Forum Post: The New Farm Bill Shows What's Wrong With US Food
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The New Farm Bill Shows What's Wrong With US Food
Saturday, 01 June 2013 09:07 By Kristina Chew, Care2 | Report
http://truth-out.org/news/item/16705-the-new-farm-bill-shows-whats-wrong-with-us-food
Thomas Jefferson believed that the U.S. ought to be a nation of small farmers, each owning his own land, independent and self-sufficient. But the new farm bill is all about what’s wrong with food production in the U.S. now. A quick review of the $1 trillion 2013 farm bill — it’s actually the Agriculture Reform, Food and Jobs Act of 2012; Congress didn’t get around to passing it last year — not only makes it clear how small farmers are second-class citizens, but also pushes for chemical sugar substitutes and GMO food and fails to take provisions to prepare American agriculture for climate change.
If that’s not enough, the bill also cuts food stamps to the poor by about $20.5 billion.
Cuts to Food Stamp Program
It is the case that food stamp usage is up by at least 70 percent since the financial crisis in 2008. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is spending an estimated $70 billion on the program this year.
The new farm bill, which every Republican on the House Agriculture Committee has approved, will cut some $20 billion in food stamps over the next decade. That means nearly two million people, mostly from low-income working families with kids and older Americans, will be hungry and that as many as 210,000 children could lose access to free school lunches and breakfasts due to their eligibility for these being linked to their family’s food stamp benefits.
In addition, the new bill would eliminate food stamps for anyone who has ever been convicted of a crime, a provision that will fall disproportionately on those in poor, urban areas. Some lawmakers have also wanted to cut the program due to people using food stamps for things like energy drinks, overlooking the fact that it’s just not possible to find fresh, healthy food in many of America’s cities.
Sugar Substitutes and GMO Seeds Get the Go-Ahead
Not that the new farm bill goes out of its way to promote healthy food. The bill in effect pushes for the use of chemical sugar substitutes as it sets a minimum price for sugar. As a result, U.S. companies will seek out cheaper chemical-based sugar substitutes, including high-fructose corn syrup, which has clearly been implicated as a factor in obesity rates among Americans.
A rider in the bill, The Monsanto Protection Act, is very aptly named. This act lets large agriculture companies sell GMO seeds before they are tested, bypassing the USDA requirement that the seeds first be tested for any harmful effects on humans. What’s more, the act would keep the USDA from not letting companies from selling these seeds, should they be found dangerous to our health.
Climate Change? What’s That?
Last summer, we saw image after image of farmers standing beside desiccated crops. Drought continues to plague much of the U.S.; floods and changes in rainfall have also been taking their toll. Yet the new farm bill makes very few provisions for helping U.S. farmers prepare for climate change, via funding for clean, renewable energy. The House bill designates no mandatory funding for promoting the use sustainable energy; only about 11 percent of the Senate bill provides outlays for such over the next five years.
The House is debating the new farm bill in June; it is not yet clear when the Senate will.
Only about 12 percent of American farms have sales of more than $250,000. Indeed, fewer than 1 in 4 of U.S. farms in this country produces more than $50,000 in revenues. Larger farms do more damage to the environment through pesticide and fertilizer runoff, plus their mammoth size makes it impossible for consumers to learn more about their food than what’s printed on the label. But the new bill continues to promote large-scale industry farming via crop subsidies — that is, the new farm bill is really about the U.S. farming industry and is about as far from the “nation of farmers” that Jefferson envisioned as can be imagined.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.
How Two Plant Geeks Grew a Permaculture Oasis in an Ordinary Backyard
Saturday, 01 June 2013 11:57 By Abby Quillen, YES! Magazine | Book Review
In “Paradise Lot,” two residents of an inner city write about how they transformed less than an acre of their blighted yard into a thriving food forest full of mushrooms, gooseberries, silkworms, and more. Eric Toensmeier and Jonathan Bates are not your average backyard gardeners. They call themselves plant geeks, and they’re not kidding. Toensmeier sustained a serious head injury in 1994, and to heal, he memorized thousands of Latin plant names, families, orders, and superorders. He also cross-indexed a tome of edible plants with references listing cold-hardy varieties and perennials. Bates studied biology and ecology and spends a lot of time poring over Plants for a Future, an online database of useful plants. Not surprisingly, when the two friends bought a duplex together in 2004, they didn’t build your average garden.
