Geopolitical strategy lesson from Professor Jiang

This is how food companies purposely create diseases..

 

What Big Ag doesn’t want you to know about GMOs and glyphosate

For anyone even mildly tuned in to the food movement, Monsanto (now Bayer) and other ag companies have shaped the global industrial food system with GMOs and glyphosate (Roundup). Now they’re using “gene editing” to further shape nature. Behind the marketing slogans of “precision” and rising to the challenge of “feeding the world,” a different story emerges — one of regulatory capture, hidden side effects, and a food supply increasingly engineered in ways most people never see, can’t really taste, but feel distinctly in their health.

• The incalculable risk of releasing engineered organisms into nature with no recall button

In this interview, Jeffrey Smith, founder of the Institute for Responsible Technology, explains:

• Why gene-edited foods don’t need to be labeled or safety-tested before hitting the grocery shelves (and that we’re probably eating them now!)

• How gene editing like CRISPR can unleash “surprise side effects”

• Why glyphosate became one of the most widely used and controversial chemicals on earth

• The lawsuits, cover-ups, and regulatory failures surrounding Monsanto, now Bayer, products

This conversation pulls back the curtain on the experimentation on our food supply, and what you can do right now to protect your family’s health and avoid stealth GMOs.

Disclaimer:

*This interview is for educational and documentary purposes. It presents opinions and ongoing scientific debates. It is not medical advice. For health decisions, consult a qualified clinician.*

Related links:

Institute for Responsible Technology: https://responsibletechnology.org

Secret Ingredients film: https://secretingredientsfilm.com

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Climate The Movie (The Real Truth)

The film that lifts the lid on the climate alarm, and the dark forces behind the climate consensus. Written and directed by Martin Durkin. Produced by Tom Nelson.

(You can ignore youtube's "context", aka propaganda and just watch the documentary ;) )
 

Chemtrails, Weather Modification

United Nations webcast. 

FRANKENSKIES

FrankenSkies is an 80 minute social change documentary regarding the Solar Geoengineering/Chemtrail agenda that affects every living being on earth. The struggle of bringing awareness to this subject, despite the obstacles of a socially engineered populace and the military industrial complex with its endless resources, is palpable in this awakening truth feature.

GMO whistleblower Dr. Thierry Vrain unveils insider information on engineered food

Thierry Vrain retired 10 years ago after a long career as a soil biologist and ended head of a department of molecular biology running his own research program to engineer nematode resistance genes in crops. In his retirement career as a gardener he learned five or six years ago how the soil ecosystem really functions and have been preaching ever since. He find himself with a good knowledge of genetic engineering technologies surrounded by people in fear of being hurt by the food they eat. He found that he cannot ignore them anymore and has joined the campaign to educate consumers about the potential health problems reported in the recent scientific literature.

Taking Stock: World Fish Catch Falls to 90 Million Tons in 2012

J. Matthew Roney 

www.earth-policy.org/indicators/C55/fish_catch_2012

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) projects that the world’s wild fish harvest will fall to 90 million tons in 2012, down 2 percent from 2011. This is close to 4 percent below the all-time peak haul of nearly 94 million tons in 1996. The wild fish catch per person has dropped even more dramatically, from 17 kilograms (37.5 pounds) per person at its height in 1988 to 13 kilograms in 2012—a 37-year low. While wild fish harvests have flattened out during this time, the output from fish farming has soared from 24 million tons in the mid-1990s to a projected 67 million tons in 2012.

Over the last several decades, as demand for fish and shellfish for food, feed, and other products rose dramatically, fishing operations have used increasingly sophisticated technologies—such as on-vessel refrigeration and processing facilities, spotter planes, and GPS satellites. Industrial fishing fleets initially targeted the northern hemisphere’s coastal fish stocks, then as stocks were depleted they expanded progressively southward on average close to one degree of latitude annually since 1950. The fastest expansion was during the 1980s and early 1990s. Thereafter, the only frontiers remaining were the high seas, the hard-to-reach waters near Antarctica and in the Arctic, and the depths of the oceans.

The escalating pursuit of fish—now with gross revenue exceeding $80 billion per year—has had heavy ecological consequences, including the alteration of marine food webs via a massive reduction in the populations of larger, longer-lived predatory fish such as tunas, cods, and marlins. Unselective fishing gear, including longlines and bottom-scraping trawls, kill large numbers of non-target animals like sea turtles, sharks, and corals. 

As of 2009, some 57 percent of the oceanic fish stocks evaluated by FAO are “fully exploited,” with harvest levels at or near what fisheries scientists call maximum sustainable yield (MSY). If we think of a fish stock as a savings account, fishing at MSY is theoretically similar to withdrawing only the accrued interest, avoiding dipping into the principal. 

