Bitter Greens Journal

Philpott lands two pieces on Grist.org

2005-11-29T20:15:00.000-05:00

The first one, a couple of weeks ago, a cheeky piece on how to have a "green" Thanksgiving; the other, just out today, a review of legendary multi-species pastured meat farmer Joel Salatin's new book. These are independent of my regular blogging on Gristmill.org. Check them out.

Philpott deemphasizes Bitter Greens, throws lot (for now) with Grist

2005-11-09T12:52:00.000-05:00

Some readers may have noticed that I haven't been posting much lately. That's because I've essentially moved over to Gristmill, the blog at environmental Web 'zine Grist.org. I've done so not for the lure of cash--Gristmill doesn't pay its bloggers--but in search of a broader readership. While I plan to keep Bitter Greens going long-term, readers interested in following my work should check in at Gristmill. I think if you bookmark this link, you can keep track of what I've been up to. Please comment often, and check in for a couple of paid features I'll be posting there down the line. Meanwhile, the "running critique of industrial agriculture" and the "working manifesto for a liberation politics based on food" goes on.

Seedy business: A sustainable-ag champion gets plowed under at Iowa State

2005-11-03T10:41:00.000-05:00

Plunked down in the land of huge, chemical-addicted grain farms and the nation's greatest concentration of hog feedlots, Iowa State University's Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture has always had a tough row to hoe.

Imagine trying to operate an Anti-Cronyism League from Bush's West Wing, and you get an idea of what the Leopold Center is up against. Industrial agriculture runs the show in Iowa, sustained by regular infusions of federal cash and its government-sanctioned ability to "externalize" the messes it creates. The state grabbed $12.5 billion in federal agriculture subsidies between 1995 and 2004 -- second only to Bush's own home state. Iowa leads all states in hog production: It churned out 14.5 million pigs in 2001 alone, the vast majority from stuffed, environmentally and socially ruinous CAFOs (confined-animal feeding operations).

Yet since springing to life in 1987 by fiat of the Iowa legislature -- funded ingeniously by state taxes on nitrogen fertilizer and pesticide -- the Leopold Center has become an invaluable national resource for critics of industrial agriculture and seekers of new alternatives.

Now, however, a sudden purge at the top has called the Center's much-prized independence from industrial agriculture into question.

The Leopold Center operates under the authority of Iowa State University's College of Agriculture. Last Friday, the college issued a press release announcing that the Leopold Center's director of five years, Fred Kirschenmann, had "accepted a new leadership role as a distinguished fellow of the center."

The college went on to state that it had named an interim director, effective Nov. 1.

Kirschenmann himself, however, tells a more interesting tale than what's contained in the press release's bland prose. He says his move from director to "distinguished fellow" came suddenly and without his own input.

"On Wednesday [Oct. 26] I received a letter from the interim dean asking me to resign by Friday and decide by then if I would accept the position of distinguished fellow at the center," Kirschenmann told me yesterday.

"I wrote her [the interim dean] back telling her I thought she was moving too fast, that there wouldn't be time for a smooth transition. She wrote back that it was a done deal -- she had already named a new director."

Kirschenmann says the interim dean, Wendy Wintersteen, had been on Leopold's advisory board for years and had served on the search committee that hired him in 2000. "She was always very supportive of what we were doing," Kirschenmann says. "Until about two years ago. Then she became very critical."

Her critique centered on the idea that in its work the Leopold Center was neglecting "key stakeholders," Kirschenmann adds. "But she never really clarified who those stakeholders were."

Might she have been refering to agribusiness interests? "You can draw your own conclusions," Kirschenmann says. She never cited any reason for the de facto purge, save for "some verbiage about how I would be free to pursue my own work without having to worry about administrative duties."

To be sure, Iowa State's College of Agriculture draws agribusiness cash the way a penned-up pig wallowing in its own waste draws flies. I have a call into the college for a list of corporate donors; until that call is returned, let it suffice that this is the sort of research the college commonly proffers: A study claiming to show that the genetically modified seed industry deserves a greater "level of intellectual property protection ... than what existed in the North American seed corn market in the late 1990s." Collaborators: a pair of scientists from GM seed titan Pioneer Hi-Bred International Inc., a subsidiary of DuPont.

Here are glowing testimonials from two of the college's "partners": John Deere and Cargill.

Kirschenmann says he accepted the "distinguished fellow" position because Wintersteen assured him he could continue doing his own work on sustainable agriculture. And that work is important. Under Kirschenmann the Leopold Center bluntly criticized and rigorously documented the environmental and social calamities being wrought by industrial agriculture.

Will he continue to be able to do that work at Leopold? "We'll see how it goes," he told me.

In the meantime, I'll be doing some research about which corporations and commodity groups give what to Iowa State's College of Agriculture.

Readers can express their outrage at this violation of academic freedom and blow to independent research on sustainable agriculture by writing to the following parties.

Wendy K. Wintersteen
Interim dean, ISU College of Agriculture
e-mail: wwinters@iastate.edu

Benjamin J. Allen
Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost
Email: theprovost@iastate.edu

This post originally appeared on Gristmill

New posts on Grist and MaverickEats

2005-10-11T13:25:00.000-04:00

Check new posts on Gristmill: here and here; as well as on MaverickEats.

Note to readers: Philpott to blog on Grist

2005-10-05T15:38:00.000-04:00

I've been invited to write about food politics on Grist.org, an environmentalist Web zine that claims 100,000 readers. While the gig pays the exact same amount that Bitter Greens pays, I can't resist the opportunity to reach a broader (by a factor of about 1,000) audience.

My plan is to do shorter, pithier pieces on Grist, and to keep doing longer, more analytical pieces here.

Here's my first post on Grist.

Dominant traits II: Why GM soy looks set to swamp Europe

2005-10-03T11:37:00.000-04:00

Maverick Farms lies on a dirt road halfway up a steep hollow in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Twenty years ago all the land around here was agricultural. Each family generally had a couple of milk cows, a pig or two, and a garden plot to feed themselves; for cash, they planted cabbage (to be sold to a nearby sauerkraut factory, long gone) and tobacco.

All of that has changed. The word "farm" has become a marketing tool to move real estate, and little else. The only other entity with "farm" attached to its name on our road is "Clark's Creek Farm"--a suburban-style subdivision.

Our area is a magnet for SUV-driving second-home seekers and the real-state flacks who serve them. Up the road from us, the dirt flies as machines rip into the mountainside to create new lots for fancy homes. Starting at about 7:00 a.m., the rooster's hoarse cry is drowned out by the steady roar of giant trucks careening up the mountain, carrying construction material and machinery.

Nearly everyone up there wants the road to be paved--it would make construction so much easier, and you could comfortably drive your SUV faster than 20 mph to get up and down the mountain. We say: Hell, no. We're joined in our refusal by two neighbors, people with deep family roots in the area who don't want to see our holler turned into a suburb of Orlando or Charlotte. We refuse to sign the papers that would force the road's paving.

In the end, we will lose and the developers and second-homers will win. They will have forcibly created the logic that makes the road's paving "necessary." Carve enough mini-mansions into the mountainside, cram the road with enough construction trucks and "utility" vehicles, and of course it will have to be paved. It will become a safety issue. The road as it is will have to be condemned; a handsome strip of asphalt will rise up in its place. Progress! And goodbye to our chicken shed and springhouse.

I tell this bitter story to illustrate what's going on with genetically modified (GM) food in Europe. Bear with me.

An organization called Agricultural Biotechnology Europe, a PR front for Monsanto, Syngenta, Dupont, et al, recently commissioned a study of the costs to food conglomerates of pursuing a "GM avoidance" strategy.

First some background. Because of high-profile campaigning from the likes of Greenpeace, a large swath of European society has rejected GM food and demands that it be labeled as such at the supermarket. Those demands have forced grain-processing giants such as Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill to do something they hate doing: make distinctions in what they consider to be a sea of sameness. No longer can a soybean be a soybean be a soybean. Now they must separate GM from non-GM--a service for which they naturally charge a premium.

The dilemma mostly centers on soybeans, which Europe mostly imports from the Americas. The continent grows most of its own corn, which thus far is almost totally non-GM.

When Roundup ready soybeans first sprang to life in US fields in 1996, ADM and Cargill solved the Europe problem by diverting US soybeans away from the European food market (though they kept GM soy flowing into the animal-feed market), and sent the Europeans Brazilian soy. At that time, Brazil had banned GM seeds.

In the meantime, Roundup Ready soy gained a foothold in Brazil, as farmers bought the seeds on the black market from Argentina and then saved them for future planting, thumbing their noses at Monsanto. Then, earlier this year, the Brazilian government approved the planting of GM crops. That means the supply of non-GM soy has been shrinking.

For European food conglomerates bending to consumer pressure to produce "non-GM" food, that will mean higher prices for non-GM soy, the study argues. Already, the study reckons that 51 percent of the soy grown globally is GM; and fully 90 percent is "dominated by GM-origin material," meaning soy that's stored without any careful separation of GM and non-GM material. So supplies of non-GM soy are already tight.

Right now, non-GM soy draws a 5-10 percent premium over GM soy on the market. As supplies dwindle, the study says, the premium could go as high as 25 percent. (Interestingly, Brazilian farmers get no premium for growing non-GM soy; all the extra cash now accrues to the processor, the study reports.)

Bottom line: If you want GM-free processed food, you must pay Archer Daniels Midland a nice premium. I predict that as the premium grows, European consumer resistance to GM food will fade--and Monsanto's seeds will take over the Brazilian savanna much as they have the Midwestern plains and the pampas of Argentina.

And here is where we arrive at the conceptual link between land politics in my area of North Carolina and food politics in Europe. Just as developers and vacationers here have created the necessity of fulfilling their goal--turning our road into a suburban-style throughway--the GM seed trusts have overwhelmed the food system with their seeds, creating conditions that will eventually force acceptance.

Like so many BGJ posts, this one will end with a plea for consumers to remove themselves from the commodity system as much as possible by avoiding the supermarket and seeking sustenance at the farmers market and from backyard and neighborhood plots.

Dominant traits: Can the seed trusts be busted?

2005-09-28T16:56:00.000-04:00

According to a recent study by ETC Group, the world's ten-largest seed vendors control about half of the global seed market.

By the standards of late capitalism, that's a modest concentration level. In the United States, for example, the top four beef packers pack more than 80 percent of the nation's beef. Microsoft famously owns more than 90 percent of the world's computer operating system market. Consolidation of suppliers is as American as the SUV and the Apache helicopter.

Nevertheless, seeds lie at the heart of all organized food production, and thus at the heart of human culture for the past 10,000 years. Perhaps the seed trade deserves a closer look.

At the top of the seed pile, the above-linked ETC report shows, we find Monsanto, the former "life-sciences" giant that mutated into a gene-splicing agribusiness behemoth . It vaulted over rival Dupont as the world's largest seed supplier in March, when it snapped up fruit-and-vegetable seed titan Seminis for $1.4 billion. Below Monsanto and Dupont we find Syngenta, the Swiss agribusiness firm. The three companies, like genetic experiments they might conjure up in one of their labs, share at least two sinister traits.

The first is that they are all among the world's largest pesticide companies. I'll address that topic another time.

The other shared trait is this: In addition to peddling physical seeds, they also peddle what's known in the business as "traits." This is the precise genetic coding that's artificially inserted into a seed's germoplasm to create a desired characteristic--say, the ability to withstand herbicides like Monsanto's Roundup, which otherwise obliterate all plant life on contact. These companies can and do license these "triats" and sell them to other seed purveyors.

To put it in computer terms, we're looking at a kind of software/hardware model: the seeds are the hardware and the traits are the software.

In the computer world, these functions tend to be distinct: Microsoft dominates desktop software; Dell tops the market in PCs. Even Bush's Justice Department and SEC, both of which operate squarely under the heel of Wall Street in anti-trust matters, might squack if those two behemoths merged. In seeds, however, the giants perform both functions without raising a regulatory eyebrow.

At first glance, comparing the the seed market to the PC market looks like a stretch. Microsoft owns nearly 100 percent of the desktop software market, while Monsanto, Dupont, and Syngenta together control only about a quarter of the seed market.

But a closer look at individual at the fast-emerging genetically modified (GM) seed market shows Monsanto weilds a Microsoft-like heft. The ETC report reveals that 88 percent of the world's GM crop acreage is planted with seeds containing Monsanto-owned traits. More than 90 percent of the world's genetically modified soybean crops contain Monsanto's genetic goodies. For maize (field corn, the stuff that's ground into industrial-food inputs like high-fructose corn syrup or fed to confined livestock, not the food you eat off the cob), that number is 97 percent.

As for cotton, Monsanto traits account for 61 percent of the GM seed market. In April of this year, Monsanto spent $300 million to snap up Emergent Genetics, the third-largest cotton seed company in both India and the US.

Let's think about what that deal means. Before its sellout, Emergent, like many independent seed purveyors, could buy GM traits from the three giants: Monsanto, Dupont, and Syngenta; it could shop around for the best price. Now, it will presumably only use Monsanto traits.

By selling both physical seeds and traits--hardware and software--Monsanto puts itself in the position of cornering individual markets. That's the sort of thing that used to set an attorney general's teeth on edge. Our last couple of AG's though, have been much more interested in spying on citizens and justifying torture of suspected enemies of the state.

Now, so far, Monsanto's dominance extends only to the largest, most lucrative, and (not coincidentally) heavily subsidized crops: soybeans, cotton, corn. What happens if it turns its R&D attention to fruits and vegetables? Can the debut of GM bitter greens be far off? (Rather than sue me, maybe Monsanto should corner the market on the seeds of arugula, watercress, Tokyo bikuna, etc. That would bring Maverick Farms to its knees!)

Here we run against the sinister implications of Monsanto's Seminis buy. To date, attempts to genetically alter fruits and vegetables have failed miserably. A few years ago, Monsanto magnanimously bestowed upon Kenya the gift of a GM sweet potato, designed in a lab to increase yield. It was easy, then, to paint GM opponents as racist. The trouble was, the Monsanto sweet potato proved a bust in the field, as this article shows.

And Seminis itself grew out of the dashed GM hopes of a Mexican plutocrat named Alfonso Romo, whose late 1990s buying binge eventually made Seminis the world's largest fruit and vegetable seed company. (Romo is part of that generation of Mexican businessmen, the leading figure of which is the telecom baron Carlos Slim, who attained lavish wealth in the 1990s aided by a great burst of state-sponsored cronyism applauded by the IMF, Wall Street, and Washington.) Here's how the Wall Street journal described Romo's GM dreams in 1999:

[Romo] envisions creating utopian vegetables: non-browning lettuce, broccoli with enhanced cancer-fighting properties, and produce of all kinds that won't wrinkle, spoil or blemish. Whether his own scientists or others develop the means to accomplish those goals, he believes he will benefit. "Seeds are software," he says. "And we have the seeds."

The above-linked article hails a joint venture between Romo's company and Monsanto to create Roundup Ready lettuce--an effort that seems, thankfully, to have gone bust. Romo's company claims responsibility for those ignominious and flavorless "baby carrots" one finds stuffed into bags on supermarket shelves, and it brought to market seeds for a "cucumber that yields a hamburger-size pickle slice designed to lie perfectly between a pair of buns," the Journal reports.

That's bad stuff; but what I really found offensive was that "Mr. Romo's company lowered the heat factor of the jalapeno pepper, helping salsa pull even with ketchup in the U.S. in dollar sales." The man seems intent on breeding any flavor at all out of American food.

Luckily, to my mind, the market eventually frowned on Romo's efforts. Within two years of the Journal article, the U.S. business press had knocked Romo from his pedestal. His biotech schemes faltered on the supermarket shelf or on the petri dish, and his company became sodden with debt.

Here is Business Week in 2001:

Today, it's a chastened Romo who surveys the wreckage of his worldwide empire. The 50-year-old, hailed as a visionary seven years ago when he first invested in agricultural biotechnology and seed companies, now is struggling to pay creditors and remain afloat. An agreement restructuring Romo's corporate debt is expected with the banks any day. But Romo's problem remains: He grew too big, too fast.

Eventually, Romo restructured his seed holdings and created Seminis, which, as stated above, he recently sold to Monsanto for $1.4 billion. A corporate tightrope walker, he managed to stay on as chief of the division.

The deal immediately posed moral problems for small-scale farmers, including Maverick Farms. Both of our main seed suppliers--Johnny's and Fedco--buy and resell seeds from Seminis. As this thoughtful articleby Matthew Dillon of the Seed Alliance shows, Johnny's and Fedco will likely have to continue buying certain seeds from Seminis; its market heft is so great that it essentially holds a monopoly position in certain varieties, including heirlooms like Early Girl tomatoes.

And it's that market heft, combined with Monsanto's R&D muscle, that conjures a dire picture: What if Monsanto plunges seriously into GM vegetables? Many Wall Street analysts thought Monsanto wildly overpaid for Seminis, a slow-growing business with loads of debt. The only way the deal made sense was if Monsanto really thought it could cash in on GM veggies. Will it be allowed to dominate both the vegetable seed market and germoplasm market?

Today's Senate approval of the pro-industry zealot John Roberts as chief justice of the Supreme Court bodes ill for the future of U.S. antitrust law.

Ladies and gentlemen of the small-scale sustainable-farming world, it's time we got more serious about seed saving.

Roundup, ready

2005-09-22T16:10:00.000-04:00

Over the past 72 hours, Organic Consumers Association network members have deluged the U.S. Senate with 35,000 emails and 10,000 telephone calls. Thank you for your support. This nearly unprecedented grassroots upsurge has temporarily rattled Congress and the industry, delaying the initial Sneak Attack in the Senate on organic standards, resulting in a compromise amendment September 21 calling for “further study of the issue."

The OCA warns, however, that "another, possibly even more serious, Sneak Attack" is brewing in the House/Senate Conference Committee." Check out its latest missive on the issue here.

Organically groan: working conditions on California's organic farms
While it's important to preserve the organic label's integrity in the supermarket shelf, it's even more important to interrogate what it means in the field. Bitter Greens Journal recently became aware of an interesting study published in the Winter-Spring 2005 edition of the University of California-Davis' Sustainable Agriculture Newsletter.

Authored by Aimee Shreck, Christy Getz, and Gail Feenstra, the study examines the attitudes of California organic growers toward farm labor. The results make melancholy reading.

The authors point out that:

A common misperception among farmers and consumers is that organic certification already addresses working conditions for farmworkers, and that because organic agriculture rules forbid many toxic pesticides, it is often assumed that organic is “better” for farmworkers than conventional agriculture.

U.S. organic accreditation standards have no work-place conditions stipulations, the authors write. And given the defensive posture that the organic movement finds itself taking viz. industry, it's hard to imagine that changing any time soon (see above).

But the study doesn't paint a picture of mega-farms shamelessly exploiting workers. The authors sent their survey to 500 organic farmers; 188 returned them. Here's how the authors describe their respondents:

Like most organic farmers in California, the majority of the farmers responding to our survey operate at a small-scale in terms of area farmed and annual sales. Almost three-quarters (73.8 %) of respondents farm 50 acres or less, and 64 % of the farms reported less than $50,000 in annual sales...Two-thirds of the farmers responding hire workers in addition to their families at least part of the year.

I can tell you from experience that farming at that scale throws off little spare income for worker benefits; I'm surprised that such a high percentage can afford to hire help. That they can illustrates the relative abundance of cheap immigrant labor in California (although, as I reported reported recently, the cheap pool of labor to which California vegetable growers have grown addicted may be drying up.)

Not surprisingly, there's little support among this hard-scrabble lot for adding a workers' rights amendment to organic standards, the authors report. Here's a key sentence:

Most employers in the study do not (and perceive that they cannot afford to) provide things like living wages and health insurance. Indeed, many small-scale farmers like those who participated in this study do not provide insurance for themselves.

Nor, evidently, is their strong support for the right of collective bargaining, a right agricultural workers won in California some 30 years ago. Fully 40 percent of respondents told the authors they "strongly disagree" that ag workers should have the right to unionize. Amazing.

The report really ends up being as much about the sad state of organic farming as it is about labor conditions in the field. As corporations such as Kraft and Dean Foods rush into organic food to exploit its 20 percent compounded annual growth rate in the retail market, farmers--even in the California, land of Berkeley and Alice Waters, the promised land of organic ag--are languishing.

"Our findings question expectations that organic agriculture systems necessarily foster social, or even economic sustainability for most farmers and farmworkers involved," the authors declare. "Indeed, many farmers themselves forgo the kinds of employment benefits available to workers in most other sectors."

Their conclusion seems spot-on:

We suggest that to create production conditions that are favorable to a broader conception of social justice, change is needed in the entire food system, not just at the point of production. Indeed, to move beyond the silence about labor within the sustainable agriculture and organic communities, we must situate these issues in the context of the entire food chain (production, processing, distribution and consumption).

Wal-Mart invades Guatemala, Chili's does the Middle East
In the West, overall food sales have stagnated, growing at about the same anemic rate as the population. That has made multinational food corporations scramble to keep profits growing at a rate that please their investors.

One strategy has been to move into organic foods, sales of which, as stated above, are growing at a 20 percent annual clip. The results of that trend have been well-documented by the Organic Consumers Association.

The other major strategy has been to expand to the global south, where traditional food customs largely hold out. The dominance of small, informal marketing networks in places like Guatemala are seen as an "opportunity" by corporate strategists seeking high returns on invested capital. This post, from way back in March, analyzes that phenomenon.

Thus Wal-Mart, which relies increasingly on grocery sales, has conquered Mexico, establishing itself in less than 10 years as the nation's largest employer and number-one grocer. And now, like Cortez himself, it's gazing south to Guatemala.

Meanwhile, Brinker Inc. owner of several dreadful restaurant chains including Chili's, has announced it's moving into "Latin America, the Middle East and eventually China and India." The company hopes eventually to have 40 percent of its total stores in those places.

I wish both corporations a hostile and disastrous reception in their adopted new homes.

New blog launched: MaverickEats

2005-09-21T21:59:00.000-04:00

We've launched a food-oriented blog at Maverick Farms called MaverickEats. Check it out.

The organic label controversy: an update and an exchange

2005-09-21T14:18:00.000-04:00

As I reported here Monday, the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) raised an alarm that a Senate Committee might, as early as Tuesday, "acting in haste and near-total secrecy," make serious changes to national organic standards.

Nothing substantial has happened yet, and OCA now reports that the vote in question, involving a rider on the 2006 Agriculture Appropriations Bill, could still take place sometime this week.

Meanwhile, Bitter Greens has been trying to sort out the complicated politics behind what's happening on the Hill. I thank two people who have supplied me with some of the e-mails that have been flying around the sustainable-ag world in response to the doings on the Hill: Steve Gilman, an authority on community-supported agriculture and owner of the Ruckytucks Farm in Stillwater, NY, (see his comment on my post from yesterday); and Tana Butler, who runs the excellent California blog Small Farms.

As you'll see from the exhange below, the debate is more complicated than the Organic Consumers Association lets on. I don't have time to comment on or contexualize the exchange below; I leave it for readers to sort out.

What I will add to the debate is this:
1) While I think the Organic Consumers Association is simplifying things a bit, I agree absolutely that no changes to organic code should be made in a secretive senate committee as a rider on a huge bill. The organic movement should hash these issues out on its own, in public, and present Congress with a unified agenda; failing that, Congress should hold public hearings about the future of organic and decide how to proceed on that basis. Therefore, I agree with OCA that consumers and farmers should call their senators and demand that they vote down this rider.
2) Over time, as consumers increasingly flock to organic products and as organics continue to outperform a stagnate overall food market, the likes of Kraft and Dean Foods will exert more and more pressure to bend organic code to their own ends. While I understand why organic-farming pioneers like Steve Gilman will always fight to keep the organic label meaningful, and I support them, I also think it's time to start thinking beyond organic. For consumers, it's not enough to shop at Whole Foods (which calls itself a "certified organic supermarket," or some such nonsense) or eat Amy's Organics TV dinners. They'll have to do the work at identifying and supporting the growers in their area who are practicing ecologically and socially sound farming--certified organic or not.

What follows is a debate between two women who have been deeply involved in the organic movement about the wisdom of changes now before the Senate. The debate took place on SANET, a list serve operated by Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education, known widely as SARE.

[Note: The OTA they bandy about is the Organic Trade Association, the group that's behind the rider in the Senate. In my post yesterday, I characterized OTA as "essentially a front group for industry players that want to squeeze the organic label for profit; its member list includes Kraft and Horizon, the organic arm of dairy giant Dean Foods." While Kraft and Horizon are members, my characterization now looks too broad. As Steve Gilman commented on my blog yesterday, " I understand that even some of [OTA's] own Board members were not consulted concerning this hasty and dangerous action of opening the Organic Foods Production Act to further meddling by the powers that be."

In fact, Emily Brown Rosen, whose letter below establishes her as a sharp critic of OTA's agenda on the Hill, works for a group that's a member of OTA.]

Here is the debate:

Emily Brown Rosen
Organic Research Associates, LLC
P.O. Box 5
Titusville NJ 08560
609-737-8630
fax: 609-737-6652
ebrownrosen@earthlink.net

Dear SANET,
Yes, there are a lot of broad, simplistic statements being made on both sides about the proposed change to OFPA put forth by OTA and industry . Unfortunately we are dealing with a sudden action that has not been open to public debate, and the resulting tendency to overstate the issues, perhaps on both sides, in an effort to engage action one way or the other. OTA's proposed amendment was not provided to OTA members or the public until Sept. 19th, at least 10 days after it was circulated to the Senate.

Regarding the impact of a prohibition of synthetics in processing, it is true that many multi-ingredient processed food contains synthetics. These will be impacted by the Harvey ruling, and require a large number of products to be labeled "made with organic" ingredients, or to reformulate. It won't necessarily be harder to make organic TV dinners, but it will be required to labeled them as "made with organic ingredients" TV dinners- which might not be such a bad thing. Some consumer groups think this is a very good thing.

The organic industry claims this will reduce sales and devastate the market for organic, but according to OTA's own figures, in 2003 the combined sales of packaged food plus sauces/condiments and snack foods categories totals $2.039B, or 19.6% of total organic food sales. (2004 Manufacturers Survey) Although this is a substantial portion of the organic food market, it is not a majority of the marketplace, and it is likely that quite a good percentage of these products will be able to figure out ways to reformulate with natural additives, and that adjustments to the National List can be made on a number of substances now listed as synthetic that are in fact available in natural or organic forms.

OTA has also been repeating some misinformation - that baking soda is synthetic (it is not, it is on the list at 205.605(a) as natural), that all pectin will be ruled out (high methoxy pectin is natural) and that processors must relabel without the USDA seal by the end of 2005 ( not true - they have until June 2007.)

While it is possible there does need to be a change to OFPA to define and limit the types of synthetics allowed in organic processing, there has been no public discussion of the strategy to do this, nor an attempt to consider mitigation of the problem through regulation change. As OTA has noted in the summary they sent to Congress (still not public) , the original intention of Congress was to limit and control the number of synthetics allowed in organic production. This is reflected in the limited categories allowed in crop and livestock production, (copper, sulfur, vitamins, minerals etc) . OTA's proposal does not "control" the use of synthetics in processing, it is a wide open allowance with no restriction on categories, and no criteria for evaluation (those that are currently in use have been struck down by the Harvey suit.)

The OTA language also needs close vetting as there are a number of other consequences, such as lack of inclusion of processing aids, and a completely vague and unrestricted process proposed for determination of commercial availability.

The proposed OTA "fix" on dairy feed allows for 3rd year transitional feed to be feed to animals in conversion, which is a long time NOSB recommendation and in the current NOP rule. It is arguable whether a law change is needed to restore this provision. It does not address the critical issues of dairy herd replacement animals. It is likely that USDA will remove the requirement that "once entire distinct dairy herd has been converted to organic.. . all animals must be under organic management from the last third of gestation" since it is connected in the regulation to the allowance of the 80/20 feed exemption that was overturned by Harvey. This means young animals could be managed conventionally for the first year of life, including the use of antibiotics before conversion on an ongoing basis. If the OFPA is to be changed, this should be on the table.

Organic farmers have put up with a steady raising of the bar on organic standards - such as the requirement for organic seed, organic transplants, 100% organic feed, no list 3 inerts, strict composting standards, no transitioning slaughter stock, no pressure treated wood in contact with crops….the list goes on and on. It is understandable that processors need to have stability in the regulations, but at this point, to open OFPA and add synthetics in processing with no restrictions, with a lack of criteria, and vague allowances for "emergency" non organic ingredients is a step backward, and could undermine consumer confidence in the label.

A working group organized by the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture made a good faith attempts made to date to avoid this so called "cut off your nose" situation. This included some members the NCSA Organic Steering Committee, RAFI, CFS, National Organic Coalition, Beyond Pesticides, Consumers Union, National Cooperative Grocers Association, and several others who invited OTA and the industry to come to the table to work out possible middle ground solutions. The hope was to find solutions could actually strengthen OFPA while addressing some of the critical impacts of the Harvey decision. However, repeated efforts at communication and compromise were rebuffed, finally after a 5 hour meeting on Sept 15 in Washington. Although productive discussion and many points of common ground were established, OTA chose not to come back to the table and went forward with its proposal to the Senate unchanged.

The organic community has a lot of clout with Congress when unified, it is too bad that these issues could not have been addressed in a more inclusive and public manner to avoid this type of division. Quite a few people tried hard.
regards,

Emily Brown Rosen
Organic Research Asociates
OTA Member, and co-author of the 1999 OTA American Organic Standards
NOFA NJ Board of Directors
Midwest Organic Services Association Advisory Council
Pennsylvania Certified Organic staff

----------------------------------------------------------------

Grace Gershuny wrote:

Dear SANET:
I'm pasting in below the Organic Trade
Association's action alert on the same subject
but opposite position as that circulated by the
Organic Consumers Association (OCA). Most of
OCA's statements are flat out lies, and if the
results of the Harvey lawsuit are allowed to
stand there will be a dramatic loss of markets
for organic farmers, as well as products
available to organic consumers. Talk about
reversing 35 years of effort by the organic
community--OCA's position is a classic case of
trying to cut off your nose to spite your
face. Check out the factual information
presented by OTA and decide for yourself.

Thanks for listening,

Grace Gershuny

P.S. I have been working as a consultant to OTA
for the past year or so, most recently in helping
its members with various strategies to mitigate
the damage done by Harvey. But I am writing this
on my own nickel, as a longtime organic advocate,
author, grower, teacher, and, yes, former NOP staff member.

Action Alert from the Organic Trade Association

Sept. 19, 2005

This News Flash includes a summary of OTA's
proposal to Congress. The OTA Board of Directors
has given its unanimous support. If you receive
inquiries about this issue from your customers,
please use the information OTA is providing in
this News Flash to clarify any misperceptions or misunderstandings.

OTA's stance: The Organic Trade Association
Supports a Return to the Status Quo and Requests
that Congress Act after June 2005 Court Ruling.

