"Olivier De Schutter and Gaëtan Vanloqueren"-The New Green Revolution: How Twenty-First-Century Science Can Feed the World

Countries can and must reorient their agricultural systems toward modes of production that are not only highly productive, but also highly sustainable.

by Olivier De Schutter and Gaëtan Vanloqueren

Some crises appear and disappear in global media while remaining acute in the lives of real people. Global food insecurity is this type of crisis. In January 2011 the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) warned that global food prices in December 2010 exceeded the 2008 peak during the so-called food price crisis that sparked “food riots” across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.¹ The UN also warned that the price increase would not stop overnight and that we were entering “danger territory.”² Although prices stabilized in the spring, global food prices in May 2011 remained higher than they were in June 2008. We will see more price spikes in the future, due to a growing discrepancy between supply and demand, the impacts of climate disruption on agricultural production, and the merger of the energy and food markets. The food crisis is here to stay.

Governments have pledged to reinvest massively in agriculture. After three decades of neglect, this is welcome news. However, as countries announce impressive figures on the scope of their reinvestment, we tend to forget that the most pressing issues today regarding agricultural reinvestment involve not only how much, but how.

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"Olivier De Schutter and Gaëtan Vanloqueren" - The New Green Revolution: How Twenty-First-Century Science Can Feed the World

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/21-1

Published on Sunday, August 21, 2011 by Solutions

 

Countries can and must reorient their agricultural systems toward modes of production that are not only highly productive, but also highly sustainable.

by Olivier De Schutter and Gaëtan Vanloqueren

Some crises appear and disappear in global media while remaining acute in the lives of real people. Global food insecurity is this type of crisis. In January 2011 the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) warned that global food prices in December 2010 exceeded the 2008 peak during the so-called food price crisis that sparked “food riots” across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.¹ The UN also warned that the price increase would not stop overnight and that we were entering “danger territory.”² Although prices stabilized in the spring, global food prices in May 2011 remained higher than they were in June 2008. We will see more price spikes in the future, due to a growing discrepancy between supply and demand, the impacts of climate disruption on agricultural production, and the merger of the energy and food markets. The food crisis is here to stay.

Governments have pledged to reinvest massively in agriculture. After three decades of neglect, this is welcome news. However, as countries announce impressive figures on the scope of their reinvestment, we tend to forget that the most pressing issues today regarding agricultural reinvestment involve not only how much, but how.

The choice between agricultural development models has immediate and long-term consequences. Since 2008 some major reinvestment efforts have been channeled into a slightly modified version of the Green Revolution without fully considering our other great contemporary challenge of climate change. In contrast, scant attention has been paid to the most cutting-edge ecological farming methods—methods that improve food production and farmers’ incomes, while also protecting the soil, water, and climate.

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"Dennis O'Brien" - The Flight of the Bumble Bee: Why Are They Disappearing

by Dennis O'Brien for USDA
Washington DC (SPX) Aug 16, 2011

http://www.seeddaily.com/reports/The_Flight_of_the_Bumble_Bee_Why_Are_They_Disappearing_999.html

A U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientist is trying to learn what is causing the decline in bumble bee populations and also is searching for a species that can serve as the next generation of greenhouse pollinators.

Bumble bees, like honey bees, are important pollinators of native plants and are used to pollinate greenhouse crops like peppers and tomatoes. But colonies of Bombus occidentalis used for greenhouse pollination began to suffer from disease problems in the late 1990s and companies stopped rearing them. Populations of other bumble bee species are also believed to be in decline.

Entomologist James Strange is searching for solutions at the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Pollinating Insects-Biology, Management and Systematics Research Unit in Logan, Utah. ARS is USDA's chief intramural scientific research agency, and this research supports the USDA priority of improving agricultural sustainability.

