Katherine Gustafson - Farmers Markets Move Online

It isn’t always easy finding fresh, high-quality food in this country. Supermarkets with their long, complex supply chains usually offer unripe or subpar produce that leaves a lot to be desired. But the usual alternative methods of provision have distinct limitations. Luckily, technology provides one great answer to this dilemma, opening up an important new avenue for small-scale producers to connect to customers.

Only local farms can deliver the very freshest produce. But while the common methods of providing this bounty to consumers—community supported agriculture (CSA) plans and farmers’ markets—are essential components of a revitalizing fresh-food sector, they don’t always provide a sufficiently flexible or robust shopping experience.

CSAs require a large up-front cash layout and lock you into eating whatever happens to be delivered. Farmers’ markets vary vastly in size and quality, from those that enforce requirements on farm-size and distance to those that don’t seem to hold vendors to any standards at all. It’s dismaying to discover resellers at “farmers’” markets; for all you know, they bought their wares at Safeway that morning.

For quality-minded consumers who would like to support local agriculture, it can be a struggle to obtain the freshest food on a consistent basis. And small farmers may struggle to find enough convenient markets for their goods.

Read More:

http://www.nationofchange.org/farmers-markets-move-online-1335593740

Carey L. Biron - Food Security Slipping Ever Further Away

Continuing near-record high food prices around the world are highlighting international inattention to a looming threat, observers here warned on Friday.

According to speakers at the launch of the World Bank-International Monetary Fund (IMF) Global Monitoring Report 2012, on the sidelines of the Bank-IMF spring meetings, a lack of focus on agriculture and nutrition in development priorities could prove disastrous in the event of another spike in food prices. 

The sudden rise in food prices in 2007-08 is thought to have brought the number of hungry people to more than one billion internationally. While food costs dropped in 2009 due to the international financial crisis, 2011 again saw record highs, brought about in part by variable weather conditions, mounting oil prices and the growing use of biofuels. 

According to information released by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation in early April, food prices have continued to rise during the first three months of this year, and currently remain higher than during the crisis period of 2007-09. According to many observers, high food costs have become the "new norm". 

The social implications of fluctuations in food costs have been clear. The high cost of staple foods was a major driver behind the Arab Spring protests, for instance. Today, continued high food prices are fuelling inflation worries across the globe, notably in India and China. 

Read More:

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=107516

Eric Reguly - When Bill Gates pushes high-tech agriculture, who benefits?

When Bill Gates speaks, the world tends to listen. The second-richest man on the planet is treated like a god when he opens his mouth. He’s still chairman of Microsoft. The billions of dollars of donations he has made through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have captured the attention of the World Health Organization and set the agenda for vaccine development and inoculation over the past decade. Now, through sheer wealth-driven clout, his plan to reduce world hunger has found a rapt audience in the United Nations’ food agencies.

Gates descended on Rome, home of three UN food agencies, in February like a rumpled angel. In a speech at the International Fund for Agricultural Development (disclosure: my wife is an employee), and at a related media event, two themes emerged: technology and big business.

His talk was peppered with phrases and references to “yield,” “global productivity target” and “digital agriculture.” He mentioned some of the biggest food processing corporations, among them Procter & Gamble and Nestlé, and seemed enthusiastic about their potential role in the food development chain. “I’m a huge believer in the private sector and drawing them in,” he told the dazzled crowd.

But I was left wondering whether Gates’s agenda would contribute to the public good or the good of big business. Philanthrocapitalism, as it has been dubbed, has a dark side. Relying on genetically modified (GM) crops and chemicals to push up output per acre may help Monsanto (which was one of the stocks in the Gates Foundation’s investment portfolio), Syngenta and other tech-driven food biggies, but won’t necessarily support those who need the most help—poor smallholder farmers and underdeveloped countries. Making them part of Big Ag’s global supply chain might not help either.

Read More:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-magazine/when-bill-gates-pushes-high-tech-agriculture-who-benefits/article2413679/

Frank Lipman - What Practical Tips Do You Suggest To Avoid GM Foods?

1. *Avoid "at risk" ingredients*
The commonest crops that are genetically modified are Soy (91%) Canola (88%) Corn (85%) Cotton (71%) Sugar Beets (90%) and Hawaiian papaya (more than 50%). So in general, avoid foods with ingredients derived from corn or soybeans. Fortunately there is no GM popcorn or blue or white corn.

2. *Avoid processed foods in general*
This is the most reliable way to prevent purchasing GM foods as most processed foods have GMO ingredients in them. Processed foods using products made from corn and soybeans contain the most GM ingredients.

3. *Buy organic*
Organic foods can be labeled in 3 different ways
a) “100% organic” – all ingredients are organic.
b) “organic”- at least 95% of ingredients are organic. The remaining 5% has to be non-GMO.
c) “made with organic (name of ingredient)”- 70% of ingredients are organic. The remaining 30% has to be non-GMO.

Read More:

http://www.drfranklipman.com/what-practical-tips-do-you-suggest-to-avoid-gm-foods/

2012 Senate Farm Bill Does More Harm Than Good

Statement of Craig Cox, Senior Vice President for Agriculture and Natural Resources, Environmental Working Group, on the Senate Agriculture Committee’s 2012 farm bill.

“The 2012 farm bill should do more to support family farmers, protect the environment, promote healthy diets and support working families. Unfortunately, the bill produced today by the Senate Agriculture Committee will do more harm than good. It needlessly sacrifices conservation and feeding assistance programs to finance unlimited insurance subsidies and a new entitlement program for highly profitable farm businesses. Rather than simply ending the widely discredited direct payment program, the Senate Agriculture Committee has created an expensive new entitlement program that guarantees most of the income of farm businesses already enjoying record profits. Replacing direct payments with a revenue guarantee program is a cynical game of bait-and-switch that should be rejected by Congress.

