Three Challenges To Sustainabilty
By Arty Mangan on Jan 13, 2011
http://www.bioneers.org/campaigns/food-farming-1/blog/three-challenges-to-sustainabilty
The dominant systems in place today- energy, food, agriculture, economy, education etc.- are unsustainable, and so by definition will fail. What are some of the obstacles to designing long-term, truly sustainable systems and how do we overcome them?
Food Label Lies: How to Sort Truth From Hype
by Lisa Gosselin, Eating Well Magazine, via The Huffington Post,
http://organicconnectmag.com/wp/2010/10/food-label-lies-how-to-sort-truth-from-hype-2/
I live in Vermont. I have cows and goats as neighbors. I buy chickens from the farm a mile down my road. I’m the editor of EatingWell Magazine, for pete’s sake, which champions wholesome, local food and healthy eating. So you would think I’d know what terms like “all natural” mean. Especially when “All Natural” appears on a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, which is made exactly 10.3 miles away from my house.
Welcome to the food deserts of rural America
by Steph Larsen 22 Jan 2011 6:00 AM
http://www.grist.org/article/2011-01-21-welcome-to-the-food-deserts-of-rural-america
The paradox of our unhealthy food system is that many rural towns lack healthy food access, even as the food we eat is grown in rural places. To put it simply, our current food system is failing the very communities that grow our food... So how is it possible that people in farm country have a hard time finding food? In short, it's complicated.
There are lots of ideas out there, from the Rural Grocery Initiative at Kansas State University to federal resources laid out on the Center for Rural Affairs page on rural food access to news stories and inspiring videos about a 17-year-old who saved the grocery store in Truman, Minn.
Rural communities need entrepreneurial skills to start and run a successful business. They also need young and energetic farmers willing to grow food and teach others how to do the same.
Food-cost shocks ripple worldwide from Iowa
10:20 PM, Jan. 29, 2011
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20110130/BUSINESS/101300340/Food-cost-shocks-ripple-worldwide-from-Iowa?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|Frontpage
Shoppers who have seen hamburger prices increase as much as 10 percent in recent months will pay even more for burgers, steaks and other meat products as a result of a commodities boom that is putting money in Iowa farmers' pockets while it rocks the rest of the world.
One estimate has meat prices rising 4 percent this year. Food cost increases in 2011 are likely to jolt consumers because they follow a three-year period of flat or declining prices.
The higher prices are the result of decreased supply and increased demand. As U.S. cattle and hog herds have reached their smallest levels since 1958, export demand has risen by as much as 50 percent in recent months. Another factor is an 85 percent increase since last summer in the price of corn, a commodity that is economically and emotionally symbolic to Iowa because it is the prime feedstock for cattle and hogs.
[and... who's pushing this?]
USAID Administrator Highlights Private Sector Partnerships to Reduce Hunger and Poverty at the World Economic Forum
http://www.usaid.gov/press/releases/2011/pr110128.html
WASHINGTON, DC – At the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland USAID Administrator Dr. Rajiv Shah gathered with the CEOs of Unilever and Monsanto to support the launch of WEF's global framework titled "Realizing a New Vision for Agriculture." The show of support emphasizes USAID's leadership in creating synergies between the public and private sectors to meet the global food security challenge.
Championed by 17 global companies and supported by key public and civil-society leaders, the New Vision framework outlines priorities and examples to illustrate the role businesses can play in meeting global food and nutrition needs through accelerated, sustainable agriculture-led growth. Through the U.S. Government's Feed the Future initiative, the New Vision for Agriculture will aim to leverage private-sector investment to scale up agricultural growth in food-insecure countries. The 17 global companies that champion the initiative are: Archer Daniels Midland, BASF, Bunge, Cargill, The Coca-Cola Company, DuPont, General Mills, Kraft Foods, Metro, Monsanto Company, Nestlé, PepsiCo, SABMiller, Syngenta, Unilever, Wal-Mart Stores and Yara International.
Water Is Life
By Arty Mangan on Jun 22, 2010
http://www.bioneers.org/campaigns/food-farming-1/blog/water-is-life
Ethics and economics compete for fair distribution of water among people, industry & ecosystems as rural New Mexico communities and Central Valley California farmers face serious challenges.
Living on the land deals with local food security, intensive home & market growing, organic soil building, sustainable resources, healthy food & animals, & more. Our email discussion list is at http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/livingontheland . Inaction is not an option.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Food Price Bubble? grow your own
An era of cheap food may be drawing to a close
Reuters poll: Higher grain prices will persist, spurring more global unrest
updated 1/30/2011 1:36:58 PM ET
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41311106/ns/business-retail/from/toolbar
U.S. grain prices should stay unrelentingly high this year, according to a Reuters poll, the latest sign that the era of cheap food has come to an end. U.S. corn, soybeans and wheat prices -- which surged by as much has 50 percent last year and hit their highest levels since mid-2008 -- will dip by at most 5 percent by the end of 2011, according to the poll of 16 analysts.
The forecasts suggest no quick relief for nations bedeviled by record high food costs that have stoked civil unrest. It means any extreme weather event in a grains-producing part of the world could send prices soaring further. The expectations may also strengthen importers' resolve to build bigger inventories after a year in which stocks of corn and soybeans in the United States -- the world's top exporter -- dwindled to their lowest level in decades.
Rampant Speculation Inflated Food Price Bubble
By Stephen Leahy
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=54274
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Jan 28, 2011 (IPS) - Billions of dollars are being made by investors in a speculative "food bubble" that's created record food prices, starving millions and destabilising countries, experts now conclude.
Wall Street investment firms and banks, along with their kin in London and Europe, were responsible for the technology dot-com bubble, the stock market bubble, and the recent U.S. and UK housing bubbles. They extracted enormous profits and their bonuses before the inevitable collapse of each.
Now they've turned to basic commodities. The result? At a time when there has been no significant change in the global food supply or in food demand, the average cost of buying food shot up 32 percent from June to December 2010, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Nothing but price speculation can explain wheat prices jumping 70 percent from June to December last year when global wheat stocks were stable, experts say.
"There is no food shortage in the world. Food is simply priced out of the reach of the world's poorest people," said Robert Fox of Oxfam Canada in reference to the estimated one billion people who go hungry. "Hunger is not a food production problem. It is an income problem," Fox told IPS.
The conditions that created the 2007-08 price hike and food riots have not changed, he said. It is no surprise to see record-high food prices and riots again in Egypt, Algeria, Jordan and elsewhere.
Weather used to be the big determinant of food prices, but not anymore. Trillions of dollars have been pumped into food commodities markets in the last few years thanks to deregulation of commodities trading in the U.S., reports Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.
In an analysis of the food price crisis of 2007-08, De Schutter documents how the U.S. government passed legislation in 2000 deregulating the food commodity markets and for the first time permitted speculation on speculation.
Here's how it used to work. In January, Farmer Brown would sign a contract to sell his 2011 future crop to a grain trader like industry giant Cargill for 100 dollars a tonne. In the fall, Cargill would then sell Farmer Brown's grain at whatever price they could get to a bakery or feedlot company for cattle. These "futures" contracts insulated both the farmer and the grain trader from wild price fluctuations.