They set out with a list of ambitious goals. They wanted to transform their yard into a permaculture oasis by planting “a mega-diverse living ark of useful and multifunctional plants” from their bioregion and around the world. They hoped to harvest “two handfuls of fresh fruit every day for everybody in the house, including guests, for as long a season as possible,” and also to attract birds, beneficial insects, and a couple of bachelorettes.
Toensmeier, the main author of Paradise Lot, who also wrote Perennial Vegetables and co-wrote Edible Forest Gardens, doesn’t skimp on details about how he and Bates turned a “dead and blighted” one-tenth of an acre of compacted soil in a “biologically impoverished neighborhood” of Holyoke, Mass., into Food Forest Farm, an Eden for edibles. Although it is more memoir than how-to, Paradise Lot outlines the basics of sheet mulching, raising silkworms, keeping chickens, and growing mushrooms. Readers will gain an understanding of the principles and objectives of permaculture, a movement that began in Australia in the 1970s. It combines indigenous land management practices, ecological design, and sustainable methods to create low-maintenance gardens that function like natural ecosystems.
It’s inspiring and a little daunting to read about what Toensmeier and Bates achieved on their small plot in eight years. They managed to transform their Massachusetts front yard into a tropical garden. In their backyard, they installed a pond, shed, and greenhouse, and they grow about 160 edible perennials, many of which you’ve likely never heard of before. Here’s an inventory of the berries they harvest each season: honeyberries, strawberries, goumi cherries, Gerardi dwarf mulberries, four kinds of currants, gooseberries, jostas, blueberries, wild raspberries, golden Anne raspberries, ground-cherries, wintergreen berries, juneberries, and lingonberries. Toensmeier hopes the complexity and diversity of Food Forest Farm won’t dissuade beginners from experimenting with permaculture in their backyards, since part of the reason they undertook the project in an urban area with typical inner-city problems was to make it a relevant example for amateurs to emulate. “Our desire to try many new things—new models of production, hundreds of new and interesting species—meant that we put a lot more time into a garden of this size than any reasonable person would ever do,” he writes. It’s helpful that the book shares the friends’ ample mistakes, setbacks, and revisions, making it clear that the most important thing a gardener needs if embarking on a similar project is a dedication to experimentation.
Paradise Lot offers gardeners more than inspiration and instruction. Toensmeier and Bates present an unconventional alternative to the American dream: two single men committed to a friendship and to making their backyard and neighborhood better. “Trusting each other with such a responsibility felt especially rare in this world,” Bates writes in one of the short essays he contributes to Toensmeier’s text. The friends’ dedication to each other and to a patch of land paid off. “We made our little paradise here,” Toensmeier writes. Moreover, Paradise Lot is permeated by an incredibly hopeful and compelling vision of humans’ place in nature. Toensmeier is critical of the environmental movement’s emphasis on minimizing footprints, because he thinks that permaculture and indigenous land management practices offer us ways to affect ecosystems for the better. After all, he and Bates turned a barren lot into a habitat for fish, snails, frogs, salamanders, raccoons, opossums, woodchucks, bugs, and worms.
And the wildlife actually helps them manage the garden. The birds eat insects. The opossums eat rotten fruit when it drops. The squirrels eat unwanted Norway maple seedlings. Some permaculture farmers even employ squirrels as labor by setting out buckets near their nut trees, letting the squirrels fill them, and swapping the nuts for corn. Toensmeier is convinced it’s time for us to re-evaluate our ideas of “nature,” “agriculture,” and “wilderness” and embrace the potential to transform our communities into beautiful, healthy ecosystems like Food Forest Farm.
