Occupy Rio+20

By Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, cross-posted from PAN's website

Governments are gathering in Brazil, twenty years after the historic 1992 Earth Summit where nations around the world pledged to devote themselves to ending hunger and conserving the planet’s resources for future generations.

This week, governments gather once again, and food and agriculture are high on the agenda of “Rio+20.” Global leaders will be discussing which way forward to feed the world amidst growing food, climate and water crises. Monsanto & Co. have geared up with slick websites and sound bytes — to the point where some have dubbed the official meeting “Greenwash +20.” But the good news is that people around the world are mobilizing like never before for a new food system.

What, GE won’t feed the world?! 

The first Rio gathering in 1992 marked an important historical moment when nations came together with inspiring goals and commitments to keep our planet from going off the rails and to save and replenish the ecosystems that are required for life to continue. But 20 years on, the report card on progress is bleak, and tragically, this meeting (like Copenhagen and too many others) promises more hot air and no progress.

Of profound concern is the undue influence exerted by multinational corporations who have entered the “sustainability” and “green” debate with predictable zeal. The recently released report Greenwash +20 documents how multinational corporate interests thwart government action toward real sustainable development. In food and agriculture, the report exposes the Big 6 player Syngenta, in particular, for its role in suppressing science, influencing the public conversation to bolster profits, and shadow-writing public policy.

Despite the best attempts of the Big 6 pesticide/biotech companies to persuade us that their toxic chemicals and expensive patented seeds are needed, here’s the real deal: GE crops haven’t delivered on 20 years of empty promises. No yield gains, no drought-tolerance, no nutritional improvement.

Rather, farmers signing contracts with Big 6 players have lost their land and their right to save and exchange seed, have fallen deeper into debt, seen their communities wither, stores shuttered, schools closed...The greatest benefits from the sale of GE seeds and the pesticides that go with them have consistently accrued to their manufacturers, companies like Monsanto which more than doubled its profits at the height of the global food price crisis of 2008. We know this to be true from the words of farmers — whether in Iowa or India — and from the hard facts presented to us by independent scientists.

People Power

The heartening news is that farmers and scientists around the world know better than to believe the Biotech Brigade. From Berkeley to Brazil, there is incredible momentum gathering like never before to democratize our food system. This momentum is manifested in the thousands of people gathering at the People’s Summit in Rio. Here peasant farmers, community and social movement leaders, policy advocates, researchers and academics are sharing their knowledge and stories of how communities and entire nations are building strong and vibrant local and regional food systems without buying into corporate dependency.

This “unofficial” meeting, already going on, is where the smarts and solutions lie. Two full days will be dedicated to agroecology and the science and organizing required to build an ecologically sane and democratic food and farming system. While official meetings miles away in walled-off rooms promise entrenchment and false hope, the agroecology meeting has sparked the analysis and relationship-building needed to fuel our movement for change.

Here are some exciting products already coming out of Rio:

• Agroecology in the U.S., a new brief from PANNA showcasing the success of ecological farming at home and laying out policy recommendations for the U.S. government (also in Spanish);
• Scaling up Agroecology: Spreading the Hope for Food Sovereignty and Resiliency by the Latin American Scientific Society for Agroecology;
• The Global Common Statement for a Toxics-Free Future, co-produced by PAN International and partners in the International POPs Elimination Network;
• The collectively produced Ag Transitions website that demonstrates the ability of small-scale family farming to meet 21^st century challenges;
• Time To Act Rio+20, a powerful civil society statement endorsed by PAN and the Global Agriculture website, both of which take up the call of the pathbreaking IAASTD report.

The global people’s gathering in Rio shows that there’s more movement than ever for Food Democracy. It’s up to us to create this change. Here are three ways to engage today:

• Sign the statement from Occupy Rio+20.
• Join PAN’s alert list, where you’ll get updates on how to take action for food democracy and a healthy planet. Right now, we’re supporting the brave Mothers of Argentina vs. Monsanto in our online action with the White House.
• Play “Game Change Rio,” a game that raises awareness of the issues we’ll need to address if future generations are to enjoy life on this planet. (Demo video here).

As the leader of PAN’s Food Democracy campaign team, I’m thrilled by the public conversations taking place in Rio and the momentum powering social movements around the world. Join us.

Organic or Conventional? There Is No Comparison

By Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, cross-posted from PAN's website

Media are all atwitter about a new Nature study by researchers at McGill University and the University of Minnesota that compares organic and conventional yields from 66 studies and over 300 trials. In extrapolating the study's findings to the charged question of how to feed the world, more than a few got it all wrong.

The core finding of the study is that “yield differences [between organic and conventional] are highly contextual, depending on system and site characteristics.” In other words, sometimes organic does better, sometimes conventional does. In fact, the sheer variety of comparisons led Mother Jones columnist Tom Philpott to observe that the study “like a good buffet… offered something for every taste.”

For example, yields of fruit and oilseed crops showed no significant difference between organic and conventional, while conventional cereal crops and some vegetables produced higher yields than organic counterparts under certain conditions. With irrigation, conventional averaged 35% higher yields than organic (with the authors acknowledging that organic systems were mostly compared to high-input commercial systems), but this difference dropped dramatically under rain-fed conditions (the reality for most small-scale farmers around the world)—confirming other studies that have demonstrated the superior water-holding capacity and water infiltration characteristics of organic systems.