Key Points

* The federal rules authorizing the use of
the USDA Organic seal on food products are five
years old, and are the touchstone of mainstream consumer acceptance of organic products.
* The current organic rules are the result of
adoption by USDA of recommendations from a
citizen advisory board created by Congress and 10
years of notice and comment rulemaking based on those recommendations.
* As might be expected with a new federal
program as comprehensive as the nearly 500-page
organic rule, certain parts of the rules were
found to be inconsistent with the statute.

The June 2005 Court Ruling Threatens the Booming Organic Market
* The June 2005 court ruling impacted three parts of the federal rules.
* First, it effectively blocked the common
use of harmless substances like baking soda,
pectin, ascorbic acid, vitamins and minerals,
etc., the so-called "allowed synthetics" in
processed food products bearing the USDA Organic seal.
* Second, it required the rules relied upon
by small dairy farms transitioning to organic
management practices be revised, with the
unintended result that making the change will be
significantly more costly after the ruling.
* Third, it disallowed the procedure
implemented by the Secretary's organic certifying
agents for recognizing the commercial
unavailability of organic agricultural products.

The Court Preserved the Status Quo for One Year=20
to Allow Congress to Remedy the Problem

* To avoid consumer confusion and market
disruption, the Court declined to immediately
vacate the rules to allow Congress to consider its ruling.
* Due to crop cycles and the lead time
necessary for product formulation, labeling, and marketing of organic products to consumers,
legislative clarification must be immediate.
* The businesses that produce and market the
majority of America's certified organic farm
products will have to drop product lines or
re-label them without the USDA seal by the end of 2005.
* Some have estimated that up to 90% of the
multi-ingredient products that today bear the
USDA Organic seal will have to be removed or
relabeled without using the USDA seal.
* To compensate for the lower value consumers
place on products not "organic enough" to carry
the USDA seal, some companies may reformulate
with less organic content or discontinue certain product lines.

The Solution is to Clarify the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990
* It is critical that Congress seize the
opportunity created by the Court and act before the end of the year.
* The necessary clarifications will stabilize
the marketplace for farmers, and businesses that
contract with farmers for organic agricultural
commodities, and do nothing more than restore the
status quo -- an interpretation of the statute by
the citizen advisory board that was created by
Congress to advise the Secretary on organic matters.

The organic label and beyond

2005-09-20T16:47:00.000-04:00

What, precisely, is going on with the organic label in Congress?

I found the e-mail I received last night from the Organic Consumers Association (posted here) troubling, important---and somewhat confusing.

Why, suddenly, was the Senate "acting in haste and near-total secrecy" to water down organic?

From what I can tell, the story goes like this. In 2002, a Maine organic blueberry farmer and National Organic Program inspector named Arthur Harvey took exception to the USDA's newly rolled out Organic Food rule, which sought to codify organic standards. Harvey charged that certain aspects of the Rule amounted to a de facto loosening of Organic Foods Production act of 1990.

For one, the Organic Rule allowed processors to use conventional ingredients “not commercially available in organic form” in foods that would be labeled organic--which certainly cedes a lot of power to processors that are using the organic label only as a marketing tool. Next, it sanctioned the use of synthetic substances in food processing. Finally, it allowed dairy farmers to use 20 percent conventional feed in the first nine months of a dairy herd’s one-year conversion to organic.

So Harvey sued the USDA, using the agency's then-chief Anne Veneman. The case is now inscribed in the annals of agriculture history as Harvey v. Veneman.

The suit initially failed--a U.S, judge and a Maine judge essentially sided with Veneman. But in January of 2005, an appeals court sided with Harvey--but it didn't spell out how the ruling should be enforced.

To make a complicated story simple, while stakeholders with a genuine interest in preserving "organic" as a meaningful label tried to sort out how to respond to Harvey v. Veneman, the big processors, under the flag of the Organic Trade Association (OTA), cobbled together a pro-industry agenda and presented it to the Senate a solution to the problem of how to enforce Harvey v. Venemen.

The OTA is essentially a front group for industry players that want to squeeze the organic label for profit; its member list includes Kraft and Horizon, the organic arm of dairy giant Dean Foods. (Horizon, the number-one seller of organic milk, is notorious for keeping many of its cows on feedlots.)

The strategy seems to be to use the dispute over issues raised by Harvey to get Congress to take power from the National Organic Standards Board’s (NOSB), which has a strict view of what organic means, and hand it over to the USDA, generally the handmaiden of industry. Such a legislative move would be difficult to challenge in court,

Thus Harvey's perfectly reasonable lawsuit appears to have had the unintended consequence of giving industry the chisel with which to puncture federal law around what "organic" means.

While I fully agree with the Organic Consumers Association that everything must be done to fight this shady effort, and I applaud Harvey for doing his best to preserve "organic," I also think it's time to go back to basics: Grow your own food when you can, buy from growers in your area whenever possible, and reject as much as you can processed food.

Urgent: Organic standards under attack

2005-09-19T23:12:00.000-04:00

I'm on the e-mail list of the the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), which sent me the following urgent missive this evening. Key sentence: 'In the past, grassroots mobilization and mass pressure by organic consumers have been able to stop the USDA and Congress from degrading organic standards. This time Washington insiders tell us that the “fix is already in.' So we must take decisive action now."

Here's the e-mail, along with information on how to respond:

The Organic Consumers Association (OCA) needs your immediate help to stop Congress and the Bush administration from seriously degrading organic standards. After 35 years of hard work, the U.S. organic community has built up a multi-billion dollar alternative to industrial agriculture, based upon strict organic standards and organic community control over modification to these standards.

Now, large corporations such as Kraft, Wal-Mart, & Dean Foods--aided and abetted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) are moving to lower organic standards by allowing a Bush appointee to create a list of synthetic ingredients that would be allowed organic production. Even worse these proposed regulatory changes will reduce future public discussion and input and take away the National Organic Standards Board’s (NOSB) traditional lead jurisdiction in setting standards. What this means, in blunt terms. is that USDA bureaucrats and industry lobbyists, not consumers, will now have more control over what can go into organic foods and products. (Send a quick letter to your Congressperson online here: http://www.organicconsumers.org/sos.cfm)

Tomorrow, Tuesday, Sept. 20, acting in haste and near-total secrecy, the U.S. Senate will vote on a “rider” to the 2006 Agriculture Appropriations Bill that will reduce control over organic standards from the National Standards Board and put this control in the hands of federal bureaucrats in the USDA (remember the USDA proposal in 1997-98 that said that genetic engineering, toxic sludge, and food irradiation would be OK on organic farms, or USDA suggestions in 2004 that heretofore banned pesticides, hormones, tainted feeds, and animal drugs would be OK?).

For the past week in Washington, OCA has been urging members of the Senate not to reopen and subvert the federal statute that governs U.S. Organic standards (the Organic Food Production Act—OFPA), but rather to let the organic community and the National Organic Standards resolve our differences over issues like synthetics and animal feed internally, and then proceed to a open public comment period. Unfortunately most Senators seem to be listening to industry lobbyists more closely than to us. We need to raise our voices. (Send a quick letter to your Congressperson online here: http://www.organicconsumers.org/sos.cfm)

In the past, grassroots mobilization and mass pressure by organic consumers have been able to stop the USDA and Congress from degrading organic standards. This time Washington insiders tell us that the “fix is already in.” So we must take decisive action now. We need you to call your U.S. Senators today. We need you to sign the following petition and send it to everyone you know. We also desperately need funds to head off this attack in the weeks and months to come. Thank you for your support. Together we will take back citizen control over organic standards and preserve organic integrity.

* Call the Capital Switchboard here: 877-762-8762
* Send a quick letter to your Congressperson online here:
http://www.organicconsumers.org/sos.cfm

Thanks,

ORGANIC CONSUMERS ASSOCIATION
6771 South Silver Hill Drive
Finland, MN 55603
Phone: (218)-353-7454 Fax: (218) 353-7652

The fault lines of industrial agriculture, Part I: an overview

2005-09-14T13:31:00.000-04:00

"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain a conception of history that is in keeping with that insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism."
--Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," 1940 (see Benjamin, Illuminations, editor Hannah Arendt)

The news from industrial agriculture's trenches has been bleak lately, providing a stark glimpse at the fault lines that run through our food system--and possible openings for a new system that values the local, the delicious, the environmentally sane, and the socially just.

The crises of industrial agriculture
Hurricane Katrina has exposed just how much grain farmers rely on foreign markets to sop up their huge surplus. The hurricane knotted up the Mississippi close to the port, pushing down the price of grain and leaving farmers in the southern grain belt holding mountains of product they can't sell. (Farmers in the northern grain belt haven't harvested yet; the Mississippi is expected to be open by the time they do.)

Then there’s the energy crunch. Well before Katrina caused a spike in gas prices, analysts were already fearing that soaring fuel and fertilizer prices would force farmers to pay about $3 billion more in energy costs this year than they did last year.

In Montana, before Katrina reared up, a bushel of wheat was fetching $2.85--40 cents less than the cost of production. "I've lost more money in the past five years than I made in the previous 35," one farmer complained to the Billings Gazette).

While that farmer can still count on the USDA to step in and make up for at least some of those losses, the subsidy system is under attack. The World Trade Organization looks increasingly serious about forcing the industrialized nations to slash agricultural subsidies. The United States subsidies its farmers at the rate of about $17 billion per year, the bulk of which goes to large-scale grain farmers in the Midwest. The next Farm Bill, due in 2007, could well be considerably less generous.

Things aren't much better in central California, home to a huge concentration of the nation's fruit and vegetable production. Fuel and fertilizer prices, of course, are taking their toll. But unlike their counterparts in the Midwest, who rely on huge gas-guzzling combines to harvest their crops, fruit and vegetable farmers still need human hands for picking. For years, California landowners have quietly relied on a steady influx of cheap, undocumented workers from Mexico for that task.

Now, reports Associated Press, that stream is drying up. Nativist political pressure has inspired the federal government to more tightly enforce the southern border, making it more difficult and dangerous to cross. Meanwhile, a nationwide housing boom has been drawing more and more migrant workers out of the fields and orchards and onto construction sites, where the work is steadier and higher paid.

Raisin growers are complaining that a brewing labor shortage has put their harvest in jeopardy. "We just don't have enough people, and it's a perishable crop," one grower told the Associated Press.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, more than half of the nation's farm workers are here illegally. A dearth of undocumented workers could thus force up wages among pickers. As I've said before, that would seriously squeeze farm profits, since farm owners have little leverage to increase prices for their goods in a buyers' market dominated by a few huge processors and retailers.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the labor-rights movement among undocumented workers in California is showing signs of life. Last week, the United Farm Workers (UFW) declared victory in a two-year contract battle with Gallo, the behemoth that's responsible for one in four bottles of wine produced in California.

Now, all of these crises can and will be managed in ways that preserve the status quo. It's not for nothing that Bush chose Chuck Conner, former de facto lobbyist for industrial-food warhorse Archer Daniels Midland, as his deputy secretary of agriculture.

But it's not too late for sustainable-agriculture advocates to grab the initiative. Over the next weeks, Bitter Greens Journal will focus on the crises of industrial agriculture, and the opportunities they present for real change.

Saxby Chambliss and family values

2005-09-06T22:17:00.002-04:00

Saxby Chambliss, R.-Ga, who serves as chair of the powerful Senate Agriculture Committee, has been a vigorous advocate of agricultural subsidies. When President Bush hinted earlier this year he might have to cut ag subsidies to help offset surging military spending, Chambliss rushed to the rescue. He got Bush to agree to preserve subsidies for high-volume commodities like corn, soybeans, and (particularly dear to Chambliss' Georgia heart) cotton. Any cuts that need to be wrung out of the USDA will come from conservation and poverty programs such as food stamps, not commodity programs.

Bitter Greens Journal does not oppose government support for farming per se, but considers the current subsidy system a farce--a giveaway to huge commodity buyers like Archer Daniels Midland disguised as a gift to family farmers. I've laid out a partial critique of the subsidy system here; I'll return to the topic soon, addressing some thoughtful points in defense of the system raised in a recent issue of Albert Krebs' Agribusiness Examiner.

For now, let's just say that it's no surprise that Sen. Chambliss, whom I have already taken to task here and here, is such a popular beneficiary of big-ag cash.

But his rock-solid support for commodity subsidies may also have a familial angle. I learned from this interview that Sen. Chambliss' son-in-law is one Joe Baker, owner of Baker Farms in Norman Park, Ga., and boardmember of the Georgia Fruit & Vegetable Growers Association.

According to the Environmental Working Group's invaluable Farm Subsidy Database, Baker Farmsgot about $171,000 in federal subsidies between 1995 and 2003, the great bulk of them from the controversial cotton program.

Now, in the grand scheme, $170k isn't so very much. By comparison, Georgia's top-20 most-subsidized farms all received in excess of $2 million over the same period.

Still, comparing Baker Farms' annual take with that of the state of Georgia as a whole yields an interesting trend: Baker Farms' percentage share of its state's total subsidy allotment increases consistently over the period.

And that period--1995 to 2003--roughly coincides with Chambliss' ascent from member of the U.S. House (where he was first elected in 1994) to his entry into the Senate (2002).

Looks like Baker grew savvier about how to "farm the government" (as the practice is known in the trade) as his daddy-in-law scaled the heights on the shoulders of big-ag cash.

Roundup, ready

2005-09-02T13:43:00.000-04:00

The newly constructed railroads, lauded as institutional safeguards against famine, were instead used by merchants to ship grain inventories from outlying drought-stricken districts to central depots for hoarding (as well as protection from rioters). Likewise the telegraph ensured that price hikes were coordinated in a thousand towns at once, regardless of local supply trends. Moreover, British antipathy to price control invited anyone who had the money to join in the frenzy of grain speculation...As a result, food prices soared out of the reach of outcaste laborers, displaced weavers, sharecroppers, and poor peasants. 'The dearth,' [a contemporary British publication] pointed out, 'was one of money and labor and not food.'

Before British rule, famine had been rare on the subcontinent. During droughts, food moved from unaffected areas to stricken areas through informal networks. Davis claims that these networks crumbled under pressure from the "theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham, and Mill."

Thus began the great game of "development" in the southern hemisphere, a project lately taken over by the IMF, the World Bank, and the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization.

Davis claims that at the time of the French Revolution, "the difference in living standards between a French [peasant] and a Deccan farmer were relatively insignificant compared to the gulf that separated both from their ruling classes." By the end of the 19th century, though, after as many as 50 million perished from famine in India, Africa, and South America, "the inequality of nations was as profound as the inequality of classes."

The New Orleans calamity needs a Mike Davis to parse its vicous race/class angle, the feeble response of a war-addled administration, and the ruinous reign of developers in Louisiana politics.

Roundup(R) the usual suspects
What do you get when Monsanto and the Farm Bureau (whose sorry politics are discussed
here) teams up with the National Corn Growers Association, the United Soybean Board, the U.S. Grains Council, and the National Cotton Council (discussed here)?

If your answer is vast-scale, heavily subsidized, and environmentally ruinous agriculture, you have a point. But I was thinking of a different response: television that promises to be so bad that it might qualify as camp.

The above-mentioned crew have pooled funds to create a public-television series called "America's Heartland." According to its Web site, the show is:

[A] new weekly public television series...which will celebrate our nation’s agriculture. Profiling the people, places, and processes of agriculture, the series will tap into—and strengthen—the ties that bind us all together: the love of our land and the respect for the people who live on and from it, a national fascination with food, curiosity about unfamiliar places and ways of life, and the bedrock American values of family, hard work and the spirit of independence.

In other words, rather than focus on the wretchedly depressed conditions reigning in most rural areas and a dismal food system that has made the U.S. the fattest nation on earth--or on alternatives such as the budding local-food movement--the series will paint a portrait of noble, stoic family farmers cranking out "miraculous" amounts of commodities so that "American consumers [can] spend less to feed themselves than any other country in the world."

Is it crude of me to point out that this is just the sort of nonsense that issued forth from both Soviet and Nazi propaganda mills?

Bitter Greens responds to Monsanto

2005-08-29T11:53:00.000-04:00

As I reported Friday, Monsanto contacted me to "request" that I cease using the headline "Roundup, ready," a title I use for an occasional feature that rounds up food-politics news. Below find Monsanto's letter followed by my response.

Dear Mr. Philpott,
I am the trademark and copyright attorney for Monsanto Company, the owner of the Roundup Ready(R) trademark. The attached link is to the Bitter Greens Journal which features the name "Roundup, ready" as the title of one of its features. Roundup Ready(R) is a well known trademark which is registered by Monsanto not only in the United States, but in many countries throughout the word [sic]. As you have pointed out in the column, Roundup Ready(R) is famous in the agricultural industry.

While you have stated in your column that you chose the name "Roundup, ready" in honor of Monsanto's famed line of seeds, we must object to this use and request that you change the name for the following reasons:

1) You are using our trademark without our consent. This use of the term could cause your readers to think that your journal is in some way sponsored by Monsanto or that Monsanto supports the positions set out in your journal.

2) You are using our trademark in an incorrect manner (with a comma and in a way that genericizes the mark). This weakens our trademark rights.

I would appreciate your confirmation that you will change the name of this column and cease using "Roundup, ready" or any form of our trademark as the name of a feature or in an incorrect manner in your journal. We appreciate your cooperation in this matter.

http://bittergreensgazette.blogspot.com/

Very truly yours,

Barb
Barb Bunning-Stevens
Monsanto Corp.
Assistant General Counsel - Trademarks

Dear Ms. Bunning-Stevens,
Although it's comical for a corporation with upwards of $5 billion in annual revenue to harass an obscure blogger who helps run a 2.5-acre farm, the tone of your letter is earnest; so I will reply earnestly.

Your arguments seem specious to me, and I therefore I must refuse to cease using "Roundup, ready" as the title for an occasional feature on my Web log.

You write that "[t]his use of the term could cause your readers to think that your journal is in some way sponsored by Monsanto or that Monsanto supports the positions set out in your journal." Yet my journal clearly presents itself as a "running critique of industrial agriculture," and from its first post on has made no secret of its distaste for Monsanto and its particular style of industrial agriculture.

I doubt you will be able to dig up a single reader who, after perusing a "Roundup, ready" post, will think to himself, "Now this fellow must be on the Monsanto dole!"

To further clarify my position on Monsanto, and to underline my institutional, financial, and ideological independence from it, I'm considering placing a new feature along the left-hand side of my blog. Titled "Bitter Greens on Monsanto," it would be a compilation of clickable headlines to the 15 or so posts that have mentioned your company. Would that go some way toward distancing our two entities?

Nor am I persuaded by the claim that my use of a comma in "Roundup, ready" somehow "weakens [Monsanto's] trademark rights." If I were in the business of genetically altering seeds so that they could withstand copious applications of herbicides, and I were marketing my product under the brand "Roundup, ready," cheekily trying to leverage Monsanto's marketing might and hoping the comma would protect me from copyright troubles, I would certainly tremble in fear on being contacted by a Monsanto attorney. And I would immediately cease and desist that dubious practice.

However, I am selling nothing. I am a polemicist employing (in the case of "Roundup, ready") satire to advance the cause of locally based, organic agriculture. If I'm able with my writing to stop a farmer from buying your product, then it will be due to the force of my arguments, not to any confusion regarding your trademark.

With all due respect, it seems to me that rather than protect your trademark from any serious threat, what you're really trying to do is intimidate a political opponent into ceasing what is surely Constitutionally protected speech. And so, as I stated above, I must decline your request. And I will redouble my efforts to study and write about the practices of your company.

Respectfully,
Tom Philpott
Bitter Greens Journal

Monsanto to Bitter Greens: "Cease" and Desist

2005-08-26T10:35:00.000-04:00

Yesterday the farming project I work for, Maverick Farms, received the following extraordinary e-mail. I don't have time to respond now, as we're scrambling to put on our monthly farm dinner. Given Monsanto's record of suing farmers, I suppose I should stifle guffaws and take it seriously. For now, though, I'll delight in having tweaked a transnational corporation valued in the marketplace at a cool $17 billion. Here's the letter. I will respond when I get a chance. (Readers should also note that I'm putting the finishing touches on a post about the current oil crunch.)

Dear Mr. Philpott,
I am the trademark and copyright attorney for Monsanto Company, the owner of the Roundup Ready(R) trademark. The attached link is to the Bitter Greens Journal which features the name "Roundup, ready" as the title of one of its features. Roundup Ready(R) is a well known trademark which is registered by Monsanto not only in the United States, but in many countries throughout the word [sic]. As you have pointed out in the column, Roundup Ready(R) is famous in the agricultural industry.

While you have stated in your column that you chose the name "Roundup, ready" in honor of Monsanto's famed line of seeds, we must object to this use and request that you change the name for the following reasons:

1) You are using our trademark without our consent. This use of the term could cause your readers to think that your journal is in some way sponsored by Monsanto or that Monsanto supports the positions set out in your journal.

2) You are using our trademark in an incorrect manner (with a comma and in a way that genericizes the mark). This weakens our trademark rights.

I would appreciate your confirmation that you will change the name of this column and cease using "Roundup, ready" or any form of our trademark as the name of a feature or in an incorrect manner in your journal. We appreciate your cooperation in this matter.

http://bittergreensgazette.blogspot.com/

Very truly yours,

Barb
Barb Bunning-Stevens
Assistant General Counsel - Trademarks

Roundup, ready

2005-08-07T15:52:00.000-04:00

By leveling the playing field for our products, CAFTA will help create jobs and opportunities for our citizens. As CAFTA helps create jobs and opportunity in the United States, it will help the democracies of Central America and the Dominican Republic deliver a better life for their citizens. By further opening up their markets, CAFTA will help those democracies attract the trade and investment needed for economic growth.

My purpose now is not to debunk those faith-based banalities--I partially did so a while back here--but rather to establish that this is a president with a strong rhetorical commitment to what he calls free trade. What follows will show that this commitment is purely rhetorical--it evaporates when the dictates of free trade conflict with big-money U.S. industrial interests.

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal ran an astonishing piece about US cotton farmers' efforts to win favor with their counterparts in Africa, who for years have been undercut by US agriculture subsidies.

Between 1995 and 2003, US cotton farmers received more than $14 billion in federal handouts. Last year alone, the Journal reports, the government doled out $4.5 billion in cotton subsidies.

That means that US cotton farmers can afford to sell their wares on global markets at a fraction of the cost of production. African farmers, who produce cotton much more cheaply, are therby squeezed out of world markets and into misery. It's important to note here that global institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank, and the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization have for years prodded African farmers to produce for the global commodity markets--it helps their governments earn foriegn exchange to pay back debts run up by national elites.

As it stands now, the Journal reports, US cotton farmers, whose production costs are among the world's highest, export three-quarters of their produce and own 40 percent of the global market.

Clearly, here is a situation that violates the tenets of free trade. Forced to compete without government support, the US cotton industry would likely collapse--what the free traders hail as "creative destruction." To a zealous free trader, the situation described above is tantamount to thundering the Lord's name in vain during Sunday service (or, to allude to recent news item, flushing a Bible down the toilet).

So how does our White house-enthroned Adam Smith acolyte react to these desecrations being committed by his government at the service of big cotton farmers?

Rather than kick them off the dole like a bunch of welfare mothers, he's sending USDA flacks out to Africa, accompanied by worthies from the National Cotton Council, to sweet-talk African farmers into not challenging US subsidies at the World Trade Organization.

The Journal article opens:

WEREKELA, Mali -- Drummers and dancers greeted Jim Butler when he arrived at this settlement of dirt roads and mud houses in January. The deputy undersecretary at the U.S. Department of Agriculture met with local cotton farmers and promised American help to boost productivity. He presented the village headman with a pewter paperweight embossed with a USDA seal. The headman, who has neither a desk nor paper, hid it for safekeeping.

The trip was part of an extraordinary effort to lend a hand to African cotton farmers. But the prime motivation wasn't altruistic. West African nations, newly assertive in global trade negotiations, are agitating for the abolition of subsidies essential to the prosperity of many American farmers. By offering tips on improving mills, analyzing dirt and chasing away bugs, the U.S. cotton industry is hoping to win some regional goodwill and maintain its domestic privileges a little while longer.[Emphasis not in original]

I find it remarkable that neither the Journal reporters nor their editors saw anything odd about the conflation of the USDA and the US cotton industry. Sure, the USDA exists to promote the interests of domestic farmers. But it has clearly gone to extreme lengths to promote a single kind of farming--the vast-scale sort that's more interested in conquering foreign markets than feeding and clothing people.

Not surprisingly, the USDA/cotton industry's African charm offensive has largely fallen flat among the continent's cotton farmers. Here is the Journal again:

Several months after Messrs. [Cotton Council official John] Pucheu and [USDA official] Butler visited Werekela, the villagers' enthusiasm had dissipated. "If we all go to the market together, the Americans have no problem with the low price, because they get subsidized support," says Mr. Traore, who is missing his front teeth. "But for us, cotton sales are all we have."
He's sitting under a big shade tree with five other farmers escaping the afternoon heat. Chickens scratch in the dirt at their feet. "The Americans," he says, "promised they would help us develop. But they never mentioned subsidies."
Adds fellow farmer, Niantili Fomba: "The only thing we've gotten since is lower prices [for their cotton]."

••••••

The joys of industrial dairy
It's a little-known fact that California recently passed Wisconsin as the nation's most prodigious dairy-producing state.

California's San Joaquin Valley alone boasts 2.5 million dairy cows--about a fifth of the nation's total herd. It also ranks right up there with Los Angeles and Houston among the areas with the country's most polluted air.

Coincidence? As this LA Times article shows, the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District says no. After a recent study, the agency concluded that "the average dairy cow produces 19.3 pounds of gases, called volatile organic compounds ... [these] gases react with other pollutants to form ground-level ozone, or smog." Multiplying 19.3 by 2.5 million gets us about 50 million pounds of cow gas wafting into the Valley's atmosphere each year.

"The dairy industry will be forced to invest millions of dollars in expensive pollution-control technology in feedlots and waste lagoons, and may even have to consider altering animals' diets to meet the region's planned air-quality regulations," the paper reports.

Aha! Here is an attempt to charge the dairy industry for what are known as "externalities"--costs that are normally pushed off the ledger of industrial farming and onto that of society as a whole. (Right now, citizens of the Valley are bearing some of those burdens in the form of an extremely high asthma rate, the Times reports.) If industrial farming had to pay for the messes it creates, I think we'd see a huge push toward valuing small-scale, sustainable-minded farming.

In the Land of Arnold, however, the industry stands an excellent chance of rebuffing this bold attempt to hold it responsible for its reaking, hazardous mess.
•••••

Cheap labor, cheap food, Part I: A farm labor crisis?
Bitter Greens Journal has long argued that US society relies on a cheap, plentiful supply of labor from points south to maintain its beloved cheap-food system.

No good nativist should enjoy a $5 lunch from McDonald's without reflecting on the contribution illegal immigrants make to delivering such a hefty dose of calories for so scant a price.

Are these patriots on the verge of delivering a decisive blow to the American way of eating? Are their efforts to "secure our borders" going to spark a rise in food prices?

It's way too early to tell. But as this well-researched, nuanced article from the Fresno (California) Bee shows, trouble is brewing in Big Ag's trenches. Once again, San Joaquin Valley, that (evidently quite aromatic) epicenter of vast-scale West Coast farming, displays industrial agriculture's logical extremes.

Here is the Bee:

The supply of farmworkers is shrinking in the San Joaquin Valley, and some farmers are concerned it will take longer for workers to finish picking crops this summer.

They also worry the labor shortage will intensify in the coming years.

Farmworker crews are typically made up of 20 to 25 people. But on some farms this year, there are as few as 13 workers per crew, says Manuel Cunha Jr., president of the Fresno-based Nisei Farmers League.

The article cites the California Institute For Rural Studies for this startling fact: "More than 400,000 farmworkers toil in San Joaquin Valley fields, and more than 40% of them are illegal immigrants."

Yet the number of illegal immigrants streaming into the Valley has decreased for five years running, as it has in the nation as a whole. The article states that annual illegal immigration into the US peaked at about 750,000 people in the late 1990s and now stands at about 700,000. (This reflects the number of people who sneak in each year, not the total number living in the US).

The reason: "Fewer migrant workers are crossing the border illegally because of more border patrol agents, human smugglers raising their prices and the Minuteman Project that put civilian patrols on the U.S.-Mexico border, workers and federal officials say."

And the ones who do make it in are increasingly spurning agriculture in favor of higher-paid fields like construction and landscaping, the article states.

Farmers tell the Bee that they've been able to harvest their crops despite the labor shortage. Long-term, however, they fear they'll have to pay more to attract more workers.

That could spark a crisis. As grocery retailing consolidates--and Wal-Mart gobbles up more market share in the industry--the number of large-scale buyers falls. That gives buyers like Wal-Mart tremendous leverage to demand low prices from farmers. Thus farmers in place like the Joaquin Valley will find themselves squeezed between rising labor costs and stagnant prices for their goods.

One possible scenario is that the Wal-Marts of the world will simply buy more and more produce from countries like Mexico and Chile. That will mean farm closings on in the Joaquin Valley.

Another, more likely scenario is that the US government will ease up on patrolling the border. That has been its traditional response to labor shortages within industrial agriculture.
•••••

Cheap labor, cheap food, Part II: Bitter chocolate
Have Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, and Nestle been knowingly buying cocoa beans from farms that utilize slave labor?

That's what a lawsuit filed by three people from Mali claims, according to this AP article.

The lawsuit charges that:

[T]he plaintiffs were each forced from their homes in Mali in 1996 while still in their teens to toil without pay at cocoa bean plantations in the neighboring nation of Ivory Coast.

The plaintiffs, who worked in separate plantations, claim they worked 12 hours a day or more, were barely fed and were subject to beatings if they didn't work properly or attempted to escape.

All the while, the deep-pocketed transnationals knew of these conditions in the cocoa fields and looked the other way, the suit claims.

"It is unconscionable that Nestle, ADM and Cargill have ignored repeated and well-documented warnings over the past several years that the farms they were using to grow cocoa employed child slave laborers," said a lawyer for the plaintiffs told AP. "They could have put a stop to it years ago, but chose to look the other way. We had to go to court as a last resort."

Down and dirty: the fate of soil in industrial society

2005-08-02T13:39:00.000-04:00

"Common as dirt," goes the old insult. Despite its antique nature, the saying may sum up industrial (and post-industrial) society's take on soil: low, squalid, filthy, annoyingly abundent, beneath dignity and respect.

Consider the zeal to clean, to wash, to sterilize and scrub. Claudia Hemphill, a doctoral student in environmental science at the University of Idaho, has been doing some interesting work on the recent social history of soil. As US society mutated from primarily rural to overwhelmingly urban and suburban in the span of less than a century--today about 3 percent of the population engages directly in agriculture--dirt came to be demonized, Hemphill argues.

By the dawn of the 20th century, when immigrants (many of them former farmers) and our own displaced rural populations flocked into US cities, they found themslves confronted with a stark public-health slogan: "Dirt, Disease and Death.”

A society washing its hands of agriculture didn't want dirt clinging to its trousers. Hence the cult of detergent.