“Imagine what would happen,” he writes, “if we as a species paid similar attention to all the degraded and abandoned lands of the world.”
This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
All the more reason for all of us who can, to go out and plant a garden; even if it is as small as some pots on a window sill.
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Seven Companies Polluting the World Without Consequences
Sunday, 02 June 2013 10:06 By S.E. Smith, Care2 | Report
http://truth-out.org/news/item/16720-seven-companies-polluting-the-world-without-consequences
The only thing more horrifying than rampant industrial pollution is pollution without consequences. Yet, companies across the globe freely dump toxic substances into the environment and get off with minimal punishments, sometimes even walking away from a pollution incident without being held accountable. That leaves residents, and governments, with the bill for cleaning up potentially life-threatening environmental pollution, a process that may take decades. Take a look at some of the worst offenders.
This company’s in the news this week thanks to a benzene spill near Parachute, Colorado. Williams processes fracked natural gas and managed to spill almost 250 barrels of mixed natural gas liquid, which inevitably made its way into the waterway. Two months later, residents are waiting for an explanation — and for punishments for Williams Energy. Lawmakers in the state have just addressed an outdated law capping fines at $10,000, but their actions are meaningless unless the state is ready to take action and actually levy those fines.
The aerospace giant generates tremendous amounts of pollution in the course of its daily operations, including at a now abandoned facility in Calverton, New York. As is often the case with industrial pollution, initial evaluations of the site indicated something was going wrong, but now public health officials are realizing that the size of the company’s pollution plume may be much larger than previously estimated. Volatile organic compounds are saturating the groundwater, and no matter how wide and deep officials drill in search of clean water, they’re turning up more pollution. The Navy’s responsible for the cleanup bill here, but Northrop’s operations certainly haven’t been limited to this site.
It took 30 years, but GE is finally being called to task for its extensive pollution of the Hudson River. The fight over GE’s pollution was one of the seminal battles of the environmental movement, pulling together activists who used a variety of organizing tactics to force the company to take responsibility. Now, that victory is already ringing bittersweet, as the EPA is in the process of relaxing the cleanup requirements, relieving responsibilities for GE without ensuring the river will be safely restored.
Dow’s polluting activities are legendary — this is the firm behind the horrific Bhopal disaster, for example. But the company is spewing dioxins in waterways, among many other pollution offenses, and regulators seem to be prepared to allow that to keep happening. In fact, the Supreme Court granted Dow what amounts to a free license to pollute despite objections from activists, pollution victims and environmental defense organizations. Institutional support for polluters makes it hard for citizens to fight them, let alone hold them accountable.
This Australian company’s so infamous, its polluting activities have actually inspired a campaign, No Dirty Gold, centered around cleaning up the mining industry and getting consumers involved in anti-pollution work. Across the world, Rio Tinto is polluting communities with toxic chemicals used in metals extraction and processing, in addition to engaging in blatant human rights violations, particularly in the Global South. Yet, the company remains a powerhouse in the industry, in no small part thanks to relief from fines and regulation provided by friendly politicians.
Seeing this firm on the list probably won’t surprise you, and it might not shock you that this firm is very good at using its lobbying skills to dodge pollution fines. Koch Industries isn’t afraid of throwing its weight around to have fines reduced or rescinded, even as it cuts a swath of pollution across the U.S. At the same, the Koch family is extending its reach into a wide variety of markets and industries including newspapers, making it harder for ordinary citizens to understand the full extent of its polluting activities, human rights violations and abuses of power, because it controls the source of information and exchange in some communities.
When pollution is effectively your business, you tend to argue against limitations on pollution across your working area, especially state-mandated limits on individual pollution. U.S. Steel has been fighting attempts to regulate pollution in several states, including Indiana, where environment advocates have called for a crackdown on the company’s operations. They note that allowing U.S. Steel to continue discharging harmful materials like mercury into the Great Lakes causes tremendous environmental harm, and it has had ample opportunities to clean up its act on its own: it’s time for the company to get serious.
