Chile’s Salmon Farms Verging on Breakdown

It seems like not a week goes by without industrial animal food production somehow making headlines—the H1N1 flu pandemic, astounding meat recalls, high levels of arsenic in chicken feed, or any of a dozen other concerns. One recent story that should have generated some rather large waves, however, has made only a minor splash. Chile’s salmon farming industry, second only to Norway’s, is on the verge of collapse.

Salmon are not indigenous to Chile, but grown in crowded cages installed in the bays and estuaries of the country’s otherwise beautiful southern fjord region. These “farmed” Atlantic salmon are fed a steady diet of wild fish—perfectly edible for humans, but more profitable when converted into “value-added” finfish. The approximately three pounds of wild fish needed to produce each pound of farmed salmon has caused some people to refer to finfish aquaculture operations as “reverse protein factories.” Equally alarming, salmon farms have become excessively dependent upon toxic pesticides to combat sea lice and antibiotic medicines to thwart viruses that can run rampant among the high concentrations of rapidly growing, penned fish—not unlike industrial-scale hog, poultry, and cattle CAFOs on land.

But the drugs are no longer working. According to industry source Intrafish, Chile’s 2009 salmon output could decline by as much as 87 percent from last year—a drop from 279,000 metric tons in 2008 to between 37,000 metric tons and 67,000 metric tons. The cause is the widespread outbreak of a virus known as infectious salmon anemia (ISA). When the virus first appeared in 2008, many offshore aquaculture companies moved their production farms further south in Chile, into waters still unaffected by ISA. Instead of lessening the problem, the industry actually spread the virus into the southern waters.

The Chilean government and regulatory agency are now implementing measures to address the crisis, but their efforts, for the time being, have been too little, too late. Chilean salmon stocks have been devastated, and this is expected to send ripple effects throughout the world’s food supply. A 20 percent shortfall in the global supply of farmed Atlantic salmon is predicted for this year and perhaps 2010 as well. The human toll in this saga is also significant, as the salmon industry has become a primary employer in the southern region of the country, and could lead to the unemployment of as many as 15,000 people.

Experts had been cautioning for years about the hazards of unsanitary conditions and overcrowding in industrial salmon cages. The first widespread die-offs due to ISA began to mount early in 2008, but the industry declined to take protective measures to guard against further spread of the infection. Critics have called for improved conditions by limiting the number of salmon in the cages and by spreading the farms farther apart from one another to avoid transfer of disease and to lessen the concentration of harmful chemicals, antibiotics, and other adverse affects of large-scale fish production.

Unfortunately, this has not been the only alarming news in 2009 about Chilean aquaculture. In February, the Pew Environment Group obtained documents from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) revealing that the Chilean salmon industry has been using antibiotics prohibited on fish destined for the United States. Apparently, the FDA notified the three companies guilty of using the unapproved drugs that they can no longer use them on fish raised for the U.S. market. But questions remain whether or not the FDA will enforce these restrictions, and if so, how they will go about ensuring that the banned substances are not used.

Concerns over antibiotic overdosing and its potential to create antibiotic resistant disease organisms that could harm humans may become less of an issue if the Chilean salmon industry suffers an even further decline. Many are calling for a dismantlement of the industry. Others caution that without real reforms it could implode of its own unsustainable production practices. At a minimum, we should take this as one more in a long series of wake-up calls that our concentrated animal food operations—whether on land or at sea—need to be urgently reconsidered, before they are all on the verge of collapse.



Pew Press Release on Unapproved Chemicals
Pew Letter on Unapproved Chemicals
New York Times article on Chilean Salmon Virus
New York Times article on Chilean Salmon Industry Rehabilitation efforts

Deep Ecology Champion Arne Naess Passes

Amidst the euphoria swirling around this historic inauguration was the passing of Norwegian philosopher, Arne Naess, on January 13. Perhaps best known for coining the term “Deep Ecology,” Naess was one of Europe’s most well respected and prolific philosophers of the 20th century. His writings and lectures spanned Spinoza, the nonviolence of Mahatma Gandhi, and 20th century environmentalism.

