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#387

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Sun Nov 22, 2009 6:39 pm
Subject: Resource: Estimating GHG Emissions from Campus Food Services

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Download the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future Foodprint Report <http://www.jhsph.edu/clf/PDF_Files/Foodprint_Report.pdf>

* * *

http://www.cleanair-coolplanet.org/for_campuses/chefs.php

CHarting Emissions from Food Services (CHEFS)

GHG in foodClean Air-Cool Planet has been helping organizations measure their carbon footprints since 2001. Now CA-CP takes its focus on scientific rigor, transparency and comprehensiveness to another aspect of sustainability within organizations: the impact of institutional dining services.

Our new initiative, CHarting Emissions from Food Services, is developing a tool for release in early 2010 that quantifies the carbon impact of food production, processing, distribution, preparation and disposal. The goal is to create a tool like the Campus Carbon Calculator-- one that is flexible enough to be used by any campus-based organization (e.g. schools, hospitals, corporate campuses, museums or camps, or municipal campuses), simple enough for someone that does not have a degree in industrial ecology, and accurate and relevant enough to truly inform better decision-making by dining service operators and their patrons.

The CHEFS program will be especially meaningful in that it is the first carbon footprint tool to reflect growing methods and supply chain models in the U.S. and Canada. Most existing programs use European data.

A prototype of the CHEFS tool is being piloted on 13 campuses, including Arizona State University, Boston University, Grand Valley State University, Furman University, Johns Hopkins University, New York University, The Evergreen State College, the University of California at Davis, University of Florida, the University of New Hampshire, Vassar College, Wesley College and Yale University.

Johns HopkinsSeveral of these campuses were instrumental in the original conceptualization of CHEFS, including Johns Hopkins University, whose Center for a Livable Future conducted the foundational research upon which the program is based, and Furman University, whose sustainability team encouraged CA-CP to create this resource.

Yale University, another pilot school, hosted two CA-CP Climate Fellows this summer engaged in research and outreach related to this project, and experts from across the university have consulted with CA-CP on how to make the tool as accurate and user-friendly as possible.

ARAMARK, a leading provider of college and university dining services, is supporting the development of the tool with active research and facilitation for its participating pilot campuses, and is the project's Founding Sponsor. Ten of the 13 pilot campuses are Aramark clients, and the company is facilitating data collection for those campuses. The close partnership with ARAMARK will help ensure that the tool has been thoroughly tested and is as relevant and user-friendly as possible to dining service operations on an institutional scale.

Calculator logoThe CHEFS tool will work in tandem with CA-CP's current Campus Carbon Calculator which tracks direct campus emissions, and is generally regarded as the "tool of record" for most of the 650 signatories to the American Colleges and University Presidents Climate Commitment (ACUPCC), a voluntary agreement to move toward campus climate neutrality.

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#386

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Sun Nov 22, 2009 1:24 pm
Subject: Feature: North America Gets Its First "Slow" City

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http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=09-P13-00047&segmentID=4

Slow City
Air Date: Week of November 20, 2009

Cowichan Bay, a small Canadian town, has become the first Slow City in North America. Towns or cities have to meet certain criteria to gain slow city certification - pedestrian walkways, no big box or chain stores, a population of less than 50 thousand. Producer Don Genova visited Cowichan Bay and found a community proud of its newly gained status.

YOUNG: A village in British Columbia has scored a North American first by becoming something called a Cittaslow, or Slow City. A Slow City is an offshoot of the Slow Food movement; it's a sort of quiet resistance to fast lane, drive-thru homogenization. The seaside town of Cowichan Bay, north of Victoria on Vancouver Island, doesn't have a single fast food restaurant in sight. As Don Genova reports, the villagers want to keep it that way.

[RAIN SOUNDS; SEAGULL SOUNDS]

GENOVA: It's a grey, rainy morning in Cowichan Bay. Seagulls call, fishing boats bob gently at the pier. A hungry sailor arriving from dockside won't find a McDonald's or KFC in this town. Instead, eateries are called the Rock Cod Cafe and the Masthead Restaurant. Radway Fair Trade and Cow Bay's Pirate Shack take the place of The Gap and Costco.

[SOUNDS OF BAG RUSTLING; WOMAN SAYING, "I'D LIKE A LOAF OF THE PANNED LOAF MULTIGRAIN, SLICED, PLEASE, FOR STARTERS"; SLICER MOTOR SOUNDS]

GENOVA: The True Grain Organic Bakery sits in the middle of the narrow strip of shops lining the seaside. A slicer carves through fresh loaves of bread as Bruce Stewart emerges from the milling room. He's owned the bakery for two years now.

STEWART: Yeah, my wife Leslie and I were living in Toronto, and for a little while after that we were living in Calgary, and we decided that it was time to start a family, and we realized that we didn't want to raise our children in a large city, having both grown up in small communities.

GENOVA: The previous owner had started a ball rolling, and Stewart quickly found himself leading the bid to designate Cowichan Bay a Cittaslow, Slow City.

Illustration Omitted
Bruce Stewart owns the True Grain Organic Bakery and led the bid to make Cowichan Bay a slow city. (Photo: Don Genova)

STEWART: What Cittaslow is going to allow us to do is take all the hard work that's been done by so many different individuals and so many different groups and put it all together and allow us to use it as a framework and move forward to do better. We can be doing a lot better in terms of recycling in the community; we could be doing a lot better in terms of environmental infrastructure.

GENOVA: Cittaslow is an international network of 120 towns in 16 countries. It was founded a decade ago by mayors of some small historic towns in Italy, looking for a way to preserve their culture. They were helped by the same man who founded the Slow Food movement, Carlo Petrini. Mara Jernigan is the president of Slow Food Canada.

[CROWD SOUNDS]

JERNIGAN: So they started to identify the characteristics that defined that kind of cultural identity for a town, so pedestrian walkways, you know, bicycle, not too much light pollution, and just decided to put together Cittaslows.

[VOICES TALKING IN CROWD]

GENOVA: It seems like the whole town of 3,000 is on the docks of the Cowichan Bay Maritime Museum, preparing for a Cittaslow celebration. Towns must have fewer than 50,000 people to qualify. They are judged on many factors: environmental policy, land use, availability of local food ingredients, encouragement of craft products and independent businesses. Marks are even given for a community's friendliness and hospitality. Jernigan says Cowichan Bay was an ideal candidate given how it stands out from neighboring urban areas.

JERNIGAN: You know just south of here in Langford it's full of big box stores, and we've got fast food restaurants all over the highway in Duncan, I think one day I counted and there's 16, within a one-kilometer basis right in the heart of downtown Duncan and that kind of thing is really destructive to the health and the economies of small, local places, and Cowichan Bay, you know, for one reason or another, is different. It's more about what we're not, you know.

MAN: I'm honored to have the privilege to officially announce that Cowichan Bay is North America's first Cittaslow community.

[APPLAUSE AND CHEERING; CROWD SOUND]

GENOVA: A crowd welcomes the announcement, the celebration made more complete with local wine, seafood and bounty from nearby farms. The Cittaslow committee is a volunteer group. But keeping the nature of Cowichan Bay intact is in the hands of politicians who pass municipal bylaws and approve changes in zoning. Cowichan Bay is an unincorporated village, administered by a much larger regional council, which has approved big box growth in other areas. Lori Iannidinardo sits on that council. She says a new Official Community Plan is in the works.

IANNIDINARDO: It's the community's input, it's not my say, it's the community making this document, it is a living document, but it's also, if a developer comes and they have a look at our official community plan, they'll go wow, this is the style of this community, this is the design, and we hope to work on that.

GENOVA: It's not just developers that will get the message. Guests to Mara Jernigan's farmhouse bed and breakfast are quick to pick up the feel of the region.

JERNIGAN: By the time they leave they say, 'Wow, I feel like I met all these people in the community, I know where the chicken comes from, I know where the vegetables come from, where the cheese and the bread', and that's a very, very special thing that we have.

[SEAGULL SOUNDS; WATER SOUNDS]

GENOVA: Naramata in British Columbia will join Cowichan Bay to become Canada's second Cittaslow, and Sonoma, in California, will become the USA's first Cittaslow at the end of November. So, it looks like this idea of slowing down life in small towns in North America is gathering speed. For Living On Earth, I'm Don Genova in Cowichan Bay, British Columbia.

YOUNG: Well, you can see pictures of Cowichan Bay and learn more about Slow Cities at our website, LOE dot org.

*** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed, without profit, for research and educational purposes only. ***

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#385

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Sat Nov 21, 2009 11:44 am
Subject: News: More People Choose Vegetarian When That's the Default Choice

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http://www.climatebiz.com/blog/2009/11/17/when-behavioral-economics-meets-climate-change-guess-whats-coming-dinner

When Behavioral Economics Meets Climate Change, Guess What's Coming for Dinner?

By Marc Gunther
Published November 17, 2009

At the Net Impact conference last week, a waiter stopped by before lunch to ask if anyone at our table wanted a vegetarian meal instead of chicken. Just one or two people did.

This, as it happens, is typical. When a meat-based entrée is being served, and people are offered a vegetarian alternative, about 5 to 10 percent will request it.

But what if the choices were reversed? Organizers of the 2009 Behavior, Energy and Climate Change Conference, which began Monday in Washington, tried an experiment: They made a vegetarian lunch the default option, and gave meat eaters the choice of opting out.

Some 80 percent went for the veggies, not because there were lots of vegetarians in the crowd of about 700 people but because the choice was framed differently. We know that because, at a prior BECC conference, when meat was the default option, attendees chose the meat by an 83 percent to 17 percent margin.

More than lunch is at stake here. "Omnivores contribute seven times the greenhouse gas emissions, when compared to vegans," says Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez, the conference chair, who works for the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy.

Might there be broad-based ways to promote a vegetarian diet, while giving people the freedom to choose what they want? How can smart-grid technology be designed to encourage people to conserve energy? Which green marketing messages work, and which don't? Can the insights of behavioral economics help fight climate change?

Those are the questions that engaged the policy makers, academics, and business executives at this BECC event, which differs from most conversations about climate change. Typically, when politicians, environmentalists or corporate executives discuss the issue, they focus on technology (solar, wind, electric cars) or regulation (cap-and-trade, the UN climate talks). The BECC crowd focuses on another powerful lever, albeit one that doesn't get as much attention: human behavior, and in particular the irrational, emotional, self-defeating, short-term, inconsiderate and plain old silly human behavior that most of us engage in every day.

Like keeping incandescent light bulbs burning, when we know CFLs are cheaper (and most work very well). Or looking at the price tag of an appliance, rather than its lifecycle costs. Or buying things -- like over-sized homes -- that we can't afford.

As Erhardt-Martinez notes, personal choices have a huge collective impact on the climate crisis. Home energy use and the use of personal vehicles -- that is, the way we live -- accounts for about 38 percent of U.S. energy consumption. Behavior change could generate energy savings of 25 to 30 percent over the next five to eight years, she said.

There's no need to wait for technology breakthroughs. "We already have much better choices," she said. "People aren't making them."

Dan Ariely, professor of behaviorial economics at Duke and director of the Center for Advanced Hindsight (!) -- gave the opening keynote at BECC, and he left no doubt that most of us are not nearly as rational in our decision-making as we would like to think we are. (I blogged in June about Ariely's entertaining book, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. If this topic interests you, I can also enthusiastically recommend Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. Sunstein has since joined the Obama administration as a shaper of regulations.) Ariely, Sunstein, Thaler and others have all brought the insights of psychology to the study of economics, helping explain how we humans actually behave. Hint: we're not always the dispassionate, rational, self-interested, utility-maximizers of Econ 101.

"We wake up every morning with an incredible sense of agency," Ariely says, meaning that we see ourselves as masters of our own fate. But evidence suggests that emotion, not to mention the people who design user interfaces -- from the lunch menu to the choices presented by our 401-K plans -- play a large role in our lives.

The climate crisis is a particular challenge for behavioral economists. It's a long-term problem, and we tend to focus on the immediate. (That's why Americans can't resist dessert, and had a negative savings rate for many years.) Greenhouse gases are invisible, unlike other pollutants. Measuring the impact of individual actions is all but impossible. Global warming will harm other people, mostly poor people in the global south, before it damages the U.S.

"If you said, I want to create a problem that people don't care about, you would probably come up with global warming," Ariely says.

Still, there's creative work being done to change behavior. Check out the Energy Smackdown, a community-based competition to excite people about saving energy. Some utility companies put smiley faces on bills of efficient consumers, promoting friendly neighborhood rivalries. Speakers at the conference addressed such topics as "Consumption-Based Carbon Footprint Accounting Tools," "Pay as You Drive Insurance" and "Framing Matters: The Impact of Policy Context on Willingness to Change Energy Consumption Behavior."

Call me a geek, but I'd like to know more. Unfortunately, I couldn't attend most of the conference. So if you presented, or want to offer insights on how behaviorial economics can mitigate climate change, feel free to comment below, send me an email or propose a guest blogpost on the topic.

GreenBiz.com Senior Writer Marc Gunther maintains a blog at MarcGunther.com.

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#384

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Sat Nov 21, 2009 11:42 am
Subject: News: Congress Approves Food Safety Legislation

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http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-food-safety19-2009nov19,0,2020262.story

Senate committee approves food safety bill
The measure would expand the FDA's watchdog powers, but the panel doesn't specify how the reforms would be funded.

By Andrew Zajac
November 19, 2009

Reporting from Washington - A Senate committee on Wednesday unanimously approved a much-awaited overhaul of the Food and Drug Administration's food safety system, although it gave little hint of how it would pay for the sweeping changes.

The measure, like one passed in the House, would significantly upgrade the FDA's regulatory powers -- giving the agency the power to order a food recall instead of merely requesting that a producer institute one. In its version of the bill, the Senate panel added whistle-blower protections and unspecified grants to states to beef up food safety capabilities. It also would require the government to take into account organic agricultural standards and other factors when writing food safety rules.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said the measure was not likely to go to the Senate floor before early next year because healthcare legislation was a higher priority.

The push for reform comes after a series food-borne illness outbreaks in recent years -- involving peanuts, jalapeno peppers, cookie dough, spinach and other items.

Harkin said he wanted to get cost estimates for the legislation from the Congressional Budget Office before deciding how to propose paying for the expanded regimen of product tracking and inspections. But both he and Sen. Michael B. Enzi (R-Wyo.), the committee's ranking Republican, spoke against levying user fees on the food industry.

"If this is something for public protection, it's something we all should pay for," Harkin said.

The House-approved food safety bill would cost an estimated $3.7 billion over five years, partly paid for by a $500 annual fee on food processing facilities.

A leading consumer advocacy group urged Harkin to reconsider his opposition to such fees.

If the food safety budget comes solely from appropriations, said Jean Halloran, director of food policy initiatives for Consumers Union, Congress might be tempted to cut it if a year or two goes by without significant food-caused illnesses.

"We feel like you need a dedicated revenue stream for this," Halloran said.

Scott Faber, vice president for federal affairs for the Grocery Manufacturers Assn., said his group -- which represents food, beverage and consumer products companies -- understood that the frequency of food facility inspections needed to be increased and was not necessarily opposed to user fees.

But the association, Faber said, would rather see such fees used for rebuilding the FDA's scientific research capacity because in the long run that is the best path to reducing outbreaks of illness.

azajac@...

Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times

*** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed, without profit, for research and educational purposes only. ***

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#383

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Sat Nov 21, 2009 11:31 am
Subject: Feature: Feeding the World, As the Climate Changes

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http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427353.500-four-ways-to-feed-the-world.html

Four ways to feed the world

* 18 November 2009 by Debora MacKenzie

IT IS humanity's oldest enemy. Despite all our science, a sixth of people in the developing world are chronically hungry. At a summit in Rome this week, world leaders reaffirmed a pledge to end hunger "at the earliest possible date".

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) wanted them to promise to end hunger by 2025, but the delegates declined. They said instead that they would keep trying to meet their previous goal: to halve chronic hunger from 20 per cent of people in developing countries to 10 per cent by 2015 (see graph). But can they? Based on their performance so far, the FAO considers it "unlikely".

That, agricultural experts tell New Scientist, is because governments have broken their promises and slashed aid budgets for agriculture. The hungry poor fell to 16 per cent in 2007, mainly thanks to Asia's economic boom, but recession and soaring food prices pushed it back to 17 per cent in 2008.

"Ending hunger by 2025 is not realistic," says Joachim von Braun of IFPRI, a food-policy institute in Washington DC. "Halving it might be, but it requires sustained action."

It gets worse: global population is set to grow to 9.1 billion by 2050, while global warming will have a serious impact on farming. What can be done?

The FAO says feeding 9 billion people will require a near-doubling in food production. All nations will have to take part, but attention will be focused on poor countries, where there is most room for improvement and where better farming will give poor farmers income to buy food. The FAO says farming investment in poor countries must grow from $142 billion per year to $209 billion.

Agricultural research must also increase. The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) - the international, mainly government-funded labs that perform farm research for poor countries - says agricultural R&D spending for developing countries needs to grow from $5.1 billion to $16.4 billion per year by 2025. Its researchers say that in theory, given funds, they can boost agriculture enough to double food production, although global warming may make this impossible. These are their top priorities.

1 Hold on to water

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization says irrigated areas must expand by 11 per cent by 2025, yet the ancient aquifers that feed much of the world's food production are running dry.

