Ed. Note: The Mulch is participating in Blog Action Day 2010, an initiative led by Media Consortium member Change.org that asks bloggers around the world to publish posts on the same issue on the same day. This year's topic is water.
Last week, rivers in Hungary ran red with toxic sludge, creating the perhaps most powerful image of water contamination possible. Imagine, for a second, if every chemical leaching into waterways in this country had such a brilliant hue. What color would our water be?
Less than crystal clear, certainly. We still don't know, for instance, what chemicals the government and BP poured into the Gulf Coast after the Deepwater Horizon spill, as Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard reports. Beyond one time dumps, American industries and consumers are steadily polluting our water system. Energy companies contaminate waterways. So do massive, industrial farms. Sewer systems overflow, and landfills leach waste. Even household chemicals - pesticides applied to suburban lawns, for instance - contribute to the problem.
Flouting the Clean Water Act
After the Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969, politicians finally took note of the country's polluted and within a few years had passed the Clean Water Act. In theory, the Clean Water Act should limit contamination, but as The New York Times reported last year, violations have been increasing. Just this month, in Kentucky, environmental advocates brought a case against two coal companies that allegedly violated the Clean Water Act more than 20,000 times, as Public News Service's Renee Shaw reports.
The violations "include doctoring water pollution reports, failing to conduct tests, and exceeding permit pollution limits," Shaw reports.
On Saturday, Jill Richardson had a recommended diary at DKos concerning a landmark Ohio court ruling about rBGH:
BIG BIG BIG Victory This Week (After 20 Years of Waiting)
by Jill Richardson
Sat Oct 02, 2010 at 02:29:41 PM PDT
After 20 years of B.S. from the FDA, a court in Ohio this week FINALLY recognized the same science that experts have been touting all along. The court case was about rbGH - Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone - an artificial hormone first made and sold by Monsanto, and now by Elanco, a division of Eli Lilly.
From the beginning, the FDA has said there is "no compositional difference" between milk from cows shot up with rbGH and milk from untreated cows. (For simplicity's sake, I am going to refer to these as rbGH milk and rbGH-free milk.)
Scientists said otherwise. And Monsanto, for its part, gave the FDA only SOME of the data, in such a way that made rbGH look better... and tried to intimidate scientists and academic journals to keep them quiet.
But the Ohio court has now recognized the 20 year old science proving:
1.rbGH milk has more pus in it, making it sour quicker.
2.rbGH milk is less nutritious than rbGH-free milk.
3.rbGH milk has more IGF-1 (a hormone linked to some cancers) in it.
Jill goes on to provide a very concise summary of the back-story. Among other things, she notes:
There were a few major decisions at the federal level that really crippled the anti-rbGH side in the fight. One was the FDA decision that there was "no compositional difference" in rbGH milk compared to rbGH-free milk. And then there was the fact that labeling laws got left to the states to decide. That meant that if ONE state banned "rbGH-free" labels, it would affect many others, because any company that sold to more than one state (or sold products nationally) wouldn't want to make different types of packaging to comply with different state laws.
And that's how it comes about that an Ohio appeals court decision could be so important.
Although it's been a long time for me, I was once quite familiar with this struggle. What caught my eye about it now was just how perfectly it illustrates the utter hypocrisy of standard-issue corporate/conservative propaganda.
You see, usually the corporate/conservative line is that government should butt out, that consumers know best ("consumer sovereignty"), and they don't need big brother (the "bacon police" or whatever) telling them what they can or cannot do.
But almost from the very beginning, the argument here has been the exact opposite. With scientific manipulation and decades of corrupting the acientific advisory process, it was relatively easy to get rBGH approved by the government--and supported by the Federal courts. But there was just one catch: You see, consumers just hate rBGH milk, so the last thing that Monsanto & its corporate buddies wanted was informed consumers. So they wanted to use government power to prevent milk producers who rejected rBGH from informing potential customers that their milk was rBGH-free.
In short, the corporate/conservative position was intensely pro-regulation--a regulation stiffling free speech by rBGH-free milk producers.
This example should serve to make everything perfectly clear: The only reason that corporations and conservatives oppose government regulations is because they generally tend to restrict corporate power and protect average citizens. But when regulations are needed to protect corporate power, and leave the average citizen defenseless, then those regulations will be defended with a ferocity that would make a mother lion proud.