Now, after the passage of the U.S. Commodity Futures Modernisation Act in 2000, Cargill could sell Farmer's Brown "futures" contract to an investment bank on Wall Street for 120 dollars a tonne, who could in turn sell it to a European investment company for 150 dollars a tonne and then sell it to a U.S. public pension fund for 175 dollars a tonne and so on. Add in some complex financial instruments like 'derivatives', 'index funds', 'hedges', and 'swaps', and food become part of yet another highly-profitable speculative bubble.
Reuters poll: Higher grain prices will persist, spurring more global unrest
updated 1/30/2011 1:36:58 PM ET
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41311106/ns/business-retail/from/toolbar
U.S. grain prices should stay unrelentingly high this year, according to a Reuters poll, the latest sign that the era of cheap food has come to an end. U.S. corn, soybeans and wheat prices -- which surged by as much has 50 percent last year and hit their highest levels since mid-2008 -- will dip by at most 5 percent by the end of 2011, according to the poll of 16 analysts.
The forecasts suggest no quick relief for nations bedeviled by record high food costs that have stoked civil unrest. It means any extreme weather event in a grains-producing part of the world could send prices soaring further. The expectations may also strengthen importers' resolve to build bigger inventories after a year in which stocks of corn and soybeans in the United States -- the world's top exporter -- dwindled to their lowest level in decades.
Rampant Speculation Inflated Food Price Bubble
By Stephen Leahy
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=54274
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Jan 28, 2011 (IPS) - Billions of dollars are being made by investors in a speculative "food bubble" that's created record food prices, starving millions and destabilising countries, experts now conclude.
Wall Street investment firms and banks, along with their kin in London and Europe, were responsible for the technology dot-com bubble, the stock market bubble, and the recent U.S. and UK housing bubbles. They extracted enormous profits and their bonuses before the inevitable collapse of each.
Now they've turned to basic commodities. The result? At a time when there has been no significant change in the global food supply or in food demand, the average cost of buying food shot up 32 percent from June to December 2010, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Nothing but price speculation can explain wheat prices jumping 70 percent from June to December last year when global wheat stocks were stable, experts say.
"There is no food shortage in the world. Food is simply priced out of the reach of the world's poorest people," said Robert Fox of Oxfam Canada in reference to the estimated one billion people who go hungry. "Hunger is not a food production problem. It is an income problem," Fox told IPS.
The conditions that created the 2007-08 price hike and food riots have not changed, he said. It is no surprise to see record-high food prices and riots again in Egypt, Algeria, Jordan and elsewhere.
Weather used to be the big determinant of food prices, but not anymore. Trillions of dollars have been pumped into food commodities markets in the last few years thanks to deregulation of commodities trading in the U.S., reports Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.
In an analysis of the food price crisis of 2007-08, De Schutter documents how the U.S. government passed legislation in 2000 deregulating the food commodity markets and for the first time permitted speculation on speculation.
Here's how it used to work. In January, Farmer Brown would sign a contract to sell his 2011 future crop to a grain trader like industry giant Cargill for 100 dollars a tonne. In the fall, Cargill would then sell Farmer Brown's grain at whatever price they could get to a bakery or feedlot company for cattle. These "futures" contracts insulated both the farmer and the grain trader from wild price fluctuations.
Now, after the passage of the U.S. Commodity Futures Modernisation Act in 2000, Cargill could sell Farmer's Brown "futures" contract to an investment bank on Wall Street for 120 dollars a tonne, who could in turn sell it to a European investment company for 150 dollars a tonne and then sell it to a U.S. public pension fund for 175 dollars a tonne and so on. Add in some complex financial instruments like 'derivatives', 'index funds', 'hedges', and 'swaps', and food become part of yet another highly-profitable speculative bubble.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Food and Farming Transition
Post Carbon Institute - Spring 2009
http://www.postcarbon.org/report/41306-the-food-and-farming-transition-toward
Summary

The seeds of the new food system have already been planted. America's farmers have been reducing their energy use for decades. They are using less fertilizer and pesticide. The number of organic farms, farmers' markets, and CSA operations is growing rapidly. More people are thinking about where their food comes from.
These are important building blocks, but much remains to be done. Our new food system will require more farmers, smaller and more diversified farms, less processed and packaged food, and less long-distance hauling of food. Governments, communities, businesses, and families each have important parts to play in reinventing a food system that functions with limited renewable energy resources to feed our population for the long term.
books I can't do without
A few books stand out as practical how-to's in my walls of gardening books. Not theory or ideology, just indispensable. I hit used book stores, thrift stores, but to order online I use only http://www.bookfinder.com . These are the ones I can't do without for market growing. Some are more timely now than ever before.
Rodale's Ultimate Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening. The Indispensable Green Resource for Every Gardener, Rodale Press
High-Yield Gardening: How to Get More from Your Garden Space and More from Your Gardening Season, Rodale Press
Getting the Most from Your Garden, Rodale Press
The Complete Book Of Composting, Rodale Press
How to Grow More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine, by John Jeavons (& others by Jeavons)
Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long, by Eliot Coleman
The New Organic Grower: A Master's Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener, by Eliot Coleman (& others by Eliot Coleman)
The Garden Primer, by Barbara Damrosch
The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times, by Carol Deppe
Start With The Soil, by Grace Gershuny
Stocking Up III: The All-New Edition of America's Classic Preserving Guide, Rodale Press
Keeping Food Fresh: Old World Techniques & Recipes: Old World Recipes and Techniques, Chelsea Green Publishing Co
Rodale's Ultimate Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening. The Indispensable Green Resource for Every Gardener, Rodale Press
High-Yield Gardening: How to Get More from Your Garden Space and More from Your Gardening Season, Rodale Press
Getting the Most from Your Garden, Rodale Press
The Complete Book Of Composting, Rodale Press
How to Grow More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine, by John Jeavons (& others by Jeavons)
Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long, by Eliot Coleman
The New Organic Grower: A Master's Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener, by Eliot Coleman (& others by Eliot Coleman)
The Garden Primer, by Barbara Damrosch
The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times, by Carol Deppe
Start With The Soil, by Grace Gershuny
Stocking Up III: The All-New Edition of America's Classic Preserving Guide, Rodale Press
Keeping Food Fresh: Old World Techniques & Recipes: Old World Recipes and Techniques, Chelsea Green Publishing Co
Saturday, January 29, 2011
LiveBlogging Edible Institute 2011 #EI2011
LiveBlogging Edible Institute 2011
Posted on January 29th, 2011 by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
http://networkedblogs.com/dD6WR
Hello from sunny Santa Barbara, CA and the 2011 edition of Edible Institute at the Hotel Mar Monte. Today and tomorrow I’ll be liveblogging the goings on here for those of you who couldn’t make it and for those who did but mighta missed something. Since it’s live please forgive typos and so on – I’ll put on my editors hat at the end of the day.
Follow the goings on on the Twitter machine via the hashtag #EI2011
We’ve a heckuva lineup today, including a keynote from no less than Dr. Joan Dye Gussow, who is a serious food producer, a writer, and officially a retiree from Teachers College, Columbia University where she is Mary Swartz Rose Professor Emerita, former chair of the Nutrition Education Program, and where she still teaches her course on nutritional ecology every fall. Her latest book is called (I adore this title) “Growing, Older.”