Johan Rockström of the Swedish Resilience Centre in Stockholm says we need to rethink water. "Blue" water, which flows in streams, is the usual basis for farm planning yet accounts for just 5 to 15 per cent of the water flowing through farming systems. The rest, "green" water, is either lost through run-off or evaporation or passes usefully through crops. There are several ways to capture more of this green water in crops, including soil-covering mulches, terraces, and underground tanks filled by the run-off from tropical downpours. In parts of Kenya and China such tanks can get a crop through the dry spell that frequently follows a downpour.

Mapping the potential for combining all of these approaches shows that the largest untapped potential to improve water productivity is in the savannahs, says Rockström. This is sometimes counter-intuitive, he adds. "Dry Namibia and Botswana have more than enough green water to feed themselves."

2 Stop ploughing

For 1000 years, farmers have turned over the top layer of soil to bury and kill weed seeds. This is expensive, damages soils and releases greenhouse gases.

Most maize and soya growers in the Americas have abandoned the plough for "no-till" farming: they merely scratch furrows in the ground to plant their seed and handle weeds with herbicides and herbicide-resistant genetically modified crops.

But farmers do not need those if they smother weeds with organic residue such as straw, and rotate crops to frustrate pests, says Bram Govaerts of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) in Mexico, a CGIAR lab. This is known as conservation agriculture, and besides conserving soil, nutrients and energy, it cuts water loss. Govaerts has been managing experimental plots in Mexico using these methods, and finds that conservation agriculture can yield as much as traditional agriculture in good years, and even more during drought.

3 Go back to basics

Creating high-yielding seeds is only worthwhile if farmers have access to them, and can sell their produce for a profit. "There are varieties of maize that resist climate stress or disease, but how do you get them to farmers?" asks Prabhu Pingali, deputy head of agriculture at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Nerica rice is a case in point. This dryland variety was bred in the 1990s by CGIAR scientists who crossed Asian rice with an African species. Nerica competes better with weeds than other varieties, yields more and contains more protein. But few African farmers have heard of it.

Government services that taught farmers new techniques were dismantled during the debt crisis of the 1980s, says Papa Seck, head of the CGIAR's African Rice Center in Cotonou, Benin. "We need them back."

Even if they have access to better seed varieties, African farmers often don't invest in boosting production because they don't have access to markets and therefore cannot sell their extra crops for a profit. And sold or not, crops are often poorly stored and lost to rot: half the bananas grown in Kenya are lost each year, says Peter Hartmann of IITA, CGIAR's tropical agriculture lab in Ibadan, Nigeria. He says Africa would not need imported food aid if it could use all the crops it produces.

You have to look at the whole food system to boost production, says Hartmann. For instance, IITA bred higher-yielding, disease-resistant cassava and helped set up factories to grind the crop into flour; but then discovered uptake was limited because there was limited transport: cassava grows in southern Nigeria, the trucking industry is in the north. After publicity brought truckers in, production grew from 35 million to 45 million tonnes, on less land, from 2004 to 2007.

4 Boost yields

Mark Rosegrant of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) calculates that crops that will yield 25 per cent more food would boost African food production more than doubling irrigation would. It might also be easier. "We have tremendous options to enhance yields," says Hans Braun, head of wheat at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center.

Last week the world's wheat scientists launched a consortium to raise wheat yield by genetically re-engineering the crop's photosynthesis, no less. "It is inefficient compared with some plants," says Braun. "Improvements are feasible, and will dramatically increase water efficiency, heat tolerance and yield." They plan to equip wheat with more efficient variants of the key photosynthetic enzyme rubisco, and with suites of genes to convert it from the C3 photosynthetic system to the C4 system found in maize, which fixes more carbon per unit of light. Meanwhile, CGIAR's International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines is developing C4 rice.

Braun says the key is money. The yields of new varieties of maize are climbing twice as fast as yields of rice and wheat. This is because maize is bred mainly by private companies, which invest $1.5 billion a year in it. Wheat and rice breeding, by contrast, is done mostly in government labs. Wheat gets only about $350 million a year. Apart from Chinese hybrid rice varieties, rice yields have been stagnant for years.

*** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed, without profit, for research and educational purposes only. ***

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#382

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Fri Nov 20, 2009 12:55 am
Subject: Commentary: What Each One of Us Eats, Affects Us All

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/15/AR2009111502210.html

Bellying up to environmentalism
Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.

By James E. McWilliams
Monday, November 16, 2009

I gave a talk in South Texas recently on the environmental virtues of a vegetarian diet. As you might imagine, the reception was chilly. In fact, the only applause came during the Q&A period when a member of the audience said that my lecture made him want to go out and eat even more meat. "Plus," he added, "what I eat is my business -- it's personal."

I've been writing about food and agriculture for more than a decade. Until that evening, however, I'd never actively thought about this most basic culinary question: Is eating personal?

We know more than we've ever known about the innards of the global food system. We understand that food can both nourish and kill. We know that its production can both destroy and enhance our environment. We know that farming touches every aspect of our lives -- the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the soil we need.

So it's hard to avoid concluding that eating cannot be personal. What I eat influences you. What you eat influences me. Our diets are deeply, intimately and necessarily political.

This realization changes everything for those who avoid meat. As a vegetarian I've always felt the perverse need to apologize for my dietary choice. It inconveniences people. It smacks of self-righteousness. It makes us pariahs at dinner parties. But the more I learn about the negative impact of meat production, the more I feel that it's the consumers of meat who should be making apologies.

Here's why: The livestock industry as a result of its reliance on corn and soy-based feed accounts for over half the synthetic fertilizer used in the United States, contributing more than any other sector to marine dead zones. It consumes 70 percent of the water in the American West -- water so heavily subsidized that if irrigation supports were removed, ground beef would cost $35 a pound. Livestock accounts for at least 21 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions globally -- more than all forms of transportation combined. Domestic animals -- most of them healthy -- consume about 70 percent of all the antibiotics produced. Undigested antibiotics leach from manure into freshwater systems and impair the sex organs of fish.
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It takes a gallon of gasoline to produce a pound of conventional beef. If all the grain fed to animals went to people, you could feed China and India. That's just a start.

Meat that's raised according to "alternative" standards (about 1 percent of meat in the United States) might be a better choice but not nearly as much so as its privileged consumers would have us believe. "Free-range chickens" theoretically have access to the outdoors. But many "free-range" chickens never see the light of day because they cannot make it through the crowded shed to the aperture leading to a patch of cement.

"Grass-fed" beef produces four times the methane -- a greenhouse gas 21 times as powerful as carbon dioxide -- of grain-fed cows, and many grass-fed cows are raised on heavily fertilized and irrigated grass. Pastured pigs are still typically mutilated, fed commercial feed and prevented from rooting -- their most basic instinct besides sex.

Issues of animal welfare are equally implicated in all forms of meat production. Domestic animals suffer immensely, feel pain and may even be cognizant of the fate that awaits them. In an egg factory, male chicks (economically worthless) are summarily run through a grinder. Pigs are castrated without anesthesia, crated, tail-docked and nose-ringed. Milk cows are repeatedly impregnated through artificial insemination, confined to milking stalls and milked to yield 15 times the amount of milk they would produce under normal conditions. When calves are removed from their mothers at birth, the mothers mourn their loss with heart-rending moans.

Then comes the slaughterhouse, an operation that's left with millions of pounds of carcasses -- deadstock -- that are incinerated or dumped in landfills. (Rendering plants have taken a nose dive since mad cow disease.)

Now, if someone told you that a particular corporation was trashing the air, water and soil; causing more global warming than the transportation industry; consuming massive amounts of fossil fuel; unleashing the cruelest sort of suffering on innocent and sentient beings; failing to recycle its waste; and clogging our arteries in the process, how would you react? Would you say, "Hey, that's personal?" Probably not. It's more likely that you'd frame the matter as a dire political issue in need of a dire political response.

Vegetarianism is not only the most powerful political response we can make to industrialized food. It's a necessary prerequisite to reforming it. To quit eating meat is to dismantle the global food apparatus at its foundation.

Agribusiness has been vilified of late by muckraking journalists, activist filmmakers and sustainable-food advocates. We know that something has to be done to save our food from corporate interests. But I wonder -- are we ready to do what must be done? Sure, we've been inundated with ideas: eat local, vote with your fork, buy organic, support fair trade, etc. But these proposals all lack something that every successful environmental movement has always placed at its core: genuine sacrifice.

Until we make that leap, until we create a culinary culture in which the meat-eaters must do the apologizing, the current proposals will be nothing more than gestures that turn the fork into an empty symbol rather than a real tool for environmental change.

James E. McWilliams, an associate professor of history at Texas State University at San Marcos and a recent fellow in the agrarian studies program at Yale University, is most recently the author of "Just Food."

*** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed, without profit, for research and educational purposes only. ***

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#381

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Thu Nov 19, 2009 12:25 pm
Subject: Resources: Pew Trust Reports on Industrial Meat Production

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See:
       http://www.pewtrusts.org/our_work_detail.aspx?id=484

Cheers,
-
    Ashwani
       Vasishth       vasishth@...         (201) 684-6616
                        A-211, Environmental Studies
                  http://phobos.ramapo.edu/~vasishth
                        http://www.csun.edu/~vasishth/

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#380

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Tue Nov 17, 2009 10:03 am
Subject: Feature: Edible Landscapes Planned for Pittsburg Vacant Lots

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http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09319/1013306-53.stm

A forest of food planned for city
Two women propose to turn four empty lots in Hazelwood into area of trees, herbs, fruit-bearing shrubs

Sunday, November 15, 2009
By Doug Oster, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Illustration Omitted
Juliette Jones, left, and Michelle Czolba sit at the site of the proposed Pittsburgh Food Forest on Second Avenue in Hazelwood. The two are planning to grow trees, shrubs and perennial herbs to help feed the community with fresh food. Doug Oster/Post-Gazette

Second Avenue in Hazelwood doesn't provide many scenic views, with its broken-down abandoned cars, boarded-up storefronts and other signs of a struggling neighborhood.

But four vacant, adjacent lots in the heart of its business district hold the promise of something better -- a soon-to-be oasis of fresh food. Now the land is covered with tall grasses, scrubby brush and milkweed plants with dried brown pods that have littered the ground with feathery white seeds.

In the center of the field is a tamped-down, cleared space revealing an unlikely sight. Juliette Jones and Michelle Czolba sit on the ground amid the tall weeds strategizing about the details of turning this place into something called a food forest.

Ms. Jones, of Hazelwood, works for REI, the outdoor-equipment store. Ms. Czolba, of Lawrenceville, works with TreeVitalize Pittsburgh, a partnership of community, municipal and nonprofit agencies that plants trees throughout the region.

Both women are using their masters' of science degrees in sustainable systems from Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania to make a difference in the neighborhood.

Some of their inspiration comes from the Philadelphia Orchard Project, which since 2007 has worked with community organizations and volunteers in that city to bring orchards to vacant lots.

An Erie native, Ms. Jones learned about Hazelwood from friends who live there and moved to the neighborhood in June. She spotted the vacant lots near the intersection of Second and Hazelwood avenues and thought they would be a perfect place for a similar project.

The nearly quarter-acre site will use new techniques to provide fresh food and green space for the community, using a technique called permaculture, or permanent agriculture.

"It's trying to replicate some of the systems that nature uses to grow food," Ms. Jones said.

Unlike a community garden in which annual vegetables are grown, the food forest will be planted in zones -- one with trees, then smaller perennial fruit-bearing shrubs, hardy ground-hugging herbs and other plants that continue to bloom and produce each year.

The women are considering many plants for the forest, including strawberries, asparagus, rhubarb, fruit trees and smaller bushes bearing such fruits as blueberries and raspberries. One thing they will grow for sure: Hazelnut trees, the neighborhood's namesake tree. The soil is being tested now to prepare for early spring planting.

Ms. Jones and Ms. Czolba also are forming a license agreement with the Urban Redevelopment Authority, which owns the lots. They have obtained an $8,000 grant from the Sprout Fund for plants and other expenses.

The site will include an area for workshops that are already being planned for spring. Ms. Czolba wants to teach residents how to replicate what will be growing in the food forest in their own gardens.

They are connecting with churches, residents and community leaders to help with the project and are looking for volunteers to work on the site and maintain it for the future.

Self-described urban farming advocate Jim McCue, a longtime resident of Hazelwood, said he has watched as his neighborhood has lost important basic resources, such as a grocery store. He doesn't like it.

"We want walkable communities. You don't want a school, library or a grocery store that you have to get into a vehicle to get to," he said.

As a crusader for local food, he has helped create gardens and a farm stand in Hazelwood, and he dreams of building a greenhouse across from the vacant lots. Mr. McCue believes that turning to green strategies and fresh food will help resurrect Hazelwood.

"If you feed people, it's the wisest investment you could possibly make," he said. "Your mind is part of your body. If you eat well; you're going to think well."

But to succeed, he said, the project will need help from the community.

"I'm confident that people are going to start catching on; with good management you can take a small area of land right in the city and grow good, healthy food and a fair amount of it."

Ms. Jones also hopes to see the food forest idea spread to other city neighborhoods.

"Planting and growing my own food organically, that's what drives me," she said. "That's a way I can make a positive change, and then being able to share that with the community is important. "

To learn more ...

For more information about the Pittsburgh Food Forest or to volunteer, go to pittsburghfoodforests.blogspot.com or its Facebook page at www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=243498015467. Or contact pghfoodforests@....

Doug Oster can be reached at doster@... or 724-772-9177.

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#379

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Tue Nov 17, 2009 10:02 am
Subject: News: UN Links Copenhagen Talks to World Hunger

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http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/11/16/world/international-uk-food-summit.html?_r=2

U.N. Urges Climate Deal to Fight "Devastating" Hunger

By REUTERS
Published: November 16, 2009

ROME (Reuters) - The United Nations said on Monday that a climate change deal in Copenhagen next month is crucial to fighting global hunger, which Brazil's president described as "the most devastating weapon of mass destruction."

Government leaders and officials met in Rome for a three-day U.N. summit on how to help developing countries feed themselves, but anti-poverty campaigners were already writing off the event as a missed opportunity.

The sense of scepticism deepened at the weekend, when U.S. President Barack Obama and other leaders supported delaying a legally binding climate pact until 2010 or even later, though European negotiators said the move did not imply weaker action.

"Hunger is the most devastating weapon of mass destruction on our planet, it doesn't kill soldiers, it kills innocent children who are not even one-year old," Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva told the summit.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said there could be "no food security without climate security."

"Next month in Copenhagen, we need a comprehensive agreement that will provide a firm foundation for a legally binding treaty on climate change," he said.

Africa, Asia and Latin America could see a decline of between 20 and 40 percent in potential agricultural productivity if temperatures rise more than 2 degrees Celsius, the U.N. says.

Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to be the hardest hit from global warming as its agriculture is almost entirely rain-fed.

With the number of hungry people in the world topping 1 billion for the first time, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation called the summit in the hope leaders would commit to raising the share of official aid spent on agriculture to 17 percent of the total -- its 1980 level -- from 5 percent now.

That would amount to $44 billion a year against $7.9 billion (4.7 billion pounds) now. Farmers in rich countries receive $365 billion of support every year.

WHERE'S THE MONEY?

But the summit declaration adopted on Monday included only a general promise to pour more money into agricultural aid, with no target or timeframe for action.

A pledge to eliminate malnutrition by 2025, one of the early aims of the summit, was also missing from the statement, which merely stated that world leaders commit to eradicate hunger "at the earliest possible date."

Last year's spike in the price of food staples such as rice and wheat sparked riots in as many as 60 countries.

Rich food importers have rushed to buy foreign farmland, pushing food shortages and hunger up the political agenda -- but also raising fears of a new colonialism in poor countries.

"We should fight against this new feudalism, we should put an end to this land grab in African countries," Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi told the summit.

Food prices have fallen back since their 2008 record highs but remain high in poor countries. The FAO says sudden price rises are still very likely.

A summit of the Group of Eight leading powers in July pledged $20 billion over the next three years to boost agricultural development, in a big policy shift towards long-term strategies and away from emergency food aid.

But FAO Director General Jacques Diouf said those were "still promises that need to materialise."

Apart from Italy's Silvio Berlusconi, G8 leaders skipped the summit, which looked more like a gathering of Latin American and African heads of state.

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#378

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Mon Nov 16, 2009 8:21 am
Subject: News: US Food Safety Act Takes Shape

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http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/jersey/index.ssf?/base/news-15/1258248311208230.xml&coll=1

Long-awaited food safety act would thwart a global threat

Sunday, November 15, 2009
BY JUDY PEET
STAR-LEDGER STAFF

For Elex Scheels, the nightmare was not just one toddler screaming in pain.

Two of the Scheels' then-20-month-old triplets got salmonella. And the family dog.

"I was consumed by guilt that I undercooked something and did this to my children. I felt really bad about the dog, too," said Scheels. "Then I found out it was the all-natural, organic snacks that poisoned my children.

"There's something wrong in this country if you can't even buy food in the grocery store without worrying that your kids are going to die."

For decades, congressional bills to update America's food safety regulations languished in committee, despite the fact that 14 Americans die every day from food poisoning, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The wait may finally be over, according to a Senate spokesman. The Food Safety Modernization Act, the first major overhaul of FDA food safety regulations since the Great Depression, could move to the Senate floor in the next few weeks.

Proponents of the bill, including Rep. Frank Pallone (D-6th Dist.), -- who co-sponsored the House version that passed last summer -- say it is the best hope to help keep people from being for sickened by tainted food.

"Our food system is antiquated, the number of outbreaks is increasing, and people are dying," said Pallone. "We have the knowledge to prevent food poisoning, but the government is not doing it, This needs to stop now."

