The Cost-Effective Way to Feed the World

By Margaret Mellon and Doug Gurian-Sherman
By 2050, the world will have to feed 9 billion people, adapt to climate change, reduce agricultural pollution, and protect fresh water supplies - all at the same time. Given that formidable challenge, what are the quickest, most cost-effective ways to develop more productive, drought-, flood- and pest-resistant crops?

Some will claim that genetically engineered (GE) crops are the solution. But when compared side-by-side, classical plant breeding bests genetic engineering. Coupled with ecologically based management methods that reduce the environmental harm of crop production, classical breeding could go a long way toward producing the food we will need by mid-century.

Producing better crops faster certainly would help the world feed itself, but genetic engineering has no advantage on that score. Not only can classical breeding programs introduce new varieties about as fast as genetic engineering, technical improvements are making classical practices even faster.

Early steps in the genetic engineering process avoid the multiple rounds of cross-breeding inherent in classical plant breeding by directly inserting engineered genes into the crop. But seed companies then use classical breeding to transfer engineered genes to the crop's numerous varieties for different markets and climates - and that takes time. And just as in classical breeding, new engineered varieties must be tested in the field for several years to ensure they perform as expected.


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Big Ag Won't Feed the World

By Tom Philpott
Back in March, USDA secretary Tom Vilsack spoke at an event called the Commodity Classic in Tampa, Fl. Sponsored by agribusiness giants Monsanto, BASF, Syngenta, John Deere, Dow AgroSciences, Dupont, Syngenta, and Archer Daniels Midland, among others, the event hails itself as the "premier national trade show and convention for corn, soy, wheat and sorghum farmers."

According to an account in the trade journal Agri-Pulse, Vilsack spoke "with sometimes evangelistic fervor." He thundered against critics ofcorn-based ethanol, reiterated the Obama administration's goal of doubling US farm exports by 2014 by ramming open foreign markets, and praised the assembled farmers and agribusiness flacks for their record of "ensuring affordable food for US families," Agri-Pulse reported. The former governor of Iowa ended his speech on an evem more flattering note: "The farmers in this room have provided the prescription that this nation must follow to get itself back totally on its feet ... You should never ever bet against the American farmer because if you do, it's a losing bet." The audience roared its approval.

The ag secretary was essentially promoting an agribusiness-as-usual vision of farm policy: maximum production of a few commodity crops, mainly to be used to fatten confined animals, create cheap sweeteners and fats, and fill gas tanks. He did so amid much rhetoric about "jobs," the Agri-Pulse account shows. But that's ludicrous. The modern food system lionized by Vilsack has been a massive net destroyer of jobs. And the fixation on doubling US ag exports can't be good news for farmers in the global south, who struggle to compete with their highly capitalized US peers. Ever get a threatening phone call from your ISP? You might as well be their employee, rather than the reverse. Ever get a DMCA takedown notice? Ever have a website taken down by your host in response to an unsubstantiated complaint? Welcome to "our free market system."

Remember the Pinkertons, uniformed private thugs the bosses used to hire to bust union organizers' heads? Now Monsanto hires them to snoop around private farms, testing farmers' crops to see if they contain any genetic material from engineered seeds under patent. The Runyons, an Indiana farm family, were invaded in 2008 by Monsanto's hired goons in response to an "anonymous tip" that their farm hosted Roundup-ready soybeans.  Sounds almost like - ahem - the Drug War, doesn't it? 

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Prince Charles: Save the World with Organic Farming

Britain's crown prince has a message for America: You don't pay enough for your food. And the way you produce it is ruining the planet.

Fresh from his oldest son's wedding, Prince Charles came to Washington to slam today's conventional agricultural system as unsustainable because of its reliance on biotechnology and chemicals.

"The current model is simply not durable in the long term," he told a food-policy conference hosted Wednesday by Georgetown University.

The prince, who has long been a virulent opponent of biotechnology, has devoted some of the royal lands to organic farming. He ran through a list of the challenges facing the globe - growing populations, rising commodity prices, increased demand for meat as incomes grow, a changing climate, and limited water supplies. He offered organic farming as the answer to those challenges because of its ability to maintain soil fertility reliance on chemical inputs. 

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What Would the World Look Like If We Relied on Industrial Agriculture to Feed Everyone?

By Ari LeVaux
The world's population will probably hit 9 billion by 2050. That's about the only thing agreed upon by partisans in a long-waged debate over how best to feed all those bellies. 

On March 8, Dr. Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food, released a report arguing that the use of small-scale, diverse farming methods, which he calls "agroecology," can double agricultural production in poverty-stricken areas, increase the economic prospects of the inhabitants, and improve their local environment. 

This argument refutes a common dismissal of sustainable agriculture: that it could never feed the world. That's the contention of those who believe in agriculture methods that involve the intensive use of energy, water, machinery, and chemicals to grow cash crop monocultures. I recently discussed these competing paradigms with De Schutter, in the context of what it might look like if industrial agriculture were, in fact, to feed the world. 

