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By Karen Armstrong
$18.45
By Paul Krugman
$17.13
$18
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Dirty Bunny (CC-BY)
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We learned back in the mid-1970s that livestock antibiotics increase the presence of drug-resistant bacteria in farmworkers. Since then, meat and poultry production has nearly tripled while business, government and public advocates have battled over industry regulation. ProPublica charts that battle’s history.
Posted on Apr 5, 2012
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Wikimedia Commons / PiccoloNamek (CC-BY-SA)
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It might seem somewhat obvious, but scientists looking for reasons why bumblebees have been dying in waves in recent years are pointing to pesticides as a possible cause, as the Los Angeles Times reported Friday.
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By Jane Black —
Tracie McMillan, author of “The American Way of Eating,” goes undercover in grocery stores, restaurants and the country’s agricultural fields to find out why it’s so hard for us to eat healthy food.
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Flickr / theunabonger (CC-BY-SA)
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Here’s a fun story involving the USDA, the FDA, the GAO—i.e., the United States Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration and the Government Accountability Office—with the Office of Management and Budget thrown in for good measure.
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Illustration by Mr. Fish
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By Chris Hedges — One of the most important battles in the history of migrant labor is taking place in the fields of Florida and in the produce section of Trader Joe’s and other grocery stores.
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Flickr / ex_magician
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In 2006, more than 50 scientists and doctors—five nobel laureates among them—wrote an urgent letter to the EPA warning of the dangers of the pesticide methyl iodide. In 2007, the agency approved its use. (more)
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Flickr / Possum1500
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After Georgia’s new immigration law chased away many of its farm laborers, the state launched a dubious plan to fill the void with probationers, who lack the experience needed to do harvesting work, especially in the current heat wave. (more)
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Jorge Andrés Paparoni Bruzual (CC-BY-SA)
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Food prices shot up 36 percent in the last year, according to the World Bank, adding 44 million people to the ranks of the impoverished. For people who spend most of their money on food, it’s devastating when the price of maize, to take one example, goes up 74 percent as it did this year. (more)
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Flickr / joost j. bakker (CC-BY)
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By Barry Lando — The world will need 70 percent more food in 2050 than it produced in 2000, but the resources available are plummeting.
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Flickr / The Pug Father (CC-BY)
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The overuse of antibiotics can lead to drug-resistant superbugs, so it’s cause for concern to the folks at Johns Hopkins’ Center for a Livable Future that the vast majority of bug-killing drugs aren’t even consumed by sick humans.
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AP / Pier Paolo Cito
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The U.N. is warning that the world may be on the cusp of a new major food crisis as the result of a wave of recent environmental disasters (heat waves, floods, wildfires) and capitalist disasters (market speculation, inflation) that are pushing up the price of foodstuffs.
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Flickr / tina negus
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If you need yet another example of how Washington just doesn’t quite work, a bill that aims to curb food contamination has stalled despite having broad bipartisan support, plus backing from President Obama and industry and consumer groups, and the fact that the House passed its version of the legislation more than a year ago.
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fao.org
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The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization has released a new report gauging global hunger in 2010, and the FAO surmised that worldwide undernourishment, although slightly improved from 2009, remains “unacceptably high.” This raises the question: Is there ever an “acceptable” level?
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White House / Pete Souza
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After it became painfully obvious that the White House had been played by conservatives, press secretary Robert Gibbs apologized to Shirley Sherrod on behalf of the administration. Sherrod was forced to resign because of a video edited by conservative bloggers to distort her remarks on race.
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Equine enthusiast and budding politician Dale Peterson’s unintentionally hilarious campaign ad, in which he and his horse make their case for why he should become Alabama’s next agriculture commissioner, hardly requires any embellishment to be soundly parodied ... (continued)
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Flickr / mattdente (CC-BY-SA)
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Yasha Levine, who reported for us on tea party diva Michele Bachmann’s hypocritical penchant for federal farm subsidies, tipped us off that the Obama administration and Congress are making it harder to track the millionaires who hit up Uncle Sam for crop cash.