Want to see some more heavy polluters? The Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts generates an annual “Toxic 100” list with details on major sources of pollution. You might find it a helpful consumer guide as well as an eye-opening look at the state of pollution in the U.S. and around the world.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.
Peak Water, Peak Oil … Now, Peak Soil?
Sunday, 02 June 2013 10:41 By Stephen Leahy, Inter Press Service | Report
http://truth-out.org/news/item/16722-peak-water-peak-oil-now-peak-soil
Reykjavík, Iceland - Soil is becoming endangered.This reality needs to be part of our collective awareness in order to feed nine billion people by 2050, say experts meeting here in Reykjavík.
And a big part of reversing soil decline is carbon, the same element that is overheating the planet.
“Keeping and putting carbon in its rightful place” needs to be the mantra for humanity if we want to continue to eat, drink and combat global warming, concluded 200 researchers from more than 30 countries.
“There is no life without soil,” said Anne Glover, chief scientific advisor to the European Commission.
“While soil is invisible to most people it provides an estimated 1.5 to 13 trillion dollars in ecosystem services annually,” Glover said at the Soil Carbon Sequestration conference that ended this week. The dirt beneath our feet is a nearly magical world filled with tiny, wondrous creatures. A mere handful of soil might contain a half million different species including ants, earthworms, fungi, bacteria and other microorganisms. Soil provides nearly all of our food – only one percent of our calories come from the oceans, she said. Soil also gives life to all of the world’s plants that supply us with much of our oxygen, another important ecosystem service. Soil cleans water, keeps contaminants out of streams and lakes, and prevents flooding. Soil can also absorb huge amounts of carbon, second only to the oceans.
“It takes half a millennia to build two centimetres of living soil and only seconds to destroy it,” Glover said.
Each year, 12 million hectares of land, where 20 million tonnes of grain could have been grown, are lost to land degradation. In the past 40 years, 30 percent of the planet’s arable (food-producing) land has become unproductive due to erosion. Unless this trend is reversed soon, feeding the world’s growing population will be impossible.
The world will likely need “60 percent more food calories in 2050 than in 2006″, according to a new paper released May 30 by the World Resources Institute. Reaching this goal while maintaining economic growth and environmental sustainability is one of the most important global challenges of our time, it concludes.
Urban development is a growing factor in loss of arable lands. One million city dwellers occupy 40,000 hectares of land on average, said Rattan Lal of Ohio State University.
Plowing, removal of crop residues after harvest, and overgrazing all leave soil naked and vulnerable to wind and rain, resulting in gradual, often unnoticed erosion of soil. This is like tire wear on your car – unless given the attention and respect it deserves, catastrophe is only a matter of time.
Erosion also puts carbon into the air where it contributes to climate change. But with good agricultural practices like using seed drills instead of plows, planting cover crops and leaving crop residues, soils can go from a carbon source to a carbon solution, he said. “Soil can be a safe place where huge amounts of carbon from the atmosphere could be sequestered,” Lal told IPS.
When a plant grows it takes CO2 out the atmosphere and releases oxygen. The more of a crop – maize, soy or vegetable – that remains after harvest, the more carbon is returned to the soil. This carbon is mainly found in humus – the rich organic material from decay of plant material. Soil needs to contain just 1.5 percent carbon to be healthy and resilient – more capable of withstanding drought and other harsh conditions.
“Healthy soils equals healthy crops, healthy livestock and healthy people,” Lal said.
However, most soils suffer from 30 to 60 percent loss in soil carbon. “Soils are like a bank account. You should only draw out what you put in. Soils are badly overdrawn in most places.” Farmers and pastoralists (ranchers) could do “miracles” in keeping carbon in the soil and helping to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and feed the world if they were properly supported, Lal said.
The world’s 3.4 billion ha of rangeland and pastures has the potential to sequester or absorb up to 10 percent of the annual carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels and cement production, estimates Ólafur Arnalds, a soil scientist at the Agricultural University of Iceland. Eliminating overgrazing and using other pasture management techniques will reduce the number of animals on the land in the short term but it is better for the long term health of grazing lands. While these practises can help with climate change, there many other good reasons to adopt them, Arnalds told IPS.