The bill would affect the growing number of contaminated foods regulated by the federal Food and Drug Administration. It would not involve meat, which is monitored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

In the good old days, consumers just had to worry about undercooked pork and raw seafood. Now, experts say, peanut butter, produce, spices and even baby food may make you sick.

"The food supply has become truly global, and so has food contamination," said Donald Schaffner, director of the Rutgers Center for Advanced Food Technology. "The FDA does not have the power to do the job we need them to do."

While politicians ponder regulations, Cook College researchers explore scientific fixes.

Schaffner, who served on federal pathogen-review panels, is focused on complex risk-assessment modeling systems that will track and, hopefully, predict outbreak patterns.

Other investigations include anti-microbial packaging, bio-defense membranes and improved chemical techniques to destroy the pathogens in foods that cannot be cooked to the "kill temperature."

GLOBAL FACTORS

It is a far cry from 1938, when Congress last updated FDA food safety regulations. Then, America produced much of its own food, and one of major causes of food poisoning was lack of refrigeration.

The food supply has become global, experts say, and the sources of contamination are universal.

It's not just a matter of cracking down on growers from one particular country. According to the FDA, food on America's tables comes from some 200 countries, including China, Mexico, Uganda, Vanuatu and Burkina Faso.

"I worry particularly about farm-bred fish from Third World countries. Sanitary conditions are appalling," said Donna Rosenbaum, executive director of Safe Tables Our Priority, a national organization dedicated to improving food safety.

The FDA is responsible for the roughly 80 percent of the U.S. food supply, according to a 2008 Government Accountability Office report. While the number of domestic food processing firms grew nearly 30 percent between 2001 and 2007, the number of FDA inspectors increased by barely 1 percent, the report noted.

STATE OF DENIAL

The GAO report also noted Americans have "little confidence in the safety" of packaged imported foods and two-thirds are more worried about food safety than about a flu pandemic or natural disasters.

Despite the fears, a poll conducted this year by the Rutgers Food Policy Institute found about 40 percent those polled didn't really believe they would be hurt by the tainted food. Only 25 percent said they threw out food after hearing about a recall, and 12 percent said they ate food even if they thought it had been recalled.

For Scheels -- who testified on behalf of Pallone's bill -- the ordeal began with her daughter Sydney, spread to her son Cole and "quickly went to hell."

Instead of passing in a few days, as it often does with healthy adults, Sydney Scheels' condition deteriorated. She lost 10 percent of her body weight in a week. She was quarantined for three months.

The culprit, health authorities told Scheels, was a bag of vegetarian snack food. which was voluntarily recalled.

"We still don't know if there will be any long-term health consequences," said Scheels, who sued the food maker and settled out of court without any admission of liability by the food manufacturer. "Who knows when it might happen again? This new Senate legislation is not the end-all in food safety, but it's at least a start."

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#377

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Mon Nov 16, 2009 8:15 am
Subject: News: Cloning of Animals An Everyday Reality in America

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http://www.reutershealth.com/archive/2009/11/13/eline/links/20091113elin013.html

Welcome to the Clone Farm

Last Updated: 2009-11-13 14:40:06 -0400 (Reuters Health)
By Karl Plume

ENID, Oklahoma (Reuters) - To the untrained eye, Pollard Farms looks much like any other cattle ranch. Similar looking cows are huddled in similar looking pens. But some of the cattle here don't just resemble each other. They are literally identical -- clear down to their genes.

Of the 400-some cattle in Barry Pollard's herd of mostly Black Angus cattle there are 22 clones, genetic copies of some of the most productive livestock the world has ever known.

Pollard, a neurosurgeon and owner of Pollard Farms, says such breeding technology is at the forefront of a new era in animal agriculture. "We're trying to stay on the very top of the heap of quality, genetically, with animals that will gain well and fatten well, produce well and reproduce well," Pollard told a reporter during a recent visit to his farm.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2008 approved the sale of food from clones and their offspring, stating the products are indistinguishable from that of their non-clone counterparts. Japan, the European Union, and others have followed suit.

The moves have stirred controversy about whether tinkering with nature is safe, or even ethical, prompting major food companies to swear off food products from cloned animals. But consumers are likely already eating meat and drinking milk from the offspring of clones, which are technically not clones, without even knowing it.

Farmers can now use cloning and other assisted breeding technologies to breed cows that produce bigger, better steaks or massive amounts of milk, and animals that resist diseases or reproduce with clockwork precision. Premier genes can translate to improved feeding efficiency, meaning the ability to convert the least amount of feed into the most meat or milk, which results in a smaller environmental footprint.

"If you don't need as much corn to feed your cattle, you might be able to cut back on the amount of fertilizer put out there on the countryside that might end up in a river. You can cut the amount of diesel that's spent raising that corn," Pollard said. "Just like they improve the genetics of corn, so they can produce more bushels per acre, we're trying to do that same type of thing by using cloning and superior genetics to produce more meat with less input."

RISING FOOD DEMAND

The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization has said food production will need to double by mid-century to meet demand from a growing world population, with 70 percent of that growth coming from efficiency-improving technologies. Such forecasts have prompted calls for a second Green Revolution, a rethinking of the movement championed by Norman Borlaug, who won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in boosting grain production for starving nations.

Biotechnological advances in grain production will remain at the forefront of the global fight to alleviate hunger, although animal agriculture will likely contribute in the longer term.

"When people talk about feeding the world, reducing or eliminating hunger, I don't think animal agriculture has much of a role to play. But, as people successfully move out of that extreme poverty, that's when you get the growth in demand for animal protein and potentially cloning could have positive benefits," said Robert Thomson, professor of agricultural policy at the University of Illinois.

Some animal breeds, ideally suited for arid climates, could be propagated to utilize grazing pastures unsuitable for crop production. Others may be bred to resist local maladies, like the Nguni cattle breed, which can develop resistance to ticks and immunity to tick-borne diseases.

Meanwhile, a growing and more affluent population in the developing world is seen boosting demand for meat and dairy products. Meat consumption in developing countries more than doubled from about 10 kilograms (22 pounds) per person per year in the 1960s to around 26 kg near the turn of the century, according to the FAO. By 2030, that was expected to rise to 37 kg per person. Milk and dairy product consumption has made similarly rapid growth.

SLOW ACCEPTANCE

Supporters say cloning will no doubt play a role in accelerating production, but the technology has been slow to take, primarily because of the high cost and resistance on ethical grounds. Of the more than 2.4 million Angus cattle that have been registered with the American Angus Association since 2001, only 56 were clones, according to Bryce Schumann, the group's chief executive.

It costs at least $15,000 to clone a cow and $4,000 to clone a sow, although improving efficiencies will likely lower those costs in coming years, said Mark Walton, president of ViaGen, a company in Austin, Texas, that provides animal cloning and genomics services.

ViaGen owns the intellectual property rights to the technology that in 1996 produced Dolly the sheep, the world's first animal cloned from an adult cell, at Scotland's Roslin Institute. ViaGen, along with its partner company, Trans Ova Genetics of Sioux Center, Iowa, produces the vast majority of the clones in the United States. Other cloning companies are in Brazil, Argentina, Australia, and China.

Of the roughly 102 million cattle and 66 million hogs in the United States, "no more than a few thousand" are clones, according to Walton. Global numbers are around 6,000.

The most common cloning technique is called somatic cell nuclear transfer, a process in which a donor egg cell's nucleus is removed and replaced with the nucleus (and genes) of a cell from the animal that scientists aim to duplicate. That cell is then stimulated and later implanted in a surrogate mother.

Walton said cloning is costly because it is a relatively tedious process and the technology is relatively immature, comparable to the production inefficiencies to that of the early automobile industry. Years ago, scientists were able to achieve success in only 2 or 3 percent of attempts, but ViaGen now boasts 10 to 15 percent efficiency in producing a calf. It's aim is nearer to 60 percent, about the same as traditional in-vitro fertilization, Walton said.

CONSUMER ACCEPTANCE

Despite the steady improvement in the technology, consumer acceptance of cloning as a viable means to produce human food remains the top hurdle for breeders and cloning companies.

A survey conducted by the International Food Information Council found that half of Americans surveyed viewed animal cloning as "not very favorable" or "not at all favorable." A similar number said they were unlikely to buy meat, milk, or eggs from offspring of cloned animals, even if the FDA says the products are safe. Other surveys have found that nearly half of consumers have moral objections to cloning.

"When you're genetically modifying a plant, creating a seed that perhaps has a resistance to insects, that's different than cloning, and maybe modifying a sentient being," said Chris Waldrop, director of the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America. "There are different ethical, religious, and moral issues that a society has to grapple with before they move forward on such a technology."

Despite cloning's gradually improving rate of success in producing healthy animals, the process still has a high rate of failure. Some animals are born with abnormalities and have to be euthanized and some have more health problems at birth than conventionally bred animals.

Large Offspring Syndrome also occurs more often with assisted breeding technologies like cloning. The syndrome causes the fetus to grow too large, causing problems for both the clone and the surrogate.

Opponents also say the FDA's risk assessment was not thorough enough and a long-term, multi-generational study of cloning's effects on food products is needed. At the very least, the products should be labeled as derived from cloning, they say.

"The largest study looked at milk from only 15 cows. Only one study used standard methods of toxicology, and that study looked at the effects of feeding 20 rats products from clones for 14 weeks," said Jaydee Hanson, policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety, a nonprofit advocacy and research group. "We don't think that cloning is a technology that's ready yet, and we certainly don't think it's ready to be on your plate."

The only way to definitively avoid food from clones is to buy organic products, which by the Organic Trade Association's definition are from only traditionally bred animals, he said.

The U.S. Agriculture Department has asked the livestock industry to voluntarily keep clones out of the food supply for the moment, but the moratorium does not apply to progeny of clones. Major meat and dairy companies, such as Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, and Dean Foods, have said they will not accept products from clones, citing the desires of their customers.

BREEDERS, NOT FOOD

ViaGen's Walton said cloned animals are far too valuable as breeding stock to be used for food, but that the progeny of clones are "undoubtedly already in the food chain." However, he said, "the proportion is infinitesimally small compared to the total meat supply, a tiny little drop in the ocean."

Still, ViaGen and the Biotechnology Industry Organization have helped to create a supply chain management program to track clones from birth to death. ViaGen also gives farmers the incentive to disclose when and where they cull a clone by holding a deposit until the clone's owner can verify that the animal has been euthanized or slaughtered for meat.

In time, Walton said, consumers and food producers will become more comfortable with cloning, much like they have with genetically modified crops, but it will take time and it will take openness from cloning providers.

"Companies have a bottom line to protect, so they are cautious about new technologies and they are cautious about listening to their customers," he said. "No scientist can say definitively that nothing will be different tomorrow. But, given the body of knowledge and the amount of work that's been done, you can be extremely confident that the probability of something untoward happening is incredibly small."

Copyright © 2009 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

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#376

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Sat Nov 14, 2009 3:25 pm
Subject: News: Even Partial Vegetarianism Can Help Cut GHGs, Report Argues

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'Eating the planet? How we can feed the world without trashing it' is produced by Compassion in World Farming and Friends of the Earth.

Briefing:

http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/briefings/eating_planet_briefing.pdf

Full Report:

http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/briefings/eating_planet_qa.pdf

   * * *

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/6538961/Go-vegetarian-at-least-two-days-a-week-urge-Friends-of-the-Earth.html

Go vegetarian at least two days a week urge Friends of the Earth
     People should go vegetarian for at least two days a week in order to save the planet, according to a new report.

By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent
Published: 7:00AM GMT 11 Nov 2009

Illustration Omitted
     Paul McCartney has urged people to give up meat Photo: GETTY

Sir Paul McCartney, Lord Stern and the UN have suggested people may need to stop eating meat completely in order to prevent catastrophic climate change.

However, the new report says that if poeple cut meat from their diet for just two days a week - adopting "flexitarianism" - that will be enough to stop global warming.

Meat eating is a problem because cows produce the greenhouse gas methane in large quantities, while it requires a lot more energy and water to produce chickens or other animals rather than vegetables.

The latest research by Friends of the Earth and Compassion in World Farming looked at different diets, farming methods and land use to find out how much carbon dioxide is produced under different models.

It found that enough food could be produced to feed the growing world population, while not increasing greenhouse gases, if more sustainable farming methods are used. For example vegetables can be grown locally and animals can be grazed on British uplands rather than coming from cleared rainforest in Brazil.

Consumers can also make a difference. At the moment, during the week the average European eats one large beef steak, two portions of chicken breast, two pork chops as well as milk and cheese every day.

But just by cutting out meat on two days and eating slightly smaller portions of both meat and dairy, people could make a huge difference to the planet. This would still mean the average European could have a balanced diet of one small beef steak, one portion of fish, one portion of chicken, two pork sausages and two eggs over the course of the week, as well as a small amount of dairy products every day

Clare Oxborrow, senior food campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said people could make a difference with small changes to their diet.

"It's amazing news that we can feed a rapidly expanding population without trashing the planet - and still eat meat several times a week," she said.

* * *

http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/press_releases/eating_the_planet_11112009.html

We can eat meat, ditch factory farming and save the planet - new research

11 November 2009

We don't need to go veggie to feed a booming world population and save the planet from climate change and forest destruction - and can produce enough food for everyone without factory farming, new research from Friends of the Earth and Compassion in World farming shows.

'Eating the planet?', published today (Wednesday 11 November 2009), as world leaders prepare for the FAO World Summit on food security, reveals that we can still enjoy meat several times a week whilst feeding the world using planet-friendly and humane farming methods.

Cruel and intensive factory farming practices currently used to mass produce meat for people in rich countries - who eat around six times as much meat as those in the poorest countries - are destroying forests and wildlife as land is cleared to grow animal feed and graze cattle.

The research models future food production against different diets, farming methods and land use, and concludes that enough food can be produced to feed the growing world population with fairer and healthier diets whilst avoiding deforestation and animal cruelty.

Continuing to eat more meat and dairy globally - the production of which already generates more climate-changing emissions than all of the world's transport - will push the world's climate and resources over the edge.

Despite pushes from agribusiness to intensify farming to feed a growing global population that is expected to reach over nine billion by 2050, the researchers found that a diet equivalent to eating meat three times a week would allow forests to remain untouched, animals to be farmed in free-range conditions and greener farming methods to be used.

With as many people obese in the West as malnourished in poor countries - roughly a billion of each - distributing protein more fairly is also an opportunity to tackle global health problems, the report points out.

But feeding the world in a planet-friendly way means there will be little room to grow bio-fuel crops for cars. Feeding people must come first. Compassion in World Farming and Friends of the Earth are calling on Ministers to switch support from factory farming to planet-friendly and humane methods.

The groups also want the Government to take action to measure and reduce the impact of the UK's meat and dairy production and consumption - and to switch subsidies from intensive to planet-friendly and humane farming.

Clare Oxborrow, senior food campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said: "It's amazing news that we can feed a rapidly expanding population without trashing the planet - and still eat meat several times a week.

"With as many obese as malnourished people in the world, fairer and healthier lower-meat diets are a win-win for people and the planet.

"The Government has already backed a major scientific study that calls for a move away from intensive production - it's time it stopped spending public money on it and got behind planet-friendly farming instead."

Lasse Bruun, Head of Campaigns at Compassion in World Farming, said: "It's great to see that we can actually do without factory farming and still eat meat, just by cutting down the amount we consume."

"With 60 billion animals being reared for livestock production every year and the figure set to double by 2050, we really need to re-consider our approach to farming.

"Animals are being reared like factory units to provide us with cheap meat. The true cost of eating too much meat is animal suffering, deforestation and obesity. We have the power to save our planet and be kind to animals. All we need to do is change our diets to a healthier and fairer option."

Notes to editors

- 'Eating the planet? How we can feed the world without trashing it' is produced by Compassion in World Farming and Friends of the Earth. http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/briefings/eating_planet_briefing.pdf

www.foe.co.uk/resource/briefings/eating_planet_qa.pdf

- It summarises an original study undertaken by researchers at The Institute of Social Ecology, Alpen Adria Universität Klagenfurt, Vienna, Austria, and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany and draws out implications and recommendations arising from the research findings.

* * *

http://www.foe.co.uk/campaigns/biodiversity/news/eating_planet_21836.html

New report says we can eat meat and save the planet

New research from Friends of the Earth and Compassion in World Farming shows we don't have to go vegetarian to save the planet.

Humans already use 75.5 per cent of the world's land, creating a challenge for feeding the growing population

Humans already use 75.5 per cent of the world's land, creating a challenge for feeding the growing population

The report, Eating the Planet? reveals how we can feed a growing global population by using planet-friendly farming methods and eating less, but better, meat.

What's the problem?

Meat and dairy production already causes more climate-changing emissions than all the world's transport.

Big businesses claim that to feed a growing population we need to massively intensify farming.

But expanding factory farms so we can eat more meat and dairy would push the world's climate and resources over the edge.

The global food system is unfair

There are now the same number of obese people globally as there are people going hungry in poor countries - one billion of each.

And westerners also eat six times more meat than those in the poorest countries.

Forests in South America are being cleared to make way for animal feed plantations for factory farms in the west - turfing out people who've lived there for centuries.

Eating meat two or three times a week

This research shows the world can produce enough food for a global population of over nine billion by 2050 without factory farms and forest destruction.

It also sees an important role for environmentally-beneficial organic farming.

Eating meat two or three times each week means we can feed everyone fairly by:

    *      Using planet-friendly farming methods.
    *      Rearing farm animals in free-range, humane conditions.

Fix the Food Chain

Find out more about our campaign to Fix the Food Chain and find out more about our comedy and music event LIVEstock for the Food Chain Campaign.