Things are scheduled to start rolling here in about 20 minutes, so the first update from here will happen in about an hour or so. Take a look at the schedule of events, and please check back throughout the day (and again tomorrow).
But first, a word from our sponsors – a quick shoutout to the folks that helped make this thing happen:
St. Germaine
Green Project Consultants
and Verterra.
OK, we’re getting underway here with a welcome from Edible Communities co-founder Tracey Ryder. Shoutouts to the above sponsors, staff, and the instigator of all of this, Edible San Francisco publisher Bruce Cole.
Dr. Gussow has taken the stage, and is saying a few nice things about our humble publications, and says she’s going to start with her “Cassandra role.” Says she’s “spent several years depressing college students.”
“I feel the need to confess that I don’t feel as if I belong here,” Gussow says, on account of feeling not as up-to-date on all the foodie-goings-on these days. She then reveals that she’s an Iowa girl, originally – she grew up in Orange City – way up in the northwest corner of the state, and named not for the fruits – somewhat obviously – but for William of Orange.
Dr. Gussow is concerned about what she calls the “Frivolity of the US food supply.”
“Whenever you don’t understand something I’m saying, simply assume I’m trying to be funny.”
She’s touching now on her first book, The Feeding Web, which came out in 1978 – a true harbinger of the coming food movement which told of the absurdity of the food supply. “People need to ask where all those marshmallow-enriched purple cereals in their technicolor food supply were coming from.”
Rodale Press, she tells us, did the first study of how much of our food might possibly be produced locally in light of the first energy crisis in the late 70s. At the time she had a student at the time who did an independent project on her native Haiti about how the only US aid going on there was that we had taken their hogs, sent them Iowa hogs, which they were to raise and send to the US. This while Haitians were starving under Papa Doc.
her first attempts to get people to eat seasonally and locally “sank like a stone” because people thought that for example people who live in the northeast would starve and “what would the people of Iowa do for vitamin C?” Check in on my own Edible Iowa for some answers to that question.
She’s not trying to urge everyone to grow their own food and recognizes that that’s not realistic, but says its vital to link their life to nature – and food’s a great way to do that. “If we win our war with nature, we lose.”
“We have just elected – or the corporations have, or whoever’s in charge now – a strange group of people who don’t believe in climate change to add to the people who don’t intend to do anything about it.”
“Business as usual is no longer an option, but we’re doing business as usual.”
She highly recommends (as do I) Bill McKibben’s brlliant book Eaarth.
She’s optimistic about the growing availability of local foods. “People who used to admit embarassingly that they lived in Brooklyn now brag about it.”
But, “Those with an investment in the status quo will not give up without a fight.”
Fear is an obstacle, she says. But it’s being addressed by films like Food, Inc, and Foer’s book “Eating Animals.”
Those that say organic can’t feed the world fail to realize that they had their chance and haven’t succeeded, so maybe we should try it. GMO’s have failed thus far to broadly increase yields, says Gussow.
“We have an sustainble food supply, and Michael Pollan said that what unsustainable means is that it will end.” And that, she says, gives her hope.
Ooo, a nice shoutout too to the Slow Money Movement.
“I believe the local food movement is building a model for supporting us when the end of the current scene comes, and it will come” She urges us to take a stand too for economic and social justice.
“Living as if our food is infinite on a finite planet.”
“We know that we are all a guilty party,” she tells us, “including those who grow their own food in New York and then FLY to California to talk about it”
Quoted Jim Hightower quoting his father “Everybody does better when everybody does better.”
“Hope is the lesson nature keeps teaching me”
“We need to pay more for local food from local farmers and that’s going to have to be OK.”
And with that, a big standing O for Dr. Gussow.
Question time: and the first asks what DOES she eat in January? Answer briefly is that she does a lot of puttin’ up (need to know more about how? Check out Sherri Vinton’s book Put’em Up).
Another asks her to comment on state and federal budget cuts resulting in universities funding and being funded by big ag and chemical companies, etc. She blames some of it on California passing Prop 13. Reminds me of the famous Oliver Wendall Holmes quotation “Taxes are the fee I pay to live in a civilized society.”
Break time, and then our first panel on “Will Urban Ag Change the Way we Eat”, with:
Annie Novak: Founder and director of Growing Chefs, field-to-fork food?education program; the children gardening program coordinator for?the New York Botanical Gardens, and co-founder and farmer of Eagle?Street Rooftop Farm in Greenpoint. Annie has worked with the CENYC?Greenmarket, Slow Food, and Just Food advocating and growing urban?agriculture throughout NYC. Her work in agriculture has been featured?in New York Magazine, Edible Brooklyn and the Martha Stewart Show?among other press.
David Cleveland: Professor, Environmental Studies Program University?of California Santa Barbara. Recent work: Trade offs between ?Agriculture, Open Space, and Urbanization. The ?value of land: Agriculture, food and urbanization in the Goleta?Valley, California.
Ashley Atkinson: Director of Project Development and Urban Agriculture?- Greening of Detroit Ashley gardens with passion and is?growing a new economy in her community that could change the way? Detroit uses its open spaces. As the Director of Project Development?and Urban Agriculture for the Greening of Detroit, Atkinson is?developing Detroit’s premier market farm from a 30-acre city park?filled with sewer pipes; all on a budget of $40 per week.
And moderated by:
Kerry Trueman is the co-founder of EatingLiberally.org, a netroots website & organization that advocates sustainable agriculture, progressive politics and a less-consumption driven way of life. She blogs regularly at Eating Liberally, right here on Huffington Post, and Civil Eats.
OK, a few Pixie tangerines and we’re back with the aforementioned panel
Deborah Kane of Edible Portland (among a lot of other fantastic exploits, like FoodHub) is handling introductions.
Annie’s talking about all the benefits of green roofs (rooves?) and showing some pictures of her work in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Novak: “Beekeeping seemed like a great idea because it was illegal at the time and that was stupid.”
And a shout out from Novak to the great work of Growing Power
David Cleveland is talking about “What does localizing mean? – changing the way we eat or greenwashing?”
The question is, is localization the answer to the problems in our dominant agrifood system?
Part of the problem is we don’t truly know if localizing is helping because there are no solid statistics on it. So he set out to get some.
It doesn’t help on greenhouse gasses because of transportation, because a farmer’s pickup is less efficient than 18 wheelers. But most of the fossil fuels in industrial ag are used in things like nitrogen fixing and pesticides.
Pushback coming from the likes of Walmart because local food is starting to eat into their bottom line “The L word is beginning to replace the O word”
Cleveland urges us to keep labor in mind – is the local food raised by local hands? California relies on noncompetitive labor for producing it’s 50% share of the fruit, vegetables and nuts America eats.
He points out that the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt began in no small measure because of food prices.
Ashley Atkinson is now talking about her work in Detroit. mentions she doesn’t like the term “food desert.” Thinks it’s inaccurate
“There are 50K vacant lots in Detroit that are ready to be farmed.”
The growers with Grown in Detroit have agreed not to sell their food outside Detroit until their food access problems inside Detroit are lessened.
Everything she has shown – gardening, beekeeping, chickens, etc. is illegal in Detroit but “we do it anyway” – big applause.