That view is echoed by many here since determining exactly how much carbon a farm field or pasture can absorb from the atmosphere is highly variable and difficult to determine.
Proper land management can help with climate change but in no way does it reduce the need to make major reductions in fossil fuel use, said Guðmundur Halldórsson, a research co-ordinator at the Soil Conservation Service of Iceland, co-host of the conference.
And using farmland or pastures as a ‘carbon sponges’ will lead to all sorts of problems, Halldórsson told IPS.
“The real key is adopt practices that enhance soil health to improve food productivity,” he said.
That approach is much more likely to help in improve local livelihoods, protect water resources, improve biodiversity, reduce erosion and help put carbon back into the ground where it belongs, he said.
“Iceland overexploited its lands, trying to squeeze more out of the land than it could handle. We call it ‘killing the milk cow’. We can no longer live off the land as we once did.”
Situated in the North Atlantic, the windy island was once mostly covered by forests, lush meadows and wetlands when the first settlers arrived nearly 1,000 years ago. By the late 1800s, 96 percent of the forest was gone and half the grasslands destroyed by overgrazing. Iceland became one the world’s poorest countries, its people starved and its landscape remains Europe’s largest desert. Of necessity, Iceland pioneered techniques to halt land degradation and in restoration. And for more than 100 years the Soil Conservation Service has struggled but the gains are small and very slow in coming. Today at least half of the former forests and grasslands are mostly bare and subject to severe erosion by the strong winds.
“We’re still fighting overgrazing here,” Halldórsson said.
Iceland relies far less on agriculture now and the harsh lessons of poor land management of the past are irrelevant to the 90 percent of Icelanders who now live in urban areas.
“The public isn’t supporting land restoration. We’ve forgotten that land is the foundation of life,” Halldórsson said.
Visit IPS news for fresh perspectives on development and globalization.
Putting the Culture Back in Agriculture: Reviving Native Food and Farming Traditions
Sunday, 02 June 2013 13:31 By Tory Field and Beverly Bell, Other Worlds | Harvesting Justice Series
http://truth-out.org/news/item/16725-putting-the-culture-back-in-agriculture-reviving-native-food-and-farming-traditions
“At one point ‘agriculture’ was about the culture of food. Losing that culture, in favor of an American cultural monocrop, joined with an agricultural monocrop, puts us in a perilous state…” says food and Native activist Winona LaDuke.[1] Her lament is an agribusiness executive’s dream. The CEO of the H.J. Heinz Company said, “Once television is there, people, whatever shade, culture, or origin, want roughly the same things.”[2] The same things are based on the same technology, same media sources, same global economy, and same food.
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Together with the loss of cultural diversity, the growth of industrial agriculture has led to an enormous depletion in biodiversity. Throughout history, humans have cultivated about 7,000 species of plants. In the last century, three-quarters of the genetic diversity of agricultural crops have been lost. Thirty crops now provide 95% of our food needs, with rice, wheat, maize, and potato alone providing 60%. Eighty-five percent of the apple varieties that once existed in the US have been lost. Vast fields of genetically identical crops are much more susceptible to pests, necessitating increased pesticide use. The lack of diversity also endangers the food supply, as an influx of pests or disease can wipe out enormous quantities of crops in one fell swoop.
Native peoples’ efforts to protect their crop varieties and agricultural heritage in the US go back 500 years to when the Spanish conquistadors arrived. Today, Native communities throughout the US are reclaiming and reviving land, water, seeds, and traditional food and farming practices, thereby putting the culture back in agriculture and agriculture back in local hands.
One such initiative is the White Earth Land Recovery Project in Minnesota, which is recovering healthy stewardship of local tribes’ original land base. They are harvesting and selling traditional foods such as wild rice, planting gardens and raising greenhouses, and growing food for farm-to-school and feeding-our-elders programs. They are reintroducing native sturgeon to local waters as well as working to stop pesticide spraying at nearby industrial farms. They are also strengthening relationships with food sovereignty projects around the country. Winona LaDuke, the founding director of the project, told us, “My father used to say, ‘I don’t want to hear your philosophy if you can’t grow corn’… I now grow corn.”