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#375

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Sat Nov 14, 2009 3:17 pm
Subject: News: Food-borne Illnesses Can Have Long-term Consequences

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http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSTRE5AB5GN20091112

Food-borne ills can have lasting consequences: report
Thu Nov 12, 2009 4:50pm EST

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) - More than just a bad bout of stomach flu, some food-borne illnesses can cause long-term consequences, especially for young people, a report released on Thursday has found.

Researchers at the Center for Foodborne Illness Research & Prevention in Pennsylvania studied the five most common food-borne diseases and found they can cause life-long complications including kidney failure, paralysis, seizures, hearing or visual impairments and mental retardation.

"It's not just a tummy ache," the center's Tanya Roberts told a news briefing.

An estimated 76 million Americans become sick each year from food-borne illness, 325,000 are hospitalized and 5,000 die, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About half are children under 15.

Since 2006, outbreaks have been linked to peanuts, peppers, ground beef, spinach and other common foods.

Diarrhea and vomiting are the most common symptoms of food-borne illness, and typically last only a few days.

But in 2 to 3 percent of cases, food-borne disease can cause serious long-term health problems, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

For the report, the team studied campylobacter infection, E. coli O157:H7, Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella and Toxoplasma gondii.

In addition to diarrhea, fever, abdominal cramps, nausea, and vomiting, campylobacter infection can cause Guillain-Barre syndrome, the most common cause of paralysis in the United States. It can also trigger arthritis, heart infections, and blood infections.

E. coli O157:H7 infection can cause hemolytic uremic syndrome, the leading cause of acute kidney failure in children in the United States.

Listeria has been linked with infections of the brain and spinal cord, resulting in serious neurological dysfunctions or death. It kills about 1 in 5 people.

Salmonella bacteria can cause reactive arthritis, a painful form of arthritis that can interfere with work and quality of life.

And infants whose mothers were infected with toxoplamosis, caused by a food-borne parasite, can develop mental retardation, crossed-eyes and in some cases blindness in one or both eyes.

"It's not just these five," Roberts said. "There's over 200 pathogens that have different kinds of consequences and these consequences can be prevented," she said.

Sandra Eskin, director of the Food Safety Program at the nonprofit Pew Health Group, said she hopes the report will prompt action on legislation pending in Congress to reform food safety in the United States.

"We started 2009 with a major food-borne illness outbreak linked to peanut butter and peanut butter products. It ultimately resulted in nine deaths and sickened more than 700 people in 46 states," Eskin said. "Families should not have to wait another year for safer food."

(Editing by Philip Barbara)

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#374

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Thu Nov 12, 2009 11:37 am
Subject: News: Linking the Local Food Movement to Carbon Emissions

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The Trouble with Carbon

Illustration Omitted
The local food movement isn't nearly as green as you might wish. photo: Norfolk Gallery

In Europe and the United States, the "locavore" movement is gaining momentum, with a rising number of people refusing to eat anything that isn't grown within 100 miles of home. The idea is that locally-based food production will reduce the so-called carbon footprint and help to mitigate global warming.

But will it? That 747 air freighter packed with produce will spew roughly one metric ton of carbon dioxide into the air for every 2,000 miles travelled, but the can of beans you get from Africa is likely to have a smaller carbon footprint than the drive you make to the supermarket to buy it.

In particular, a New York writer named Colin Beavan has stirred international attention with his just released book, "No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet, and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process" (available through Amazon, US$16. 41). Beavan and his family tried to live in New York while seeking to reduce consumption to a bare minimum, including using no toilet paper and, among other things, not eating anything produced more than 250 miles from the city.

The book has been widely praised. "We as individuals can take action to address important social problems. One person can make a difference," wrote Marion Nestle, author of What to Eat. Similar gushing abounds.

But carbon warming as a component of food production is complicated. According to a study by Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews of Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, transportation from the farm to the supermarket accounts for just 4 percent of emissions related to food, and a minuscule amount of the total carbon footprint. Although the desire to buy local may be laudable, it may have little effect on carbon output.

That organic farmer that the carbon-conscious urban customer would like to buy from is likely to haul his produce from his farm to the city in at least a pickup truck or something bigger. The average SUV emits roughly 1.5 pounds of carbon per mile travelled. The production of local food in cold climates, which may require fertilizer, fuel and heated greenhouses, is likely to create far more emissions than growing it in the tropics, where water and sunlight are plentiful.

One study by Cranfield University in England, for instance, shows that the carbon cost of growing flowers in Kenya and flying them to the UK is perhaps a fifth of those grown in the Netherlands.

Flowers are not food, of course. But one study cited by the Guardian in 2008 involved Kenyan green beans. Kenyan farmers do not use tractors. They use cattle manure as fertilizer, their irrigation systems are simply ditches flooding fields instead of fossil fuel-driven sprinklers, and water and sunlight are plentiful.

Home-grown British beans are grown in fields sown with fossil-based fertilisers. They are ploughed by diesel-burning tractors. And, as the Guardian points out, produce grown in the developing world provides employment to legions of the poor.

Gareth Thomas, England's Minister for Trade and Development, at a seminar on air freight in 2007, pointed out that driving 10 kilometers to shop in the UK emits more carbon than flying the pack of beans from Kenya.

The Burlington & Northern Railway in the United States, in an advertisement, says it can move one imperial ton of freight 680 kilometers on a single gallon of fuel. The organic farmer in the San Francisco Bay area may be doing everything right, but moving his cabbages to a farmer's market in his pickup truck every Saturday will produce far more carbon per unit of produce than either the airfreight 747 from Kenya or the Burlington & Northern train.

The Guardian study cites apples, which are harvested in England in September and October. Some are sold fresh but others are chilled and stored for as long as 10 months. The energy used to chill them overtakes the carbon cost of shipping them all the way from New Zealand. In the winter, the study points out, UK lettuce is grown in greenhouses or polyethylene tunnels that require heating. In winter, field-grown lettuce from, say, Spain produces far less carbon even if shipped to the UK.

Are you cooking with gas or electricity? Electricity is likely to put far less carbon in the air because it is produced by a plant that may have carbon scrubbers. Natural gas gives off carbon in individual kitchens.

Hong Kong, self-contained and isolated from China, is an excellent test case. The territory, with a population of 7.04 million, has characteristics that seemingly should make it one of the least carbon-friendly cities in the world. As much as HK$8,000 in food is imported each year per person including 7.5 million tons of tomatoes alone, for instance, or 7 million kilograms of salmon from Norway. But at 5.5 tons of carbon emissions per capita annually, Hong Kong ranks well behind Singapore, for instance, at 12.3 tons per person, a similar city in terms of function and lack of hinterland.

If Hong Kong were a country it would rank 65th in terms of total carbon emissions, producing 37.411 million tons annually according to the UNDP, less than 0.1 percent of the global total - although that figure itself is in question. According to a report to the Hong Kong Legislative Council Panel on Environmental affairs on GHGs in June 2007, "The volume of GHG emissions totalled about 44.8 million tons of CO2-equivalent (CO2-e)2 in 2005, accounting for about 0.2 percent of global GHG emissions.

Emissions per capita in Hong Kong, which were around 6.4 to 6.5 tons in recent years, are far lower than those recorded in most of the developed economies such as the United States, (about 24 tons), Canada (about 24 tons), Australia (about 27 tons), UK (about 11 tons), Japan (about 11 tons), European Union (about 9 tons) and Singapore (about 9 tons). Hong Kong's carbon intensity, as measured in terms of GHG emissions per unit of gross domestic product, was 27.6 kg per HK$1,000 of GDP in 2005 and was one of the lowest amongst developed economies," the panel found.

But does it? Hong Kong is at the epicentre of some 60,000 companies owned by the territory's residents, kicking up enormous amounts of greenhouses gases in the Pearl River Delta. It all depends on who's measuring what - including the GHGs produced on an organically correct farm in, say, Northern California.

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#373

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Thu Nov 12, 2009 11:30 am
Subject: News: Food-based Illnesses Surprisingly High, Worldwide

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Tainted food surprisingly deadly in adults: WHO
Wed Nov 11, 2009 11:25am GMT

By Laura MacInnis

GENEVA (Reuters) - Millions of adults die every year from bugs and toxins in what they eat, according to new World Health Organisation data that shows food-borne diseases are far more deadly than the U.N. agency previously estimated.

The research faults unsafe food for 1.2 million deaths per year in people over the age of five in Southeast Asia and Africa - three times more adult deaths than the Geneva-based WHO had thought occurred in the whole world.

"It is a picture that we have never had before," WHO Food Safety Director Jorgen Schlundt said in an interview. "We now have documentation of a significant burden outside the less than five group, that is major new information."

Ailments linked to contaminated food and water have long been seen as a major threat to young children, who can dehydrate quickly. But the Danish veterinarian and microbiologist said the risks to older populations had been grossly underestimated.

Older children and the elderly are especially vulnerable to severe illness from major food- and water-borne diseases such as salmonella, listeria, E. coli, Hepatitis A and cholera.

Food safety experts are now seeking to measure the burden of such afflictions in people over the age of five in the Arab world, Latin America and elsewhere in Asia including China.

And already, Schlundt said, health officials are recognising the need to confront the most dangerous types of contamination in their industrial regulations and trade standards.

"Literally millions are dying every year and we know that a lot of these could be prevented," he told Reuters. "There is a realisation that instead of doing what we did in the past, in the future we should really focus on where the problems are."

MODERN FOOD PRODUCTION

Many of the contaminants that have made headlines in recent years in the United States, such as salmonella and E. coli, also exist in poorer countries but are not monitored as carefully there, according to Schlundt.

Health authorities in developed countries are now much more able to document food safety risks because of tests that can quickly connect disparate cases of illness to tainted foods such as lettuce, peppers, spinach and beef.

But the WHO expert said that some ailments have also become more prevalent in the food system alongside the globalisation of the food supply and the rise of modern food production methods, which can propagate ailments quickly and on a large scale.

"There are certain pathogens that have increased over the last 20 or 30 years. Some problems clearly have moved and become bigger because of the ways that we produce," he said.

Simple steps can cut the levels of chemicals and toxins in foods, such as avoiding conditions where mould can grow, Schlundt said. Farming techniques can also root out microorganisms from the food chain and parasites can be wiped out by targeting their hosts and transmission patterns, he said.

Because it is now clear that some foods are more vulnerable to certain food-borne ailments than others, health officials are well-placed to focus their energies on monitoring areas posing the highest potential disease risk, according to Schlundt.

Another vital part of the food-borne disease fight is having consumers take precautions in the way they prepare foods, and ensuring patients and health workers take symptoms such as diarrhoea seriously as a risk across population groups.

"Many of the deaths that we see in developing countries, if they had been treated at the right time, they would not have died," Schlundt said.

© Thomson Reuters 2009 All rights reserved

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#372

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Wed Nov 11, 2009 10:21 am
Subject: Feature: Do We Need to Return to Natural Farming?

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The fight over the future of food
Tue Nov 10, 2009 8:04am EST

* Backlash against GM crops complicates bid to feed world
* Resistance to science-based agriculture grows in U.S.
* Is a second Green Revolution needed, or even desirable?

By Claudia Parsons, Russell Blinch and Svetlana Kovalyova

NEW YORK/WASHINGTON/MILAN, Nov 10 (Reuters) - At first glance, Giuseppe Oglio's farm near Milan looks like it's suffering from neglect. Weeds run rampant amid the rice fields and clover grows unchecked around his millet crop.

Oglio, a third generation farmer eschews modern farming techniques -- chemicals, fertilizers, heavy machinery -- in favor of a purely natural approach. It is not just ecological, he says, but profitable, and he believes his system can be replicated in starving regions of the globe.

Nearly 5,000 miles (8,000 km) away, in laboratories in St. Louis, Missouri, hundreds of scientists at the world's biggest seed company, Monsanto, also want to feed the world, only their tools of choice are laser beams and petri dishes.

Monsanto, a leader in agricultural biotechnology, spends about $2 million a day on scientific research that aims to improve on Mother Nature, and is positioning itself as a key player in the fight against hunger.

The Italian farmer and the U.S. multinational represent the two extremes in an increasingly acrimonious debate over the future of food.

Everybody wants to end hunger, but just how to do so is a divisive question that pits environmentalists against anti-poverty campaigners, big business against consumers and rich countries against poor.

The food fight takes place at a time when experts on both sides agree on one thing -- the number of empty bellies around the world will only grow unless there is major intervention now.

A combination of the food crisis and the global economic downturn has catapulted the number of hungry people in the world to more than 1 billion. The United Nations says world food output must grow by 70 percent over the next four decades to feed a projected extra 2.3 billion people by 2050.

International leaders are gathering in Rome next week for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's World Summit on Food Security and will hear competing arguments over how best to tackle the problem. One of the fiercest disputes will be over the relative importance of science versus social and economic reforms to empower small farmers to grow more with existing technology.

"LISTEN TO NATURE"

Much of Europe has moved away from an agricultural system of small farms to mass commercial farming, but Italy still retains a base of family farmers who produce everything from olives to mozzarella cheese.

Oglio is one of them. A charismatic 40-year-old, he dropped out of an agricultural school after growing disillusioned with the farming methods being taught there. Today, he lets nature run its course as he grows cereals and legumes on his small family farm in Belcreda di Gambolo, about 20 miles (30 km) southwest of Milan.

He does not use any chemical, or even natural fertilisers or pesticides. He does not weed his fields. "All you need to do is observe nature, listen to it, do what nature suggests and it will take care of everything," he said.

His fields, in a low-lying plain that has a long history of growing rice used for risotto, replicate patterns found in nature. For example, clover and millet grow together, feeding each other with necessary minerals.

Oglio said his farm is eco-sustainable. He has slashed operating costs by eliminating expensive commercial products like herbicides and by reducing the use of agricultural machinery to a minimum. Such cheap and low-maintenance farming could be adopted in Africa and other regions hit by poverty and hunger, he said.

"Natural farming will not save the world. But it can feed poor families," he said.

But it's unlikely it can do so on the scale that most experts believe is necessary. And therein lies the rub. Affluent consumers may prefer the Oglios of the world to the Monsantos, but their skittishness about high-tech agriculture is making it more difficult to grapple with the mounting crisis over the lack of food.

LEARNING FROM THE PAST

The last time the world faced such dire predictions of famine was before the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, when countries like India and China transformed their agricultural systems to become self-sufficient in food. They did so by harnessing plant-breeding technology to raise yields on rice, wheat and other staple crops.

Through massive state investment in hybrid rice, China, the world's most populous country, raised its yields from two tonnes per hectare in the 1960s to more than 10 tonnes per hectare by 2004. Chinese scientists seek further gains -- 13.5 tonnes per hectare by 2015, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), which cites China's rice program as one of the true success stories in agricultural development in a study out this week (Nov. 12) called "Millions Fed."

To be sure, the Green Revolution had its downsides -- environmental damage, to name one. In India, for example, water tables are drying up and the soil has been degraded by pesticide and fertilisers. The movement also contributed to the rise of big commercial farms at the expense of small holders, fueling resentment from its early days at what critics see as the "corporatisation" of food.

But millions of people were saved from starvation, and the movement's architect, Norman Borlaug, received the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize.

With their populations soaring, however, India and China -- not to mention most of Africa -- still face challenges, especially as climate change exacerbates environmental problems that have already slowed growth in food production.

IFPRI, part of a global network of agricultural research centers, said last month lower yields due to climate change would cut "calorie availability" for the average consumer in a developing country in 2050 by 7 percent, compared with 2000.

Higher temperatures reduce crop yields while encouraging pests and plant diseases. For almost all crops, South Asia would experience the largest declines in yields. IFPRI said rice output in the region would be 14 percent lower than if there were no climate change.

"India sorely needs another Green Revolution," said Kushagra Nayan Bajaj, joint managing director of Bajaj Hinduthan (BJHN.BO), India's top sugar producer, which is importing raw sugar after a drought hit the domestic cane crop.

But a second green revolution would face a strong counterinsurgency, even in a place like India that benefited so profoundly from the first one.

"The point is that chemicals destroy the sustainability of productivity in the long run ... Yes, a second green revolution is indeed very essential -- the very need of the hour. But it should not be the same kind of green revolution that the first was," said P.C. Kesavan, a fellow at the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, set up by the father of India's Green Revolution.

Economists and scientists in India are demanding a raft of policy initiatives, including allowing genetic engineering, which its proponents argue does the same job as traditional plant hybridization, only quicker and more efficiently.

India has so far allowed GM seeds only for cotton, which has boosted productivity, but suggestions of allowing such seeds for edible crops have always evoked strong protests.

CRADLE OF CORN

It's a similar story in Mexico, where Borlaug started his pioneering research in the 1940s at the Cooperative Wheat Research and Production Program. Mexico issued permits last month for the first time for farmers to grow genetically modified corn.

Considered by many the cradle of corn, Mexico is home to more than 10,000 varieties, used to make the classic tortilla, a staple of the Mexican diet. Corn was first planted in Mexico as many as 9,000 years ago and the grain was adapted by Spanish conquerors in the early 1500s and eventually spread to the rest of the world.

Mexico faces the same dilemmas over GM corn as do many developing countries -- balancing consumer fears with the need to grow more food.

"We see corn as our cultural heritage, our legacy. For us it's not just a question of food, but about conserving our traditions," said Celerino Tlacotempa, who works for an organization of native Nahuatl farmers in the southern mountains of Guerrero state.

"With genetically modified seeds we will lose our varieties of colored corn. There will be no more purple corn, black corn, white corn," Tlacotempa said. "Above all, we will be condemned to buy seeds from companies like Monsanto. It's not sustainable. It's a real risk for the wellbeing of these communities."