I cross country skied with Naess when he was in his mid-80s. On a sunny spring day, we strided and poled three or four miles to the Peter Grubb Hut at the base of Castle Peak, not far from Donner Pass. We stopped occasionally to take in the sweeping views of the Sierra Nevada, and Naess fanatically checked his pulse. At the hut, he insisted on shadow boxing and fooling around with my friend, the outstanding Norwegian skier, Jon Erik Brondmo, and me. In addition to his childlike high energy, I had this feeling that Arne had a special lens onto the world, that he was sensing and relishing in layers of aliveness that the average person could not see or experience.

Perhaps this is what helped him to discern the important differences between “Deep Ecology,” which addresses the root causes of biodiversity loss, and “Shallow Ecology,” that attempts to remediate environmental problems with end-of-pipe fixes. Naess very clearly stated his concerns about the growing human population, the rise of affluence and technology, and the reverence for all of the earth’s species. Among his more notable quotes, I remember him saying that he was a pessimist for the 21st century but an optimist for the 23rd century, when he envisioned that extreme changes in the human population, in ecological and social justice, and other developments would once again turn us toward a more harmonious way of life. But Naess believed in personal responsibility and urgency. “Every week counts. How terrible and shamefully bad conditions will be in the 21st century, or how far down we fall before we start on the way back up, depends on what YOU and others do today and tomorrow. There is not a single day to be lost. We need activism on a high level immediately.”

Below is the 8-Point Deep Ecology Platform drafted by Arne Naess and George Sessions:

1. The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: inherent worth, intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.

2. Richness and diversity of life-forms contribute to the realization of these values and are also values in themselves.

3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs.

4. Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening.

5. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease.

6. Policies must therefore be changed. The changes in policies affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present.

7. The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent worth) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between big and great.

8. Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to participate in the attempt to implement the necessary changes.

NY Times Obituary

Ripe for Change?

The American public’s demands for a radical new direction in the country’s food and farm policy are beginning to gain some rather serious volume. It’s a new year, a new administration is assembling, and the unrequited expectations of the last eight years are being vocalized: in key newspapers, on the blogosphere, among community organizers, and at dining tables around the country. We are experiencing a shift in the global gestalt, not only around the possibility and need for change, but in the places where such reforms have to start.

People want our unhealthy food and agriculture system made healthy. And it doesn’t look like they’ll be giving up any time soon.

At the Slow Food Nation in San Francisco in 2008, the Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture was unveiled, an eloquent call and 12-point checklist for a 21st century approach to food and farm policy. Thousands of people signed on immediately. And the declaration is gathering steam as it makes its way around the country.

In December, the Iowa-based group Food Democracy Now drafted a letter to the Obama Transition Team recommending potential candidates for the vacant Secretary of Agriculture position. Within a week, that letter gained over 60,000 signatures. A core group of sustainable food advocates talked with the Obama Transition Team to express the severity and urgency of a potential food system meltdown. But it remains to be seen if that testimony will actually be taken seriously by the new administration, with former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack as USDA chief. In the mean time, Kim Severson of the New York Times wrote a full-page article about the Food Democracy Now effort, which is well worth the read. Will the Obama’s till up a few acres of the White House’s precious lawn to plant a vegetable garden? It doesn’t seem that much to ask.

Journalist Christopher Cook—in a recent piece for the Christian Science Monitor—put forward a “nine-point platform for food reform.” He calls for the new administration to include food and agriculture projects in the forthcoming stimulus package, asking for “change we can eat.”

Just this week, Wes Jackson of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, and our sustainability laureate, Wendell Berry, published an opinion piece in the New York Times calling for a Fifty-year Farm Bill. The United States, Jackson and Berry argue, must quickly move from highly erosive and toxic monocultures of corn and soybeans that blanket the country, to a more perennial landscape. That is, farming systems that maximize soil and water protection by providing as much permanent ground cover as possible. Jackson and Berry call for a two-pronged approach: transitioning back to hay, pasture, and grazing rotations that allow the “farming to fit the land”; and a revolution in perennial grains that could reduce the need for plowing, toxic pesticides, and heavy doses of fertilizers.

