August hasn’t been a happy month the for the Monsanto public-relations team. No, I’m not referring to my posts on how Gaza and Mexico don’t need the company’s high-tech seeds—the ones it will supposedly be “feeding the world” with in the not-so-distant future.

Monsanto’s real PR headache involves one of its flagship products very much in the here and now: the herbicide Roundup (chemical name: glyphosate), upon which Monsanto has built a highly profitable empire of “Roundup Ready” genetically modified seeds.

The problem goes beyond the “superweed” phenomenon that I’ve written about recently: the fact that farmers are using so much Roundup, on so much acreage, that weeds are developing resistance to it, forcing farmers to resort to highly toxic “pesticide cocktails.”

What Roundup is doing aboveground may be a stroll through the meadow compared to its effect below. According to USDA scientist Robert Kremer, who spoke at a conference last week, Roundup may also be damaging soil—a sobering thought, given that it’s applied to hundreds of millions of acres of prime farmland in the United States and South America. Here’s a Reuters account of Kremer’s presentation:

The heavy use of Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide appears to be causing harmful changes in soil and potentially hindering yields of the genetically modified crops that farmers are cultivating, a US government scientist said on Friday. Repeated use of the chemical glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup herbicide, impacts the root structure of plants, and 15 years of research indicates that the chemical could be causing fungal root disease, said Bob Kremer, a microbiologist with the US Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service.

Now, Kremer has been raising these concerns for a couple of years now—and as Tom Laskaway showed in this 2010 Grist article, the USDA has been downplaying them for just as long. Laskaway asked Kremer’s boss at the Agricultural Research Service, Michael Shannon, to comment on Kremer’s research. According to Laskaway, Shannon “admitted that Kremer’s results are valid, but said that the danger they represent pales in comparison to the superweed threat.”

So let’s get this straight: The head of the USDA’s crop-research service agrees that Roundup damages soil and thinks the superweed problem is even more troublesome. In the face of these two menaces, you might expect the USDA to intervene to curtail Roundup use. But Shannon meant his statement as a rationale for ignoring Kremer’s work. Meanwhile, the USDA keeps approving new Roundup Ready crops—ensuring that the herbicide’s domain over US farmland will expand dramatically.

Kremer commented on his employer’s reception of his work in a Reuters article last year:

“This could be something quite big. We might be setting up a huge problem,” said Kremer, who expressed alarm that regulators were not paying enough attention to the potential risks from biotechnology on the farm, including his own research…”Science is not being considered in policy setting and deregulation,” said Kremer. “This research is important. We need to be vigilant.”

Meanwhile, at a conference in Boulder, Colorado, in early August, another mainstream ag expert raised serious concerns about the poison, according to an account in Boulder Weekly. Iowa-based consultant Michael McNeill, who has a Ph.D. in quantitative genetics and plant pathology from Iowa State University, advises large-scale corn and soy farmers on weed control and soil fertility. He’s observing trends in the field that are consistent with Kremer’s research. Here’s Boulder Weekly:

McNeill explains that glyphosate is a chelating agent, which means it clamps onto molecules that are valuable to a plant, like iron, calcium, manganese, and zinc.…The farmers’ increased use of Roundup is actually harming their crops, according to McNeill, because it is killing micronutrients in the soil that they need, a development that has been documented in several scientific papers by the nation’s leading experts in the field. For example, he says, harmful fungi and parasites like fusarium, phytopthora and pythium are on the rise as a result of the poison, while beneficial fungi and other organisms that help plants reduce minerals to a usable state are on the decline. He explains that the overuse of glyphosate means that oxidizing agents are on the rise, creating oxides that plants can’t use, leading to lower yields and higher susceptibility to disease.

According to McNeill, problems with Roundup aren’t limited to the soil—they also extend to Roundup Ready crops and the animals that eat them.

McNeill says he and his colleagues are seeing a higher incidence of infertility and early-term abortion in cattle and hogs that are fed on GMO crops. He adds that poultry fed on the suspect crops have been exhibiting reduced fertility rates.

McNeill made an interesting comparison to the Boulder Weekly reporter: “Just as DDT was initially hailed as a miracle pesticide and later banned, researchers are beginning to discover serious problems with glyphosate.”

Well, the EPA has been in the process of reviewing glyphosate’s registration since July 2009, but I’ve seen no evidence that the agency has the fortitude to challenge Monsanto and its multibillion-dollar empire. Just last week, Kremer told Reuters that neither the EPA nor the USDA has shown interest in further exploring his research. Maybe Monsanto’s PR team doesn’t have much to worry about, after all.

Tom Philpott is the food and ag blogger for Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. To follow him on Twitter, click here. Get Tom Philpott’s RSS feed.

Reposted from Mother Jones.

While speaking up for policy reform, individuals can help provide market demand for climate-friendly foods by following the principles of a climate-friendly diet, writes Anna Lappé.