At the same time, other Mexican farmers in the north of the country have been cultivating GM seeds smuggled over the border from the United States for some time, attracted by the crops' greater resilience to drought and pests and higher yields.

Tomas Lumpkin, director of CIMMYT, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center that Borlaug started in Mexico, said the country now imports about half of the corn it consumes. With climate change and other pressures, he said, it was vital to raise production using all tools available.

"It is a much more complex and difficult world than Borlaug faced, but we have much more powerful tools than he had, and we need to start testing those and deploying those," he said.

"GMOs are just another set of tools in the toolbox, but we need to be able to use those tools," Lumpkin said. "If we could deploy those varieties so that the farmer in the developing world has the same powerful seed as the farmer in Iowa, why should they be handicapped?"

© Thomson Reuters 2009 All rights reserved

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#371

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Wed Nov 11, 2009 10:16 am
Subject: Commentary: The Food Security Implications of Climate Change

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November 10, 2009

Plan B Updates
The Copenhagen Conference on Food Security

Lester R. Brown

For the 193 national delegations gathering in Copenhagen for the U.N. Climate Change Conference in December, the reasons for concern about climate change vary widely. For delegations from low-lying island countries, the principal concern is rising sea level. For countries in southern Europe, climate change means less rainfall and more drought. For countries of East Asia and the Caribbean, more powerful storms and storm surges are a growing worry. This climate change conference is about all these things, and many more, but in a very fundamental sense, it is a conference about food security.

We need not go beyond ice melting to see that the world is in trouble on the food front. The melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets is raising sea level. If the Greenland ice sheet were to melt entirely, sea level would rise by 23 feet. Recent projections show that it could rise by up to 6 feet during this century.

The world rice harvest is particularly vulnerable to rising sea level. A World Bank map of Bangladesh shows that even a 3-foot rise in sea level would cover half of the riceland in this country of 160 million people. It would also inundate one third or more of the Mekong delta, which produces half of the rice in Viet Nam, the world's number two rice exporter. And it would submerge parts of the 20 or so other rice-growing river deltas in Asia.

The worldwide melting of mountain glaciers is of even greater concern. The World Glacier Monitoring Service in Switzerland has recently reported the eighteenth consecutive year of shrinking mountain glaciers. Glaciers are melting in the Andes, the Rocky Mountains, the Alps, and throughout the mountain ranges of Asia.

It is the disappearing glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan Plateau that are of most concern, because their ice melt sustains the flow of the major rivers of India and China--the Indus, Ganges, Yangtze, and Yellow rivers-during the dry season. This ice melt thus also sustains the irrigation systems that depend on these rivers.

Yao Tandong, one of China's leading glaciologists, who predicts that two thirds of China's glaciers could be gone by 2050, says "the full-scale glacier shrinkage in the plateau region will eventually lead to an ecological catastrophe."

It will also lead to a humanitarian catastrophe. China is the world's leading producer of wheat. India is number two. (The United States is third.) In contrast to the United States, most wheat grown in China and India is irrigated. With rice, these two countries totally dominate the world harvest. The projected melting of these mountain glaciers in Asia represents the most massive threat to food security the world has ever seen.

The prospects for the harvests of wheat and rice, in these two countries, each with over a billion people, are of concern everywhere. We live in an integrated world food economy, one where harvest shortfalls anywhere can drive up food prices everywhere.

Rising temperature also directly affects crop yields. In a study published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, an international team of scientists confirmed the rule of thumb emerging among crop ecologists that for each 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature above the norm during the growing season, we can expect a 10-percent decline in wheat and rice yields. In a world with limited grain stocks-a world that is only one poor harvest away from chaos in grain markets-a crop-shrinking heat wave in a major grain-producing region could lead to politically destabilizing food shortages.

The delegates are gathering in Copenhagen against a backdrop of spreading hunger. For much of the late 20th century, the number of hungry people was declining, but it bottomed out in the late 1990s at 825 million. It then turned upward, reaching 870 million in 2005 and passing one billion in 2009. The combination of rising seas, melting glaciers, and crop-withering heat waves could push these numbers up even faster, forcing millions more families to try and survive on one meal a day.

We are in a race between political tipping points and natural tipping points. Can we cut carbon emissions fast enough to keep the melting of the Greenland ice sheet from becoming irreversible? Can we close coal-fired power plants fast enough to save at least the larger glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau? Can we head off crop-withering heat waves of ever greater intensity? These are food security issues. This is what Copenhagen is about.

Lester R. Brown is the president of the Earth Policy Institute and author of "Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization."

More information can be found in Chapter 1: "Selling Our Future" and Chapter 3: "Climate Change and the Energy Transition," available for free downloading at http://www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/books/pb4.

Copyright © 2009 Earth Policy Institute

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#370

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Date: Wed Nov 11, 2009 10:09 am
Subject: Commentary: The Raw Milk Revolution

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Drinking problems
I drink raw milk (sold illegally on the underground market)

* Joel Salatin
Posted 5:50 PM on 3 Nov 2009

From Joel Salatin's foreword to The Raw Milk Revolution: Behind America's Emerging Battle Over Food Rights by David Gumpert.

The Raw Milk Revolution book coverI drink raw milk, sold illegally on the underground black market. I grew up on raw milk from our own Guernsey cows that our family hand-milked twice a day. We made yogurt, ice cream, butter, and cottage cheese. All through high school in the early 1970s, I sold our homemade yogurt, butter, buttermilk, and cottage cheese at the Curb Market on Saturday mornings. This was a precursor to today's farmer's markets.

In those days, the Virginia Department of Agriculture had a memorandum of agreement with the Curb Market that as long as vendors belonged to an Agricultural Extension organization such as Extension Homemaker's Clubs or 4-H, producers could bring value-added products to market without inspection and visits from the food police. The government agents assumed that anyone participating in the extension programs would be getting the latest, greatest food science and therefore conform to the most modern procedural protocols, which created its own protection.

As the Virginia Slims commercial says, "We've come a long way, baby." These conciliatory overtures to maintain healthy and vibrant local food economies exist no more. Today I can't sell any of those things at a farmer's market, and even if I take eggs some bureaucrat will come along with a pocket thermometer and, without warrant or warning, reach over and poke it through my display eggs to see if they are at the proper temperature. If they aren't, no amount of pleading that those are for display only can dissuade the petulant public servant from demanding that I dump those display eggs in a trash can on the spot. I don't sell at farmer's markets anymore.

In 1975, when I graduated from high school and began plotting my farming career, I figured out that I could hand-milk ten cows, sell the milk to neighbors at regular retail prices, and be a full-time farmer. This was before most people had ever heard the word organic. But selling milk was illegal. In those days, we didn't know about herd shares or Community Supported Agriculture or even limited liability corporations.

As a result, I went to work for a local newspaper and became the proverbial part-time farmer-working in town to support the farming passion. I don't think I've ever gotten over the fact that the government arbitrarily determined to make it very difficult for me to become a farmer. That seems un-American, doesn't it?

Isn't it curious that at this juncture in our culture's evolution, we collectively believe Twinkies, Lucky Charms, and Coca-Cola are safe foods, but compost-grown tomatoes and raw milk are not? With legislation moving through Congress demanding that all agricultural practices be "science-based," I believe our food system is at Wounded Knee. I do not believe that is an overstatement.

Make no mistake, as the local, heritage, humane, ecological, sustainable-call it what you will (anything but organic since the government now owns that word)-food system takes flight, the industrial food system is fighting back. With a vengeance. By demonizing, criminalizing, and marginalizing the integrity food movement, the entrenched powers that be hope to derail this revolution.

This industrial food experiment, historically speaking, is completely abnormal. It's not normal to eat things you can't spell or pronounce. It's not normal to eat things you can't make in your kitchen. Indeed, if everything in today's science-based supermarket that was unavailable before 1900 were removed, hardly anything would be left. And as more people realize that this grand experiment in ingesting material totally foreign to our three-trillion-member internal community of intestinal microflora and -fauna is really biologically aberrant behavior, they are opting out of industrial fare. Indeed, to call it a food revolution is accurate.

But revolutions are always met with prejudice and entrenched paradigms from the about-to-be-unseated lords of the status quo. The realignment of power, trust, money, and commerce that the local heritage-based food movement represents inherently gives birth to a backlash. By the time of Wounded Knee, Native Americans no longer jeopardized the American reality.

But to many Americans, these Natives had to be crushed, extinguished, put on reservations. Would America have been stronger if European leaders had listened to wisdom about herbal remedies and consensus building? The answer is yes. But to Americans, the red man was just a barbarian because he didn't govern by parliamentary procedure or ride in horse-drawn stagecoaches along cobblestone streets. In fact, he was considered a threat to America. Just like giving slaves their freedom in 1850. Just like imbibing alcohol in 1925. Just like homeschooling in 1980.

The ultimate test of a tyrannical society or a free society is how it responds to its lunatic fringe. A strong, self-confident, free society tolerates and enjoys the fringe people who come up with zany notions. Indeed, most people later labeled geniuses were dubbed whacko by their contemporary mainstream society. So what does a culture do with weirdos who actually believe they have a right to choose what to feed their internal three-trillion-member community?

The only reason the right to food choice was not guaranteed in the Bill of Rights is because the Founders of America could not have envisioned a day when selling a glass of raw milk or homemade pickles to a neighbor would be outlawed. At the time, such a thought was as strange as levitation.

Indeed, what good is the freedom to own guns, worship, or assemble if we don't have the freedom to eat the proper fuel to energize us to shoot, pray, and preach? Is not freedom to choose our food at least as fundamental a right as the freedom to worship?

How would we feel if we had to get a license from bureaucrats to start a church? After all, beliefs can be pretty damaging things. And charlatans certainly do exist. Better protect people from those charlatans-bad preachers and raw milk advocates.

But what does a society do when the charlatans are in charge? In charge of the regulating government agencies. In charge of the research institutions. In charge of the food system.

That is a real conundrum, because if health depends on opting out of what the charlatans think is safe, we are forced into civil disobedience. When the public no longer trusts its public servants, people begin taking charge of their own health and welfare. And that is exactly what is driving the local heritage food movement.

Lots of folks realize they don't want industrialists fooling around with something as basic as food. People like me don't trust Monsanto. We don't trust the Food and Drug Administration. We don't trust the Department of Agriculture. We don't trust Tyson. And we don't think it's safe to be dependent on food that sits for a month in the belly of a Chinese merchant marine vessel.

This clash of choice versus prohibition brings us to today's Wounded Knee of food. The local heritage-based food movement represents everything that is good and noble about farming and food culture. It is about decentralized farms. Pastoral livestock systems. Symbiotic multi-speciation. Companion planting. Earthworms. It is about community-appropriate techniques and scale. Aesthetically and aromatically sensual romantic farming. Re-embedding the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker in the village. And ultimately about health-giving food grown more productively on less land than industrial models.

Certainly some of this clash represents the difference between nurturing and dominating. The local heritage food movement-the raw milk movement-is all about respecting and honoring indigenous wisdom. The industrial mind-set worships techno-glitzy gadgetry and views heritage food advocates as simpletons and Luddites. Or dangerous criminals.

In this wonderful exposé The Raw Milk Revolution, David Gumpert employs the best journalistic investigative techniques to examine this clash from the raw milk battlefront. Be assured that the same mentality exists toward homemade pickles, home-cured meats, and cottage industry in general. The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in the food system, but it is harassed out of existence by capricious, malicious, and prejudiced government agents who really do believe they are doing society a favor by denying food choice to Americans.

The same curative properties espoused by raw milk advocates exist in a host of other food products, from homemade pound cake and potpies to pepperoni and pastured chicken. Real food is what developed our internal intestinal community. And it sure didn't develop on food from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations and genetically modified potatoes that are partly human and partly tomato. Long after human cleverness has run its course, compost piles will still grow the best tomatoes and grazing cows will still yield one of nature's perfect foods: raw milk.

One of our former apprentices has just started a ten-cow herd-share arrangement with our customers. Here is a young, entrepreneurial, go-get-'em farmer embarking on his dream, serving people who are enjoying their dream of acquiring unadulterated milk. Can any arrangement, any relationship-between farmer and cow, cow and pasture, customer and producer be more honorable, respectable, open, and trusting? Everything about this is righteous, including respecting the individual enough to let her decide what to eat and what to feed her children.

Let the revolution continue.

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#369

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Mon Nov 9, 2009 4:47 am
Subject: News: Bluefin Tuna Edges Toward Extinction, Some Warn

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http://www.seeddaily.com/reports/Bluefin_tuna_on_edge_of_extinction_environmentalists_warn_999.html

Bluefin tuna on edge of extinction, environmentalists warn

Illustration Omitted
The World Wildlife Fund says a collapse in bluefin, a predator, could also trigger sharp changes in stocks of other species such as squid or sardines, also affecting fishing communities in turn.

by Staff Writers
Washington (AFP) Nov 5, 2009

An international fisheries group set up to protect Atlantic tuna has done the opposite and driven one species of the fish, the bluefin, to the edge of extinction, environmentalists said Thursday.

On the eve of a 10-day meeting in Brazil of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), environmentalists accused the group of ignoring the advice of its own scientists and setting fishing quotas for bluefin tuna that have drastically depleted stocks.

"ICCAT has continually disregarded countless opportunities to do the right thing and secure the Atlantic bluefin tuna," Susan Lieberman, director of international policy at the Washington-based Pew Environment Group, told reporters.

Marine biologist Carl Safina, president of the Blue Ocean Institute, which studies how human behavior impacts the ocean, called ICCAT "the poster child for not only failure... but cynicism and a real unwillingness to get serious, be professional and listen to what the science has to say.

"The world's first fisheries management agency formed out of concern for this one species never followed their own science, never lived up to their mandate to manage for a sustainable yield," Safina said.

ICCAT was set up in the late 1960s to conserve "tuna and tuna-like species in the Atlantic Ocean and adjacent seas," according to its website.

Lieberman said ICCAT has for decades set quotas above what its own scientists have recommended for bluefin tuna.

Those quotas are systematically exceeded by industrial fleets, which over-fish the species.

Combined with illegal fishing, this has caused the population to decline by more than 85 percent in the eastern Atlantic and by more than 90 percent in the western Atlantic.

"The bluefin tuna will not be with us and certainly will be extinct if governments don't do the right thing... and unless ICCAT says, 'Enough is enough, it's time for a zero quota; we're going to put the brakes on this fishery,'" Lieberman said.

"If we had any terrestrial species that had declined this much, this quickly, we would have said we have to shut this down, we have to let them recover," Lieberman told AFP.

The environmentalists also called for stricter regulation of the trade in sharks, which are often caught up as "by-catch" in commercial tuna-fishing operations and are also being targeted directly by fishing fleets for their fins and meat.

Around 100 million sharks are caught in commercial and sports fishing every year, and several species have declined by more than 80 percent in the past decade alone, according the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).

"ICCAT needs to set science-based sustainable catch limits on the number of sharks that can be killed and prohibit the retention of exceptionally vulnerable sharks species such as the big-eyed thresher," Lieberman said.

The environmentalists want the bluefin tuna to be included on the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) list of animals and plants most threatened with extinction, and for some species of shark to be included on a CITES list which regulates trade.

"We want their trade regulated so they don't go the way of the bluefin," Lieberman told AFP.

Bluefin tuna is popular in upscale sushi restaurants around the world, particularly Japan, while shark-fin soup is a delicacy and status symbol in some Asian countries. Shark meat is also gaining popularity in Europe.

Forty-eight countries in every region of the world -- ranging from Algeria, Barbados, China and France, to Ivory Coast, Japan, the United States and Venezuela -- are contracting parties to ICCAT.

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#368

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Mon Nov 9, 2009 4:40 am
Subject: News: Soil Scientist Warns Climate Change Would Cut Agricultural Productivity

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http://ghanabusinessnews.com/2009/11/08/soil-scientists-warn-of-worsening-food-crisis/

Nov 8, 2009 10:56 - - 0 Comments

Soil scientists warn of worsening food crisis

Illustration Omitted
         Desertification.

Soil scientists have warned of worsening food insecurity in the next decades unless pragmatic measures were adopted to enhance soil productivity by minimising the effects of changing weather patterns.

Quoting from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which predicted that climate change, could cause potential crop yields from rain-fed agriculture to decline by 50 per cent in some African countries by 2050 while the population increased from 770 million in 2005 to 1.5 billion in 2050, the scientists said this would result in soaring prices for inadequate food which would make most of the people hungry.

Dr. Kofi Budu Laryea, a Professor at the Department of Soil Science, Faculty of Agriculture and Consumer Sciences, University of Ghana, said the current farming practices (slash and burn) involving burning to clear the land, taking away of the top soil, did not encourage environmental sustainability but rather fuelled climate change.

He was delivering a lecture at a climate change symposium in Accra on Friday, organised by the Soil Science Society of Ghana, on the topic: "Possible Impacts of Climate Change on Soil Physical Processes and the Environment".

It was attended by members of the academia, civil society, NGOs and representatives of United Nations agencies.

Prof. Laryea said those farming practices coupled with industrial revolution had led to an increase in greenhouse emissions causing high atmospheric temperature which had resulted in the current rising sea surface levels and erratic rainfall pattern globally.

He said the increasing effects of climate change meant that there would be decrease in vegetation growth leading to less addition of biomass to the soil which would lead to increased organic matter decomposition and loss, the effects of which would be land degradation spiral resulting in productivity losses.

