m not all that convinced about: so I won’t feel guilty. I have nothing against being innocent, but really, it’s not about me. It’s about the planet and its people and all the wonderful critters with whom we share it. So, while it’s nice, although currently difficult, to find and buy palm-oil-free cookies in the grocery store, it’s even more helpful to support the great campaign led by Girl Scouts Madison Vorva and Rhiannon Tomtishen for deforestation-free cookies. Choosing food as if the planet mattered is good, but joining with others to change it is even better!

Spraying pesticide onto apple trees. USDA photo by Keith Weller.

But pest resistance also raises important questions about the harmful influence of the biotech industry over regulators. It is not incidental that resistance is rapidly increasing to pesticides used on GE crops. It is due in large part to the unprecedented use of the herbicide glyphosate on these crops, and the high use of Bt, which drives pest resistance. But resistance is is also due to bad policies that are the result, in part, of regulators listening too closely to industry.

In a post about increasing insect resistance to Bt, Dan Charles covers some of this important back story about these crops. But a recent NPR post by Charles on herbicide resistant weeds leaves out some of the important reasons why we are facing these problems. That post briefly revisits the history of weed resistance to glyphosate herbicide. Unfortunately it gives a one-sided version of what has occurred, relying solely on Monsanto sources to explain why the company got it so wrong when they predicted that weeds were highly unlikely to develop resistance to glyphosate.

So let’s fill in a few of the blanks.

First, to hear Monsanto interviewees tell it, one would think that there was unanimity among scientists at the time that resistance was as unlikely as the sun failing to shine.

To the contrary, weed scientists like Stephen Powles and colleagues noted back in 1998—two years before the first resistant weeds appeared in glyphosate-tolerant crops—that precautions should be taken to prevent glyphosate resistance. Powles and his colleagues wrote that “It would be prudent to accept that resistance can occur to this highly valuable herbicide and to encourage glyphosate use patterns within integrated strategies that do not impose a strong selection pressure for resistance.”

Industry Roadblocks

The reasons why Powles’ recommendations were not enacted are complicated. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been hesitant about requiring resistance management. But it did so for Bt crops with considerable success, because it considered Bt to be a special social good. Weed scientists, though, have a similar view of glyphosate, with some calling it a once in a century chemical.

EPA’s reticence does not prevent the industry from proactively preserving useful chemicals, and it could be argued that it would be in their interest to maintain sales of these products as long as possible. But all means for reducing resistance in weeds involve using less of a herbicide now, and more of other types of weed control, and to sacrifice some short-term profit for longer-term sustainability. And that is something companies such as Monsanto or DuPont don’t like to do. Companies discount the future value of products compared to current value and profits. For example, future sales are often reduced by competitors coming into the market with their own products. So companies view this as a “bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” situation. Using sustainable practices also does not consider the pressure for high short-term profits by publicly held companies.

Monsanto’s efforts over the years have actually been just the opposite of good stewardship and the sustainable use of glyphosate. It has actively argued, for example through advertisements to farmers, to keep the herbicide spray nozzles wide open rather than advocating practices that could have forestalled or reduced the rise of resistant weeds. Because of this, the company was taken to task by numerous weed scientists.

This is a crucial piece of the story, because it demonstrates one more reason why we need effective and strong regulatory policies to protect the public good. And why we need to listen less to companies and more to independent scientists.

Charles’ story ends by quoting his Monsanto sources saying that even if resistance may have been predictable (it was!), perhaps nothing could have been done about it. This ignores the largely successful resistance management of Bt under the direction of U.S. EPA, which could have served, very broadly, as a model for glyphosate-resistant crops. EPA even had an internal process to develop a voluntary resistance management system for pesticides that was ultimately scuttled by industry. It also ignores the pleadings of weed scientists over the years to take actions, which were well known, to slow resistance. Although there have been some serious failings with the program for Bt, such as poor compliance or EPA caving in to industry requests for a watered-down program, scientists credit it with delaying or preventing resistance of several insect pests.

Protecting Sales Instead of the Public Good

The best resistance management involves using long crop rotations, cover crops, mulches, and similar practices, along with minimal use of pesticides where needed. This greatly reduces pest numbers, is highly productive, and can be economically successful. These practices are being advocated more and more by mainstream scientists.

But you won’t hear this discussed by the Monsanto employees interviewed by Charles. These ecologically sound practices would, by design, drastically reduce amount of pesticides used. So these practices would work directly against the narrow interests of companies like Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, or Bayer, that dominate the pesticide and GE seed industries, and wield undue influence over regulators.

Agroecological farming might also threaten the economic viability of genetic engineering. Development of an engineered crop trait is very expensive, about $136 million on average according to a recent industry report. That is one reason why most GE crops so far are big-acreage row crops like corn, soybeans, and cotton. But the value of many of these traits would be greatly reduced when used in truly sustainable agroecological systems, because pest infestations would be much lower and cause much less damage. It would be hard for companies to charge farmers the very high prices for seed they do now, because they would have less value where pests are less of a problem. And without those high prices, it is unclear whether the companies could afford to develop these seeds.

One of my favorite discoveries this time was the Chelsea Market. One hundred years ago, this sprawling warehouse complex was home to the National Biscuit Company’s bakeries, and birthplace of the Oreo cookie. Today, it houses a wide variety of food purveyors, many of them focused on bringing locally produced ingredients to New Yorkers’ tables.

The contrast between the ubiquitous mass-produced sandwich cookie and the local and organic produce, meats, and other foods for sale at today’s Chelsea Market is striking. It feels symbolic of the choice our country’s food and farm policy-makers face at this moment.

The author’s local and organic birthday lunch—chicken liver pate with spiced pickled pears, and roasted beet salad—at The Green Table in New York's Chelsea Market.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not a purist. I enjoy the occasional Oreo as much as the next person. (Okay, maybe more.)

Still, I wish that locally grown beets received the sort of incentives that our current farm policies lavish on the heavily-processed cookie’s ingredients.

Toward Healthy Food and Farms

This year, we can make that wish a reality.

This morning, Senate Agriculture Committee Chair Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) is convening a hearing on the topic of healthy food initiatives, local production, and nutrition. It will feature testimony from the Secretary of Agriculture, the president of Detroit’s Eastern Market Corporation, and Walmart’s Senior Director of Local Sourcing and Sustainable Agriculture.

Also this morning, UCS is releasing its Farm Bill platform and policy priorities. The documents spell out what’s wrong with our current food policies, documenting, for example, that the USDA paid out more than $5 billion in subsidies for just two processed-food and animal-feed crops—corn and soybeans—in 2010. By contrast, subsidies for all fruits and vegetables amount to only about 7 percent of what corn and soy receive.

Our platform also outlines exactly what we think Congress and the USDA should do this year to ensure a healthier, more sustainable food future.

In particular, we support farm policies that will:

• Expand the production and accessibility of healthy food, through increased investments in local food systems; expanded incentives for fruits, vegetables, and organic foods of all kinds; and an improved “safety net” for farmers who grow such foods and who farm in environmentally friendly ways.
• Increase farmers’ adoption of sustainable agriculture and conservation practices that protect soil, water, human health, and ecosystems.
• Ramp up publicly-funded research to improve and expand modern, sustainable food and farm systems.

Check out all the specifics at www.ucsusa.org/foodandfarmpolicy.

And join the conversation. What’s your #1 food policy priority? Tell us in the comments below.