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#392 From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Fri Nov 27, 2009 4:02 pm
Subject: Feature: "Wastefulness" of American Eating Habits Grows 		ashwanivasishth
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http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/1125/1

Americans' Eating Habits More Wasteful Than Ever

By Erik Stokstad
ScienceNOW Daily News
25 November 2009

After their biggest meal of the year, Americans might reflect on the fate of those moldering Thanksgiving leftovers. Nearly 40% of the food supply in the United States goes to waste, according to a new study, and the problem has been getting worse. "The numbers are pretty shocking," says Kevin Hall, a quantitative physiologist at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) in Bethesda, Maryland.

Food waste is usually estimated through consumer interviews or garbage inspections. The former method is inaccurate, and the latter isn't geographically comprehensive. Hall and his colleagues tried another approach: modeling human metabolism. They analyzed average body weight in the United States from 1974 to 2003 and figured out how much food people were eating during this period. Hall and Chow assumed that levels of physical activity haven't changed; some researchers think that activity has decreased, but Hall and Chow say their assumption is conservative. Then they compared that amount with estimates of the food available for U.S. consumers, as reported by the U.S. government to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

The difference between calories available and calories consumed, they say, is food wasted. "We called it the missing mass of American food," says co-author Carson Chow, a mathematician at NIDDK. In 2003, some 3750 calories were available daily per capita; 2300 were consumed, so 1450 were wasted, comprising 39% of the available food supply, the team reports in the November issue of PLoS ONE. This figure exceeds the 27% estimated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) from interviews with consumers and producers.

Much of the waste is probably happening at home, say experts. A study published earlier this year by Jeffery Sobal, a sociologist at Cornell University, and colleagues examined food waste in Tompkins County, New York, through interviews. They found that production accounted for 20% of waste, distribution for about another 20%, and consumers for the remaining 60%. "Food waste used to be a cultural sin," Sobal says.

There is apparently more sin now than ever. Chow and Hall's model suggests that the percentage of food wasted has risen sharply over the past 35 years, whereas the USDA figures that it has remained roughly constant. In 1974, Hall and Chow found, only 30% of calories in the U.S. food system went to waste. So exactly where are the extra losses occurring? "That's a very interesting question to which we don't have an answer," Hall admits.

Experts say they're not surprised that a greater percentage of food is being wasted, given that average food prices have declined in real terms. "If it was more expensive, waste would be reduced," says chemical engineer Greg Keoleian, who co-directs the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He also notes that many Americans are also eating more than they need to. "Waste and overconsumption is the key issue affecting the sustainability of the U.S. food system," he says.

Hall and Chow hope to expand their analysis to other countries, including Japan, which has the reputation for being more frugal.

***   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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#391 From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Fri Nov 27, 2009 3:56 pm
Subject: News: Consumers Want Independent Tracking of GM Content In Foods 		ashwanivasishth
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/6652037/People-want-independent-information-on-GM-foods-finds-new-study.html

People want independent information on GM foods, finds new study
     People want truly independent information to help them make up their minds about genetically modified (GM) foods, according to a new study for the Food Standards Agency (FSA).

Published: 12:40PM GMT 25 Nov 2009

Shoppers also want a clear labelling system to tell them if the food they buy is genetically modified or if products like milk and meat were produced from animals given GM feed.

The study, Exploring Attitudes to GM Food, was published by the FSA as a group set up to prompt public discussion on GM food meets for the first time.
 
The report will be presented to the independent GM Dialogue Steering Group which was set up by the FSA at the Government's request to decide how best the public can be informed and involved in discussions on GM food.

The new research suggests consumers do not trust all the information they receive about GM products and are suspicious of the Government's stance.

The report's conclusions say the FSA is ''well positioned'' to provide the public with information about GM food but only if it can ''provide evidence to the public of its independence from government, from business and from campaigning organisations''.

Shoppers told the National Centre for Social Research, which carried out the study, that they find current labelling ''inconsistent and confusing'' and they want all GM food products to be clearly marked.

Suggestions to improve labelling included clearly marked specialist GM ranges within stores or a traffic light system grading food according to whether it contains no GM material, GM derived ingredients or GM ingredients.

Researchers questioned 30 people who had previously responded to a question about GM food in the annual British Social Attitudes survey.

They were chosen to represent a range of opinions so the study could look at how they formed their views on GM foods.