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Flickr / Tambako the Jaguar
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Sure, it behooved our Neolithic ancestors to band together and form proto-civilizations for many reasons, but one main motivation, according to archaeologist Patrick McGovern—who works, and we kid you not, at the University of Pennsylvania Museum’s Biomolecular Archaeology Laboratory for Cuisine, Fermented Beverages, and Health—was the time-honored pursuit of alcoholic intoxication.
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cironline.org
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By Lance Williams, California Watch —
Wealthy corporate farmer Stewart Resnick (shown above with wife Lynda) has written check after check to U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s campaigns, and when he needed her help, he got quick results.
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flickr.com / bridgepx
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Some 93 percent of soybeans and 80 percent of corn: Those numbers reflect how much of each crop is grown with seeds genetically altered under the patents of agro-giant Monsanto. An antitrust investigation is at hand, as questions about a monopoly status seem not too far off.
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wfp.org
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Global hunger is a “world emergency” now, if it wasn’t before, with the number of hungry people rising to a record 1 billion, according to the United Nations. Given this scary statistic, it’s not looking good for a goal, set in 2000, to reduce the number of people going hungry worldwide by half by 2015.
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Flickr / sarniebill1
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Global population is expected to hit 9.1 billion in the next 40 years, causing demand for food to double. The U.N. says we will need to produce 70 percent more food by 2050 or risk starving hundreds of millions of people.
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Flickr / Sundi_MOZ
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For those die-hard bicoastal types who view much of America’s heartland as flyover territory, the phenomenon of “rural brain drain,” as The Chronicle of Higher Education calls the ongoing migration of younger generations from the country’s small towns, probably doesn’t seem terribly troubling—but the Chronicle makes the case for why this mass exodus may constitute a national crisis.
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watersecretsblog.com
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A dry spell in India’s usual monsoon season has had a dramatic effect on food prices and availability, affecting more than 700 million people in the world’s second most populous country. With its farmers hit hard by the drought, India is forced to begin importing food to make up for the shortages.
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Is the pastoral arcadia of the country life far from derivatives and emissions and the other excreta of our modern cities all that it’s cracked up to be? Two new memoirs give readers who don’t want to stir from their armchairs to take up farming an insider’s look.
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AP photo / Andy Wong
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By Chris Hedges — All efforts to save the planet will be useless if we do not cut population growth. By 2050, the planet will have between 8 billion and 10 billion people, according to a recent U.N. forecast. And yet studies, books and documentaries that deal with various crises fail to discuss the danger of all those billions of hungry people looking for a better life.
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SF Chroncile / Lance Iversen
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The key word being had: The new secretary of energy, Nobel Prize-winning Steven Chu, is making waves in the policy community with his daunting comments about climate change. Chu warns that the farms of California, the nation’s leading agricultural producer, could vanish by the end of this century if steps to slow global warming are not taken.
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Flickr / seiu_international
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Well, Hillary Clinton will have to wait a little longer, but seven others whom President Barack Obama tapped to join his Cabinet had gotten the all-clear from the Senate as of Tuesday afternoon.
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nytimes.com
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Doing little to slough the stereotype that Midwestern governors are automatically good at farming, Barack Obama has announced the next nominee to his presidential inner circle: former Iowa governor and presidential candidate Tom Vilsack as agriculture secretary.
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flickr.com
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While supporters of the much troubled Doha Round of the World Trade Organization believe talks may have found their second wind, only the world’s largest economies seem to be breathing. The form of capitalism supported by these countries is resisted by poorer nations, which rightly fear WTO deregulations would disproportionately benefit the wealthy.
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Flickr / Randy Son Of Robert
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Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has made it official: California is in a drought. It’s the first official drought declaration for the Golden State in 17 years. Schwarzenegger has threatened water rationing to protect the state’s $32 billion agriculture industry.