Because the Farm Bill is renewed every five to seven years, and because its billions of dollars in farm owner incentives actually determine many of the rules of our modern food system, federal policy can become both a driver and road map for that long term goal. In fact, using a fifty year Farm Bill plan, we could begin to plot out a half century of sustainable food policy. Instead of “Getting Big or Getting Out,”—the cold war-era blueprint for the past fifty years of agribusiness domination—we could “Go Perennial by the Next Centennial.”

My hope is that this surge in popular understanding of the importance of our food system to the very survivability of our society is not merely swept up in the winds of change blowing across Washington at this very moment. Rather, I hope these efforts are only the seeds of something much larger, a movement that will grow to millions of concerned citizens. Millions of citizens who may be willing to make small contributions to an organization dedicated to demonstrating the power of a new movement—civic agriculture. Maybe then the needs of the people and the land and the future will begin to take precedence over the greed and ambition of corporate agribusinesses now standing in the way of healthy food and agriculture.

These times are ripe for change.

Bush’s Final Stinking Act

In the waning hours of its lame duck presidency, the Bush Administration continued its deregulation of industry with a new ruling granting immunity to feedlot operators. Last week the Environmental Protection Agency made it easier for Confined Animal Feeding Operations, a.k.a. CAFOs—factory “farms” with 1,000 animals or more—to pollute the nation’s air and waterways with hog, chicken, and cow feces. As if a global economic meltdown weren’t enough, the Bush Administration is now doing what it can to set up a meltdown in the food system.

The EPA’s recent ruling allows the biggest, grisliest factory farms to “self certify” that they are not discharging waste into U.S. waterways. A subsequent ruling also exempts CAFOs from reporting gaseous pollutants like ammonia and hydrogen sulfide to the federal government. Anyone familiar with CAFOs can tell you that these massive industrial farms perpetrate some of the biggest pollution crimes in the country.

Contempt for governance has been the hallmark of the Bush/Cheney Administration, and this latest ruling is no exception. EPA Assistant Administrator for Water Benjamin H. Grumbles spun the new rules as “a strong national standard for pollution prevention.”

But not everyone in Washington was buying it. Congressman Albert R. Wynn—chairman of the House subcommittee on environment and hazardous materials—labeled the changing regulations as a "gift from the Bush administration to big corporate animal feeding operations that denies the public of knowledge that serious contaminants are in the air."

We’ve witnessed how well Wall Street self-regulated over the last decade. How can we possibly trust operations with 1 million chickens or 10,000 hogs or 15,000 dairy cattle and waste volumes that approach mid-sized cities (but without sewage treatment plants) to tell us the truth about their manure emissions?

In reality, the EPA’s new “clean water rule” is code for “fecal matter in your drinking water.” And this is not the quaint manure of your grandparents’ generation. Modern CAFO manure is known to harbor all kinds of nasty substances, including arsenic, antibiotic medicines, hormones, heavy metals, and dioxins.

Just this summer, the town of Thief River Falls, Minnesota advised residents to evacuate because hydrogen sulfide emissions from a nearby dairy operation reached 200 times the standard allowed by state law. According to one report, the nauseous fumes were so pervasive, residents were literally puking in their driveways.

One has to wonder, what have we done to deserve this? How can our public officials play so fast and loose with our health? But wait a minute, it’s been this way for at least the past eight years. Wasn’t one of the Bush Administration’s first acts of environmental protection to raise the levels on how much arsenic is acceptable in drinking water?

According to Martha Noble, an attorney with the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition in Washington D.C., the recent CAFO self-regulation rulings are the final act of “revolving door politics” in an out-going administration. Industry representatives that the Bush Administration put into positions of power are now returning to the private sector. As part of the pre-interview process, they are setting in place as many industry-friendly rules and policies as possible. An EPA staffed with industry hacks ensured that the corporate agenda would be taken care of at the public’s expense.

Noble fears that the recent CAFO rulings will not be easily undone. Under the Congressional Rule Act, Congress has 60 service days to review and amend this final rule. But it’s a cumbersome process. And these are just a few among many last minute exemptions to pave the way for destructive enterprises like oil and gas exploration, coal power production, and uranium mining. (For the full list, visit ProPublica’s webpage tracking all of the midnight rule changes.)