New Forest Farm is nestled in the Kickapoo Valley 130 kilometers west of Madison, Wisconsin. In the summer of 2008, the state—and much of the US Midwest—was deluged with unseasonal downpours, and large tracts of farmland were flooded. The heavy rains and flooding caused $15 billion in damages and left 24 people dead across the Midwest. Wisconsin declared a state of emergency. Yet on a visit just weeks after the rainstorms had swept the region, Mark Shepard of New Forest Farm does not seem beaten down at all.

Shepard is lounging on the porch of his newly constructed cider mill, powered by solar panels and a soon-to-be built windmill. His farm is bursting with life: undulating fields of bush cherries, Siberian peas, apricots, cherries, kiwis, autumn olives, mulberries, blueberries, rosehips and asparagus, hickory nuts and oak, apples and chestnuts, and more. He escaped devastation from the deluge, he says, not by luck but by savvy farming.

It is a kind of farming that created these resilient fields and that puts Shepard at the heart of a movement scattered from the verdant valleys of the US Midwest to South Korea, from the foothills of the Himalaya to the plains of southern Brazil. It goes by many names, but it is fundamentally about following agro-ecological principles. Shepard and like-minded farmers around the world are proving that a sustainable and abundant food system need not rely on fossil fuels. They are also showing how these climate-friendlier farms can help the world adapt to the climate crisis at the same time. Extreme weather events like the floods that swamped Wisconsin are only going to be more common as the climate destabilises because of ever-greater greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions, including those from the food and agriculture sector.

The climate crisis and its main drivers generally conjure up images of dirty coal-fired power plants or fuel-guzzling sports utility vehicles. Yet the food industry and agribusiness are among the biggest contributors to climate change. In many developing countries without significant heavy industry, agriculture is in fact the most important source of greenhouse-gas emissions, largely because of its role in deforestation.

Farming, especially industrial-scale production of livestock on factory farms, is among the biggest drivers of deforestation. As forests are cleared, the trees release enormous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere along with other greenhouse gases, including methane and nitrous oxide. The loss of forests contributes more than 17% of human-made emissions of carbon dioxide. Globally, livestock production accounts for 18% of global emissions, according to the United Nations. New Zealand’s ruminant livestock animals produce 85% of that country’s emissions of methane—a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide.

Greenhouse-gas emissions from food occur at every step in the food chain: farming, processing, packaging, transportation, wholesale/retail, food service, household consumption and waste. Account for all the direct and indirect emissions—including land-use changes, the production of farm chemicals and synthetic fertiliser, and fossil fuel energy use throughout the supply chain—and the food system is responsible for as much as one-third of global GHG emissions. These emissions can largely be traced back to a radical remaking of agriculture and food systems in the twentieth century, first in the industrial world and then in developing countries.

But it does not have to be this way. Innovative farmers like Mark Shepard are showing the potential of sustainable farms to feed the world while not depleting its finite resources like fossil fuels and not exacerbating the climate crisis. Sustainable farmers use a variety of techniques and innovations to protect against weeds and pests and to boost soil fertility without relying on fossil fuels or synthetic pesticides. Some of these techniques include using cover crops, crop rotations and beneficial insects. Farmers like Shepard are also beginning to generate their own energy—in his case, through wind turbines and solar panels. Small-scale methane digesters can also convert animal waste into usable energy.

Sustainable farming techniques build healthy soil, which benefits plant health and climate stability. In side-by-side field trials over 30 years, the US-based Rodale Institute found that corn and soybeans raised with organic techniques stored more carbon in the soil year after year. In a review of these field trials, Cornell University professor David Pimentel found that the organic farming methods produced the same yields of corn and soybeans as did industrial farming, but they used 30% less energy, less water and no synthetic pesticides. Based on these lessons, former Rodale Institute chief executive officer Timothy LaSalle estimates that if 434 million acres [nearly 176 million hectares] of cropland in the United States shifted to organic production, nearly 1.6 billion tons [1.45 billion tonnes] of carbon dioxide could be sequestered annually, “mitigating close to one quarter of the country’s total fossil-fuel emissions.”

These findings, and similar results from research around the world, are remarkable, for they point to the potential of agriculture to help mitigate climate change. Furthermore, research shows that sustainable farms are also better able to withstand the climate instability triggered by the greenhouse effect. At Rodale, researchers found that the organic test fields did better during dry years, “thanks to improved water-holding capacity of the extra soil organic matter,” says LaSalle.

On a global scale, the shift away from petrochemicals in the food supply need not threaten food productivity. In one meta-study of yields from organic and industrial farms around the world, researchers from the University of Michigan found that introducing agro-ecological approaches in developing countries led to two to four times greater yields. Estimating the impact on global food supply if all production shifted to organic farming, the authors found an average yield increase for every single food category they investigated.