Seufert et al.'s intense scrutiny of a relatively small number of studies (66) is intriguing, but—media hype aside—the study doesn't really tell us which systems are better suited to providing healthy nutritious food for all in the 21st century. And to the authors' credit, they acknowledge that. 

Yields don’t tell us how to feed the world

But let's cut to the chase. The animating question behind these "organic vs. industrial ag" debates is how to feed the world. Never mind that every study worth its salt points to poverty and inequity as root causes of hunger.

We know that agroecological farming can double global food production, and that investing in ecological farming is one of the best ways to improve rural communities’ food and livelihood security in developing countries. We also know that it’s not just how we cultivate our food that matters. The drivers of global hunger have everything to do with global trade, investment and ownership rules. Rewriting these rules, reining in corporate power and restoring democratic control over our food and farming systems are three of the most important ways we can fight hunger. Several of my colleagues have written an excellent piece addressing these points, carried yesterday by Huffington Post.
While any farmer will tell you that getting good yields is always desirable, a narrow fixation on yield measurements tends to blind policymakers to the bigger picture. Seufert et al. get this. They write:

Yields are only part of a range of economic, social and environmental factors that should be considered when gauging the benefits of different farming systems.

So Scientific American’s headline to its coverage of the Nature piece, “Will Organic Food Fail to Feed the World?” was a disappointing mischaracterization of a paper that led to no such conclusion.

In fact, Seufert et al. make an excellent case for increasing funding for organic farming research, to better understand how these systems already work so well and to identify "improvements in management techniques" that "may be able to close the gap between organic and conventional yields." What always amazes me is how close organic systems are to conventional in yield, in the absence of meaningful federal research, development and extension support for organic. (Philpott reports that less than 1% of USDA research funds go towards organic systems, with the other 99% going towards industrialized agriculture—a tiny improvement on the 0.1% of federal research monies designated for organic previously documented by the Organic Farming Research Foundation.) 

Real-world relevance

I asked University of Michigan Professor Ivette Perfecto (a co-author on the seminal 2007 Badgley et al. paper examining organic farming's contributions to the global food supply) what she thought of the piece in Nature. Her reply:

Although it is useful for understanding what are the factors that may limit productivity of organic and conventional systems, the restricted selection of the studies limits its applicability to the real world.  There are very few studies from developing countries and none that compares organic agriculture with the conventional systems practiced by small-scale farmers.

What our study demonstrated was the potential of organic agriculture in developing countries for achieving yields similar to the so-called "best conventional practices" but without the negative environmental impacts of conventional agriculture.

Having recognized that conventional agriculture is simply not an option for the 21^st century, loaded as it is with intolerable costs to our children’s health, our soil, water, biodiversity and even ecosystem function — shouldn't we be focusing instead on what investments are needed to bring organic systems to scale?

Wanted: Scientific Integrity On GMOs

By Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, cross-posted from PAN's website

As reported in this week's UK Guardian, Nina Federoff spoke about threats to science at a meeting of 8,000 professional scientists. The former Bush Administration official and GMO proponent described her "profound depression" at how difficult it is to “get a realistic conversation started on issues such as climate change or genetically modified organisms.” I too have agonized over our inability to talk seriously about climate change.

However — and this is no small matter — by conflating fringe climate-deniers with established scientists raising valid concerns about the effects of GMOs, Federoff undermines the scientific integrity that she purports to uphold. The hypocrisy is astonishing.

The reason we cannot get a reality-based conversation started on GMOs is because we have precious little independent science on their effectiveness or safety. We know so little about GMOs' safety or efficacy because global ag biotech firms like Monsanto, Dow and DuPont actively suppress science under the heading of protecting “confidential business information.” Companies routinely deny scientists’ research requests and suppress publication of research by threatening legal action, a practice one scientist describes as “chilling.”

In February 2009, 26 corn-pest scientists anonymously submitted a statement to U.S. EPA decrying industry’s prohibitive restrictions on independent research, especially as concerns ag biotech. They submitted the following statement anonymously for fear of being blacklisted:

Technology/stewardship agreements required for the purchase of genetically modified seed explicitly prohibit research. These agreements inhibit public scientists from pursuing their mandated role on behalf of the public good unless the research is approved by industry. As a result of restricted access, no truly independent research can be legally conducted on many critical questions regarding the technology, its performance, its management implications, IRM, and its interactions with insect biology. Consequently, data flowing to an EPA Scientific Advisory Panel from the public sector is unduly limited.

The same year, the editors of Scientific American warned of the debilitating effects of the ag biotech industry’s attacks on science:

Unfortunately, it is impossible to verify that genetically modified crops perform as advertised. That is because agritech companies have given themselves veto power over the work of independent researchers.

When the world’s top scientists have been allowed to examine freely the available evidence, unfettered by corporate restrictions, the results stand in startling contrast to industry claims. Four years ago, the agricultural equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was completed, the World Bank and UN-led International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD). I participated as a lead author in that rigorous 4-year process, in which over 400 scientist and development experts from more than 80 countries conducted the most comprehensive assessment of international agricultural technology to date. The IAASTD’s findings were clear:

1. Genetically engineered crops have failed to deliver on industry promises of increased yields, nutritional value, salt or drought-tolerance.
   
2. The unprecedented pace of corporate concentration in the pesticide and seed industry has enabled the ag biotech industry to exert undue influence over public policy and research institutions, funneling public resources towards products that have benefited their manufacturers without generating benefits for the world’s poor.
   
