Archive for the ‘food and agriculture’ Category
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Africa: Agro imperialism’s final frontier?
Saturday, November 21st, 2009
In an article titled, “Is There Such a Thing as Agro-Imperialism?” in the NY Times Sunday Magazine, Andrew Rice writes about how wealthy nations are now staking out land in the developing world—notably Africa—in order to feed their own future populations. Let me say up front that if increasing foreign investment in domestic agriculture can pull African nations out of poverty, then it’s worth a serious look.
However, there’s a related issue that’s worth noting: Sooner or later, the combination of (1) rising populations, (2) higher per-capita meat consumption, and (3) possible shifts to more sustainable meat production (pasture fed)—with its attendant land requirements and higher costs—will likely force the developed world to export more of its own food production to the developing world, where land and labor are cheap.
This could lead to potentially large ecological damage if the modern industrialized agricultural model—rather than sustainable modes of production— is also exported.
There are several conversations that need to happen:
- Who benefits from foreign cash flows, especially in countries with abysmal records of transparency, corrupt governments, and land tenure rights? It’s not clear it will be the farmers.
- Should the developed world reduce its meat consumption to accommodate higher-yielding agriculture within its own geographic borders before it turns to the developing world—who has difficulty feeding its own people— for help.
- Is this even feasible in food-insecure nations? As stated in the article, “The idea that one country would go to another country…and lease some land, and expect that the rice produced there would be made available to them if there’s a food crisis in that host country, is ludicrous.”
Excerpts:
Tags: Africa
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Good Guide—Learn what product labels don’t always tell you about the things you buy
Friday, November 20th, 2009
There’s a new guide to shopping that looks interesting. It’s called Good Guide, and it helps people learn more about what’s in their products that might not be healthy–to you, the environment, or society.
It’s easy to click on many different product types—from food to personal products to air fresheners to toys. For example, ever wonder about different kinds of mac and cheese?
Here’s more information about them:
What chemicals are in your baby shampoo?
Was sweatshop labor used to make your t-shirt?
What products are the best, and what products should you avoid?
Increasingly, you want to know about the impacts of the products you buy. On your health. On the environment. On society. But unless you’ve got a Ph.D, it is almost impossible to find out the impacts of the products you buy. Until now…
GoodGuide provides the world’s largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental, and social impacts of the products in your home.
With GoodGuide, you can:
- Find safe, healthy and green products that protect you and your family
- Search or browse over 70,000 food, toys, personal care, & household products to see what’s really beneath the label
- Use expert advice and recommendations on products to quickly learn the impacts of what you buy
- Find better products and make purchasing decisions based on what’s important to you
- Create a personalized favorites list with the products that are right for you and your family
Related post: Do our daily routines put our health at risk?
Posted in behavior, environmentalism, food and agriculture, organic, shopping guides, solutions | No Comments »
Is eating personal?
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
That’s the question posed by James McWilliams in an op-ed in Monday’s Washington Post.
I gave a talk in South Texas recently on the environmental virtues of a vegetarian diet. As you might imagine, the reception was chilly. In fact, the only applause came during the Q&A period when a member of the audience said that my lecture made him want to go out and eat even more meat. “Plus,” he added, “what I eat is my business — it’s personal.”
I’ve been writing about food and agriculture for more than a decade. Until that evening, however, I’d never actively thought about this most basic culinary question: Is eating personal?
Read the rest of the article. It’s not an entirely new argument, but it adds insight to the current debate on meat-based diets.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kitsa_sakurako/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Posted in behavior, food and agriculture | 1 Comment »
“Avoiding Factory Farm Foods: An Eater’s Guide”
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
Nicolette Niman has a new column, Avoiding Factory Farm Foods: An Eater’s Guide, this week at Huffington Post. This follows her NY Times column last week, Carnivore’s Dilemma, of which I was somewhat critical for the notable absence of land use concerns in the sustainable meat industry.
It’s a personal story that complements Jonathan Safran Foer’s recent thoughts on vegetarianism as a response to factory farming. I was surprised to learn that someone known for her family’s more-sustainable livestock ranch network is actually vegetarian.
Here are her main points on avoiding factory farmed foods. Her article provides more details on each:
Posted in behavior, food and agriculture, organic, shopping guides, sustainability | No Comments »
Are rural kids overweight because of a lack of access to healthy food?
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
Rural and urban areas have in common an increasing problem of grocery store consolidation and flight to suburbia, which has a more-profitable mix of cheap land for big box stores and greater densities of affluent consumers.
