The Build-UPS!

AGRICULTURE - LOTS OF HOPE!!

From the book "More Good News" by David Suzuki and Holly Dressel.

(The "headings" are mine)

A book well worth having in your home library, especially if you are still raising children.

　

......The ongoing movement to reform agriculture worldwide is simply huge and is one of the most encouraging developments of the early twenty-first century. In fact it's arguably the single best reason for hope this planet has got at the moment. It's local, it's global, it's creative, and it's multifaceted. Unlike the confusing and even dangerous aspects of many energy technologies, the food revolution is getting almost every element exactly right in terms of balancing food production and consumption against the health of our water, soil, and air, even including social and economic concerns. Because all these elements are so closely intertwined, the more the new agricultural revolution grows, the better off human health and ecosystem health can become as well.

FLOOD OF BOOKS

A multitude of changes in eating and growing practices over the past few years have come from new businesses, international NGOS, community organizations, urban gardens, and market and food outlets. A flood of books and films has led the way. Authors Eric Schlosser and John Banzhaf popularized the work of earlier researchers such as Vandana Shiva, Pat Mooney, and Ronnie Cummins by attacking the negative aspects of current food production systems. Books like "Fast Food Nation, Chew on This: Everything You Don't Want to Know about Fast Food," and "Spoiled: the Dangerous Truth about a Food Chain Gone Wild," as well as films like "Food, Inc." and "Super Size Me," have highlighted everything from the hidden calories and carcinogens in burgers and lattes to the food industry's vast dependence on corn sweeteners and trans fats. Such works have demonstrated how fast-food ingredients have led to obesity and an epidemic of heart disease and diabetes. They've demonstrated how the use of centralized slaughterhouses and vegetable-packing factories can spread contaminants like Salmonella and Listeria.

BAD COMING OUT

These popular books and films, read and seen by millions, have also exposed the effects of "agrifood" industrialization on land, air, water, and sea-the ocean dead zones caused by pesticides and herbicides, the contamination of soil by industrial fertilizers, and the misuse and fouling of water everywhere. They have alerted us to the fact that thousands of locally adapted or multiuse species, from Dexter cattle and Araucana chickens to ancient grains and fruit varieties, have disappeared from our farms and our diets. These breeds and varieties produced delicious food, but the grains didn't grow fast enough for impatient investors and marketing boards, the wonderful fruits were too fragile to travel thousands of miles in fossil fuel-powered trucks, and the animals couldn't survive the grotesque crowding, minimal attention, and chemical feeds of an industrial farm....

Authors Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver became household names with "The Omnivore's Dilemma and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life." The title of Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon's book, "The 100-Mile Diet (called Plenty in the U.S.)", has become the term for a lifestyle exercise that millions of people are trying out. This movement to eat seasonally and only what your locality can produce has led to a great deal of media attention, including a book with the bodacious title "The Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food beyond Factory Farms." Attempting to eat locally is a difficult discipline (especially when it comes to our tropical addictions, like coffee and sugar), but it does appear to be the best way to save soil, water, plants, animals, and our own health. Supporting local farmers, buying organic, cruelty-free, and fair-trade varieties whenever possible - but always from local sources - has become a new form of ethical living.

The chief way this can be done, given the difficulty of identifying the provenance of foods in most supermarkets, is to get involved directly with your own food supply by supporting farmers' markets and especially by committing to a particular farmer and prepaying for weekly supplies of produce, fruit, or meat and eggs every year.

BEGAN IN JAPAN

Community-supported agriculture (CSA) ventures began in Japan in the partly because the country's lightly cooked cuisine demands such varied and ultrafresh ingredients. It remains the greatest Japanese gift to the environmental movement so far. The speed with which this decentralized, leaderless, unfunded system caught fire is just about unprecedented. Today there is hardly a person in the industrialized world, even in remote and small cities, who hasn't heard of CSAS, and there are many millions of subscribers, each with his or her own "family farmer."

