Global food system must be transformed 'on industrial revolution scale' | Environment The existing global food system is failing half the people on Earth, the report warns. Photograph: Martin Godwin The world will not be able to feed itself without destroying the planet unless a transformation on the scale of the industrial revolution takes place, a major government report has concluded. The existing food system is failing half of the people on Earth, the report finds, with 1 billion going hungry, 1 billion lacking crucial vitamins and minerals from their diet and another billion "substantially overconsuming", leading to obesity epidemics. "The global food system is spectacularly bad at tackling hunger or at holding itself to account," said Lawrence Haddad, director of the Institute of Development Studies and an author of the Global Food and Farming Futures report. "We need to act now," said Caroline Spelman, the secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs, whose department co-commissioned the report from the government's futures thinktank Foresight.
Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food Correction Appended: Aug. 20, 2009 Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He's fed on American corn that was grown with... Subscribe Now Get TIME the way you want it The print magazine in your mailbox The Tablet Edition on your iPad® Subscriber-only content on TIME.com, including magazine stories and access to the TIME Archive.
Our energy-gulping industrial food system revealed in eight bullet points Reefer madness: Refrigerated supermarket trucks are but one link in our gas-guzzling food chain.Photo courtesy Paul Sullivan via FlickrIn his recent The New York Times op-ed, “Math Lessons for Locavores” — debated at length in our “Food Fight” feature — Stephen Budiansky shows that transportation and “modern” (i.e., highly mechanized and chemical-intesnsive) farming make up relatively small parts of industrial food’s energy footprint. Consumers in their kitchens, in Budiansky’s view, are the real energy guzzlers — so locavores should stop worrying and learn to love industrial food. Those points are addressed broadly by a recent article in Amber Waves, the publication of the USDA’s Economic Research service. On page 13 of this lucidly written report, we find that in 2002, U.S. households used nearly 4 quadrillion BTUs of energy in the kitchen, more than any other sector of the food system. For Budiansky, these facts exonerate the industrial food system in energy-use terms.
Our Failing Food System Agriculture in the United States has taken the wrong road, and it isn't working. The wealthiest nation in the world, with the most powerful technology in history at its disposal, is feeding its citizens a diet that evolution has not equipped us for. And we are growing most of this food using methods that poison and undermine our soil, water and air with unsustainable quantities of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. The results? A population—and a healthcare system—threatened by a crisis of diet-related illness; millions of acres of damaged farmland; chemical runoff spilling into our waterways and creating an oxygen-starved "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico. In short, our food system, for all its vaunted productivity, is failing us. Unhealthy Food Policy U.S. food policy is intended to help farmers grow the food we need. The solution? More on unhealthy food policy Industrial Agriculture The late 20th century saw a major transformation in U.S. agriculture. Animal production also changed.
The industrial food system depends to its peril on cheap oil. | The National Fork With a gallon of gasoline in America now averaging almost $4.00, the topic of oil dependence is timely. Cheap oil and other fossil fuels have helped create the modern American economy, and to a lesser extent, the economies of other industrialized cultures around the world. Big industry totally depends on them. Naturally, this includes the food industry. Let’s list some of the ways in which cheap fossil fuels sustains the conventional food system in America. Factory farm grain is sown and harvested using enormous tractors that run on fossil fuels. According to Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivor’s Dilemma, in the industrial food system, “it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food, ” and that’s before the food even leaves the farm! According to Polyface Farms farmer and author Joel Salatin, the current industrial food model that fossil fuels made possible is revolutionary. Joel then goes on:
The international food system and the climate crisis Today’s global food system, with all its high-tech seeds and fancy packaging, cannot fulfil its most basic function of feeding people. Despite this monumental failure, there is no talk in the corridors of power of changing direction. Large and growing movements of people clamour for change, but the world’s governments and international agencies keep pushing more of the same: more agribusiness, more industrial agriculture, more globalisation. As the planet moves into an accelerating period of climate change, driven, in large part, by this very model of agriculture, such failure to take meaningful action will rapidly worsen an already intolerable situation. This year more than one billion people will go hungry, while another half a billion people will suffer from obesity. There is another dimension to this interaction between climate change and the global food system that reinforces the urgent need for action. The forecast is for famine And then there is the market to consider. References
Foodies, Get Thee to Occupy Wall Street The Occupy Wall Street protests grew out of anger at the outsized power of banks. But as they've expanded nationwide, the uprisings have evolved into a kind of running challenge to the way power is concentrated in all aspects of our economy—concentrated into the hands of people with an interest in maintaining the status quo. No doubt, the financial sector is a stunning example. This MoJo chart shows how the 10 largest banks came to hold 54 percent of US financial assets, up from 20 percent in 1990. As big banks gobbled smaller banks and became megabanks, they managed to extract more and more wealth out of the economy . Even after the epochal meltdown and bailout, the financial sector now claims fully a third of US corporate profits . But other economic sectors are similarly concentrated, and have a comparable grip on public policy. 1. Let's start with "inputs," the stuff farmers buy before they plant their crops. Monsanto is an interesting case. Finally, let's look at the supermarkets.