Some 30 percent of stocks are “overexploited”—they have been fished beyond MSY and require strong management intervention in order to rebuild. The share of stocks in this category has tripled since the mid-1970s. A well-known example of this is the Newfoundland cod fishery that collapsed in the early 1990s and has yet to recover. 

This leaves just 13 percent of oceanic fish stocks in the “non-fully exploited” category, down from 40 percent in 1974. Unfortunately, these remaining stocks tend to have very limited potential for safely increasing the catch. 

These FAO figures describe 395 fisheries that account for some 70 percent of the global catch. Included are the small minority that have undergone the time-consuming and expensive process of formal scientific stock assessment, with the remainder being "unassessed" fisheries. There are thousands more unassessed fisheries, however, that are absent from the FAO analysis. In a 2012 Science article, Christopher Costello and colleagues published the first attempt to characterize all of the world’s unassessed fisheries. The authors report that 64 percent of them were overexploited as of 2009. 

The top 10 fished species represent roughly one quarter of the world catch. Nearly all of the stocks of these species are considered fully exploited (most of these fish have more than one geographically distinct stock), including both of the major stocks of Peruvian anchovy, the world's leading wild-caught fish. Stocks that are overexploited and in need of rebuilding include largehead hairtail—a ribbon-like predator caught mainly by Chinese ships—in its main fishing grounds in the Northwest Pacific. (See data.) 

Despite the unsustainable nature of current harvest levels, countries continue to subsidize fishing fleets in ways that encourage even higher catches. Governments around the world spend an estimated $16 billion annually on increasing fleet size and fish-catching ability, including $4 billion for fuel subsidies. Industrial countries spend some $10 billion of that total. More than $2 billion is spent by China, whose 15-million-ton catch is nearly triple that of the next closest country, Indonesia. 

The world’s fisheries reveal a classic case of diminishing returns. In a 2012 paper published in the journal Fish and Fisheries, scientists found that overall engine power for the world fishing fleet has grown 10-fold since 1950, while the total catch has grown just fivefold. (In Asia, home to 3.2 million of the estimated 4.4 million fishing vessels worldwide, the growth was 25-fold.) In other words, ships now have to use twice as much energy to catch a ton of fish as they did 60 years ago. 

Seafood plays a vital role in world food security. Roughly 3 billion people get about 20 percent of their animal protein from fishery products. It is perhaps unsurprising that fish account for half or more of animal protein consumption in small island developing countries, but the same is true for some much more populous countries, such as Bangladesh and Indonesia (home to a combined 400 million people). 

With the wild catch no longer increasing, aquaculture has emerged as the world’s fastest-growing animal protein source, soon to overtake beef in total tonnage. China, which has raised carp for millennia, produced nearly 37 million tons of farmed fish in 2010, which was 60 percent of the world total. 

Six of the world’s top 10 farmed fish are carp species, either filter feeders or those fed a largely plant-based diet. But a commonly cited drawback of aquaculture is that wild-caught forage fish—smaller plankton consumers that support the higher levels of the food chain—are often turned into fishmeal and oil used to feed farmed predatory fish, such as salmon and shrimp. In fact, a caught Peruvian anchovy’s main fate is to be fed to farmed fish, pigs, and chickens. 

And while the share of the wild catch fed to farmed fish has declined since the mid-1990s, scientists recently have called for a reduction in fishing pressure on forage fish by as much as half, well below MSY. They note that if poor environmental conditions lead to poor spawning success in a given year, a much lower catch would provide a buffer against collapse and ripples up the food chain. Recent developments in the Peruvian anchovy fishery help illustrate the vulnerability of forage fish: Warm Pacific Ocean waters associated with a mild El Niño were implicated in a 40 percent drop in the fish’s population between 2011 and 2012. In response, Peru, which hauls in over 80 percent of the total harvest, cut its allowed catch for the upcoming season by two thirds to its lowest level in 25 years. The country's top fisheries regulator admitted, “Technically, we should have said the quota is zero.” 

There is hope for rebuilding the world’s fisheries. In several well-studied regional systems, multiple fisheries have bounced back from collapse after adopting a combination of management measures. These include restricting gear types, lowering the total allowable catch, dividing shares of the catch among fishers, and designating marine protected areas (MPAs). Around coral reefs in Kenya, for example, communities removed beach seine nets and co-managed a network of “no-take” zones. The result was an increase in total fish biomass, size per fish, and fishers’ incomes. 

Worldwide, 8.1 million square kilometers of MPAs have been designated—an area larger than Australia but covering only about 2 percent of the oceans. Well-designed and managed MPAs offering varying levels of protection provide multiple ecological and social benefits, but marine reserves where fishing is excluded entirely are most effective. A 2010 study of no-take reserves in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef showed up to a doubling of fish abundance and size within them, as well as increased fish populations outside reserve boundaries. In June 2012, Australia announced that it would increase its number of reserves of all kinds from 27 to 60, protecting one third of its waters. 