One of George W. Bush parting gifts to all Americans is a compromised food safety system. And, like the CAFO industry it protects, it will leave a long, lingering stench.

To learn about the “revolving door” politics of the EPA and USDA—in more juicy detail—come back to read part II of this posting.

News: Secretary of Food

It's hard not to notice that--among all the reports of Obama's appointments and potential appointments--headline news of the next Secretary of Agriculture has been conspicuously absent. But behind the scenes, the president-elect's transition team has been doing its agricultural homework. Last week Dan participated in a conference call with the transition team and a group of food activists including Michael Pollan and Alice Waters.

Dan is also among the original signers of a petition circulating to advocate for a progressive-minded Secretary of Agriculture appointment. If you haven’t yet, please visit the site, read the message, and consider signing the petition. The next Secretary could play a very big role in the future of food and agriculture in our country, not to mention health, climate change, energy, and so many more issues that are all tied together.

http://www.fooddemocracynow.org/original-signers/

When you’re done, read the recent New York Times column in which Nicholas Kristof advocates for a renamed "Secretary of Food" position.

NEWS: Farming with Mother Earth

Check out Dan's article in the current issue of Mother Earth News. It's an excerpt of text and photos from Farming with the Wild.

"At first glance, the phrase “farming with the wild” may seem contradictory. Agriculture has been and remains the relentless process of selec­tion and minimization, one that now blankets billions of the Earth’s acres with a mere handful of crops. Farming and ranching activities are consistently identified as the pri­mary cause of wildlife habitat loss, the archenemy of the biodiversity crisis..." Read more.

You can pick up your own copy of Farming with the Wild and other Watershed Media books in our online store.

Californians Ban Animal Factory Farm Techniques

In this week’s 2008 election, California unanimously voted to dismantle some of the animal factory farming industry’s most restrictive confinement practices. Restrictive being the operative word. The law that goes into effect in 2015 will phase out: 1) gestation crates that virtually immobilize sows throughout their pregnancies; 2) veal crates where male dairy cows are anemically confined; and 3) “battery cages” that afford a laying hen no more living space than a standard piece of copy paper and six to seven companions.

Of these three confinement systems, California’s egg industry will be the most severely affected. The Los Angeles Times estimates the size of the state’s flock of egg-laying hens at 20 million. Hog and veal operations are limited throughout the state, the nation’s largest agricultural producer. Throughout the campaign, conventional egg producers threatened to move their operations across state lines or even south of the border if Proposition 2 passed, sounding alarms that California’s egg supply could face food safety threats. With the passage of the law, egg producers who do choose to stay in business will have to shift their operations to free-range systems, a small but swiftly growing segment of the national market.

Proposition 2 was championed by the Humane Society of the United States, Farm Sanctuary, and the California Veterinary Medical Association, among many others. The opposition included egg and hog producers farmers both in and outside the state, as well as the American College of Poultry Veterinarians, who claimed the law would be economically disastrous for California egg producers and raise prices for consumers.

California has long considered a bellwether for political, economic, and cultural trends across the nation and the world. And for this reason the campaign was hard fought, with both sides raising $8.5 million for their effort, according to the Los Angeles Times. Both sides also see this as a sign of a national snowball against animal factory farms—perhaps not just on confinement systems, but on environmental and labor violations, greenhouse gas emissions, as well as grain subsidies that all together, have created a nightmarish and unsustainable meat, dairy, and egg production supply. (Also the subject of an upcoming Watershed Media book, The Animal Factory.)

What we are witnessing here is the emergence of ethics and food production issues not just in a state referendum but in what could soon be a national policy dialog. There is little time to celebrate, however. While Californians passed this step toward humane farming, the Bush Administration eased restrictions on feedlots and Confinement Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). Under just issued EPA requirements, large livestock facilities (whose waste flows often exceed those of small cities) can avoid obtaining pollution permits as long as they claim they will not harmfully discharge into nearby waterways.

Sure, we believe you're not dumping your shit in the creeks, streams, and waterways!

