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Nothing is more precious than balance, stability, and sustainability. Today, we’re hanging by our fingernails to a skyrocket of intense insane change, and it’s the only way of life we’ve ever known. Joel Bourne has spent his life riding the rocket. He grew up on a farm, and studied agronomy at college. But sharp changes were causing many farmers to go bankrupt and taking over the family farm would have been extremely risky, so he became a writer for farm magazines. Later, he was hired by National Geographic, where he has spent most of his career.

In 2008, he was assigned to cover the global food crisis, and this project hurled him into full awareness of the big picture. The Green Revolution caused food production to skyrocket, and world population doubled in just 40 years. Then, the revolution fizzled out, whilst population continued to soar. Demographers have told us to expect another two or three billion for dinner in 2050. Obviously, this had the makings of an excellent book, so Bourne sat down and wrote The End of Plenty.

The subtitle of his book is “The Race to Feed a Crowded World,” not “The Race to Tackle Overpopulation.” A growing population thrills the greed community, and a diminishing herd does not. Overpopulation is a problem that can be solved, and will be, either by enlightened self-restraint, by compulsory restraint, or, most likely, by the vigorous housekeeping of Big Mama Nature. Feeding the current population is thrashing the planet, and feeding even more will worsen everything, but this is our primary objective. We are, after all, civilized people, and enlightened self-restraint is for primitive savages who live sustainably in roadless paradises.

– See more at: http://transitionvoice.com/2015/06/plenty-of-trouble-feeding-a-climate-changed-world-after-peak-oil/#sthash.8vamboU4.dpuf

GMOs and the Neoliberal Apologists

June 16, 2015

GMOs and the Neoliberal Apologists

Ignoring Reality, Subverting Morality

Monsanto is often called one of the most ‘evil’ companies on the planet. It has a history of knowingly contaminating the environment and food with various poisons, cover ups and criminality (see this, outlining the company’s appalling history). In recent times, there has been much focus on its promotion and patenting of GMOs, the deleterious impacts of its glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup and how GMOs pose a threat to human and animal health, ecology and the environment (see this, for example).

Campaigners and activists have described how global agribusiness players like Monsanto are threatening food security and food democracy. Monsanto and others have been able to capture or unduly influence government regulatory/policy agendas, important trade deals and global trade policies via the WTO. Monsanto is a major player and wields enormous political influence and receives significant political support.

Little wonder then that we now have campaigns specifically targeting Monsanto. While it is laudable and correct to highlight the actions of Monsanto and indeed its partners like The Gates Foundation, we should not be side tracked from developing a wider analysis to understand the underlying forces that drive companies like Monsanto.

A recent piece by Christina Sarich shows that any shares held by Gates or the individuals at the top of the Monsanto corporate structure like CEO High Grant or CTO Robb Fraley are dwarfed by those held by institutional shareholders, such as Vanguard, Capital Research and State Street.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Monsanto and the Subjugation of India

June 14, 2015

Monsanto and the Subjugation of India

Control the Food, Control the State

After a study of GMOs over a four-year plus period, India’s multi-party Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture recommended a ban on GM food crops stating they had no role in a country of small farmers. The Supreme Court appointed a technical expert committee (TEC), which recommended an indefinite moratorium on the field trials of GM crops until the government devised a proper regulatory and safety mechanism. As yet, no such mechanism exists, but open field trials are being given the go ahead. GMO crops approved for field trials include rice, maize, chickpea, sugarcane, and brinjal.

The only commercially grown genetically modified (GM) crop gown in India at this time is Bt cotton. It is hardly the resounding success story the pro-GMO lobby would like us to believe.

Pushpa M Bhargava is founder director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India. Writing in the Hindustan Times, he states that

* Bt cotton is far from having been an unqualified success in India. It has worked only in irrigated areas and not in rain-fed regions that represent two-thirds of the area under cotton cultivation in the country.

* Out of over 270,000 farmers’ suicides, Bt cotton farmers constitute a substantial number.

* In Andhra Pradesh, there have been deaths of thousands of cattle that grazed on the remnants of Bt cotton plants after harvesting of cotton.

* Resistance to pests in Bt cotton has developed over the years. There has also been a marked increase in the number of secondary pests such as mealy bug.