As the source of healthy foods goes away, the resulting communities are often described as “food deserts.” When we think of food insecurity in the world, we often think of famines in developing countries. Unfortunately, food insecurity is also an issue here at home for America’s poor. When grocery stores are far away, people may rely more on smaller grocery and convenience stores, thereby consuming more high-calorie junk foods and other processed foods.
In a recent issue1,2 of Rural Sociology (subscription required), Kai Schafft and colleagues examined populations across Pennsylvania where 50% of people lived farther than 10 miles from large grocery stores (8 miles is deemed an average trip to the store) and compared them to populations where people lived closer to big stores.
What did they find?
Posted in environmental justice, food and agriculture, race and class | No Comments »
Jonathan Safran Foer: Eating Animals
Saturday, November 7th, 2009
Salon.com interviewed the author of the new book, Eating Animals. An interesting conversation about factory farming and vegetarianism, suggesting how he differs from Pollan, Schlosser, and Singer.
Excerpts:
It’s an explanation of my own vegetarianism, and it’s a straightforward case for caring and thinking, and for the ideas that matter. These little daily choices that we’re so used to thinking are irrelevant are the most important thing we do all day long. An enormous and very destructive force — historically, it’s unprecedented how destructive our farm system is — has taken over America and is starting to take over the world. And unlike so many other horrible systems, this one doesn’t require electing a new government or raising billions of dollars or fighting a war. It can be dismantled just by people making different choices.
One thing that has interested me about my response to this whole project is that it’s made me care about other things. I mean, caring is contagious. It’s very hard to care about one thing and not care about its neighbor.
The most disturbing thing is not any instance, but the rule. It’s a shame in a way that PETA videos or slaughterhouse videos are most people’s exposure to factory farming because it gives the impression that the horrible things are the exception, when in fact they’re the rule.
So what we should be talking about is how upward of 99 percent of animals are raised and what it does to them, what it does to the environment, what it does to rural communities, what it does to farmers. And that’s bad; I mean, those things are bad.
First of all, [people] just have to say no to factory farms always. Not sometimes, not most of the time, but always, which means eating vegetarian a lot of the time.
Also, here’s the Huffington post column by Natalie Portman that’s referenced in the interview: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals Turned Me Vegan.
Excerpt:
I remember in college, a professor asked our class to consider what our grandchildren would look back on as being backward behavior or thinking in our generation, the way we are shocked by the kind of misogyny, racism, and sexism we know was commonplace in our grandparents’ world. He urged us to use this principle to examine the behaviors in our lives and our societies that we should be a part of changing. Factory farming of animals will be one of the things we look back on as a relic of a less-evolved age.
Update (11/8): Foer’s article, Against Meat, in the NY Times Magazine (10/7)
Related post: In defense of sustainable meat production
Tags: vegetarian
Posted in behavior, food and agriculture | 2 Comments »
In defense of sustainable meat production
Saturday, October 31st, 2009
Nicolette Niman has a column today in the NY Times, “Carnivore’s Dilemma,” in which she argues that meat production, especially beef, has gotten a bad rap because of its climate change impacts. However, as she points out, not all meat production is the same in terms of its greenhouse gas production, similar to an earlier post that not all conventional farming is alike.
Niman’s family runs a livestock ranch network that is more humane and sustainable than your typical factory farm (you might be familiar with their pork products). They have been featured in recent analyses of food ethics by Peter Singer.
She makes a number of good points, showing how conventional meat production contributes to climate change in ways that sustainable livestock farming doesn’t:
- land clearing to make way for pastures or crops to feed livestock
- enteric (gut) fermentation of feed grains that animals are not used to eating, causing the overproduction of methane
- feed grains that are often grown with fertilizers and pesticides using heavy machinery burning fossil fuels, which are energy and carbon intensive and lead to other ecological issues such as toxicity and nutrient pollution
- large manure piles or lagoons that emit other kinds of greenhouse gases like nitrous oxide.
- long supply chains and several processing steps that add energy
I think most people would agree that switching from an industrial mode of meat production to locally grown, more-organic, free-range modes of production is a good thing. If all livestock animals were raised and killed humanely, raised on healthy, locally sourced foods, and sold with minimal processing and transportation, this would be a large step forward in terms of reducing both climate warming and animal cruelty (warning: this video is graphic).