“So dirt became the major symbol of disease,” Hemphill says in a recent University of Iowa press release. “Anyone who was considered socially inferior--such as immigrants or different ethnic groups--was called dirty. Dirtiness was a huge insult. Housecleaning became an obsession. Even outdoors, dirt is eliminated--backyards are turned into concrete patios or covered up with gravel or bark-mulch. Dirt is so intrinsically bad, we don’t even want to see it outdoors.”

It's a well-known irony that the campaign against dirt delivered dire health consequences of its own. Modern parents who essentially sterilize their children with "anti-bacterial" soap, and forbid them to play in the dirt, have managed to wreck their charges' immune systems. It turns out that after all "we need to have some dirt in our lives," as Hemphill says. All along, it's been our metaphor for disease that's helped shield us from disease.

Yet despite better recent press, dirt still gets short shrift. Hemphill points out that even environmentalists tend to neglect the ground beneath their feet, focusing their energies on water and air.

The fragmentation of the broader society cleaves environmentalism and subverts it. Groundwater runoff from chemically fertilized fields is a significant source of water contamination; industrial agriculture's addiction to fossil fuel contributes to air pollution and global warming. Yet mainline environmentalism is curiously silent on the question of agriculture and soil stewardship. (There are a couple of proud exceptions, including Greenpeace's bare-knuckled fight against genetically modified crops.)

I think even consumers who try to shop locally for sustainably grown produce don't think enough about the soil and what it means. Every apple you eat, every carrot and every clove of garlic, represents nutrients leached from the soil--nutrients that must be replaced one way or another for agriculture to sustain itself. Same with meat. Whether a cow feeds freely on meadow grass or has field corn shovelled into its tiny hovel, soil somewhere is being leeched of nutrients.

I wonder if many vegans ponder the ultimate source of their nutrition. Small-scale farmers who reject synthetic inputs have essentially two options for replenishing the nutrients they pull out of their soil: animal manure and what's known as "green manure," plants capable of leeching nitrogen out of the air and depositing it into the soil. (Compost could be considered a third option, but farm-scale composting typically relies on a heavy dose of manure--not the green kind.)

Most small organic farms use both methods. Green manure by itself would be a tricky option. First, the seeds tend to be expensive (for example, hairy vetch), and small-scale market farming is a notoriously seat-of-the-pants proposition.

Second, using green manure as the only fertility strategy imposes opportunity costs. Say a farmer wants to use the same bed to grow several different crops in succession over a single season. Green manuring would require her to devote parts of her fields all season to growing cover crops for the sole purpose of tilling them in. Again, that's tough to pull off on a typical small farm, where there's intense financial pressure to produce as much as possible for market. In the heat of the season, it makes more sense to simply work in some well-composted manure before planting the next bed.

Thus vegans who shop at the farmers market are faced with a stark fact: that beautiful carrot you just enjoyed likely spent its growing life swaddled in a rich bed of decomposed animal shit. Try as we might, we can't shake off the scatological origins of life, any more than we can meaningfully win any war against dirt.

I mention this not to take a poke at the vegans, but rather to remind them of the importance of animals in the nutrient cycle of farming.

And this points up another vexation of small-scale farming in an industrial-scale world. Fertilizing by manure is less difficult than a purely plant-based strategy, but not by much. Industrialization has rent farming in two. For the most part, there are animal farms and meat farms; few do both. Thus vegetable farmers tend to spend a lot of time wrangling and making deals to get tremendous loads of manure delivered to their farms. And since small-scale meat and dairy production has collapsed in most areas, even the most conscientious organic farmers end up using manure from industrial farms.

Vegans and anyone else interested in organic local vegetables thus have an interest in supporting humane, pasture-based animal farming in their areas.

Scientists, too, have tended to neglect dirt. Hemphill conjectures that they recoil from the inherently murky nature of the stuff. Water can be filtered to its elements: two hydrogen atoms linked to one oxygen. No such luck for soil. Hemphill puts it well:

If you take a sample of water from the stream and filter out the leaf bits and twigs, insects and impurities, you’re left with pure water. If you take a handful of soil and remove the rock particles, pollen grains, decomposing wood bits, water and microorganisms, you’re left with nothing. Philosophically, this makes it cognitively unmanageable because it bypasses our tendency to want to sort things out into little piles that are all the same.

Healthy soil literally lives and breathes; it's made up of decomposing matter and live organisms, from tiny bacteria to earthworms as big as your finger. Healthy soil is like a decadent poem: fevered activity, death, life, rebirth, green leaves and lovely flowers rooted in a bed of seething scatology.

A society that fails to study that poem risks extinction. Consider that field corn--the fodder that's fed to confined animals and makes its way into food-proccessing factories and ethanol plants, not the sweet stuff you eat off the cob--is the number-one U.S. crop, heavily underwritten by federal subsidies. No crop erodes soil faster than field corn.

The political economy of flavor: an exchange with a chowhound

2005-07-12T16:21:00.000-04:00

Responding to this post--my tribute to an effort to link traditional hog-raising with traditional North Carolina barbecue--New York food writer and chowhound.com founder Jim Leff objected to my characterization of his take on a Manhattan barbecue joint. I had written: "Leff once told me he thought it was ridiculous that a certain restaurateur insists on using Niman Ranch pork, from heritage-breed pigs raised on small farms without industrial inputs, at his high-toned Manhattan BBQ joint."

Leff went on as follows:

Hmm...if you say so, I'm sure I said this in some context. And I'm glad if discussion of the issue helped spur some insights. But this isn't actually how I feel - about food in general or about that particular Manhattan BBQ joint.

I've eaten food made from crap ingredients where the final result tasted so ecstatically delicious I was made to gasp. And I've gasped over food made from fussy foodie fixings (FFF's), as well. Ingredients are irrelevant, really. Unless you're eating a single raw ingredient (i.e. gnawing on an artichoke), all that truly matters is the skill, care, and touch of the chef. I'd vastly prefer soup made by a loving genius from canned supermarket ingredients to soup made from FFFs by someone just going through the motions. This might sound reverse-snobbish, but it's not.

If a chef feels the need to pour 1959 Chateau Lafite into the stock to give it that certain oomph (and someone else is footing the bill), I'm all for giving that chef what s/he thinks is needed. But same if the secret ingredient is Jiffy Peanut Butter. I don't take a materialistic view; ingredients don't interest me. Great cooking is more than the sum of its parts, and I aim to live entirely in that margin.

By the same token, I'm never impressed with glib adjectives or pandering to status...though that, too, could be mistaken for a reverse-snobbish attitude.

The place you're talking about is Blue Smoke, a barbecue restaurant run by Danny Meyer (of Gramercy Tavern and Union Square Cafe). They use blue chip provisions, and the chef is a fancy trained fellow, not some backwater 'cue meister. The result doesn't taste like folkloric 'cue; the meat is infinitely more subtle and rich, and everything's extremely refined...and there's soul to the food and I deem it delicious. It's not "authentic", but who cares? It's just another manifestation of deliciousness.

And it's Blue Smoke's deliciousness that impresses me, not its refinement in and of itself. Refinement is merely a parameter. The spectrum from sophisticated refinement to guileless simplicity is horizontal, not vertical, and there are peak experiences (and soulless crap) to be found at every point of that spectrum.

Both snobs and reverse snobs miss good stuff, and I strive to be a universal receiver for every manifestation of treasure (there's so little of it, we mustn't disregard an iota!).
--Jim Leff, chowhound.com

Bitter Greens Journal responds
Jim Leff may be the most important restaurant critic writing in English today.

I say that not because he visited my farm once and wrote mostly nice things about us. Or because I consider him a friend and excellent company. (I once spent an afternoon careening through Lexington, N.C., with him in what he calls his "chow-mobile," sampling the famed local 'cue. On the chow trail he comes off as a kind of nebbishy Falstaff, mixing wry humor with unchecked hedonism. Watching him unlock the secret to Lexington 'cue--two words: "side brown"--was like tagging along on Saul's fateful trip to Damascus.)

I praise Leff for his ability to slice through the swaths of marketing hype that blanket "dining" in America today to find what he calls the treasure. Celebrity chefs may be plunking down foodie temples in Vegas and snatching book, TV, and even movie deals with the ease with which they can julienne a carrot; but that doesn't mean that our national store of culinary treasure is growing.

Indeed, what's happened along our highways tells a different story, one not likely told in the Dining In/Dining out section of the New York Times or Bon Apetit magazine. What one finds there is the death of culinary culture: a torrent of bland, institutional food--what Leff might call "soulless" fare. I'm not even speaking of the hordes of McDonald's and its ilk. The locally owned holdouts, by and large, have surrendered. The ubiquitous Sysco truck has left a trail of culinary death in its wake.

And, whether we like it or not, the cities have succumbed as well. From my perch in North Carolina, New York--with its great diversity and bulk of wonderful food--seems a culinary paradise. But a visitor who walks randomly into a restaurant in Manhattan--or even Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, or Staten Island--is likely to find crap prepared with all the passion a suburban pool cleaner might bring to his task. Face it: Typical New York pizza--save for a few miraculous outposts--sucks. So does most food there. But the exceptions, the treasure, are glorious--if you can find them.

That's what makes Leff so valuable. He's omnivorous; he haunts the city's dining scene--its haute temples and shabby storefronts alike--with an eager palate and what Hemingway called a bullshit meter. "Astonish me," he essentially says, whether confronted by an indifferently cleaned plastic table or a purse-lipped sommelier with a crisp white cloth draped over his forearm. He can find mana or dreck as easily in one as the other.

The formidable owner of Kitchen Arts and Letters, a bookstore on Manhattan's Upper East Side, once told me, as I was buying Jim's old guide to New York restaurants, that "Leff isn't impressed with a place unless its some filthy dive in Queens." He had it wrong, of course. Sure, Leff has discovered gems among Queens' filthy dives; but he has also bowed with great respect to some of Manhattan's great chefs. Go to a four-star recommended by Leff, and you can be sure that its celebrity chef still cooks with passion and care.

I hail Leff's importance because I've seen what he's done in New York. One example: Some years ago, he identified an obscure pizza joint in deep-central Brooklyn--Di Fara--as a throwback to the days when southern Italians swarmed into New York and created its reputation as a pizza paradise. His writing has given Di Fara's venerable owner and master cook, Dom, near-celebrity status. Go there now on a Saturday afternoon and you'll find the place buzzing--thrill-seeking Manhattan pilgrims jostling elbows with locals just hungry for a slice.

Many have plausibly speculated that without Leff's intervention, Dom would have retired long ago. Now I hear tell that Dom's sons recently opened a pizza place in Greenwich Village. Ultimately, that's Jim's doing.

And yet...reading Leff's philosophy of food--as exemplified by his response to my post--reminds me of reading the literary criticism of the great Vladimir Nabokov. I'm thrilled by it, I learn from it--and I mostly disagree with it.

Nabokov didn't give a damn about anything in literature expect for what he called the shiver a writer could or could not send up his spine. He reveled in artistic genius and rejected everything else. Writers have nothing to teach us about the era in which they wrote; they only offer us a vivid or dull prose style, a well- or poorly told story. Politics is divorced from literature, or at least irrelevant to it.

Jim brings a similar "art for art's sake" sensibility to food. "Ingredients are irrelevant, really," he declares. "[A]l that truly matters is the skill, care, and touch of the chef."

He's overstating the case here, and I think he knows it. Jim, what if a scoundrel were to sneak into Di Fara at night and replace Dom's beloved extra-virgin olive oil with Wesson corn oil? Could the great one, even with all his soul and care, salvage that pie?

But Leff is wrong in a deeper sense, too. I grant that cooks play a key role in creating what ends up one the plate, but let me usher a second actor onto the stage: the farmer. Everything we eat, from the palest Perdue chicken to the greenest leaf of spinach, was ultimately coaxed out of the earth by a farmer. And I argue that whether that farmer is suspended high above a vast corn field in some massive and terrifying contraption spewing petrochemicals or on the ground spreading well-composted manure into his field makes a critical difference.

I salute the cooks the world over who have learned to turn industrial products--what Jim calls crap ingredients--into delicious food. Yes, it can be done. But the returns are diminishing as topsoil erodes and parches and small farmers are evicted from the land.

Yes, by all means, let's “receive ... every manifestation of treasure”! But let's also question why there is so little of it, and what we can do to restore our stock of it. The answer lies in the earth, my friend, and in transforming the political economy of food.

Clearing the air on ethanol: an exchange

2005-07-04T07:21:00.000-04:00

Responding to this post, an unnamed person from the American Lung Association of Minnesota wrote in with the following spirited defense of ethanol.

Bitter, green, and uninformed, I'm afraid.

Patzek [Editor's note: Berkeley oil geologist and ethanol critic Tad W. Patzek] is a Big Oil Apologist (crisis, what crisis? Drill ANWR!) living in an Ivory Tower fantasyland. Look at his C.V. -- he actually brags about his "friend of the oil industry" award. Look it up -- I did.

Let Roger [I think the author means Tad. --Ed.] know he can move to Minnesota, the E85 Capitol of North America, anytime. With 20 models of FFVs (flexible fuel vehicles) on sale now and more than 150 E85 pumps statewide (new stations opening every week), Minnesota is the place to be to use E85.

Who says so? The American Lung Association of Minnesota. Read more at www.CleanAirChoice.org

Ethanol isn't a miracle fuel. But it is cleaner burning than gasoline, and a good short-term step until practical, clean vehicles and/or fuel can be develped fully.

Bitter Greens Journal responds:

Not a miracle fuel, eh?

Adding ethanol to our fuel supply causes air pollution...You have more vapor emissions when you're refueling and when your car is sitting in a parking lot on a hot summer day. And ethanol can degrade systems in cars, so you'll get more leaks.

That quotation comes not from an academic with ties to the oil industry, but from one Peter Iwanowicz--director of the American Lung Association of New York State. You'll find it in this rather devastating piece from the 8/2004 Audobon magazine.

Note that Iwanowicz's critique of ethanol is independent of the fuel's energy balance, or the energy a fuel delivers divided by the energy required to create it. Thus, even given the most generous calculations of ethanol's energy balance (highly disputed territory; more below), there's no consensus that ethanol actually improves air quality--even within the American Lung Association itself.

Indeed, the production of ethanol in my critic's home state of Minnesota has not been entirely smooth viz. air pollution. Here's that Audobon article again:

[I]n October 2002 the EPA settled with 12 ethanol plants in Minnesota, hitting them with civil penalties ranging from $29,000 to $39,000 each, and requiring that each spend about $2 million cutting back on emissions of nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, particulates, and other hazardous pollutants.

None of this has stopped the American Lung Association of Minnesota from vigorously promoting ethanol as, well, a miracle fuel. Not only does the group evidently scan the Internet to root out obscure blogs that dare quetion the wonderous benefits of ethanol, but it also runs an entire Web site, mentioned above by the letter writer, designed solely to flog the many benefits of the controversial fuel. The group does so in terms even more enthusiastic than you'll find even on the Web site of Archer Daniels Midland, the corporate ethanol king and the greatest champion and beneficiary of the fuel's many public subsidies.

In its almost evangelical zeal for ethanol, the ALA of Minnesota has plunged itself into an alliance with some of the nation's major industrial agriculture interests. Here it is in bed with Monsanto, promoting a special strain of the GMO's seed giant's corn. Appropriately enough, the initiative is called "Fuel Your Profits."

The ALA of Minnesota has also allied itself with its state's Corn Grower's Association. Minnesota is the nation's fifth most prodigious producer of corn, and its corn farmers draw about $400 million per year in federal commodity subsidies.

Now to address the specific charge leveled against BGJ by the unnamed ALA of Minnesota functionary, namely that the blog is "uniformed" because it failed to note Tad Patzek's ties to the oil industry. Patzek's CV does not include a "friend of the oil industry" award, but it does demonstrate a cozy relationship with Shell and other petrol giants.

Does that fact automatically discredit his charge that ethanol production consumes more energy than it renders? No, but it surely casts doubt. (I can't resist pointing out that the ALA's almost wild-eyed support of ethanol as a clean-air panaecea, in the face of contrary evidence, is rendered suspect by its cozy relations with the companies who benefit most from ethanol subsidies.)

At any rate, Bitter Greens Journal has always acknowledged that studies measuring the energy balance of ethanol contradict each other. The USDA, which partially underwrites ethanol production with its generous corn subsidies, claims in a report much-hyped on the ALA of Minnesota's Web site that ethanol generates 1.67 units of energy for every unit consumed.

Patzek is one of two major academics who dispute the USDA's rosy finding. The other is Cornell's David Pimentel, who charges that the USDA's methodology assumes that every farm producing corn for ethanol uses "best practices" to maximize yield, and operates under the very best soil and water conditions. "If I[ made the same assumptions as the USDA], I think I could get my figures to be positive, too," Pimentel told Audobon magazine.

Under real-world conditions, the scientist reckons that corn-based ethanol production requires about 29 percent more energy than it renders at the pump.

Now, my critic at the ALA of Minnesota will point out that Pimentel has worked professionally with oil-tainted Tad Patzek. BGJ does not have the scientific background to judge whether the rosy or the dire assessment of ethanol's energy balance holds more true. But the USDA's generous sponsorship of industrial corn production renders its pronouncement's on ethanol at least as suspect as those of Patzek and Pimentel.

Indeed, that great friend of oil GW Bush recently installed industrial corn man Chuck Conner as deputy secretary of the USDA. Before taking that post, Conner served for several as Bush's special assistant on agriculture. Before that, Conner was president of the Corn Refiners Association--a front group for Archer Daniels Midland. Read all about it here.

One thing I learned from reading through USDA material is that coal is a major source of energy for ethanol-production plants. Why would the Lung Association of Minnesota throw its lot so emphatically with a technology that relies on such a lung-ruining energy source? Surely, that question bears more investigation from BGJ.

Meanwhile, let me urge the group to try a different path: urge Minnesotans to reject Big Oil and Big Ag alike, and boost their cardiovascular health, by riding their bikes to work--and by buying as much of their food as possible from small, local farms.

The Way Forward

2005-06-29T14:26:00.000-04:00

"The Way Forward," an occasional Bitter Greens Journal feature, focuses on small-scale sustainable-food efforts that challenge the dominance of industrial and industrial-organic agriculture. Readers are urged to e-mail me--tom@maverickfarms.com--with ideas for this column.

Smoking out industrial hog production
Has industrial pig farming ruined traditional North Carolina barbecue?

The New York food writer Jim Leff--founder of chowhound.com and a man whom I have seen eye a pulled-pork platter with a fervor a religious fanatic might reserve for a beloved icon--says no. Leff once told me he thought it was ridiculous that a certain restaurateur insists on using Niman Ranch pork, from heritage-breed pigs raised on small farms without industrial inputs, at his high-toned Manhattan BBQ joint.

Barbecue is about taking the cheapest cuts of pork and turning them into something sublime, Leff told me, or something to that effect.

I see his point. Surely, it's sacrilege that BBQ has turned into the latest Manhattan status food, complete with $20/plate price tags and accompanying wine lists. BBQ is working people's food, and yes, it must never live high on the hog. The barbecue cut par excellence is the shoulder--or, put more bluntly, the butt. Yes, the pork butt.

But must the butt--the pork butt--have no pedigree? Must we lovers of NC BBQ submit to the awful and growing hegemony of Smithfield Foods, that farmer-destroying, flavor-killing, environment-befouling, labor-exploiting profit machine? Does one have to go to Manhattan and sit among tedious Wall Streeters to get smoked pork that isn't raised in filthy crowded pens and pumped full of hormones, antibiotics, and genetically modified, mass-produced, and highly subsidized corn?

And here is the blind spot of Leff's argument. Fifty years ago, virtually all pork arrived to the pitmaster in Niman-approved fashion: it was produced on tiny farms and fed on forage, garden culls, and kitchen slop. Today 70 percent of pork is produced under contract with giants like Smithfield, meaning under tremendous pressure to pump out as much meat as possible as cheaply as possible. Not so long ago, small farms accounted for nearly all pork production; today, the USDA reports, small farms contribute just 11 percent of the nation's pork. The nation's 18-largest hog farms pump out an eye-popping 25 percent of the pork we consume.

As late as 1967, the US supported more than a million hog farms; by 2000, the number had plunged to under 100,000, even as pork consumption inched up more than 1 percent per year.

Here in North Carolina, an explosion in hog production has been accompanied by the economic slaughter of hog farmers.
In 1986, the state boasted 15,000 hog farmers and about 2.4 million hogs. By 2000, about 9.6 million hogs called North Carolina home, the vast majority of them stuffed into confinement pens. The number of hog farmers had tumbled to 3,600. (Source: North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.)

Who benefits from such trends? Well, Smithfield does, if its stock chart is any indication. (Note that its share price soared by a factor of nearly 10 between 1990 and 2000.)

Among the many losers I would place we aficionados of North Carolina barbecue, my esteemed friend Leff included. In short, I argue that barbecue must have tasted better before corporate hatchetmen hijacked hog production. These people have designed hog breeds to maximize meat yield at the expense of flavor--and their market dominance means that nearly every BBQ shack from Wilson to Memphis uses industrially raised pork.

At the same time, I join Leff in deploring the yuppification of 'cue.

I have seen a way out of this dilemma.

I'm somewhat ashamed--though not overly so--that the lightening bolt came to me in the form of Gourmet Magazine, specifically its July 2005 issue. There you'll find a profile of Ed Mitchell, a well-known pitmaster located in that far-eastern North Carolina BBQ mecca, Wilson. (Unhappily, I haven't sampled NC barbecue east of Lexington--yet.)

Until recently, Mitchell ran a renowned eponymous BBQ joint in Wilson; like his competitors, he paid little attention to the quality of the pork he bought. But then something happened. Here is the Gourmet article:

[Mitchell] had never thought of the inferiority of factory-farmed pork until, in the spring of 2003, he cooked a hog that had bred to be succulent instead of lean, a hog that had spent much of its life in pasture, eating sweet-potato culls and field corn. 'That pork knocked me down,' Wilson recalls. 'it tasted like the barbecue I knew from the tobacco days: juicy and full of flavor. I knew that was the pork my grandfather ate all his life. I knew that was the old-fashioned pork we lost when near about everybody went industrial.'

So now Wilson, an African-American, is working with small-scale African-American pork farmers in his area to identify a pork breed and develop a raising protocol that can produce pork worthy of the smoking pit. He wants to create a small chain of barbecue joints that will buy directly from those farmers and produce 'cue that would have pleased Mitchell's grandfather, at prices that may be a bit higher than average, but well within reach of working folks. At the same time, he'd like to train a new generation of pitmasters to sustain the craft of slow-smoking meat.

The article says that Wilson has signed a development and marketing deal with North Carolina A&T, an historically black college in Greensboro.

Here lies the way forward, a chance to support great food, struggling farmers, and culinary populism all at once. I am encouraged that John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, penned the Gourmet piece. I hope he'll throw any institutional power he wields behind the effort. If the US branch of Slow Food is to have any relevance, than the effort to revive real barbecue, while at the same time giving small farmers a key lifeline, must rise to the fore of its agenda.

The Gourmet article hints that Mitchell's project may be fragile, in danger of collapse. That's not surprising; sustainable ag requires a commitment not just from farmers and food professionals, but from society as a whole, including government--a commitment that, outside of an elite of well-heeled, status-conscious consumers, is almost wholly lacking.

Mitchell's is the sort of effort that can expose the link between delicious food and a vibrant small-scale farm economy.

Note: Jim Leff responded to my post; I have pasted his response below to give it more prominence. Look for my rejoinder soon. --T.P.

"Leff once told me he thought it was ridiculous that a certain restaurateur insists on using Niman Ranch pork, from heritage-breed pigs raised on small farms without industrial inputs, at his high-toned Manhattan BBQ joint."

Hmm...if you say so, I'm sure I said this in some context. And I'm glad if discussion of the issue helped spur some insights. But this isn't actually how I feel - about food in general or about that particular Manhattan BBQ joint.

I've eaten food made from crap ingredients where the final result tasted so ecstatically delicious I was made to gasp. And I've gasped over food made from fussy foodie fixings (FFF's), as well. Ingredients are irrelevant, really. Unless you're eating a single raw ingredient (i.e. gnawing on an artichoke), all that truly matters is the skill, care, and touch of the chef. I'd vastly prefer soup made by a loving genius from canned supermarket ingredients to soup made from FFFs by someone just going through the motions. This might sound reverse-snobbish, but it's not.

If a chef feels the need to pour 1959 Chateau Lafite into the stock to give it that certain oomph (and someone else is footing the bill), I'm all for giving that chef what s/he thinks is needed. But same if the secret ingredient is Jiffy Peanut Butter. I don't take a materialistic view; ingredients don't interest me. Great cooking is more than the sum of its parts, and I aim to live entirely in that margin.

By the same token, I'm never impressed with glib adjectives or pandering to status...though that, too, could be mistaken for a reverse-snobbish attitude.

The place you're talking about is Blue Smoke, a barbecue restaurant run by Danny Meyer (of Gramercy Tavern and Union Square Cafe). They use blue chip provisions, and the chef is a fancy trained fellow, not some backwater 'cue meister. The result doesn't taste like folkloric 'cue; the meat is infinitely more subtle and rich, and everything's extremely refined...and there's soul to the food and I deem it delicious. It's not "authentic", but who cares? It's just another manifestation of deliciousness.

And it's Blue Smoke's deliciousness that impresses me, not its refinement in and of itself. Refinement is merely a parameter. The spectrum from sophisticated refinement to guileless simplicity is horizontal, not vertical, and there are peak experiences (and soulless crap) to be found at every point of that spectrum.

Both snobs and reverse snobs miss good stuff, and I strive to be a universal receiver for every manifestation of treasure (there's so little of it, we mustn't disregard an iota!).
--Jim Leff, chowhound.com

Still kicking/toward a more robust Bitter Greens

2005-06-16T07:59:00.000-04:00

Bitter Greens Journal has entered a period of dormancy, laid low by intensive time demands from Maverick Farms.

We're just putting the finishing touches on a massive overhaul of our farmhouse kitchen and bathrooms, designed to streamline our cooking activities and boost our agritourism operation. Amid the chaos of the remodel we're gearing up for our first farm dinners of the season, June 25 and 26, five-course feasts for 30-35 at the farmhouse. Meanwhile, we're farming like mad, supplying local chefs with greens, running our 11-share community-supported agriculture (CSA) operation, and maintaining our weekly stand of veggies and baked goods at the farmers market in Boone.

Along with harvesting comes maintenance--weeding, pest control, staking tomatoes, as well as planting new beds for our succession-planting schemes.

That, along with the odd off-farm freelance-writing job and two trips to visit ailing family members, has left little time for research-heavy blogging.

Toward a more robust Bitter Greens
Yet the dream of creating an excellent sustainable-ag web site burns bright. I envision a site brimming with information for farmers, consumers, even scholars and journalists. Blistering critiques of industrial ag alongside tales from this farm and others. Reports from farmers markets and farms around the country and world. Bite-size news morsels alongside tightly written essays, personal and otherwise. I'd like BGJ to become a Freedom of Information Act machine, exposing the government's role in shaping the allegedly free market that's ruining our food system and the world's. And a corporate scourge, taking a sharp pencil to proxy statements and annual reports.

The vision sounds ambitious, to put it gently, given all that's happening on the farm. But I have a plan: I've groped for the ever-elusive way forward, and found it (I think): collaboration.

In short, I need help. First of all, I need an HTML maverick to help design a more flexible site (clearly, away from blogger) and set up new features like perpetually updating news feeds. I need far-flung correspondents passionate about local food willing to write about issues in their area. I need... well, anyone interested in collaborating on this project is invited to contact me at tom@maverickfarms.com.

Meanwhile, there are posts percolating in my fevered brain, which I hope to find time to deliver soon—realistically not until after farm-dinner weekend.

And now, to the field, to the soil, from whence all of our sustenance, sustainable and otherwise.

A well-oiled machine

2005-05-18T11:48:00.000-04:00

Big Ag is getting nervous about energy costs. The hand-wringing reveals much about the energy-intensive nature of industrial agriculture--and its lack of imagination regarding alternatives.

Here's an Associated Press article laying out the energy story in terms dictated by the American Farm Bureau Federation, which not innacurately calls itself "the voice of agriculture." It has only forgoten to add a few modifiers: vast-scale, heavily subsidized, energy-intensive.

The AP article cites a Farm Bureau economist complaining that high oil prices will add about 10 percent to farmers' costs this year, or about $3 billion.

If a 10 percent increase amounts to $3 billion, that means US farmers spend about $30 billion per year on fuel and fertilizers.To put that number in perspective, the entire annual economic output of Guatemala--which the US is trying to lassoo into a free-trade pact that has the Farm Bureau salivating--is about $50 billion.

Another way to look at it: In order to sustain industrial ag, the Federal Government from 1996 to 2003 forked over about $131 billion to farmers, the top 10 percent of recipients hording 70 percent of the loot. That's an average of about $15 billion a year, or about half of the energy/fertilizer bill.

No wonder President Bush caved in to industrial-ag pressure and decided to preserve ag subsidies at current levels in the 2006 budget.

Clearly, we're looking at an energy-intensive system here. This 2002 paper by Johns Hopkins scientists Leo Horrigan, Robert S. Lawrence, and Polly Walker claims that:

The average U.S. farm uses 3 kcal of fossil energy in producing 1 kcal of food energy (in feedlot beef production, this ratio is 35:1), and this does not include the energy used to process and transport the food. (Emphasis added.)

Last time anyone checked--according to the Hopkins professors no one has since a 1969 Defense Department study--food travels an average of 1300 miles bewteen farm and table in the US. That's a lot of oil up in smoke.

And the energy efficiency of industrial ag has deteriorated over time. Richard Manning claims that in 1940, just before chemical-intensive agriculture really took hold, the average farm actually produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy used, and that by 1974 the ratio had fallen to 1:1.

What, then, is the Farm Bureau's agenda for addressing the American farm's exorbitant energy bill, and for increasing energy efficiency?

It has none. According to the group's Website, its energy agenda includes urging the government to raid the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve, supporting ludicrous government ethanol subsidies, and opposing "excessive" automobile fuel-economy standards.

Clearly, our food system is wholly reliant on cheap energy. But what happens when the age of cheap energy ends?

A billion acres sold (and counting)

2005-05-13T23:24:00.000-04:00

The genetically modified (GM) seed industry is aglow with news of its latest milestone: one billion acres have now been planted with biotech crops. As one industry executive enthused in an Associated Press story, "somewhere in the northern hemisphere, a farmer has [recently] planted the one billionth acre of seed containing biotech traits."

Northern hemisphere? Genetically modified seeds are pretty popular among commodity farmers in Brazil and Argentina, too. And don't some states in southern India sanction GM cotton? In fact, one industry front group boasts that GM acreage is growing at least as fast in the quote-unquote developing world as it is in the northern hemisphere.

No matter. The ascent from zero to a billion acres planted in less than a decade is indeed a remarkable achievement--more stunning still, given all the popular opposition to GM.

Describing the sheer vastness represented by one billion acres, yet another industry front group gushes:

A billion acres is a lot of territory. It would take more than 27 land masses the size of Iowa to fill up that much space.

If you lined up a billion square acres, they would circle the planet at the equator more than 1587 times. They would reach to the moon and back 164 times. They would go all the way to the sun and all the way back--and still have some length left to spare.