Bio: Raj Patel has degrees from the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics and Cornell University, has worked for the World Bank and WTO, and protested against them around the world. He has testified about the causes of the global food crisis to the US House Financial Services Committee and is an Advisor to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. In addition to numerous scholarly publications, he regularly writes for The Guardian, and has contributed to the LA Times, NYTimes.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Mail on Sunday, and The Observer. He is the author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System and most recently, The Value of Nothing.
Can you please explain the concept of food sovereignty, and what policies and programs will help encourage it?
Food sovereignty is about communities', states' and unions' rights to shape their own food and agricultural policy. Now that may sound like a whole lot of nothing, because you're actually not making a policy demand, you're just saying that people need to be able to make their own decisions. But, actually, that's a huge thing. Because in general, particularly for smaller farmers in developing countries, and particularly for women, decisions about food and agricultural policy have never been made by them. They've always been imposed.
That's why La Via Campesina, the organization that really invented the term, says that one of the visions behind food sovereignty is that food sovereignty is about an end to all forms of violence against women. That may sound something not at all to do with food, but of course, if we're serious about people being able to make choices about how their food comes to them and what the food system looks like, then the physical and the structural violence to which women are exposed in the home, in the economy and in society, all need to be tackled. Otherwise we will continue with a situation in which 60 percent of the people going hungry today are women or girls. So food sovereignty, to boil it down, is really about power - who has it in the food system, and how to redistribute it so that those who have concentrated it, have it taken away from them.
In terms of specific policies, what Via Campesina are calling for is for agriculture to be removed from the World Trade Organization, which is a way again in which local countries' sovereignty is already been given away. They also call for large corporations to be booted out of agriculture. There's strong opposition to Monsanto for example, and the way that they've been behaving in many developing countries, and many Via Campesina members are campaigning against Monsanto in their home countries.
Will another Green Revolution or more food subsidies help reduce hunger?
To answer the question, let's look at Malawi. It's the poster child for what a new green revolution in Africa might look like, with widespread subsidies of inorganic fertilizer for farmers. When I went there, late last year, what you found was long lines at the gasoline pump, because all Malawi's foreign exchange had been spent on importing this fossil fuel-based fertilizer. The country had bankrupted itself in order that it might be a showcase for the new green revolution in Africa. And of course, there are alternatives right there in Malawi, driven by farmers - invariably by women who are innovating around sustainable systems like poly-culture - growing lots of crops simultaneously together, building soil fertility for the long run.
What this shows is that there are some basic incompatibilities between varieties of ways of addressing agrarian problems in Africa. Some organizations, Worldwatch included, adopt a 'big tent' approach, in which solutions that keep the status quo but improve it marginally sit alongside far more radical approaches. Ultimately, you can't promote genetically modified monoculture or techniques that make large-scale commercial farming less destructive at the same time as wanting something like food sovereignty, which calls for much more of a deeper structural rethink of the way the food system operates. Food sovereignty is about democracy in our food system so that everyone gets to eat - industrial agriculture involves a food system run by technocrats for profit. At the end of the day, you can have one or the other -not both.
How does global agricultural policy affect small-scale farmers across the world?
In general the policies foisted on developing countries through organizations like the World Bank is that large scale agriculture is the way to go: that small farmers are a relic of the past. They are of purely cultural significance but economically, socially, and agriculturally, they stand in the way of development. So the policies that are essentially designed to increase farm size and kick off rural populations to the cities are ones that you see in pretty much every country around the world. And yet of course, it is the poor in rural communities that are being forced to bear the brunt of these policies and these are the communities that are least able to afford it. And again - you can never say it too often - it is on women's shoulders that the bulk of the pain of moving from agrarian society to a so-called modern industrial society one, falls.
Factory food sickens humans, livestock and the environment
What we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the last 10,000. So asserts Robert Kenner's new film, FOOD, Inc., which opens nationwide June 19th. The vast bulk of food production is now controlled by just a few mega-corporations with one value: profit. Relying on genetic engineering, pesticides and antibiotics, factory food is cheap, requiring little land. But the external costs to our health, the environment and the natural food industry are enormous.
Director: Robert Kenner
Producers: Robert Kenner and Elise Pearlstein
Co-Producer: Eric Schlosser
Released by Magnolia Pictures, with Participant Media and River Road Entertainment
93 minutes
FOOD, Inc. is the single most important film of the decade. Transcending hype and industry muzzling, the film exposes some of the cruel and unnatural aspects of industrial farms and food processing. It links epidemic rates of US obesity and diabetes with our intake of genetically engineered food.