3. The developing world’s best hopes for feeding itself, especially under conditions of climate change, lie not in GMOs, but rather in approaches such as agroecology—the integration of cutting-edge agroecological sciences with farmer innovation and locally appropriate, productive and profitable, ecological farming practices. The ability of agroecology to double food production within 10 years was recently re-affirmed by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.
   

So yes, let’s beat back the “anti-science lobby” and restore scientific integrity to public policy and independence and transparency to our research institutions. The future of our planet depends on it.

Austerity For Dummies

By Richard (RJ) Eskow, cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future

"I feel stupid," someone said the other day. "I consider myself well-informed, but I have no idea what the term 'austerity economics' really means."

Actually it's not that complicated, and most of the lesson plan can be found in today's headlines.

We'll explain austerity to you in six steps, and we promise it it won't take more than 900 words. Since adults read an average of 250-300 words per minute - and we know all of you are above average - our little course shouldn't take more than three minutes.

It's certainly worth knowing. Despite its many failures, "austerity economics" keeps remaking - and unmaking - the global economy. The only disagreement at this weekend's Republican debate was over which candidate would push austerity more aggressively. And austerity dominated the political agenda last year - "Deficit Commission," anyone? - until Occupy came along.

Merriam-Webster named "austerity" the "Word of the Year" for 2010. But like the monster from a 1950's science-fiction movie, it just keeps on growing. This week alone the name was invoked in government houses from Athens to Lagos.

What is this creature called "austerity," and why does it still hold so much power? If you've got three minutes, let's get started.

Food Stamp Challenges

The idea behind the Food Stamp Challenge -- to live for 1 week on the average food stamp allotment -- is to call attention to the crisis of hunger and income inequality in the United States, to dramatize just how difficult it is to live on $31.50/week, and to send a strong message to  Congress -- especially House Republicans -- that cuts to funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, are unacceptable.

Several members of Congress and other public officials have taken the challenge.  Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, only those who already oppose cuts to SNAP have done so.  Gluttonous conservatives who are in willful denial about poverty and seek to weaken the safety net even further in favor of tax cuts could stand to take the Food Stamp Challenge.  But they would never consider participating in an experiment that risks highlighting the difficulties faced by poor people, much less go hungry for a week.  God forbid they would have to forgo seven days of being wined and dined by lobbyists.   

The rest of us are being encouraged to take the challenge as well.  Our family is planning to do it, although I must admit it feels a little gimmicky.  While I think it should be a prerequisite for those in Congress planning to vote for cuts to Food Stamps, I'm not sure how meaningful it will be to those of us who already know the heart-breaking and inexcusable numbers -- 15.1% of Americans below the poverty line; 16.2 million hungry children -- and staunchly believe there should be more not less funding for social programs.  But hopefully it will provide a more tangible sense of the compromises and hardships that low income people have to endure when buying food and give us a renewed sense of urgency to do something about it.

Laura Clawson's excellent piece below discusses some of the lessons she learned from taking the Food Stamp Challenge and some of its limitations. 

Nourishing the Roots Of Food Justice

By Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, cross-posted from PAN's website

What a week! PAN and over 1,000 food movement activists from around the country have just wrapped up the Community Food Security Coalition’s 15th Annual National Conference, Food Justice: Honoring our Roots, Growing the Movement, which filled five days with stimulating field trips, workshops and discussion in Oakland and around the Bay area. As Jim Embry of Sustainable Communities Network in Kentucky observed, “More than 1,000 kindred folks from USA, 1st Peoples Nations, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Kenya and all in between attended. The conference held near Occupy Oakland was a blessing. The healing (between groups) was so needed and inspiring!”

A smaller number of us capped the week by participating in the 1^st National Assembly of the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance, a post-conference gathering of over 70 activists from the family farm, worker and food justice communities along with allied organizations working to build a grassroots-led food sovereignty movement in the U.S. 

Farmers & farmworkers speak out

Highlights for me last week included hearing the stories of farmworkers from Florida and family farmers from Iowa, Montana, Wisconsin and Maine, who spoke to students at a community event that PAN co-organized with National Family Farm Coalition, hosted by San Francisco State University professor, Kathy McAfee. The panel, Farmer and Farmworker Voices from Across the Country: Fighting for Justice on the Farm, sparked animated questions from the students, after they heard how farmworkers and farmers are organizing for their rights and for their very survival.
We have a problem. It’s called the extraction of wealth. — Joel Greeno, Wisconsin dairy farmer, speaking to President Obama.

To a spellbound audience, Joel Greeno (dairy farmer and leader of the farmer tractorcade during the Madison protests) described his late summer meeting with President Obama, who walked into a workshop on rural issues, sat down and asked if anyone had anything to say. While everyone else (mostly industry lobbyists) froze in their chairs, Joel didn’t miss a beat. “We have a problem in Wisconsin”, he told the President. “It’s called the extraction of wealth. All you need to do to fix the situation and put people back to work is to pay farmers a living.” When Joel finished speaking, the entire room had gone completely silent. Even Obama — caught like a deer in the headlights —had not a word to say in response.

What's Your Beef (And Why's It Coming From Tanzania)?

By Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, cross-posted from PAN's website

What does an American businessman, Iowa State University and 162,000 refugees in Tanzania have in common? 

Answer: they are all either directly involved in or soon-to-be impacted by a small group of U.S. investors’ plans to acquire 800,000 acres (1,250 square miles) of land in Tanzania and transform it into large-scale industrial crop, beef and agrofuel production. They plan to use genetically engineered (GE) seed and other inputs supplied by Monsanto, Syngenta and other global agribusinesses.