A "lot of territory," indeed! Consider, too, that biotech acreage is growing at a compounded annual rate of 20 percent. That means, if present trends hold, there will 1.2 billion biotech acres (five more Iowas) a year from now--and 1.44 billion acres (another six Iowas) the year after that. That's the beauty of compounding interest, as the financial planners like to say.

Already, the above-linked AP story reports, 85 percent of soybeans and 45 percent of corn planted in the United States in 2004 were biotech crops.

The story goes one to quote a satisfied customer of the GM industry's goods, one Gordon Wassenaar, 69, of Prairie City, Iowa, who:

farms about 750 acres of soybeans and about 500 acres of corn. All of his soybeans are biotech crops, and his corn is grown from about three-fourths biotech seed. He said he's used the biotech crops for years now and they've saved on cost, cutting down the use of farm chemicals, and saved some on the work because less spraying is required.
"We're pleased," he said. "No complaints at all."

So biotech's been a boon, huh? Well, Bitter Greens Journal respects all farmers, and salutes anyone still scratching a living off the land in 2005. (Although it bitterly deplores the commodity market that most farmers have been forced to sell into; see this post).

But I wonder if the goods proffered by Monsanto, which dominates the markets for biotech soy and corn seeds, have really been such a great benefit after all. I went to one of my favorite Web sites, the indispensable Environmental Working Group's farm-subsidy page. I found that the farmer quoted by AP, Wassenaar, racked up an eye-popping $337,759 in commodity subsidies between 1995 and 2003, roughly the period of GM agriculture's great rise.

Again, all respect to Wassenaar, but if GM is so wondrous, then why does the government have to dole out $37,528 a year to keep his farm afloat?

I doubt the claim that GM cuts down, long-term, on use of farm chemicals. Monsanto's Roundup Ready seed lines evidently require higher doses of the herbicide glyphosate, the key ingredient Monsanto's cash-cow Roundup product.

And if GM increases yield, as its enthusiasts promise, then farmers like Wassenaar will either have to buy and tend large herds of manure-producing ruminants—or boost application of fossil-fuel-laden fertilizers. Why? As the Appalachian State University agroecologist and Maverick Farms mentor Christof den Biggelaar points out, higher yields mean more nutrients pulled out of the soil.

Higher yields can only be sustained by amending the soil, one way or another.

According to an article in Business Week (April 13, 2000), the average yield per acre of corn has surged from 34 bushels in the 1940s to 44 in the '50s to 120 bushels by the late 1990s. The price paid for that leap can be partially measured by the devastation caused by nitrogen-rich fertilizers being washed into waterways from the Mississippi clear down to the Gulf of Mexico. (As for the implications on energy usage, stay tuned for an upcoming post.)

Also, exploding yields led to tumbling prices. Not coincidentally, the same period described by Business Week saw the total number of U.S. farms plunge from 5 million to under 2 million.

There's a lot of despair and pain built into that number, lots of tradition ruined, families and entire areas devastated. The quality of our food, too, has paid a dear price.

And as GM crops continue their awesome ascent, I fear, the unpaid bills of industrial agriculture will continue piling up.

The only salute I can offer Monsanto on the occasion of the billion-acre milestone is a middle finger raised high in the air. I hope more farmers join me in this gesture. (That one’s for the Monsanto flack who regularly checks in on Bitter Greens Journal.)

NC outrage
One way the GM industry spreads its seed, so to speak, despite widespread opposition, is through buying politicians. Monsanto recently got slapped on the wrist by the US Justice Department for bribing Indonesian officials to accept GM crops. A Bitter Greens Journal reader called Sally alerted me to a bit of shenanigans going on right in my own back yard.

According to a environmental group called the Dogwood Alliance, based in the US south, "Members of the North Carolina General Assembly have filed a flurry of bills drafted by corporate agribusiness to preempt local regulations that might restrict genetically modified crops."

Instead of simply preventing local governments from passing ordinances that ban biotech crops-bans which a few towns in California have imposed, evidently spooking the GM industry--the bills try to evade public outrage by through vagueness. They would forbid municipalities "to control any kind of plant or plant pest."

I'll be looking into the money trails of the pols sponsoring these bills. One is NC Sen. Charles Albertson (address: 136 Henry Dunn Pickett Road. Beulaville, NC, 28518; phone number (910) 298-4923); others are Assemblyman Dewey Hill, and senators David Hoyleand Tom Apodaca.

Dogwood Alliance says similar bills have been floated in nine other states. Stay tuned.

Ethanol and 'peak oil': an aside

2005-05-02T22:38:00.000-04:00

Responding to one of my periodic tirades on ethanol, reader Roger Dennison recently wrote in to say:

Tom, the thing you don't mention in your blog, which will certainly impact agriculture in a big BIG way, is the inevitable onset of 'Peak Oil'. I must assume you know what I'm talking about. I am so certain about the future fuel supply crisis, that, when it comes, I want to be (A) living in a place that sells ethanol or E85, (or biodiesel) and (B), have a Flex-Fuel vehicle that will run on it. By that point, and it could happen sooner than later, the "glut" of ethanol will suddenly transform into a shortage.

I'm curious to know what you have to say on this matter.

Bitter Greens Journal responds
I'm familiar with "peak oil," the idea that humans have consumed crude oil so rapidly over the past 100 years that the world's deposits are severely diminished. The argument goes like this: All of the "easy" oil has been sucked out of the earth or will be soon; what's left will be expensive to extract, both becuase it's concentrated in politically unstable countries, and because it lies deeper under the earth's surface than the easy stuff. Thus oil production has peaked or will soon--and the world faces ever-tightening supplies of oil and ever higher prices at the gas pump.

The oil industry, and its champions within the White House, downplay the peak-oil scenario. Sure, they say, oil production will eventually peak, but not anytime soon; thus no need for serious conservation/alternative-energy efforts.

Yet I find the peak-oil argument generally persuasive, especially after having read Paul Roberts' bracing 2004 book The End of Oil. Anyone who thinks peak oil is a fringe theory should read that impeccably documented work. Note also that Richard Lugar and James Woolsey, respectively US senator and former CIA chief, essentially put forward a "peak oil" analysis in this 1999 essay in Foreign Affairs, that trumpet of establishment thinking.

Indeed, those two worthies were essentially arguing my critic Dennison's case: that ethanol provides a way out of an imminent energy crunch.

I disagree.

Studies about how much energy gain ethanol delivers conflict. The USDA, that long-time underwriter of ethanol production, recently came out with a study claiming that ethanol delivers a little more energy than it requires to produce.

Tad W. Patzek, a geoscientist at Berkeley, begs to differ. He claims that accounting for "the myriad energy inputs required by industrial agriculture, from the amount of fuel used to produce fertilizers and corn seeds to the transportation and wastewater disposal costs," ethanol consumes six units of energy to produce just one.

So USDA posits a marginal gain and a Berkeley scientist posits a significant loss. Either way, if petrol prices skyrocket under a peak oil model, how will we come up with the energy needed for mass-scale monocrop corn production?

Indeed, I find the idea that we can rely on industrial agriculture to fuel our 211-million-strong fleet of cars in the US fanciful, at best.

Richard Manning, in his Harper's 2004 essay The Oil We Eat, has this to say:

Ever since we ran out of arable land, food is oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1. And this understates the problem, because at the same time that there is more oil in our food there is less oil in our oil. A couple of generations ago we spent a lot less energy drilling, pumping, and distributing than we do now. In the 1940s we got about 100 barrels of oil back for every barrel of oil we spent getting it. Today each barrel invested in the process returns only ten, a calculation that no doubt fails to include the fuel burned by the Hummers and Blackhawks we use to maintain access to the oil in Iraq.

In short, an agricultural system that depends so heavily on fossil fuel represents a dubious option for replacing fossil fuel.

If Bitter Greens Journal ruled the world, the government would stop subsidizing industrial agriculture and ethanol production and start building a real train system. Keeping 211 million vehicles on the road, nearly one for every man, woman, and child in the US, may simply not be sustainable.

Amtrak's annual budget is about $1 billion a year. Corn farmers get at least that much in subsidies in a typical year, and the highways suck up many more times that.

Archer-Daniels Midland's man at USDA

2005-04-29T12:03:00.000-04:00

"Charles Conner served as President of the Corn Refiners Association from 1997 through 2001. During his tenure, he expertly guided the industry through several challenging trade and biotech issues. His term coincided with significant growth in the industry and the development of several new uses of corn."
--From a Corn Refiners Association press release, dated April 28, 2005, praising Chuck Conners confirmation as Deputy Secretary of Agriculture

In his blistering polemic against industrial agriculture, Against the Grain, Richard Manning quotes The New York Times on Archer Daniels Midland's political influence: "Archer-Daniels does not have a lobbyist in Washington; it does not need one."

The Paper of Record meant that ADM has skillfully and quietly created a niche for itself within the US political economy, without need of a noisy team of lobbyists. ADM buys 12 percent of the nation's corn at a heavily subsidized price from farmers, and converts it into two main products: high-fructose corn syrup and ethanol. As I'll show below, both of those products owe their markets completely to government intervention. And in both cases, govermnent action benefits ADM without resulting in direct payments that the company's opponents can easily attack on the Hill.

Thus, no need for a lobbyist. However, despite ADM's lack of a lobbyist in Washington, it does boast a man in Washington, specifically in the Department of Agriculture.

Chuck Conner, recently confirmed as deputy secretary of the US Department of Agriculture, made his Bitter Greens Journal debut in this post, stroking his chin and declaring "intriguing" a mind-bendingly dumb idea involving ethanol, the fuel made from corn.

From 1997 to 2001, Conner served as president of the Corn Refiners Association. ADM is the dominant corn refiner: As stated above, it buys 12 percent of all field corn grown in the US, the country's largest crop. And it controls a third of the high-fructose corn syrup market, and about a third of the market for ethanol. The corn-refining industry is so highly concentrated that the association has only seven member companies, among them ADM and another shadowy agri-giant, privately held Cargill.

A 'perfect vehicle'
In 1996, the Corn Refiners Association became embroiled in a scandal involving ADM's scheme to fix the price of high-fructose corn syrup and other processed corn products. The Chicago Sun-Times reported on Nov. 3, 1997, that an FBI agent testified to a grand jury that ADM had used the association between 1992 and 1995 as cover to hold secret meetings with competitors for price-fixing purposes. (Article unavailable online; I pulled it from Nexis.)

The Sun-Times article states: "The trade group provided what the alleged conspirators called 'an easy cover-up' and 'perfect' vehicle for carrying out their plans, the agent said in an affidavit."

ADM eventually copped a plea, pleading guilty to fixing the price for lysine and citric acid (corn-processing byproducts) in exchange for immunity from charges involving high-fructose corn syrup. The company paid a then-record fine of $100 million, and executive Michael Andreas, son of legendary CEO Dwayne Andreas, did time in jail.

The Corn Refiners Association, however, walked away clean, although it might not be a coincidence that it needed a new president in 1997, the year Conner signed on.

And, indeed, ADM walked away clean, too. In 2004 alone, the company turned a profit of $318 million from its sweetener business. (Source: company financial report linked here.)

Conner's only notable activity that I can dig up as leader of that august group has been his attempt to bully Mexico into letting heavily subsidized high-fructose corn syrup from the US overwhelm its domestic sugar industry.

Sweetness and power
Now an aside. Why does high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) exist? Richard Manning shows in Against the Grain that ADM financed the lobbying effort that led to the blatantly protectionist sugar-quota system that went into effect in 1982 and has held sway ever since. (Signed into law by one zealously pro-free trade president, Reagan, it now has the full support of another, GW Bush. Clinton, too, paraded his free-trade credentials while accepting the sugar quotas).

What does this have to do with HFCS? The world price of processed sugar has long been below that of HFCS, meaning industrial users such soft-drink bottlers have no real reason to buy it. That's where the sugar quota comes in. It props up the price of sugar in the US to twice the world level. With the sugar price artifiically inflated, ADM has a ready market for its HFCS. Here is Manning: "The cost of corn syrup hovers about halfway between world sugar and protected domestic sugar, a price designed to 'overcome [soft-drink] bottler resistence, a reluctance, it turns out, solely based on price.' " (He is quoting a Barron's article.)

Today, HFCS is the dominant sweetener in the US; 42 percent of the corn grown here goes into making it. If it weren't for ADM's efforts, no market for it woud exist.

This information puts an interesting spin on the sugar industry's opposition to CAFTA, and Conner's involvement in trying to rig up a sugar exception to that trade pact, discussed here.

A well-fed senator
Before taking the helm of the tainted trade group, Conner served as an aide to Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., starting in 1980. During that long tenure, Conner attained the position of minority and majority staff director of the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee.

Luger is a long-time proponent of government subsidies for ethanol, a stance I've critiqued here, among other places. Even ethanol's staunchest supporters acknowledge it would collapse if the government pulled the plug; here'sa Cal-Berkeley scientist who claims that, accounting for "the myriad energy inputs required by industrial agriculture, from the amount of fuel used to produce fertilizers and corn seeds to the transportation and wastewater disposal costs," ethanol burns more energy in its production phase than it delivers as fuel.

In the January/February 1999 issue of Foreign Affairs, Luger published a long essay hailing ethanol as just the thing to save the US from dependence on foreign oil. His co-author: James Woolsey, director of the CIA from 1993 to 1995. At the time, Woolsey served on the board of directors of BCI International, an ethanol start-up company. I'm not making this up.

Throughout his long career and tenure on the Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee, Lugar has been a magnet for agribusiness cash. This link shows the goodies he received in 1996, Conner's last full year as his assistant; click around that site for more info.

Before becoming ADM's man in the USDA, Conner served from 2001 until just a few weeks ago as ADM's man in the White House, bearing the title of "special assistant to the president for agriculture, trade and food assistance."

It's not far-fetched to say that ADM does have a lobbyist in Washington, only the company doesn't pay his wages. You do. Salary:: $134,000.

When future historians gasp in horror at how Pax Americana ran the world's food system, obscure figures like Conner may become objects of derision. On the other hand, the way these guys are running the world, we may be lucky to have future historians at all.

CAFTA and industrial ag

2005-04-26T10:50:00.000-04:00

Looking for ammunition in the fight to derail CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement that Bush is currently trying to ram through Congress, someone recently asked me how it would affect US farmers.

The answer depends on what sort of farmers we're talking about.

Commodity farmers--those who produce large amounts of corn, wheat, soybeans, and other bulk crops that fuel the global industrial food system--would likely benefit. For a commodity-corn farmer, for example, the prospect of dumping lavishly subsidized corn right into the southern heart of the tortilla belt must sound pleasant indeed.

Click on the above link, and you'll find that the U.S. government delivered $37.4 billion in direct payments to large-scale corn farmers between 1995 and 2003. To put that number in perspective, Central America's largest economy, Guatemala’s, boasts a GDP of about $56 billion.

It's no wonder, then, that American Farm Bureau president Larry Wooten, himself a tobacco and grain farmer, recently reiterated his group's "strong support" for CAFTA (also known as CAFTA-DR, because the Dominican Republic is also involved), which he declared would "overwhelmingly be a win-win opportunity for U.S. agriculture.”

He went on to analyze the pact in terms so stark that Bitter Greens Journal itself would have been proud to have authored them. He enthused:

The CAFTA-DR would put the United States in a position to underprice competitors and boost market share for almost every major commodity, while giving our producers access equal to or greater than that of our competitors.

Corn, cattle, and pork interests have also weighed in. National Corn Growers Association president Leon Corzine even hinted that CAFTA passage would temper corn growers' voracious appetite for government cash. He said: "It has always been NCGA's position that corn growers want income from the marketplace - the global market - and not from the government. To do this, we need the CAFTA-DR markets opened."

Yeah, right. I suppose NAFTA--which in 1994 opened Mexico's market to an avalanche of cheap, low-quality corn and threw untold thousands of corn farmers off the land and across the border--wasn't enough for him?

The only group of U.S. commodity farmers I know of who aren't cheering CAFTA are sugar producers. The Central American countries produce sugar, and thus CAFTA would mean easing United State's strict sugar-quota program, which went into effect in 1982 and has since survived many challenges.

While I bitterly oppose CAFTA, I have little sympathy for the sugar industry. In fact, it needs no sympathy from these quarters. The Financial Times reported on April 12 (the article is available only for a fee) that "Although sugar represents only 1 percent of US farm revenues, the industry accounted for about 17 percent of political contributions by agriculture businesses between 1990 and 2004--just over $20 million."

Those handouts have evidently won some influence in the Bush administration, that bastion of free trade. Last year, Bush capitulated to sugar interests and rammed an exemption for sugar into a free trade pact with Australia. The FT reports that the administration is busily trying to work some sort of sugar concession into CAFTA.

One possibility: to allow in a certain amount of Central American sugar but to "set it aside for conversion to ethanol--a prospect described as 'intriguing' by Chuck Conner, the president's advisor on food and trade issues." Don't get me started on the absurdity of that idea.

To sum, CAFTA, like NAFTA before it, looks like a great boon for most commodity farmers and the industrial-food interests they serve. (As for large-scale vegetable and fruit producers, I expect that CAFTA will provide them a new upsurge of cheap labor, as CAFTA wreaks havoc on local foodways and clears the land of subsistence and market farmers alike.)

And how would CAFTA affect small-scale U.S. farmers geared to their local markets, like Maverick Farms?

Not much, probably.

However, it must be noted that for small-scale farming to be sustainable, it must turn a profit. (Unlike large-scale monocrop farming, it can't rely on government handouts.)

In our current system, small-scale, local-based farming relies for its existence on a healthy pool of expendable income—which is ultimately generated by exploiting cheap labor in places like Central America. I've discussed the class paradoxes of sustainable agriculture in this post and this post.

Monsanto marches on

2005-04-24T14:10:00.000-04:00

"Exponential growth, dwindling opposition--it all adds up to a windfall for Monsanto," I wrote in Bitter Greens Journal's very first post on Jan. 20.

I used the gene-splicing seed giant's blockbuster performance on Wall Street to argue that its attempted leveraged buyout of global agriculture is moving forward with nary a hitch. (The black, red, and green lines, respectively, represent the major U.S. stock indexes, trampled underfoot by Monsanto.)

Since that time, Monsanto has continued to thunder ahead of the broader market.

Here are a few recent developments.

• Monsanto continues its successful campaign in European courts to force Brazilian and Argentine soybean farmers to pay royalties for seeds. These cases illuminate the dark core of Monsanto's business model. Conventional seed companies sell farmers seeds and book a one-time profit; farmers are free to save seeds, as they have since the dawn of agriculture, for future use.

Monsanto, however, is developing a sort of software model. It sells not only seeds but also a license on the DNA contained within the seed, which it claims to own; farmers are expected to pay royalties each year for as long as the company holds a patent on the seed's DNA.

When Argentina opened its market to GM seeds in 1996, it shrewdly denied Monsanto a patent. Farmers bought Roundup Ready soy seeds (genetically engineered to withstand copious applications of Roundup, Monsanto's cash-cow weed killer) and proceeded to save them--without paying Monsanto. Meanwhile, these farmers quickly began smuggling GM seed for sale into Brazil--which only recently officially opened its doors to GM seeds.

As this Wall Street
Journal article shows, Monsanto's strategy for shaking down Argentina's farmers is to file lawsuits in EU countries that recognize the company's soy patents and import Argentine soy. Since the company can't charge farmers royalties annually, it's demanding a 1 percent cut of the take when the nation's farmers sell their goods in Europe.

The same tactic has already been used to squeeze cash out of Brazil's soy farmers, the WSJ reports.

How critical is this tactic to Monsanto's profit prospects? The company's shares plunged 5 percent on April 4, the day after ministers from Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay issued a joint statement deploring the export charge, the WSJ reports. With the US market rapidly maturing (see lead quote above), the company will need to squeeze cash out of rapidly emerging ag commodity-producing regions like Argentina and Brazil, investors figure.

Shares quickly recovered, however, as Wall Street analysts rallied round the company's stock.

Greenpeace, which has been helping defend Argentine farmers against these assaults, notes a sinister twist to Monsanto's strategy. The group's Emiliano Ezcurra told the Journal:

Monsanto has sold these seeds here since 1996, but it never went after farmers before because it was waiting for practically all of them to become users of Roundup Ready. Now that nearly everyone uses Roundup Ready, Monsanto is suddenly interested in collecting royalties. That is very suspicious.

It should also be noted here that Monsanto has not been shy about suing U.S. farmers who never bought Monsanto seeds, but whose crops were contaminated by Monsanto traits through cross-pollination, for non-payment of royalties. (See a recent report by the indispensable Center for Food Safety for details).

Greenpeace's Ezcurra is not sanguine about the Argentine farmers' prospects in EU courts. He added: "The most probable outcome is that Monsanto will win this case...But it's important that people in Europe be aware of Monsanto 's maneuverings in Argentina."

Surely, the whole business is sordid. By buying into the promises of GM, Argentine and Brazilian farmers are submitting to the ruinous trap of maximizing production for the global commodity market. The sort of input-heavy agriculture being practiced there is not only a poor business model for farmers, but it's also environmentally disastrous, as it depends heavily on nitrogen-rich fertilizers as well as Monsanto's Roundup.

Nevertheless, I wish those farmers well in their attempt to stiff this rogue company.

• Here is an excellent WSJ article describing Monsanto's ultimately bungled attempt to bribe Indonesia's government into accepting GM seeds.

The punchline: Charles Martin, the company's main Asia hand, fired for his role in the botched bribery, now heads up the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's chapter in China, of which Monsanto is a dues-paying member.

Martin is the author of the following gem, quoted by the WSJ and revealed to investigators by an Indonesian official:

When the government plays classical music, we play classical music; when it plays jazz, we play jazz; if it plays bribery, we play bribery; but if it plays clean, that is what we like.

U.S. authorities caught Monsanto doling out a total of $750,000 in bribes to officials, for which it slapped a fine of $1.5 million on the company.

• Meanwhile, Monsanto's bottom line swells.

Earlier this month, Monsanto reported net income for first-quarter 2005 had more than doubled compared with the same period a year before, surging to $373 million from $154 million. Moreover, the company told Wall Street it expects earnings to grow 17% overall in 2006 and 20% to 25% in 2007.

The company added that those numbers assume royalty revenue from Brazil and Paraguay but not from Argentina. "We hope we can finally reach a resolution [with Argentina] that allows us to be compensated for the value our technology has brought to that country's soybean farmers," a company official declared.

And if Monsanto succeeds, I suppose it plans to use its soaring profits to help clean up the environmental and social messes its technology is creating down there.

• I'll end on a bit of hopeful news. Monsanto recently announced it had received a "a broad subpoena from Illinois officials seeking information about the pricing and licensing of its genetically modified seeds" (quote from a WSJ article).

Details remain sketchy, but lots of interesting info can be revealed when state prosecutors go after big companies, as several Wall Street firms can attest. BGJ will be watching this story.

Squeezed the last drop: the vexed economics of small dairy farms

2005-04-22T13:00:00.000-04:00

Any day now, Bill Sherwood will shut down his 50-cow dairy farm in Bethel, a stretch of pretty rolling pastureland outside of Boone, a town in the Appalachians of North Carolina.

“I sold my cows to a man in South Carolina,” he told me recently. “I’ll keep milking them until he comes and takes ‘em away.”

As late as the 1970s, there were 15 small dairy farms in Bethel. When Sherwood shutters the dairy business he started in 1959, there will be none. Similarly, the hills of Watauga County once teemed with dairy farms, most of them small in scale. According to Watauga County extension agent Frank Bolick, the county will only have one left when Sherwood retires, Tommy Tester’s 20-cow operation in the Silverstone Community.

The collapse of dairy farming in Watauga County stems from broad trends in the dairy industry and U.S. agriculture generally. Simply put, farmers have seen prices for their goods decline or stagnate, while the cost of doing business rises steadily.

According to the USDA’s Economic Research Service, in the early 1980s it cost farmers $11.90 to produce 100 pounds of milk, which drew an average market price of $13.40. That makes a 1.5 percent return. By the late 1990s, however, the average cost of doing business had actually run ahead of the average price. The economic return to the farmer went negative, to 1.6 percent.

Given those conditions, conventional dairy farmers face two choices: either get bigger, to try to make up on volume what they’re losing in price, or get out of the business.

A recent study by Geoff Benson, an agricultural economist at North Carolina State University, shows that the total number of U.S. dairy farms plunged from about 158,000 in 1993 to under 100,000 in 2001. Smaller farms showed a much higher tendency to go out of business than larger ones. Nationwide, about 15,000 farms in Sherwood’s size class—herds ranging from 30 to 100 cows--went out of business between 1997 and 2002, a 23 percent drop in just four years.

Meanwhile, the number of farms with herds of over 500 cows actually grew during that period, Benson reports. “Cows are being redistributed from small farms to larger ones and average herd size is increasing,” he writes.

Two major factors drive the low price farmers draw for their milk. The first is oversupply. Farmers have been squeezing as much milk as possible out of each cow to offset stagnant prices and rising costs. But doing so has caused a treadmill effect—the resulting glut of milk only makes it cheaper, forcing farmers to drive up production still more.

The second factor is consolidation of processors, the companies that buy the milk produced by Sherwood. The four largest processors buy 60 percent of the milk produced in the United States. In many regions, including this one, a single buyer exists for milk destined for fluid consumption (as opposed to cheese and other processed products). Most of Sherwood’s milk went for processing to Pet Dairy in Wilkesboro, a subsidiary of Dean Foods, the largest U.S. processor.

Dean recently announced plans to shut down the Wilkesboro plant, consolidating its business with another plant in Winston-Salem. Since farmers typically pay for trucking milk to the processing plant, that would have added to Sherwood’s cost burden.

When a single buyer controls a market, it wields tremendous leverage to minimize prices.

It’s not surprising, then, that Bill Sherwood’s son, James, has elected not to take over the farm when his father retires, choosing instead to work a county correctional facility.

“It just doesn’t make sense,” he told me recently. “Our costs keep going up, but the price the company pays stays the same.”

In a future post, I'll discuss ways in which communities can wrest control of dairy production from the mega-processors.

Homogenized milk: the devil?

2005-04-21T09:18:00.000-04:00

The natural homogenization of goat milk is, from a human health standpoint, much better than the mechanically homogenized cow milk product. It appears that when fat globules are forcibly broken up by mechanical means, it allows an enzyme associated with milk fat, known as xanthine oxidase, to become free and penetrate the intestinal wall. Once xanthine oxidase gets through the intestinal wall and into the bloodstream, it is capable of creating scar damage to the heart and arteries, which in turn may stimulate the body to release cholesterol into the blood in an attempt to lay a protective fatty material on the scarred areas. This can lead to arteriosclerosis. It should be noted that this effect is not a problem with natural (unhomogenized) cow milk. In unhomogenized milk this enzyme is normally excreted from the body without much absorption.
--excerpted from “Goat Milk versus Cow Milk,” by G. F. W. Haenlein and R. Caccese, University of Delaware, Newark, in the Extension Goat Handbook, fact sheet E-1, 1984.

The source for this rather astonishing claim is old; but it comes not from some blissed-out health guru peddling a product, but rather from an ag-extension scientist at a respected university.

It bears out what I consider a key theme: that the problem in the American diet isn't the amount of fat people consume, as the mainstream health authorities typically claim, but the quality of fat. In the popular imagination, the linguistic identity between fat as food and fat as excess body weight has caused great confusion--which could be cleared up by watching, say, rail-thin Italians enjoy copious quantities of virgin olive oil.

Has the case against homogenized milk been thoroughly tested and debunked? If not, why is virtually all the milk on supermarket shelves, including most organic milk, homogenized?

It's tempting to reply that the FDA surely wouldn't allow a practice known to be health-ruining to rise to the level of industry standard in a food as widely consumed as milk. But remember, the agency allowed itself to be cowed for decades by industrial food interests bent on using partially hydrogenated oil as a cheap and ubiquitous cooking fat.

I found the above quote in an excellent newsletter called Creamline, which is geared to small- and micro-scale dairy producers.

I'll be writing more about small-scale dairy in the days to come, because the second to last dairy in our county just announced it's shutting down--squeezed out by the impossible economics of conventional dairy farming.

Saxby Chambliss gets his way

2005-04-14T10:04:00.000-04:00

When Bush proposed steep cuts in agricultural spending for the 2006 budget earlier this year, targeting both commodity subsidies and conservation programs, industrial-agriculture interests and sustainable-ag proponents alike organized in protest.

It's no surprise which side won the day.

Bush's beleaguered ag scretary, Mike Johanns, announced April 12 that large-scale commodity farmers could rest easy: the 2006 budget will maintain them in the style to which they've grown accustomed.

Sustainable-ag schemes will not be so lucky.

The above-linked Associated Press story reports that the orginal cuts proposed by Bush would have totalled $8 billion over 10 years. The House's proposed budget would slash Agriculture Department spending by $5.3 billion in 2006, while the Senate's would slice off $2.8 billion.

"If cuts don’t come from payments to [commodity] farmers, they still must come from somewhere," AP writes. And it goes on to state that the likely targets will be conservation and food-stamp programs.

One program on the chopping block is the Conservation Security Program (CSP), described by the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture as an "an innovative federal program that provides financial and technical assistance to farmers and ranchers nationwide to help them implement sound conservation practices that improve soil, water, and ecosystem health."

The program essentially gives farmers an immediate financial incentive to break away from environmentally ruinous chemical inputs and begin treating their farms as living ecosystems. Rather than reward gross output, as do the commodity supports so dear to industrial-ag interests, these payments reward farmers for how they farm.

And also unlike commodity supports, which explicitly push farmers to scale up to grab more largesse, this program is structurally geared to human-scale farming. In its fact sheet on the Conservation Security Program, the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture points out that:

Several key rules of the CSP stipulate that eligible land must be privately owned, that an eligible applicant must have an active interest in the agricultural operation, and that an applicant must have control of the land for the life of the CSP contract. This discourages the kinds of land erosion and water pollution that can result from short-term land leases while encouraging the farmer's stake in his own land.

The 2002 Farm Bill, the Campaign reports, stipulates that the program should receive $649 million in 2006. To put that number in perspective, note that the U.S. government spent $2.8 billion subsidizing commodity corn farmers in 2003 alone.

But even $649 million is too much for a program that doesn't play into the hands of agribusiness. The National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture reports that Bush's proposed 2006 budget would slash the program's funding to just $375 million. Now that Bush has yanked commodity supports off of the chopping block, you can count on even steeper cuts in that program.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R. Ga., Senate Agriculture Committee chair and champion of Georgia's fat and happy cotton farmers, has already been rubbing his paws together at the prospect of chopping the USDA's food-stamp program as a way of preserving the government's generosity to vast-scale farming enterprises.

A blog less cynical about national-level electoral politics might print that lout’s address and urge you to harangue him. This one will merely urge you to plant a garden and spend as much of your food budget as possible buying directly from small farmers.

Citizen Ruth: A measured defense of Ruth Reichl

2005-04-10T09:48:00.000-04:00

Gourmet editor and former New York Times chief restaurant critic Ruth Reichl has had such a meteoric career that some sort of backlash is inevitable.