* The soil where Bt cotton has been grown over a prolonged period has become incapable of sustaining any other crop.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

If Food Is a Right, Who Should Provide It?

June 6, 2015

If Food Is a Right, Who Should Provide It?

Nearly 850,000 Canadians visited food banks in one month last year.

At a recent public forum in Victoria, B.C. about the right to food, the first audience question was about federal politics and the October election, which put the panelists in an awkward position.

“We all work for charities that are very non-partisan and would never suggest that you vote in any particular way,” said Laura Track, counsel for the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, alluding to federal laws that restrict what organizations with charitable status can say.

The June 2 panel included Peggy Wilmot from the advocacy group Faith in Action, Roberta Bell from the Victoria Native Friendship Centre, Rudi Wallace from the Mustard Seed food bank, and Stephen Portman from the Together Against Poverty Society. A similar event with different panelists is planned for Vancouver on June 24.

Track did allow, “I agree that it’s a political issue for sure, and should be an issue in the next election.”

As the author of a soon-to-be-released report, Hungry for Justice: Advancing a Right to Food for Children in BC, she clearly sees ending hunger as a top priority. The report details rising food insecurity in Canada, critiques the treatment of hunger as a matter for charities to deal with, and considers what it would mean to recognize the right to food as a human right.

“The right to food is clearly protected in international human rights agreements that Canada has signed and agreed to uphold,” wrote Track. “But what does it mean to have a ‘right’ to something when that right so often goes unfulfilled?”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why the Colorado River Basin Crisis is No Surprise

June 5, 2015

Why the Colorado River Basin Crisis is No Surprise

They Were Warned 70 Years Ago and Still Haven’t Acted

Perhaps you have heard how urgent it is for the upper basin states to take water from the Colorado River before those “Californians use it all up?” This us-versus-them attitude, as a justification to take more water from a finite system, will obviously not solve the regional water predicament. Later on, I will explain that scientists from California demonstrated early leadership to create equitable water solutions for everybody.

California’s surface and groundwater allotment from the Colorado River Basin is limited to 4.4 million acre-feet per year and 70 percent of this water is used to grow food and fiber in the Imperial and Coachella Irrigation Districts, which is largely exported. However, it might surprise you to know that the state of Arizona uses as much surface water from the Colorado River system, and if you include the water that Arizona consumes from the water supply underneath the Colorado River Basin, then it exceeds California’s consumption by about 3.5 million acre-feet per year.

Here is the inventory of Arizona’s surface water: The estimated natural flow of the Gila River through Arizona is about 1.8 million acre-feet. The state of New Mexico will use a portion of this surface water, but Arizona consumes the lion’s share and the river bed is dry long before it ever reaches the Colorado River. This includes the flow of the Little Colorado River in Arizona, which is 138,000 acre-feet. Again, New Mexico will use a portion of this water supply and Arizona dominates the rest.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Farming: A Not-For-Profit Enterprise?

June 5, 2015

Farming: A Not-For-Profit Enterprise?

I am just musing now, as in a-muse, not advocating and criticizing. What if the economics of money profit and loss, under capitalism, or socialism, or a monarchy or any other system, doesn’t really work for farming. Maybe growing food is supposed to be a not-for-profit enterprise, a part of our personal duty, like bathing and brushing our teeth. Or a sport like amateur golf done for fun not for money.

The usual reaction among farmers when I bring up this notion is a chorus of snickers and joking agreement that the best to be said for farming is that you die rich so the kids have something to fight over. And there’s more than a little truth in that. So why am I considered supremely naive to just come right out and say that maybe owning land is a good investment and is the only way farming is profitable financially. Even when farms are huge and seemingly sure-fire moneymakers at least some years, they continue to rely heavily on subsidies to make ends meet.