As you might guess, not everyone is going to benefit from this mega-project! The deal, if it goes through, would force 162,000 former refugees from Burundi off land they have tended for the past 40 years, destroying their livelihoods and the communities they have built to give their children a future. 

Follow the money (sigh, yes — again)

So who wins? The Tanzanian government might make a few dollars off the deal, but it won’t be much, once negotiations over a suite of investor incentives (tax holidays, duty waivers, and relaxed rules for repatriation of dollars out of Tanzania) are concluded. The three biggest winners would be Iowa-based AgriSol Energy, Summit Group (a large-scale farming and livestock operation headquartered in Alden, Iowa) and Pharos Global Agriculture Fund. Iowa State University is also a key supporter of the project.

These three private entities stand to gain the most, not only by ramping up lucrative agrofuel production for export, but even more significantly, by requiring — as a condition of the deal — that the Tanzanian government overturn its current prohibition of genetically engineered crops. They are demanding creation of a regulatory framework that allows importation and cultivation of GE crops in that country.

Rewriting Southern countries’ biosafety legislation in order to start flooding the region with exports of U.S. GE crops has long been a tactic of the U.S. State Department and Agency for International Development (USAID). And it’s no coincidence that the Obama administration’s Feed the Future initiative targets Tanzania for “agricultural development” based on public-private partnerships and transgenic biotechnology.

The deal requires the Tanzanian government to overturn its current prohibition of GE crops.

And who loses? Obviously, the Burundi people who are getting kicked off the land. But the threats go well beyond the 800,000 acres and 162,000 people in question there. Tanzanian farmers, consumers, their agricultural markets and biodiversity are all at risk.

Until recently, Tanzanians were somewhat protected from the intrusion of transgenic crops by the country’s placement of the precautionary principle at the center of its biosafety legislation. That has shifted, as under intense industry pressure, the government has relaxed its laws and allowed research and field trials of GE corn and cassava, with GE cotton around the corner. The last legal protections against GE crops could fall, if the AgriSol land grab is able to effectively rewrite Tanzania’s biosafety laws. And this is why Tanzanians have formed an alliance to fight back.

Here in the U.S. the Oakland Institute is leading the charge to expose and block the Tanzanian land grab and is calling on concerned individuals to take action and urge the wealthy Iowa investor Bruce Rastetter (who is simultaneously CEO of Pharos Ag and Summit Farms as well as Managing Director of AgriSol Energy) and the Prime Minister of Tanzania to drop the project. Joining the call, the Sierra Club has brought the voices of its one million members to bear, sending its own letter urging Rastetter and the Prime Minister to abandon “this ill-advised project.” It's easy to follow Oakland Institute's lead by sending a letter of your own. 

Global policy stalled

The Tanzanian case is one of many such land grabs — more formally described as large-scale land acquisitions — that have been sweeping across the Global South in recent years. The epidemic reached such disastrous proportions, with such gross violations of human rights, that the United Nations finally turned its attention to the issue and began in 2008 to draft “voluntary guidelines” to protect communities from the harmful effects.

Earlier this month, 800 farmers’ rights, environment and development groups joined victims of land grabs in petitioning the Chair of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s Committee on Food Security to swiftly finalize the guidelines. Governments meeting in Rome were to adopt the voluntary guidelines by October 17, but failed to do so.

The U.N. body came close to approving the guidelines, explained U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter, but foundered over the specific provisions affecting large-scale investments in farmland. The Committee on Food Security will meet again in early 2012 and de Schutter expects that the guidelines could be ratified later in the year. Civil society groups and farmers’ coalitions like La Via Campesina continue to play a critical role in these negotiations, pressing for strong and enforceable language. 

Stand with Tanzania

While adoption of the voluntary guidelines in 2012 is urgently needed, every additional week of delay puts hundreds of thousands of farmers’ livelihoods at risk.

Take Action » Join Oakland Institute’s campaign to block the Tanzanian land grab. Send a letter to AgriSol’s Bruce Rastetter and the Tanzanian Prime Minister urging them to abandon the land deal.

Memo To Congress: No Secret Farm Bill

By Mark Hertsgaard, cross-posted from his website

Providing yet another reason for its 9 percent approval rating, Congress is attempting to write the nation’s next farm bill in secrecy—sneaking it into law as part of the deficit reduction package to be produced by the “supercommittee.”

This anti-democratic maneuvering could determine the shape of one of the most important—and controversial—pieces of legislation Congress considers, sometimes called the food bill because of its enormous influence over what Americans (especially children) eat, what food costs (here and overseas), whether our food is safe to eat and whether 45 million impoverished Americans (again, about half of them children) continue to receive food stamps. The bill also helps determine whether agriculture respects or pollutes our air, soil and water.

And the Farm Bill may not be the only law written behind closed doors and fast-tracked through the legisilative process, thanks to the supercommittee’s requirements. Ben Becker, a spokesman for the Senate Agriculture Committee, rejects accusations of undue secrecy in the new Farm Bill even as he emphasizes, “We didn’t choose this process. It was forced on all committees.”

Reauthorized every five years, the farm bill is due for reconsideration in 2012. Food movement activists had promised the strongest, most unified campaign yet to reform the legislation away from its emphasis on lavish subsidies for agribusiness and environmentally destructive practices and toward family farms and sustainable agriculture [see Dan Imhoff's “Farm Bill 101”].