Her latest memoir, Garlic and Sapphires, has thus far drawn lukewarm reviews from the
the Times and the New York Observer.(Adam Gopnik has some typically glib and forgettable things to say about it in a recent New Yorker.)

Bitter Greens Journal has just two things to add to this discussion.

• Reichl wrote an excellent review. I didn't live in New York during her tenure at the Times, but I read her religiously from the hinterlands of Austin, Texas. She was my stylistic model during my stint as a restaurant critic at the Austin Chronicle. She wrote tight, pungently argued reviews that attempted to place the restaurant under discussion in a broader context. Her catholicity of tastes contrasted brightly against the dull Francophile obsessions of her predecessors. She used the first-person voice as a tool of expression without making the reviews about herself. And she usually managed to write vividly about food without overwriting and lapsing overtly into food porn--a difficult task. Her model may have been the film critic Pauline Kael--personal, yes, but intensely devoted to the subject at hand, not herself.

• Alone (as far as I can tell) among the made members of the food-media mafia, Reichl cares about sustainability and the brutal economics of farming. When she took over Gourmet a few years ago, it focused on European travel and high-end NY and California restaurants. While it certainly retains those foci, Gourmet since Reichl's arrival has published articles on: a land-trust scheme that helps "land rich, cash poor" small farmers keep land under cultivation while freeing up cash for retirement, etc; Ronnybrook Dairy, a small, popular-but-struggling family-owned dairy in the Hudson Valley; the pioneering Virginia farmer Joel Salatin, who has taken the raising of animals for meat to new levels of sustainability; the food industry's long, successful, but ultimately doomed campaign to hide the health-ruining qualities of hydrogenated oil; and the sudden ubiquity of genetically modified food on supermarket shelves. These are just the examples I can remember off the top of my head (Gourmet has no online archive of features.) Not one of them is imaginable in any other high-circulation food magazine (Food and Wine, Bon Apetit, Savuer, etc.); or in pre-Reichl Gourmet.

Educating the well-heeled readers of glossy food magazines about sustainability and the plight of small farmers is certainly not sufficient for sparking fundamental change; but it sure is necessary. And Citizen Ruth (as I've taken to calling her, a nod to her social consciousness, which towers over that of her peers) is doing her part.

The ethanol shakeout

2005-04-09T07:52:00.000-04:00

Many commodity corn farmers, buffeted by decades of steadily falling prices for their goods and borne aloft only by government
subsidy, have been transfixed by the promise of ethanol, the corn-based fuel.

It's not hard to see why. For years, they've sold their product to Archer Daniels Midland, the world's biggest buyer of commodity corn, and watched the agribusiness titan turn that cut-rate corn into highly profitable ethanol. The company generates about half a billion dollars in profit each year; according to FTN Midwest Securities analyst Christine McCracken, nearly a quarter of that hoard comes from ethanol production.

As any seasoned Bitter Greens Journal readers knows, ADM's highly profitable ethanol business wouldn't make a dime if the U.S. government didn't prop it up through various tax credits and other subsidies (see this post, this post, and this one).

That means ADM benefits from a double-dose of largesse. Corn-production subsidies keep the price of corn down, cutting ADM's cost (not only for ethanol production but also for its other cash cow, high-fructose corn syrup). Ethanol subsidies boost the price it gets in the marketplace.

As Dwayne Andreas, the legendary fixer who heads up ADM, declared not long ago:

The free market is a myth. Everybody knows that. Just a very few people say it. If you're in a position like I am and do business all over the world, and if I'm not smart enough to know there's no free market, I ought to be fired.

The reason they don't call it socialism is that socialism is a bad word. [See Manning, Richard, Against the Grain, p. 144.]

So it's no surprise that farmers sick of being fleeced out of their corn for a pittance by the likes of Andreas would want to create their own ethanol plants to process their own corn, and they're doing so, pooling their own money to invest millions in new facilities.

I wish they wouldn't.

Rather than get involved with yet another highly inefficient project that wouldn't exist with government support--after all, they're already involved in large-scale monoculture corn production--these farmers might be better off scaling down, saving on input costs by going organic, diversifying their crop base, and focusing on local markets. Let ADM grow its own damned corn.

But the promise of fast profit glitters bright in the depressed cornbelt. As I've said before, if too many ethanol facilities come on line to fast, flooding the market with product, the price will drop. Small farmer-owned cooperatives will be much more vulnerable to a prolonged price slump than the likes of ADM, which has the resources--$1.4 billion of cash in the bank as of June 30, 2004--to sit out a downturn.

And the downturn is on. ADM saw its shares plunge 11 percent last Wednesday when above-mentioned analyst McCracken of FTN Midwest Securities cut her profit forecast on the agri-giant. She declared:

The primary issue driving our downward revision is that the expansion in the ethanol industry exceeds demand...Year-to-date ethanol prices have fallen 36 percent and prices are down 28 percent year-over-year.[Emphasis added]

If the fall in ethanol prices inspires investors to slash ADM's value more than 10 percent in one day, how will it affect small producers that don't generate half a billion dollars in profit each year and don't have $1.4 billion in the bank?

Corn-belt newspapers are full of hand-wringing, but no one's declaring a crisis just yet.

I'm haunted by something I read in the Wall Street Journal not long ago:

David Nelson, a farmer who's chairman of the two-year-old Midwest Grain Processors ethanol plant in Lakota, Iowa, is well aware of the overexpansion threat. "It's starting to get crowded around here," says Mr. Nelson, 52, sipping a Corona in the smoky bar of Cattleman's Steak & Provisions near his Belmond, Iowa, farm. "In the back of our minds, we know there is to be a day of reckoning."

But his solution isn't to cut back. It's to grow big enough to survive a shakeout. Midwest Grain Processors sold about $17 million more stock in January to double the size of its plant. That means this plant alone will be able to make 100 million gallons a year. And its farmer owners are already thinking about where to build a second plant. (Emphasis added.)

But there's only one player that's definitely "big enough to survive a shakeout," and it's not some farmer-owned cooperative.

Maverick spring

2005-04-07T11:26:00.000-04:00

Maverick Farms planted its first greens beds of the year yesterday--greens that Jim Leff, founder of that essential Web site, Chowhound, hailed as "hallucinogenic in their intensity and persistence of flavor; coated with a dab of oil and vinegar, they steal every meal they accompany." We planted the greens made famous around here by our mentor farmer Bill Wilson: spinach, arugula, Tokyo bikuna, mizuna, Russian red kale, and pepper cress. And we threw in a few new-to-us greens that we're excited about: mache, orach, and maruba santoh.

Happy spring to all the sustainable farmers, gardeners, and eaters world-wide.

The Way Forward

2005-04-07T09:34:00.000-04:00

This post marks the debut of "The Way Forward," an occasional feature focusing on small-scale sustainable-food efforts that challenge the dominance of industrial and industrial-organic agriculture. Readers are urged to e-mail me--tom@maverickfarms.com--with ideas for this feature.

Gardening in the Motor City
My friend the excellent Detroit funk/R&B musician Jonah Nadir Omowale (known universally as Nadir; check this guy's music out) alerts me to a new community-gardening initiative in the Motor City.

Even though I abandoned Brooklyn for the Appalachians, I'm no sentimental pastoralist. I'm a long-term disciple of the great urban theorist (and champion of cities) Jane Jacobs. Human history since the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago has been the history of cities. Cities are the future; as David Owen's superb article "Green Manhattan" (in the Oct. 18, 2004, New Yorker, unavailable for free online; get thee to the library) shows, they may be our only hope. The trick is to create agricultural systems within and just outside of cities, minimizing the ruinous effects of long-haul freight transit, maximizing availability of fresh delicious food, and boosting local and even neighborhood economies.

Farmers' markets have been the most visible effort at creating sustainable urban food networks. Equally if not more important, although virtually invisible to well-heeled urban foodies who laudably support farmers' markets, inner-city gardening projects represent a vanguard in the effort to overthrow industrial food and reintroduce sustainably grown, delicious food to populations that were knocked off the land a generation or two ago.

Nadir e-mailed me the following notice about just such a project budding in Detroit. There is much to be learned from it.

Shamba Organic Garden Collective Informational Meeting Set for April 9th at Black Star Communtiy Bookstore

Nsoroma Institute’s Shamba Organic Garden Collective will kick off its 2005 growing season with an informational meeting on Saturday, April 9th at 4:00 p.m. at Black Star Community Bookstore. Influenced by the Toronto-based Afri-Can Food Basket, the Collective was organized in 2002 to: promote African self-reliance through urban organic gardening; develop within the members of our community an appreciation for the interdependence of humans and our environment; promote collective work and cooperative economics; promote health and good nutrition. Shamba is a Kiswahili word that means garden or farm. Based at Nsoroma Institute, an African-centered K-8 school in Oak Park, the collective consists of students, parents and staff of Nsoroma Institute as well as community members interested in organic gardening. The collective maintains a network of organic vegetable gardens throughout the Detroit area..

Organic gardening can be simply defined as growing fruits, vegetables and herbs without the use of genetically modified seeds, chemical pesticides or fertilizers. Organic gardening is a proactive way to insure that we have greater access to high-quality life-sustaining foods. When done in an organized manner, it can also result in a visible reduction in our food bills and can become a source of revenue.

An abundance of information is available about the detrimental effects of the typical meat-based, highly-processed American diet. Heart disease, cancers and various other killers continue to impact America’s Black communities at astounding rates. In many of our homes, “fast-food” in Styrofoam containers has replaced meals lovingly prepared from real foods in our own kitchens. Surely, a people desiring to be free and independent must take control of both what they eat and the source of that food.

The April 9th informational meeting is open to those who have never gardened, but are interested in learning, as well as those who are experienced gardeners. Information will be shared on recommended crops for beginning gardeners, creating a garden plan, basic tools, composting, and 2005 spring planting dates. Additionally, organic seed and Shamba t-shirts will be available for sale.

The Shamba Organic Garden Collective’s promotion of organic gardening is essentially an effort to move our people toward sanity, wholeness and healing. It helps us to break our dependence on the multi-national agribusinesses that control food production and distribution for much of the planet’s population. It embraces an important part of our heritage that helped sustain our bodies and spirits for millennia. For more information on the Nsoroma Institute Shamba Organic Garden Collective call Donna Mayes or Malik Yakini at (248) 541-2548.

If Bitter Greens Journal ruled the world, the main task of city bureaucrats and politicians would be to identify and financially support grassroots programs like this one. But as Jane Jacobs demonstrated more than 40 years ago, they typically take aim at the projects that are actually working on the street, and focus instead on grandiose schemes to boost their supporters in the construction and real-estate trades. Example: the vicious, mostly unsuccessful attack by Rudolph Guiliani--that venerable thug and possible next president--on New York's robust and essential community-garden movement. The great "hero" denounced community gardens as a form of communism--even as he championed spending billions in public cash to rip out several west-side neighborhoods and build a pro football stadium.

At any rate, a salute to our fellow gardeners in Detroit from Maverick Farms.

The case of Cuba
Addiction to cheap, subsidized energy. Reliance on chemical fertilizers and insecticides. A fetish for high-tech "solutions" and huge, expensive, gas-guzzling machines. Dull, institutional food that requires enrichment to meet nutritional needs. Where will it all end? How can it be transformed into something that makes sense? One answer is economic calamity, as Bill McKibben's excellent article in the latest (April) Harper's shows. The article won't be available online until the next issue comes out; but it's there for the reading in most libraries.

Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga, villain

2005-04-01T14:47:00.000-05:00

In their fight to protect industrial-farming interests in their home states, GOP congressmen and senators are predictably targeting food-aid programs for poor people, as well as sustainable-ag programs.

Here is an AP article documenting this sordid behavior. GW Bush, constrained by costly foreign adventures, has been forced into the politically unpalatable position of having to ask Congress to cut agricultural subsidies, the great bulk of which go to vast-scale commodity farms, a great many of them in the GOP-controlled heartland.

That won't do, retort GOP worthies on the Hill. According to the AP article:

Instead, Republican committee chairmen are looking to carve savings from nutrition and land conservation programs that are also run by the Agriculture Department. The government is projected to spend $52 billion this year on nutrition programs like food stamps, school lunches and special aid to low-income pregnant women and children. Farm subsidies will total less than half that, $24 billion.

Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., said the $36 billion food stamp program is a good place to look for savings.

Chambliss--who carries water for the well-heeled Georgia cotton farmers who are dumping their cheap subsidized cotton throughout the world, to disasterous effect for African cotton farmers--added that, "There's not the waste, fraud and abuse in food stamps that we used to see. … That number is down to a little over 6 percent now ... But there is a way, just by utilizing the president's numbers, that we can come up with a significant number there."

Normally, I oppose corporal punishment in all forms; this man, however, deserves to be horse-whipped. So-called conservatives of this ilk have never met a welfare program they didn't like, as long as it benefits a potential donor.

Meanwhile, I learn from the fine blog Four Seasons that these same scoundrels on the Hill are also defunding a farm-to-school program that would give schools grants to:

purchase adequate equipment to store and prepare fresh foods, develop vendor relationships with nearby farmers, plan seasonal menus and promotional materials, and develop experiential nutrition education related to agriculture.
[Quote from the Community Food Security Coalition.]

The program, which was voted into law in 2004 but never funded, would require $5 million "to get off the ground," Four Seasons reports. Keep in mind that Georgia's ten biggest cotton farmers gained that in subsidies in 2003 alone.

Clearly, the way forward is to spend the government's entire farm-subsidy budget--estimated this year to be $24 billion--on programs that develop sustainable local food systems and link small farmers with low-income consumers through farm-to-school and other programs.

And Chambliss? Once he's had his horse-whipping, let's send him to Africa to explain to cotton farmers there why he's worked so hard to wreck their livelihoods.

'New and improved' organic

2005-03-31T15:08:00.000-05:00

"The new ... package design coincides with the roll-out of several new and improved products including Low Fat Bars, Moist and Chewy Bars, Crackers and Soups," crows a food-processing executive in a press release.

No news in that; "new and improved" has been a cliché for shilling boxed foods since the 1960s, and food-processing execs are forever toying with packaging in hopes of jacking up sales.

The above statement, then, would fit into nearly any food-industry press release since the 1980s (the "low fat" business means it couldn't have emerged any earlier); however, that statement surfaced just a few days ago, from the PR department of none other than Hain Celestial, by its own reckoning a "leading natural and organic beverage, snack, specialty food and personal care products company in North America and Europe."

And thus we view the organic label's inexorable slide into tool for marketing heavily packaged and advertised junk food.

Certainly, there's no surprise in that development. As I've written before, the overall U.S. food market has matured, leaving industry heavyweights to scramble for new markets in the so-called developing world. The other way the food-processing titans such as Kraft and Heinz can eke out growth in a stagnate market is to roll out new products.

But Heinz can only tweak its (high-fructose corn syrup-laden) ketchup so many times, just as there's only so much Kraft can do to its mac and [processed] cheese [food]. One way forward for those companies is to roll out organic products--or buy into existing organic brands. Many readers will already know that Heinz owns 20 percent of Hain. Reader Lulu LaMer (note her blog's independently conjured title) has alerted me to this handy guide to which transnational industrial food giants own which allegedly sustainable-minded "health" food brands.

The attraction is obvious. This 2002 study from the USDA's Economic Research Service (ERS) shows the premiums frozen organic vegetables get at the retail level over their conventionally grown peers. Organic frozen broccoli, for example, is 72 percent more expensive than conventional, while green peas draw a whopping 110 percent premium and green beans get an extra 76 percent by displaying the organic tag.

Thus while these companies maintain their slow-growing cash-cow products like mac and cheese and ketchup (which remain profitable because producing them is so cheap), they're rushing in to leverage organic cachet. The result has been the industrialization and commodification of a movement that arose to fight the industrialization and commodification of food. Here's how ERS describes processed organic food:

There are two basic marketing channels for processed organic foods. In both cases, farmers first produce raw commodities. In the first case, these commodities are then sent to the manufacturer, who converts them into a processed product. A distributor acts as a middleman, moving processed products from manufacturers to retailers. In the second scenario, a middleman (shipper) procures raw commodities from farmers and delivers them to manufacturers. After creating the processed good, the manufacturer moves the products through to retailers. The middleman secures the quantities needed; he or she also ensures that the commodities are high quality and meet the manufacturer’s organic standards.

Thus the power relations of industrial agriculture are preserved; the pricing power goes to the middlemen, the manufacturers, and the retailers, leaving little for farmers, who once again face the "get big or get out" edict of a market controlled by a few consolidated buyers. And farmers stop growing food for people to eat, but rather commodities--inputs in an industrial process that after much energy expenditure creates something like food.

The result may be free of pesticides, but I can't imagine it being delicious or particularly healthful.

The supermarket goes south

2005-03-22T06:40:00.000-05:00

The United States has made two great contributions to world cuisine over the last century: the fast-food franchise and the supermarket.

Temples of the cheap-food revolution, both institutions flourished in the 20th century, offering consumers convenience and the cachet of fast life. At the height of the post-war prosperity boom, before the yuppie-led backlash, fast-food and the supermarket occupied the cutting edge of food fashion in a rapidly suburbanizing nation.

At a Grocery Manufacturers Association convention in 1962, an air of hubris and self-celebration held sway that would not have been out of place at, say, a tech trade show in Silicon Valley, circa 1998. As Harvey Levenstein writes:

An executive at the American Can Company told the assemblage that "the package revolution" had helped give the American family not more time for women to work "but more time for cultural and community activities." Charles Mortimer, head of General Foods, boasted that "built-in chef service" had now been added to "built-in maid service" [ie, the dishwashing machine, etc.] implying that housewives could now lead the lives of the leisured upper class. [Quoted by Richard Manning in Against the Grain.]

Among the ironies of these pronouncements was that those very women would soon be sucked en masse into the menial end of the American workforce, as the post-War boom faded and wages could no longer keep up with the dreams of consumption (or in many cases, the bills).

But the supermarket and the "package revolution" marched on. According to Amber Waves, an online publication of the US Department of Agriculture focusing on the "Economics of Food, Farming, Natural Resources, and Rural America," supermarkets controlled between five and ten percent of US food retail sales in the 1930s. By 2001, that figure had risen to 80 percent.

The result has been, to paraphrase Adorno, disaster triumphant: environmental ruin, failing health, and, not least, horrible food. Apologists for the system crow that it at least produces cheap food. I counter that the costs associated with collapsing health and a damaged environment have merely been shuffled off of the balance sheets of the food-processing giants, whose share prices have fattened as much as the waist lines of the people those companies purport to nourish.

The good news, from Bitter Greens Journal's perspective, is that after explosive growth in the post-war decades, growth in overall supermarket sales in the United States has slowed to about 2 percent annually, roughly equal to population growth. It's what Wall Street calls a "mature market"--stable, lucrative, and stagnant.

Stagnation is causing all manner of disruption in the grocery industry. Wal-Mart, for one, is leveraging its low-cost model to steal market share from old-line regional warhorses like Safeway and Kroger. At the high end of the market, health-food chains like Whole Foods and Wild Oats are boosting sales and profits by luring customers from the old-line chains with health claims and yuppie cachet. But the overall grocery pie is not growing, and the stocks of Safeway and it peers are being punished accordingly.

The resulting strategy has been to head south--to globalize. The post-industrial world's grocery market may have matured, but there are still plenty of people in the southern hemisphere who nourish themselves within traditional, localized food networks. As southern-hemisphere governments have opened their markets to foreign investment over the past 20 years, prodded by the IMF and other transnational institutions, an enormous opportunity has arisen for multinational food processors and grocery giants.

"The largest firms, based in Western Europe and the United States, are expanding their sales in numerous foreign markets to maintain growth, while growth in the home markets stagnate," according to the Amber Waves article linked above. They've been extraordinarily successful so far:

Until 1990, there were only a small number of supermarkets in most Asian and Latin American countries, existing mainly in major cities and wealthier neighborhoods and primarily financed by domestic capital. By the early 2000s, supermarkets had penetrated the middle-class neighborhoods, and even the poorer urban neighborhoods and rural areas, particularly in Latin America. While supermarkets accounted for 15-30 percent of the national food retail sales before 1990, they currently account for 50-70 percent of the retail sales in many Latin American countries, registering in one decade the level of growth experienced in the United States in five decades. The development of the supermarket sector in Asia is similar to that of Latin America, but 5-7 years behind in its expansionary process. However, supermarkets in Asia are growing at a faster rate compared with those in Latin America. [Emphasis added]

In the the cold governmentese of the Amber Waves piece, here's how the trend has affected the food systems of these nations:

The changes in the food retail sector have resulted in a trend toward centralization of procurement, whereby large distribution centers have taken over the distribution functions of myriads of smaller centers and middlemen. A Carrefour [multinational French supermarket giant] distribution center in São Paulo may serve 50 million consumers in three different States, and an Ahold wholesaler in Costa Rica may serve the entire Central American food retail market for Ahold.

Translated loosely, that means that farmers and the local middlemen that distribute their goods are getting knocked out of business, and thus off the land and into poverty. The New York Times can be as bland and officious as any government agency. On this topic, however, the paper published a frank article (unfortunately available only for a fee) late last year.

Titled "Survival of the Biggest: Supermarket Giants Crush Central American Farmers," the article states that:

Across Latin America, supermarket chains partly or wholly owned by global corporate goliaths like Ahold, Wal-Mart and Carrefour have revolutionized food distribution in the short span of a decade and have now begun to transform food growing, too.

The megastores are popular with customers for their lower prices, choice and convenience. But their sudden appearance has brought unanticipated and daunting challenges to millions of struggling, small farmers.

The stark danger is that increasing numbers of them will go bust and join streams of desperate migrants to America and the urban slums of their own countries. Their declining fortunes, economists and agronomists fear, could worsen inequality in a region where the gap between rich and poor already yawns cavernously and the concentration of land in the hands of an elite has historically fueled cycles of rebellion and violent repression.

In short, the buyers of farm goods in these countries are rapidly consolidating, giving them huge leverage to dictate price and other terms. Second, these companies push high-margin processed food, which means more profit for processors and less for farmers.

This is a topic I’ll be returning to soon.

Note to readers: This will be my last post for several days. I’ll be attending the "Trading Justice: NAFTA's New Links and Conflicts" conference in Memphis this weekend, and will be reporting on it soon.

Roundup, ready

2005-03-18T07:11:00.000-05:00

"Roundup, ready" is an occasional feature of Bitter Greens Journal. Named in honor of Monsanto's famed line of seeds genetically engineered to withstand its herbicide Roundup, this feature will give a brief overview of recent news, trends, and topics in the food-politics world. Each of them is a candidate for expansion in the days and weeks to come.

Whole Foods at the greenmarket gates
In addition to its 23rd St outlet and some sort of megastore at the Time Warner building near Central Park, Whole Foods has opened a 50,000 square-foot store at New York City's Union Square, site of the city's flagship farmers' market.

For those who haven't been, the Union Square Greenmarket is pretty wonderful. Four days a week, you can get everything there from artisanlly made, raw-milk cheese to fantastic organic kim chee to first-rate bread to great milk in glass jars to endless fruits and veggies, both conventionally and organically grown. On a typical Saturday in mid-summer, I can't think of a nutritional need that can't be satisfied, and in great style.

Reader Mitch Mills alerted me to this interesting NY Times piece on what effect the new Whole Foods will have on business at the farmer's market.

The article quotes one farmer who said he wasn't overly worried, but adding that "I've heard others were panicky, afraid they will go out of business because they will have to lower their prices to compete."

Knowing Whole Foods as I do--and we share the same home town, Austin, Texas--it's hard for me to imagine Whole Foods instigating a Wal-Mart-style policy of lowering prices to kill small competitors and then later raising them. It's not that the company is particularly compassionate--this is a publicly traded company, bound by law to maximize profit, and it's done quite well by its shareholders so far.

Rather, the company seems to have, embedded in its corporate DNA (to engage in a bit of the current jargon), an allergy to low prices. It bets--successfully, so far--that people will pay a hefty premium on just about everything, merely for the right to walk about in foodie/yuppie splendor.

In fairness, the article makes it seem as though WF plans to be a good neighbor to the greenmarket--which would be good business. It would not be in its interest to enter a brawl with some of the country's most high-profile small farmers. As Mitch points out, the company pledges to buy 20 percent of its produce from area farmers. That's a good PR move, and a testament to the vibrancy of the NY greenmarket program.

In the end, I agree with Greenmarket vendor and Bitter Greens Journal hero Jonathan White, who told the Times that "People who want strawberries and salad greens in January will go to Whole Foods.... But shoppers at Whole Foods can't talk to a farmer. I think you'll see people shopping in the Greenmarket carrying Whole Foods bags."

Anybody who visits the Union Square greenmarket should find White at his Bobolink Dairy stand at the northwest corner. Get him to give you his great spiel on why cows must be outside, and not penned up. And try his products. Here's Mitch Mills' review: "very nice cheeses and absolutely fantastic woodfired-brick-oven bread."

The trouble with organic
Mitch also dug up this prescient rant from 1993 about the problems the government-certified organic label would pose for small farmers.

The article, as well as the journal that published it, the Rodale Institute's New Farm, is must reading for anyone interested in keeping up with debates surrounding the organic label.

The ethanol trap, continued
Here's the latest mainstream press piece on the ethanol craze, discussed in this post and this post.

My favorite line is this one: "Nicholas Hollis, president of the Washington-based nonprofit Agribusiness Council, called ethanol 'the greatest snake oil of the 21st century' and pointed to a study concluding that it requires more energy to produce than it saves."

What in the world is the Agribusiness Council and why would a group with that name be a bitter critic of ethanol?

A cursory Web investigation did not shed much light on those mysteries, nor find the study "pointed to" by Hollis. Here, though, is a full-on polemic by Hollis, one that accuses Archer Daniels Midland of essentially stealing ethanol plants from farmer cooperatives, among other crimes.

Clearly, the Agribusiness Council and its surprising disdain for ADM call for further investigation.

Food and class, part 2

2005-03-17T09:47:00.000-05:00

Find Part I of this article here

Strains within the system are starting to show. Simply put, industrial food is making the people who rely on it sick and fat, to the point that U.S. life expectancy looks set to decline for the first time in two centuries.

In a nation whose biggest employer (and grocer)--Wal-Mart--hangs its business model on its ability to low-ball workers, it's difficult to see how people are going to start, en masse, paying top dollar to niche farmers at farmers' markets.

Evidence of class-based distribution of diet-related maladies abounds. This recent AP article shows that in rural areas the child-obesity rate is even higher than the brisk national average. The evidence dispels "a long-held belief that in farm communities and other rural towns, heavy chores, wide expanses of land and fresh air make leaner, stronger bodies," the article says.

The article points to three factors contributing to the trend of surging child obesity in rural areas: mechanization of farming, the rapid rise of satellite dishes and cable television (which arrived later, but spread much faster, in rural areas than in urban ones), and rising poverty due to the decline in farming and other economic activity.

"The only other place where researchers are finding obesity rates similar to rural America is in the poorest, most troubled urban neighborhoods, suggesting that poverty may be the overriding cause," the article states.

Interesting connection. Just as manufacturing jobs have for three decades been fleeing inner cities in search of cheaper labor to the south, falling commodity prices for farm goods have been throwing farmers out of work. Likewise, the rural jobs provided by extractive industries like coal-mining are inherently short-lived. As a development strategy, mountain-top removal has natural limits, and when they're reached, capital must and does move on.

But why would poverty, which has historically led to starvation, cause people to be overweight? The U.S. spends less per capita on food than any nation in the world, probably than any nation since the rise of the nation-state. The cheap-food machine we've created--fuelled by our cheap-oil policy and underwritten by billions each year in commodity-agriculture subsidies--means that poor people can get almost limitless calories. Nourishment, however, is not part of the game.

How, then, can the sustainable-food movement mount a challenge to industrial food's hold on the bulk of the population? People aren't just addicted to the jolt provided by food laden with high-fructose corn syrup; they're also addicted to the cheap price tag.

In many urban areas, rising demand for quality food has provided a robust market for small farmers in outlying areas. For seven or eights months out of the year in New York, for example, a consumer who makes a conscientious effort and who has sufficient expendable income can satisfy just about all of her caloric needs from delicious food grown within 100 miles of the city. That's true for an even greater part of the year in California's population centers.

Theoretically, as demand for sustainably gown food grow in such places, increased supply will push its price down, meaning that lower-income people can afford it. And groups like Just Food in New York and efforts like Alice Waters' Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley are doing important work toward broadening the range of sustainable food in urban areas.

But there's an important limiting factor at work here.

According to a US Dept of Ag study, in the period of 1994-1996, the average price for an acre of agricultural land was $850. But the an acre of land in an area defined as "urban-influenced"--close enough to a city to be attractive for suburban or second-home development, eg, NY's Hudson Valley--was $1880. Land in non-urban-influenced areas—ie, out in rural areas—was $640. (Precise citation to come.)

Here lies the paradox of the sustainable-food movement. Demand for locally and sustainably grown food is concentrated in cities; but prices for farmland near cities are severely inflated by development pressure. Where farmland is cheap, people are poor and accustomed to industrial food. Where people are wealthy and attracted to healthy food, farmland is dear.

And that dearness limits the entry of new farmers into areas such as New York’s Hudson Valley. In short, a young person who’d like to buy 20 acres to grow heirloom tomatoes to sell into the thriving NYC market has to compete against deep-pocketed developers thinking about second homes for corporate lawyers (the same people, ironically, who provide a market those tomatoes.)

Pricy land limits supply; limited supply keeps prices up; high prices maintain the class problem of the sustainable-food movement.

And rural areas? From what I can tell, despite all the devastation of the last 50 years, the dream of industrial agriculture burns bright. March 20, the first day of spring, has been declared National Agriculture Day. Here’s how the Union County Advocate in rural Kentucky heralded the holiday:

Modern farmers have to be efficiency experts, engineers, scientists and marketing gurus. Life down on the farm is not what it used to be.

"The face of agriculture is changing--more rapidly now than ever before," says Sam Moore, president of Kentucky Farm Bureau. "From a team of horses and a good memory in the early 1900s to tractors with the power of 300 horses and computer-controlled cropping systems today, American farmers provide consumers with better quality food at a lower price."

That's the message of National Ag Day, which is being celebrated March 20, 2005, ….

No mention of niche farming or organic techniques.

Likewise at ag career day for high school kids in Sioux City, Iowa, chronicled here.

Bitter Greens Journal has been criticized for the undeniable gloom of its pronouncements. Why fixate on the inexorable rise of Monsanto’s stock price, and not celebrate the robust performance of Whole Foods?

But the bright-side view obscures the tremendous amount of work that needs to be done to create a sustainable and just food system in the United States.

Food and class, part I

2005-03-15T12:07:00.000-05:00

The sustainable-food movement has a class problem.

Slow Food, for example, is an essential organization, with its declaration of a universal "right to taste" and its mandate to:

oppose the standardisation of taste, defend the need for consumer information, protect cultural identities tied to food and gastronomic traditions, safeguard foods and cultivation and processing techniques inherited from tradition and defend domestic and wild animal and vegetable species.