In one of the largest studies of how agro-ecological practices affect productivity in the developing world, researchers at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom reviewed 286 projects in 57 countries, mostly in Africa. Of the 12.6 million farmers who were transitioning to sustainable agriculture, the researchers found an average yield increase of 79% on farms. A 2008 UN Conference on Trade and Development and UN Environment Programme report concluded that “organic agriculture can be more conducive to food security in Africa than most conventional production systems, and … is more likely to be sustainable in the long term.”

In the most comprehensive analysis of world agriculture to date, the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) found that “reliance on resource-extractive industrial agriculture is risky and unsustainable, particularly in the face of worsening climate, energy and water crises,” according to Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, a lead author of the report.

The IAASTD study, the University of Essex findings, the Rodale Institute’s conclusions and Mark Shepard’s abundant fields all point in one direction: If we are to continue to feed the planet — and feed it well — in the face of global climate chaos, we should be radically rethinking the industrial food system. We can start with what is on our plates.

We can make food choices in line with a climate-friendly diet. We can choose to eat foods from sustainable farms, reduce consumption of highly processed foods, and cut back — or cut out — meat and dairy that comes from factory farms. We can also reach for local and regionally grown foods. (Even though transportation-related emissions are a relatively small segment of the overall impact of most food items, choosing to support regional farmers is an important part of building a resilient, biodiverse food system.)

But it is important not to stop there. At least for now, climate-friendly choices are unavailable in most communities, largely because agricultural policies in the United States and elsewhere have been providing incentives for industrial production for decades — at the cost of sustainable producers. US industrial livestock producers receive billions of dollars in direct payments etched into the Farm Bill, the multi-billion-dollar policy that governs food and farming. From 1995 to 2006, the Farm Bill legislation paid nearly $3 billion in direct subsidies to large-scale livestock producers.

Livestock producers benefit from the US Farm Bill in indirect ways, too. Between 2003 and 2005, corn producers received $17.6 billion in subsidies, and soybean producers another $2 billion. Because feed costs usually account for 60% or more of the total cost of production for most factory farm operators, policies that enable grain and soy prices to fall below the cost of production are a boon to processors and retailers. And since 67% of US corn and nearly all of the soybean meal are used for domestic or overseas livestock or fish feed, these commodity subsidies could also be seen as livestock industry subsidies.

In total, these federal subsidies saved the factory livestock sector an estimated $35 billion between 1997 and 2005, according to researchers at Tufts University. Livestock industry lobbyists also succeeded in getting payments from the Farm Bill’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) for concentrated animal feeding operations, even though the programme was designed to help small-scale farmers reduce pollution. By 2007, factory farms were receiving as much as $125 million a year from this programme alone.

These are just some of the “perverse” farm policies that are providing incentives to further a food system that is contributing to the climate crisis. But the Farm Bill could instead encourage a shift away from fossil-fuel-dependent agriculture and toward an agricultural system that is part of mitigating the climate crisis. It could, for instance, provide:

• farmer education to facilitate the transition from chemical agriculture to organic farming;

• broader incentives for farmers who make the transition and financial support to subsidize the costs of organic certification (in 2009, the EQIP Organic Initiative set aside more than $35 million in assistance for certified and transitioning organic farmers);

• incentives and support for all farmers to build healthier, carbon-rich soil matter and to reduce the use of synthetic fertiliser;

• greater enforcement of environmental regulations for emissions-intensive factory farming and commodity crop production; and

• research dollars to explore how to reduce on-farm greenhouse-gas emissions (currently only 2.6% of the US Department of Agriculture’s research budget goes toward organic approaches).

The Farm Bill could also expand its programs that encourage consumption of fruits and vegetables and local foods instead of highly processed products. The WIC Farmers Market Nutrition Program, for example, operates in 45 states and provides up to $30 a year in vouchers to low-income children and to pregnant and post-partum women for redemption at farmers’ markets. Reaching 2.2 million people, this programme could be significantly expanded, fueling greater consumption of climate-friendly foods and fueling regional food systems.

These are just a few of the policy changes that could help shift the food system. While speaking up for policy reform, individuals can help provide market demand for climate-friendly foods by following the principles of a climate-friendly diet.

Yes, we cannot change the world just by buying organically grown apples from the neighborhood farmers’ market, but it’s a start.

Anna Lappé is a co-founder of the Small Planet Fund and author of Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It.

This extract is from the Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World 2011: Innovations That Nourish the Planet. The full report is available from Earthscan (non-US readers) and Worldwatch (US readers). State of the World 2011: Innovations That Nourish the Planet © Copyright 2011, Worldwatch Institute

A new report from the UN advises ditching corporate-controlled and chemically intensive farming in favor of agroecology.

There are a billion hungry people in the world and that number could rise as food insecurity increases along with population growth, economic fallout and environmental crises. But a roadmap to defeating hunger exists, if we can follow the course — and that course involves ditching corporate-controlled, chemical-intensive farming.