The study also quizzed those who did not have a strong opinion and came to the conclusion that while some were unlikely to form a firm view in future, others were undecided because they felt uninformed.

Researcher Clarissa Penfold said: ''We found people aren't indifferent but they are undecided or unsure. There are people who don't care but there were others who found it difficult to form an opinion.''

The steering group, which meets for the first time today and tomorrow, aims to find out consumers' views on GM food and will discuss what information people need to make an informed choice about what food they eat.

Its work will inform future Government policy.

In August Environment Secretary Hilary Benn warned that a ''radical rethink'' of the way the UK produces and consumes food is needed,

His remarks came as the Government published an assessment showing that future global food supplies could be threatened by the impacts of climate change, expansion of crops grown for fuels and a growing population eating more.

The new steering group is chaired by John Curtice, a politics professor and director of the Social Statistics Laboratory at the University of Strathclyde.

Other members include Dr Guy Barker, director of the Genomics Resource Centre at Warwick HRI, Warwick University, Professor Ian Crute, chief scientist for the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, Dr Helen Wallace, director of GeneWatch UK, a not-for-profit organisation that campaigns for genetics to be used in the public interest and Brian Wynne, professor of science studies at Lancaster University, and associate director of the ESRC Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics.

***   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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#390 From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Thu Nov 26, 2009 1:34 pm
Subject: News: Environmental Impacts of Food Waste Studied 		ashwanivasishth
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http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/11/24/tech-environment-food-waste.html

Food waste has environmental impact: scientists

Last Updated: Wednesday, November 25, 2009 | 12:49 PM ET
CBC News

Americans are wasting food at a rate of 1,400 calories per person per day which has implications for obesity and climate change, U.S. researchers say.

Decomposing food waste emits the greenhouse gases methane and carbon dioxide, say the scientists, and producing and cooking food that doesn't get eaten burns excess fossil fuels, as well.

Kevin Hall and his colleagues at the U.S. National Institutes of Health found that food waste in the U.S. has increased by about 50 per cent since 1974. They estimate the current yearly food waste in the U.S. at 150 trillion calories.

The researchers came to their calculations from the difference in the energy content between the U.S. food supply and the amount of food eaten by the American population.

They estimated the amount of food eaten in the country by using a mathematical model of human metabolism that relates body weight to the amount of food eaten.

Hall and his colleagues relate the amount of food waste to the U.S. obesity epidemic and suggest that both are the result of an excess supply of cheap, readily available food.

"Addressing the oversupply of food energy in the US may help curb the obesity epidemic as well as decrease food waste, which has profound environmental consequences," they wrote in the journal Public Library of Science ONE.
Link to greenhouse gasses

The environmental impact of food waste stems from the greenhouse gases that result from its preparation and decomposition. Methane from food waste rotting in landfills is 25 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Also because agriculture uses about 70 per cent of the fresh water supply, the researchers estimate that food waste represents a significant waste of water, as well.

"Food waste now accounts for more than one quarter of the total freshwater consumption and 300 million barrels of oil per year," the researchers wrote. That represents about four per cent of the total U.S. oil consumption.

Although there is no similar data for Canada, World Vision Canada says that in Toronto alone, more than 17.5 million kilograms of food is thrown out every month.

In Britain, the government's Waste & Resources Action Programme estimates that $17.5 billion worth of food is wasted every year.

***   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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#389 From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Thu Nov 26, 2009 1:33 pm
Subject: News: "Fresh" Fish May Have Larger Footprint than Frozen Fish 		ashwanivasishth
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/debunking-our-fetish-of-the-fresh/article1375159/

Agriculture
Debunking our 'fetish of the fresh'

Illustration Omitted
        A shopper buys fresh fish at St. Lawrence Market in Toronto. J.P. Moczulski/The Globe and Mail

The local food movement has made waves among environmentally conscious consumers. But an ecological economist has revealed that the carbon footprint is much bigger than you'd think. His landmark findings apply to everything from milk to meat, posing a challenge for die-hard locavores

Jessica Leeder Global Food Reporter

From Tuesday's Globe and Mail Published on Tuesday, Nov. 24, 2009 12:00AM EST Last updated on Tuesday, Nov. 24, 2009 8:24PM EST

So you're grocery shopping in Halifax, waffling between buying fresh Atlantic salmon or frozen Alaskan sockeye. You choose the fresh filets because buying local adds up to a bigger environmental and sustainable bang for your buck, right?