"I'm surprised at the simplistic diagnosis that appears to be dominant in public discourse," De Schutter said. "The official mantra is we need a 70 percent increase in agricultural production to feed the world. But this completely oversimplifies the debate. It only pays attention at the supply side of the equation, when we must also work on demand -- for instance the overconsumption of meat in industrialized countries. By 2050, if the current curves continue, 50 percent of global cereal production will go either to feeding cattle or to the irresponsible push towards biofuels production and consumption through fiscal stimuli and subsidies." 

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World Agriculture Threatened by Water Gluttony: Report

NEW YORK (AFP) - World agriculture employs more than one billion people but is in trouble because it's the biggest consumer of ever scarcer water and a huge producer of greenhouse gas emissions, a new report said Wednesday.

Worldwatch Institute, a research group on climate, energy, agriculture and the green economy, said there had to be a revolution in investment in food and water to reverse a "frightening" long-term depletion of stocks.

"Agriculture as we know it today is in trouble," said the institute's "State of the World 2011" report.

The industry accounts for one trillion dollars of the global economy but also 70 percent of water withdrawals and 15 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, much of that from developing countries.

The institute said small farmers who dominate the industry would be the key to maintaining food supplies for the world's estimated one billion hungry people.

Studies have shown that increasing food production is not making a dent in reducing hunger in the world.

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World 'Dangerously Close' to Food Crisis, U.N. Says

Global grain production will tumble by 63 million metric tons this year, or 2 percent over all, mainly because of weather-related calamities like the Russian heat wave and the floods in Pakistan, the United Nations estimates in its most recent report on the world food supply. The United Nations had previously projected that grain yields would grow 1.2 percent this year.

The fall in production puts the world "dangerously close" to a new food crisis, Abdolreza Abbassian, an economist with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, said at a news conference last week.

Rising demand and lower-than-expected yields caused stocks of some grains to fall sharply and generated high volatility in world food markets in the latter half of the year. Prices for some commodities are approaching levels not seen since 2007 and 2008, when food shortages prompted riots around the world.

"There is no crisis at this stage, but it could come if we don't act," Mr. Abbassian said. "The numbers are getting dangerously close to what we saw in 2008."

With world stocks depleted, wheat production will need to grow by 3.5 percent and corn production by 6 percent next year to avoid future price shocks, he estimated.

"Just normal production will not do anymore," he said.

Good yields in regions with poor food security like East Africa eased the pain of sharp rises in world grain prices this year, however.

In the long term, however, growing demand for food staples like corn and seed oil for use as biofuels will most likely continue to play a central role in tightening world food supplies, the United Nations warned. Roughly 7 percent of global yields of corn and other coarse grains is being used to make ethanol.

"This is a huge amount that does have an impact on the food markets and on prices," Hafez Ghanem, assistant director general for the Food and Agriculture Organization, told reporters.

In the United States in particular, ethanol production is supported by heavy government subsidies, without which it would be largely uneconomical to manufacture.


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Reducing Urban Water Use Around the World with Compost Toilets

Theodore Roosevelt once noted that "civilized people ought to know how to dispose of the sewage in some other way than putting it into the drinking water." But that's what we're still doing every day.

The one-time use of water to disperse human and industrial wastes is an outmoded practice, made obsolete by new technologies and water shortages. Yet it is still common around much of the world. Water enters a city, becomes contaminated with human and industrial wastes, and leaves the city dangerously polluted. Toxic industrial wastes discharged into rivers and lakes or into wells also permeate aquifers, making water -- both surface and underground -- unsafe for drinking.

The current engineering concept for dealing with human waste is to use vast quantities of water to wash it away, preferably into a sewer system, where it may or may not be treated before being discharged into the local river. The "flush and forget" system takes nutrients originating in the soil and typically dumps them into the nearest body of water. Not only are the nutrients lost from agriculture, but the nutrient overload has contributed to the death of many rivers and to the formation of some 405 "dead zones" in ocean coastal regions. This outdated system is expensive and water-intensive, disrupts the nutrient cycle, and can be a major source of disease and death. Worldwide, poor sanitation and personal hygiene claim the lives of some 2 million children per year, a toll that is one-third the size of the 6 million lives claimed by hunger and malnutrition.

Sunita Narain of the Center for Science and Environment in India argues convincingly that a water-based disposal system with sewage treatment facilities is neither environmentally nor economically viable for India. She notes that an Indian family of five, producing 250 liters of excrement in a year and using a water flush toilet, contaminates 150,000 liters of water when washing away its wastes.


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Retribution for a World Lost in Screens

Nemesis was the Greek goddess of retribution. She exacted divine punishment on arrogant mortals who believed they could defy the gods, turn themselves into objects of worship and build ruthless systems of power to control the world around them. The price of such hubris was almost always death.