And a shoutout to the fine work of Brother Nature
Question about dealing with municipalities and all the illegal stuff they just mentioned. Ashley says Just Do It – ask for forgiveness rather than permission. “If we’d asked for permission we’d have never done what we did”
Gary Nabhan asks if the food miles issue is dead. David Cleveland says yes and we should recast the issues around local and sustainable food.
Another break, and then we return with panel #2:
Activists and Advocacy: SOLE Food’s Message for Change.
Tom Philpott moderator. Grist food editor, Tom Philpott farms and cooks at Maverick Farms, a sustainable-agriculture nonprofit and small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
PANELISTS:
Ralph Loglisci: Project Director for the Johns Hopkins Healthy Monday ?Project. Before joining the Center for a Livable Future, Ralph served?as the Communications Director for the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute?of Bioethics. However, it was his work as the Communications Director?for the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production that Ralph?became aware of the intricate connections between food systems, the?environment and public health.
Debra Eschmeyer: Marketing & Media Manager of the National Farm to? School Network and the Center for Food & Justice. She works from a ?fifth-generation family farm in Ohio, where she continues her passion?for organic farming raising heirloom fruits and vegetables. Prior to ?joining CFJ, Debra was the Project Director at the National Family ?Farm Coalition in Washington, DC where she focused on U.S.?agricultural policy and food sovereignty initiatives among grass roots? domestic and international rural advocacy and other social justice ?networks.?? She also blogs right here at HuffPo.
Dan Imhoff: Co-founder of Watershed Media, a researcher, author, and ?independent publisher who has concentrated for nearly 20 years on?issues related to farming, the environment, and design. He is the ?author of numerous articles, essays, and books including Food Fight:?The Citizen’s Guide to a Food and Farm Bill, Paper or Plastic:? Searching for Solutions to an Overpackaged World; Farming with the? Wild: Enhancing Biodiversity on Farms and Ranches; and Building with? Vision: Optimizing and Finding Alternatives to Wood.
Philpott:
The rise and fall of the American industrial machine has lead to local food systems in these communities like Detroit, need to move beyond the 3-5 percent
Federal policy perpetuates the current dominant food system
Why aren’t policy makers learning from detroit and other local food systems? Need to push policy in these directions.
Last two admins were abysmal, then Michele Obama using soft power to effect change, but President Obama is still putting agribiz based people in his administration.
Eschmeyer
She helped make farm-to-school competitive grant program possible
Points out that Republic budget cutters do not have direct subsidies on their hit list, but to have Americorps, NEA, Organic Certification, and ObamaCare.
Urges people to help collect data that support these ideas, for example: $1 spent on local food circulates $3 in the community – that’s a low estimate.
Collaborate with people smarter than you. And join the Community Food Security Coalition, among many others.
Highlight your heroes – like Ashley (above)
“Every ingredient has a lobbyist,” but Eschmeyer believes Edible Communities could be the “lobbyist” for the good food movement.
Ralph Loglisci:
Is studying the effect of the Meatless Monday thing, seeing if their is science behind how well it works.
A shoutout to the Center for a Liveable Future blog
Points ou that this is not an elitist thing – we want good healthy food for EVERYONE. Reminds me of Josh Viertel’s recent video question to President Obama: “Why do Fruit Loops cost less than fruit?”
Dan Imhoff describes himself as a “reluctant wonk”
A Manure lagoon is now eligible to be part of a farm environment protection plan
Talks about how industrial ag says “you don’t understand agriculture”
The Tea Party could actually be an ally to the real food movement – cutting $5billion in subsidies, and how good food can be an economic engine
The map of the disaster relief farms and the non subsidized farms are the same
Says he is rewriting Food Fight:?The Citizen’s Guide to a Food and Farm Bill, for the new 2012 Food & Farm Bill
References the issue brought up by Mission Readiness. (See my essay on the subject called Why Johnny Can’t March)
New Food & Farm bill should include:
Delink nutrition title from land and farm title
No subsidation without social obligation
“Getting perennial by the next centennial” – taking a much longer view of agriculture
A Suburban and Urban Ag title
One size doesn’t fit all: Regs are currently made only for big ag.
MUST get urban people involved in the Food & Farm bill
Now LUNCH! Back in an hour or so.
Posted on January 29th, 2011 by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
http://networkedblogs.com/dD6WR
Hello from sunny Santa Barbara, CA and the 2011 edition of Edible Institute at the Hotel Mar Monte. Today and tomorrow I’ll be liveblogging the goings on here for those of you who couldn’t make it and for those who did but mighta missed something. Since it’s live please forgive typos and so on – I’ll put on my editors hat at the end of the day.
Follow the goings on on the Twitter machine via the hashtag #EI2011
We’ve a heckuva lineup today, including a keynote from no less than Dr. Joan Dye Gussow, who is a serious food producer, a writer, and officially a retiree from Teachers College, Columbia University where she is Mary Swartz Rose Professor Emerita, former chair of the Nutrition Education Program, and where she still teaches her course on nutritional ecology every fall. Her latest book is called (I adore this title) “Growing, Older.”
Things are scheduled to start rolling here in about 20 minutes, so the first update from here will happen in about an hour or so. Take a look at the schedule of events, and please check back throughout the day (and again tomorrow).
But first, a word from our sponsors – a quick shoutout to the folks that helped make this thing happen:
St. Germaine
Green Project Consultants
and Verterra.
OK, we’re getting underway here with a welcome from Edible Communities co-founder Tracey Ryder. Shoutouts to the above sponsors, staff, and the instigator of all of this, Edible San Francisco publisher Bruce Cole.
Dr. Gussow has taken the stage, and is saying a few nice things about our humble publications, and says she’s going to start with her “Cassandra role.” Says she’s “spent several years depressing college students.”
“I feel the need to confess that I don’t feel as if I belong here,” Gussow says, on account of feeling not as up-to-date on all the foodie-goings-on these days. She then reveals that she’s an Iowa girl, originally – she grew up in Orange City – way up in the northwest corner of the state, and named not for the fruits – somewhat obviously – but for William of Orange.
Dr. Gussow is concerned about what she calls the “Frivolity of the US food supply.”
“Whenever you don’t understand something I’m saying, simply assume I’m trying to be funny.”
She’s touching now on her first book, The Feeding Web, which came out in 1978 – a true harbinger of the coming food movement which told of the absurdity of the food supply. “People need to ask where all those marshmallow-enriched purple cereals in their technicolor food supply were coming from.”
Rodale Press, she tells us, did the first study of how much of our food might possibly be produced locally in light of the first energy crisis in the late 70s. At the time she had a student at the time who did an independent project on her native Haiti about how the only US aid going on there was that we had taken their hogs, sent them Iowa hogs, which they were to raise and send to the US. This while Haitians were starving under Papa Doc.
her first attempts to get people to eat seasonally and locally “sank like a stone” because people thought that for example people who live in the northeast would starve and “what would the people of Iowa do for vitamin C?” Check in on my own Edible Iowa for some answers to that question.
She’s not trying to urge everyone to grow their own food and recognizes that that’s not realistic, but says its vital to link their life to nature – and food’s a great way to do that. “If we win our war with nature, we lose.”