Well, maybe not.

Embracing the local food philosophy - a guilt-reduction approach adopted by many environmentally confused but well-meaning shoppers - is not always as Earth-friendly as it seems, according to new results emerging from a global, three-year study on the life cycle of salmon production. In fact, buying imported fish that "swim" frozen into local ports via environmentally economical cargo ships can have a bigger impact on reducing the carbon impact of your meal - and global climate change - than choosing organic or local stock.

While the study focuses on salmon, "a global super commodity" available almost universally in any season thanks to commercial-farming operations, its authors say their findings are applicable to other major food commodities. Their findings challenge a body of food activism that has grown up around notions that buying close to home is the most environmentally ideal, a philosophy that is under increasing pressure from critics.

"We have this prioritization, this fetish of fresh," said Peter Tyedmers, an ecological economist at Dalhousie University's School of Resource and Environmental Studies, who helped author the study. "We're making a lot of poor assumptions around why we pursue local," he said, adding: "If we want to prioritize local economies, that's a great thing. But let's understand that it comes at a cost."

To decode when local is truly best, consumers need to take a few steps backwards along the food chain, focusing not on where their food was produced, but how. In the case of farmed salmon - carnivorous fish that live on pellets made from other fish - that means awakening to the intense environmental drain caused by making those pellets, which are culpable for around 90 per cent of the total greenhouse-gas emissions the fish generate up to the point of harvest.

    " Fresh is a big problem over long distance. If it's fresh, it's being air-freighted. And air freight comes at a huge environmental impact. "

The environmental weight of the inputs salmon require is similar to those in other types of conventional farming, a factor that allows researchers to generalize some of their findings to other consumer products.

"Intensive livestock production, whether it be salmon or milk, is predicated on concentrated feeds ... that are global commodities," Prof. Tyedmers said. "Your milk may be from down the block. But what fed the cow? Usually people are completely overlooking what the milk was built on," he said.

Prof. Tyedmers and his colleagues at the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology, and Ecotrust, an Oregon-based environment research organization, examined data from salmon-farming operations in Norway, the world's biggest salmon producer, Chile, Scotland and British Columbia over the course of their study. Their aim: to quantify the carbon footprint of man-made salmon farm systems.

Aside from feed, the researchers found that modes of catching and preserving salmon mattered more on the environmental balance sheet than whether they were grown on organic feed, which doesn't have as much environmental impact in salmon as in other forms of agriculture because in salmon the creation of organic feed pellets requires higher amounts of energy.

When weighing fresh versus frozen, Prof. Tyedmers said considering the salmon's mode of transport is critical.

"Fresh is a big problem over long distance. If it's fresh, it's being air-freighted," he said, adding: "And air freight comes at a huge environmental impact.

"If you're choosing salmon that has been frozen at sea, it probably came to you at a very low-scale environmental impact," he said.

In spite of his research, Prof. Tyedmers said he doesn't view the local-food movement as invalid.

"There's a lot of good reasons we shouldn't be ashamed of saying we value local food," he said. "There are really good cultural reasons to value local. It's almost like we're too embarrassed to say, 'I like the people who make my food.' " Jamie Kennedy, a Toronto-based chef who has parlayed his local-food activism into celebrity, has never been shy about expressing his love of farmers even though one might argue it helped destabilize his restaurant empire during the recent economic crunch. He argues the value of local-food procurement is more fully appreciated when the movement is seen from more than one angle. For him, the social gains it offers are huge.

"When you engage in local-food procurement, what you're doing is engaging with people that are involved with the growing of food ... that's how culture evolves," he said. "You have direct relationships with these people. That level, for humanity, is so important."

Cecilia Rocha is the director of Ryerson University's Centre for Studies in Food Security. She said the local-food movement, which has been embraced mostly because of the sensibility it appeals to, is a subject ripe for vigorous research.

"This idea of local comes from some good principles and good intentions. That's why people are so committed to it," she said. "It's hard to challenge things when they ... challenge our common sense."

*******

Not all salmon are created equal

Professor Peter Tyedmers and his colleagues illustrated this in a recent paper that outlined the gaps in greenhouse-gas emissions that exist between different salmon-producing regions.

