Archive for the ‘food and agriculture’ Category
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Brazil: Amazon deforestation rate plunging
Saturday, September 11th, 2010
In a previous post last week, we discussed a new paper in PNAS showing that new land for agriculture during the ’80s and ’90s came at the expense of tropical forests and savannas.
In this week’s issue of Science, Antonio Regalado reports on satellite imagery (able to record land clearing and fires from slash-and-burn agriculture) showing substantial deforestation declines in the Brazilian Amazon since 2004—from a peak of 27,000 km2/year in 2004 to 7,500 km2/year in 2009.
Why the dramatic downturn over the past half decade?
Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira … credited government enforcement efforts, including cutting off loans to those clearing large amounts of forest for cultivation…
Gilberto Câmara, general director of INPE, said that farmers may now be employing smaller conflagrations to escape detection, and the agency reported a large increase in the number of fires last month. He believes a more accurate survey known as Prodes, due out in November, will show a smaller decline. “We are seeing a process of consolidation in the Amazon, with no new frontiers, fewer large scale cuts, and more small fires to expand existing farms,” he says.
Daniel Nepstad, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, says that recent decisions by large food processors and supermarkets not to buy soybeans and beef from newly deforested areas has helped to slow the rate of deforestation. Some landholders may also be conserving forests in hope of receiving carbon credits.
But Nepstad worries that the picture could change for the worse if prices for
agricultural products, depressed because of a sluggish economy, begin to rebound.
“I think the bigger question is, ‘When the prices come up, will Brazil’s government be
able to hold the line?’ ”
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Photo credit: CIAT
Tags: Amazon, trees and forests
Posted in biodiversity science, food and agriculture, land use | No Comments »
Lauerman: Our conflicted relationship with animals
Sunday, September 5th, 2010
Salon.com is running an interview by Kerry Lauerman with Hal Herzog on his new book, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat. The story is worth reading for an assessment of why the public can be outraged by women throwing cats into dumpsters or puppies into a river (last week’s tabloid news) while at the same time consuming more meat than ever.
A few excerpts:
Why is it so hard to think straight about animals?
I think it’s the human-meat relationship. The fact is, very few people are vegetarians; even most vegetarians eat meat. There have been several studies, including a very large one by the Department of Agriculture, where they asked people one day: Describe your diet. And 5 percent said they were vegetarians. Well, then they called the same people back a couple of days later and asked them about what they ate in the last 24 hours. And over 60 percent of these vegetarians had eaten meat. And so, the fact is, the campaign for moralized meat has been a failure. We actually kill three times as many animals for their flesh as we did when Peter Singer wrote “Animal Liberation” [in 1975]. We eat probably 20 percent more meat than we did when he wrote that book. Even though people are more concerned about animals, it seems like that’s been occurring. The question is, why?
And, by the way, I think that the argument against eating meat is very strong.
….
So is the solution just to come to terms with the disconnect between loving our cat and treating it like a family member and enjoying our fried chicken?
I think that’s the human condition. I think this humanization of pets is really fascinating. I developed a tongue-in-cheek scale that I called “feeding kittens or boa constrictors” scale. I asked people, “Would it be OK to feed snakes versus cats certain types of food?” One was mice: Would it be OK to feed a mouse to a boa constrictor? Is it OK to feed a mouse to a cat?
Almost everyone said it was not OK to feed a mouse to a cat. I interviewed a student who had cats. I said, “Would you ever feed a dead mouse to your cat? You can buy them at the pet store.” She said, “No!” She was horrified. And I asked why. She had this great quote. She said, “If my cat ate mice, it wouldn’t be like me.”
I love that. And that really gets it. When we admit cats and animals into our world, and we think of them like relatives and we think of them like us, it makes perfect sense for us to think that, yes, they’d rather have a gourmet natural duck entree out of a can than eat a mouse. No, my pet really enjoys dressing up for Halloween. And so we basically have drawn that moral circle so that we think of them more like us than like them. I don’t really see that as changing.
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And that’s the lesson here. Our modern food system disconnects humans and the animals we eat all the way to the supermarket meat aisle. Ethicists like Singer argue that sentient animals should be given the same moral considerations as people, as many folks already do for their pets.
Would we be willing to eat meat if we raised our own cows, pigs, and chickens and treated them with the same respect and care we show our pets?
For some meat eaters, probably not. But for many others, probably yes…and that would be a good thing to the extent it generated a world with less animal suffering.
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Photo courtesy of sandcastlematt.