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"JESSE McKINLEY" - Farm Thieves Target Grapes, and Even Bees

New York Times,  July 21, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/22/us/22crime.html?_r=1

By JESSE McKINLEY

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — Sgt. Walt Reed said he could tell right away that the grapes were stolen. They looked like an ordinary bunch. Except, he said, for the way they were dressed.

“Usually grapes are put into plastic bags,” said Sergeant Reed, a 28-year veteran of the Kern County Sheriff’s Office. “But these grapes were just thrown in a Styrofoam box.”

Sergeant Reed — who eventually arrested a suspect after staking out a Kern County vineyard — is just one of dozens of deputies on the front lines of agricultural crime in California, home to the nation’s most productive farms and the people who prey on them. While thievery has long been a fact of life in the country, such crimes are on the rise and fighting them has become harder in many parts of California as many grants for rural law enforcement have withered on the vine.

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Eco-Farming Could Double Food Output of Poor Countries, Says UN

A move by farmers in developing countries to ecological agriculture, away from chemical fertilisers and pesticides, could double food production within a decade, a UN report says.

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Nothing new in 20 years: Nearly everyone still wants genetically modified food labeled

At this MSNBC poll [http://bit.ly/fTMqV8], over 40,000 people have voted strongly in favor of labeling genetically modified foods: 96% of all respondents. But, a review of several polls going back to 1994 reveals that the numbers have always been high -- the vast majority of people have always wanted GM labels. That biotech foods have remained unlabeled for nearly 20 years in the US reveals a deliberate and willful refusal by regulatory agencies to serve the will of the people, instead opting to abet industry profits through public deception.

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Genetic Engineering. Roundup or Roundup-Ready Crops May Be Causing Animal Miscarriages and Infertility

One of the nation’s senior soil scientists alerted the federal government to a newly discovered organism that may have the potential to cause infertility and spontaneous abortion in farm animals, raising significant concerns about human health. Dr. Don Huber, professor emeritus at Purdue University, believes the appearance and prevalence of the unnamed organism may be related to the nation’s over reliance on the weed killer known as Roundup and/or to something about the genetically engineered Roundup-Ready crops. In a letter to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, the professor called on the federal government to immediately stop deregulation of roundup ready crops, particularly roundup ready alfalfa. Below is the full text of the letter:

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Get Ready: The GOP Has Declared War on the Environment

Many who follow environmental issues find themselves routinely disappointed with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for its failure to adequately protect the environment (and thus the health of the American people). Even with the EPA acting as environmental cop on the beat, the U.S. is still home to fish too contaminated to eat, dead zones off our coasts (such as one the size of Massachusetts in the Gulf of Mexico), and an unthinkable amount of pesticides applied to our lands. In fact, according to Pesticide Action Network, some two-thirds of all active ingredients in pesticides were legalized by the EPA in a process known as "conditional registration." That's the legal equivalent of saying "Go ahead and use it, and tell us later whether or not it's safe." Once conditionally registered, pesticides are rarely, if ever, removed from the market once the safety studies are completed.

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Vandana Shiva: Climate Change and Agriculture: Biodiverse Ecological Farming Is the Answer, Not Genetic Engineering

Industrial globalised agriculture is heavily implicated in climate change. It contributes to the three major greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide (CO2) from the use of fossil fuels, nitrogen oxide (N2O) from the use of chemical fertilizers and methane (CH4) from factory farming. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change (IPCC), atmospheric concentration of CO2 has increased from a pre–industrial concentration of about 280 parts per million to 379 parts per million in 2005. The global atmospheric concentration of CH4 has increased from pre–industrial concentration of 715 parts per billion to 1774 parts per billion in 2005. The global atmospheric concentration of N2O, largely due to use of chemical fertilizers in agriculture, increased from about 270 parts per billion to 319 parts per billion in 2005.

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A new food manifesto

Food isn’t just something we need to shovel down our gullets each day to survive. It’s far more potent: the means, more than any other, by which we humans shape our planet and ourselves.

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