Prof. Laryea urged farmers to avoid any farming practice that would involve tillage which would affect soil structure and called for the adoption of conservation tillage, which allowed 30 per cent coverage of soil surface by residues after planting, to make agricultural lands withstand the effects of climate change.

Dr. Musah Farihou Mbenga, Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Representative for Africa who spoke on the topic "Climate Change and Food Security in Africa and Ghana in particular" called for agricultural practice that would contribute to reduced greenhouse gas emissions to improve the quality, availability and efficiency of land use.

He said there should be policy focus on rural investments to reduce the long-term effects of short-term climate variability on food security, through crop insurance and incentives that would encourage farmers to adopt better agricultural land use practices.

Dr. Mbenga noted that the effects of climate change also held bleak future for fisheries and aquaculture dependent people since production and marketing costs would rise as against decrease in buying and exports.

He stressed the need for improved decentralisation and bottom-up processes in line with the high heterogeneity of agro-climatic conditions leading to specific and innovative solutions.

Dr. Seth Kofi Akyea Danso, a Professor at Department of Soil Science, Faculty of Agriculture and Consumer Sciences, University of Ghana who spoke on the topic "Impacts of Soil Management on Climate Change" called for proper management of soil to improve its organic matter level for improved crop yield.

Dr F.M. Tetteh, President of the Society, said the symposium was to stimulate debate and generate ideas towards the forthcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference scheduled for Copenhagen in December.

He said the presentations would be made available to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Agriculture for action to improve the country's food production status in the face of climate change.

Source: GNA

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#367

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Mon Nov 9, 2009 4:28 am
Subject: News: Farm-to-Table Concept Finds Traction, In Montana

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http://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/montana/article_35f955d8-cc0a-11de-9a1f-001cc4c002e0.html

Ag producers, consumers pushing farm-to-table concept
In the mid-20th century, 70% of what Montanans ate was produced in state

By TOM LUTEY Of The Gazette Staff | Posted: Sunday, November 8, 2009 12:15 am | LoadingŠ

Illustration Omitted
Cal Silver of Glendive empties beans into a smaller container so she can run the beans through a cleaner. The beans are part of a farm-to-table program operated in Glendive. DAVID GRUBBS/Gazette Staff

GLENDIVE - His farm truck bed is edged with a rind of rust and the frost bitten air needs thawing, but as Alvin Hoff unloads his harvest of dark red beans, he feels the heft of what he hopes are the seeds to farming's future.

"I'm always willing to try something different," Hoff said. "I've always put in experimental beans, soldier beans, heirlooms. I've put in beans the Mandan Indians raised, good quality."

To Hoff, these beans are seeds of hope. Discouraged by a global farm economy offering profit margins as thin as 3 percent, Hoff is trying something that hasn't been done in these parts for decades. He's raising food for his neighbors, for the local school lunch program and Montanans wanting to know from where their food comes.

The townies call this emerging trend farm-to-table. Farmers like Hoff call it a second chance at feeding the state, which Montana farmers once did well.

There was a time when 70 percent of what Montanans ate was produced in state. They grew watermelons in Whitehall, green peas in Bozeman, apricots in Corvallis, beans in Glendive, all for commercial sale. Now there's a push to return to those days by farmers and consumers who say farm profits would be better and so would the healthfulness of the food we eat.

But it's been so long since Montana fed itself, the burning question is whether it still can.

"Montana was a net exporter of processed foods and vegetables, and of course that was canned, but the state had the infrastructure to deal with a surplus of processed food," said Nancy Matheson, who oversees commodity development for the state Agriculture Department. "Cantaloupes were raised in Circle, green peas were raised in Gallatin Valley. Turkeys were raised in Park County. Cheese and other dairy products were raised across the state. And we grew enough to export them. We served other markets."

In 1947 more than 4,000 Montanans drew paychecks from the 200-plus canneries, dairies, slaughterhouses and mills processing Montana food. Those companies as a group were one of the state's largest employers, Matheson said.

That all changed in the 1950s with the massive expansion of the federal interstate highway system and the arrival of powerful, diesel-engine trucks. The trucks, initially designed for carry troops, rumbled into American life from the military factories of World War II. Behind them they towed refrigerated trailers, developed for hauling food to soldiers without spoiling.

Before the war, it was nearly impossible to haul food more than 50 miles. Trailers were cooled with ice and when the ice melted, food quickly spoiled.

After the war, fruit and vegetable states like California began shipping not only fresh produce across the country, but also frozen food, also perfected as part of the war effort. Food only seasonally available when grown in Montana was suddenly imported and available year round.

At the same time distribution was improving, the federal government began subsidizing certain crops like wheat, barley and pinto beans, a problem for Hoff and others favoring variety. Pretty soon it didn't make sense to grow anything the government wouldn't support, Matheson said. Federal subsidies were based on acres planted so non-subsidized, small-acre crops like vegetables quickly disappeared.

Just four decades later, despite producing enough grain to provide 40 loaves of bread a day to every man woman and child in the state, farmers are producing only 5 percent of the food in an average Montanan's diet. The rest is imported through an elaborate national food network.

The local distribution network and food processors essential for delivering Montana food to local markets has mostly disappeared. In a state with more acres plowed for farming than nearly any other, would-be buyers of Montana products must hunt to find food they need.

"The biggest challenge for us has been finding a steady reliable production stream for certain commodities," said Mark LoParco, dining services director at the University of Montana.

Montana's universities and public schools are at the forefront of the local food movement. Advocates of reviving the local food system, like state Superintendent of Public Instruction Denise Juneau, see public school and university cafeterias as essential for bringing Montana food back to the table. Juneau pegs the public school market for Montana food at $25 million. Others peg potential farm-to-cafeteria profits at $75 million if variety and processing improve.

Schools are easily the biggest food buyer in most communities, Juneau said. If the schools can get local food in the form they need it, it shouldn't be hard to get it delivered to local restaurants and stores, also. Public schools are trying to serve "all Montana" meals several times a year and working local food projects into their curriculum to make the lesson stick.

At the college level Montana State University in Bozeman is offering a new degree program addressing sustainable agriculture practices like farm to table and bio-energy. In Missoula, the UM's efforts to feed the campus local food are being coordinated with the environmental studies program.

Six years ago, at the urging of students and professors, LoParco started looking for ways to add Montana commodities to the university's food program. At the time, there wasn't a lot of local food on University of Montana's $3 million grocery list.

With the help of environmental studies students, LoParco went out and found melons in Dixon, Miles City beef, Flathead Valley pork, breakfast cereal from Harlowton and Whitehall potatoes, to name a few. Finding local food for the university has now become a job for a federal community service volunteer.

"We now have an AmeriCorps worker and basically what she does is find sources of local food for us. We have 54 active vendors. Around 20 percent of our food is local," LoParco said. "That's pretty significant in a $3 million food budget."

And local food hasn't proved more expensive, LoParco said. At times, the Montana sources have been better economically. When mad cow disease in Canada halted imports of hamburger, a staple food service ingredient, prices shot up nationally. But with a local supplier of beef, the university avoided not only the national price hike, but also the food safety scare.

Montana beef has been the hardest ingredient for LoParco to find consistently. He's looking for additional sources now. The state's last large commercial meat processor, Billings-based Pierce Packing Co., went bankrupt in 1985. Ranchers mostly raise cattle born in the early spring and shipped out of state in the fall for fattening and slaughter. If the beef makes it back to Montana, it's been so commingled in major packing houses that all a consumer can tell is if it's a product of "U.S., Mexico and Canada," the standard language on country of origin labels.

There's a demand for Montana beef when it can be had, say commercial food buyers.

"There should be no excuse for us not producing our own beef product," said Salley Young, food service director for tiny Greenfield School near Fairfield.

Young and her husband, Steve, raise cattle in the school district. When Greenfield began talking about buying local hamburger a few years ago, Young suggested processing a few of her culls. Vaughn Meats, a small, federally-certified meat processor a few miles southeast of town, agreed to grind the burger into packages called chubs and frozen patties. Greenfield's idea soon caught on. Now two dozen other small schools are part of the program.

At $2.20 a pound delivered, the beef hasn't raised the school's food bill, Young said. It's lower in fat than the food service meat the school was buying. Most importantly, it's local. In 2008 when meat suppliers to other Montana schools were recalling meat because of a California downer cow scare, Greenfield didn't have to worry.

"We know where our cows grew up. There's no downer garbage," Young said. "The product we deliver to people, when I look them right in the eye, I want to know where the cow was born."

This year, Greenfield began working local vegetables into their lunch program as well. Students have brought purple carrots, orange cherry tomatoes, corn. Young puts the produce in the salad bar, along with a note of about who contributed what. She's still receiving student's green-picked tomatoes as they ripen.

The state is trying to improve connections between farm and table. Montana's Legislature approved five regional agricultural innovation centers to help farmers add value to their products and form marketing plans. The best projects hatched at the centers are forwarded to state's Growth Through Agriculture loan program. The loans can be used for anything from irrigation to veterinary supplies, but food processing projects are well represented.

Six weeks ago, the state issued loans to a startup cheese factory in Bozeman, an egg processor in Broadview and processing equipment for local food at a new Lolo grocery. Six of the 2009 grants went to food processors.

But the road ahead is long. At Community GATE in Glendive, where Hoff pours his beans into a seed cleaner so they can be bagged for commercial and retail sale, worker Peggy Iba is aware that local food movement is merely blip on the agriculture radar.

An acronym, GATE stands for "giving assistance toward employment" and promotes a local farm to table economy. The seed cleaner sorting Hoff's harvest was acquired after the area's larger commodities companies balked at cleaning a mere pickup bed of beans.

"You ask the elevator if they'll clean it for you, they'll say no. They only do semi loads," Iba said.

"There's a demand for our stuff. We have a huge demand for our purple barley flakes. We're telling people you can ad value to your crops and form a food company. We did and it's really not that expensive."

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#366

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Sat Nov 7, 2009 7:29 am
Subject: News: Pulses Proposed As A Way to Make Food System More Sustainable

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Give Peas a Chance - Pulses offer improved sustainability in the field and on the plate

<http://www.pulsecanada.com> WINNIPEG, Manitoba, Canada, November 6, 2009 --/WORLD-WIRE/-- The Canadian pulse industry today released a white paper on the benefits of using pulses - beans, peas, lentils and chickpeas - as a food ingredient that provides nutritional and health benefits and contributes to environmental sustainability. Give Peas a Chance - The case for more pulses in the field and on the plate shows how using pulses can improve the nutritional profile of food products and reduce the carbon footprint of the food produced.

"Food manufacturers and retailers are not only looking for healthy and nutritious products, they also wants to know the environmental story of the food they are producing and marketing," says Gordon Bacon, CEO of Pulse Canada. "Pulses have a great story to tell as they offer both sustainability in the field and positive nutritional results on the plate."

The health benefits of pulses are plentiful. Higher in protein than most other crops, pulses are low in fat and they have a low glycemic index, which means their carbohydrates are mostly fibre and starch that prevent blood sugars from rising quickly after eating. Clinical trials have shown that eating pulses are not only nutritionally beneficial, they provide excellent health benefits and can even help combat chronic health concerns such as diabetes, heart disease and obesity.

Pulses are also an environment-friendly crop. As a member of the 'legume' family, they have a symbiotic relationship with soil organisms, which allows them to make their own nitrogen fertilizer from the atmosphere. By producing their own fertilizer, this reduces the need for manufactured nitrogen made from fossil fuels.

With consumer demand for healthy and environmentally sustainable products increasing, the global food industry is looking for solutions. Pulses can be part of the solution with their combined health and environmental benefits. The pulse white paper, Give Peas a Chance - The case for more pulses in the field and on the plate, outlines the opportunities and is available online at www.pulsecanada.com/givepeasachance.

"The message is very simple," says Bacon. "If more pulses are eaten, more will be grown and that's great news for health and for the environment."

Pulse Canada is the national association representing pulse growers, processors and traders. Direction and funding is provided by Alberta Pulse Growers Commission, Saskatchewan Pulse Growers, Manitoba Pulse Growers Association, the Ontario Bean Producers Marketing Board, Ontario Coloured Bean Growers and the Canadian Special Crops Association (CSCA). Over the last 20 years, Canada's pulse industry has become a world leader in pulse production, research and exports. Today, Canada is the world's largest exporter, selling to more than 150 countries around the globe, and one of the world's largest pulse producers.

For more information, visit <http://www.pulsecanada.com>www.pulsecanada.com.

CONTACT:

Tracey Thompson,
Director of Marketing & Communication
Tel: (204) 925-3785

Copyright © 2009, World-Wire. All rights reserved.

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#365

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Tue Nov 3, 2009 6:40 am
Subject: News: Meat Production Accounts for Half of All GHG Emissions, Researchers Say

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http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/meat-creates-half-of-all-greenhouse-gases-1812909.html

Study claims meat creates half of all greenhouse gases
Livestock causes far more climate damage than first thought, says a new report

By Martin Hickman, Consumer Affairs Correspondent
Sunday, 1 November 2009

Climate change emissions from meat production are far higher than currently estimated, according to a controversial new study that will fuel the debate on whether people should eat fewer animal products to help the environment.

In a paper published by a respected US thinktank, the Worldwatch Institute, two World Bank environmental advisers claim that instead of 18 per cent of global emissions being caused by meat, the true figure is 51 per cent.

They claim that United Nation's figures have severely underestimated the greenhouse gases caused by tens of billions of cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry and other animals in three main areas: methane, land use and respiration.

Their findings - which are likely to prompt fierce debate among academics - come amid increasing calls from climate change experts for people to eat less meat.

In the 19-page report, Robert Goodland, a former lead environmental adviser to the World Bank, and Jeff Anhang, a current adviser, suggest that domesticated animals cause 32 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), more than the combined impact of industry and energy. The accepted figure is 18 per cent, taken from a landmark UN report in 2006, Livestock's Long Shadow. <>

"If this argument is right," write Goodland and Anhang, "it implies that replacing livestock products with better alternatives would be the best strategy for reversing climate change.

"In fact, this approach would have far more rapid effects on greenhouse gas emissions and their atmospheric concentrations than actions to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy."

Their call to move to meat substitutes accords with the views of the chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, who has described eating less meat as "the most attractive opportunity" for making immediate changes to climate change.

Lord Stern of Brentford, author of the 2006 review into the economic consequences of global warming, added his name to the call last week, telling a newspaper interviewer: "Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world's resources."

Scientists are concerned about livestock's exhalation of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Cows and other ruminants emit 37 per cent of the world's methane. A study by Nasa scientists published in Science on Friday found that methane has significantly more effect on climate change than previously thought: 33 times more than carbon dioxide, compared with a previous factor of 25.

According to Goodland and Anhang's paper, which has not been peer-reviewed, scientists have significantly underestimated emissions of methane expelled by livestock. They argue that the gas's impact should be calculated over 20 years, in line with its rapid effect - and the latest recommendation from the UN - rather than the 100 years favoured by Livestock's Long Shadow. This, they say, would add a further 5bn tons of CO2e to livestock emissions - 7.9 per cent of global emissions from all sources.

Similarly, they claim that official figures are wrong to ignore CO2 emitted by breathing animals on the basis that it is offset by carbon photosynthesised by their food, arguing the existence of this unnecessary animal-based CO2 amounts to 8.7bn tons of CO2e, 3.7 per cent of total emissions.

On land use, they calculate that returning the land currently used for livestock to natural vegetation and forests would remove 2.6bn tons of CO2e from the atmosphere, 4.2 per cent of greenhouse gas. They also complain that the UN underestimated the amount of livestock, putting it at 21.7bn against NGO estimates of 50bn, adding that numbers have since risen by 12 per cent.

Eating meat rather than plants also requires extra refrigeration and cooking and "expensive" treatment of human diseases arising from livestock such as swine flu, they say.

One leading expert on climate change and food, Tara Garnett, welcomed Goodland and Anhang's calculations on methane, which she said had credibility, but she questioned other aspects of their work, saying she had no reason to dispute the UN's position on CO2 caused by breathing. She also pointed out that they had changed scientific assumptions for livestock but not for other sources of methane, skewing the figures.

She said: "We are increasingly becoming aware that livestock farming at current scales is a major problem, and that they contribute significantly to greenhouse gases. But livestock farming also yields benefits - there are some areas of land that can't be used for food crop production. Livestock manure can also contribute to soil fertility, and farm animals provide us with non food goods, such as leather and wool, which would need to be produced by another means, if it wasn't a byproduct from animal farming."

While looking into the paper's findings, Friends of the Earth said the report strengthened calls for the Government to act on emissions from meat production. "We already know that the meat and dairy industry causes more climate-changing emissions than all the world's transport," said Clare Oxborrow, senior food campaigner.

"These new figures need further scrutiny but, if they stack up, they provide yet more evidence of the urgent need to fix the food chain. The more damaging elements of the meat and dairy industry are effectively government-sponsored: millions of pounds of taxpayers' money is spent propping up factory farms and subsidising the import of animal feed that's been grown at the expense of forests."

Justin Kerswell, campaign manager for the vegetarian group Viva!, said: "The case for reducing consumption of meat and dairy products was already imperative based on previous UN findings. Now it appears to have been proven that the environmental devastation from livestock production is in fact staggeringly more significant - and dwarfs the contribution from the transport sector by an even greater margin.

"It is essential that attention is fully focused on the impact of livestock production by all global organisations with the power to affect policy."

* * *

Meat and greenhouse gases
[info]rbtgoodland wrote:
Sunday, 1 November 2009 at 12:53 am (UTC)

From Robert Goodland: As the Telegraph reports today, my co-author and I have assessed the life cycle and supply chain of meat and dairy products. We have deduced that at least 51% of worldwide human-caused greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) are attributable to livestock, and our full report is viewable on Worldwatch's website.