Tags: meat and diet
Posted in behavior, environmental ethics, food and agriculture, nature and culture | No Comments »
New land for agriculture coming mainly at the expense of tropical ecosystems
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010
There have traditionally been two ways to produce more food for an increasing population: Convert native ecosystems like forests and grasslands to agricultural fields (what we call “extensification”) or make the yields on existing croplands go up, through the use of things like machinery, fertilizers, irrigation, pesticides, and GMOs (what we call “intensification”).
Historically, these processes have occurred in tandem: an initial phase of extensification and land clearing followed by development and intensification. Converting North America’s prairies to corn and wheat in the 19th century is a classic example of the former, whereas 20th-century rise of fossil fuels, and the machines and fertilizer they support, is an example of the latter.
So while it’s not surprising to learn that developing nations in tropical regions are experiencing significant deforestation for food production, as Holly Gibbs and colleagues at Stanford describe in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (citations removed for clarity), it’s important to understand the magnitude of ecosystem change as well as the drivers of change:
This study confirms that rainforests were the primary source for new agricultural land throughout the tropics during the 1980s and 1990s. More than 80% of new agricultural land came from intact and disturbed forests. Although differences occur across the tropical forest belt, the basic pattern is the same: The majority of the land for agricultural and tree plantation expansion comes from forests, woodlands, and savannas, not from previously cleared lands.
Worldwide demand for agricultural products is expected to increase by ∼50% by 2050, and evidence suggests that tropical countries will be called on to meet much of this demand. Consider, for example, that in developed countries the agricultural land area,
including pastures and permanent croplands, decreased by more than 412 million ha (34%) between 1995 and 2007, whereas developing countries saw increases of nearly 400 million ha (17.1%). Moreover, developing countries expanded their permanent croplands by 10.1% during the current decade alone, while permanent cropland areas in developed countries remained generally stable. If the agricultural expansion trends documented here for 1980–2000 persist, we can expect major clearing of intact and disturbed forest to continue and increase across the tropics to help meet swelling demands for food, fodder, and fuel.
Indeed, recent studies confirm that large-scale agro-industrial expansion is the dominant driver of deforestation in this decade, showing that forests fall as commodity markets boom. Rising commodity prices have been implicated in the destruction of Amazonian rainforests for soy production and peat swamp forests for oil palm production in Southeast Asia. Drivers of cropland expansion may impact forests directly through local or regional demand or indirectly through more globalized demand that may occur via market-mediated effects. Although this study does not specifically assess displacement or indirect land use changes, it does highlight the likelihood that intact and degraded forests will be replaced by agricultural land when such changes occur. Regardless of the mechanism, concern continues to mount about the large emissions of carbon dioxide that result when tropical forests are felled and often burned to make room for new agricultural land.
This was more of a land use change analysis, so it didn’t include a lot on the global drivers causing deforestation. It would be a mistake, for instance, to ascribe all of this change to population growth in these tropical regions or efforts to supply more food to people living there. Rather, extensification today is a global phenomenon driven by international trade, as the developing world loses native ecosystems to feed other countries. And destroying forests and peatlands is a major net source of greenhouse gas emissions, so we’re also warming climate as an unintended consequence.
Why not just halt extensification and switch to intensification on existing farmland? It’s expensive—moreso than simply clearing more land in many cases. When the demand for cheap food rules the world, forest clearing in poor countries with abundant, cheap land is often what you get.
It should make us all pause considering that the environmental effects of the demand for goods like soy and palm oil by the industrialized world are being externalized to tropical countries. We are now chopping down tropical forests to make soy burgers, biodiesel, and snack foods. As Cameron Scott notes, “The Amazon, It’s What’s for Dinner.”
Reference:
H. K. Gibbs, A. S. Ruesch, F. Achard, M. K. Clayton, P. Holmgrene, N. Ramankutty, and J. A. Foley (2010). Tropical forests were the primary sources of new agricultural land in the 1980s and 1990s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
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Photo courtesy of leoffreitas
Tags: trees and forests
Posted in biodiversity science, biofuels, food and agriculture, land use, population | 1 Comment »
Pesticides in produce gaining attention
Tuesday, June 1st, 2010
Two stories in today’s news:
(1) The Washington Post ran an article on the possible pesticide-child behavior link we examined in a previous post.
(2) CNN also picked up the recent report from the Environmental Working Group (video clip and printed story) on pesticide residues in produce:
The Dirty Dozen (may contain 47-67 pesticides per serving—EWG suggests buying or growing these organically)
- Celery
- Peaches
- Strawberries
- Apples
- Domestic blueberries
- Nectarines
- Sweet bell peppers
- Spinach, kale and collard greens
- Cherries
- Potatoes
- Imported grapes
- Lettuce
The Clean 15 (contain fewer or no pesticides—EWG suggests you can buy these conventionally grown)
- Onions
- Avocados
- Sweet corn
- Pineapples
- Mango
- Sweet peas
- Asparagus
- Kiwi fruit
- Cabbage
- Eggplant
- Cantaloupe
- Watermelon
- Grapefruit
- Sweet potatoes
- Sweet onions
The EWG shopper’s guide.