At an 1883 international fisheries exhibition, Thomas Huxley, president of the British Royal Society, said, “Probably all the great sea fisheries are inexhaustible; that is to say that nothing we do seriously affects the number of the fish.” This view prevailed well into the twentieth century. Faced now for several decades with evidence to the contrary, the world has made some progress. But securing a future for world fisheries, especially in a time of warming and acidifying seas, means moving much more quickly to put scientific advice into practice. 

# # #

Data and additional resources at www.earth-policy.org. 

Feel free to pass this information along to friends, family members, and colleagues!

Media Contact: Reah Janise Kauffman (202) 496-9290 ext. 12 | rjk@earthpolicy.org

Research Contact: J. Matthew Roney (202) 496-9290 ext. 17 | jmroney@earthpolicy.org

Natural World: Farm for the Future

Jim Rogers: Become a farmer!

Jim Rogers interviews

Taking down Monsanto - The California Ballot initiative

Food Inc.

Know where your food is coming from and vote for change through your food choices and with your wallet!

When the Nile runs dry

By Lester R. Brown

Earth Policy Institute

A new scramble for Africa is under way. As global food prices rise and exporters reduce shipments of commodities, countries that rely on imported grain are panicking. Affluent countries like Saudi Arabia, South Korea, China and India have descended on fertile plains across the African continent, acquiring huge tracts of land to produce wheat, rice and corn for consumption back home. 

Some of these land acquisitions are enormous. South Korea, which imports 70 percent of its grain, has acquired 1.7 million acres in Sudan to grow wheat—an area twice the size of Rhode Island. In Ethiopia, a Saudi firm has leased 25,000 acres to grow rice, with the option of expanding this to 750,000 acres. And India has leased several hundred thousand acres there to grow corn, rice and other crops. 

These land grabs shrink the food supply in famine-prone African nations and anger local farmers, who see their governments selling their ancestral lands to foreigners. They also pose a grave threat to Africa's newest democracy: Egypt. 

Egypt is a nation of bread eaters. Its citizens consume 18 million tons of wheat annually, more than half of which comes from abroad. (See data at www.earth-policy.org.) Egypt is now the world's leading wheat importer, and subsidized bread—for which the government doles out approximately $2 billion per year—is seen as an entitlement by the 60 percent or so of Egyptian families who depend on it. 

As Egypt tries to fashion a functioning democracy after President Hosni Mubarak's departure, land grabs to the south are threatening its ability to put bread on the table because all of Egypt's grain is either imported or produced with water from the Nile River, which flows north through Ethiopia and Sudan before reaching Egypt. (Since rainfall in Egypt is negligible to nonexistent, its agriculture is totally dependent on the Nile.) 

Unfortunately for Egypt, two of the favorite targets for land acquisitions are Ethiopia and Sudan, which together occupy three-fourths of the Nile River Basin. Today's demands for water are such that there is little left of the river when it eventually empties into the Mediterranean. 

The Nile Waters Agreement, which Egypt and Sudan signed in 1959, gave Egypt 75 percent of the river's flow, 25 percent to Sudan and none to Ethiopia. This situation is changing abruptly as wealthy foreign governments and international agribusiness firms snatch up large swaths of arable land in the upper Basin. While these deals are typically described as land acquisitions, they are also, in effect, water acquisitions. 

Now, when competing for Nile water, Cairo must deal with several governments and commercial interests that were not party to the 1959 agreement. Moreover, Ethiopia—never enamored of the agreement—has announced plans to build a huge hydroelectric dam on its branch of the Nile that would reduce the water flow to Egypt even more. 

Because Egypt's wheat yields are already among the world's highest, it has little potential to raise its land productivity further. With its population of 81 million projected to reach 101 million by 2025, finding enough food and water is a daunting challenge. 

Egypt's plight could become part of a larger, more troubling scenario. Its upstream Nile neighbors—Sudan, with 44 million people, and Ethiopia, with 83 million—are growing even faster, increasing the need for water to produce food. Projections by the United Nations show the combined population of these three countries increasing to 272 million by 2025—and 360 million by 2050—from 208 million now. 

Growing water demand, driven by population growth and foreign land (and water) acquisitions, are straining the Nile's natural limits. Avoiding dangerous conflicts over water will require three Basin-wide initiatives. The first is for governments to address the population threat head-on by ensuring that all women have access to family planning services and by providing education for girls throughout the region. The second is to adopt more water-efficient irrigation technologies and shift to less water-intensive crops. 