“To feed 9 billion people in 2050, we urgently need to adopt the most efficient farming techniques available. And today’s scientific evidence demonstrates that agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilizers in boosting food production in regions where the hungry live,” says Olivier de Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. Agroecology is more or less what many Americans would simply call “organic agriculture,” although important nuances separate the two terms.

Used successfully by peasant farmers worldwide, agroecology applies ecology to agriculture in order to optimize long-term food production, requiring few purchased inputs and increasing soil quality, carbon sequestration and biodiversity over time. Agroecology also values traditional and indigenous farming methods, studying the scientific principals underpinning them instead of merely seeking to replace them with new technologies. As such, agroecology is grounded in local (material, cultural and intellectual) resources.

A new report, presented today before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, makes several important points along with its recommendation of agroecology. For example, it says, “We won’t solve hunger and stop climate change with industrial farming on large plantations.” Instead, it says the solution lies with smallholder farmers. The majority of the world’s hungry are smallholder farmers, capable of growing food but currently not growing enough food to feed their families each year. A net global increase in food production alone will not guarantee the end of hunger (as the poor cannot access food even when it is available), an increase in productivity for poor farmers will make a dent in global hunger. Potentially, gains in productivity by smallholder farmers will provide an income to farmers as well, if they grow a surplus of food that they can sell.

With its potential to double crop yields, as the report notes, agroecology could help ensure smallholder farmers have enough to eat and perhaps provide a surplus to sell as well. The report calls for investment in extension services, storage facilities, and rural infrastructure like roads, electricity, and communication technologies, to help provide smallholders with access to markets, agricultural research and development, and education. Additionally, it notes the importance of providing farmers with credit and insurance against weather-related risks.

In the past, efforts to help the hungry involved developing high yielding seeds and providing them along with industrial inputs to farmers in poor countries. However, in poor countries, smallholder farmers who often live on less than $1 or $2 per day, cannot afford industrial inputs like hybrid or genetically engineered seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, or irrigation. Many work each year to make sure their crops go far enough to feed their families, with little left over to sell. And for those who live far from roads and cities, there might not be a market to sell to anyway.

Agroecology requires replacing chemical inputs with knowledge, often disseminated by farmers who work together with scientists and aid organizations to teach their fellow farmers. “Rather than treating smallholder farmers as beneficiaries of aid, they should be seen as experts with knowledge that is complementary to formalized expertise,” the report notes. For example, in Kenya, researchers and farmers developed a successful “push-pull” strategy to control pests in corn, and using town meetings, national radio broadcasts, and farmer field schools, spread the system to over 10,000 households.

The push-pull method involves pushing pests away from corn by interplanting corn with an insect repelling crop called Desmodium (which can be fed to livestock), while pulling the pests toward small nearby plots of Napier grass, “a plant that excretes a sticky gum which both attracts and traps pests.” In addition to controlling pests, this system produces livestock fodder, thus doubling corn yields and milk production at the same time. And it improves the soil to boot!

Significantly, the report mentions that past efforts to combat hunger focused mostly on cereals such as wheat and rice which, while important, do not provide a wide enough range of nutrients to prevent malnutrition. Thus, the biodiversity in agroecological farming systems provide much needed nutrients. “For example,” the report says, “it has been estimated that indigenous fruits contribute on average about 42 percent of the natural food-basket that rural households rely on in southern Africa. This is not only an important source of vitamins and other micronutrients, but it also may be critical for sustenance during lean seasons.” Indeed, in agroecological farming systems around the world, plants a conventional American farm might consider weeds are eaten as food or used in traditional herbal medicine.

De Schutter does not dismiss the U.S. government’s preferred strategies of crop breeding and fertilizers as potentially helpful in the fight against hunger, but warns of caution in using them. Crop breeding, he notes, can be complementary to agroecology. Perhaps referring to efforts to develop drought-resistant maize, the report says, “Agroecology is more overarching [than crop breeding] as it supports building drought-resistant agricultural systems (including soils, plants, agrobiodiversity, etc.), not just drought-resistant plants.”

When asked to provide more detail about crop breeding, De Schutter responded that “most [agroecologists] are very careful with some of these [crop breeding] technologies, particularly genetic engineering.” He noted that genetically engineered crops not only carry environmental risks, but are also “associated with unsustainable farming practices and with a worrying concentration of the seed industry.” In contrast, he sees promise in marker-assisted selection and participatory plant breeding, which “uses the strength of modern science, while at the same time putting farmers in the driver’s seat.”

De Schutter also highlights the risks of using nitrogen fertilizer, which contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and water pollution, saying that, “the use of fertilizers [in Africa] could increase a bit without major environmental damages.” He sees many reasons why agroecology is a better choice than nitrogen fertilizer, pointing out that, “many agroecological methods simply outperform mineral fertilizers: they result in similar levels of return on investments if you measure only productivity, but they create systems that are more resilient to climate change, some of them produce additional fodder for animals (nitrogen-fixing trees for instance), or fruit (thus vitamins).”