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Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/maheshkhanna/786837829/
Posted in food and agriculture, health, pollutants, toxics | No Comments »
Pesticide link to child behavior?
Monday, May 17th, 2010
MSNBC is reporting today on new research suggesting that some pesticides may double the rate of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) in kids.
Youngsters with high levels of pesticide residue in their urine, particularly from widely used types of insecticide such as malathion, were more likely to have ADHD, the behavior disorder that often disrupts school and social life, scientists in the United States and Canada found.
Kids with higher-than-average levels of one pesticide marker were nearly twice as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD as children who showed no traces of the poison.
The take-home message for parents, according to Bouchard: “I would say buy organic as much as possible,” she said. “I would also recommend washing fruits and vegetables as much as possible.”
As discussed in a previous post “Do our daily routines put our health at risk?” here’s an easy to use shopping guide of which fruits and vegetables to buy organic.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/anushruti/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Posted in behavior, food and agriculture, health, organic, toxics | 2 Comments »
Agriculture: Evolution strikes back
Monday, May 3rd, 2010
The NY Times is running a cover story on how crop weeds are becoming resistant to one of the most ubiquitously used herbicides—Roundup.
This is the herbicide that farmers can spray on genetically modified crops that are resistant to its damage. It’s widely used on major crops, such as soy, corn, canola, sugar beet, and cotton.
In theory, all weeds other than the GM crop succumb to the chemical. As the Times story suggests, that’s not the case anymore because weeds are evolving resistance, possibly rendering Roundup and Roundup-ready GM crops ineffective.
Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds.
To fight them, Mr. Anderson and farmers throughout the East, Midwest and South are being forced to spray fields with more toxic herbicides, pull weeds by hand and return to more labor-intensive methods like regular plowing.
“We’re back to where we were 20 years ago,” said Mr. Anderson, who will plow about one-third of his 3,000 acres of soybean fields this spring, more than he has in years. “We’re trying to find out what works.”
Farm experts say that such efforts could lead to higher food prices, lower crop yields, rising farm costs and more pollution of land and water.
“It is the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,” said Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts.
…If frequent plowing becomes necessary again, “that is certainly a major concern for our environment,” Ken Smith, a weed scientist at the University of Arkansas, said. In addition, some critics of genetically engineered crops say that the use of extra herbicides, including some old ones that are less environmentally tolerable than Roundup, belies the claims made by the biotechnology industry that its crops would be better for the environment.
“The biotech industry is taking us into a more pesticide-dependent agriculture when they’ve always promised, and we need to be going in, the opposite direction,” said Bill Freese, a science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety in Washington.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kankan/ / CC BY 2.0
Posted in food and agriculture, land use, organic | 2 Comments »
Food aid and long-term food security
Sunday, March 21st, 2010
As we saw in a previous post, food aid is a complex issue. On one hand, it’s critical for acute crisis situations where people are starving because of things like war and natural disasters. On the other hand, in more chronic situations of malnutrition, food aid and cheap imports have the capacity to undermine local food production, which, in the long run, harms the prospect of people feeding themselves through local production.
A farmer’s worst enemy is free food and cheap imports.
In recent years, we have seen this play out in Africa, as Oxfam acknowledges. MSNBC is running a story today, “With cheap food imports, Haiti can’t feed itself,” about how the same thing has happened there. Worth reading.
There is also a larger debate at play here about the implications of free trade and industrialized food production.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/un_photo/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Posted in food and agriculture, race and class, solutions | 2 Comments »
New analysis of pesticides and bee colony collapse disorder
Friday, March 19th, 2010
European bee populations are on the decline worldwide. Who cares? These bees are major pollinators of crops and therefore perform, for free, a vital ecological service worth about $U.S. 14 billion per year. Not to mention the many other species of non-crop flowering plants that reproduce with the help of insects like this.
The recent kind of decline is specific—only female worker bees disappear—and has been given the name colony collapse disorder (CCD). Nobody has figured out why this is happening. The potential list of culprits includes mites, viruses, synthetic chemicals, and other factors.
In an article this week in PLoS ONE, Christopher Mullin and colleagues explore further the potential link between pesticides and CCD.1
Excerpts:
One third of honey bee colonies in the US were lost during each of the last three winters between ’06-’09. This alarming overwinter along with other losses of this primary pollinator, Apis mellifera L., as well as those of native pollinators, has been documented in North America and Europe. The most recent manifestation of this decline, Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), has led to a significant collaborative effort involving several land grant universities, Departments of Agriculture and the USDA.