The new voluntary compliance law is unimaginable in its neglect of the public trust. It is part of the final act of an administration which will no doubt be remembered for its cronyism, corruption, contempt of government, and transfer of the public treasury and well being to the private sector.

And while Californians voted in favor of the first African American president, for more humane treatment for animals, and in support of a high-speed passenger rail system, we also voted for a restriction of marriage between a man and a woman.

Obviously, there are still more miles to travel and mountains to climb and not a moment to lose. As my classics professor said to me upon my completion of undergraduate work, “Go forth and be frustrated.” But don’t forget the hope for a better world delivered in the 2008 election.

For a sense of the potential ripple effect of California's Humane Farming Act, check out this article in the Des Moines Register

Resources:
LA Times article
Text of Proposition 2
Bush Administration's new CAFO law
(photo credit: Humane Society)

"It's the Food System, Stupid"

Throughout the last two years of presidential campaigning, one important topic has been noticeably absent. We’ve heard quite a bit about ending or prolonging the Iraq War, about the global economic recession, about a world running out of oil and the urgent need to develop renewable “alternatives.” We’ve heard about global warming, although at least one candidate has voiced some doubt about its human origins. These are all urgent concerns.

But we haven’t heard much about the need to put healthy food on our tables. We haven’t heard a candidate stand up and say, “It’s the food system, stupid.”

There are presently 800 million people in the world who go hungry each day, and ironically, one billion who qualify as overweight or obese. Food riots have erupted in cities and communities across the globe. Some key food producing regions have been gripped by drought, others have experienced catastrophic floods. Fingers are being pointed at the rapidly expanding agrofuel industry, which is taking valuable arable acreage away from food and grain production to fill gas tanks. Prices of productive farmland are soaring from Argentina to Iowa to the Ukraine. Suddenly, the world seems to be bumping up against limited resources—limits to soils, to fresh water, to food.

Yet in the eyes of our political establishment, the world food crisis seems somehow a distant threat. We have become such a global food commodity powerhouse over the last century, that it would be almost un-American to connect those dots. Except for the nearly 40 million people who suffer “food insecurity” in the United States, (the USDA’s official term for hunger.) Nearly half of those people are children. This says nothing of the two out of three Americans who are either overweight or clinically obese, a trend that could be greatly abated with a focused and sound nutrition policy. There’s just one small problem with that. To tackle issues of nutrition, you have to deal with the food and farming system.

Among the many issues that must surface to the top of the stack on the next president’s desk is that of changing our nation’s food and agriculture policy. If we look carefully at the great number of challenges we face as people, as nations, and as a world today—peak oil, climate change, biodiversity loss, and military conflict come to mind—we have to consider the vast impacts of industrial agriculture and food production. Our soils are being depleted at remarkable rates due to excessive plowing. Fresh water systems are in decline as they are overwhelmed by chemicals and agricultural wastes. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the world’s 20 billion domestic livestock generate nearly 20 percent of all greenhouse gases—that’s more than all global transportation impacts combined. The dominant 20th century method of intensive animal food production, the CAFO (confined animal feedlot operation), where animals are jammed into concentration-like factories, fed antibiotics and hormones, and generate unimaginable amounts of toxic waste, was recently deemed “unsustainable” by a three-year Pew Commission study (“Putting Meat on the Table”).

Ending the CAFO would mean the end of the all American meal. That of course might not be a bad thing, because we can’t simply continue eating or farming the way we have been.

As we contemplate a world with less fossil fuels, we can also contemplate a food system that is far more regionally and locally adapted. As we consider a world worth passing on to our kids, we can also imagine starting them out with a sound sense of where food comes from, how it is produced, and the difference between sound nutrition and excessive calories. In fact, we can imagine a healthy agriculture sector, producing an abundance and diversity of good foods as being the very foundation of a secure society, where people are not rioting on the streets, and where once productive farming valleys are not being converted into barren deserts.

But there is a hitch. And this is where the next president and administration comes in. While incredible work is being done at the grassroots at various levels around the country to build a new 21st century locally-oriented food system, it can’t be accomplished without a food and farm policy that allows it to flourish. Somehow, food and its just, humane, and ecologically sound production and distribution must be understood and addressed for what it is: one of the urgent issues of our time.