Nemesis, related to the Greek word némein, means "to give what is due." Our nemesis fast approaches. We will get what we are due. The staggering myopia of our corrupt political and economic elite, which plunder the nation's wealth for financial speculation and endless war, the mass retreat of citizens into virtual hallucinations, the collapsing edifices around us, which include the ecosystem that sustains life, are ignored for a giddy self-worship. We stare into electronic screens just as Narcissus, besotted with his own reflection, stared into a pool of water until he wasted away and died.

We believe that because we have the capacity to wage war we have the right to wage war. We believe that money, rather than manufactured products and goods, is real. We believe in the myth of inevitable human moral and material progress. We believe that no matter how much damage we do to the Earth or our society, science and technology will save us. And as temperatures on the planet steadily rise, as droughts devastate cropland, as the bleaching of coral reefs threatens to wipe out 25 percent of all marine species, as countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh succumb to severe flooding, as we poison our food, air and water, as we refuse to confront our addiction to fossil fuels and coal, as we dismantle our manufacturing base and plunge tens of millions of Americans into a permanent and desperate underclass, we flick on a screen and are entranced.

We confuse the electronic image, a reflection back to us of ourselves, with the divine. We gawk at "reality" television, which of course is contrived reality, reveling in being the viewer and the viewed. True reality is obliterated from our consciousness. It is the electronic image that informs and defines us. It is the image that gives us our identity. It is the image that tells us what is attainable in the vast cult of the self, what we should desire, what we should seek to become and who we are. It is the image that tricks us into thinking we have become powerful-as the popularity of video games built around the themes of violence and war illustrates-while we have become enslaved and impoverished by the corporate state. The electronic image leads us back to the worship of ourselves. It is idolatry. Reality is replaced with electronic mechanisms for preening self-presentation-the core of social networking sites such as Facebook-and the illusion of self-fulfillment and self-empowerment. And in a world unmoored from the real, from human limitations and human potential, we inevitably embrace superstition and magic. This is what the worship of images is about. We retreat into a dark and irrational fear born out of a cavernous ignorance of the real. We enter an age of technological barbarism.

To those entranced by images, the world is a vast stage on which they are called to enact their dreams. It is a world of constant action, stimulation and personal advancement. It is a world of thrills and momentary ecstasy. It is a world of ceaseless movement. It makes a fetish of competition. It is a world where commercial products and electronic images serve as a pseudo-therapy that caters to feelings of alienation, inadequacy and powerlessness. We may be locked in dead-end jobs, have no meaningful relationships and be confused about our identities, but we can blast our way to power holding a little control panel while looking for hours at a screen. We can ridicule the poor, the ignorant and the weak all day long on trash-talk shows and reality television shows. We are skillfully made to feel that we have a personal relationship, a false communion, with the famous-look at the outpouring of grief at the death of Princess Diana or Michael Jackson. We have never met those we adore. We know only their manufactured image. They appear to us on screens. They are not, at least to us, real people. And yet we worship and seek to emulate them.


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Fair World Project: New Voice for Fair Trade Movement in Organic Sector and Beyond

The Organic Consumers Association (OCA) launched the Fair World Project (FWP) today to promote fair trade in commerce, especially in organic production systems in developing countries as well as at home, and to protect the term "fair trade" from dilution and misuse for mere PR purposes. The OCA's new project fills the critical need for a watchdog of misleading fair trade claims, and a cheerleader for dedicated fair trade mission-driven companies. Through FWP, OCA will focus on promoting projects that connect the environmental and health benefits of organic agriculture with the social benefits derived from fair trade.

The Fair World Project's inaugural publication of For a Better World will debut at the Fair Trade Futures Conference, September 10-12 at the Boston Marriott Hotel-Quincy. Fifty thousand copies will be distributed to fair trade outlets such as co-ops and organic markets nationwide. The publication features candid articles on the fair trade movement, including different approaches to fair trade certification, exceptional fair trade projects abroad and at home in the West, as well as how to reintegrate fair trade back into the organic movement.

"As demand from conscious consumers expands the market for fairly traded products we must ensure that claims made by companies hold up to fair trade standards and that marketing and labeling of these products are accurate," says Dana Geffner, Executive Director of the Fair World Project. "With new fair trade certifiers joining the movement, seasoned certifiers enabling questionable opportunistic fair trade claims and "fairwashing" practices more common, the Fair World Project aims to discuss and dissect," adds Geffner.

The FWP intends to encourage critical thinking rather than blind faith regarding fair trade claims and certification schemes. Through publications, events, and targeted campaigns the group articulates and advances the issues involved in fair trade, with the goal of helping consumers, business owners, employees and activists make informed decisions about where and on what to spend their money and resources

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