FOOD INDUSTRY PROBLEMS

Getting paid in advance for a summer's supply of produce or a winter's supply of meat and eggs gives the farmer some security in the face of droughts, onslaughts of pests, cold snaps, or flooding. If the spinach crop dries up or the chicken runs into an owl, the farmer is allowed to put more zucchini and beef in the buyer's basket instead of greens and eggs. These days, however, the farmer's major economic enemy is the increasingly integrated intermediaries who take a huge bite for marketing, transporting, packaging, slaughtering, storing, or processing crops and livestock. Every conventional farmer growing supermarket food is extremely vulnerable to changes in huge, globalized markets and to unfair consolidation in the supply chain by intermediaries, who frequently buy up all the slaughterhouses or packaging facilities in a wide area so that they can charge farmers whatever they like for their services. Retailers usually take the biggest bite of all. Moreover, perverse "hygiene" regulations often make small-scale, on-farm selling or packaging illegal, thus penalizing small producers and favoring the processing giants. Good food provided by most farmers can be contaminated in centralized slaughtering and processing facilities, which may serve most of a continent. That's the major reason more countrywide outbreaks of E. coli, Salmonella, and Listeria have occurred since the food system became so heavily industrialized.

LOCAL IS BEST

All of these problems are virtually eliminated by buying locally through farmers' markets and CSAS, which are also closer to what Europeans, with their local, fresh markets, have always done. "You've begun to attack dependency and distancing in the food supply," says Brewster Kneen, longtime food activist and author of another great title, Farmaggedon. "You eliminate the debt factor," because farmers don't have to borrow from banks or governments to get their seed and supplies in the spring. They just have to be sure to manage their money so they're left with a profit. This setup is vastly more sustainable for them because it's more fluid and flexible; city people learn that there are a lot more food varieties out there than they thought, that nature is unpredictable, and that food producers have to face challenges. Farmers learn what people really want and can quickly adjust their production to serve their market. Many c s A s are cooperatives, where members can drive out to the farm, help with weed and insect control, or just picnic in the country; most have festivals or potlucks at the end of the season and are community oriented, donating their surpluses to poorer clients or charity. "What you're really doing," says Kneen, "is reconstituting a community and a social life around food. You're creating a whole new culture. We have to realize that's what we're doing; and that's what we need."

SLOW FOOD MOVEMENT

Another consumer revolution is exemplified by the Slow Food movement, which began in northern Italy about twenty years ago. At first glance it seems less overtly an alternative to existing

marketing and production systems and more like a pleasure-and history-centered club for well-heeled epicureans. Its chapters in 132 countries are called "Convivia," from the word "convivial." Their primary function is to bring people together for jolly dinners based on delicious local foods, usually served with plenty of wine. But there is substance behind the movement as well.

Slow Food's slogan, "Good, Clean, Fair," seems no more threatening than Mom and apple pie, and its "Ark of Taste" is an ongoing collection of food products from eco-regions around the world that celebrates local culinary traditions and foods while also attempting to include them in a "virtual ark," to help preserve them. Besides the Dogon onion from Mali described above, the Ark program features delights such as Canada's own "saskatoon berry" and Brazil's "umbu" and "pequi" fruits. However delicious, intriguing, or even effete these foods may sound, a reader might wonder whether too demanding a market might outstrip the supply of these new delicacies; but the Slow Food organization already considered all that. In fact, it has put more thought than one would expect into investigating how food is raised and how programs can be established to support this diversity....

MAIN RETAIL GIANTS HAVE JOINED

The Slow Food movement, CSAS, and health food co-ops, along with the popular media they work with, are all responsible it for alerting the public to the dubiousness of processed foods, fast foods, and non-certified cocoa and coffee. After years of pressure, organic and fair-trade coffees, teas, cocoa, and sugar are now readily available - and not just through health food stores, co-ops, and specialty shops selling "green" brands like Divine Chocolate and Equal Exchange. Mainstream retail giants have joined the revolution. Starbucks was singled out during demonstrations in Seattle in 2000 for its resistance to fair-trade certified products. It claimed it was paying a fair price to "its own" farmers, but with no outside policing, that reassurance sounded pretty hollow to food activists. Today the massive coffee chain is offering several fair-trade brands with the appropriate certification, and is moving toward providing more.