NPR called it this summer's "suspense thriller."
The film condemns how workers and animals are abused. Illegal immigrants, who cannot complain about working conditions, comprise most of the workers at industrial food plants. They are vulnerable to raids and deportation. No corporate executives are arrested.
Well researched and well scored, the film debunks the pastoral fantasy spin. Industrial food is not grown, raised or processed on a farm. The animals see no sunshine, are kept immobile in cages, and are genetically or chemically modified. Those that are somewhat mobile are bioengineered to plump their bodies faster than their bones and muscles can support. They flop helplessly to the floor when trying to move.
Seed money for start-ups may be evaporating faster than California's dwindling reservoirs, but this rocky economy's proving to be fertile ground for the seed industry. Cash-strapped consumers, scared by the specter of an empty fridge, are investing in the ultimate low-tech, high-yield start-up: the kitchen garden. The National Gardening Association estimates that some 43 million Americans are gearing up to grow at least some of their own food this spring.
And no wonder. As Roger Doiron, founder of Maine-based Kitchen Gardeners International, has documented, a few dozen seed packets costing $130 can yield more than two thousand dollars worth of produce over the course of the growing season. "We have a fabulous opportunity," C.R. Lawn, the founder of another Maine mainstay, Fedco Seeds, told an audience at the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture's Farming For The Future conference last month. "The challenge is on us to come through." Lawn, an endearingly shaggy character who looks a bit like a pale Papa Smurf, rocked gently from side to side as he spoke of the challenges that his company faced following the acquisition of Fedco's largest seed supplier, Seminis, by monolithic Monsanto back in 2005.
... Last month, 45 U.S. food-processing groups, representing firms whose raw material costs have gone through the roof, demanded that the U.S. agriculture secretary release farmers from their contractual obligation to maintain a portion of their land for wildlife preservation. The U.S. baking industry's trade association, representing firms such as Kellogg Co., Sara Lee Corp. and Interstate Bakeries Corp., plans a march on Washington by the firms' employees later this month to press for a reduction in U.S. wheat exports. ...
Brilliant. Let's further degrade our declining natural resources to compensate for a crop growth pattern that degrades our natural resources. And by 'natural resources', I mean the human species' life support system.
What's plain to any reasonable observer is that conservation programs, which already tend to enroll marginal and previously degraded land, aren't the problem with declining wheat availability. In addition to the export concern (an issue because a lot of other countries are closing off exports after a bad world harvest generated a bumper crop of buyers,) this is:
... The milling industry has been resistant to using such genetically modified wheats, so wheat plants have to be improved the old-fashioned way, by laboriously selecting those with the desired qualities in test plots. That is an expensive and time-consuming process.
Even then, there is no assurance that farmers will buy the seed year after year. That is because of the nature of the wheat plant, an unusually complex organism originating in the Middle East thousands of years ago. Unlike hybrid corn, which loses its productivity after the first year, seeds from improved wheat varieties can be saved and replanted for several years without significant loss of yield.
Syngenta, a large seed company, is still working to develop improved wheat, but Rob Bruns, who heads the North American cereal seed operation, acknowledged that it's difficult to create "enough critical mass to pay for the higher tech investments."
The upshot is that most wheat research is now consigned to public colleges with limited amounts of federal and state funds. ...
Human beings have been adapting plants and animals to our needs for millenia. We're really good at it by now, when we put our minds to it. But the environment is not a blank slate onto which we add crop organisms; competition from pests, weeds and disease never stops.
Farmers used to save their own seed and do the kind of breed tinkering that now gets done mostly in corporate or university research plots. Though as you read above, that activity is mostly centralized in the hands of a few companies who may not bother with it for all grains, and often adapt varieties more to brands of chemicals than to local growing conditions.
Even the editors of The Economist, who've clearly all got certificates from the Condoleezza Rice School of How Could We Ever Have Known, were compelled to let the following truth slip onto the 34th page of their April 19th-25th, 2008, issue, in an article entitled, "The new face of hunger." Emphasis mine:
STATE BLOGS
Bio: Raj Patel has degrees from the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics and Cornell University, has worked for the World Bank and WTO, and protested against them around the world. He has testified about the causes of the global food crisis to the US House Financial Services Committee and is an Advisor to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. In addition to numerous scholarly publications, he regularly writes for The Guardian, and has contributed to the LA Times, NYTimes.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Mail on Sunday, and The Observer. He is the author of Stuffed and Starved: 