Finally, for the sake of peace and future development cooperation, the nations of the Nile River Basin should come together to ban land grabs by foreign governments and agribusiness firms. Since there is no precedent for this, international help in negotiating such a ban, similar to the World Bank's role in facilitating the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty between India and Pakistan, would likely be necessary to make it a reality.

None of these initiatives will be easy to implement, but all are essential. Without them, rising bread prices could undermine Egypt's revolution of hope and competition for the Nile's water could turn deadly. 

# # # 

Lester R. Brown is President of the Earth Policy Institute and author of World on the Edge. 

Data and additional resources at www.earth-policy.org

*NOTE: A version of this piece appeared in the New York Times' Op-Ed section on June 2, 2011.

Feel free to pass this information along to friends, family members, and colleagues!

Vandana Shiva: The future of food and seed

Scientist, feminist, ecologist and author, Vandana Shiva, presenting the keynote address at the 2009 Organicology Conference in Portland, Oregon, on February 28, 2009.

Can the United States feed China?

By Lester R. Brown

Earth Policy Institute

In 1994, I wrote an article in World Watch magazine entitled “Who Will Feed China?” that was later expanded into a book of the same title. When the article was published in late August, the press conference generated only moderate coverage. But when it was reprinted that weekend on the front of the Washington Post’s Outlook section with the title “How China Could Starve the World,” it unleashed a political firestorm in Beijing. 

The response began with a press conference at the Ministry of Agriculture on Monday morning, where Deputy Minister Wan Baorui denounced the study. Advancing technology, he said, would enable the Chinese people to feed themselves. This was followed by a government-orchestrated stream of articles that challenged my findings. 

The strong reaction surprised me. In retrospect, although I had followed closely the Great Famine of 1959–61, during which some 30 million people starved to death, I had not fully appreciated the psychological scars it left. The leaders in Beijing are survivors of that famine. As a result of that traumatic experience, no leader could acknowledge that China might one day have to import much of its food. China, they said, had always fed itself, and it always would. 

As party leaders assessed the situation, they decided to launch an all-out effort to maintain grain self-sufficiency. The government quickly adopted several key production-boosting measures, including a 40 percent rise in the grain support price paid to farmers, an increase in agricultural credit, and heavy investment in developing higher-yielding strains of wheat, rice, and corn, their leading crops. 

They offset cropland losses in the fast-industrializing coastal provinces by plowing grasslands in the northwestern provinces, a measure that contributed to the emergence of the country’s massive dust bowl. In addition to overplowing, they expanded irrigation by overpumping aquifers. 

Lastly, the Party made a conscious decision to abandon self-sufficiency in soybeans and concentrate their agricultural resources on remaining self-sufficient in grain. The effect of neglecting the soybean in the country where it originated was dramatic. In 1995 China produced and consumed nearly 14 million tons of soybeans. In 2010 it was still producing only 14 million tons—but it consumed nearly 70 million tons, most of it to supplement grain in livestock and poultry rations. China now imports four-fifths of its soybeans. (See data.)

China’s decision to import vast quantities of soybeans led to a restructuring of agriculture in the western hemisphere, the only region that could respond to such a massive demand. The United States now has more land in soybeans than in wheat. Brazil has more land in soybeans than in all grains combined. Argentina, with twice as much land in soybeans as in grain, is fast becoming a soybean monoculture. For the hemisphere as a whole, there is now more land in soybeans than in either wheat or corn.

The United States, Brazil, and Argentina—the big three soybean producers—now account for more than 80 percent of the world harvest and nearly 90 percent of soybean exports. Nearly 60 percent of world soybean exports go to China.

Despite China’s herculean efforts to expand grain output, several trends are now converging that make it harder to do so. Some, like soil erosion, are longstanding. The pumping capacity to deplete aquifers has emerged only in recent decades. The extraordinary growth in China’s automobile fleet and the associated paving of land have come only in the last several years.

Overplowing and overgrazing are creating a huge dust bowl in northern and western China. The numerous dust storms originating in the region each year in late winter and early spring are now regularly recorded on satellite images. For instance, on March 20, 2010, a suffocating dust storm enveloped Beijing, prompting the city’s weather bureau to warn that air quality was hazardous, urging people to stay inside or to cover their faces when outdoors. Visibility was low, forcing motorists to drive with lights on in daytime.

Beijing was not the only area affected. This particular dust storm engulfed scores of cities in five provinces, directly affecting over 250 million people. And it was not an isolated incident. In early spring, residents of eastern China hunker down as the dust storm season begins. Along with the difficulty in breathing and the dust that stings the eyes, people face a constant struggle to keep dust out of homes and to clear doorways and sidewalks of dust and sand. But the farmers and herders in the vast northwest, whose livelihoods are blowing away, are paying a far higher price.