“We have just elected – or the corporations have, or whoever’s in charge now – a strange group of people who don’t believe in climate change to add to the people who don’t intend to do anything about it.”
“Business as usual is no longer an option, but we’re doing business as usual.”
She highly recommends (as do I) Bill McKibben’s brlliant book Eaarth.
She’s optimistic about the growing availability of local foods. “People who used to admit embarassingly that they lived in Brooklyn now brag about it.”
But, “Those with an investment in the status quo will not give up without a fight.”
Fear is an obstacle, she says. But it’s being addressed by films like Food, Inc, and Foer’s book “Eating Animals.”
Those that say organic can’t feed the world fail to realize that they had their chance and haven’t succeeded, so maybe we should try it. GMO’s have failed thus far to broadly increase yields, says Gussow.
“We have an sustainble food supply, and Michael Pollan said that what unsustainable means is that it will end.” And that, she says, gives her hope.
Ooo, a nice shoutout too to the Slow Money Movement.
“I believe the local food movement is building a model for supporting us when the end of the current scene comes, and it will come” She urges us to take a stand too for economic and social justice.
“Living as if our food is infinite on a finite planet.”
“We know that we are all a guilty party,” she tells us, “including those who grow their own food in New York and then FLY to California to talk about it”
Quoted Jim Hightower quoting his father “Everybody does better when everybody does better.”
“Hope is the lesson nature keeps teaching me”
“We need to pay more for local food from local farmers and that’s going to have to be OK.”
And with that, a big standing O for Dr. Gussow.
Question time: and the first asks what DOES she eat in January? Answer briefly is that she does a lot of puttin’ up (need to know more about how? Check out Sherri Vinton’s book Put’em Up).
Another asks her to comment on state and federal budget cuts resulting in universities funding and being funded by big ag and chemical companies, etc. She blames some of it on California passing Prop 13. Reminds me of the famous Oliver Wendall Holmes quotation “Taxes are the fee I pay to live in a civilized society.”
Break time, and then our first panel on “Will Urban Ag Change the Way we Eat”, with:
Annie Novak: Founder and director of Growing Chefs, field-to-fork food?education program; the children gardening program coordinator for?the New York Botanical Gardens, and co-founder and farmer of Eagle?Street Rooftop Farm in Greenpoint. Annie has worked with the CENYC?Greenmarket, Slow Food, and Just Food advocating and growing urban?agriculture throughout NYC. Her work in agriculture has been featured?in New York Magazine, Edible Brooklyn and the Martha Stewart Show?among other press.
David Cleveland: Professor, Environmental Studies Program University?of California Santa Barbara. Recent work: Trade offs between ?Agriculture, Open Space, and Urbanization. The ?value of land: Agriculture, food and urbanization in the Goleta?Valley, California.
Ashley Atkinson: Director of Project Development and Urban Agriculture?- Greening of Detroit Ashley gardens with passion and is?growing a new economy in her community that could change the way? Detroit uses its open spaces. As the Director of Project Development?and Urban Agriculture for the Greening of Detroit, Atkinson is?developing Detroit’s premier market farm from a 30-acre city park?filled with sewer pipes; all on a budget of $40 per week.
And moderated by:
Kerry Trueman is the co-founder of EatingLiberally.org, a netroots website & organization that advocates sustainable agriculture, progressive politics and a less-consumption driven way of life. She blogs regularly at Eating Liberally, right here on Huffington Post, and Civil Eats.
OK, a few Pixie tangerines and we’re back with the aforementioned panel
Deborah Kane of Edible Portland (among a lot of other fantastic exploits, like FoodHub) is handling introductions.
Annie’s talking about all the benefits of green roofs (rooves?) and showing some pictures of her work in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Novak: “Beekeeping seemed like a great idea because it was illegal at the time and that was stupid.”
And a shout out from Novak to the great work of Growing Power
David Cleveland is talking about “What does localizing mean? – changing the way we eat or greenwashing?”
The question is, is localization the answer to the problems in our dominant agrifood system?
Part of the problem is we don’t truly know if localizing is helping because there are no solid statistics on it. So he set out to get some.
It doesn’t help on greenhouse gasses because of transportation, because a farmer’s pickup is less efficient than 18 wheelers. But most of the fossil fuels in industrial ag are used in things like nitrogen fixing and pesticides.
Pushback coming from the likes of Walmart because local food is starting to eat into their bottom line “The L word is beginning to replace the O word”
Cleveland urges us to keep labor in mind – is the local food raised by local hands? California relies on noncompetitive labor for producing it’s 50% share of the fruit, vegetables and nuts America eats.
He points out that the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt began in no small measure because of food prices.
Ashley Atkinson is now talking about her work in Detroit. mentions she doesn’t like the term “food desert.” Thinks it’s inaccurate
“There are 50K vacant lots in Detroit that are ready to be farmed.”
The growers with Grown in Detroit have agreed not to sell their food outside Detroit until their food access problems inside Detroit are lessened.
Everything she has shown – gardening, beekeeping, chickens, etc. is illegal in Detroit but “we do it anyway” – big applause.
And a shoutout to the fine work of Brother Nature
Question about dealing with municipalities and all the illegal stuff they just mentioned. Ashley says Just Do It – ask for forgiveness rather than permission. “If we’d asked for permission we’d have never done what we did”
Gary Nabhan asks if the food miles issue is dead. David Cleveland says yes and we should recast the issues around local and sustainable food.
Another break, and then we return with panel #2:
Activists and Advocacy: SOLE Food’s Message for Change.
Tom Philpott moderator. Grist food editor, Tom Philpott farms and cooks at Maverick Farms, a sustainable-agriculture nonprofit and small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
PANELISTS:
Ralph Loglisci: Project Director for the Johns Hopkins Healthy Monday ?Project. Before joining the Center for a Livable Future, Ralph served?as the Communications Director for the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute?of Bioethics. However, it was his work as the Communications Director?for the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production that Ralph?became aware of the intricate connections between food systems, the?environment and public health.
Debra Eschmeyer: Marketing & Media Manager of the National Farm to? School Network and the Center for Food & Justice. She works from a ?fifth-generation family farm in Ohio, where she continues her passion?for organic farming raising heirloom fruits and vegetables. Prior to ?joining CFJ, Debra was the Project Director at the National Family ?Farm Coalition in Washington, DC where she focused on U.S.?agricultural policy and food sovereignty initiatives among grass roots? domestic and international rural advocacy and other social justice ?networks.?? She also blogs right here at HuffPo.
Dan Imhoff: Co-founder of Watershed Media, a researcher, author, and ?independent publisher who has concentrated for nearly 20 years on?issues related to farming, the environment, and design. He is the ?author of numerous articles, essays, and books including Food Fight:?The Citizen’s Guide to a Food and Farm Bill, Paper or Plastic:? Searching for Solutions to an Overpackaged World; Farming with the? Wild: Enhancing Biodiversity on Farms and Ranches; and Building with? Vision: Optimizing and Finding Alternatives to Wood.
Philpott:
The rise and fall of the American industrial machine has lead to local food systems in these communities like Detroit, need to move beyond the 3-5 percent
Federal policy perpetuates the current dominant food system
Why aren’t policy makers learning from detroit and other local food systems? Need to push policy in these directions.