Writing the bill in secret and sneaking it into law would not only pre-empt citizen involvement and violate democratic norms, observes In Defense of Food author Michael Pollan; it would also squelch the prospects for reform. “So now what happens to an important proposal like The Local Farms, Food, and Jobs Act, introduced by Representative Chellie Pingree and Senator Sherrod Brown?” Pollan asked in an e-mail interview with The Nation. “Does it even get a hearing? The writing of agricultural policy in America has never been a shining example of democracy at work; now, it threatens to devolve into a travesty.”

Occupy The Food System

The GE Emperor Has No Clothes!

By Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, cross-posted from PAN's website

On October 13, I joined fellow food democracy activists from around California at a press conference on the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall. We were there to welcome the release of a new Global Citizens’ Report on transgenic crops, aptly entitled The GMO Emperor Has No Clothes.


As World Food Day approaches (Sunday, October 16), what better way to honor and support small-scale and family farmers around the world than by publicizing the report’s message: genetically engineered crops have utterly failed to deliver, it’s time to cut our losses, save our seeds, defend our rights and Occupy the Food System.

This much is clear: after 25 years of research, 14 years of commercialization and millions of dollars in public funding, genetically engineered (GE) crops have failed to deliver on promises again and again. GE crops neither increase yield nor provide nutritional benefits. No drought or salt-tolerant crops have yet been commercially developed; GE crops won’t feed the world and - unlike agroecological approaches - GE technology can’t help farmers in the U.S. or anywhere adapt to the complex and shifting challenges of global climate, water, energy and biodiversity crises. (For a great primer/infographic on GE, see here.)

Even Howard Buffet (Warren’s son) acknowledged as much at this week’s World Food Prize Symposium in Des Moines. Buffet spoke of the need for a biological-based, sustainable soil management plan, and urged Africans not to sacrifice crop biodiversity in order to imitate U.S. monocultural industrial farming methods. While some of his other statements indicate that he has a woefully deficient appreciation of African farmers’ rich knowledge and capacities, his comments created quite a stir at this typically pro-Green Revolution venue.

With mountains of scientific and empirical evidence from the field, it is therefore even more insulting and outrageous that the U.S. State Department continues to applaud the naked GE emperor and push transgenic biotechnology so aggressively throughout the developing world, as revealed in these leaked cables. Offensive, but not so surprising; with former Crop Life pesticide lobbyist, Islam Siddiqui, firmly ensconced as Chief Agricultural Negotiator at the U.S. trade office, we can expect more of the same.

Back out on the streets of San Francisco, people are gathering this Saturday for an Occupy San Francisco march and rally. Part of what makes the emerging food movement and the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations so simultaneously main street and radical is that their diagnosis of our shared problem hinges on fairness. It’s not fair that a few mega-corporations are making record profits at the expense of the health and livelihoods of ordinary people here in the U.S. and the world over. This is why farmers from India to Iowa are demanding food democracy, in which ordinary people take charge of establishing the food and agricultural systems we need to build up resilient farms and resilient communities. This is why many of us — from San Francisco to Seattle to New York — will be making the gap between the 1% and the 99% — and the connection between food and democracy — explicit as we continue to Occupy the Food System.

Mexican Maize Ready For Climate Challenge

By Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, cross-posted from PAN's website

“Sin Maíz, No Hay País!” The chant is ringing out this morning across the fields, villages and towns of Mexico, in recognition of Mexico’s National Day of Corn, September 29. “Without corn, there is no country!” is the literal translation of this ongoing national campaign to celebrate and protect the cultural heritage and significance of corn to the Mexican people.

With the campaign entering its fourth year, Mexicans can also celebrate the good news that the maize that Mexican farmers have been cultivating in traditional farming systems for thousands of years already contains much of the genetic diversity they’ll need to weather the challenges of climate change in the coming century.

A recently published international paper confirms what Mexican farmers have known in their hearts for generations. Researchers examined traditional maize seed systems used by 400 Indigenous and mestizo households from 20 communities in five states of eastern Mexico, at altitudes ranging from 10 to nearly 3,000 meters above sea level. Their conclusion:

Maize landraces in Mexico show remarkable diversity and climatic adaptability, growing in environments ranging from arid to humid and from temperate to very hot. This diversity raises the possibility that Mexico already has maize germplasm suitable for the 'novel' crop environments predicted for 2050.

The measured tone belies the significance of the report. Using their own indigenous and locally adapted seeds (Mexico has 59 landraces and 209 varieties of corn) and ecological methods of farming, Mexican farmers are prepared to adapt to the environmental stresses of climate and water crises looming on the horizon. In other words, despite everything that Monsanto tells us, Mexicans really don’t need GMOs or industrial agricultural packages from the North, thank you very much!
Maize, Mexico's staple food as well as a symbol, has the potential to adapt to climate change and mitigate its effects without any need for genetically modified seeds. – Emilio Godoy, IPS News, Sept 8, 2011.

Seeding Justice, Cultivating Democracy

By Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, cross-posted from PAN's website

Last week, hundreds of people poured into the Women’s Building here in San Francisco to take part in the Justice Begins with Seeds conference, organized by the California Biosafety Alliance and co-sponsored by PANNA and several other partner groups. Abuzz with activities from September 13-17, the conference provided a forum for Californians to engage in movement building that challenges the corporate food system, pushes back against genetically engineered food and seeds, and nourishes the roots of food democracy.