The group has undeniably done important work internationally toward those goals; yet its US branch tends to throw pricey events accessible only to an economic elite.

Examples like this abound. Dan Barber, chef of Blue Hill in New York, has been a tireless champion of small farmers and local food. Yet his restaurants, where dinner plus wine easily surpasses $100, must by necessity cater to Wall Streeters and wielders of corporate expense accounts.

Here at Maverick Farms, we've pledged to "promote family farming as a community resource"; yet we ask $40 a head for our biggest fund raiser, our farm dinners. (We do offer a lower-priced work-exchange option.)

The problem is essentially structural. Small-scale farming is labor-intensive. We charge chefs $20 a pound for salad greens; but our produce is meticulously hand-picked and rinsed, "graded in the field," which means chefs can take our greens from the bag to the plate without culling bad leaves.

From a business perspective, it's a bad model. Despite our $40 dinners and $20 bags of greens, no one here gets paid a dime beyond room and board. We'd be much better off pooling our resources and buying a McDonald's franchise.

Historically, people of limited means have tended to scrape by on what's locally available, while the wealthy have used their resources to draw in fancy food from far away. Now, that situation has turned upside down.

Economies of scale brought on by increasing consolidation, vast subsidies, and wholesale, unchecked exploitation of immigrant labor have created a system of cheap, plentiful, and dreadful food.

Industrialization, mass culture, wage stagnation, and Puritanism (eg, prohibition) have almost completely destroyed traditional foodways here, allowing McDonald's and the home convenience-food industry to fill the void. A bad-feedback loop thrives; the food industry shovels billions of dollars into marketing and controls school lunches, leaving vast swaths of the population innocent of alternatives and ignorant of what real food tastes like.

In the meantime, a backlash against industrial food is gaining force in the Anglo-American world. It started when Americans like Julia Child and Brits like Elizabeth David travelled to southern Europe at the precise point when industrialization was swamping our food culture. A prosperous middle class, buoyed by the post-War boom, travelled to Italy and France and tasted farm-fresh food prepared with flavor--not portability, volume, and profit--as the primary motivating factor. Hence the birth of the yuppie food revolution.

But middle-class wages have since stagnated; real growth in wages since the early '70s has been minimal, save for a blip in the 1990s. So the bulk of the people who frequent Dan Barber's restaurant or Alice Waters' place in Berkeley tend to be pretty well-heeled.

Chefs gained celebrity status starting in the 1980s, when the yuppie food revolution gained force. I predict that in places like New York and San Francisco, the age of the rock-star farmer is not far off.

I am reminded of a line from Baudelaire’s notebooks:

If a poet demanded of the State the right to have a few bourgeois in his stable, people would be very much astonished, but if a bourgeois asked for some roast poet, people would think it quite natural.

Welcome to the era of roast farmer. Micro-farms dot the areas outside of metropolises, producing hand-picked, highly nutritious, and pungent microgreens to be plopped on lawyers', accountants', and high-tech professionals’ plates astronomical prices. Meanwhile, the people who staff the vast services economy get the dreck served up by thriving companies like Smithfield Foods.

Find Part II of this post here.

The milky way

2005-03-14T07:28:00.000-05:00

Responding to this post, reader and old college friend Mitch Mills asks:

Do you have any idea if there are any Niman Ranch-style operations for dairy farmers (i.e. ones that buy milk from small producers and then market it (and associated products) for them in a coordinated way)?

The short answer is, yes.

But before I answer that question directly, let me lay out a strategy for consumers looking for the best milk products but who also want to support their local economies.

First, think beyond officially certified organic, and look first for a local source of sustainably produced milk. "Organic" is fast becoming a marketing tool leveraged by the industrial giants, who have found organics to be the fastest-growing segment of the food market (hence stuff like Heinz Organic Ketchup; I'm pretty sure those "organic" tomatoes are grown on a vast industrial farm in California). Many small farms, Maverick Farms included, have decided that the organic label is more trouble than it's worth; we deal directly with our customers, who know we don't use artificial pesticides and fertilizers and can visit us to check, and thus don't need to submit ourselves to FDA approval.

Mitch lives in New York City. When I lived there, I bought most of my milk from Ronnybrook Farm. Ronnybrook is a true family farm in the Hudson Valley. An article on them a couple of years ago in Gourmet, evidently unavailable on the Internet, described it as a multi-generational business struggling with the brutal economics of small farming and barely staying afloat. They were considering going organic, which would allow them to sell into a Niman Ranch-style cooperative, but decided it was too much paperwork, and were instead amping up production of their value-added products such as drinkable yogurt.

Bottom line: the product is great, the cows feed on pasture in the summer and farm-grown hay in the winter, and they don't use growth hormones and only treat the animals with antibiotics when they're sick. Here is the FDA harassing Ronnybrook in 2003 for putting "hormone-free" on its label. The venerable government agency is here carrying water for Monsanto, sole maker of recombinant bovine growth hormone, or rBGH.

One way to find locally made food, milk included, is to check with your local food co-op, if you're lucky enough to have one in your area. (If you're not, try starting one.) Brooklyn has a magnificent one called the Park Slope Food Coop. That co-op sells an excellent, Norteastern-based milk brand called Nautural By Nature. These guys seem pretty serious about the pasture aspect of organic production, and the buyer at the PS Coop told me that many of the farms that sell to NBN are close to NY.
To answer Mitch's question, NBN is a Niman-style operation available in NY.

A good coop, like the one in Brooklyn. is really a buying club supporting local agriculture: It pools consumers' buying dollars into a lot big enough to buy farmers' products in bulk, delivering a fair price to both parties. The PS Coop also has an excellent selection of sustainably raised meats from nearby farmers, and at least one additional brand of milk, also of excellent quality, from an individual NY State farm.

Finally, there's Organic Valley, a nationally available conglomeration of farms that has a much better reputation that Horizon. They seem pretty serious about pasture.

Here at Maverick Farms, we have access through the local health-food store to milk from a Ronnybrook-style dairy called Homestead Creamery, located in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, not far from here. But we'd rather buy direct from the only remaining dairy farm in our area.

There used to be a couple of dozen dairy farms lining the lovely rolling pastures of Bethel; declining prices for bulk milk has left only one standing. The farmer pastures his cows in the summer and feeds them his home-grown corn in the winter. He sells his stuff to Pet (owned by Dean Foods, which processes fully one-third of the fluid milk consumed in the US), the only processor in the area, for whatever price Pet is willing to pay.

Sometimes, however, it's inconvient for us to make the 20-minute trek out to the dairy farm. In that case, we buy Homestead Creamery.

Roundup, ready

2005-03-11T07:46:00.000-05:00

Monsanto's BT [Btacillus thuringiensis] cotton is the only genetically modified crop allowed in India, a reluctant entrant into the world of biotechnology. Ever since three varieties of the seed were given three-year licenses in 2002, the company has faced stiff opposition from environmental groups. But it managed to get approval for one more strain in 2004.

Before its acquisition by Monsanto, Emergent had licensed Monsanto's BT technology for sales in India. India's lifting of the ban pushed Monsanto shares up 4.4 percent on March 4.

In 1998, Monsanto made a $1.9 billion bid for cottonseed titan Delta and Pine Land, which failed under antitrust pressure form the US Justice Department. No one expects the Bush justice department to question the Emergent deal.

Monsanto's Agent Orange escape
A federal judge rejected a class-action suit by 4 million Vietnamese against US chemical manufacturers, including Monsanto, for selling the herbicide Agent Orange to the US government during the Vietnam War.

The government used Agent Orange to defoliate the countryside in places it thought enemy insurgents were hiding. Associated Press reports:

Many U.S. veterans and Vietnamese have long blamed Agent Orange for a variety of illnesses, including cancer, diabetes and spina bifida. The U.S. government claims there is no direct evidence linking dioxin [Agent Orange's active ingredient] with the illnesses. However, about 10,000 Vietnam War veterans in the United States receive disability benefits related to Agent Orange exposure.

Clinging to the tenuous fig leaf provided by official US government denial, a spokesman for Monsanto's co-defendent Dow Chemical declared Wednesday that: "We believe that defoliants saved lives by protecting allied forces from enemy ambush and did not create adverse health effects."

A Monsanto spokesman added: "This was a good decision for law. I think the judge recognized the problems with the plaintiffs' case."

The ethanol trap revisited
The Wall Street Journal ran an excellent article yesterday on the craze among Midwest farmers for investing in ethanol plants, a topic I touched on here.

The piece is unfortunately only available to WSJ.com subscribers, so I'll hit a few key points.

The article warns that the rush to produce ethanol facilities could create a glut of the stuff, meaning lower prices and, possibly, failed investments. It notes that Archer Daniels Midland, the leading producer of ethanol and the world's biggest buyer of corn, has "tellingly" declined to boost its own production. "Production is growing faster than demand," a top ADM exec tells the Journal.

And it quotes credit-rating agency Standard & Poor's as calling the new facilities "highly speculative."

The saddest thing reported in the article is that farmers are not only betting their own money on the plants, they're also borrowing money to invest, a practice Wall Street calls investing "on margin." The article profiles one farmer who's investing $100,000 in a facility--$20,000 of his own, the rest coming from a bank. If the investment fails, the guy will not only be out 20k, he'll also owe 80k to a bank!

All the signs of a bubble waiting to burst are here. The article states:

David Nelson, a farmer who's chairman of the two-year-old Midwest Grain Processors ethanol plant in Lakota, Iowa, is well aware of the overexpansion threat. "It's starting to get crowded around here," says Mr. Nelson, 52, sipping a Corona in the smoky bar of Cattleman's Steak & Provisions near his Belmond, Iowa, farm. "In the back of our minds, we know there is to be a day of reckoning."

But his solution isn't to cut back. It's to grow big enough to survive a shakeout. Midwest Grain Processors sold about $17 million more stock in January to double the size of its plant. That means this plant alone will be able to make 100 million gallons a year. And its farmer owners are already thinking about where to build a second plant. (Emphasis added.)

That sort of thinking, multiplied, will cause a huge glut of ethanol to hit the market, resulting in a nosedive in price. As I said before, all ADM has to do is sit back and wait.

How now, organic cow?

2005-03-10T08:54:00.000-05:00

Do you allow your cows to pasture?

In compliance with the USDA Organic Regulations, all Horizon Organic cows have access to nutritious pasture during the seasons of the year when it is available. For example, in Maryland, the entire herd (of about 698 cows) have daily access to 120 acres of well-managed perennial grass pasture which makes up a significant portion of their diet from March through December.
From Horizon Organic Dairy's FAQ

According to The Cornucopia Institute, that's a lie--or at least a legalistic twisting of the truth. The Wisconsin-based group, which dedicates itself to fighting "for economic justice for the family-scale farming community," has been campaigning against what it calls "large industrial dairy farms producing 'organic' milk.' "

It's taken its case straight to the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees organic-certification code. Miraculously, Cornucopia won over an FDA advisory panel, which recommended tightening rules regarding milk cows' access to pasture. What the FDA will actually do with the recommendation remains in doubt. As reported here, Bush recently appointed a shameless industry tout as head of the FDA.

Access to pasture lies at the heart of any meaningful definition of organic cattle-raising. I don't have time to spell out why, so I'll defer to two great authorities on pasture grazing: Virginia meat farmer Joel Salitin and NY State dairy farmer/cheese maker Jonathan White.

Cornucopia contends that Horizon is subjecting certified-organic dairy cows to feedlot conditions at two industrial-style operations, one in Idaho and one in California.

"According to reports, both the Idaho and California operations differ little from conventional confinement dairies other than having their high-producing cows fed certified organic feed," says Mark Kastel, Cornocopia's senior farm policy analyst, in a press release. "Real organic farms have made great financial investments in converting to pasture-based production — enhancing the nutritional properties of the milk and for enhancing animal health—while it appears that these large corporate-dominated enterprises are happy just to pay lip service to required organic ethics."

The group has launched an "Organic Integrity Project," which will act as a "corporate watchdog assuring that no compromises to the credibility of organic farming methods and the food it produces are made in the pursuit of profit. We will actively resist regulatory rollbacks and the weakening of organic standards to protect and maintain consumer confidence in the organic food label."

Amen.

The cash cow

2005-03-09T08:56:00.000-05:00

Like a cow pumped full of Monsanto's growth hormones, the U.S. farm-subsidy program has been gushing prodigiously since 1995--"the costliest decade in the 70-year history of government farm subsidies," according to the Environmental Working Group.

That heroic organization has broken down the US farm-subsidy system in all its sordid grandeur, and put the results up on a wonderful Web site (brought to my attention by an article the yesterday's Washington Post referenced here).

Start here, with the EWG's analysis of the data it generated. According to EWG, the U.S. government dropped a cool $131 billion on subsidies between 1995 and 2003. However,

It's not as if the subsidies are 'saving the family farm.' Of the 2,128,982 farms enumerated by the most recent Census of Agriculture, for 2002, only 33 percent received government payments. Two-thirds of the nation's farmers get no subsidy payments whatsoever. For the most part they don't qualify because they grow the 'wrong' things. If you want to see what the wrong things are, stroll through the produce aisle or meat department of your local supermarket. The farmers who produce most of America's food do so without a check from taxpayers.

That's because the large-scale farms have managed to dominate the government milk teat, the report goes on:

The real action is at the top of the farm subsidy food chain, where 10 percent of the recipients—just over 305,023 individuals, partnerships, corporations, estates and myriad other entities—took in 72 percent of the total payments taxpayers provided for conservation, commodity and disaster programs over the 9 years. (That's an upward tick of 1 percent in concentration for the top 10 percent over the eight-year analysis EWG presented last year.) They collected, on average, $309,823 each, roughly $34,000 annually. The elite in this world of government dependency collected even more. The top four percent of recipients, for instance, number just over 122,000. Yet they cost taxpayers about $65 billion over 9 years, which works out to an average of $529,000, or nearly $59,000 per year.

The report goes on to detail just how skewed the system is toward subsidizing large-scale, environmentally ruinous commodity farming vs. funding sustainable-farming efforts. It states:

The public hears a lot of soothing, bi-partisan talk about the vital importance of conservation and protecting the environment whenever it's time to move an ungainly farm subsidy bill through the body politic. But once the flow of commodity payments has been locked in, Congress proceeds in the out years to cut funds from the very conservation programs that provide broader, public interest cover when subsidy bills are under fire.

Case in point: For all the wailing among red-state politicians about how Bush's proposed 2006 budget would cut commodity subsidies (see this post), I've heard no complaints from any major politician about how the budget would affect conservation funding. The indispensable National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service hasbroken down just what the budget would do to conservation programs, and it's not pretty.

I guess we'll have to wait until it's time to promote the next Farm Bill before politicians start prattling about conservation funding again. Meanwhile, the disparity is stark. Between 1995 and 2003, the government paid out $103.7 in commodity support, vs. $16.3 billion for conservation. The report also details how the large farms game the government on disaster aid.

Once you've read the analysis, it's time to play with the state-by-state data base. It's fun.

Take Texas, my home state and Bush's. Twelve or so years ago, current governor Rick Perry, longtime stable boy for the state's large-scale ranchers, edged out Jim Hightower as the state's Ag commissioner. (Say what you want about Hightower, but there he was in the late '80s and early '90s, promoting organic agriculture and hormone-free beef as ag commissioner of Texas.) The state snatched $432 million in livestock subsidies between 1995 and 2003, with the largest 10 percent of the recipients hoarding 57 percent of the take.

I always hated how, in New York City, Washington apples were ubiquitous in stores, while state-grown apples were rare and more expensive. Well, Washington soaked up $134 million in subsidies between '95 and '03, while NY state farmers got only $29.1 million. I doubt the apple farmers whose produce I so treasured in the farmers market got much of the action. The top 20 percent of recipients snared more than half of the goodies.

Check out what's happening with ag subsidies in your state, and then pressure one of those rogue U.S. Reps to do something about it.

Bush ag cuts roil GOP

2005-03-08T08:03:00.000-05:00

It's impossible not to savor a bit of shadenfruede at the expense of GOP farm-state legislators.

These people clearly knew during the 2004 presidential election that the federal government's generous underwriting of large-scale agriculture couldn't last unabated. Bush is shelling out $5 billion a month trying to maintain order in his fiefdoms in Iraq and Afghanistan. That flow of cash won't likely stop anytime soon. According to Counterpunch, the insurgency controls all main roads to Baghdad--an astonishing claim, missing from the mainstream press, that would explain the Occupation's failure to stop a plague of car-bombings.

That, plus a generous regime of tax cuts for high earners, and a nice increase for military spending ex-Iraq, spells deficits that would have made Reagan himself blush. Who didn't know that, after the election, Bush's moneymen would produce their knives and parse the Federal budget for "fat"?

By cutting the maximum level of subsidies and other tactics, the proposed Bush budget would trim about $5.7 billion in federal support over the next ten years, enough to finance approximately five weeks of "peace keeping" in Iraq and Afghanistan. Based on formulas from the 2002 Farm Bill, farmers will get about $17.8 billion in subsides this year (the amount of support changes with market conditions).

Now those Red State rascals have to explain to their constituencies, mostly in areas where subsidized farming is one of the few areas that pay, that the gravy train is losing a good deal of its gravy. Of course, if they want to stick around in Washington, they'd better put up a good fight first, and they are, as this terrific article in today's Washington Post shows.

The article states that tensions are particularly running high in the south, the bedrock of Bush's electoral success. That's because the large-scale flight of the textile industry to cheap-labor havens overseas has left cotton farmers searching for a market. And their political friends have done a nice job of fixing one up for them. The Post article states:

It costs an average 65 cents for a farmer in the United States to produce a pound of cotton; the adjusted world price in late February ran less than 40 cents. This has made U.S. cotton growers unusually dependent on the government. A program called "Step 2" essentially subsidizes cotton exports and protects home producers from foreign competition.

Step 2, which has cost taxpayers more than $2 billion since 1990, pays a rebate to textile mills that buy U.S. cotton when foreign cotton is cheaper. Brokers who sell U.S. cotton abroad for less than what they paid at home can get the government to reimburse them for the difference.

By taking advantage of a raft of federal subsidies and legal loopholes, cotton farmers can boost their income to more than 70 cents a pound -- double the recent world price. Emphasis added.

Now, don't think some Mississippi dirt farmer with 40 acres out back is cashing in on this windfall. The article states that "One percent of those [cotton farmers] receiving subsidies collected 28 percent of the money paid out between 1995 and 2003," adding that only 30 percent of Mississippi's cotton farms are large enough to be eligible.

Meanwhile, it should be noted, African cotton farmers, many of whom were prodded into commodity farming by various international institutions, have suffered bitterly as subsidized US cotton swamps their markets. Brazil recently won a claim through the WTO against the US for essentially dumping its cotton on foreign markets. The Post article notes that Bush’s proposed cuts wouldn’t reduce the cotton subsidy to a level that would comply with the WTO ruling.

Speaking generally, Bitter Greens Journal supports an end to all commodity-farming subsidies. In their place, we'd like to see federal grants for setting up viable local and regional food systems. How much? Five billion a month would certainly do the trick.

Meanwhile, we’ll enjoy watching GOP congressmen squirm.

Mortification of the flesh

2005-03-07T08:23:00.000-05:00

What he dreads is that, during a lull in the conversation, someone will come up with what he calls The Question--"What led you, Mrs. Costello, to become a vegetarian?"--and that she will get on her high horse and produce ... the Plutarch Response. After that, it will be up to him to repair the damage. The response comes from Plutarch's moral essays. His mother has it by heart. He can reproduce it only imperfectly. "You ask me why I refuse to eat flesh. I, for my part, am astonished that you can put in your mouth the corpse of a dead animal, astonished that you do not find it nasty to chew hacked flesh and swallow the juices of death wounds." Plutarch is a real conversation stopper. It is the word juices that does it. Producing Plutarch is like throwing down the gauntlet; after that, there is no telling what will happen.
--From Elizabeth Costello, by JM Coetzee

Given the way meat animals are raised in this country, it's hard not to cede the whole game to the vegetarians--or even to the vegans, for the lot of laying hens and milking animals isn't much (if any) better.

"It was a typical modern dairy," writes Nicolette Hahn Niman, in an Op-ed in today's NY Times, "with cows living indoors in a metal building with concrete floors, rather than in the bucolic setting many of us imagine."

When the title of her piece, "The Unkindest Cut," popped up on my daily "agriculture" search, I assumed it was a shrill complaint from some GOP red-state Rep about Bush's farm-subsidy cuts. Rather, the article is about the practice, now standard in factory farms, of cutting off the tails of milk cows and pigs. The usual procedure, reports Niman, does not include the use of anesthetics.

She writes:

I have often observed just how useful tails are to cattle. At certain times of year, cows' tails are in constant motion, flicking away flies and other insects that gather on their backs. Other than predators, which most farm animals don't have to worry about very much, flies are the bane of a cow's existence. And confinement dairies, which often have dense fly populations, are places where cows are especially in need of their tails.

A farmer tells Niman that she has chopped the tails off of her cows because "it's just easier to milk them that way"--evidently, tails get in the way of the heavy machinery used to extract milk.

Things are just as grim on hog farms, where the preferred surgical instrument is the wire cutter. Niman writes:

Like a dairy cow, a pig uses its tail not only to shoo away insects but also to communicate. Like dogs, pigs wag their tails when they are happy, twitch them when they are nervous, let them drop straight down when they are sick. They may stick them straight out behind them when they are frightened or alarmed.

The pork industry's rationale for tail docking is that pigs bite each other's tails and that the tails can then become infected. When pigs' tails are cut off, the stubs stay intensely sore and so, the theory goes, the bite will cause so much pain that the bitee will move away from the biter. (The industry refers to this as "avoidance behavior.")

She then establishes that tail-biting is a behavior engaged in only by pigs raised in dense confinment--and she then debunks the claim that the tail-chopping practice curtails biting.

Niman then raises the hope that the Department of Ag will ban the practice, noting that Britain, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland have all banned dairy-cow tail chopping and the EU banned routine snipping of pig's tails in 1991.

I doubt the USDA will do any such thing. The current director, Mike Johanns, made his political bones as governor of Kansas. It's hard to imagine him challenging the agri-interests that have pushed him up the ladder.

The villain here is a food system that drives farmers to ever-more heroic measures to preserve profitability amid falling prices for their goods. In dairy, every region has one or two buyers (around here it's Pet) that essentially dictate prices. Then there's the disaster of bovine growth hormones (brought forward by our friends over at Monsanto), which when widely adopted in the early 1990s, boosted production, leading to lower prices. With prices for their goods falling, I can see why farmers would be tempted to squeeze more cows into their production line, and reduce some of the increased labor by "docking" their cow's tails.

As artisanal cheese maker and small-scale dairy farmer Jonathan White likes to joke, conventional dairy farmers lose money on every gallon, but try to make up for it with volume.

As for the pork farmers, well, that industry is so consolidated and "vertically integrated" that it's a wonder there are any hog farmers left. The ones that survive tend to be locked into contracts with the big processors like Smithfield.

Since the early 1980s, the number of hog farms in the nation has plunged from nearly 500,000 to only 85,000. And following its striking consolidation, hog production has also shifted rapidly into supply chains…. A recent survey by researchers at the University of Missouri found that the share of hogs sold to processors under some type of contractual arrangement climbed above 80 percent in January 2001, up from about 65 percent in 1999.

That quote, from a 2001 study, comes not from some left-wing ag economist, but from none other than the U.S. Federal Reserve, through the Center for the Study of Rural America in the Fed's Kansas City office. Here is a list of downloadable publications from that group; the one quoted above is called "The New U.S. Meat Industry," second quarter, 2001. Read it.

The contracts in question give processors enormous price leverage; they have farmers taking desperate measures to cut costs, including stuff like chopping off pigs' tails with wire cutters.

Have I mentioned recently how much I hate Smithfield Foods?

Rather than surrender to vegetarianism, consumers can seek out and support sustainably and humanely produced meat. She was too classy to state it, but the above-quoted Nicolette Hahn Niman is the wife of Bill Niman, founder of Niman Ranch. Bitter Greens Journal reveres Niman Ranch. It carefully selects small farms that do things right--free ranging animals on grass pastures--and gives them a good price on their goods. It then processes and packages the product itself.

Full disclosure: Maverick Farms has used NR pork at our farm dinners more than once; it's magnificent. NR's hog-processing facilities, and assocaied hog farms, are in Iowa and North Carolina.

Other sustainable meat sources we know and love around here are Redgate Farms, an NC-based, smaller-scale version of Niman that does first-rate pork; and Hickory Nut Gap Farm, close to Asheville, NC, which sustainably raises pigs, chickens, cows, turkeys, and lambs. The farmers there, Jamie and Amy Ager, are producing terrific stuff and doing a great job of caring for the pasture they occupy. Rather than the hell-on-earth feel of factory meat farms, their place is gorgeous and smells as sweet as a spring rain. Their barn recently burned down--a devastating blow to a small farm.

Find your own source of local, sustainably raised meat and support it, or seek out Niman Ranch. You'll be paying a premium, but you can be sure that a farmer is getting a much bigger cut of the action. The low price of the stuff on the supermarket shelf reflects subsidies to large-scale farmers (remember, those miserable animals are eating highly subsidized, genetically altered corn and soy) and economies of scale squeezed out of the hides of farmers by the likes of Smithfield.

My beef with Smithfield

2005-03-05T08:57:00.000-05:00

I hate Smithfield Foods, that paragon of industrially raised, industrially processed meat.

I hate the flavorless garbage it sells. I hate its labor practices, so egregious that they inspired a blistering report from Human Rights Watch. (That report is the black book of industrial meat. All McDonalds eaters and Wal-Mart grocery shoppers should read it. It tells the story of how the meat-packing industry, with Smithfield helping lead the way, busted the unions, reversing 40 years of progress in wages and safety and returning conditions and pay to levels that would make Upton Sinclair seethe.)

I hate the way its stock chart stands essentially as a mirror image of the trajectory of wages and conditions in its plants, rising implacably as the lot of its workers declines. I despise its pioneering use of immigrant labor--since it can't take its plants overseas, it essentially recreates the miserable power relations prevalent in places like southern Mexico, importing people from there who've been kicked off the land over the past 20 years.

The HRW report states that:

When Smithfield opened its Tarheel plant in 1993 [a pork-processing plant in North Carolina], fewer than 10 percent of its hourly employees were immigrants. Today, an estimated half of the plants workers are Hispanic immigrants. African-Americans make up about 40 percent of the workforce.

I hate the way it pioneered a "vertical integration" strategy in pork production. It's both the biggest producer and processor of hogs (see this post). Its pork-production arm--it raises 825,000 sows per year--gives it what farmers call a formidable "captive supply." Thus it can manipulate the price of hogs on the open market to suit its own ends. Withhold hogs and the price rises, boosting its production arm. Add hogs to the market and the price declines, giving a break to its processing arm.

And I hate the feedlot style of raising animals, which maximizes cruelty and creates a huge waste problem, imbuing entire counties with the stench of shit and polluting rivers and streams.

Having vented all of that spleen, I can comment on Smithfield’s latest quarterly report. Bottom line: for the three months ending Jan. 30, the company netted about $97.5 million in profit. That's about twice what it made in the same period a year before.

The main driver was its hog-producing arm, which flourished as demand for pork rose amid panic about mad cow disease in beef. (Here's a nice take on the mad-cow scare from Richard Manning.)

Not surprisingly, its beef operations contributed nothing to its bottom line. The company has had a presence in the beef-processing and the beef feedlot businesses, but hasn't been a top-four player in either.

Until last Tuesday, that is. On the same day as it released its quarterly report, the company announced it was merging its beef-feedlot operations with those of ContiBeef, the nation's second-largest feedlot operator.

The as yet unnamed entity, a 50-50 venture, will operate as the world's largest cattle-feeding operation, according to an industry observer quoted in the article above.

The news barely made a ripple in the business press. The only substantial commentary on it I've found come from the Organization for Competitive Markets, a Naderite non-profit that bills itself as a coalition of "farmers, ranchers, academics, attorneys and policy makers dedicated to reclaiming the agricultural marketplace for independent farmers, ranchers and rural communities."

In its press release, the group declared that "“We are very worried about potential market impacts resulting from this merger ... Smithfield grew from meager beginnings in Virginia in the early 1980’s to become the major force integrating the hog industry and destroying market access for tens of thousands of independent hog producers in the Southeast and later the Midwest.”

It points out that the beef-packing firm that had been the industry leader before the merger, Cactus Feeders, has been using a captive-supply strategy similar to Smithfield's in pork. "We now have the pioneer of captive supply in hogs overtaking the pioneer of captive supply in cattle as the dominant feeding company in America," the release states.

It then speculates that Smithfield will next purchase a large beef packer, giving it dominant vertical integration in both beef and pork.

The Monsanto samba

2005-03-04T06:57:00.000-05:00

Brazil's congress voted to legalize genetically modified (GM) crops yesterday. President Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva still has to approve the legislation before it can go into effect; there's little doubt he will, despite Greenpeace's best efforts.

Brazil's official capitulation is big news for Monsanto. As most BGJ readers know by now, the agri-giant's Round Up Ready seeds already control about a third of Brazil's fast-growing soy output. Farmers have been buying Roundup Ready seeds for years on the black market. The new law will grant the agri-giant legal standing to enforce intellectual property rights claims on farmers whose soybeans can be shown to be genetically identical to Roundup Ready, whether through illicit buying on the black market or cross-pollination.

The windfall could be huge and ongoing. As the AP put it Thursday, "Brazil is second only to the United States in soy production, but easily has the potential to become the world's largest soy producer because of cheap land, low labor costs and plentiful water."

Monsanto saw its stock nudge up nearly 1 percent on the news Thursday. That's a pretty modest rally, but then, part of the reason the stock has risen so steadily over the past year is that investors have been factoring in Brazil's surrender to GM crops.

The company immediately repaid the favor, announcing Thursday afternoon that its Brazil unit would spend $20 million over the next few years to conjure a soy seed containing an insectide to combat specific domestic pests.

"The new soybean variety would employ techniques already used in new varieties of corn and cotton that have genes from the Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, bacteria, which produces a natural toxin to kill bugs that feed on crops," Reuters reported Thursday.

That's Bt soy, right in the middle of one of the world's richest wildlife areas.

Same old story. Farmers and government officials sell out to agribusiness in hopes of creating higher yields. When the bumper crop arrives, prices drop, and the buyers--those same agribusiness firms--score a windfall. Farmers then fall into despair (see this post), and all sorts of environmental and social damage piles up. All the while, over on Wall Street, they're bidding up the share prices of the agri-stocks.

Meanwhile, government officials and Monsanto execs in Argentina are rubbing their hands together at the prospect a corn seed that contains both the Bt and Roundup Ready functions.

The ethanol trap

2005-03-02T07:14:00.000-05:00

According to the report referenced in this post, the only area of agricultural production not succumbing to increasing consolidation is ethanol, the fuel derived from corn.

Archer Daniels Midland is the largest individual ethanol producer, conjuring up some 1.07 billion gallons of the stuff each year. But the top four producers of ethanol control just 49 percent of the market--not so much, by U.S. standards, and down steadily since the top four controlled 73 percent in 1987 (ethanol king Bob Dole's heyday in the US senate.)