Wang Tao, one of the world’s leading desert scholars, reports that from 1950 to 1975 an average of 600 square miles of land in China’s north and west turned to desert each year. By the turn of the century, nearly 1,400 square miles of land was going to desert annually. The trend is clear.

China is now at war. It is not invading armies that are claiming its territory, but expanding deserts. Old deserts are advancing and new ones are forming like guerrilla forces striking unexpectedly, forcing Beijing to fight on several fronts. And in this war with the deserts, China is losing.

A U.S. Embassy report entitled “Desert Mergers and Acquisitions” describes satellite images showing two deserts in north-central China expanding and merging to form a single, larger desert overlapping Inner Mongolia and Gansu Provinces. To the west in Xinjiang Province, two even larger deserts—the Taklimakan and Kumtag—are also heading for a merger. Highways running through the shrinking region between them are regularly inundated by sand dunes. 

An estimated 24,000 villages in northwestern China have been totally or partially abandoned since 1950 as sand dunes encroach on cropland, forcing farmers to leave. Unlike the U.S. Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when many farmers in the Great Plains migrated to California, China’s “Okies” do not have a West Coast to migrate to. They are moving to already heavily populated eastern cities. 

Overpumping, like overplowing, is also taking a toll. As the demand for food in China has soared, millions of Chinese farmers have drilled irrigation wells to expand their harvests. As a result, water tables are falling and wells are starting to go dry under the North China Plain, which produces half of China’s wheat and a third of its corn. The overpumping of aquifers for irrigation temporarily inflates food production, creating a food production bubble that eventually bursts when the aquifer is depleted. Earth Policy Institute estimates that some 130 million Chinese are being fed with grain produced by overpumping—by definition, a short term phenomenon. 

In a 2010 interview with Washington Post reporter Steve Mufson, Chinese groundwater expert He Qingcheng noted that underground water now meets three fourths of Beijing’s water needs. The city, he said, is drilling 1,000 feet down to reach water—five times deeper than 20 years ago. He notes that as the deep aquifer under the North China Plain is depleted, the region is losing its last water reserve—its only safety cushion. His concerns are mirrored in the unusually strong language of a World Bank report on China’s water situation that foresees “catastrophic consequences for future generations” unless water use and supply can quickly be brought back into balance. 

At the same time, China is losing cropland to residential and industrial construction, and to paving land for cars as their numbers multiply at a staggering rate. In 2009, vehicle sales totaled 14 million, surpassing those in the United States for the first time. In 2010, sales jumped to 18 million, and in 2011 they are projected to reach 20 million, the highest ever for any country. Adding 20 million cars to the fleet means paving one million acres for roads, highways, and parking lots. Cars are now competing with farmers for cropland in China. 

Rural China is also facing a tightening labor supply. As industrial wages rise, it becomes more difficult to find young people to work at low-return jobs in rural areas. Marginal cropland and smaller plots, no longer economical, are abandoned. As the rural labor supply shrinks, so does the potential for labor-intensive double-cropping (such as planting winter wheat and then corn as a summer crop in the north or producing two rice crops per year in the south), a practice that has dramatically expanded China’s grain production. 

As all these trends converge, China’s food supply is tightening. In November 2010, the food price index was up a politically dangerous 12 percent over a year earlier. Now after 15 years of near self-sufficiency in grain, it seems likely that China soon will turn to the world market for massive grain imports, as it already has done for 80 percent of its soybeans.

How much grain will China import? How will it compare with their soybean imports? No one knows for sure, but if China were to import only 20 percent of its grain, it would need 80 million tons, an amount only slightly less than the 90 million tons of grain the United States exports to all countries each year. This would put heavy additional pressure on scarce exportable supplies of wheat and corn.

For China, the handwriting is on the wall. It will almost certainly have to turn to the outside world for grain to avoid politically destabilizing food price rises. To import massive quantities of grain, China will necessarily draw heavily on the United States, far and away the world’s largest grain exporter. To be dependent on imported grain, much of it from the United States, will be China’s worst nightmare come true. 

For U.S. consumers, China’s worst nightmare could become ours. If China enters the U.S. grain market big time, as now seems inevitable, American consumers will find themselves competing with 1.4 billion Chinese consumers with fast-rising incomes for the U.S. grain harvest, driving up food prices. 

This would raise prices not only of the products made directly from grain, such as bread, pasta, and breakfast cereals, but also of meat, milk, and eggs, which require much larger quantities of grain to produce. If China were to import even one fifth of its grain, there would likely be pressure from U.S. consumers to restrict or to ban exports to China, as the United States did in the 1970s, when it banned soybean exports to Japan. 