We have found 121 different pesticides and metabolites within 887 wax, pollen, bee and associated hive samples. Almost 60% of the 259 wax and 350 pollen samples contained at least one systemic pesticide, and over 47% had both in-hive acaricides fluvalinate and coumaphos, and chlorothalonil, a widely-used fungicide. In bee pollen were found chlorothalonil at levels up to 99 ppm and the insecticides aldicarb, carbaryl, chlorpyrifos and imidacloprid, fungicides boscalid, captan and myclobutanil, and herbicide pendimethalin at 1 ppm levels. Almost all comb and foundation wax samples (98%) were contaminated with up to 204 and 94 ppm, respectively, of fluvalinate and coumaphos, and lower amounts of amitraz degradates and chlorothalonil, with an average of 6 pesticide detections per sample and a high of 39. There were fewer pesticides found in adults and brood except for those linked with bee kills by permethrin (20 ppm) and fipronil (3.1 ppm).
The 98 pesticides and metabolites detected in mixtures up to 214 ppm in bee pollen alone represents a remarkably high level for toxicants in the brood and adult food of this primary pollinator. This represents over half of the maximum individual pesticide incidences ever reported for apiaries. While exposure to many of these neurotoxicants elicits acute and sublethal reductions in honey bee fitness, the effects of these materials in combinations and their direct association with CCD or declining bee health remains to be determined.
The high frequency of multiple pesticides in bee collected pollen and wax indicates that pesticide interactions need thorough investigation before their roles in decreasing bee health can be either supported or refuted. The large number of studies to date, are limited by being done on mostly one compound at a time, as well as using whole colonies where the timing of contaminated pollen intake and its utilization by the colony are difficult to interpret as a causal relationship. Laboratory studies have clearly indicated sublethal impacts on honey bee learning, immune system functioning, and synergism of insecticide toxicity by fungicides, yet combinations of herbicides with fungicides and insecticides in 3 or more component mixtures have not been studied.
The widespread occurrence of multiple residues, some at toxic levels for single compounds, and the lack of any scientific literature on the biological consequences of combinations of pesticides, argues strongly for urgent changes in regulatory policies regarding pesticide registration and monitoring procedures as they relate to pollinator safety. This further calls for emergency funding to address the myriad holes in our scientific understanding of pesticide consequences for pollinators. The relegation of bee toxicity for registered compounds to impact only label warnings, and the underestimation of systemic pesticide hazards to bees in the registration process may well have contributed to widespread pesticide contamination of pollen, the primary food source of our major pollinator. Is risking the $14 billion contribution of pollinators to our food system really worth lack of action?
1Christopher A. Mullin, Maryann Frazier, James L. Frazier, Sara Ashcraft, Roger Simonds, Dennis vanEngelsdorp, Jeffery S. Pettis (2010). High Levels of Miticides and Agrochemicals in North American Apiaries: Implications for Honey Bee Health PLoS ONE
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Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/viamoi/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Tags: bees
Posted in biodiversity science, food and agriculture, organic, pollutants, toxics | 2 Comments »
The rise of drug-resistent bacteria
Saturday, March 6th, 2010
Nicholas Kristof has another column in the Sunday NY Times, The Spread of Superbugs, about bacteria that are increasingly difficult to kill with antibiotics and their links to the way we produce meat in modern agricultural systems.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/estherase/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Posted in food and agriculture, health | No Comments »
Science Magazine considers whether decreasing meat consumption can increase global food security
Saturday, February 13th, 2010
In this week’s special issue devoted to food security, Science asks what it will take to feed 9 billion people by mid century.
Food insecurity—the inability of people to feed themselves—may rise if food supply cannot keep pace with population. This is a concern that goes back over 200 years to Thomas Malthus.
One theme shows up in a few articles: Can reducing meat consumption help in the battle to feed more people?
Erik Stokstad’s news feature (subscription required)1 provides a nice lead:
The United States, for instance, has just 4.5% of the world’s population but accounts for about 15% of global meat consumption. Americans consume about 330 grams of meat a day on average—the equivalent of three quarter-pound hamburgers. In contrast, the U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends that most people consume just 142 to 184 grams of meat and beans daily. In the developing world, daily meat consumption averages just 80 grams. Those numbers suggest that people living in the United States and other wealthy nations could increase world grain supplies simply by forgoing that extra burger or chop.
However, he interviews researchers and cites studies that raise a number of issues potentially complicating this story…
Tags: meat and diet
Posted in behavior, food and agriculture, population, solutions | 2 Comments »
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