I had the honor of speaking at the opening plenary Friday morning, and of sharing the PAN network’s vision of what it means to reclaim our food system. The auditorium pulsed with the diversity, wisdom, courage and vast experience of our movement: Latino community organizers, urban food justice activists, Mexican farmers and keepers of the ancient, vital heritage of corn seed diversity, youth leaders, lawyers, scientists, poets, writers and artists.

As a global network linking 600 groups from over 90 countries, PAN is best known for our three decades of work challenging the global proliferation of pesticides. At the same time, ever since our founding in 1982, PAN has fought for people’s rights to a safe, fair and sustainable food system. That work has taken many forms over the years: farmer caravans travelling across Asia, denouncing the corporations that manufacture chemical pesticides and GMOs and highlighting farmers’ innovative ecological alternatives; organic cotton farmers in Peru, Benin and Senegal collaborating with European partners in devising clean, fair and green marketing initiatives; and here in the U.S., campaigning to save conservation payments in the Farm Bill as the most concrete step we can take right now to support American farmers who are stewarding the earth and protecting future generations.

As I told conference participants last week, “seeding justice” at PANNA means two things to me: growing agroecology and nourishing the emerging food democracy movement in this country. The many faces of these two things can get us a long way towards food sovereignty. In so many concrete ways, I am energized by our daily work in this realm:

• fighting for fairness for workers and for family farmers (call your Senator to urge support for the fair farm rules! the fight is still on!);
• exposing and challenging Monsanto’s monopoly control over the world’s seed supply;
• campaigning for green payments and policy measures to support farmers transitioning towards agroecological and organic practices; and
• mobilizing communities from California to Colombia to Cameroon, to stand together for food justice, food democracy and food sovereignty.

As Indian scientist-activist Vandana Shiva explained in her rousing keynote address:

We have to make food democracy the core of the defense of our freedom and survival. We will either have food dictatorship for a while and then a collapse of our food systems and our societies, or we will succeed in building robust food democracies, resting on resilient ecosystems and resilient communities.

Monsanto's Superweeds and Superbugs

By Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, cross-posted from PAN's website

The ecological, economic and agro- nomic disaster accompanying herbicide-tolerant transgenic crops is by now well known: over 10 million acres of superweeds resistant to Monsanto’s weedkiller, Roundup; farm machinery breaking on Roundup-resistant pigweed thick as a baseball bat; Monsanto paying farmers to spray their fields with competitors’ herbicides; a new gener- ation of transgenic crops in the pipeline engineered to withstand older even more dangerous chemicals like 2,4-D.

 Last week brought more bad news for Monsanto: the same phenomenon is also occurring in insect pest populations that are developing resistance to transgenic “Bt corn” in the Midwest. The Wall Street Journal recently reported Iowa State University’s findings that the corn rootworm is for the first time proving resistant to the insecticidal toxin, Bt, in transgenic corn in Iowa. Four days later, Business Week reported Bt corn plants in northwestern Illinois toppling over after root damage caused by the same insect, apparently as impervious as its Iowa cousins to the engineered Bt toxin. Likewise, insect resistance to transgenic Bt crops in India (where dramatic crop failures resulted) and South Africa has been reported.

This is a classic case of the pesticide treadmill. A pesticide application (whether sprayed the old-fashioned way or applied through a crop plant engineered to contain that toxin in its cells) typically kills many–but not all–of the targeted pests. Of those that survive, some will pass on their genetic traits of pesticide resistance to their offspring, gradually leading to a more and more resistant population. Farmers get trapped on this treadmill as they are forced to use more — and increasingly toxic — chemicals to control pest populations that continue to develop resistance to each new type or class of pesticides.

Monsanto Empire Hungry For Sweet Corn

Cross-posted from PAN's website.

Monsanto has announced it will start selling a new genetically engineered sweet corn directly to U.S. farmers this fall, the Los Angeles Times reports. In doing so, the biotech heavyweight will be directly challenging Syngenta, which has until now been the sole producer of the genetically engineered (GE) sweet corn sold at your grocery store since the late 1990s.

 Monsanto’s new “triple-stack” sweet corn has been engineered to contain three genetic traits, including a bacterial toxin (Bacillus thurengiensis, or Bt) that kills insect pests and resistance to Monsanto’s best-selling weedkiller, Roundup. Roundup has lately been in the news for its association with birth defects as has the worrying way in which the engineered Bt toxin is turning up in umbilical cordblood. Meanwhile, Monsanto’s Roundup Ready system has contributed to an epidemic of superweeds spreading across 11 million acres of land.

When Monsanto began aggressively promoting its “triple-stack” field corn in 2008, the company raised the price by 30%, making it the most expensive corn seed on the market. Unable to find “single-trait” GE corn or non-GE corn seed on the market, farmers found they had few options—and with the price of inputs skyrocketing and Monsanto recording tidy profits, more family farmers filed for bankruptcy. The Farmer to Farmer Campaign has reported on these and other abuses of the biotech seed industry experienced by American family farmers.

Organic and conventional farmers alike are alarmed at the increasing risk of genetic contamination of their fields by Monsanto’s ubiquitous Roundup Ready GE crops, and the loss of locally adapted crop varieties. As PAN's Marcia Ishii-Eiteman explained to Fast Company, "Corn is very promiscuous, meaning it's easy for cross-pollination to occur. We saw this in Mexico when Indigenous corn varieties there were contaminated with GE corn.”