But in dealing with China, the United States now faces a very different situation. When the U.S. Treasury Department auctions off securities every month to finance the U.S. fiscal deficit, China has been a major buyer. It holds over $900 billion worth of U.S. Treasury securities. China is our banker. In another time, another age, the United States could restrict access to U.S. grain as it did in the 1970s, but with China today this may not be possible. 

For Americans, who live in a country that has been the world’s breadbasket for more than half a century, a country that has never known food shortages or runaway food prices, the world is about to change. Like it or not, we are going to be sharing our grain harvest with the Chinese, no matter how much it raises our food prices.

How to feed the world by 2050: biotech isn't the answer

By the Atlantic

Samuel Fromartz

We don't need to grow more food. Instead, we need to know the world's future population—and what these people will be eating.

With food prices hitting record highs, people are rioting and political regimes are crumbling. We can only imagine what it will be like when the global population rises to 9 billion in 2050 from just under 7 billion now. More riots, more deforestation, more hunger, more revolutions? How are these people going to be fed? The unequivocal answer we so often hear: biotechnology.

Let's ignore for the moment the cause of rising food prices, which have been attributed to everything from bad weather and poor harvests to higher oil prices that push up the cost of fertilizers, the rise of biofuels, even commodity index funds (which are bidding up futures, though I'm skeptical they are leading the parade). The thing I get hung up on is the "9 billion." It makes a great sound bite but what's behind the figure?

So far the vast resources of commercial biotechnology have gone to commodity crops such as corn and soybeans (and soon alfalfa). The majority ends up as animal feed, and thus meat, which is the least efficient way to produce calories. Meat also happens to be available to the richest people, not the poorest. So, we haven't really used genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to "feed the world." Instead we've used them bring down the cost of industrial meat production and incentivize a transition to a meat-centric diet. The loss of calories that result from feeding grains to animals instead of humans represents the annual calorie needs of more than 3.5 billion people, according to the UN Environmental Program. In short, GMOs arguably are making matters worse by fueling the production of more animal feed and food-competing biofuels. 

Be that as it may, we're still stuck with the 9 billion problem. Population is like compounding interest, with small changes producing big results down the road. So the growth rate is hugely important and it doesn't always do what's expected. National Geographic had an interesting take on this, showing that the argument popular in the 1960s about a "population bomb" largely turned out to be a fiction. By the early 1970s, fertility rates around the world had begun dropping faster than anyone had anticipated. Since then, the population growth rate has fallen by more than 40 percent:

In industrialized countries it took generations for fertility to fall to the replacement level or below. As that same transition takes place in the rest of the world, what has astonished demographers is how much faster it is happening there. ...

"The problem has become a bit passé," Hervé Le Bras (a French demographer) says. Demographers are generally confident that by the second half of this century we will be ending one unique era in history--the population explosion--and entering another, in which population will level out or even fall.

This is why numbers are important. On that score, Andrew Revkin had an interesting exchange on the Dot Earth blog at the Times that showed a range of opinion on what it would take to "feed the world." Revkin's post noted that Douglas Southgate, an agricultural economist at Ohio State University, "argues that a low growth scenario for population, leading to just under 8 billion people by 2050, could see a 26-percent drop in food prices even with substantial rise in consumption." This is considered the low-range for 2050, but considering how off the mark Malthusians were in the past, it shouldn't be entirely discounted.

But let's say we do get to 9 billion. The impact on resources, it turns out, depends a lot on what we eat. Vaclav Smil, a University of Manitoba analyst, pointed out to Revkin "a menu of possible food lifestyles," which for a world of 9 billion meant either bountiful supplies or scarcity.  Here's the spectrum:

1) eating enough to survive with reduced lifespans (Ethiopia),

2) eating enough to have some sensible though limited choices and to live near-full lifespans when considering other (hygienic, health care) circumstances (as in the better parts of India today),

3) having more than enough of overall food energy but still a limited choice of plant foods and only a healthy minimum of animal foods and live close to or just past 70 (China of the late 1980s and 1990s),

4) not wanting more carbohydrates and shifting more crop production and imports to [livestock] feed, not food, to eat more animals products, having overall some 3,000 kcal/capita a day and living full spans (China now),

5) having gross surpluses of everything, total supply at 3,500-3,700 kcal/day, eating too much animal protein, wasting 35-40% of all food, living record life spans, getting sick (U.S. and E.U. today).

Obviously, we want to avoid option one and two, as much as possible. Option three and four would mean 1 billion people who lack enough food today would be better off. But Smil says, "The world eating between levels 3-4 would not know what to do with today's food." In other words, we have enough already.  But, he also adds, "the world at 5 is impossible." Nor is it desirable, considering the obesity crisis and health risks.

So really, the question isn't how will we feed 9 billion by 2050? The question is how many people will we really have and what will they be eating? 