We show that a 25% reduction in livestock products worldwide can be achieved at minimal cost, while yielding at least a 12.5% reduction in human-caused GHGs. This is about as much reduction as is considered possible to achieve in an agreement at the upcoming U.N. conference on climate change in Copenhagen.

The FAO's prior estimate is based on a simple model of the carbon cycle. However, a virtuous carbon cycle model does not work these days in the real world, which is much more complex. A simple carbon cycle model does not account for the tens of millions of hectares of forest converted in recent decades to grazing land and cropland to feed tens of billions more livestock each year.

In ranching in tropical regions, forest is cut and burned to create new pastures. Soil is depleted in a few years, so then more forest is cut and burned. That, added to by livestock's breath and other excretions, has resulted in high levels of atmospheric carbon, significantly fuelling climate change.

In responses to Lord Stern, meat and dairy producers claim that their products use grass more efficiently than in tropical regions, and therefore should not be targeted in Copenhagen. However, in British pastures and other temperate regions, large amounts of soil carbon are released over time.

Moreover, while meat and dairy producers do not often reveal this, most British cattle - as elsewhere - graze for the first part of their lives, and then are fed carbon-intensive grains and legumes for the second part. In fact, a majority of the world's crops become feed for cattle and other livestock.

Feed, meat and dairy products are global commodities, so they get flown, shipped and trucked all over the world. Then British and other tables get laden with highly carbon-inefficient foods. And global warming is trans-boundary, which means that Lord Stern and others must look beyond British borders in considering the impacts of meat and dairy products on climate.

In both tropical and temperate regions, much of the same land used to graze livestock and grow feed could instead regenerate tall grasses and forest, among which -- as well as in the soil beneath - much more carbon could be absorbed and sequestered than in land set aside for grazing and feed.

If regeneration of pasture and forest would occur on a large, global scale, then as much as half of today's atmospheric carbon could potentially be absorbed. At the same time, many carbon emissions from livestock's breathing and other excretions could be stopped. Most important, carbon absorption in forest, grasses and soil reclaimed from livestock and feed would be the only feasible way to absorb a significant amount of today's atmospheric carbon in the near term. This analysis shows why Lord Stern dares to imagine a world where not all land today dedicated to livestock and feed would remain so.

Following submission of our article for publication, we learned that the number of livestock worldwide in 2007 was actually 56 billion, many more than we accounted for in our article. That would raise our estimate of GHGs worldwide attributable to livestock. On the other hand, our article noted that further work remained to be done on producing a reliable estimate of global carbon from methane not attributable to livestock. Once that estimate is available, it would offset some carbon attributable to the new numbers of livestock that we have learned about.

It will not suffice to substitute one meat product with another that has a somewhat lower carbon footprint. Marketing campaigns should pitch meat and dairy substitutes that can be eaten all week long - because they are tasty, economical, easy to prepare, and healthful. Most important, by replacing meat and dairy products with better alternatives, consumers can collectively take a single powerful action to reverse climate change. Action is needed now, before it is too late.

   * * *

http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6294

Livestock and Climate Change

by Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang

Illustration Omitted
        Livestock and Climate Change: What if the key actors in climate change are...cows, pigs, and chickens?

The environmental impact of the lifecycle and supply chain of animals raised for food has been vastly underestimated, and in fact accounts for at least half of all human-caused greenhouse gases (GHGs), according to Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, co-authors of "Livestock and Climate Change".

A widely cited 2006 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Livestock's Long Shadow, estimates that 18 percent of annual worldwide GHG emissions are attributable to cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, camels, pigs, and poultry. But recent analysis by Goodland and Anhang finds that livestock and their byproducts actually account for at least 32.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, or 51 percent of annual worldwide GHG emissions.

Read "Livestock and Climate Change," World Watch Magazine [FREE PDF] <http://www.worldwatch.org/files/pdf/Livestock%20and%20Climate%20Change.pdf>

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#364

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Tue Nov 3, 2009 6:24 am
Subject: Commentary: Talking About Food Marketing Practices Proves Difficult

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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/30/FD4A1ABD12.DTL

Frank talk about food sometimes quashed

Marion Nestle
Sunday, November 1, 2009

Q: It must take courage to criticize the marketing practices of food companies. Doesn't it get you into a lot of trouble?

A: Trouble? That depends on how you define it. Some pushback has to be expected as a normal consequence of advocating a food system that promotes better health for all and more sustainable agricultural production.

My latest experience with pushback occurred on World Food Day, Oct. 16. I had been invited by the U.S. Embassy in Rome to give the annual George McGovern lecture at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. After my talk, our new ambassador to U.N. agencies in Rome, Ertharin Cousin, thanked me but told the audience that the opinions they had just heard were mine alone and did not represent those of the U.S. government.

What did I say that required a disclaimer? The point of my talk was to argue that international food issues such as hunger, obesity and food safety must be viewed as problems of society rather than personal choice.

As social problems, they are unlikely to be solvable by technical interventions such as functional foods, commercial weaning foods, irradiation or genetically modified foods. Instead, international food problems require social interventions that address underlying human needs for sustainability, social justice and democracy.

World insecurity

FAO had just released its 2009 report on the state of world food insecurity. Its date revealed how the economic crisis has caused the number of hungry people in the world to increase sharply. Some argue that genetic modification of crops is the only way to increase food productivity and reverse this trend. Whether food biotechnology really can fix world hunger is debatable, but one thing is clear: It is unlikely to create sustainability, social justice or democracy.

We know how to solve world hunger problems: promote breastfeeding, provide clean water and safe food, empower women, educate children, develop community food security, promote agricultural sustainability and ensure political stability. These strategies are social, not technological.

I ended my talk with praise for the Obamas' leadership in promoting sustainable food production and initiating a new era in American agriculture.

Un-American? Under ordinary circumstances I would have shrugged off the ambassador's remarks, but these are not ordinary times. I interpret her remarks as evidence that the food movement must be making real progress.

As further evidence, consider what happened to journalist and Berkeley professor Michael Pollan. His "Omnivore's Dilemma" is high on the reading lists of many universities, yet twice this fall agricultural interests have attempted to force universities to cancel campus speaking invitations.

Pressure over Pollan

Washington State University had already bought 4,000 copies of "Omnivore's Dilemma" for incoming freshman when a member of its Board of Regents, a wheat grower, objected to the way the book portrays industrial agriculture. The university canceled the reading program and Pollan's lecture, saying it would cost too much at a time of budget crisis.

Bill Marler, a Seattle lawyer and WSU alumnus, called the university's bluff by offering to pay the costs. Pollan's book got distributed. He gave his talk. State agriculture did not collapse.

Much the same thing happened at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. A local beef rancher, outraged that Pollan had been invited to speak unopposed, threatened to withdraw a promised $500,000 contribution. The rancher's exchange of letters with Cal Poly's president is available at links.sfgate.com/ZIMH, and well worth reading by anyone concerned about how industrial agriculture influences public policy.

Pollan offered the university a free lecture or panel with other speakers, but not both. The university chose the panel.

Although the rancher's argument might appear to be about the value of presenting balanced views to students, universities are supposed to distinguish between academic and commercial interests. As university professors, Pollan and I base our opinions on our education, training, research and professional experience - not on how they might affect an industry. Our job is to teach students to read and think critically so they can form their own opinions about what we and others tell them.

Exerting influence

If our professorial opinions cannot be offered without public disclaimers and insistence on equal time for opposing views, I have to assume that what we are saying must be perceived as influential. If it indeed is influential, I expect even more pushback as the current food movement extends its reach and becomes stronger and more effective.

Trouble? Bring it on.

Marion Nestle is the author of "Food Politics," "Safe Food" and "What to Eat," and is a professor in the nutrition, food studies and public health department at New York University. E-mail her at food@... and read her previous columns at sfgate.com/food.

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#363

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Sun Nov 1, 2009 9:47 am
Subject: Commentary: Getting At Good Food Isn't Easy

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http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2009/10/21/sowing-seeds-good-food-revolution

Sowing the Seeds of a Good Food Revolution
By Will Allen
Published October 21, 2009

Autumn has arrived in the Northeast. The leaves are turning colors, the days are getting shorter, and the weather has a hint of the chill to come.

It's a time of change in many ways. Our nation is grappling with the daunting challenges of health care and global warming. Another change is coming as well. It's called the good food revolution.

By bringing locally grown, organic, nutritiously rich food to a table near you, the good food revolution can help us tackle these larger societal issues, and benefit us all.

We need a revolution in our food delivery system because the global $3.2 trillion processed-food industry is undermining our health and significantly contributing to our carbon footprint.

Let's take a quick look at how produce in Massachusetts makes it to our grocery store shelves. Quite likely it was picked in California's Central Valley, the mother of all breadbaskets. The produce journeyed across the country from the field to the wholesaler to a retailer and finally to your dinner table. Total travel time, about 12 to 14 days.

Have you ever wondered how much nutrition is left after that voyage? Not much. You're largely eating vacuous cellulose -- even if you buy it from Whole Foods. This long journey also exposes it to multiple handlers and contaminants that create health scares -- recalled meat, tomatoes, peanuts -- that are regular features on the nightly news.

Have you ever wondered how many greenhouse-gas-emitting-food miles it took for that nutritionally leached meal to arrive on your plate? The answer is about 3,000 miles. Figure you eat produce from California every day. That means 365 days a year, your food travels 3,000 miles across the country, adding almost 1.1 million food miles to your personal carbon footprint. Ouch!

If this system seems unsustainable to you, it is. It would collapse if it were not for the tremendous state and federal subsidies that big agribusiness receives.

The impact of our industrial food system takes an even greater toll on poorer inner-city residents. Redlining in these districts doesn't just apply to the banking industry. It's as hard to get a mortgage in these neighborhoods as it is to get fresh produce. Often residents have to drive miles to get to a full-scale grocery store. This nutritional wasteland is particularly devastating on children.

The good news is that we can turn this around. Already, more privileged households are increasingly buying locally grown organic foods and getting the best nutrition possible. Ten million people will or have planted food gardens this year, including one on the White House lawn.

It's time to bring this revolution to the rest of America. We need to make this a choice that more of us will be able to make regardless of our socioeconomic status.

Organizations like Growing Power, which I founded and direct, are cutting health care costs and greenhouse gas emissions by promoting programs so people can grow organic, culturally appropriate food close to economically distressed urban populations. By engaging the local community, Growing Power produces $250,000 worth of organic food in a working-class neighborhood in Milwaukee's Northwest side -- less than a half-mile from the city's largest public housing project. Local residents work and volunteer at the farm, creating a stronger, more economically viable and healthier community.

This revolution is taking place in Massachusetts, too. Organizations like the Marion Institute work with urban schools to bring nutritiously rich food to city neighborhoods in the state. For example, the institute recently helped build 17 raised vegetable beds at the Global Learning Charter Public School in New Bedford, providing children the opportunity to eat well, learn, and experience a bit of greenery on an otherwise wall-to-wall concrete campus.

The good food revolution cannot stop at farmers' markets or natural food stores in suburban or wealthier urban neighborhoods. For the revolution to be complete, people in poorer neighborhoods must have access to it, too.

Will Allen, CEO of Growing Power Inc., is an urban farmer based in Milwaukee who is transforming the cultivation, production, and delivery of healthy foods to underserved, urban populations. His post, which appeared in the Boston Globe, is reprinted here with permission.

Allen will be a keynote speaker this week at Bioneers by the Bay: Connecting for Change, October 22 through 25, in New Bedford, Mass. The annual conference is presented by the Marion Institute and draws environmental, industry and social justice innovators who have demonstrated visionary and practical models for restoring the Earth and its inhabitants. More information about the fifth annual gathering is available at http://connectingforchange.org/.

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#362

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Fri Oct 30, 2009 9:59 am
Subject: Feature: Bioengineered Crops Present Risks of Gene Leakage

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http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114206060

Bioengineered Plants Gone Wild

by Joe Palca
October 27, 2009

Illustration Omitted
    Virus-infected squash plant growing in a garden. Miruna Sasu

Special genes inserted into crop plants have a way of leaking into the environment. That much scientists know for sure. What they're less certain about is what effect those genes have on plants growing in the wild.

Andrew Stephenson is interested in answering that question. He's a plant ecologist at Penn State University. Plant breeders put things called transgenes into plants to give them desirable properties such as disease resistance.

"People were concerned that when the transgene escapes into the wild populations, it will provide a fitness advantage," says Stephenson.

A fitness advantage means the wild plants, with this advantageous transgene, might grow out of control, mucking up the ecosystem.

Meet The Cucurbita

Stephenson studies a wild squash plant called cucurbita, the Texas gourd. It looks like a pumpkin plant, but with smaller leaves. The fruits are about the size of a baseball or softball, they're round or slightly pear-shaped, and they taste terrible.

Cucurbita shows up throughout the American Southwest and Mexico. Stephenson wanted to know what would happen when his wild gourd picked up a transgene that's used in cultivated squash to protect the crop from plant viruses.

So he purposely created a strain of Texas gourd with the transgene, and planted some next to the same gourd that didn't have the transgene. Then he waited for spring, when aphids would bring a plant virus to the field.

Stephenson reports in the journal PNAS that as the virus spread through the field, it only affected the Texas gourd without the transgene.

Illustration Omitted
       Spotted cucumber beetles can carry bacterial wilt disease, which is lethal to the cucurbita. Miruna Sasu

Enter The Cucumber Beetle

So at first, it looked as if scientists were right to worry that the transgene might give cucurbita a fitness advantage. But then, something strange happened. After the aphids arrived in the field, along came another pest: the cucumber beetle. These beetles carry a different plant disease ... not a virus, but bacteria

"These bacteria secrete an exopolysaccharide, a kind of snotlike stuff," says Stephenson.

When the beetles eat the gourd's leaves and flowers, this snotlike stuff gets into the plant's plumbing. This first causes the leaves to wilt, and then ultimately kills the plant.

But, surprisingly, the beetles don't seem to like the taste of the virus-infected cucurbita, so they tend to chew on the healthy plants protected by the transgene.

"As the virus spreads through the susceptible plants in the field, the beetles become increasingly concentrated onto the healthy transgenic plants," says Stephenson.

Yes, the plants are protected from the virus, but that makes them more vulnerable to the bacteria.

Stephenson says no one suspected that would happen.

The Fitness Advantage

Now in this particular case, the unintended consequences aren't bad. The wild gourd apparently won't grow out of control because if the transgene gives the plant a fitness advantage, the cucumber beetle takes that advantage away.

But Norman Ellstrand, a plant geneticist at the University of California, Riverside, says that is not what's important about Stephenson's research. "We know the transgene sometimes give us unexpected effects. And when you do an experiment like Stephenson's group did," says Ellstrand, "you see how complicated ecology really is."

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#361

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Fri Oct 30, 2009 9:32 am
Subject: Feature: Debating Corn As A Basis for Meat Production and for Ethanol

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http://www.grist.org/article/2009-10-23-corn-meat-ethanol-global-warming

Corn-based meat and ethanol: burning the planet to a crisp

    * Tom Philpott
      Posted 3:01 PM on 23 Oct 2009

Illustration Omitted
     Corn harvest in Iowa. Would you like that in your Big Mac, your gas tank, or both?Photo courtesy of USDA NRCS.

What do industrially produced meat and corn-based ethanol have in common?

Well, they both thrive on the assumption that it's good idea to devote vast swaths of land to an incredibly resource-intensive crop-corn-and then run that crop through an energy-sucking process to create a product of dubious value.

And ... they both got tagged as major drivers of climate change this past week.

Ethanol took the harder blow of the two, I think. It came wrapped in the Oct. 23 issue of Science. In a concise and devastating "policy forum" piece, a team of authors led by University of Minnesota researcher Tim Searchinger fingered a gaping defect in existing European and pending U.S. climate policy: biofuel gets treated as carbon-neutral, ignoring carbon emissions from land-use change. According to the paper ($ub req'd), the Kyoto Protocol, the European Union's cap-and-trade law, and the final version of Waxman-Markey (the House climate bill that passed over the summer) all contain the a "far-reaching but fixable flaw":

    [They] does not count CO2 emitted from tailpipes and smokestacks when bioenergy is being used, but it also does not count changes in emissions from land use when biomass for energy is harvested or grown. This accounting erroneously treats all bioenergy as carbon neutral regardless of the source of the biomass, which may cause large differences in net emissions. For example, the clearing of long-established forests to burn wood or to grow energy crops is counted as a 100% reduction in energy emissions despite causing large releases of carbon.

Or, as Searchinger put it to a Wall Street Journal reporter, "Literally, in theory, if you chopped up the Amazon, turned it into a parking lot, and burned the wood in a power plant, that would be treated as a carbon-emissions reduction strategy."

The implications of the flaw are staggering: existing climate law, coupled with U.S. and European biofuel mandates, could lead to vast forest clearing-unleashing a gusher of greenhouse gases in the name of ... averting climate change. That's sort of like trying to save your sight by gouging out your eyes. The authors state:

    One study estimated that a global CO2 target of 450 ppm under this accounting would cause bioenergy crops to expand to displace virtually all the world's natural forests and savannahs by 2065, releasing up to 37 gigatons (Gt) of CO2 per year (comparable to total human CO2 emissions today). Another study predicts that, based solely on economic considerations, bioenergy could displace 59% of the world's natural forest cover and release an additional 9 Gt of CO2 per year to achieve a 50% "cut" in greenhouse gases by 2050. The reason: When bioenergy from any biomass is counted as carbon neutral, economics favor large-scale land conversion for bioenergy regardless of the actual net emissions. [Emphasis added.]