Last two admins were abysmal, then Michele Obama using soft power to effect change, but President Obama is still putting agribiz based people in his administration.
Eschmeyer
She helped make farm-to-school competitive grant program possible
Points out that Republic budget cutters do not have direct subsidies on their hit list, but to have Americorps, NEA, Organic Certification, and ObamaCare.
Urges people to help collect data that support these ideas, for example: $1 spent on local food circulates $3 in the community – that’s a low estimate.
Collaborate with people smarter than you. And join the Community Food Security Coalition, among many others.
Highlight your heroes – like Ashley (above)
“Every ingredient has a lobbyist,” but Eschmeyer believes Edible Communities could be the “lobbyist” for the good food movement.
Ralph Loglisci:
Is studying the effect of the Meatless Monday thing, seeing if their is science behind how well it works.
A shoutout to the Center for a Liveable Future blog
Points ou that this is not an elitist thing – we want good healthy food for EVERYONE. Reminds me of Josh Viertel’s recent video question to President Obama: “Why do Fruit Loops cost less than fruit?”
Dan Imhoff describes himself as a “reluctant wonk”
A Manure lagoon is now eligible to be part of a farm environment protection plan
Talks about how industrial ag says “you don’t understand agriculture”
The Tea Party could actually be an ally to the real food movement – cutting $5billion in subsidies, and how good food can be an economic engine
The map of the disaster relief farms and the non subsidized farms are the same
Says he is rewriting Food Fight:?The Citizen’s Guide to a Food and Farm Bill, for the new 2012 Food & Farm Bill
References the issue brought up by Mission Readiness. (See my essay on the subject called Why Johnny Can’t March)
New Food & Farm bill should include:
Delink nutrition title from land and farm title
No subsidation without social obligation
“Getting perennial by the next centennial” – taking a much longer view of agriculture
A Suburban and Urban Ag title
One size doesn’t fit all: Regs are currently made only for big ag.
MUST get urban people involved in the Food & Farm bill
Now LUNCH! Back in an hour or so.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Intensive beds for home or market - a better plan in few words
[doesn't matter what you call it; I didn't invent anything here but rely on many useful techniques from others inc. Eliot Coleman, John Jeavons, and years of Rodale Press books & Organic Gardening]
Intensive beds can raise production with less work and cost per pound of production. For example, usually beets or spinach are planted 6 inches apart in a row with 18 inches between rows. Instead plant them 6 inches apart in a row with 6 inches between rows. Make this a permanent bed 3 or 4 feet wide with a 1-2 foot aisle to walk on, just leaving enough aisle to get through without stepping on the beds and the right width to reach the middle from both sides. This way you can more than double the number of plants in the same garden space. Do the math. Double the plants, double the production.
Beds do not always need to be raised or framed at all. Drainage problems or thin topsoil may call for raised beds. You can experiment with a couple beds over a year or two. But it's a simple matter to convert a large single row garden to permanent beds. Just stake corners for beds, string around each bed, mulch the beds and stop walking on them.
Larger plants or vining plants need more space to grow of course. With squashes for example you won't get more plants in the same garden area, but by growing them in permanent mulched beds you can still conserve water and cut down weeding and insect damage. So you can get better production from the same number of squash plants or whatever with less inputs.
Mulching beds conserves moisture and keeps the soil and roots cooler in hot summers. And you only water the beds, not the aisles. So even though twice the plants are growing in the same garden space, water requirements do not go up. This also helps to prevent plant stress and insect damage. The sun bakes bare soil and the feeder roots near the surface, and the resulting stress invites insect damage. Mulch pays for itself in productivity and time saved.
Without empty aisles between single rows, plants grow to shade the mulch and soil, further reducing soil temperature and evaporation, and reduce light to any weeds that make it through the mulch. Each beds becomes a microclimate.
Beds make more efficient use of mulch and soil amendments. To get the same production with single file rows, you'd need to at least double the size of the garden. To mulch twice the space would mean double the amount of mulch. Only the beds need mulch. It also keeps down weeds, and walking in the aisles compacts the ground and keeps down weeds in the aisles. This saves time and effort.
By not compacting the bed soil with your feet the soil under mulch stays looser which helps root growth and production. You can save labor since there's no need to till up the whole garden next year and keep bringing weed seeds to the surface to sprout. Leave beds and aisles where they are; just add amendments to the surface and remulch for the winter. That makes permanent beds. If you're using driplines just pull the mulch and lines aside to add amendments, then replace.
True, adding mulch once a year is some time or expense, but the cost of not mulching or trying to mulch twice the garden area is far greater. And with healthy soil and mulched beds you won't need to till and cultivate, and that's time and money saved. Once the beds have a healthy level of organic matter, it only takes yearly addition of compost and whatever amendments on the surface, under mulch, to maintain fertility. The secret to surface decomposition is constant mulch and regular moisture. If you ever noticed old fence posts rot and break off at the soil surface instead of down in the soil, that's nature's way. The best decomposition works at the interface between the surface and the detritus covering it.
Some say you have to loosen the beds every year with a tool called a U-bar. It costs over $200 so let's just keep it mulched and save the money. Let the earthworms do the work, since they're not being chewed up all the time with tillers.
Okay, you've just doubled production. Now double it again by double cropping. Grow early and late vegetables in the same beds. This can get a bit tricky and takes experimenting. This usually means starting transplants early spring and more transplants to be ready when a bed is finished with the early plants. Other season extension techniques can be used such as floating row covers, cloches, cold frames, or greenhouse. Identify cool weather plants for spring like spinach, and those that do well with fall frost like cabbage, and those that need all summer to mature like tomatoes and peppers. Some need to be staggered for continuous market production, like carrots and beets. Some need late fall planting like garlic, but they harvest here in June or July and free up the beds for later crops. Some crops can be interplanted, started in beds before the plants there are finished. Perennials like asparagus or sunchokes need areas all to themselves all year - if you have room. But even growing perennials in permanent mulched beds keeps them contained and happy.
Now that's four times the production from the same garden space. And four times the sales at the market. If twice the plants is too much work, just grow vegetables in half the garden and use the other half to grow legumes or compost crops or small livestock.
This can be done without the cost of machinery, and with free local organic amendments, without any fossil fuel inputs at all. Of course it's not suited to large farming operations. But with far more production per acre or per square foot, who needs big farms? It is suited however to small local production in a million communities across the country, and can provide healthy food for market or neighbors, and good income for those with a little room to grow (or work with someone who has room). More importantly, it's part of the solution to the problems of freshwater depletion, topsoil loss, peak oil, climate change, pollution, health care costs, and unemployment. We don’t need permission, votes, grants, or foundation funding to do it. It’s a grassroots thing.
~~ tradingpost paul
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Science says organic can feed the world & reduce CO2, GMOs don't raise yields, waste scarce water & fossil fuel inputs
Scientists Find Organic Agriculture Can Feed the World & More (excerpts)
ISIS Report 06/09/07
Comprehensive study gives the lie to claims that organic agriculture cannot feed the world because it gives low yields and there is insufficient organic fertilizer.