Poverty of course plays a big role in both these issues because, as Juergen Voegele, director, agriculture and rural development, the World Bank, pointed out to Revkin: "We already have close to one billion people who go hungry today, not because there is not enough food in the world but because they cannot afford to buy it." 

Raising incomes, or course, is a difficult nut -- one that doesn't succumb to a solution hatched in a lab. But more income means better-educated families, and even declining population growth. The flip side, though, is that rising incomes are also associated with higher meat consumption, which can get us closer to option five on Smil's lifestyle if we are not careful. So the best case: to raise incomes and to incentivize less resource-intensive food consumption. 

But we don't need to become vegans to save the world (which would doom us even if we did because so few would go along). In many developing countries, such an approach would amount to culinary imperialism, given the importance of meat for both income generation, the result of having a cow or goat or two, and as a source of much-needed calories for children from milk and scant meat. Never mind the use of manure to grow crops. We're not talking about factory farms here, but animals that play a central role in cultures and livelihoods.

As the Nat Geo article concluded:

... it will be a hard thing for the planet if ... people are eating meat and driving gasoline-powered cars at the same rate as Americans now do. It's too late to keep the new middle class of 2030 from being born; it's not too late to change how they and the rest of us will produce and consume food and energy.

This post also appears on Chewswise.com.

Food sovereignty in your local community

By David E. Gumpert

The Complete Patient

Maybe the citizens of tiny Sedgwick on the Maine coast were listening to the calls of Dave Milano, Ken Conrad, and others for more trust and community, and less rigid one-size-fits-all food regulation.

On Saturday morning, Sedgwick became likely the first locale in the country to pass a "Food Sovereignty" law. It's the proposed ordinance I first described last fall, when I introduced the "Five Musketeers", a group of farmers and consumers intent on pushing back against overly aggressive state food regulators. The regulators were interfering with farmers who, for example, took chickens to a neighbor for slaughtering, or who sold raw milk directly to consumers.

The proposed ordinance was one of 78 being considered at the Sedgwick town meeting, that New England institution that has stood the test of time, allowing all of a town's citizens to vote yea or nay on proposals to spend their tax money and, in this case, enact potentially far-reaching laws with national implications. They've been holding these meetings in the Sedgwick town hall (pictured above) since 1794. At Friday's meeting, about 120 citizens raised their hands in unanimous approval of the ordinance.

Citing America's Declaration of Independence and the Maine Constitution, the ordinance proposed that "Sedgwick citizens possess the right to produce, process, sell, purchase, and consume local foods of their choosing." These would include raw milk and other dairy products and locally slaughtered meats, among other items.

This isn't just a declaration of preference. The proposed warrant added, "It shall be unlawful for any law or regulation adopted by the state or federal government to interfere with the rights recognized by this Ordinance." In other words, no state licensing requirements prohibiting certain farms from selling dairy products or producing their own chickens for sale to other citizens in the town.

What about potential legal liability and state or federal inspections? It's all up to the seller and buyer to negotiate. "Patrons purchasing food for home consumption may enter into private agreements with those producers or processors of local foods to waive any liability for the consumption of that food. Producers or processors of local foods shall be exempt from licensure and inspection requirements for that food as long as those agreements are in effect." Imagine that--buyer and seller can agree to cut out the lawyers. That's almost un-American, isn't it?

This from a press release put out after the vote by supporters:

"Local farmer Bob St.Peter noted the importance of this ordinance for beginning farmers and cottage producers. 'This ordinance creates favorable conditions for beginning farmers and cottage-scale food processors to try out new products, and to make the most of each season's bounty,' said St.Peter. 'My family is already working on some ideas we can do from home to help pay the bills and get our farm going.'

"Mia Strong, Sedgwick resident and local farm patron, was overwhelmed by the support of her town. 'Tears of joy welled in my eyes as my town voted to adopt this ordinance,' said Strong. 'I am so proud of my community. They made a stand for local food and our fundamental rights as citizens to choose that food.'"

The ordinance comes up for a vote in three other Maine towns upcoming--Penobscott, Brooksville, and Blue Hill. 

Grow your own food

Monsanto's Roundup triggers over 40 plant diseases and endangers human and animal health

By The Institute For Responsible Technology

The following article reveals the devastating and unprecedented impact that Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide is having on the health of our soil, plants, animals, and human population. On top of this perfect storm, the USDA now wants to approve Roundup Ready alfalfa, which will exacerbate this calamity. Please tell USDA Secretary Vilsack not to approve Monsanto’s alfalfa today. [Note: typos corrected from Jan 16th, see details]

While visiting a seed corn dealer’s demonstration plots in Iowa last fall, Dr. Don Huber walked past a soybean field and noticed a distinct line separating severely diseased yellowing soybeans on the right from healthy green plants on the left (see photo). The yellow section was suffering from Sudden Death Syndrome (SDS), a serious plant disease that ravaged the Midwest in 2009 and ’10, driving down yields and profits. Something had caused that area of soybeans to be highly susceptible and Don had a good idea what it was.