OTHER GIANTS ON TRACK

Other giant retailers, including McDonald's, Dunkin' Donuts, and Cadbury, are introducing fair-trade products. In March 2009  Cadbury Dairy Milk announced it would begin buying its cocoa from fair-trade producers in Ghana. This part of the company sells more than 300 million bars of chocolate annually in Great Britain, which means that nearly 20 percent of Ghana's 700,000 small cocoa farmers will benefit from this gigantic new market. The very next month, Mars, Inc. announced new sustainability commitments for cocoa, moving beyond fair-trade certification to Rainforest Alliance certification, which supervises growing as well as labor standards. There is only one Mars branch scheduled to use the new cocoa, Galaxy Chocolate in the U.K., but this crack in a once stubbornly closed wall of indifference is already leading to calls from the International Labor Rights Forum and organic activists to vastly increase the number of such products, and to bring in still-resistant competitors like Hershey.

GOOD EFFECTS

The effect these changes in corporate behavior will have on the harsh lives of small coffee and cocoa growers is hard to overestimate. Cadbury is calling its move a "virtuous circle" of purchase; they've put a floor on prices so that they can't drop below production costs, and if a producer improves quality, it's directly rewarded with better prices. Before, such efforts were ignored by intermediaries and not worth the extra effort for growers. More use of certified products also opens the way to far more sustainable farming practices. Fair-trade certifiers will help producers manage plantations in the way coffee and cocoa evolved, as part of a complex of trees and other tropical forest plants that provide homes to birds and wildlife, a form of traditional agroforestry. They'll provide more sustainable jobs, protect habitat, and still make profits-while producing dark, delicious chocolate, which is, let's face it, one of the greatest joys of food life....

HOW SLOW FOOD BEGAN

Slow Food began as a protest against its opposite, fast food, as exemplified by a branch of McDonald's that opened at the base of Rome's Spanish Steps in the 1980s. Slow Food's founder Carlo Petrini didn't stage demonstrations on that occasion; he decided to take a more subversive tack. Like Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, and Alice Waters, who are all active members of the Slow Food movement, Petrini decided to show how much more delightful life could be without the dangerous chemicals and greedy intermediaries of our current food system. On its list of organizational objectives, following the succulent descriptions of Convivias, exotic foods, festivals, celebrations, and "promoting taste education,." Slow Food describes an ambitious agenda that includes "educating consumers [and] citizens about the risks of fast food. .. the drawbacks of commercial agribusiness and factory farms... [and] the risks of monoculture and reliance on too few genomes or varieties; developing various political programs to preserve family farms; lobbying for the inclusion of organic farming concerns within agricultural policy; and lobbying against the use of pesticides... [and] against government funding of genetic engineering." Sounds more like Greenpeace, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, or the Third World Network-but wearing that pleasant mask of conviviality.

PRODUCTION RULES

One of the movement's initiatives is Presidia, a food standards labeling program. The requirements to use the Presidia label are long and far more complex than those for becoming certified organic. The producers join what is called a "Presidium" and "comply with production rules that respect traditions and environmental sustainability." They must, of course, use "organic or integrated cultivation methods," but they must also raise only native varieties and breeds, use raw milk in their cheeses, and pasture sheep and goats on mountainsides "to maintain regional integrity and defend the mountain ecosystem." The hay, forage, and other feedstuffs must be natural; "the use of silage or genetically modified products is not permitted."

Presidia members may not use additives, sweeteners, emulsifiers, stabilizers, or colorants, and they must use "recycled paper, glass, wood and any other material that is recyclable" for their packaging, labels, and brochures. Even fishers must follow ecological cycles and must "avoid fishing in periods when the survival of species might be endangered and only use traditional nets and fishing methods of small-scale coastal fishing." Finally, Presidia producers must respect social customs and history, each one must be connected "to a specific geographical area" and must honor its "environmental, historical, and socioeconomic perspective." In order to accomplish this, the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity provides veterinarians, agronomists, and food technologists for "assistance and advice."