Not-for-profit farming would be based on a different economic model for farmland. “Profit” would come from the satisfaction and enjoyment and recreational value of possessing or owning land, not squeezing it to death for money profit. Then the land and the farmer’s life on it would not be subject to money manipulation and would not need the highest yields or the biggest machinery to survive. It would just need more not-for-profit food producers.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

An ecological look at vegetable gardening systems

June 2, 2015

An ecological look at vegetable gardening systems

I’ve examined some different systems of growing vegetables in earlier posts, viewing them primarily from the standpoints of yield (pounds produced per unit area) and inputs required. Now I want to view them from another perspective: that of ecology. What does the science of ecology suggest about how we might best grow vegetable plants, and how do different growing systems support ecological insights or work against them? Fighting against the ecological tendencies of a plant makes extra work for the gardener and causes the plants to grow less well than they otherwise would. If we understand the ecological needs of the vegetables we want to grow, we can create a garden habitat that is better able to meet their needs. That might lead to a better yield of the vegetables that we grow or if not a better yield, at least a better use of our limited time as folks with lives outside the garden.

Caveat: I am not a trained ecologist. While I have studied aspects of ecology that relate to gardening, I cannot guarantee that I have applied them correctly. I think this topic deserves more study, especially by people who know a lot more about ecology than I do.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Gardens of Plenty

June 2, 2015

The Gardens of Plenty

Editor’s Note: In France, Gardens of Plenty help provide not just vegetables but training and job skills. Yardfarms can be developed not just in backyards but in community spaces around towns and cities, helping to train others to not just make a living but to make their communities more sustainable, more food secure, more resilient.

Jardin Cocagne. Photo (CC): PHOTO CLUB de St Hilarion

In the Jardins de Cocagne gardens the jobless and homeless find self-confidence and support in creating a future.

How can people in difficult circumstances build autonomous lives? The answer might be found in the Jardins de Cocagne: by cultivating vegetables. Initiated in 1991 by Jean-Guy Henckel, the project has now taken root in several French regions. These gardens, whose name translates into the “Gardens of Plenty”, take in men and women in precarious living situations, such as welfare recipients, the long-term unemployed, or the homeless. Hired under a government-supported employment contract, they grow organic produce, which is then sold to subscribers by the basket. For up to two years, the gardeners work 24 hours a week for minimum wage under the guidance of professional vegetable farmers and social workers. “The objective here is not to exploit people out of commercial interest,” Henckel explains. “We are conflict mediators, because we manage to unite three feuding sisters: Society, Business, and Ecology. The Jardins de Cocagne must be economically viable, yet without turning a blind eye to human beings in their existential need, and without harming the planet.”

Networking and expanding

In order to consolidate its activities, the Cocagne network is currently building a donor fund consisting of tax-exempt private as well as corporate and public donations. Following the concept from the earth into the basket, the new Planète Sésame restaurants are now defining the motto as from the basket onto the plate. The restaurants are operated by people in reintegration programs and supplied with produce from the gardens. New projects are being launched, such as the Fleurs de Cocagne gardens that specialize in flower production. The latest Cocagne branch is located in “Europe’s Silicon Valley” on the Saclay plateau, right next to the technological research center Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives, the business college École des Hautes Études Commerciales, and the Centrale, AgroParisTech, Polytechnique—an ambitious project featuring a farm, a restaurant, a hostel, and an 18-hectare organic vegetable garden.

Back in time: Retracing the path to diversity

May 28, 2015

Back in time: Retracing the path to diversity

Industrial bread production is based on speed, scale and uniformity. To supply this system, industrially grown grain is limited to a few, highly controlled varieties. But greater diversity would make grain crops more adaptable and therefore more sustainable in the long run. How are some plant breeders, farmers, millers and bakers retracing the path to ancient, diverse grains that will see us eating healthier, tastier bread into the future?

All grain was once grass

Some 10,000 years ago, hunter gatherers began to eat different grasses to supplement their diet of berries, nuts, meat and fish. Over time, they domesticated some of these grasses through careful cultivation. In his book Six Thousand Years of Bread, H.E. Jacob describes how early man transformed the “wild grain into a domestic animal”. So began thousands of years of humans working with the environment to grow grain that could adapt to different climates and soils. However, with the onset of industrial farming in the early 20th century ‘ancient grains’, as they are now called, and the knowledge developed with them, became a thing of the past.