And the report tells us that "Farmer-owned ethanol plants accounted for 1.276 billion gallons per year or 37.3% of total capacity." Surprisingly, facilities owned by farmers as a whole produce more ethanol than ADM!

Farmers throughout the corn belt are investing in cooperatively owned ethanol plants. One farmer told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (“Midwest Farmers become major investors in ethanol plants,” 2/20/2005, unavailable online) why he was considering plunking down $20,000 to invest in such an operation: essentially, to gain a measure of power in a business controlled by giants.

“We don’t have control. We call up and somebody says, ‘This is the price we’ll give you,’ ” he told the paper.

All over the Midwest, cooperatives are forming to build new plants. One project, Illini Bio-Energy, is enticing farmers with the prospect of 22.8 percent annual return on investment for their $20,000 outlay. A Illini Bio-Energy functionary told the Post-Dispatch that the group hoped to raise $25 million in direct investment from farmers before seeking a bank loan to make up the difference on building a $96 million ethanol production plant.

In an age of vast overproduction and long-term pressure on corn prices (see this post ), farmer-owned ethanol plants are, at first glance, an alluring way to keep farmers in business while wrestling some market control away from the agri-giants.

Yet Bitter Greens Journal cannot hail this trend as a way forward for sustainable farming.

First of all, ethanol owes its existence to government subsidy. As recently as November 2004, the credit-rating agency Standard & Poor’s declared that:

The industry simply cannot survive without the subsidy. The growth in the industry is mainly driven by favorable public policy expectations...a change in governmental policy … could devastate the ethanol industry. (Quote taken from The Oil Daily, Nov. 22, 2004.)

When a product can’t exist without subsidies, that means that it costs more to make than it can fetch on the market.

The U.S. Congress, lured by generous campaign donations from the likes of Archer Daniels Midland, has been subsidizing ethanol production since the 1970s. In October, Congress extended through 2010 the 5.4 cent per gallon exemption ethanol enjoys from the 18.4 cent per gallon federal excise tax on gasoline. That encourages oil refiners to buy more of the stuff.

Bush signed on, which didn’t hurt his push for votes in the rural states. Expressing blustery, make-no-mistake support for ethanol subsidies has long been a rite of passage for presidential candidates, Democrat and Republican alike.

Meanwhile, the energy bill currently before Congress would require refiners to use a minimum 5 billion gallons of ethanol annually. “Farm interests plan efforts in the coming weeks to raise that floor, perhaps to 8 billion gallons,” reports the Post-Dispatch. Moreover, several states, Missouri among them, provide additional support for ethanol.

One source, the admittedly self-interested American Petroleum Institute, puts the total value of government support for ethanol (federal and state programs combined) at about $1 billion per year.

Now, much of this cash ultimately ends up in the coffers of Archer Daniels Midland. Despite the recent deterioration of its market share, ADM’s ethanol arm netted $135.4 million in operating profit for the second half of 2004. That’s not a bad take for a business line that relies on Uncle Sam’s generosity for its existence.

Remember, the company produces a billion gallons of ethanol a year--about a third of all production--and has essentially limitless resources to increase capacity. If ADM wants to put small companies like Illini Bio-Energy out of business, all it has to do is significantly jack up production, which would lower the price of ethanol.

Also, the Gold Rush-style push to build new plants could itself be disastrous for ethanol prices, and the farmers who are investing in cooperatives. The Oil Daily for Nov. 22, 2004 reported that:

If too many producers jump into the market, there could be a "glut" of ethanol, leading to large stocks of unused fuel and reduced profits, Elif Acar and Arthur Simonson, authors of the S&P report, told Oil Daily in an interview. "That's what happened in the power industry and it could happen in ethanol, too," they said.

In that case, all ADM would have to do is sit back and wait for the small fry to fail before regaining its old dominance.

Thus a farmer who bets $20,000 on getting a nice cut of the ethanol action is playing a risky game. The house always wins at blackjack.

Nor is ethanol the “clean-burning fuel” hailed by ADM and its allies on Capitol Hill. The process of transforming corn to fuel requires large inputs of fuel—typically including decidedly dirty-burning coal. If ethanol generates more energy than it requires for production, then it has crossed that threshold only recently. The most optimistic assessment, from the USDA, claims it takes 1 gallon of fossil fuel to generate 1.24 gallons of ethanol.

I’m not sure if that number accounts for all the fertilizers needed to grow corn, or all of the gas burned hauling it to processing plants.

As Richard Manning argues in Against the Grain, you can’t assess the wisdom of growing fuel from the ground without accounting for the steep environmental costs of industrial agriculture. He points to a massive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, where all sorts of marine life once flourished, caused by heavy use of fertilizers in the Midwest. The practice ends up washing loads of nitrogen into the Mississippi River, which in turn finds its way into the Gulf, where it causes large algae blooms that squeeze out other forms of life.

What the ethanol subsidies are really about, he argues, is finding an outlet for the officially sanctioned overproduction of corn. (The other main outlet for the corn surplus is high-fructose corn syrup; more on that later.)

Bitter Greens Journal believes that no sane agricultural model can be based on overproduction and mono-cropping. We wish those farmers in the Midwest well, but we also wish they’d use their resources to diversify into other crops, transition away from reliance on chemical inputs and genetically modified seeds, and work toward creating viable local markets for their goods.

Note to readers

2005-03-01T14:20:00.000-05:00

Please write me at tphilpott@skybest.com if you want me to put you on a list to receive an e-mail every time I update my blog.

Highly concentrated

2005-03-01T11:46:00.000-05:00

Like the great bulk of the orange juice it produces, the U.S. food system tends to be highly concentrated.

The latest evidence: Mary Hendrickson and William Heffernan of the University of Missouri's Department of Rural Sociology have come out with a pithy, no-nonsense compilation of concentration rates across the industry, available for download here at the National Farmers Union site.

Here are some of the report's telling revelations:

• The top four beef packers--Tyson, Cargill, Swift, and National Beef Packing--control 83 percent of the packing market, up from 72 percent in 1990. (Tyson's buyout of IBP a couple of years ago accounts for much of that jump.) That means if you're a cattle farmer, there aren't a whole lot of buyers out there clamoring for your stuff. You pretty much take what the big boys offer.

• The top four pork packers own 64 percent of the market, up from 37 percent in 1987. Smithfield foods, which reports earnings today (expect a post on that tomorrow) stands atop the pork-packing heap. Interestingly, it's the largest pork producer, too (the top four hog producers account for about half the overall market). That means Smithfield weilds huge power over hog prices. It can bring hogs onto to the market when it wants to lower the overall price, which helps its packing business; it can withhold hogs from the market to boost the price, which helps its hog raising business.

• The top three soybean crushers--BGJ perennial favorites Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, and Cargill--control 71 percent of that market. (Soybean crushing feeds the large and growing market for soybean oil, the craze for soy protein in processed foods, and soy supplements into animal feed.) The three are also powerhouse soy traders. Their market heft, plus low soy prices engendered by U.S. farm subsidies and increased production in Brazil and Argentina, spells great profitability for these giants.

• Wal-Mart has bulled its way to the top of the global grocery market. It grossed $244 billion in global grocery sales in 2004; the number two player, France's Carrefour, managed $64.7 billion. Domestically, Wal-Mart rang up $66.4 billion. Its closest competitor is Kroger, which snagged $46 billion in sales. Wal-Mart's dominance of the domestic grocery market underlines the U.S. food system's reliance on cheap labor for profitability. This important article in The New York Review of Books (12/16/04) summarizes the recent literature on the retail behemoth's authoritarian strategies for keeping its vast workforce overworked and underpaid--a habit that's central to its business model.

Food as commodity

2005-02-24T08:48:00.000-05:00

In business terms, a commodity is a useful item, produced in bulk, with no characteristics that distinguish it from others of its kind. What brand of DVD player do you own? Few people know. DVD players have become a commodity; they're all pretty much the same.

In commodity markets, prices tend to drop over time. Personal computers, for example, have steadily fallen in price over the past 15 years. Remember when "IBM or McIntosh?" meant something? Now it's "PC or McIntosh," and PC controls upwards of 90 percent of the market. In commodities markets, the producer that can churn out the most product at the cheapest price wins. Dell clawed its way to the top of the PC market by streamlining production and squeezing its suppliers for price breaks as it gained heft. Producing a great, innovative product had nothing to do with it.

It's counterintuitive to me that we would surrender something as sensual and poetic as food production to the brutal economics of commodity markets. Food a commodity? Nonsense! Well, it is, and the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization has recently issued its biennial "State of Agricultural Commodity Markets." Time for Bitter Greens Journal, dormant this past week after a good-weather spell spurred a burst of activity on the farm, to snap to attention.

The report brims with interesting information. For example:

• Around 2.5 billion people in the "developing world" depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. (Those quote marks are mine; I've seen little convincing evidence of broad-based development in nations that have surrendered to the rules of IMF-style economic programs.) Note that in the US, something like 2 percent of the population is directly involved in agriculture.
• A graph of inflation-adjusted global ag commodity prices between 1961 and 2002 (see page 11 of the report) shows a steady downward trend line, just as we've seen with PCs and DVDs. Ag commodities cost on average of a third less now than they did in 1961, adjusted for inflation. Remember, bigger is better in commodity markets. That's why Nixon's secretary of agriculture, the notorious Earl Butz, could command farmers to "get big or get out."
• The "developed countries"--essentially, the US, the euro zone, and Japan--support their agricultural "producers" (what happened to "farmers"?) to the tune of $230 billion per year. That's 30 times the amount these nations provide in agricultural aid to the "developing countries."
• Three companies (Phillip Morris, Nestle, and Sara Lee) control about half of the world's coffee roasting; the price of raw coffee plunged 70 percent between 1997 and 2001, "threatening the livelihoods of 25 million people and triggering food emergencies in several countries in Africa and Central America." The report doesn't make this point, so I'll add it: While the price of raw coffee was plunging to the despair of coffee farmers, the price consumers were paying at the grocery store for their Folgers held steady with inflation. That spelled a windfall for Phillip Morris, Nestle, and Sara Lee.
• “During the 1990s, countries that depend on cotton exports for more than 20 percent of their trade revenues increased the volume of exports by over 40 percent. But their revenues fell by 4 percent following a steep drop in cotton prices.” These countries are mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. The study doesn’t note this, but that same time frame coincides with a surge in profits for mass-produced clothes companies like Gap Inc.
• The report concedes that the steady fall in commodity prices is "structural, reflecting the basic forces of supply and demand that drive markets: global supplies have grown more rapidly than demand, fuelled by increased productivity and the emergence of major new producers." (That's one reason I've written so much about Brazil, which is busily, and with World Bank financing, ripping into its vast savanna and rainforest areas to clear land for soy production. Who wins that game? Not Brazil's farmers, who can be sure the price of soybeans will fall over time. Rather food processors, fertilizer/insecticide producers, and purveyors of genetically modified seeds will cash in.)
• Even as the IMF and the World Bank (and the FAO, for that matter) have promoted commodity agriculture production as a way for "developing" countries to earn foreign exchange to pay back debt (typically to developed-country banks and entities like the IMF), what the FAO calls the "terms of trade" for those countries' ag products have deteriorated. "Terms of trade" refers to the purchasing power derived from exports. Say country A sells chewing gum and country B sells SUVs. Country A will have to sell country B a lot of chewing gum if it wants to buy an SUV. Thus it has horrible terms of trade. Meanwhile, country B has wonderful terms of trade with respect to country A. Now, as ag commodity prices drop, the income developing countries derive from producing ag commodities drops. Meanwhile, the price of manufactured goods they need to buy to stay competitive with developed-country farmers--think John Deere combines--has kept up with inflation. According to the report, the value of the manufactured goods that developing countries can buy with their ag-commodity income has halved since 1961.

I could write about this report all day. The overall thrust is that submitting to commodity markets has been disastrous for developing countries. The only thing it's developed, judging from this report, is the profits of the transnational food giants. (It does make the claim that swelling urban populations have benefited from lower food prices; it forgets to add that failed ag policies have driven millions off the land.)

Yet even after teasing out all of this scandalous information, the FAO can only search for ways of "making commodity markets work for everyone." It suggests that developing countries remove tarrifs on goods from developed countries (which would be ridiculous) and also their developing-country peers (which makes sense). It urges developing countries to cut back subsidies to corn, cotton and soybean farmers. Fine.

But all of its policy recommendations involve ways of keeping developing-country farmers in the game of producing for global commodities markets.

Bitter Greens Journal believes that agriculture should not be a tool to pay back debt owed by a wealthy elite to a bunch of international banks. Agriculture should be concerned with growing food for people to eat. The UN is serving the corporations, not the world's people, when it urges farmers in Africa and and Latin America to produce, say, massive quantities of soybeans. A UN truly bent on helping create a just world would use its resources to identify and support local foodways. Let farmers produce for their local markets, and let Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill grow their own damned corn and soybeans.

Missing from this 60-odd page report is any discussion of what the food-as-commodity system has done to food. Let's end with a quote from the great Masanobu Fukuoka, author of The One Straw Revolution (Japan, 1978).

"If you think commercial vegetables are nature's own, you're in for a big surprise. These vegetables are a watery chemical concoction of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash, with a little help from the seed. And that is just how they taste. And commercial chicken eggs (you can call them eggs if you like) are nothing more than a mixture of synthetic feed, chemicals, and hormones. This is not a product of nature, but a man-made synthetic in the shape of an egg. The farmer who produces vegetables and eggs of this kind, I call a manufacturer."

Bush names food-industry flack as FDA chief

2005-02-17T07:48:00.000-05:00

That's hardly a news flash. The only surprise is that Bush didn't place a pharmaceutical-industry PR man at the top of the Food and Drug Administration.

That would have been a bold move, even for Bush, given the FDA's recent record of approving dangerous drugs from the likes of pharma giants Pfizer and Merck. Of course, Bush's move was typically bold in one sense: just as he promoted his national-security adviser after she badly misinterpreted (or misrepresented) the national-security threat posed by Iraq, and he bumped up a Justice department official who disastrously promoted torture as a policy, he's chosen as FDA head a man who has been, according to the Wall Street Journal, "a high-level official at the FDA while its handling of antidepressants and other drugs has come into question."

The great paper is a bit more polite in describing the food-industry ties of the new FDA head, Lester Crawford. "Dr. Crawford, 66 years old, has worked for a food-industry group, but spent most of his career at the FDA and the Agriculture Department, as well as in academe," the paper reports. And that's the last mention of his food-industry ties.

Here's a brief bio, which reports that Crawford has been director of the Virginia Tech Center for Food and Nutrition Policy and executive vice-president of the National Food Processors Association.

A cursory web search exposes the Virginia Tech Center for Food and Nutrition Policy as an industry poodle. Here it is denying that high-fructose corn syrup is a cause of obesity; here it's commiserating with food processors about how mean Europe is for demanding labelling of genetically altered food; and here it's downplaying the well-established health-ruining qualities of partially hydrogenated oil.

The corn-syrup defense is a particularly dear topic to the barons of the industrial food system. All that cheap, subsidized corn has to go somewhere; the food industry, led by Archer Daniels Midland, has successfully kept pressure on Congress to keep sugar tariffs high, thus making high-fructose corn syrup the sweetener of choice for the food-processing industry. Richard Manning, in his book Against the Grain, lays this sordid story out. I'll be returning to this theme in BGJ.

No need to fixate much on the National Food Processors Association. Suffice to say that its board is chaired by a Kraft exec and includes representatives from the likes of Tyson, Archer Daniels Midland, Unilever, and many more.

In fairness to Bush, there's no reason to believe that Kerry would have picked an industry critic to head up the FDA.

Roundup
The UN is evidently sending a banned genetically altered corn strain to Guatemala in the form of food aid. Let's hope cross-pollination doesn't let this rogue corn ruin ancient strains in the homeland of the Maya.

This WSJ article describes a polemic between the US and Mexican governments over the collapse in the monarch-butterfly population. The Mexican government blames industrial ag, including crops engineered to contain pesticides, in the US midwest; the US blames bad forest management in Mexico.

"Some widely publicized laboratory experiments, Monarch butterfly caterpillars did die after eating milkweed coated with genetically modified corn pollen. In its own studies, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said there probably is little risk to butterflies," the Journal says. But why wouldn't corn designed to kill bugs, kill bugs?

Roundup, ready

2005-02-15T08:39:00.000-05:00

This post marks the debut of "Roundup, ready," a new occasional feature of Bitter Greens Journal. Named in honor of Monsanto's famed line of seeds genetically engineered to withstand its herbicide Roundup, this feature will give a brief overview of recent news, trends, and topics in the food-politics world. Each of them is a candidate for expansion in the days and weeks to come.

• Low soy prices feed Smithfield profits
As I wrote last week, soy prices have plunged. Monday, Smithfield Foods, the top U.S. hog producer and pork processor, signaled its fourth quarter 2004 profits had come in much higher than expected.

These two trends are not unrelated; soybeans are the key input in the industrial production of hogs, of which Smithfield produces about 14.5 million annually.

Another reason for the stellar profitability, it must be said, is that Smithfield has such a tight grip on labor costs that it recently inspired a blistering Human Rights Watch report.

The company's Monday press release hailing its 2004 profits was merely a preview; on March 1, it will deliver its full profit report. Bitter Greens Journal will be ready.

• Rhymes with dung
Bunge (rhymes with dung, which is what farmers should be using instead of the company's chemical fertilizers) also reported fourth quarter results bolstered by Brazil's soybean explosion.

Bunge is a key player in the global industrial food chain. By its own reckoning, it ranks as the world's largest oilseed processor; the world's largest seller of bottled vegetable oil to consumers and a leading supplier of premium edible oils to the U.S. foodservice industry;
the world's largest corn dry miller; the largest manufacturer and seller of fertilizer and a leading supplier of animal feed in Brazil; the largest exporter of soy products to Asia; and a leading biodiesel producer. It generates in excess of $20 billion in annual revenue and boasts a stock-market value of around $5 billion.

The company reported operating profit for the fourth quarter of 2004 of $181 million, down 4 percent from the same quarter a year earlier. But things would have been worse without Brazil's burgeoning demand for fertilizer, which it needs to as cultivate soybeans on its marginal lands.

While overall operating profit was deteriorating, profit in the company's fertilizer segment bulled ahead 60 percent, from $68 million in the fourth quarter of 2003 to $109 million in fourth-quarter 2004. Fertilizer sales leapt 40 percent, from $593 million to $830 million.

While the company does not break out its results by region, it hinted strongly that Brazil drove its success in fertilizers.

Alberto Weisser, the company's CEO, said in Bunge's quarterly report that he expects worldwide soybean demand to rise 4 percent per year long-term. "“Demand will encourage production, and South America, especially Brazil, will enjoy the
majority of this growth. Brazilian soil needs nutrients so fertilizer sales should increase steadily as well," he said.

He added some interesting info on the supply/demand situation for soy. "This year’s U.S. soy crop is approximately 85 million tons, which represents a 27% increase over last year’s crop. The 2005/2006 Brazilian soy crop is forecast at 64 million tons, a 23% increase over last year, and the Argentine crop is forecast at 39 million tons, a 13% increase over 2004. ... Demand is strong. The USDA projects global soybean meal consumption in 2005 at 140 million tons, an 8% increase over 2004."

If global demand rises 8 percent and the world's dominant producers boost production 20 percent and more, sounds like more low prices for soy farmers, and more good tidings for the processors who buy their goods.

• Ag Sec Johanns to address soy, corn farmers
Bitter Greens Journal is slowly getting the lowdown on Mike Johanns, the former Nebraska governor Bush tapped this year as the new agriculture secretary.

Oh, how we'd love to be in Austin, Texas, on Feb. 25 when he addresses the combined convention and trade show of the National Corn Growers Association (NCGA) and the American Soybean Association (ASA), known appropriatley as the Commodity Classic.

These farmers, like their Brazilian counterparts, are the industrial food system's foot soldiers. Using gigantic John Deere combines, genetically altered seeds from Monsanto, and fertilizers from Bunge and insecticides from Syngenta and others, they produce the inputs that are processed into food ingredients by Archer Daniels Midland, for later use in processed foods by food giants like Kraft. These farmers also help supply the main input to the industrial animal-farming sytem, as represented by above-mentioned Smithfield Foods.

Whereas Brazil's soy farmers take a hit when the price of soy plunges, these guys get cash payments from the U.S. government. Now Bush is muttering darkly about severely cutting those time-honored subsidies.

These farmers will raise legitimate questions about where the industrial food system will be if a subsidy reduction causes many of them to fail. I'm afraid the answer is: in Brazil, buying soybeans. How will Johanns spin this one? These guys form the basis of the Republicans' support in the quote-unquote blue states. If they pull back in the 2006 mid-term elections, some GOP Congressmen could be fidning themselves led to slaughter as unceremoniously as one of Smithfield's hogs.

I'll be closely watching media accounts of that speech; would any on my Austin readers like to cover it for me? I would try to arrange press credentials.

• AP buzzes bee crisis

I've criticized the Associated Press for playing down the role of insecticides in a budding nationwide agricultural crisis caused by a shortage of bees.

But at least it's covering the crisis. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have not touched it. And here comes the good old AP again, releasing its third story in the last several weeks about how a shortage of bees is seriously threatening fruit and vegetable farming in the U.S.

As for the angle that I think is most interesting--that heavy insecticide use has created a super-resistant mite that's savaging bees--the article has this to say: "Beekeepers once used a plastic strip coated with one of two miticides placed in the hives when the bees are dormant. But the mites became resistant to both."

It adds: "Scientists are working on several possible solutions....One is formic acid, a hazardous material that has proved difficult to apply safely. They are also looking at oxalic acid, which is found in lettuce and is more benign."

Does anyone else care about this story but me and the Associated Press?

Brazil's losing game

2005-02-10T07:36:00.000-05:00

It's the devil's bargain of industrial agriculture: A farmer uses debt and high-dollar inputs to jack up production, and then hopes for a bonanza on international commodities markets.

It worked in Brazil, for a time. This NYT article from December, unfortunately only available for a fee, describes the country's meteoric rise as an agricultural export power:

"Brazil's advantages start with the availability of large amounts of cheap land, especially here in this region of well-drained tropical savanna known as the cerrado. Larger than the American grain belt but dismissed as useless for farming until barely a quarter of a century ago, the cerrado cuts across the heart of Brazil, and its vastness permits economies of scale that are the envy of producers elsewhere."

It goes on to say that the farmers there have embraced soybeans as the crop on which to hang their fortunes: "Until recently, for example, soybeans were not thought to flourish in tropical soils and climates. But researchers at Embrapa and similar private or state institutes have developed more than 40 varieties of soy specially adapted for the cerrado. Soybeans now account for nearly half of Brazil's farm exports and are the main crop in this region" (emphasis added).

The agribusiness giants have swooped in, the article goes on:

"The Brazilian bonanza has been eagerly welcomed by the main international agricultural trading companies, which have been quick to seize new opportunities. In this town of 30,000 [Lucas do Rio Verde, in the heart of the cerrado], Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge and Cargill not only have built huge warehouses and silos along the main highway, but have also provided credit to farmers on a scale far beyond the means of the Brazilian government."

This is interesting. These companies are the middlemen of the international agricultural commodities markets. They buy vast amounts of soybeans, corn, cotton, etc., and sell them to the big processors. Their trading operations make their money off the "spread," or the difference between what the pay for the goods and what they sell them for. They're willing to finance the farmers because more production means lower prices for the goods.

The Times article is generally celebratory--the author is Larry Rohter, longtime NYT Latin American correspondent, notorious in the '80s for his apologia for Reagan's policies in Central America. The article doesn't mention, as this recent Dow Jones article does, that one quarter of Brazil's soybean output comes from genetically modified seeds, nearly all of them Monsanto's Round-Up Ready variety.

And it mentions only in passing the severe drop in soybean prices, caused by that scourge of farmers locked into the industrial system, overproduction.

Leave it to the good old Financial Times to set the record straight. This outstanding article should be read by any farmer who's considering scaling up into the big leagues as a business model.

"Another bumper soya crop is being harvested [in Brazil]," the article states. Nevertheless:

"The collapse of international soyabean prices and a big rise in production costs caught Mato Grosso's highly indebted farmers off guard, plunging many into deep losses after years of big profits." The economics are brutal. It costs Brazil's farmers $10.30 to produce a bag of soybeans, among the lowest in the world. Last year, when strong demand from China pushed the market price to $16 per bag, the farmers thrived. But overproduction has sinced halved the price, meaning that the farmers are selling their goods for $2 per bag less than production costs.

Remember those trading houses mentioned above by the NYT's Rohter? Get this:

"Some farmers complain that consolidation in the agriculture business has made them dependent on a handful of trading houses, which provide financing for seeds and fertiliser, storage and purchase agreements. But last year, when prices started falling, trading companies did not offer purchase contracts, the farmers say. 'They financed us but didn't buy our product - now it's worth half of what it was,' says Rodrigo Stechow, head of the rural association in Campo Verde."

See how it works? If the big trading houses get together and stop buying, then prices tumble, and the farmer is left with interest obligations that perhaps can't be met by the falling cost of his/her goods.

The article states that the farmers are forming cooperatives that would give them more pricing power to stand up to the big trading houses, which is a step in the right direction. But they're playing a losing game.

A Brazilian ag official told the FT that: ""It was easy to make money at $16 a bag [of soybeans] but we may never see that again. Now it is time to prove Brazil can still produce the best and cheapest farm products in the world." Somewhere, a Cargill exec is rubbing his hands together and grinning.

Note to readers:: I try to be as concise as possible in this blog. If I there’s ever an economic concept I don’t sufficiently explain, please let me know, and I’ll take another crack at it. One of the factors that maintains the global political-economic order is the vast obfuscation that surrounds it. I’m here to cut through the obfuscation, not contribute to it.

Bush whacks sustainable ag

2005-02-09T15:28:00.000-05:00

Evidently, when you blow on $5 billion a month waging war and "nation-building", boost non-war defense spending 5 percent, and slash taxes, you have to cut spending elsewhere.

Election's over; time to start lecturing the special interests about deficits. Reagan tried something like that in the 1980s, although he was lecturing about deficits even before he began his tax-cut and military-spending binge. (He ended up creating huge deficits anyway.) Now Bush II is having his go at transforming the federal government into an essentially pure military machine.

Predictibly, farm spending sustains a heavy blow from Bush's proposed 2005 budget.

The major media have all focused on the plan to cut agriculture subsidies by $5.74 billion (more than a month's mayhem in Iraq) over the next 10 years. I don't much care about that. The subsidy system is geared toward large-scale industrial farming; much of that cash gets recycled into the coffers of agribusiness giants like John Deere, and into banks in the form of interest payments from farmers trying to scale up. And the subsidies give U.S. farmers a price advantage in global commodities markets, wreaking havoc, for example, on domestic Mexican corn production. Also, the IMF, et al, hector farmers in Africa to gear production toward export, even when they can't compete on price with vast-scale U.S. farmers.

But there's no reason not to reform the subsidy system to favor small farmers looking to feed their local areas. Economies of scale, lack of local food-processing infrastructure, consolidation of wholesale buying into a few hands, rising land prices near urban areas, scarcity of markets away from the yuppie havens--all of these conspire to give factory farms an advantage over small farms.

And here's where we get to the real scandal of Bush's budget viz. farming. The Sustainable Agriculture Coalition has produced a concise list of complaints regarding the proposed budget. Essentially, the president is gutting every small-farm program activists managed to squeeze into the 2002 Farm Bill.

Big-scale farmers and agribusiness interests have powerful allies in Congress, including some Republican senators in the south, who will battle to preserve their flow of D.C. cash. Who will stick up for the small farmers? Democrats?

A well-diversified company

2005-02-08T17:55:00.000-05:00

Many readers may already know this, but I had no idea until today: In addition to its thriving biotech-seed business line, Monsanto is the largest--and only!--producer of recombinant bovine growth hormone, rBGH for short. This Mother Jones article documents a Maine dairy farmer's fight to label his milk rBGH-free.

"We state what we are trying to do, simply and honestly," the farmer, Portland-based Stan Bennett, tells Mother Jones. "It's my right--and obligation--to inform [customers] of the facts."

Not so, according to Monsanto. In a gesture well-known to many vegetable farmers (147, according to the Center for Food Safety), Monsanto is suing Bennet. The charge: "deceptive" and "misleading" advertsing.

One of these days, Bitter Greens Journal is going to tell the story of what a disaster rBGH has been for small dairy farmers since its introduction a decade or so ago. It's led to a glut of milk on the market, pressuring raw milk prices and providing a windfall for large-scale milk processors. And jacked-up production is making cows' milk-production capacities burn out faster than new milk cows can replace them, leading to a cow shortage. I got that critique of growth hormones from an excellent food conference I attended in New York a couple of years ago, in a seminar hosted by master cheese maker Jonathon White of Bobolink Dairy.

Just as biotech crops are being sold as a panecea for vegetable farmers world-wide, rBGH was pitched as the savior of the small dairy farm. Things didn't work out that way.

Amazingly, Monsanto was also among the main companies involved in the creation and marketing of Agent Orange, the herbicide the US military used in the Vietnam War to defoliate jungles, to devesating effect on Vietnamese civilians and U.S. soldiers alike.

Monsanto in Mesopotamia

2005-02-08T06:59:00.000-05:00

As part of large-scale privatization scheme, shrewdly enacted before anyone got a chance to vote, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq last spring issued Order 81, which governed "patent, industrial design, undisclosed information, integrated circuits and plant variety law." (Here's a list of links to all the orders--fascinating stuff.)

Appropriately for these times, the edict placed seed germoplasm within the rubric of industrial process, assigning it private ownership to be leveraged perpetually for profit. It was a neat and brazen trick: An occupying army, with the stroke of a pen, institutionalizes its brand of agriculture in one of the birthplaces of agriculture. It was as if Bush and his army had sacked Rome, and handed all the architectural decisions over to Century 21.

The order was, from what I can tell, widely ignored in media. Naomi Klein, in her excellent Harper's article dissecting the privatization scheme, didn't mention it. There has been a lot of loose analysis of order 81 on the Internet, characterized by this this writer, who declared that: "This order prohibits Iraqi farmers from using the methods of agriculture that they have used for centuries. The common worldwide practice of saving heirloom seeds from one year to the next is now illegal in Iraq. Order 81 wages war on Iraqi farmers. They have lost the freedom and liberty to choose their own methods of agriculture."

That's overstated. Here is a careful analysis of Order 81 from Grain, an international NGO that promotes sustainable agriculture. Here is the kernel of the report:

"The CPA has made it illegal for Iraqi farmers to re-use seeds harvested from new varieties registered under the law. Iraqis may continue to use and save from their traditional seed stocks or what’s left of them after the years of war and drought, but that is the not the agenda for reconstruction embedded in the ruling. The purpose of the law is to facilitate the establishment of a new seed market in Iraq, where transnational corporations can sell their seeds – genetically modified or not, which farmers would have to purchase afresh every single cropping season."