There are lots of intervention points along the way in which federal policy plays a defining role: 1) the Farm Bill, which sets land use policies and pumps tens of billions of dollars into the food and farming sectors every year; 2) the Child Nutrition Act, which spends nowhere nearly enough money on our school lunch program; 3) the medical establishment, which has yet to stand up and champion a sound nutrition policy as one of our best and most economically effective preventive health care strategies. There are dozens more. All must be explored.

Many seasoned veterans of federal policy caution that food policy is at best a creature that can only be changed incrementally around the edges. If you’re looking for revolution, don’t mess with the halls of Congress. The best way ahead, they argue, is at the local level without government assistance. This would be all well and good if the next administration decided to go out of the food and farming business altogether by abandoning its massive subsidy and tax programs. If Uncle Sam actually got out of the way there might be a fair playing field for the smaller scale producers. (It’s an idea that should be seriously considered—at least in a line item fashion.)

Alternatively, instead of shutting down the USDA, the next administration could take a 21st century view of food and farm policy and see it for what it can and should be: the basis of a “Make America Healthier” platform. This would include health in all its aspects: diversity of regionally adapted crops, fair prices and markets for all producers, practices that protect and conserve important resources, dignity for workers, a conservation ethic that respects all species, optimized local food systems region by region, and so on an on.

Since we won’t hear much about this in debates and on the campaign trail, we’re going to have to demand it ourselves. Because the health and wealth and well-being of our country is at stake. That is the task before us.

Farm Bill Post-Mortem

Many people have wondered just how the 2008 Farm Bill ultimately ended up. Were substantive reforms included? Should we be satisfied or disappointed?

Personally, I think outrage is the only sane response to the bill passed in May after nearly two years of deliberations and public input. The tag team of the corporate agribusiness lobby in cahoots with the hunger and food stamp lobby fought long and hard to ensure that the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 remains a lot like the Food, Security, and Rural Energy Act of 2002. Sure there are some much needed programs included in the bill. But the payouts to millionaire agribusiness actually increased this time.

The skinny (or the fat, as it were). 

The 2008 Farm Bill contains over $300 billion in programs that last through 2012. Over two-thirds of that budget will go to Nutrition programs, food stamps, hunger assistance, and so on. While that may seem like a lot, it was high time for the $1 per meal Food Stamp allotments of previous farm bills to be increased. A record 28 million Americans applied for Food Stamps in 2008 as a result of rising food and fuel costs and the slumping economy.

The show of hands. 

The bill was passed by whopping margins in the House (306-110) and Senate (82-13), and President Bush’s veto was overridden by similar majorities in both legislative branches. The subtext here is that it was an election year and the Farm Bill was everyone’s chance to bring home the pork and the earmarks. In order to get the bill passed there were $400 million in tax breaks for Kentucky racehorse breeders, assistance for farmers in Alaska and Hawaii, relief for Northwest salmon fishermen, and even $400 million to purchase timberland in Montana for a Nature Conservancy reserve (Plum Creek).

The hitch. 

Whoops, the final copy of the bill that was sent to the President’s desk was missing Title 3, the section that deals with trade matters. The Ag Committee chairmen tried to make it seem like a harmless clerical oversight.

Why the status quo? 

Collin Peterson (D-MN) was the head of the House Agriculture Committee and had no intentions of working for reform. He seemed miffed at certain points in the process last year, when hard working taxpaying citizens “who know nothing about the economics of agriculture” asked for a bit of reflection and transparency on the far reaching consequences of ballooning commodity supports in a year when farmers are receiving record prices. Tom Harkin (D-IA), chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, was supposed to stand up for reform, as was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who hails from the district in the world where food and sustainability issues reign supreme. Both settled for the shallow reforms they were championing without tackling the elephant in the living room—agribusiness plundering of the treasury.

Biggest Scam. 

The Average Crop Revenue Election program (ACRE) will be rolled out next year for commodity growers. A large national farm lobby called the ACRE “lucrative beyond our expectations.” If prices fall below 2007 and 2008 record levels, which most agricultural economists expect they will, or if yields decline due to unpredictable weather or other problems, commodity payments could make a joke out of the already monumental payment programs of the 2002 farm bill.