Diversity creates stability

Dr Philippa Ryan is an archeobotanist at The British Museum who specialises in studying ancient grains and understanding why some varieties might have been forgotten or lost while others were encouraged. At the Oxford Food Forum | Future of Food’s recent conference, she spoke about how Sudanese farmers have an historic capacity to adapt to changes in climate, technology and the economy. This resilience is due in large part to their diverse use of established grains such as pearl millet, sorghum, barley and wheat, which have been adapted over time.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Human manure: Closing the nutrient loop

May 24, 2015

Human manure: Closing the nutrient loop

Using human urine and faeces as fertiliser may seem an unappetising concept but it’s been common practice for centuries. In the sewage systems of today, which deal with millions of tonnes of domestic waste and industrial effluent, this human fertiliser comes in the form of treatedsewage sludge.

Promoting a waste product that some consider hazardous as a resource to grow your food may seem like a paradox, but in Britain, a world leader in recycling sewage into agriculture, it is recognised by the government and the EU as the best environmental option. It diverts waste away from oceans and landfill and provides essential plant nutrients to the soil. Nevertheless, EU organic regulations don’t permit the use of sewage sludge on organic farms. So, what are their concerns? Is this form of manure safe for agriculture? Are we putting our health and our soils at risk when we spread human waste on land?

“1% of wastewater is waste. The rest is wasted water.”

Human urine and faecal matter are a rich source of essential plant nutrients. Historically, human excreta, ‘nightsoils’, were collected from towns and villages and spread in raw or composted form on fields in the surrounding farmland. This informal treatment is still practiced in some areas of China, South East Asia, Africa and Latin America, where municipal sewage works don’t exist or are poorly functioning. In the 1850s, Europe’s growing urban populations and the discovery of the link between raw sewage and cholera led to the implementation of large-scale sewage systems. These water-based systems combined all domestic waste, industrial effluent and road surface run-off. For the next century the resulting sewage sludge was disposed of in landfill and directly into the oceans.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bloom Where You’re Planted: Prepping to Survive Where You Are Right Now

May 23, 2015

Bloom Where You’re Planted: Prepping to Survive Where You Are Right Now

Have you ever heard anyone utter some variation of one of these comments?

“I’m going to start prepping as soon as I can move.”

“I can’t prepare because I live in a tiny apartment.”

“Well, once we are able to get moved to our farm in two years I’ll start prepping hardcore.”

“I’m saving the money for moving instead of using it for preps.”

“There’s no point in prepping here because if the SHTF I’ll be dead.”

Maybe you didn’t overhear someone else saying it. Maybe you said it yourself. One of the most common excuses that people use for prepper procrastination is the unsuitability of where they currently live.

This is the kind of thinking that will get people killed.

While your current situation may be less than ideal, you have to remember that very few locations are actually perfect for prepping. Nearly anywhere you live will be subject to some type of extreme weather, be it crippling cold, blazing heat, drought, tornadoes, or hurricanes. Chemical spills can taint water supplies anywhere. Riots and civil unrest can occur outside of the big city.

The point is, to borrow an old saying, you just have to bloom where you’re planted.

There are many things you can do to create a viable preparedness plan wherever you happen to live. Apartment dwellers at the top of a city high rise, folks in the middle of the desert, those in a beachfront condo, and people in HOA-ruled suburban lots all have to examine their situations, figure out their pros and cons, and work towards resolving what they can.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Arguments against GMOs

May 23, 2015

Arguments against GMOs

I recently decided to take an epidemiology course to fill in gaps in my knowledge base. The entire online graduate certificate in Environmental Health looked interesting, so I applied for the entire certificate. Environmental Health was the first course that I took online at this flagship Florida university. The online experience would be a separate post in itself — the online course was mechanically flawless but grossly deficient in interactions and building critical thinking skills.

One of my class assignments was to argue in a paper against Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). Since the course and the textbook were too reductionist for my tastes, I argued using macroscopic arguments. I doubt the teaching assistants read it–like all other assignments in thisMOOC, it received a grade with no comments. Various friends are asking me what I think of GMOs, and most students in the class and most of my friends think that GMOs are a great solution for our food problems, so I am reposting the paper here.

Corporations promote GMOs as the solution to world hunger through expanded global food sources. That hopeful argument is not based on evidence, and there are many arguments against widespread GMO use. Most science and policy arguments are reductionist. But Einstein said that we cannot solve problems from the same consciousness that created the problems. We must learn to see the world anew, from a larger scale to see a complete picture of the processes involved. Reductionist science is not the answer to the problems engendered by a finite biosphere with a human population in overshoot.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Albert Einstein, Soil, Honey Bees and Biodiversity.