So while Order 81 doesn't ban seedsaving per se, it creates a rigorous framework for enforcing the claims of biotech seed companies when they do establish a presence in Iraq. The order awards Monsanto and its ilk a much more generous deal than what's being hammered out, for example, in Argentina, which has generally been heroic over the past couple of years in pursuing its own economic interests over those of the global investment class.

Order 81 gives patent holders a 20-year monopoly over germoplasm; last I checked, Argentina was considering offering only seven years. Degrees of obscenity, to quote J.M. Coetzee.

It will not likely be long before Monsanto is cashing in on this handiwork. According to the Grain piece, a government organization called the US Agency for International Development has been implementing an Agricultural Reconstruction and Development Program for Iraq (ARDI) since October 2003. Think they're encouraging farmers to save heirloom seeds? A little push from ARDI plus a bit of cross-pollination should spell a nice market for Monsanto.

Like all the Orders delivered by fiat of L. Paul Bremer, former occupation chief, Order 81 remains in effect unless and until the new Iraqi government specifically overturns it. Am I being cynical in assuming that the election process will throw up politicians sympathetic to the interests embedded in Bremer's scheme?

Let's close with a summary from Klein in her Harper's piece, discussing the U.S.'s pre-election economic reorganization of Iraq:" If these policies sound familiar, it’s because they are the same ones multinationals around the world lobby for from national governments and in international trade agreements. But while these reforms are only ever enacted in part, or in fits and starts, Bremer delivered them all, all at once."

Cheap food, cheap labor, fat profits, part II

2005-02-04T14:54:00.000-05:00

In a recent post, I wrote about how the U.S. Department of Labor had unceremoniously halted its annual study of working and living conditions among the nation's migrant farm workers.

The study is critical in allocating aid money to help stabilize the lives of these workers and their families, who are, after all, part of the hidden backbone of this country's economy. These people tend to be among those thrown off the land by the Nafta-codified destruction of Mexico's traditional food system; their presence here is vital to the workings of our industrial food system, whose model of mass-producing cheap food relies heavily on a steady supply of cheap labor. It's ironic, unconscionable, and utterly unsurprising that the Bush administration, an enthusiastic supporter of the present food system, would treat these people so cavalierly.

Click here to get the United Farm Workers' take on this travesty; the link also contains info on how to let the Bush administration know how you feel about its dubious decision.

Of mites and men (and bees)

2005-02-04T07:57:00.000-05:00

A reader named Liz commented recently that: "The decline in beekeeping, along with the severe decline in wild bee populations, is of great concern to state agricultural folk. It's not uncommon for "pollinators" (people who keep bees primarily to pollinate crops, not necessarily to produce honey) to carry a tractor-trailor load (500 hives) across the country to pollinate California crops, because there aren't enough local beekeepers there."

And then I noticed this AP story about that very phenomenon.

It's interesting the way pesticides play into accounts of the bee crisis. The mite looms over these stories like the monster Grendel in the Beowulf tale: fierce, mysterious, unstoppable. "A tiny pest is decimating honeybee colonies across the country, worrying beekeepers and farmers who depend on the insects to pollinate their crops," the article opens.

Several paragraphs down, we get this: "Experts think the mites may have arrived in the mid-1980s from Asia, where they coexisted with local honeybees." Uh-oh. Yellow menace! But wait, did that just say "coexist"?

Two paragraphs later--number 10 in the story overall--we get to the meat of the story: "Reproducing quickly and in a closed environment, the mites have developed a resistance to pesticides — a trait they've been able to spread to their progeny faster than scientist have been able to develop new compounds to fight them off."

So North American pesticide companies have created a super-mite that their compounds can't sort out, and they've caused what appears to be a real nationwide agricultural crisis. Shouldn't that be the story’s lead, maybe even on the front page of the NY Times?

Now, before our friends over at the Center for Science in the Public Interest start chiding Monsanto to conjure up a super-bee that can stand up to the super-mite, they may want to read this piece. It details the way that bio corn, engineered to contain a pesticide, is working to create super-resistant pests. (This phenomenon is clearly in Monsanto's interest; the company can sell farmers the solution to the problem it created. But it's devastating for us organic farmers.)

Meanwhile, coca growers in Colombia have surrendered to the appeal of genetic modification. (What company is toying with the proud old coca plant?)

And, to prove that I'm a gourmand and not just a scold, here's a piece on a delicious phenomenon the NYT calls "natural wine."

Surrendering to biotech crops

2005-02-03T09:25:00.000-05:00

In an important recent report, which has yet to receive the full airing it deserves here, the Center for Food Safety lays out Monsanto's strategy for winning the war over GMO crops. First, buy up every major seed supplier, thus gaining a powerful share of the market; then patent everything in sight; and then require farmers who buy your product to sign away their right to save seeds, forcing them to repurchase your stuff each year. The coup de grace: since seed germoplasm is spread naturally through cross-pollination, farmers who never agreed to plant biotech seeds will be effectively using your stuff--and can be extorted into paying you licensing fees. And indeed, Monsanto drops $10 million a year for a 75-person-strong shake-down team, which runs around the country monitoring farmers for possible patent violations.

The study quotes Don Westfall, vice president of food consultancy Promar International (see below), in a frank assessment of the strategy: “The hope of the industry is that over time the market is so flooded that there’s nothing you can do about it. You just sort of surrender.”

Evidently, more and more farmers are surrendering; biotech crop acreage worldwide is growing at a robust 20 percent annual clip; my friend in Brazil gave a stark example of how the process works in the so-called developing world.

Moreover, the liberals are surrendering, too, removing yet another obstacle for biotech's leveraged buyout of global agriculture. The latest evidence: a craven report, released today, by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). Now, I've never found much use for the CSPI; it's always been one of those do-gooder groups that lectures the public on the importance of eating one's spinach, without questioning whether that spinach was doused with pesticides or trucked across country from a factory farm. It's forever chiding the fast-food industry to offer more low-fat items, without stopping to consider the ruinous thrust of the entire fast-food project, or the brutalizing effect "low fat" has had on the American palate.

But I would have expected a more nuanced view of biotech than what the company served up Thursday morning.

Apparently, Monsanto has not been effective enough in promoting its agenda. CSPI is annoyed that Monsanto has only transformed a few big commodity markets. " The industry promised a bounty of beneficial crops, but the biotech cupboard remains pretty bare, except for the few crops that have benefitted grain, oilseed, and cotton farmers,” the report's author complains. Moreover, the biotech-friendly Bush government should speed up the approval process: "Just 13 .. approvals were granted from 2000 to 2004, and again, it took APHIS [one of the government's oversight agencies] almost twice as long—13.4 months on average—to grant approvals."

Clearly, the answer to the biotech crop shortage is government cash. Here is the CSPI's press release heralding the report: "In the report CSPI also recommends increasing public investment in GE [genetically engineered] crops, particularly by applying existing technology to non-commodity crops and by expanding research on biotech crops that would benefit consumers. CSPI also urged increased government support for research on crops that would be important to developing countries." To be fair, the report does lodge a couple of complaints against the industry: it's not innovating fast enough (despite Monsanto's $430 million annual R&D budget), it opposes "sensible biosafety regulations in the U.S. and abroad," and it should "make its proprietary technology freely available for public research and development efforts."

Meanwhile, all the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) can do is incessantly call for "monitoring."

Thus the biotech juggernaut charges ahead, its wheels oiled (GMO canola, no doubt) by the faint complaints of its would-be critics.

Note: Styling itself a “problem solver to the food chain,” above-mentioned Promar boasts a client list that reads like a most-wanted list of U.S. corporate food criminals.

Note to readers

2005-02-01T11:50:00.000-05:00

Bitter Greens Journal will not be able to publish a new post today, and hopes to return to its regular schedule (at least one post each weekday) tomorrow.

In the meantime, I'd love to hear comments and reactions to what's been posted so far.

Thanks

Better and better every day?

2005-01-31T08:41:00.000-05:00

One of the themes of Bitter Greens Gazette will be to debunk the idea that the industrial food system is crumbling under the weight of a sustainable food movement--that small-scale local ag might, sometime soon, overwhelm or transform Big Food.

The argument goes like this: Everywhere I go, I have more chances to buy organic. Not only are Whole Foods outlets sprouting like mung beans in suburban strip malls, but my locally dominant massive supermarket chain has a whole section that's organic. Why, just the other day, I was in Sam's Club, and I found some organic milk! And my favorite local "gourmet" restaurant features local vegetables. Our side is winning!

By indulging in a bitter laugh at such effusions, we'll certainly be accused of pessimism, of not "thinking positive," a self-help platitude that's taken on near-religious status over the past decade or so. But let us nod to Herbert Marcuse and test the "power of negative thinking." By doing so, we might get a clearer picture of what's happening globally and right around us with food production and consumption. And that might help us come up with a more rigorous response to the disaster of the current food system.

Have a look at this article from today's Wall Street Journal, detailing the top 10 "trends in U.S. agriculture."

Optimists will find much comfort here. "Sales of organic food are growing about 18% a year, with meat and fish experiencing the fastest growth, according to figures from the Organic Trade Association. The amount of U.S. certified organic cropland for corn, soybeans, and other major crops doubled from 1997 to 2001, according to the USDA."

But organic hardly means local, or even sustainable. Organic produce gets a 30 percent premium to conventional in the wholesale market, but converting to organic can cost as much as $10,000 per acre. The cost requirement, as well as mass amounts of paperwork required for certification, are better suited to large industrial farms than small ones. The organic apple of bunch of kale you buy at Whole Foods was likely trucked crosscountry from California after being grown on a huge farm, almost certainly worked by exploited migrant labor. In other words, many of the industrial practices and social relations have been preserved.

I talked to an excellent small-scale farmer from the Chapel Hill area recently. He's been certified organic for nearly 30 years, and reports that certification has become more of a headache than it's worth, and that many of his peers continue to farm with organic methods but have dropped certification. He says Whole Foods, who he used to sell to, is willing to buy local--if you can beat the price offered by industrial-organic California farms.

While optimists are cheering the organic trends, we negative thinkers are getting a cold chill from the news, much detailed in this blog, about genetically modified (GMO) crops. Here is our WSJ correspondent:
"After sweeping across the American Farm Belt, genetically modified crops are making inroads overseas -- despite resistance in some nations where critics contend they could pose unknown risks to the food supply. Modified crops can tolerate weed-killing chemicals and resist damaging pests, saving farmers money in labor and lost crops.
Eighteen countries now grow biotech crops, with Argentina, China, Canada and Brazil leading biotech growth outside the U.S. An additional 45 are researching and developing their use, according to a study by C. Ford Runge, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy." (Bold not in original).

(Note to self: Research the Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy, which is funded by Cargill Foundation, Archer Daniels Midland Company, and John Cowles, Jr.)

Finally, the title of the WSJ article--"What's for Dinner? Imports"--tells a grim story. Trend #1: "Thanks to cheap land and labor, Russia, Brazil, Argentina, China and other countries are emerging as powerful agricultural producers," i.e., importers into the U.S. market. Those amazing organic strawberries you found at Whole Foods last week were likely shipped in from Chile. And that box of organic soymilk could well have been made with Brazilian soybeans--which could have been contaminated by GMO beans.

Buzz kill

2005-01-30T09:54:00.000-05:00

In a recent post, I conjectured that pesticides might have had something to do with the collapse of North Carolina's wild-bee population. Sloppy wording made it seem like I meant that pesticides, and not mites, had caused the decline of domestictated honey bees, which clearly have been scourged by mites.

The AP article referenced in my post said this: "Twenty years ago the state had a healthy population of wild bees, but they have been ravaged by mites."

Since I don't really know much about the topic, I've been doing some research. I'll call the NC State professor quoted in the article to get his perspective Monday. In the meantime, here is a National Geographic piece from last fall on the decline of wild bees in North America. While it contains no information regarding the North Carolina in particular, the article does have this to say:

" 'Prior to the advent of large-scale monoculture agriculture [the practice of growing only one kind of plant in a given plot] in the fifties and the use of lots of chemical pesticides, native bees and feral honeybees pollinated everything. It [pollination of crops] wasn't an issue. People didn't cart bees all over the country,' [Scott Hoffman Black, executive director of the Xerces Society, an insect-conservation group] said.

...

While the mites that have proven so devastating to domesticated honeybee populations cause little effect to the wild bees, pesticide use and habitat loss are taking their toll, according to Black.

'Like any animal, native bees need a place to live,' he said. 'They need nest sites and floral resources, and if they don't have them, they won't be there.' "

Seedy situation

2005-01-28T16:14:00.000-05:00

Monsanto quit selling seeds in Argentina last year, but that doesn't mean the seed giant plans to stop making money there.

According to this AP story, 95 percent of Argentina's expected 35 million metric-ton soybean crop for 2005 will emerge from GMO seeds, mainly Monsanto's infamous Roundup Ready seeds.

(Roundup Ready shines a harsh light on biotech's claims of environmental friendliness; these are seeds created to withstand Roundup, Monsanto's cash-cow herbicide. In other words, farmers using Roundup Ready seeds can dump as much herbicide as they want into the field and not affect their soy crops.)

The company claims that the great bulk of the soybean crops currently in the ground in Argentina came from seeds that farmers never paid for; they saved them from previous crops or bought them on the black market. Thus it plans to intervene in Argentina's export market, going to countries that import Argentine soybeans and demanding a 2% per-ton "licensing fee." According to an Argentine farmers' advocacy group, that would amount to $100 million annually into Monsanto's coffers from farmers' pockets. That's a pretty good revenue stream from a country where you've stopped selling your product.

There's really nothing good about this story. Argentina's GMO soybean crops are being sold internationally mainly as chicken feed, thus being shipped great distances for use in factory farms. Garbage in, garbage out, and a whole lot of energy spent and animal suffering in between.

But I will say a few things in defense of those Argentine soybean farmers. I just talked to a friend of mine who's been living in Salvador, Brazil, for a couple of months. Maverick Farms had charged him with scoring us some raw cocoa beans. He had bad news for me today. "All of the cocoa beans are GMO [genetically modified] here," he said. "It's Nestle. They planted so much GMO cocoa that the bugs got out of control for the rest of the cocao farmers. They all gave in."

I hope those farmers didn't pay some transnational company for the GMO seeds they planted. The economic relationship described by my friend amounts to extortion, not a free market. Who knows whether some similar factor didn't play a role in the GMO takeover of Argentina's soybean crop.

Also, seed-saving is an age-old practice. Maverick Farms just dropped $300 on seeds from Fedco, a sinisterly named but benign organic, heirloom seed specialist. Will Fedco come after us at the farmers market if we save our seeds from this year's crops and use them for next year's? Or will it demand some sort of licensing fee from us?

A pox on Monsanto, and a salute to any farmer who stiffs it.

Meanwhile, Brazil, world's biggest soybean producer, is trying to sort out its own mess with Monsanto.

Bee here, now

2005-01-28T15:02:00.000-05:00

Our area's small-farmer scene in buzzing about a new program to promote bee-keeping in North Carolina.

Seems that the ongoing, state-wide transition from tobacco to vegetable farming has created a shortage of bees for pollination. "I feel that if we don't do something now about (this) we may be heading toward an agriculture crisis in the state," David Tarpy, the state's cooperative extension apiculturist and assistant professor at North Carolina State University, told AP.

"Twenty years ago the state had a healthy population of wild bees, but they have been ravaged by mites. Farmers now rely on a dozen or so commercial beekeepers to pollinate their crops," the article states. Mites, huh? Might insecticide use have played a role in this problem?

At any rate, the state ag extension office, working with NC State University, is distributing $164,00 to promote small-scale bee-keeping. The grant will provide 250 lucky applicants with two hives of Russian honey bees and bee hives; they'll have to come up with their own protective gear, etc.

We at Maverick Farms were disappointed to learn that the program has already recieved 600 applications (deadline February 11). We'd love to score a couple of freebie hives; we adore raw, unfiltered, local honey. And we use it to make a mean Provence-style ice cream, every chance we get.

That fertile Rockefeller cash

2005-01-27T10:40:00.000-05:00

In his essay on the Green Revolution (referenced here), Harry Cleaver identifies the Rockefeller Foundation as a key force in spreading industrial agriculture to the so-called Third World.

The text is worth quoting at length (and well worth reading in its entirety):

"The story of the Green Revolution began in 1943 when the Rockefeller Foundation sent a team of agricultural experts ... to Mexico to set up a research program on local grains. The Foundation’s interest in Mexico at the time was stimulated by at least two factors. First was the recent expropriation of the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil interests by Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas in 1939. Second was the wartime bid of the Nazis to expand their influence in the hemisphere. The friendly gesture of a development project would not only help soften rising nationalism but might also help hang onto wartime friends."

More than 60 years later, the foundation is evidently interested in cleaning up the Green Revolution's messes by bankrolling the Gene Revolution.

There's a Philippines-based NGO called the Global Knowledge Center on Crop Biotechnology (KC), part of another entity known as the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (based in the US, with offices in Kenya and Manilla), which seems to exist to promote biotech crops in the southern hemisphere. Its Web site contains a report on PDF hailing the "near-record growth" of biotech crop acreage in 2004.

The report contains much interesting information re: GMO penetration of the southern hemisphere. To wit: "[A]pproximately 8.25 million farmers in 17 countries planted biotech crops in 2004 — 1.25 million more farmers than planted biotech crops in 18 countries in 2003. Notably, 90 percent of these farmers were in developing countries. In fact, for the first time, the absolute growth in biotech crop area was higher in developing countries (7.2 million hectares) than in industrial countries (6.1 million hectares)."

Interesting stuff; this is clearly a study worth reading, a Web site worth monitoring, and a group worth investigating. But what really caught BGJ's eye was that the Rockefeller Foundation, along with an Italian outfit called Fondazione Bussolera Branca, had funded the study.

This opens whole new veins of research for Bitter Greens Gazette: What other biotech projects are U.S. foundations underwriting? And what is this Fondazione Bussolera Branca?

Cheap labor, cheap food, fat profits

2005-01-26T16:30:00.000-05:00

Two recent reports highlight just how heavily the U.S. food system relies on cheap labor to maintain profitability.

Labor conditions have gotten so wretched in the meat and poultry-processing industry that Human Rights Watch was moved to issue a scathing report yesterday.

"In meat and poultry plants across the United States, Human Rights Watch found that many workers face a real danger of losing a limb, or even their lives, in unsafe work conditions. It also found that companies frequently deny workers’ compensation to employees injured on the job, intimidate and fire workers who try to organize, and exploit workers’ immigrant status in order to keep them quiet about abuses," the organization states in a press release announcing the study.

I haven't had a chance to look at the full report yet--my reading list is piling up--but the press release says its focuses on Tyson Foods Inc. and Smithfield Foods Inc, among others.

While these companies crack down on union activity and pinch pennies on shop-floor safety, their stocks have been doing fine for themselves in the stock market as Atkins-addled consumers load up on factory-produced meat. (The red line represents Smithfield, the blue Tyson, and the green the S&P 500, or the broader market. Read this post for more on how to read the stock market.)

Here's an article describing hog giant Smithfield's robust financial results for the last quarter.

The Human Rights Watch report highlights the industry's heavy reliance on illegal immigrant labor: "All the abuses described in this report—failure to prevent serious workplace injury and illness, denial of compensation to injured workers, interference with workers’ freedom of association—are directly linked to the vulnerable immigration status of most workers in the industry and the willingness of employers to take advantage of that vulnerability."

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Labor infuriated immigrant-advocacy groups Monday when it unceremoniously halted its annual study of working and living conditions among the nation's migrant farm workers. According to the AP article linked here: "The information is part of a survey that is the sole authority on the work and living conditions of farm workers in the United States. The National Agricultural Workers Study affects immigration and guest worker policies and influences government programs that help the workers and their families."

The article states that the number of illegal-immigrant farm workers rose from 7 percent of total farm workers in 1989 to 52 percent in 2000. This figure shows an astonishing reliance on vulnerable, low-wage labor for our food supply.

Cheap labor means industrial food giants can keep consumer food prices down while remaining highly profitable. Cheap food means downward pressure on inflation, which has been miraculously low for about the last ten years. Low inflation means low interest rates, which fuels stock-market rallies.

Every prosperous person in the US--from rightwingers fulminating about how wetbacks are destroying the country to NPR-listening Whole Foods shoppers to me--owes much of their comfort to the exploitation of immigrant labor. Take it away and you'd have to radically transform the food (and thus the economic) system on both sides of the border.

The UN and the genius of industrial agriculture

2005-01-25T09:17:00.000-05:00

"The genius of industrial agriculture is to take a solution and create two problems," writes Wendell Berry. On a small, integrated farm, animal waste enriches soil that will be used to grow vegetable crops or grazing grass. Under industrial agriculture, vast-scale animal farms, reliant on feed grown elsewhere, create huge amounts of waste that cloud entire counties with unhappy smells and need to be hauled away long distances for disposal. Meanwhile, huge mono-cropped vegetable farms, bereft of animal herds, rely on massive inputs of chemicals to enrich the soil.

That division, and the huge amount of energy and inputs needed to sustain it, lies at the heart of the Green Revolution--the post-World War II effort, financed largely by U.S. foundations, to codify industrial agriculture and take it international. Here's a link to a superb article on the Green Revolution by Harry Cleaver, econ professor at the U of Texas. (Click the link marked "The Contradictions of the Green Revolution.") Cleaver may be the only openly Marxist economist working as a full professor in the U.S. academy. In this 1972 article, he traces the Cold War foreign policy interests that lay at the heart of the Green Revolution campaign.

[Manifesto-in-progress interlude: Missing from Cleaver's analysis is any discussion of the broad destruction of local foodways wrought by the Green Revolution, or its casual ruin of delicious things. Industrial agriculture, whose genius seems nearly limitless, has succeeded in convincing middle-class Mexico City residents to make salsa verde out of a packaged mix (I've seen it with my own eyes) and in turning one of the great gifts of the earth--the tomato--into a highly profitable commodity of no more culinary value than the water used to irrigate it.

One of the goals of Bitter Greens Journal, and of its mother project, Maverick Farms, is to bridge the gap between political economy and aesthetics. We want to bring a hedonistic regard for flavor and respect for local foodways to the center of the critique of industrial agriculture; and to make sure the artisinal food movement we've aligned ourselves with retains a sharply honed political edge.]

Now the Green Revolution finds itself in tatters, its environmental and social ravages quietly acknowledged. Here is the UN, that bastion of and great hope for sustainable-development ideology (according to some): "The Green Revolution ... is not without its detractors, who argue that it promoted overuse of water, pesticides and chemical fertilizers, making poor farmers dependent on these inputs and in some cases seriously damaging the environment in the process."

Strong stuff. The answer? What the UN hails as the Gene Revolution. Through broad adoption of GMO, declares the UN's Food and Agriculture (FAO) wing, "it may be possible to increase the availability and variety of food by improving agricultural productivity and reducing seasonal variations in food supplies. Pest-resistant and stress-tolerant crops can be developed to reduce the risk of crop failure due to drought and disease. More nutrients and vitamins may be bred into plants, combating the nutrient deficiencies that affect so many of the world's poor. Crops could be made to grow on poor soil in marginal lands, increasing overall food production. ...Biotechnology also offers the possibility of reducing the use of toxic agricultural pesticides, and may also improve the efficiency of fertilizer and other soil amendments."

Thus the genius of industrial agriculture is to sell policy makers a solution to the problems it created. That this solution will fatten the profits of transnational seed giants and exert further downward pressure on agricultural commodity prices (meaning more profit for industrial food processors, less for farmers) is beyond dispute. What it will do for the environment, local foodways, and the flavor of tomatoes remains to be seen.

More bad seeds

2005-01-24T21:09:00.000-05:00

Bitter Greens Journal must seem so far like Monsanto Watch. That will change; I want this diary to focus at least as much on local issues and food-politics theory as it does on the political economy of the global food industry. But there's much to say about that the biotech behemoth, and little time to write. And I sense a complacency re: biotech among some in the sustainable-ag movement, who seem to think it will just go away because of popular protest. All the evidence I see points the other direction.

The latest on Monsanto is that it just today bought California-based Seminis, which the Financial Times calls the "world’s largest developer of fruit and vegetable seeds," for $1.4 billion (including assumed debt). Here's the Reuters version of the deal, widely distributed in the US press. the article has some interesting stuff in it: e.g., "Monsanto already controls an estimated 14 percent of the U.S. corn seed market and through licensing arrangements provides germplasm and technology traits that extend its influence into about one-third of the U.S. market."

The article dutifully reports the company's official rationale for the deal: That Monsanto bought Seminis to "capitalize on the trend toward healthier eating," and that it will continue to run its new charge as a conventional, non-GMO seed company in "the near- to mid-term." The company's CEO, Hugh Grant, added, however, that "In the long term, there may be an opportunity in biotechnology."

Isn't it a bit ominous that Monsanto just snatched up the world's biggest seed company, and is openly considering genetically manipulating its products?

The UK-based Financial Times adds a telling detail in its piece on the deal: "Seminis derives 40 per cent of its business from Europe, the Middle East and Africa." Those are just the places that Monsanto has been having trouble marketing its GMO seeds.

Monsanto shares plunged 7 percent on the news. Part of that is normal activity when a company announces a big buy; part of it reflects Wall Street concern that Monsanto overpaid for Seminis, according to the FT.

Wall Street's bet on Monsanto

2005-01-21T09:15:00.000-05:00

I had planned to discuss an extensive new report from the Center for Food Safety on Monsanto's campaign to enforce its "property rights" viz. farmers. But I haven't had time to read through the 84-page document. Before I get to that, sometime next week, I'll go into a bit more depth about what Monsanto's stock-market performance is telling us about its prospects in the struggle over GMO.

Here's the company's stock chart over the past year, compared to the S&P 500. (Market watchers use the S&P, an index containing the 500 most valuable US stocks, as a broad indicator of how the overall stock market is doing.) The red line on the chart represents the S&P's performance, while the blue line represents Monsanto's share-price growth. Note that while the S&P has essentially flatlined over the past year, Monsanto's shares have risen by 100 percent, or doubled in price. Now, investors buy stocks based on expectations of future profit growth, not past performance. One way to read Monsanto's chart, then, is that investors are expecting its earnings to grow much faster than the earnings of the average large U.S. company. And since, as I show in my previous post, Monsanto relies increasingly on GMO for its profits, the stock's sharp recent rise represents a calculated bet on widespread acceptance of biotech crops.

Another indication that the financial community is betting big money on Monsanto in its fight with the environmentalists is what analysts call "valuation." To understand valuation, think of a small business--for example, an ice cream shop. Say your local ice cream shop generated $100,000 last year in profit. How much would it be worth, if the owner wanted to sell it? Well, it would depend on whether its annual profit is holding steady, growing, or shrinking. If profit were holding steady, the shop might fetch $500,000, or five times last year's profit; if profits could reasonably be expected to grow, say, 10 percent a year, someone might shell out, say, $800,000, or eight times earnings. If profit is shrinking, the price might be something like $200,000, or two times earnings.

Similar calculations come into play when big-time investors buy stocks. Get this: Monsanto is currently trading at 70 times last year's earnings, while the average company in the S&P 500 trades at about 18 times earnings. That means that Wall Street is expecting (or "pricing in," in trader argot) serious growth from Monsanto.

Now, contrary to '90s-era popular-media hype, the stock market is not driven by sunken-eyed day traders or grandmas gambling away their retirements. What drives stock prices are the decisions of huge institutions--retirement funds, mutual funds, hedge funds. These places are run by people who manage billions of dollars and buy and sell millions of dollars worth of a single stock in a single swoop. They scour the market for growth opportunities, and they tend to do their homework. They're often wrong--in the '90s, they wildly overvalued tech stocks. But they're a lot more conservative about valuation today. If they thought biotech crops faced a bleak future, they would dump Monsanto instantly, as they did a couple of years ago, when GMO opposition seemed to be gaining force. Instead, they're bidding up Monsanto dramatically.

That's bracing news for anyone concerned about the future of small-scale, sustainable farming.

Note: the Barron's article mentioned in my previous post makes clear that Wall Street is very excited about Monsanto's global "growth opportunities." A future blog will discuss the company's activities in Brazil and Argentina, the world's emerging industrial-ag production centers.

Monsanto on the March

2005-01-20T13:30:00.000-05:00

Activists have won key victories in the battle against genetically modified food. Several industrial food purveyors--from baby-food giant Gerber to pet-food maker Iams to cereal producer General Mills--have renounced under pressure the use of GMO ingredients. McDonalds and Burger King promised in 2000 not to use GMO potatoes for their French fries (although the beef they use is raised on GMO corn). These and other blows to the growth of GMO have inspired a somewhat celebratory mood in some quarters of the foodie left. Writing in his much-celebrated Coming Home to Eat (2002), local-food guru Gary Paul Nabhan declared 2000 to have been a "watershed in the history of global food politics," marked by broad global protest against GMO and other schemes of industrial agriculture.

Yet, in the meantime, Big Ag has quietly regained its momentum in the GMO struggle. An article in the December 6, 2004, Barron's hails the resurgence of GMO-seed giant Monsanto. Entitled "Eat Up!: Why Genetically Modified 'Frankenfood' is gaining ground," the article makes the smart-money case for Monsanto. (Unfortunately, the article is available on the investment weekly's Web site only for a fee.) It points out that, despite all the protest, biotech crop acreage has surged to a 170 million acres since the technology's 1996 debut, making GMO "one of the most quickly adopted innovations in the history of agriculture, outpacing the emergence of animal-drawn plows, and the rise of tractors on the 1930s." Acreage under biotech cultivation jumped by 22 percent in 2003, a performance likely to be repeated in '04, the magazine stated.

Meanwhile, official opposition to biotech is unravelling. The European Union, which has been stalwart in refusing to accept GMO, last spring eased its ban on importing GMO crops and cultivating GMO seeds. Germany and Great Britain, which count among the world's greenest governments, now allow some. (Barron's reports that the first Frankenfoods have yet to hit Europe's supermarkets; it will be interesting to see how consumers receive them, since Europe does have strong GMO labelling laws).

And even NGO opposition to GMO shows signs of retreating. The Environmental Defense Fund, once a fierce critic, is backing off. A scientist for the group told Barron's that she'd like to see a "bit more regulation" of GMO, but that "this is not a big focus for us as it once was." And the UN has embraced biotech crops as "essential to the future of the planet," a rebuke to those who see that beleagured intitution as the planet's last hope for a global sustainable-development movement.

Exponential growth, dwindling opposition--it all adds up to a windfall for Monsanto. The ag-input giant reported last year that $2.3 billion of its total $5.5 billion in revenue for fiscal '04 came from its biotech arm. And that operation also was the company's biggest contributor to overall profits ($1.6 billion total), surpassing profit from herbicides for the first time ever.

Wall Street has taken note. The company's share price has surged from about $15 in summer 2002 to about $60 today--a staggering 300 percent gain. That means the so-called smart money is betting that Monsanto will defeat its opponents and create a world of bioengineered monocrops fuelled by patented seeds.

Tomorrow I'll post about how the company is continuing its egregious practice of suing farmers who dare save seeds from their own crops.