FINANCED

Slow Food finances itself by producing popular consumer guides and publications for sale. Slow Food's Gambero Rosso (Red Crab) guides to wine and restaurants have become to Italy what Michelin guides are to France. They're gobbled up every month and can make or break a vintage or a business. Its many food salons such as the Salone del Gusto in Turin and its yearly international Terra Madre festival attract hundreds of food and wine producers each year, each happy to pay a fee to show off their wares. In such simple ways this movement has become so powerful that when the EU tried to enforce rigid "hygiene" standards tailored to favor large processors and producers, Slow Food was able to fight back.

NASA INVENTIONS BADLY APPLIED

People in North America are unhappily familiar with these "scientifically based" hygiene standards, which were invented by NASA, the U.S. space agency, in a particularly unnatural context: to keep astronauts from getting sick. They were then adopted in other unnatural environments, like corporate food processing factories at Kraft and Unilever. As a recent health profession article put it, introducing such requirements in the EU would have imposed "impossible burdens of reporting, paperwork, and new equipment... driving thousands of small farmers out of business." This would not really have been an unintended consequence, since "health protection" is often the cover that accompanies centralization and industrialization schemes that make life impossible for small farmers and very handy for food giants. It didn't work in this case, at least partly because Europeans suffer and die far less often from food-borne illnesses than North Americans. In the U.S., the origin of the NASA standards, more than 25 out of 100 people are struck by food poisoning every year, as opposed to France's food poisoning rate of 1.2 per 100--almost 25 times lower....

　

EUROPE VERSES USA

In Europe, half a million healthy consumers were happy to sign a petition against the dangerous NASA rules. In North America so far, no single agency has been strong enough to oppose them, and that explains why hundreds of thousands of artisan food makers in Europe continue to prosper, while those across North America write books like Joel Salatin's "Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal."

SLOW MONEY

In an effort to support Salatin and other organic producers concerned about food quality and sustainability, venture capitalist Woody Tasch founded a nonprofit in line with Slow Food values. Today "Slow Money" invests in various initiatives because "the vast majority of sustainable-agriculture enterprises [have] little or no access to investment capital." The inspiration to do this came partly from Herman Daly, a former World Bank economist who taught at the University of Maryland. There, Daly developed "Ecological Economics" as a way to place human financial activity within the envelope of the world's natural systems, instead of making the realities of natural law a tiny adjunct to human obsessions about finance. Currently, national economies speculate on food as a commodity and dismiss soil fertility, water quality, nutritional value, and social traditions as "externalities" to their central concerns with making money. When Daly discusses this point, he likes to describe a favorite cartoon: "A fisherman is standing with a puzzled look on his face. On the one side, the fish in the sea and in his net are saying, 'Slow down! We can't grow that fast!' and on the other side, a banker is saying, 'Speed up! We have to grow faster! The fisherman is caught between the rate of growth of money and the natural, biological growth rates of species."

The lofty goals of Slow Money include building "a nurture capital industry," where companies have to live up to strict requirements when they apply for the legal charters that give them the right to exist. They must, for example, give away 50 percent of their profits to sustainable practices and invest 5o percent of their assets within 50 miles of where they live. In an era of bailouts for failed banks and industries, Slow Money points out that, "If it is prudent to invest tens of billions of dollars a year in a few thousand high-tech companies... then mustn't it be prudent to invest a few billion dollars a year in tens of thousands of small food enterprises that are essential to the long-term sustainability and health of soil and economy?"

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Now, you see what man can do when he puts his mind to it - reversals can take place. Over the last 50 years we have seen many types of reversals, clean-ups, and etc. The modern city "recycling program" is a huge movement to re-use what we have used. So on some physical things that mankind can implement before the end of this age, don't count-out anything.

So among all the bad news and meltdowns there are the build-ups and movements in the right directions.

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