In Latin America, a growing backlash against modified food (GMO) A new, peer-reviewed study published in Food and Chemical Toxicology has found that rats fed a regular diet of Monsanto’s genetically modified corn or exposed to Roundup, Monsanto’s top-selling weedkiller, were more likely to develop tumors, suffer organ damage and die sooner. Backers say GMOs helps farmers produce more, but some politicos fear the risks of tinkering with crops’ DNA. Are GMOs the answer to global hunger? (Shutterstock photo) LIMA, Peru — Are genetically modified crops “Franken-foods” or the answer to global hunger and climate change? That is the dilemma dividing Latin America, where vast quantities of GM crops are grown. Outside the U.S., no region has a greater expanse of agricultural land sown with genetically modified organisms (GMOs) than South America. Together, Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay have roughly 120 million acres of GM crops, principally soybean, but also significant amounts of corn. Genetically modified foods a danger?
Monsanto Joins World Business Council for Sustainable Development Monsanto has joined the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and is offering the WBCSD’s Business Ecosystems Training (BET) course globally for employees, according to the agribusiness company. Monsanto says the BET course will enhance employees’ understanding of the links between ecosystems and business. The UN expects the global population to reach 9 billion by 2050, which will mean farmers will need to grow 70 percent more food by that time, and demand for water from agriculture will likely rise from 70 percent in 2012 to at least 89 percent by 2050. This will also put increasing strains on land and ecosystem services. WBCSD and Monsanto say the growing population requires new agriculture systems and products that are more productive and more sustainable. However, Monsanto took 498th place in the Newsweek Green Rankings for 2012, an annual environmental ranking of the 500 largest publicly traded companies in the world.
Goldman bankers get rich betting on food prices as millions starve - Business News - Business Less than a week after the Bank of England Governor, Sir Mervyn King, slapped Goldman Sachs on the wrist for attempting to save its UK employees millions of pounds in tax by delaying bonus payments, the investment bank faces fresh accusations that it is contributing to rising food prices. Goldman made about $400m (£251m) in 2012 from investing its clients' money in a range of "soft commodities", from wheat and maize to coffee and sugar, according to an analysis for The Independent by the World Development Movement (WDM). This contributed to the 68 per cent jump in profits for 2012 Goldman announced last week, allowing it to push up the average pay and bonus package of its bankers to £250,000. The extent of Goldman's food speculation can be revealed after the UN warned that the world could face a major hunger crisis in 2013, after failed harvests in the US and Ukraine. The bank declined to comment on WDM's estimate or the impact of speculation on food prices.
John Robbins: The Dark Side of Vitaminwater Now here's something you wouldn't expect. Coca-Cola is being sued by a non-profit public interest group, on the grounds that the company's vitaminwater products make unwarranted health claims. No surprise there. But how do you think the company is defending itself? In a staggering feat of twisted logic, lawyers for Coca-Cola are defending the lawsuit by asserting that "no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking vitaminwater was a healthy beverage." Does this mean that you'd have to be an unreasonable person to think that a product named "vitaminwater," a product that has been heavily and aggressively marketed as a healthy beverage, actually had health benefits? Or does it mean that it's okay for a corporation to lie about its products, as long as they can then turn around and claim that no one actually believes their lies? In fact, the product is basically sugar-water, to which about a penny's worth of synthetic vitamins have been added. True.
Professor John Vandermeer challenges environmentalist Mark Lynas on GMOs Neoliberal environmentalist Mark Lynas recently gave a talk at the Oxford Farming Association in which he apologized for once militating against GMOs. Now, after having discovered "science" he has decided we need GMOs to feed the world . Anyone against GMOs, he claims, is anti-science because "the debate is over" and the "scientific consensus" has won... This is an all to familiar argument from the industry, and leads us to suspect that Lynas may have been recruited by EuropaBio's "Pro-GM Ambassador Programme." EuropaBio is the very rich and vocal lobby association of GM companies in Brussels, that prepared an international outreach programme in 2011 to give a new push for GM crops in Europe. Lynas' rant is bringing a response from actual scientists. Here's a guest blog by Professor John Vandermeer, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. What you subsequently learn in graduate school is the compendium of complications. John Vandermeer
Farmers To Face Fines Or Prison Sentences For Selling Food Directly To Customers (David Gumpert) This would seem to embody the USDA’s advisory, “Know your farmer, know your food,” right? Not exactly. For the USDA and its sister food regulator, the FDA, there’s a problem: many of the farmers are distributing the food via private contracts like herd shares and leasing arrangements, which fall outside the regulatory system of state and local retail licenses and inspections that govern public food sales. In response, federal and state regulators are seeking legal sanctions against farmers in Maine, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and California, among others. These sanctions include injunctions, fines, and even prison sentences. Food sold by unlicensed and uninspected farmers is potentially dangerous say the regulators, since it can carry pathogens like salmonella, campylobacter, and E.coli O157:H7, leading to mild or even serious illness. See Also: Obamacare Secrets Revealed: Why Unions, Liberals & Abortion Clinics Love It!