Largest taxpayer insult. 

In a 600-page bill loaded with ridiculous programs, the $3.2 billion Permanent Disaster slush fund has to take the cake. The intent of this ominously titled program is to ensure payment for farmers who are growing in areas where drought and flood are almost cyclically assured at least half the time—places like North and South Dakota and Montana, where the program’s champion Max Baucchus resides. Many experts predict guaranteed income for farming on marginal soils will cause a crash in waterfowl and other imperiled species, as well as a second coming of Dust Bowl conditions.

New Player at the Table. 

Specialty Crops are farm bill speak for foods that are actually edible without being processed or fed to animals—fruits, nuts, and vegetables. They’re also recommended in numerous daily servings by the USDA nutritional guidelines. Specialty crop growers have been left out of Farm Bill negotiations for decades but successfully wrangled a few billion dollar slice of the Farm Bill pie. This effort was led by the Western Growers (who wanted to implement a scorched earth policy on specialty crop regions around the country to prevent wild nature from contaminating fruits and vegetables) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Greatest Disappointment. 

The failure to reduce the levels of adjusted gross income to wealthy farmers or to limit the amounts of subsidies a given enterprise can receive are possibly the biggest letdowns. A married couple can have earnings up to $1 million in off-farm income and still receive payments. A married couple with $1.5 million in on-farm income is also eligible and there is no need to shut the spigot off. Payments flow regardless.

The best played hand. 

The organic industry came to the table with a simple argument. Organics is now 2 percent of the market and growing rapidly. They asked for a fair share of research dollars, cost supports, and even of things like economic studies and record keeping. It worked.

Most absent constituency. 

The medical community. Over the course of the Farm Bill debate, numerous studies linked subsidies for processed foods and the confinement animal industry to the nation’s obesity crisis. The medical costs of this nutrition epidemic now exceed $120 billion annually—many times more than cost of subsidy programs. At some point, we need to value feeding people a well-balanced diet in the first place. One wonders when doctors, nutritionists, and health professionals will wake up to the importance of the farm bill, and the power of healthy food as the original preventive medicine.

Most obvious glaring need. 

A long-term vision that deeply discusses future need and goals is desperately lacking. This would include incentives for soil protection rather than soil erosion, as well as the promotion of regional food production capacities that include diversified crops.

Biggest stumbling block. 

This may be a toss-up between the glaring need for lobby reform and anti-trust enforcement and the need to separate the nutrition title out of the farm bill. As for the former, money talks. Agribusiness showered Congress with money, and they wrote the rules. As for the nutrition title, it seems that once the hunger lobbyists get the most they think they can, they are more than content to let agribusiness run roughshod over the land, rural communities, and even the country’s nutritional well-being. We need to make farming and food assistance separate conversations by negotiating food stamps and nutrition programs at the same time the budgets are made for the national school lunch program.

Where to go from here. 

It’s time to begin the long march toward 2012, building alliances, developing regional food policy plans, and being prepared this time well before the gloves come off. That, and some how resurrect our only president who mustered the wherewithal to stand up to the great corporate monopolies. It’s time to bring back Teddy Roosevelt.

Welcome to the 21st Century

For those who stocked their pantry with emergency provisions, purchased a backup generator, or were otherwise underwhelmed by the seemingly uneventful transition to Y2K eight years ago, let it be known that the unraveling of events in 2008 have more than compensated. Food riots are erupting around the globe. Rising fuel prices are affecting the cost of everything. Snow packs are down throughout the American West, Australia is suffering its worst drought in decades, and violent storms are gripping Asia. Up and down the West Coast, salmon fishing has been suspended for the entire season due to collapsing salmonid populations. The bubble economy inflated by paving over U.S. farmland to make way for cheap subdivisions has burst, sucking along global financial markets in its tailspin. The shocking headlines keep piling up. And it’s not even summer.

Welcome to the 21st Century.