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/organicagriculturefeedtheworld.php
The average yields of organic and non-organic produce are about the same in the developed world, but it is in the developing world - where most food is needed and where farmers can least afford to pay for expensive synthetic fertilizers and pesticides - that the major gains in organic agriculture are most evident. Yield ratios of organic versus conventional range from about 1.6 to 4.0. The ratio averaged over all foodstuffs for the world is 1.3.
The implications of the University of Michigan study are far reaching. The results imply that even with rather conservative estimates, no additional land area is required to grow enough food to feed the world if we were to switch to organic, and enough biologically available N can be obtained to entirely replace the current use of synthetic N fertilizers.
There are substantial savings on carbon emissions and fossil fuels to mitigate climate change simply from phasing out pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, not to mention the extra carbon sequestered in organic soils.
No to GMOs, No to GM Science (excerpts)
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/NoToGMOs.php
Genetic engineering of plants and animals began in the mid 1970s under the illusion that the genome – the totality of all the genetic material of a species - is constant and static, and the characteristics of an organism is hardwired in its genes. But geneticists soon discovered to their surprise that the genome is dynamic and ‘fluid’, in that both the expression and structure of genes are constantly changing under the influence of the environment.
Thirty years of GMOs are more than enough
* No increase in yields; on the contrary GM soya decreased yields by up to 20 percent compared with non-GM soya, and up to 100 percent failure of Bt cotton in India
* No reduction in pesticides use; on the contrary, GM crops increase pesticide use by 50 million pounds from 1996 to 2003 in the United States
* GM crops harm wildlife, as revealed by UK’s farm scale evaluations
* Bt resistance pests and Roundup tolerant superweeds render the two major GM crop traits practically useless
* Vast areas of forests, pampas and cerrados lost to GM soya in Latin America, 15 m hectares in Argentina alone, may worsen with the demand for biofuels
* Epidemic of suicides in the cotton belt of India involving 100 000 farmers between 1993-2003, and a further 16 000 farmers a year have died since
* GM food and feed linked to deaths and sicknesses in the field and in lab tests
* Roundup herbicide is lethal to frogs and toxic to human placental and embryonic cells; Roundup is used in more than 80 percent of all GM crops planted in the world
* Transgene contamination unavoidable, scientists find GM pollination of non-GM crops and wild relatives 21 kilometres away [10]
And beware of GM bioenergy crops for producing biofuels. Biofuels are not ‘carbon neutral’ They compete directly with food for feedstock like maize, soyabean, oilseed rape, sugarcane etc., sending food prices sky-high. They also compete for land to grow them, causing large swathes of tropical rainforests to be razed to the ground, replaced by plantations, and in the process, sending extra tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, accelerating global warming [11] (Biofuels: Biodevastation, Hunger & False Carbon Credits, SiS 33). http://www.i-sis.org.uk/BiofuelsBiodevastationHunger.php
Scientists for a GM Free Europe, Final Announcement (excerpts)
Scientists from six countries join forces with MEPs to call for a Europe wide and worldwide ban on growing GM crops.
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/GM_Free_Europe.php
The event coincides with key scientific publications [1,2] on how national and international regulators have been ignoring damning evidence against the safety of GM food and feed while colluding with industry to manipulate scientific research to promote GM crops. The scientific papers will be presented to the European Parliament together with a comprehensive dossier containing more than 160 fully referenced articles from the Science in Society archives documenting the serious hazards ignored, the scientific fraud, the regulatory sham and violation of farmers' rights [3]
Time: 10:00-13:15 Date: 12 June 2007
Venue: Room P5B001, Paul Henri Spaak Building, European Parliament, Brussels
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho , Director of ISIS: “ GMOs are not only hazardous for health and bad for the environment, they will severely damage our chances of surviving global warming. GM crops need more fossil fuels and water to grow, both of which are fast diminishing."
Food Futures Now - *Organic *Sustainable *Fossil Fuel Free (excerpts)
How organic agriculture and localised food (and energy) systems can potentially compensate for all greenhouse gas emissions due to human activities and free us from fossil fuels
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/foodFutures.php
Highlights
* The largest single study in the world in Ethiopia shows composting gives 30 percent more crop yields than chemical fertilizers
* Scientists, too, find organic out yields conventional agriculture by a factor of 1.3, and green manure alone could provide all nitrogen needs
* Local farmers in Sahel defied the dire predictions of scientists and policy-makers by greening the desert and creating a haven of trees
* Organic urban agriculture feeds Cuba without fossil fuels
* Organic agriculture and localised food systems mitigate 30 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions and save one-sixth of energy consumption
* Anaerobic digestion of farm and food wastes in zero-emission food and energy farms could boost total energy savings to 49.7 percent and greenhouse gas savings to 54 percent
* Cleaner, safer environment, greater biodiversity, more nutritious healthier foods
* Higher income and independence for farmers, more employment opportunities
* Regenerate local economies, revitalize local, indigenous knowledge, create social wealth.
Preface
Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and it is accelerating, says the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report, released 17 November 2007. Eleven of the past twelve years are among the warmest since records began. Sea levels are rising faster than predicted. Heavy rains, droughts and heat waves are more frequent, and happening over larger areas of the globe. Cyclone Sidr hit Bangladesh two days earlier leaving a death toll of more than 10 000 and rising, a dramatic enactment of the “increase in intense tropical cyclone activity.”
It will be much worse as the century progresses, IPCC predicts, and has “very high confidence” that human activities are to blame, most of all, in burning fossil fuels. The annual growth rate of CO2 in the atmosphere has jumped from an average of 1.4 ppm a year since 1960 to 1.9 ppm over the past ten years.
The good news is we can do a lot to mitigate global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. IPCC tells us that keeping CO2 levels down to the most stringent levels will cost less than 0.16 percent of Global GDP a year up to 2030. Surprisingly, however, IPPC has failed to mention organic agriculture or sustainable food systems in mitigating climate change.
Biofuels: Biodevastation, Hunger & False Carbon Credits (excerpts)
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/BiofuelsBiodevastationHunger.php
A report published in 2002 by the CONCAWE group – the oil companies’ European association for environment, health and safety in refining and distribution - estimated that if all 5.6 million hectares of set-asides in the EU15 nations were intensively farmed for bioenergy crops, we could save merely 1.3-1.5 percent of road transport emissions, or around 0.3 percent of total emissions from those 15 countries [7]. These and other similarly pessimistic estimates [8] are fuelling the growth in biofuels industries in Third World countries, where, we are now told, there is plenty of “spare” land for growing bioenergy crops. The sunshine is brighter all year round, so crops grow faster, yield more and labour is cheap.
In the case of GM crops, however, we’re told there isn’t enough land, and we need GM crops to boost yields to feed the world. GM crops have failed to boost yields so far, and are overwhelmingly rejected worldwide, especially in African countries where GM food and feed are being dumped as “food aid” [9]. Biotech companies are already promoting GM crops as bioenergy crops and hoping for less regulation and more public acceptance, as they won’t be used as food or feed. But that will leave our ecosystem and food crops wide open to contamination by GM crops that are far from safe [10] (Making the World GM-Free & Sustainable ). http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Making-the-World-GM-Free-and-Sustainable.php
ISIS Report 06/09/07
Comprehensive study gives the lie to claims that organic agriculture cannot feed the world because it gives low yields and there is insufficient organic fertilizer.