He adds that agroecological gains can be achieved with local resources, “while fertilizers need to be imported. This is not a minor issue for the balance of payment of countries! A country could thus use its foreign exchange to build modern industries and create jobs rather than buying fertilizers.” However, when an urgent situation of hunger needs to be addressed, nitrogen fertilizers should not be dismissed if they can, in fact, provide the best outcome in a short-term emergency situation.

The report also warns of the harmful impact of allowing volatile prices and dumping of subsidized commodities in poor countries. Dumping occurs when a country that subsidizes its farmers (like the U.S.) promotes overproduction and causes prices to fall very low. When the excess, cheap commodities are exported to poor countries that have no trade barriers, local farmers cannot compete on price. De Schutter notes, “While not the single cause, the lowering of import tariffs in poor countries and the inability of these countries to support their small farmers” were major causes of “massive rural poverty, rural flight, and widespread hunger.” He adds, “I believe that it is vital for poor countries to be allowed to protect their farming sector and to be helped in supporting this sector.”

Will the United States heed De Schutter’s advice, adopting a development approach that embraces agroecology and seeks trade agreements that are more fair to poor countries? Recently history does not inspire much hope. De Schutter is not the first to recognize the potential of agroecology. In 2008, the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development (IAASTD) report also concluded that agroecology offered farmers a powerful means to increase production on smallholder farms, and thus decrease hunger in the world. Both De Schutter and the IAASTD report seek more than just food production from agriculture; they see agroecology as a way to improve rural livelihoods, mitigate climate change and provide resilience in the face of climate extremes.

However, the United States was one of only three countries that failed to approve the IAASTD report, due to its critiques of unregulated trade and biotechnology. American efforts to fight global hunger, to date, have focused more on crop breeding, particularly genetic engineering, and nitrogen fertilizer than agroecology. Whereas the new UN report notes that, “perhaps because [agroecological] practices cannot be rewarded by patents, the private sector has been largely absent from this line of research,” the U.S. aggressively promotes public-private partnerships with corporations such as seed and chemical companies Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, and BASF; agribusiness companies Cargill, Bunge; and Archer Daniels Midland; processed food companies PepsiCo, Nestle, General Mills, Coca Cola, Unilever, and Kraft Foods; and the retail giant Wal-Mart.

The entire report on agroecology is available on the Web site of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. Americans who are interested in seeing the U.S. follow the path outlined by De Schutter in this report should contact USAID and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Additionally, contact your members of Congress as well as the U.S. Trade Representative and the president if you wish to comment on American trade policy.

Jill Richardson is the founder of the blog La Vida Locavore and a member of the Organic Consumers Association policy advisory board. She is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It..

Reposted from AlterNet.

http://www.alternet.org/story/149325/

AMY GOODMAN: From disease to addiction, parenting to attention deficit disorder, Canadian physician and bestselling author Gabor Maté’s work focuses on the centrality of early childhood experiences to the development of the brain, and how those experiences can impact everything from behavioral patterns to physical and mental illness. While the relationship between emotional stress and disease, and mental and physical health more broadly, is often considered controversial within medical orthodoxy, Dr. Maté argues too many doctors seem to have forgotten what was once a commonplace assumption, that emotions are deeply implicated in both the development of illness, addictions and disorders, and in their healing.

Dr. Maté is the bestselling author of four books: When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection; Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do about It; and, with Dr. Gordon Neufeld, Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers; his latest is called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction.

In our first conversation, Dr. Maté talked about his work as the staff physician at the Portland Hotel in Vancouver, Canada, a residence and harm reduction facility in Downtown Eastside, a neighborhood with one the densest concentrations of drug addicts in North America. The Portland hosts the only legal injection site in North America, a center that’s come under fire from Canada’s Conservative government. I asked Dr. Maté to talk about his patients.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: The hardcore drug addicts that I treat, are, without exception, people who have had extraordinarily difficult lives. And the commonality is childhood abuse. In other words, these people all enter life under extremely adverse circumstances. Not only did they not get what they need for healthy development, they actually got negative circumstances of neglect. I don’t have a single female patient in the Downtown Eastside who wasn’t sexually abused, for example, as were many of the men, or abused, neglected and abandoned serially, over and over again.

And that’s what sets up the brain biology of addiction. In other words, the addiction is related both psychologically, in terms of emotional pain relief, and neurobiological development to early adversity.

AMY GOODMAN: What does the title of your book mean, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, it’s a Buddhist phrase. In the Buddhists’ psychology, there are a number of realms that human beings cycle through, all of us. One is the human realm, which is our ordinary selves. The hell realm is that of unbearable rage, fear, you know, these emotions that are difficult to handle. The animal realm is our instincts and our id and our passions.