Don Huber spent 35 years as a plant pathologist at Purdue University and knows a lot about what causes green plants to turn yellow and die prematurely. He asked the seed dealer why the SDS was so severe in the one area of the field and not the other. “Did you plant something there last year that wasn’t planted in the rest of the field?” he asked. Sure enough, precisely where the severe SDS was, the dealer had grown alfalfa, which he later killed off at the end of the season by spraying a glyphosate-based herbicide (such as Roundup). The healthy part of the field, on the other hand, had been planted to sweet corn and hadn’t received glyphosate.

This was yet another confirmation that Roundup was triggering SDS. In many fields, the evidence is even more obvious. The disease was most severe at the ends of rows where the herbicide applicator looped back to make another pass (see photo). That’s where extra Roundup was applied.

Don’s a scientist; it takes more than a few photos for him to draw conclusions. But Don’s got more—lots more. For over 20 years, Don studied Roundup’s active ingredient glyphosate. He’s one of the world’s experts. And he can rattle off study after study that eliminate any doubt that glyphosate is contributing not only to the huge increase in SDS, but to the outbreak of numerous other diseases. (See selected reading list.)

Roundup: The perfect storm for plant disease

More than 30% of all herbicides sprayed anywhere contain glyphosate—the world’s bestselling weed killer. It was patented by Monsanto for use in their Roundup brand, which became more popular when they introduced “Roundup Ready” crops starting in 1996. These genetically modified (GM) plants, which now include soy, corn, cotton, canola, and sugar beets, have inserted genetic material from viruses and bacteria that allows the crops to withstand applications of normally deadly Roundup.

(Monsanto incentivizes farmers who buy Roundup Ready seeds to also use the company’s Roundup brand of glyphosate. For example, they only provide warranties on the approved herbicide brands and offer discounts through their “Roundup Rewards” program. This has extended the company’s grip on the glyphosate market, even after its patent expired in 2000.)*

The herbicide doesn’t destroy plants directly. It rather cooks up a unique perfect storm of conditions that revs up disease-causing organisms in the soil, and at the same time wipes out plant defenses against those diseases. The mechanisms are well-documented but rarely cited.

1. The glyphosate molecule grabs vital nutrients and doesn’t let them go. This process is called chelation and was actually the original property for which glyphosate was patented in 1964. It was only 10 years later that it was patented as an herbicide. When applied to crops, it deprives them of vital minerals necessary for healthy plant function—especially for resisting serious soilborne diseases. The importance of minerals for protecting against disease is well established. In fact, mineral availability was the single most important measurement used by several famous plant breeders to identify disease-resistant varieties.
2. Glyphosate annihilates beneficial soil organisms, such as Pseudomonas and Bacillus bacteria that live around the roots. Since they facilitate the uptake of plant nutrients and suppress disease-causing organisms, their untimely deaths means the plant gets even weaker and the pathogens even stronger.
3. The herbicide can interfere with photosynthesis, reduce water use efficiency, lower lignin, damage and shorten root systems, cause plants to release important sugars, and change soil pH—all of which can negatively affect crop health.
4. Glyphosate itself is slightly toxic to plants. It also breaks down slowly in soil to form another chemical called AMPA (aminomethylphosphonic acid) which is also toxic. But even the combined toxic effects of glyphosate and AMPA are not sufficient on their own to kill plants. It has been demonstrated numerous times since 1984 that when glyphosate is applied in sterile soil, the plant may be slightly stunted, but it isn’t killed (see photo).
5. The actual plant assassins, according to Purdue weed scientists and others, are severe disease-causing organisms present in almost all soils. Glyphosate dramatically promotes these, which in turn overrun the weakened crops with deadly infections.

“This is the herbicidal mode of action of glyphosate,” says Don. “It increases susceptibility to disease, suppresses natural disease controls such as beneficial organisms, and promotes virulence of soilborne pathogens at the same time.” In fact, he points out that “If you apply certain fungicides to weeds, it destroys the herbicidal activity of glyphosate!”

By weakening plants and promoting disease, glyphosate opens the door for lots of problems in the field. According to Don, “There are more than 40 diseases of crop plants that are reported to increase with the use of glyphosate, and that number keeps growing as people recognize the association between glyphosate and disease.”

For more:

Roundup promotes human and animal toxins

As Roundup use rises, plant disease skyrockets

Corn dies young

A question of bugs

Roundup persists in the environment

Nutrient loss in humans and animals

Livestock disease and mineral deficiency

Alfalfa madness, brought to you by Monsanto and the USDA

please click here.