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/organicagriculturefeedtheworld.php
The average yields of organic and non-organic produce are about the same in the developed world, but it is in the developing world - where most food is needed and where farmers can least afford to pay for expensive synthetic fertilizers and pesticides - that the major gains in organic agriculture are most evident. Yield ratios of organic versus conventional range from about 1.6 to 4.0. The ratio averaged over all foodstuffs for the world is 1.3.
The implications of the University of Michigan study are far reaching. The results imply that even with rather conservative estimates, no additional land area is required to grow enough food to feed the world if we were to switch to organic, and enough biologically available N can be obtained to entirely replace the current use of synthetic N fertilizers.
There are substantial savings on carbon emissions and fossil fuels to mitigate climate change simply from phasing out pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, not to mention the extra carbon sequestered in organic soils.
No to GMOs, No to GM Science (excerpts)
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/NoToGMOs.php
Genetic engineering of plants and animals began in the mid 1970s under the illusion that the genome – the totality of all the genetic material of a species - is constant and static, and the characteristics of an organism is hardwired in its genes. But geneticists soon discovered to their surprise that the genome is dynamic and ‘fluid’, in that both the expression and structure of genes are constantly changing under the influence of the environment.
Thirty years of GMOs are more than enough
* No increase in yields; on the contrary GM soya decreased yields by up to 20 percent compared with non-GM soya, and up to 100 percent failure of Bt cotton in India
* No reduction in pesticides use; on the contrary, GM crops increase pesticide use by 50 million pounds from 1996 to 2003 in the United States
* GM crops harm wildlife, as revealed by UK’s farm scale evaluations
* Bt resistance pests and Roundup tolerant superweeds render the two major GM crop traits practically useless
* Vast areas of forests, pampas and cerrados lost to GM soya in Latin America, 15 m hectares in Argentina alone, may worsen with the demand for biofuels
* Epidemic of suicides in the cotton belt of India involving 100 000 farmers between 1993-2003, and a further 16 000 farmers a year have died since
* GM food and feed linked to deaths and sicknesses in the field and in lab tests
* Roundup herbicide is lethal to frogs and toxic to human placental and embryonic cells; Roundup is used in more than 80 percent of all GM crops planted in the world
* Transgene contamination unavoidable, scientists find GM pollination of non-GM crops and wild relatives 21 kilometres away [10]
And beware of GM bioenergy crops for producing biofuels. Biofuels are not ‘carbon neutral’ They compete directly with food for feedstock like maize, soyabean, oilseed rape, sugarcane etc., sending food prices sky-high. They also compete for land to grow them, causing large swathes of tropical rainforests to be razed to the ground, replaced by plantations, and in the process, sending extra tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, accelerating global warming [11] (Biofuels: Biodevastation, Hunger & False Carbon Credits, SiS 33). http://www.i-sis.org.uk/BiofuelsBiodevastationHunger.php
Scientists for a GM Free Europe, Final Announcement (excerpts)
Scientists from six countries join forces with MEPs to call for a Europe wide and worldwide ban on growing GM crops.
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/GM_Free_Europe.php
The event coincides with key scientific publications [1,2] on how national and international regulators have been ignoring damning evidence against the safety of GM food and feed while colluding with industry to manipulate scientific research to promote GM crops. The scientific papers will be presented to the European Parliament together with a comprehensive dossier containing more than 160 fully referenced articles from the Science in Society archives documenting the serious hazards ignored, the scientific fraud, the regulatory sham and violation of farmers' rights [3]
Time: 10:00-13:15 Date: 12 June 2007
Venue: Room P5B001, Paul Henri Spaak Building, European Parliament, Brussels
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho , Director of ISIS: “ GMOs are not only hazardous for health and bad for the environment, they will severely damage our chances of surviving global warming. GM crops need more fossil fuels and water to grow, both of which are fast diminishing."
Food Futures Now - *Organic *Sustainable *Fossil Fuel Free (excerpts)
How organic agriculture and localised food (and energy) systems can potentially compensate for all greenhouse gas emissions due to human activities and free us from fossil fuels
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/foodFutures.php
Highlights
* The largest single study in the world in Ethiopia shows composting gives 30 percent more crop yields than chemical fertilizers
* Scientists, too, find organic out yields conventional agriculture by a factor of 1.3, and green manure alone could provide all nitrogen needs
* Local farmers in Sahel defied the dire predictions of scientists and policy-makers by greening the desert and creating a haven of trees
* Organic urban agriculture feeds Cuba without fossil fuels
* Organic agriculture and localised food systems mitigate 30 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions and save one-sixth of energy consumption
* Anaerobic digestion of farm and food wastes in zero-emission food and energy farms could boost total energy savings to 49.7 percent and greenhouse gas savings to 54 percent
* Cleaner, safer environment, greater biodiversity, more nutritious healthier foods
* Higher income and independence for farmers, more employment opportunities
* Regenerate local economies, revitalize local, indigenous knowledge, create social wealth.
Preface
Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and it is accelerating, says the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report, released 17 November 2007. Eleven of the past twelve years are among the warmest since records began. Sea levels are rising faster than predicted. Heavy rains, droughts and heat waves are more frequent, and happening over larger areas of the globe. Cyclone Sidr hit Bangladesh two days earlier leaving a death toll of more than 10 000 and rising, a dramatic enactment of the “increase in intense tropical cyclone activity.”
It will be much worse as the century progresses, IPCC predicts, and has “very high confidence” that human activities are to blame, most of all, in burning fossil fuels. The annual growth rate of CO2 in the atmosphere has jumped from an average of 1.4 ppm a year since 1960 to 1.9 ppm over the past ten years.
The good news is we can do a lot to mitigate global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. IPCC tells us that keeping CO2 levels down to the most stringent levels will cost less than 0.16 percent of Global GDP a year up to 2030. Surprisingly, however, IPPC has failed to mention organic agriculture or sustainable food systems in mitigating climate change.
Biofuels: Biodevastation, Hunger & False Carbon Credits (excerpts)
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/BiofuelsBiodevastationHunger.php
A report published in 2002 by the CONCAWE group – the oil companies’ European association for environment, health and safety in refining and distribution - estimated that if all 5.6 million hectares of set-asides in the EU15 nations were intensively farmed for bioenergy crops, we could save merely 1.3-1.5 percent of road transport emissions, or around 0.3 percent of total emissions from those 15 countries [7]. These and other similarly pessimistic estimates [8] are fuelling the growth in biofuels industries in Third World countries, where, we are now told, there is plenty of “spare” land for growing bioenergy crops. The sunshine is brighter all year round, so crops grow faster, yield more and labour is cheap.
In the case of GM crops, however, we’re told there isn’t enough land, and we need GM crops to boost yields to feed the world. GM crops have failed to boost yields so far, and are overwhelmingly rejected worldwide, especially in African countries where GM food and feed are being dumped as “food aid” [9]. Biotech companies are already promoting GM crops as bioenergy crops and hoping for less regulation and more public acceptance, as they won’t be used as food or feed. But that will leave our ecosystem and food crops wide open to contamination by GM crops that are far from safe [10] (Making the World GM-Free & Sustainable ). http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Making-the-World-GM-Free-and-Sustainable.php
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