Monsanto already controls 60% of the U.S. field corn and soybean markets and 95% of the GE cotton and sugar beet markets. Over 80% of U.S. corn acreage and 90% of soybean acreage is planted to Monsanto’s patented GE traits. When it acquired the vegetable seed company Seminis in 2005, Monsanto assumed its familiar position of market dominance, making it the world’s largest fruit and vegetable seed company, with seed sales reaching growers in more than 150 countries.

Monsanto claims that its launch of the GE sweet corn this fall will be “modest.” Only in the southeast, they told the L.A. Times. And the northeast too, they added the next morning. Those two regions combined account for 52% of the sweet corn produced in the United States.

Tell Obama: Good Food = Fair Food

By Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, originally posted on PAN's website, June 22, 2011.

This morning, while my boys are eating breakfast, I’m going to take a moment to mentally thank our local dairy farmers for the milk on our table and our chicken farmers for our eggs. Then I’m going to pick up the phone and call the President. It won’t take long, and it’s really important. Family farmers and ranchers' livelihoods are on the line.


This Wednesday, June 22, is the National Call-in Day for Fair Farm Rules. It’s the day that thousands of us across the country will call the White House and urge President Obama to put Fair Farm rules into practice.

Dispelling The "Borlaug Hypothesis"

By Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, originally posted at PAN's website, June 16, 2011.

Climate change, environment and agriculture are inextricably linked. Many would have us believe that protecting the environment means feeding fewer people. Can we somehow feed the world and save rare and endangered species from extinction?

A scientific review published this month by my colleague, Michael Jahi Chappell and his co-author, Liliana Lavalle, tackles just this question. Asking “Food security and biodiversity: can we have both?” Chappell and Lavalle say yes. Citing the UN-led International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), among other studies, the authors explain how agroecological farming not only can feed the world, but also can enhance biodiversity.

Their findings dispel a common misconception that feeding the world and protecting the environment are mutually exclusive goals. Their evidence also directly refutes the “Borlaug hypothesis” (named after the father of the Green Revolution), which argues that biodiversity conservation requires the intensification and industrialization of agriculture, so as to produce enough food in a limited area and thereby leave neighboring wildlife habitat intact.

It's The (Political) Economy, Stupid!

By Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, originally posted at PAN's website, June 16, 2011.

A New York Times Environment reporter has been pumping out a series of attention-getting blogs on agriculture, climate change and the environment. So far, so good. But, while glad to see serious attention given to this intersection, I was disappointed by the author’s apparent infatuation with the promise of technological miracle cures to increase yields, evident in his near-reverential regard for the international research institutes responsible for the first Green Revolution and for the naive techno-optimism of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

One would hope to find the Times' editors a bit more astute about the politics of world hunger. The food price crises of recent years, while sparked in some cases by droughts associated with climate change, have had more to do with commodity speculation by grain traders, trade rules that dismantle small-scale farming in developing countries, and the abandonment of grain reserves and other measures to manage price volatility. And this perfect storm of bad policies has everything to do with the historically unprecedented power and influence of large multinational agribusinesses, a handful of whom now control the global food supply chain.

Logic lesson

One flawed line of reasoning I frequently see (including in this NYT blog series) goes something like this: “Heat waves in Russia destroyed their wheat crop, which caused food riots in Mozambique. Therefore we need Monsanto and the Gates Foundation to finance the development of heat-tolerant GE wheat.”

Correction: heat waves contributed to forest fires, yes. But their devastating impact was due to Russia’s privatization of its forests and the consequent attrition of its fire-fighting force. Soon after the fires, multinational grain traders, speculating on a profitable spike in wheat prices, urged Russia to place a ban on its wheat exports, which it promptly did, provoking the desired surge in prices, with repercussions felt in the streets of Mozambique and around the world.

Conclusion: We need to control commodity speculation and restore food democracy to our global food system, not engineer a new wheat seed to be controlled by another giant agribusiness.

Climate change, environment and agriculture are inextricably linked, and decisive action to reverse global warming trends is urgently needed — the Times blogger got that much right. But shallow, decontextualized analyses of cause and effect serve no one, least of all the world's poor. I'm sure that with a bit more effort (and public pressure), the Times can get the job done right.

Take Action » Write a letter to the editor at the NYT here.

Farm Baby Farm (Organically)

Organic Farming = Energy Security

by Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, originally published at PAN's website, on

With gas prices well over $4/gallon, conversation with my neighbors frequently turns to the vulnerability of our fossil-fuel-based economy and to the future of our planet. The good news I can share today is that organic farms — besides being good for the soil, environment and our health — are proving to be much more energy efficient than conventional systems.
The latest evidence comes from Canada. York University recently completed a comprehensive analysis of 130 studies comparing energy use and global warming potential of the two farming approaches.
Researchers found that organic grain growers in Canada’s prairie region had 50% lower energy use than conventional growers, primarily from the elimination of chemical nitrogen fertilizer in their operations. Meanwhile, organic dairy farmers were 64% more energy efficient (and also emitted 29% less greenhouse gases) than conventional farmers.

These findings shake up the concept that ‘bigger’ is always better. Higher crop yields, bigger equipment, less genetic diversity, and more fertilizer and pesticides do not equal a more energy-efficient operation. - Rod MacRae, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University

One more reason to get serious about sustainability. So what's the next step? 

Incremental vs. Transformative Change

Connecting the dots for us, authors of the U.S. National Resource Council’s (NRC) 2010 report, Toward Sustainable Agricultural Systems in the 21st Century, have just published a succinct re-cap of their findings in the May 6 issue of Science.