Nevertheless, a conversation about food, global change, and sustainability should have acknowledged major challenges with animal-based food systems—even ones that are more sustainable:
- Meat eating is land intensive. Why? A farmer can raise more calories on a hectare of land by growing plants rather than animals. This occurs for two reasons: (1) Livestock lose a lot of energy to the environment from their own metabolism (cellular respiration) to keep themselves alive. Thus, a lot of the energy consumed in feed simply burns off to the environment rather being turned into a useful form that people can consume. (2) There are many parts of animals that we do not consume or digest (bones, hair, some organs, etc). When you add both of these together, it turns out to be a significant loss of energy. A field of plant crops also faces these issues—plants lose energy from heat and metabolism, and there is a lot of plant biomass we can’t eat or digest. However, by eating animals (a two-level food chain), we encounter these lost sources of energy twice (once with the plants and again with the livestock), whereas we only encounter them once by eating only plants. This means we lose less energy by eating plants compared to eating animals. Put another way, we capture more energy in plant foods and can feed a greater number of people on a given land area. In a world with rising human populations and affluence, which often translates to increased per-capita meat consumption, this means that there will be increasing pressure on land use for the production of meat.
- She advocates the benefits of pasture-raised animals. But where are the pastures going to come from? Modern factory farming fosters the illusion of being land efficient by growing animals in concentrated feedlots. However, these animals are subsidized by a large fraction of land use to grow grains. This estimate suggests that 60% of the U.S. corn supply is fed to livestock. That’s a lot of land. If we eliminated all factory farming and raised all livestock on pasture, we would need to use much of the land currently being used to grow corn, assuming that meat consumption levels remain constant. Sure, that might not lead to a net increase in agricultural area, but it still represents a significant use of agricultural land. The opportunity cost is being able to produce more calories from that land, which will likely be needed to feed more people in a future world of 9 billion. Therefore, sustainability, writ large, is going to require a shift away from meat-based diets and not just a shift from factory farming to sustainable livestock production.
- As Michael Pollan and others have pointed out, factory farms raise animals on grain and hormone supplements to make them develop quickly and move to market in half the time. If we get rid of these things, our rate of livestock production may be cut by up to 50%. If meat consumption remains steady, this means we may actually need to double the pasture area needed, which could lead to new land clearing.
Sustainable meat production is a good step forward, but it’s potentially more complicated with respect to global change than Niman portrays it.
Related post: Are conventional farmers always conventional?
photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kwerfeldein/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Posted in food and agriculture, sustainability | 5 Comments »
“Can Biotech Food Cure World Hunger?”
Friday, October 30th, 2009
A full-throated debate at the NY Times today.
As I’ve alluded to before, my main criticism is that the technology advocates need to get out of their bubble and consider the social implications of these technologies as well as social forces that cause famines in the first place—namely, poverty and poor food distribution. You can increase yields as much as you want, but if people can’t afford or gain access to food, they will starve.
Related post: Food and population defy simplistic portrayals
photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarniebill/ / CC BY 2.0
Posted in food and agriculture, technology | No Comments »
In this week’s issue of Science: Bangladesh at the front lines of adaptation
Friday, October 30th, 2009
In “Hot, Flat, Crowded—And Preparing for the Worst“,1,2 (subscription required) Mason Inman lays out how Bangladesh is already coping with climate change.
Bangladesh is being hit with multiple kinds of challenges:
- salt water incursion as sea level rises, affecting water supplies and crops along the coast
- concentration of rainfall events into fewer but heavier downpours, which leads to both drought in winter months (and failure of crops) as well as severe floods during the summer monsoons that wipe out crops and destroy infrastructure
Some excerpts:
Bangladesh is striving to become a global showcase for climate change adaptation. Earlier this month, its government approved a wide-ranging strategy for dealing with climate change that includes ramping up civil engineering projects to control flooding and protect farmland from rising sea levels. Researchers here are also testing crops that better tolerate floods and drought. Realizing that time-honored approaches to living off the land no longer suffice, Bangladesh has implemented more community-level projects than any other country to gird people for climate shifts.
The World Bank estimates that as much as $100 billion a year is required to prepare people in vulnerable areas for climate change. That’s assuming the world gets its act together to rein in greenhouse gas emissions. If not, says disaster expert Ian Burton of the University of Toronto in Canada, “then the cost of adaptation is going to be enormous.”
It would be interesting for someone to estimate what the more-catastrophic adaptation cost scenarios look like compared to mitigation costs. This would make it clear what it costs to mitigate now vs. trying to adapt later when it’s more difficult to do so (if at all possible by that point).