Another revival effort involves buffalo herds. In the 1800s, European-American settlers drove wild buffalo close to extinction, decimating a source of survival for many Native communities. Just one example of the resurgence is the Lakota Buffalo Caretakers Cooperative, a cooperative of small-family buffalo caretakers, on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The cooperative sees its work as threefold, to “restore the buffalo, restore the native ecology on Pine Ridge, and help renew the sacred connection between the Lakota people and the buffalo nation.” At the national level, the Inter-Tribal Bison Cooperative is a network of 56 tribal bison programs from around the country with a collective herd of over 15,000.
In New Mexico, Native communities are organizing a wealth of initiatives. Around the state, they have started educational and production farms, youth-elder farming exchanges, buffalo revitalization programs, seed-saving initiatives, herb-based diabetes treatment programs, a credit union that invests in green and sustainable projects, and more. Schools like the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and the Santa Fe Indian School – along with grammar schools, high schools, and non-profit programs – have developed agricultural education programs. The Traditional Native American Farmers’ Association helps farmers get back onto the land, hosts workshops on seed saving and agricultural techniques, and has a youth program. The annual Sustainable Food and Seed Sovereignty Symposium at the Tesuque [Indian] Pueblo in northern New Mexico brings together farmers, herbalists, natural dyers, healers, cooks, seed savers, educators, water protectors, and community organizers. From the 2006 symposium came the Declaration of Seed Sovereignty, which denounced genetically engineered seeds and corporate ownership of Native seeds and crops as “a continuation of genocide upon indigenous people and as malicious and sacrilegious acts toward our ancestry, culture, and future generations.”
In addition to the symposium, the Tesuque Pueblo also hosts Tesuque Natural Farms, which grows vegetables, herbs, grains, fruit trees, and cover crops, including varieties long lost to the region. The project is building a Native seed library. The overarching goal is to make the Pueblo autonomous in both food and seeds. Emigdio Ballon, Quechua farmer and geneticist at Tesuque Natural Farm, said, “The only way we can get our autonomy is when we have the resources in our own hands, when we don’t have to buy from seed companies.”
The farm provides fresh foods to the senior center, sells at the farmers’ markets, and trains residents to begin farming themselves. The farm also grows medicinal herbs to treat HIV, diabetes, and cancer, and makes biofertilizer from plants. The preschoolers at the Head Start program garden; grammar school students are beginning to, as well.
People from across the nation come to Tesuque Natural Farms to study agricultural production and to take workshops on pruning, beekeeping, poultry, soil fertility, composting, and other topics. Soon the farm hopes to create a research and education center, where people can come for three to six months.
Nayeli Guzman, a Mexica woman who worked at the farm, said, “What we’re doing is very simple. These ideas are not an alternative for us, they’re just a way of life... We need to all work together as land-based people.
“Creator is not exclusive, so there’s no reason we should be,” she said. “They tell us, ‘The more biodiversity you have, the richer your soil is going to be.’ It’s like that with people. The more different kinds of people you have, the more able we’re going to be to survive. We can’t compartmentalize ourselves. That’s what industrial agriculture does.”
References:
[1] Winona LaDuke in “One Thing to Do About Food: A Forum,” Alice Waters, ed., The Nation, September 11, 2006, 18.
[2] Sharon Beder, Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism (Devon: Green Books, 2002), 184.
Download the Harvesting Justice pdf here, and find action items, resources, and a popular education curriculum on the Harvesting Justice website. Harvesting Justice was created for the US Food Sovereignty Alliance, check out their work here.
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This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.
"Toensmeier is convinced it’s time for us to re-evaluate our ideas of “nature,” “agriculture,” and “wilderness” and embrace the potential to transform our communities into beautiful, healthy ecosystems like Food Forest Farm."
Which means, most of all, leaving them all the hell alone.