It should be noted that this "flaw" in U.S. climate policy is no accident. House Ag committee chair Collin Peterson fought like a pitbull to enshrine it in Waxman-Markey. To the agribusiness lobby Pererson represents, tarnishing the good name of ethanol is tantamount to setting fire to a Bible during Sunday school.

Another article in the same Science issue explores another massive problem with biofuels: water scarcity. As the author puts it: "A widespread shift toward biofuels could pinch water supplies and worsen water pollution. In short, an increased reliance on biofuel trades an oil problem for a water problem." (Emphasis added.) According to the author, it takes between 90 and 190 liters of water to extract a kilowatt-hour worth of oil. To get the same amount of energy from corn-based ethanol? Try 2.2 and 8.6 million liters of water. Ouch.

As for meat, get this: two researchers associated with the World Bank claim in a new World Watch piece (PDF) that meat production is responsible for more than half of global greenhouse gas emissions. Previously, the most widely cited estimate came from the FAO, which reckoned meat contributes an already-stunning 18 percent.

So why the difference in assessments? The biggest factor is respiration-the breathing out of C02-by livestock. According to the authors, livestock respiration adds massive carbon to the atmosphere-that factor alone, they claim, is equal to 13 percent of global annual GHG emissions.

I don't have the scientific chops to assess their reasoning. I do wonder if the vast number if the C02 breathed into the air by farm animals isn't partially offset by the vast number of wild animals eliminated by meat production. It's not a pretty thoughtm but think of the habitat swallowed up by corn and soy fields globally-and the billions of animals who now monger exist to breathe out carbon.

However, I agree that meat production is deeply implicated in climate change-and must be cut dramatically. But I find these authors' conclusion stunning: They want to replace industrially raised meat with industrially raised soy. In place of a chicken in every pot, they want to see a "chicken" in every pot. They call on the food industry to dramatically scale up the production of highly processed fake meat-and even offer marketing advice. They declare:

A successful campaign would avoid negative themes and stress positive ones. For instance, recommending that meat not be eaten one day per week suggests deprivation. Instead, the campaign should pitch the theme of eating all week long a line of food products that is tasty, easy to prepare, and includes a "superfood," such as soy, that will enrich their lives.

They also express enthusiasm for "artificial meat cultivated in laboratories from cells originating from livestock, sometimes called 'in vitro' meat."

Sorry, but given ideas like that, I'm not ready to let a couple of World Bank guys dictate the future of cuisine. Getting a carnivorous culture to reduce meat consumption is going to be tricky no matter what. Rather than push folks to embrace soy weenies and test-tube "shmeat," I'd rather see a revival of minimally processed rice and beans, a move toward meat as a side dish, and a return to diversified farming that uses manageable amounts of manure to nourish cropland. Let's ban the CAFO-but not eviscerate what's left of our palates.

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#360

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Mon Oct 26, 2009 7:53 pm
Subject: News; Microbiology Innovation May Keep Produce, Flowers Fresher Longer

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http://www.seeddaily.com/reports/New_Method_To_Help_Keep_Fruit_Vegetables_And_Flowers_Fresh_999.html

New Method To Help Keep Fruit, Vegetables And Flowers Fresh

Illustration Omitted
In a very simple sense, climacteric plants - such as apples, bananas, peaches and tomatoes - respond to climactic change, and when they do, they produce increased levels of signal compounds like ethylene. For fruit such as peaches, ethylene causes the peach to ripen, increases aroma chemicals, but unfortunately, makes the peach very fragile.

by Staff Writers
Atlanta GA (SPX) Oct 26, 2009

Did you know that millions of tons of fruits and vegetables in the United States end up in the trash can before being eaten, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture?

A Georgia State University professor has developed an innovative new way to keep produce and flowers fresh for longer periods of time. Microbiologist George Pierce's method uses a naturally occurring microorganism - no larger than the width of a human hair - to induce enzymes that extend the ripening time of fruits and vegetables, and keeps the blooms of flowers fresh.

The process does not involve genetic engineering or pathogens, but involves microorganisms known to be associated with plants, and are considered to be helpful and beneficial to them.

"These beneficial soil microorganisms serve essentially the same function as eating yogurt as a probiotic to have beneficial organisms living in the gastrointestinal system," Pierce said.

The process works by manipulating the organism's diet so that it will over express certain enzymes and activities that work in the ripening process and keeping the flower blooms fresh. Pierce analogizes this to using diet and exercise to improve the performance of an athlete.

"We change the diet of the organism, and we can change its performance," Pierce said. "It's no different than taking a good athlete and putting them on a diet and exercise regime, and turning him or her into a world-class athlete."

In a very simple sense, climacteric plants - such as apples, bananas, peaches and tomatoes - respond to climactic change, and when they do, they produce increased levels of signal compounds like ethylene. For fruit such as peaches, ethylene causes the peach to ripen, increases aroma chemicals, but unfortunately, makes the peach very fragile.

"If you've seen ripe peaches, they will simply fall apart," Pierce said. "It will lose 90 percent of its ability to resist pressure, which means that if a peach responds normally to ethylene, it is subject to bruising when you ship it."

The enzymes produced from Pierce's new method reduce the response to signal compounds so that it takes a longer period of time for fruits to ripen, doubling the time it takes for ripening.

The catalyst in this process can be distributed through various formulations and configurations. These include being incorporated into shipping boxes, packing materials or used to treat the air of shipping containers. It could be used either with individual fruits or vegetables or for larger, bulk quantities.

This new process could have a big impact on preventing waste, improving the consumption of healthy fruits and vegetables, allowing companies to ship produce longer distances.

"Who hasn't bought fruit or vegetables and then thrown them away?" Pierce said. "Most people will buy more, and consume more, if they know that they could have a better quality of produce for longer." Pierce said.

The method also will allow for the storage of fruits, vegetables and flowers at room temperatures rather than refrigeration, thus helping to save energy, Pierce said.

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#359

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Sat Oct 24, 2009 1:19 pm
Subject: News: Sweden Looks At Food, to Cut Carbon Emissions

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/world/europe/23degrees.html?_r=1

This is the ninth in a series of articles about stopgap measures that could limit global warming. Future articles will address industry and cars.

To Cut Global Warming, Swedes Study Their Plates

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published: October 22, 2009

STOCKHOLM - Shopping for oatmeal, Helena Bergstrom, 37, admitted that she was flummoxed by the label on the blue box reading, "Climate declared: .87 kg CO2 per kg of product."

Illustration Omitted:
A dairy farm near Uppsala is among the Swedish companies now focusing on the carbon dioxide emitted in food production. Dean C.K. Cox for The New York Times

"Right now, I don't know what this means," said Ms. Bergstrom, a pharmaceutical company employee.

But if a new experiment here succeeds, she and millions of other Swedes will soon find out. New labels listing the carbon dioxide emissions associated with the production of foods, from whole wheat pasta to fast food burgers, are appearing on some grocery items and restaurant menus around the country.

People who live to eat might dismiss this as silly. But changing one's diet can be as effective in reducing emissions of climate-changing gases as changing the car one drives or doing away with the clothes dryer, scientific experts say.

"We're the first to do it, and it's a new way of thinking for us," said Ulf Bohman, head of the Nutrition Department at the Swedish National Food Administration, which was given the task last year of creating new food guidelines giving equal weight to climate and health. "We're used to thinking about safety and nutrition as one thing and environmental as another."

Some of the proposed new dietary guidelines, released over the summer, may seem startling to the uninitiated. They recommend that Swedes favor carrots over cucumbers and tomatoes, for example. (Unlike carrots, the latter two must be grown in heated greenhouses here, consuming energy.)

They are not counseled to eat more fish, despite the health benefits, because Europe's stocks are depleted.

And somewhat less surprisingly, they are advised to substitute beans or chicken for red meat, in view of the heavy greenhouse gas emissions associated with raising cattle.

"For consumers, it's hard," Mr. Bohman acknowledged. "You are getting environmental advice that you have to coordinate with, 'How can I eat healthier?' "

Many Swedish diners say it is just too much to ask. "I wish I could say that the information has made me change what I eat, but it hasn't," said Richard Lalander, 27, who was eating a Max hamburger (1.7 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions) in the shadow of a menu board revealing that a chicken sandwich (0.4 kilograms) would have been better for the planet.

Yet if the new food guidelines were religiously heeded, some experts say, Sweden could cut its emissions from food production by 20 to 50 percent. An estimated 25 percent of the emissions produced by people in industrialized nations can be traced to the food they eat, according to recent research here. And foods vary enormously in the emissions released in their production.

While today's American or European shoppers may be well versed in checking for nutrients, calories or fat content, they often have little idea of whether eating tomatoes, chicken or rice is good or bad for the climate.

Complicating matters, the emissions impact of, say, a carrot, can vary by a factor of 10, depending how and where it is grown.

Earlier studies of food emissions focused on the high environmental costs of transporting food and raising cattle. But more nuanced research shows that the emissions depend on many factors, including the type of soil used to grow the food and whether a dairy farmer uses local rapeseed or imported soy for cattle feed.

Business groups, farming cooperatives and organic labeling programs as well as the government have gamely come up with coordinated ways to identify food choices.

Max, Sweden's largest homegrown chain of burger restaurants, now puts emissions calculations next to each item on its menu boards. Lantmannen, Sweden's largest farming group, has begun placing precise labels on some categories of foods in grocery stores, including chicken, oatmeal, barley and pasta.

Consumers who pay attention may learn that emissions generated by growing the nation's most popular grain, rice, are two to three times those of little-used barley, for example.

Some producers argue that the new programs are overly complex and threaten profits. The dietary recommendations, which are being circulated for comment not just in Sweden but across the European Union, have been attacked by the Continent's meat industry, Norwegian salmon farmers and Malaysian palm oil growers, to name a few.

"This is trial and error; we're still trying to see what works," Mr. Bohman said.

Next year, KRAV, Scandinavia's main organic certification program, will start requiring farmers to convert to low-emissions techniques if they want to display its coveted seal on products, meaning that most greenhouse tomatoes can no longer be called organic.

Those standards have stirred some protests. "There are farmers who are happy and farmers who say they are being ruined," said Johan Cejie, manager of climate issues for KRAV.

For example, he said, farmers with high concentrations of peat soil on their property may no longer be able to grow carrots, since plowing peat releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide; to get the organic label, they may have to switch to feed crops that require no plowing.

Next year KRAV will require hothouses to use biofuels for heating. Dairy farms will have to obtain at least 70 percent of the food for their herds locally; many previously imported cheap soy from Brazil, generating transport emissions and damaging the rain forest as trees were cleared to make way for farmland.

The Swedish effort grew out of a 2005 study by Sweden's national environmental agency on how personal consumption generates emissions. Researchers found that 25 percent of national per capita emissions - two metric tons per year - was attributable to eating.

The government realized that encouraging a diet that tilted more toward chicken or vegetables and educating farmers on lowering emissions generally could have an enormous impact.

Sweden has been a world leader in finding new ways to reduce emissions. It has vowed to eliminate the use of fossil fuel for electricity by 2020 and cars that run on gasoline by 2030.

To arrive at numbers for their company's first carbon dioxide labels, scientists at Lantmannen analyzed life cycles of 20 products. These take into account emissions generated by fertilizer, fuel for harvesting machinery, packaging and transport.

They decided to examine one representative product in each category - say, pasta - rather than performing analyses for fusilli versus penne, or one brand versus another. "Every climate declaration is hugely time-intensive," said Claes Johansson, Lantmannen's director of sustainability.

A new generation of Swedish business leaders is stepping up to the climate challenge. Richard Bergfors, president of Max, his family's burger chain, voluntarily hired a consultant to calculate its carbon footprint; 75 percent was created by its meat.

"We decided to be honest and put it all out there and say we'll do everything we can to reduce," said Mr. Bergfors, 40. In addition to putting emissions data on the menu, Max eliminated boxes from its children's meals, installed low-energy LED lights and pays for wind-generated electricity.

Since the emissions counts started appearing on the menu, sales of climate-friendly items have risen 20 percent. Still, plenty of people head to a burger restaurant lusting only for a burger.

Kristian Eriksson, 26, an information technology specialist, looked embarrassed when asked about the burger he was eating at an outdoor table.

"You feel guilty picking red meat," he said.

*** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed, without profit, for research and educational purposes only. ***

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#358

From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Fri Oct 23, 2009 7:24 am
Subject: Commentary: Is Micelle Obama Looking to Take On Big Food?

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http://www.grist.org/article/is-michelle-obama-about-to-take-on-big-food

battle royal
Is Michelle Obama about to take on Big Food?

    * Tom Laskawy
      Posted 12:10 PM on 14 Oct 2009

With all the talk of Michael Pollan and Jamie Oliver lately, it's easy to ignore the person who right now is, given her current address, the most influential voice on food policy in the country. Naturally, I'm talking about First Lady Michelle Obama. While she's been exercising what diplomats would call her "soft power" for a while, i.e. planting a garden, making speeches on healthy eating, and so on, indications are that she's quietly developing a set of policy recommendations to reform the food system. Obama Foodorama has been tirelessly reporting on these maneuvers, which have remained under the radar-even to the point of Mrs. Obama holding "secret meetings" between her policy team and USDA officials.

The speeches continue-she gave another one just the other day at the Department of Health and Human Services. But according to Ob Fo, the First Lady's policy team-White House Food Initiatives Coordinator Sam Kass and Policy Director Jocelyn Frye-are currently fleshing out a new set of national food and health initiatives. And while nothing is imminent, it now appears that the White House is embracing the "addiction model" of food consumption as portrayed in former FDA chief David Kessler's new book The End of Overeating:

    [T]he book has become something of a bible for Mrs. Obama and her food policy team, and required reading in the White House. Dr. Kessler holds that our bodies and minds are completely changed when we consume sugar, fat, and salt and he maintains that there needs to be all kinds of behavioral changes focused on countermanding this. So while creating better food infrastructures in schools, and promoting educational programs that include cooking and gardening, and promoting better access to healthy foods for the general population through edible gardens and farmers markets, etc., ect., is crucial-these are only part of the very complicated dynamic that gets people to permanently embrace healthier eating. Mrs. Obama and her food policy team are fully aware of this, and they're busily working on ways to encompass Dr. Kessler's ideas in upcoming policy initiatives.

I'm very curious to hear how Mrs. Obama translates Kessler's treatise into policy. Because not only are sugar, fat, and salt addictive, they are accompanied by billions of dollars in marketing designed to get you hooked in the first place. The WaPo's Ezra Klein summed it up nicely when he observed that:

    People like crap food. It's convenient. Brilliant, highly paid scientists have spent millions of dollars precisely calibrating it to the modern palette. Innovative, award-winning advertisers have spent billions of dollars making us want it.

Resisting that onslaught is impossible even for many of the most jaded, highly-educated, "cosmopolitan" Americans. And yet even chef and activist Jamie Oliver-who is witness to this phenomenon on a daily basis as he tries to change the food habits of a working class American city-can't avoid indulging in a serious game of Blame the Parents:

    "I'm a respectful person, and I'm going to try to do things in the nice way. But it's almost as if parents here have stopped saying no. It's as if the kids rule the roost." We came upon a table of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. "They're a treat, there to be loved," he said. "But start having them every day, job done. It's harsh to say, but these parents, when they've been to the doctor and keep feeding their kids inappropriate food, that is child abuse. Same as a cigarette burn or a bruise."

The abuse, Mr. Oliver, is in fact perpetrated by beverage and snack company executives who develop the products, concoct the marketing campaigns and have the gall to declare things like "soda is a staple food." Meanwhile, a new study out of UCLA's Center for Health Policy Research offers compelling, if not overwhelming, evidence that focusing like a laser on sugar in general and soda in particular may really offer the most bang for the buck:

    [R]esearchers found that adults who drink a soda or more per day are 27 percent more likely to be overweight than those who do not drink sodas, regardless of income or ethnicity.

    "The science is clear and conclusive: soda is fueling California's $41 billion a year obesity epidemic," says CCPHA Executive Director Dr. Harold Goldstein, an author of the research brief. "We drink soda like water. But unlike water, soda serves up a whopping 17 teaspoons of sugar in every 20-ounce serving."

    Research shows that over the last 30 years Americans consumed 278 more calories per day even as physical activity levels remained relatively unchanged. One of the biggest changes in diet during that period was the enormous increase in soda consumption, accounting for as much as 43 percent of all new calories. According to Goldstein, that research, combined with this new data on soda consumption, offers conclusive proof of the link between soda and obesity.

    And while adult soda consumption is troubling, consumption trends among children paint an even more alarming picture for the future health of California. The study found that 41 percent of young children (2-11 years of age) are drinking at least one soda or sugar-sweetened beverage every day. Adolescents (12-17) represent the biggest consumers, with 62 percent (over 2 million youths) drinking one or more sodas every day-the equivalent of consuming 39 pounds of sugar each year in soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages.

According to the study, Americans consume 22g of added sugar daily-that's up to four times the recommended daily amount of sugar. And that's just the median amount, which means half of Americans are consuming even more than 22g of sugar a day. That. Is. A. Lot. Of. Sugar.

It sure looks like an addiction to me. Just as with tobacco, we must have government intervention to get anywhere in the obesity epidemic-and Michelle Obama has positioned herself to advocate for just that. Now we just have to wait and see if and how she survives the firestorm that will erupt the minute she does.

***   NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed, without profit, for research and educational purposes only.   ***

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