"The perfect example is between Norway and Scotland," Prof. Tyedmers said. "Let's say you're a British consumer. You say, 'I'm going to eat local because it'll have less environmental impact.' Why import salmon from Norway? Because it has much less greenhouse-gas emissions and getting it to you would be trifling if you can move it by containerized ship," he said.

By Prof. Tyedmers's estimate, the greenhouse-gas emissions at the farm gate in Norway are about 1.8 tonnes of CO{-2} equivalents per tonne of salmon harvested, versus almost 3.3 tonnes of CO{-2} equivalents per ton of salmon harvested in Britain.

   * * *

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es9010114

Not All Salmon Are Created Equal: Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of Global Salmon Farming Systems

Nathan Pelletier*, Peter Tyedmers, Ulf Sonesson, Astrid Scholz, Friederike Ziegler, Anna Flysjo, Sarah Kruse, Beatriz Cancino and Howard Silverman
School for Resource and Environmental Studies, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Sustainable Food Production, SIK - Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology, Gothenburg, Sweden, Knowledge Systems, Ecotrust, Portland, Oregon, and School of Food Engineering, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso, Valparaiso, Chile
Environ. Sci. Technol., Article ASAP
DOI: 10.1021/es9010114
Publication Date (Web): October 23, 2009
Copyright 2009 American Chemical Society
* Corresponding author e-mail: nathanpelletier@....,

Abstract

We present a global-scale life cycle assessment of a major food commodity, farmed salmon. Specifically, we report the cumulative energy use, biotic resource use, and greenhouse gas, acidifying, and eutrophying emissions associated with producing farmed salmon in Norway, the UK, British Columbia (Canada), and Chile, as well as a production-weighted global average. We found marked differences in the nature and quantity of material/energy resource use and associated emissions per unit production across regions. This suggests significant scope for improved environmental performance in the industry as a whole. We identify key leverage points for improving performance, most notably the critical importance of least-environmental cost feed sourcing patterns and continued improvements in feed conversion efficiency. Overall, impacts were lowest for Norwegian production in most impact categories, and highest for UK farmed salmon. Our results are of direct relevance to industry, policy makers, eco-labeling programs, and consumers seeking to further sustainability objectives in salmon aquaculture.

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#388 From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Tue Nov 24, 2009 11:42 am
Subject: Feature: Developing a "Super" Rice, for Salty Soils 		ashwanivasishth
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/solving-hunger-with-super-rice/article1373366/

Solving hunger with super-rice
     Herbert Kronzucker is a researcher at the University of Toronto's Scarborough Campus who is leading a team of researchers who are trying to help solve the problem of world hunger by developing a type of rice that can thrive in salt water. Peter Power/The Globe and Mail

Three billion people depend on rice. But it's being ravaged by a serious salt problem in the world's soil. A Canadian researcher hopes to find a solution with his breed of super grains that resist salt

Jessica Leeder

From Monday's Globe and Mail Published on Sunday, Nov. 22, 2009 9:57PM EST Last updated on Tuesday, Nov. 24, 2009 3:25AM EST

In a humid faux-tropical haven set in a Toronto basement and lit with near-blinding artificial sunlight, Herbert Kronzucker has begun to save the world.

As a starting point, he chose the three billion people - just under half the globe's current population - who subsist mainly on rice. The logic of doing so occurred to him while he was up to his knees in a swampy Philippine rice field more than a decade ago, on a side-trip during a tree biology project.

"I will never forget that morning, the sun rising over these rice paddies, and I realized for the first time, 'These oceans of green ... that's where the world's food comes from.' I had never realized that," the 43-year-old researcher said. "I grew up in Europe and then came to North America. You go to Loblaws when you're hungry, or McDonald's and there is always something there."

That dawn walk has led Dr. Kronzucker to the holy grail of rice: the breeding of super grains designed to resist death by salt, which ravages crops via fertilized soil and water. The ultimate result promises more than a silver bullet for farmers struggling to grow bigger crops in a degrading environment: It could provide billions of people with the golden ticket to surviving a global food crisis that is well under way.

From a continent that struggles more directly with obesity than starvation, the immense pressures on the world food system, which appear geographically confined, can seem impossible to comprehend. But global population growth is currently outpacing agricultural production by a measure of 3 to 1, according to Dr. Kronzucker. Our bread basket will never catch up: the Earth's arable land is already maxed out.