We essentially have four choices:
(1) mitigate now, adapt now
(2) mitigate now, adapt later
(3) mitigate later, adapt now
(4) mitigate later, adapt later
#1 will likely be the least expensive option in the long term, and it will help us sustain the fewest impacts in the near term. It gives us the most flexibility in terms of how we shape the future, and it buys us the most insurance against catastrophic change. The Stern Review suggested global mitigation costs of 1-2% world GDP (about $600 billion-1.2 trillion/yr). That number goes up the longer we wait. A recent Congressional Budget Office estimate of the Waxman-Markey House bill for a U.S. cap-and-trade program was $22 billion/yr (roughly the cost of a postage stamp per day for the average American household) by the year 2020.
By eliminating the up-front costs of adaptation, #2 might appear to save money, but if we don’t adapt to change we are already committed to, the costs associated with warming impacts may be large as we lose coastal real estate and farmland, sustain infrastructure damage from more severe storms and flooding, lose crop productivity, and face public health concerns from things like heat waves. This option is like refusing to pay a few hundred bucks a year for homeowners insurance but then having to pay several hundreds of thousands of dollars to rebuild after a fire.
#3 doesn’t make much sense because we will end up spending twice on adaptation—once to confront near-term changes we are already committed to and once again to deal with (or at least attempt to deal with) conditions getting much worse. Moreover, mitigating later may be too late to avoid potentially dangerous temperature rise, and it reduces our chances of lowering atmospheric CO2 if climate change is irreversible over hundreds of years.
#4 is truly a losers game. Ecologically, socially, and economically, it would likely be catastrophic in all terms.
An ounce of prevention may indeed be worth a pound of cure.
Related post: Climate adaptation: We have no choice, and it’s not enough
1Inman M. (2009) Hot, Flat, Crowded—And Preparing for the Worst. Science 326:662-663.
2Bowdoin people can access the article here.
Posted in climate adaptation, climate change science, food and agriculture, sea level rise | 2 Comments »
Climate adaptation: We have no choice, and it’s not enough
Saturday, October 24th, 2009
Our global environment is changing in ways that we are beginning to observe in our lifetimes:
- Climate is warming by as much as a degree centigrade per decade in parts of the Polar North.
- Permafrost is thawing.
- Species ranges are shifting northwards in latitude and upwards in altitude.
- Sea level is rising.
- Sea ice is shrinking.
- Polar ice is thinning.
- Pervasive droughts are beginning to grip parts of the world.
- 50 and 100 year rain storms are happening multiple times in a decade.
- Warming is wreaking havoc on cultures around the world. Inuit communities are losing their villages and traditional hunting grounds. Bangladeshi farmers are losing their coastal fields to saltwater incursion. Pacific islanders are poised to lose their atolls. This week, Nature published a story about how the thawing of the Thorthormi Glacier in the Himalayas threatens the nation of Bhutan.
Tim Killeen, head of Geosciences at NSF, once said that if you look at model projections of climate, they all say the same thing up to the year 2030: Based on the gases we have already emitted, and the inertia in the ocean-atmosphere system, we are committed to climate change at least to this point, and there’s little we can do about it. This means we have no choice but to start adapting to things like changing seasonality in temperatures and precipitation, food production, sea level rise, and species distributions. The most recent IPCC synthesis report echoes this.
After 2030, however, models diverge depending on which socioeconomic path we choose. How fast we de-carbonize the economy will determine the extent to which we mitigate warming and how much further adaptation we will need.
There is vigorous debate about the role of adaptation in a world where mitigation is clearly needed. Adaptation has long been assailed by the environmental community as giving up. And now that we need it, old thinking is hard to break.
In a recent article in Yale 360 (Learning to Live With Climate Change Will Not Be Enough), David Orr argues strongly for mitigation over adaptation, although he recognizes that adaptation strategies in the near term are prudent to meet the changes to which we are already committed.
Today, Bowdoin College’s Environmental Studies program, in partnership with the The Nature Conservancy and the McKeen Center for the Common Good, hosted a symposium, “Changing Environments, Changing Societies: Community Responses to Environmental Uncertainty.” It included a mix of international and regional scholars and practitioners, social and natural scientists, and issues like biodiversity, water, food, public health, and infrastructure/urban planning.
What were some of the main outcomes this group synthesized about adaptation?
Posted in behavior, climate adaptation, climate change science, environmentalism, food and agriculture, nature and culture, policy | 2 Comments »
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