“The proposed legislation doubles down on unlimited subsidies to buy and deliver farm insurance – at a cost of $90 billion over the next ten years. Modest reforms to these heavily subsidized insurance programs, such as means-testing and capping premium subsidies, would save enough money to spare conservation and anti-hunger programs from the proposed cuts. Crop insurance has not only become an expensive new subsidy for large farm businesses, it has also become an entitlement program for insurance agents and insurers, including companies based in tax havens such as Bermuda and Switzerland.

Read More:

http://www.ewg.org/release/2012-senate-farm-bill-does-more-harm-good

Ronnie Cummins - Millions Against Monsanto: The Food Fight of Our Lives

For nearly two decades, Monsanto and corporate agribusiness have exercised near-dictatorial control over American agriculture, aided and abetted by indentured politicians and regulatory agencies, supermarket chains, giant food processors, and the so-called “natural” products industry.

Finally, public opinion around the biotech industry’s contamination of our food supply and destruction of our environment has reached the tipping point. We’re fighting back.

This November, in a food fight that will largely determine the future of what we eat and what we grow, Monsanto will face its greatest challenge to date: a statewide citizens’ ballot initiative that will give Californians the opportunity to vote for their right to know whether the food they buy is contaminated with GMOs.

Read More:

http://www.nationofchange.org/millions-against-monsanto-food-fight-our-lives-1334324632

Verlyn Klinkenborg - The Folly of Big Agriculture: Why Nature Always Wins

In its short, shameless history, big agriculture has had only one big idea: uniformity. The obvious example is corn. The U.S. Department of Agriculture predicts that American farmers — big farmers — will plant 94 million acres of corn this year. That’s the equivalent of planting corn on every inch of Montana. To do that you’d have to make sure that every inch of Montana fell within corn-growing parameters. That would mean leveling the high spots, irrigating the dry spots, draining the wet spots, fertilizing the infertile spots, and so on. Corn is usually grown where the terrain is less rigorous than it is in Montana. But even in Iowa that has meant leveling, irrigating, draining, fertilizing, and, of course, spraying.

You can argue whether uniformity is the result of efficiency or vice versa. But let’s suppose that efficiency is merely the economic expression of uniformity. The point is this: When you see a Midwestern cornfield, you know you’re looking at nature with one idea superimposed upon it. This is far less confusing, less tangled in variation than the nature you find even in the roadside ditches beside a cornfield or in a last scrap of native prairie growing in a graveyard or along an abandoned railroad right-of-way. Nature is puzzling. Corn is stupefying.

Read More:

http://e360.yale.edu/feature/the_folly_of_big_agriculture_why_nature_always_wins/2514/

Tom Philpott - The Worst Farm Bill Ever?

The farm bill—that vast, byzantine, twice-a-decade plan for federal food, ag, and hunger policy—expires on Sept. 30, just weeks before what promises to be an epically contested presidential election.

Under normal circumstances, getting Congress to agree on such complex and expensive legislation at a politically charged juncture would be daunting. This year, with both parties touting fiscal austerity and with the GOP-dominated House having recently approved a draconian budget proposal [1], getting a farm bill through the legislative process will be nearly impossible.

But none of that will likely stop Big Agribusiness from getting what it wants, which is programs that underwrite environmentally ruinous, nutritionally vapid corn/soy agriculture. Take Big Ag's lobbying power and add a big pinch of fiscal hysteria and what you get is thin gruel for everything else in the farm bill, which could could choke off the USDA's progressive-ag programs and even result in sharp cuts to hunger programs at a time of high un- and underemployment.

Read More:

http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/04/worst-farm-bill-ever

Fertilizer use responsible for increase in nitrous oxide in atmosphere

University of California, Berkeley, chemists have found a smoking gun proving that increased fertilizer use over the past 50 years is responsible for a dramatic rise in atmospheric nitrous oxide, which is a major greenhouse gas contributing to global climate change.

Climate scientists have assumed that the cause of the increased nitrous oxide was nitrogen-based fertilizer, which stimulates microbes in the soil to convert nitrogen to nitrous oxide at a faster rate than normal.

The new study, reported in the April issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, uses nitrogen isotope data to identify the unmistakable fingerprint of fertilizer use in archived air samples from Antarctica and Tasmania.

"Our study is the first to show empirically from the data at hand alone that the nitrogen isotope ratio in the atmosphere and how it has changed over time is a fingerprint of fertilizer use," said study leader Kristie Boering, a UC Berkeley professor of chemistry and of earth and planetary science.

Read More:

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Fertilizer_use_responsible_for_increase_in_nitrous_oxide_in_atmosphere_999.html

Jill Richardson - Forget the Farm Bill: Where We Should Set Our Sights This Year For Real Change

I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but I don't care about the 2012 farm bill. Here's why.

The sustainable food and agriculture movement has a lot of momentum and a lot of opportunities right now, but only limited resources in terms of lobbying power. The movement has a large amount of people who care, but a relatively small amount of money compared to entrenched agriculture interests. It has a few strategically placed sympathetic appointees and elected representatives in the government. But, unfortunately, Dennis Kucinich alone cannot pass the vastly revamped farm bill we need.

But outside of Washington, the ranks of those who care about localizing our food supply and making agriculture more sustainable are growing every day. After all, delicious food is a powerful recruiting tool. The sustainable food movement is not powerless. Not nearly. But the movement can make far more progress if it focuses its energy on more winnable issues. Focusing on the farm bill for the whole of 2012 will use up endless resources and result in relatively little gain.

Read More:

http://www.alternet.org/story/154718/forget_the_farm_bill%3A_where_we_should_set_our_sights_this_year_for_real_change