Now, the hungry ghost realm, the creatures in it are depicted as people with large empty bellies, small mouths and scrawny thin necks. They can never get enough satisfaction. They can never fill their bellies. They’re always hungry, always empty, always seeking it from the outside. That speaks to a part of us that I have and everybody in our society has, where we want satisfaction from the outside, where we’re empty, where we want to be soothed by something in the short term, but we can never feel that or fulfill that insatiety from the outside. The addicts are in that realm all the time. Most of us are in that realm some of the time. And my point really is, is that there’s no clear distinction between the identified addict and the rest of us. There’s just a continuum in which we all may be found. They’re on it, because they’ve suffered a lot more than most of us.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the biology of addiction?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: For sure. You see, if you look at the brain circuits involved in addiction—and that’s true whether it’s a shopping addiction like mine or an addiction to opiates like the heroin addict—we’re looking for endorphins in our brains. Endorphins are the brain’s feel good, reward, pleasure and pain relief chemicals. They also happen to be the love chemicals that connect us to the universe and to one another.

Now, that circuitry in addicts doesn’t function very well, as the circuitry of incentive and motivation, which involves the chemical dopamine, also doesn’t function very well. Stimulant drugs like cocaine and crystal meth, nicotine and caffeine, all elevate dopamine levels in the brain, as does sexual acting out, as does extreme sports, as does workaholism and so on.

Now, the issue is, why do these circuits not work so well in some people, because the drugs in themselves are not surprisingly addictive. And what I mean by that is, is that most people who try most drugs never become addicted to them. And so, there has to be susceptibility there. And the susceptible people are the ones with these impaired brain circuits, and the impairment is caused by early adversity, rather than by genetics.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, “early adversity”?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, the human brain, unlike any other mammal, for the most part develops under the influence of the environment. And that’s because, from the evolutionary point of view, we developed these large heads, large fore-brains, and to walk on two legs we have a narrow pelvis. That means—large head, narrow pelvis—we have to be born prematurely. Otherwise, we would never get born. The head already is the biggest part of the body. Now, the horse can run on the first day of life. Human beings aren’t that developed for two years. That means much of our brain development, that in other animals occurs safely in the uterus, for us has to occur out there in the environment. And which circuits develop and which don’t depend very much on environmental input.

When people are mistreated, stressed or abused, their brains don’t develop the way they ought to. It’s that simple. And unfortunately, my profession, the medical profession, puts all the emphasis on genetics rather than on the environment, which, of course, is a simple explanation. It also takes everybody off the hook.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, it takes people off the hook?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, if people’s behaviors and dysfunctions are regulated, controlled and determined by genes, we don’t have to look at child welfare policies, we don’t have to look at the kind of support that we give to pregnant women, we don’t have to look at the kind of non-support that we give to families, so that, you know, most children in North America now have to be away from their parents from an early age on because of economic considerations. And especially in the States, because of the welfare laws, women are forced to go find low-paying jobs far away from home, often single women, and not see their kids for most of the day. Under those conditions, kids’ brains don’t develop the way they need to.

And so, if it’s all caused by genetics, we don’t have to look at those social policies; we don’t have to look at our politics that disadvantage certain minority groups, so cause them more stress, cause them more pain, in other words, more predisposition for addictions; we don’t have to look at economic inequalities. If it’s all genes, it’s all—we’re all innocent, and society doesn’t have to take a hard look at its own attitudes and policies.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about this whole approach of criminalization versus harm reduction, how you think addicts should be treated, and how they are, in the United States and Canada?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, the first point to get there is that if people who become severe addicts, as shown by all the studies, were for the most part abused children, then we realize that the war on drugs is actually waged against people that were abused from the moment they were born, or from an early age on. In other words, we’re punishing people for having been abused. That’s the first point.

The second point is, is that the research clearly shows that the biggest driver of addictive relapse and addictive behavior is actually stress. In North America right now, because of the economic crisis, a lot of people are eating junk food, because junk foods release endorphins and dopamine in the brain. So that stress drives addiction.

Now imagine a situation where we’re trying to figure out how to help addicts. Would we come up with a system that stresses them to the max? Who would design a system that ostracizes, marginalizes, impoverishes and ensures the disease of the addict, and hope, through that system, to rehabilitate large numbers? It can’t be done. In other words, the so-called “war on drugs,” which, as the new drug czar points out, is a war on people, actually entrenches addiction deeply. Furthermore, it institutionalizes people in facilities where the care is very—there’s no care. We call it a “correctional” system, but it doesn’t correct anything. It’s a punitive system. So people suffer more, and then they come out, and of course they’re more entrenched in their addiction than they were when they went in.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m curious about your own history, Gabor Maté.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: You were born in Nazi-occupied Hungary?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, ADD has a lot to do with that. I have attention deficit disorder myself. And again, most people see it as a genetic problem. I don’t. It actually has to do with those factors of brain development, which in my case occurred as a Jewish infant under Nazi occupation in the ghetto of Budapest. And the day after the pediatrician—sorry, the day after the Nazis marched into Budapest in March of 1944, my mother called the pediatrician and says, “Would you please come and see my son, because he’s crying all the time?” And the pediatrician says, “Of course I’ll come. But I should tell you, all my Jewish babies are crying.”