Their main message is a wake-up call:

Achieving sustainable agricultural systems will require transformative changes in markets, policy, and science.

Incremental changes are good and necessary, they explain. These include specific practices and technologies that address shortcomings in mainstream conventional agriculture. However, the narrow, technological fix approach is “inadequate to address multiple sustainability concerns.”

What we also need is a “transformative approach that builds on an understanding of agriculture as a complex socioecological system.” This approach requires “whole system redesign”. Examples include organic farming, alternative (grass-fed) livestock production, mixed crop-livestock systems and perennial grains (see Green Land Blue Waters for a great example). As you can imagine, all this is music to my systems-thinking, agroecologist's brain!

These transformations are not so many utopian dreams, but rather firmly within our grasp. NRC’s scientists make the argument that as we already have many successful examples of these innovative systems on the ground, we should realize that the problem is not fundamentally technological or scientific. Rather, it is a problem of market structure, policy incentives, funding priorities and engagement by a well-informed public.
Luckily for us, transformative action is at hand if we want it. Now is the time to get involved in building a visionary 2012 Food and Farm Bill.

Take action >> If you haven't called your Senator yet this week, urging her/him to protect green payments to farmers who are conserving our soil, water and biodiversity, here’s your chance. The issue is live right now in Congress. Please call!

The Future of Food

[PAN senior scientist Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, in an earlier post today, alerted us to an important forum on food justice, food sovereignty and food democracy that will be taking place in San Francisco on Monday.  Here she gives us highlights from a conference that took place in Washington D.C.]

Princes & Farmers On The Future Of Food

By Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, originally posted at PAN's website, May 5, 2011

As the sun crested the Berkeley hills early yesterday, I logged on to the Washington Post’s live feed of its daylong conference, The Future of Food. For the next 8 hours, I enjoyed a veritable feast of thoughtful, well-evidenced and deeply inspiring calls to embrace a new agriculture, rooted in community and ecological resilience. The messengers included the Prince of Wales — who seamlessly knitted together the challenges of our failing global food system with a clear vision for the future — Eric Schlosser, Wendell Berry, Vandana Shiva and many more.

I strongly encourage folks to listen to these eloquent speakers; several of the video clips from yesterday morning are already up on the site. The conclusions affirm what many of us know to be true. And yet, it is still something to see such a high-profile event, hosted by the Washington Post, take place in the belly of the beast.

Food Justice, Sovereignty And Democracy

By Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, originally posted on PAN's website on May 4, 2011.

Do you ever wish it were easier to find fresh, healthy food for your family? Are you outraged by a food system that fills the pockets of giant corporations and denies fairness to farmers and farmworkers alike? Do you yearn to be part of a powerful, growing movement that's spreading across the U.S. (and in fact the world), and that's transforming our relationship to food — and each other — in the most fundamental ways imaginable?

If so, join us for a lively conversation about food justice, food sovereignty and food democracy — in this and future blog posts, or live and in person in San Francisco next Monday.

On May 9, PAN will host Growing Food Democracy: Connecting Global Lessons to Local Action, a stimulating evening with food justice activist Navina Khanna of Oakland’s Live Real, and two well-known food movement authors: Robert Gottlieb and Raj Patel. I’ll be moderating the conversation, in which we’ll explore the successes, tensions and synergies between the food justice, food democracy and global food sovereignty movements. If you’re in the neighborhood, come join us! And if you’re not, post your questions and comments here and I’ll share them with our speakers.

GE Foxes Invited To Guard USDA Henhouse

By Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, originally posted on PAN's website

Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) shocked the American public with its hasty approval of three highly controversial GE crops in a row (alfalfa, sugar beets and ethanol corn). In doing so, the agency effectively thumbed its nose at U.S. federal courts and spit in the face of consumers and farmers alike. Now, USDA has apparently decided that getting sued for ignoring U.S. environmental laws is getting to be too much of a hassle. So they've come up with a new plan: why not let Monsanto evaluate the potential harms of its new transgenic products? It’ll be so much quicker this way. And save USDA a lot of money.

The two-year pilot program allowing GE developers to conduct their own environmental assessments for USDA is an “experiment” to improve its systems, says USDA. Tom Philpott calls it a craven way out. 

Conflict of interest - ya think?

USDA currently has responsibility for assessing the potential environmental impacts of new genetically engineered (GE) crops. The assessment — which is supposed to happen before the agency decides whether or not to approve commercial release of the seeds — is required by our National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). NEPA was enacted in 1970 for the express purpose of preventing damage to the environment and enriching our understanding of the ecosystems and natural resources within our country. But that was then.

The reality is that USDA has fallen into the habit of skipping over the environmental study part of its job, and approving GE crops as a matter of course. For these failures of duty, USDA has been nailed in federal court. Yet the agency persists in ignoring court decisions, as we saw last month when it deregulated (= approved) GE alfalfa before completing the court-ordered environmental impact study.

USDA's latest “experiment” to hand environmental review of GE crops over to their manufacturers is intended to speed up the process and improve quality while reducing costs, according to the official note in the Federal Register. Certainly putting patent holders in charge seems likely to help the agency get through its backlog (over 20 GE crops await approval and industry is getting antsy). But "improve quality?" I wouldn't count on it. "The conflict of interest is laughable — but we're not laughing" says Kristina Hubbard at the Organic Seed Alliance.