"It has never been this dire. And yet the human population keeps exploding," he said. "I can walk around and ask people to use condoms and have fewer children. That's very important."

Instead, the University of Toronto plant biologist, who is affiliated with the renowned Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute, decided to make his mark in the lab.

Rice is one of just four grains that form the foundation of the global food chain. While all grains are under stress from drought and salinity - the buildup of salt in soil and water - rice is under the most pressure because it is grown in irrigated fields where the salt problem, which is exacerbated by fertilization, is serious.

"Rice uses a heck of a lot of water," Dr. Kronzucker said. "It needs a lot of pesticides, a lot of fertilizers to give you that [big] yield in the end."

The problem is pressing across the chief rice-growing and consuming arc of southern and Southeast Asia, from India to China by way of Indonesia and the Philippines.

Rice science, which took off in 1960, led to yield increases credited with saving more than 800 million lives in Asia. Now, Dr. Kronzucker, who is the Canada Research Chair in Metabolic Bioengineering of Crop Plants, is hoping a new marriage of sophisticated scientific techniques will help him uncover the genetic makeup that the rice of the future will need.

The ongoing study that has garnered him international rice fame is one that probes the inner plumbing of rice plants down to the genome, which he describes as more sophisticated than that of humans. Using radio isotopes that rice roots essentially suck up, Dr. Kronzucker and his team have discovered how to monitor precisely where salt travels into the plant and watch how it cuts its murderous path, causing the plant to panic, bleeding fatal amounts of water and potassium (a critical survival nutrient).

The isotopes allow study of the rice plants while they're still living, not "all cut up" as traditional science dictates, Dr. Kronzucker said, adding: "They show us things we never could have imagined."

That includes a clearer-than-ever-before window into the rice genome, which works like a computer operating system that runs programs in response to the presence of various toxic conditions, including salt influxes. In the lab, Dr. Kronzucker's team is learning how to manipulate those "programs" with methods that can be reproduced with "precision agriculture" in the field.

They've also set a pattern of debunking the findings of some of the world's leading rice experts. Current theories hold that porous root cells are culpable for salt intake, but the Toronto team learned that the problem lies elsewhere.

For Dr. Kronzucker, the notoriety his discoveries bring is less exciting than the potential they hold. His work could erase lingering doubts about the fundamental aspects of rice's relationship with salt, which must be resolved before genomes are actually altered to avoid disaster when the re-engineered seeds finally hit the field.

When they do - and Dr. Kronzucker is not certain how far off that could be - rice farmers will be able to get them without paying unreasonable costs. On principle, Dr. Kronzucker wants to keep his pioneering work in the non-profit realm.

"Food is as fundamental as health to human rights," he said. "It will be made available to all of the world's farmers."

Illustration Omitted
     http://beta.images.theglobeandmail.com/archive/00347/rice_salt_plant_gra_347243a.jpg


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

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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 		ashwanivasishth
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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 entre 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 		ashwanivasishth
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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

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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 		ashwanivasishth
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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 Rockstrm 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 Rockstrm. 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.

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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 		ashwanivasishth
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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."

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

Cheers,
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    Ashwani
       Vasishth       vasishth@...         (201) 684-6616
                        A-211, Environmental Studies
                  http://phobos.ramapo.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 		ashwanivasishth
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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 		ashwanivasishth
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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 		ashwanivasishth
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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 		ashwanivasishth
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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 		ashwanivasishth
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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 Universitt 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 		ashwanivasishth
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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)

Thomson Reuters 2009 All rights reserved

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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 		ashwanivasishth
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http://asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2139&Itemid=189

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 		ashwanivasishth
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http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE5AA0CO20091111?sp=true

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

***   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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#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? 		ashwanivasishth
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http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN091742

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

***   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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#371 From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Wed Nov 11, 2009 10:16 am
Subject: Commentary: The Food Security Implications of Climate Change 		ashwanivasishth
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http://www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/plan_b_updates/2009/update84

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

***   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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#370 From: Yahoo News Groups <ashwani.vasishth@...>
Date: Wed Nov 11, 2009 10:09 am
Subject: Commentary: The Raw Milk Revolution 		ashwanivasishth
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http://www.grist.org/article/2009-11-03-i-drink-raw-milk-sold-illegally-on-the-underground-market

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 expos 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.

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