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Flickr / mattdente
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Humankind’s steady migration from fields to cities may have to take a slight detour. There are a lot of people in the world now and feeding them is becoming a problem. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told world leaders we face a “historic opportunity to revitalize agriculture,” warning that production would have to go up by 50 percent over the next 20 or so years.
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flickr.com
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Without batting an ironic eye, President Bush has vetoed a $289-billion farm bill, claiming the legislation gives too much money to wealthy farmers. The bill includes steps to spur biofuel use and would expand nutrition programs to help poor Americans buy food. The Democratic Congress is expected to override the veto.
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Flickr / Lauras512
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Raul Castro would like to see his island produce more food. Currently, Cuba imports the vast majority of its basic food products, at increasing expense, despite plenty of arable land. Private farmers and collective growers are hoping new reforms make it easier to produce food more efficiently, and that’s not just good news for Cuba. With rice rationing at Costco, that’s good news for the world.
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ihabitat.com
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The Department of Agriculture has ordered the largest ever beef recall in the U.S., deeming 143 million pounds of beef unfit for human consumption because of inspection violations. The plant responsible for the suspect meat happens to call the U.S. government, including the National School Lunch Program, one of its best customers.
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guardian.co.uk
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More than 93 percent of the world’s opiates are now grown in Afghanistan, with an opium crop that has doubled in the last two years. According to the executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, “No other country beside China in the 19th Century ever had such a large amount of land dedicated to illegal activities.”
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bugs.bio.usyd.edu.au
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Whither the bees? An American bee-tracking group has noted an alarming drop in the nation’s honeybee count, apparently due to their losing their inborn homing instincts and thus their way back to their hives. Conspiracy theories abound, according to The New York Times, including one claiming that what’s going on here is actually “the rapture of the bees.”
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greenpeace.org
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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that the climate crisis could afflict billions of people, especially the poor, with food and water shortages, drought and flooding. “For the first time, we are no longer arm-waving with models; this is empirical data,” explained one of the panel’s leading scientists.
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film.queensu.ca
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Chiquita has agreed to pay $25 million in fines for bribing Colombian terrorist groups to safeguard its banana plantations. One of the groups, a right-wing paramilitary organization, has been guilty of some of Colombia’s worst atrocities.
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AP Photo / Denis Poroy
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By Joshua Scheer — Annie Nelson, wife of Willie Nelson and co-chairperson of the Sustainable Biodiesel Alliance, speaks to Truthdig about stomaching the State of the Union and the myth that alternative fuels are years away.
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usatoday.com
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Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency in California after nearly three-quarters of the state’s citrus crop was wiped out by subfreezing weather last week, causing up to $1 billion in losses. Prices around the country are expected to rise drastically, as California is the nation’s major producer of fresh citrus fruit.
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washingtonpost.com
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The Food and Drug Administration is set to approve food products derived from cloned animals and their offspring. Though eating beef from a cloned cow may seem incredibly creepy, the FDA has decided the manufactured twin is just as safe as the original animal, and requires no special identification once in the food supply.
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library.ucsc.edu
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The California state attorney general’s office has found no wrongdoing in the United Farm Workers Union’s handling of its affiliated charities. The probe was launched in response to allegations raised by a series of articles published in the Los Angeles Times.
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By Marie Cocco — It hasn’t the zesty political punch of that Reagan-era effort to turn ketchup into a vegetable. But really, could there be a more unfortunate time for the Agriculture Department to banish the word “hunger” from its description of people who are, well, hungry?
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reelmoviecritic.com
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The U.S. Department of Agriculture has decided to remove the word “hunger” from its annual report assessing Americans’ access to food. Those among us who sometimes go without food, a group that has grown consistently over the last five years, will now suffer from “very low food security.”
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About 140 Californians died last month from a severe heat wave, the most casualties since 1955, when air conditioning became widespread. Officials were left scrambling to explain the inordinately high number of deaths, unusual for a place where people are used to the summer heat.
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By Robert Scheer — “It is good news that the public is finally hip to Bush’s con, yet it is worrisome when surprisingly sensible proposals by the president on immigration are automatically rejected because of the source.”
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