These crises no longer seem like isolated incidents, but more like strands of interwoven trends that are settling in for the longer term. In his recent conclusion for the Pew Commission report on industrial farm animal production, “Putting Meat on the Table,”* farmer and philosopher Fred Kirschenmann suggests three troubling issues facing the U.S industrial food and agriculture system in the years ahead: the depletion of stored energy and water resources, and changing climate. “These changes,” writes Kirschenmann, “will be especially challenging because America’s successful industrial economy of the past century was based on the availability of cheap energy, a relatively stable climate, and abundant fresh water, and current methods have assumed the continued availability of these resources.” The only way ahead, cautions Kirschenmann, is the creation of a postindustrial food and farming system in which operations become localized and harmonized with the natural systems that support them.

The events of 2008 suggest that we inhabit a changed world. A great deal of the challenges we face in the 21st century no doubt arise directly as a result of the way we have conducted our lives and managed our societies over the course of the last 100 years. There really is no place to hide. No matter where we are, we can pick up a local or national newspaper and read about these issues of energy, water, and climate not as abstract concepts or far-off lumbering threats, but as harsh realities being brought right down to a human level. Here are just a few salient issues.

Feed versus Biofuels

More than 25 percent of the nation’s corn crop is now being used for ethanol production, despite the fact that it provides just a fraction of our overall liquid fuel consumption. This includes 10 million additional acres of corn than had been planted just a few years ago. Planting more corn means we have less acreage devoted to soybeans and wheat, and less acreage preserved through Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) enrollments. Using corn for ethanol directly affects the cost of animal products, because the feedstock used for ethanol is starchy yellow processing corn, not the edible white varieties. And as wheat or rice acreage is lost in favor of expanded corn production, the price of food staples rises.

Food as Speculation

With the recent crisis in financial markets, capital has swiftly shifted toward tangible commodities, including food, also contributing to rising food prices. Governments are stockpiling foodstuffs. The value of arable farmland is soaring. Futures traders are hedging their bets on ever scarcer supplies of basic grains and oilseeds. Meanwhile, citizens around the globe feel the sting of rising food prices. Money is amassed by the powerful; others are starving. The ethics of feeding the world, not just with daily calories but with sound nutrition as well, along with generating surpluses to compensate for crop shortages, will increasingly come into conflict with the larger forces that dominate food production and distribution across the globe.

Escalating fuel costs

Imagine our contemporary food system without its massive machinery and billions of tons of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, its energy and water inputs, all directly dependent upon fossil fuels. Consider that $200 per barrel oil prices are predicted to arrive perhaps as early as the end of this year. Now take your favorite food item and double its current price. Wipe the slate clean and begin to envision alternative ways to produce foods in your respective regions, communities, and backyards, in new ways that somehow deviate from our behavior patterns of the past, when we have literally been eating oil.

Climate challenges and droughts

The failure of the 2008 Australian harvest due to extreme drought sent a shock wave across world rice markets. Ripple effects have been felt everywhere. This is not an isolated phenomenon. Just this week, the U.S. Climate Change Science Program released a sobering assessment on the impacts of climate change on the country’s bioregions. Hold on to your hats, this is a government agency document forecasting that: 1) unpredictable precipitation and weather patterns will disrupt crop performance an ongoing basis; 2) broad and potentially radical changes will transform some of the country’s most valued landscapes.

Food versus Wild Nature

As food becomes more precious, and food crop agriculture competes with an emerging agrofuels industry for scarce soil and water resources, the threats to wildlife and threatened habitats will escalate. Already we are seeing this unfold in the Salinas Valley, as the leafy green industry attempts to regain consumer confidence after industrial spinach became contaminated with E. coli 0157:H7. Never mind that wildlife probably had nothing to do with the E. coli contamination of spinach. The science now suggests that the most likely source of the pathogenic batcteria was from feedlot manure transported by windborne dust. Yet in response to marketing orders from the leafy greens industry—not on the ground biology—miles of Salinas Valley riparian habitat have been bulldozed, fences erected, and wildlife baited and poisoned in the name of making the food system safe and secure. Conventional agriculture continues to miss the point. Our fate will ultimately be determined by how well we learn to coexist with other species, not by our efforts to obliterate them.

* Click here to read "Putting Meat on the Table"