Now infants don’t know anything about Nazis and genocide or war or Hitler. They’re picking up on the stresses of their parents. And, of course, my mother was an intensely stressed person, her husband being away in forced labor, her parents shortly thereafter being departed and killed in Auschwitz. Under those conditions, I don’t have the kind of conditions that I need for the proper development of my brain circuits. And particularly, how does an infant deal with that much stress? By tuning it out. That’s the only way the brain can deal with it. And when you do that, that becomes programmed into the brain.

And so, if you look at the preponderance of ADD in North America now and the three millions of kids in the States that are on stimulant medication and the half-a-million who are on anti-psychotics, what they’re really exhibiting is the effects of extreme stress, increasing stress in our society, on the parenting environment. Not bad parenting. Extremely stressed parenting, because of social and economic conditions. And that’s why we’re seeing such a preponderance.

So, in my case, that also set up this sense of never being soothed, of never having enough, because I was a starving infant. And that means, all my life, I have this propensity to soothe myself. How do I do that? Well, one way is to work a lot and to gets lots of admiration and lots of respect and people wanting me. If you get the impression early in life that the world doesn’t want you, then you’re going to make yourself wanted and indispensable. And people do that through work. I did it through being a medical doctor. I also have this propensity to soothe myself through shopping, especially when I’m stressed, and I happen to shop for classical compact music. But it goes back to this insatiable need of the infant who is not soothed, and they have to develop, or their brain develop, these self-soothing strategies.

AMY GOODMAN: How do you think kids with ADD, with attention deficit disorder, should be treated?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, if we recognize that it’s not a disease and it’s not genetic, but it’s a problem of brain development, and knowing the good news, fortunately—and this is also true for addicts—that the brain, the human brain, can develop new circuits even later on in life—and that’s called neuroplasticity, the capacity of the brain to be molded by new experience later in life—then the question becomes not of how to regulate and control symptoms, but how do you promote development. And that has to do with providing kids with the kind of environment and nurturing that they need so that those circuits can develop later on.

That’s also, by the way, what the addict needs. So instead of a punitive approach, we need to have a much more compassionate, caring approach that would allow these people to develop, because the development is stuck at a very early age.

AMY GOODMAN: You began your talk last night at Columbia, which I went to hear, at the law school, with a quote, and I’d like you to end our conversation with that quote.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Would that be the quote that only in the presence of compassion will people allow themselves—

AMY GOODMAN: Mahfouz.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Oh, oh, no, yeah, Naguib Mahfouz, the great Egyptian writer. He said that “Nothing records the effects of a sad life” so completely as the human body—“so graphically as the human body.” And you see that sad life in the faces and bodies of my patients.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Gabor Maté, author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. He’s a bestselling author. He’s a physician in Canada.

In that first interview, we touched briefly on his work on attention deficit disorder, the subject of his book Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do about It. Well, just about a month ago, we had Dr. Maté back on Democracy Now! to talk more about ADD, as well as parenting, bullying, the education system, and how a litany of stresses on the family environment is leading to what he calls the “destruction of the American childhood.”

DR. GABOR MATÉ: In the United States right now, there are three million children receiving stimulant medications for ADHD.

AMY GOODMAN: ADHD means?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. And there are about half-a-million kids in this country receiving heavy-duty anti-psychotic medications, medications such as are usually given to adult schizophrenics to regulate their hallucinations. But in this case, children are getting it to control their behavior. So what we have is a massive social experiment of the chemical control of children’s behavior, with no idea of the long-term consequences of these heavy-duty anti-psychotics on kids.

And I know that Canadians statistics just last week showed that within last five years, 43—there’s been a 43 percent increase in the rate of dispensing of stimulant prescriptions for ADD or ADHD, and most of these are going to boys. In other words, what we’re seeing is an unprecedented burgeoning of the diagnosis. And I should say, really, I’m talking about, more broadly speaking, what I would call the destruction of American childhood, because ADD is just a template, or it’s just an example of what’s going on. In fact, according to a recent study published in the States, nearly half of American adolescents now meet some criteria or criteria for mental health disorders. So we’re talking about a massive impact on our children of something in our culture that’s just not being recognized.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain exactly what attention deficit disorder is, what attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, specifically ADD is a compound of three categorical set of symptoms. One has to do with poor impulse control. So, these children have difficulty controlling their impulses. When their brain tells them to do something, from the lower brain centers, there’s nothing up here in the cortex, which is where the executive functions are, which is where the functions are that are supposed to tell us what to do and what not to do, those circuits just don’t work. So there’s poor impulse control. They act out. They behave aggressively. They speak out of turn. They say the wrong thing. Adults with ADD will shop compulsively, or impulsively, I should say, and, again, behave in impulsive fashion. So, poor impulse control.