May 22, 2015

Albert Einstein, Soil, Honey Bees and Biodiversity.

Among the manifold quotes that are attributed to Albert Einstein, are variants along the lines of:

“If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”

and

“If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live.”

Whether it was in fact the author and originator of “Relativity” (both special and general) and the “Photoelectric Effect”, the latter of which, from his Annus mirablis, won him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921, is disputed, “http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/08/27/einstein-bees/, nonetheless, Einstein was a man of great awareness, as might be summarised by his more provenly attributable quote, to the effect that: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/alberteins121993.html The latter axiom is indeed true.

There is a tendency for humans to perceive ill occurrences as unconnected events, rather as the Biblical plagues of Egypt: water into blood, frogs, lice, wild animals or flies, deceased livestock, boils, storms of fire, locusts, darkness and death of the firstborn. Scientists now believe that these events really happened, but they were in fact all results of a single cause: not the wrath of a punitive God, but climate changehttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/7530678/Biblical-plagues-really-happened-say-scientists.html. Modern humans are aware of contemporary global menaces: a changing climate, peak oil, a dodgy economy that could collapse at any moment, and the extinction of honey bees, but relatively few of us know that the world’s productive soils are also under threat.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Soil Science Spelled It Out A Whole Century Ago

May 22, 2015

Soil Science Spelled It Out A Whole Century Ago

An organic farm marketer brought me a strange book to read and I can’t get it out of my mind. It was written by Cyril Hopkins, an agronomist at the University of Illinois in 1911. Already a century ago, science had committed the wisdom of the ages about maintaining soil fertility (Hopkins quotes Cato, Varro and Virgil from ancient Rome) to the finely wrought analysis and statistics of science. Soil scientists knew very well how to practice sustainable farming a century ago but then as now many people, including some fellow scientists, paid little attention. The strangeness of the book comes from the author’s efforts to write “The Story of The Soil” in the form of a novel, embedding his treatise on soil science in a more or less fictional love story. He had already written a factual book on how to restore and maintain fertility in America’s declining soils but, surprise, surprise, hardly anyone read it. I suppose he figured that maybe people would pay attention if a little sexual intrigue were woven into his pages of dry facts and figures about manure, lime, rock phosphate and clover rotations and what happens when you don’t do it correctly. I doubt his ploy worked except with those of us who think sustainable farming is a pretty sexy subject all by itself.

At the beginning of the twentieth century there was plenty of evidence that yields of farm crops were in decline, despite all the blazing glory shouted from the rooftops about the limitless fertility of our soils. All that was staving off a clear realization of that fact was that for two centuries and more, we always had new land to move to and repeat the process of mining the virgin nutrients out of it.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Big Waste: Why Do We Throw Away So Much Food?

May 18, 2015

The Big Waste: Why Do We Throw Away So Much Food?

In an e360 video, filmmaker Karim Chrobog looks at the staggering amount of food wasted in the U.S. – a problem with major human and environmental costs. The video focuses on Washington, D.C., which has taken steps to see that food ends up with those who need it rather than in landfills. First in a series.

BY KARIM CHROBOG

A glaring paradox of the U.S. food system is that while no country produces food as efficiently, no country wastes as much. Every year, 30 to 40 percent of what is grown and raised in the United States is thrown away or rots between farms and kitchens. That’s a startling 133 billion pounds of food — more than enough to feed the 800 million people worldwide who face hunger every day.

In this Yale Environment 360 video, we present the first of a two-part e360 series, “Wasted,” on the vexing global problem of food waste. Filmmaker Karim Chrobog visits two cities — Washington, D.C., and Seoul, South Korea — to examine why so much food goes to waste and what can be done about it. Washington, and the U.S. as a whole, has taken only minor steps to reduce this enormous waste and its related human and environmental costs. By contrast, Seoul has adopted innovative programs to minimize the amount of food that ends up going to landfills to rot.

This U.S. video explores the various links in the food chain in the Washington, D.C., area, including organizations working to cut down on food waste. Chrobog speaks with people in the trenches of this food fight, such as workers at the D.C. Central Kitchen, which collects healthy food that otherwise would be discarded and uses it to help provide 5,000 free meals a day to the needy.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article and view the video…

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