But again, please notice that the impulse control problem is general amongst kids these days. In other words, it’s not just the kids diagnosed with ADD, but a lot of kids. And there’s a whole lot of new diagnoses now. And children are being diagnosed with all kinds of things. ADD is just one example. There’s a new diagnosis called oppositional defiant disorder, which again has to do with behaviors and poor impulse control, so that impulse control now has become a problem amongst children, in general, not just the specific ones diagnosed with ADD.

The second criteria for ADD is physical hyperactivity. So the part of the brain, again, that’s supposed to regulate physical activity and keep you still just, again, doesn’t work.

And then, finally, in the third criteria is poor attention skills—tuning out; not paying attention; mind being somewhere else; absent-mindedness; not being able to focus; beginning to work on something, five minutes later the mind goes somewhere else. So, kind of a mental restlessness and the lack of being still, lack of being focused, lack of being present. These are the three major criteria of ADD.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to this point that you just raised about the destruction of American childhood. What do you mean by that?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, the conditions in which children develop have been so corrupted and troubled over the last several decades that the template for normal brain development is no longer present for many, many kids. And Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk, who’s a professor of psychiatry at Boston—University of Boston, he actually says that the neglect or abuse of children is the number one public health concern in the United States. A recent study coming out of Notre Dame by a psychologist there has shown that the conditions for child development that hunter-gatherer societies provided for their children, which are the optimal conditions for development, are no longer present for our kids. And she says, actually, that the way we raise our children today in this country is increasingly depriving them of the practices that lead to well-being in a moral sense.

So what’s really going on here now is that the developmental conditions for healthy childhood psychological and brain development are less and less available, so that the issue of ADD is only a small part of the general issue that children are no longer having the support for the way they need to develop.

As I made the point in my book about addiction, as well, the human brain does not develop on its own, does not develop according to a genetic program, depends very much on the environment. And the essential condition for the physiological development of these brain circuits that regulate human behavior, that give us empathy, that give us a social sense, that give us a connection with other people, that give us a connection with ourselves, that allows us to mature—the essential condition for those circuits, for their physiological development, is the presence of emotionally available, consistently available, non-stressed, attuned parenting caregivers.

Now, what do you have in a country where the average maternity leave is six weeks? These kids don’t have emotional caregivers available to them. What do you have in a country where poor women, nearly 50 percent of them, suffer from postpartum depression? And when a woman has postpartum depression, she can’t be attuned to the child.

AMY GOODMAN: And what about fathers?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, the situation with fathers is, is that increasingly—there was a study recently that showed an increasing number of men are having postpartum depression, as well. And the main role of the father, of course, would be to support the mother. But when people are—emotionally, because the cause of postpartum depression in the mother it is not intrinsic to the mother—not intrinsic to the mother.

What we have to understand here is that human beings are not discrete, individual entities, contrary to the free enterprise myth that people are competitive, individualistic, private entities. What people actually are are social creatures, very much dependent on one another and very much programmed to cooperate with one another when the circumstances are right. When that’s not available, if the support is not available for women, that’s when they get depressed. When the fathers are stressed, they’re not supporting the women in that really important, crucial bonding role in the beginning. In fact, they get stressed and depressed themselves.

The child’s brain development depends on the presence of non-stressed, emotionally available parents. In this country, that’s less and less available. Hence, you’ve got burgeoning rates of autism in this country. It’s going up like 20- or 30-fold in the last 30 or 40 years.

AMY GOODMAN: Say what you mean by autism.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, autism is a whole spectrum of disorders, but the essential quality of it is an emotional disconnect. These children are living in a mind of their own. They don’t respond appropriately to emotional cues. They withdraw. They act out in an aggressive and sometimes just unpredictable fashion. They don’t know how to—there’s no sense—there’s no clear sense of a emotional connection and just peace inside them.

And there’s many, many more kids in this country now, several-fold increase, 20-fold increase in the last 30 years. The rates of anxiety amongst children is increasing. The numbers of kids on antidepressant medications has increased tremendously. The number of kids being diagnosed with bipolar disorder has gone up. And then not to mention all the behavioral issues, the bullying that I’ve already mentioned, the precocious sexuality, the teenage pregnancies. There’s now a program, a so-called “reality show,” that just focuses on teenage mothers.

You know, in other words—see, it never used to be that children grew up in a stressed nuclear family. That wasn’t the normal basis for child development. The normal basis for child development has always been the clan, the tribe, the community, the neighborhood, the extended family. Essentially, post-industrial capitalism has completely destroyed those conditions. People no longer live in communities which are still connected to one another. People don’t work where they live. They don’t shop where they live. The kids don’t go to school, necessarily, where they live. The parents are away most of the day. For the first time in history, children are not spending most of their time around the nurturing adults in their lives. And they’re spending their lives away from the nurturing adults, which is what they need for healthy brain development.

[...]

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about how the drugs, Gabor Maté, affect the development of the brain.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: In ADD, there’s an essential brain chemical, which is necessary for incentive and motivation, that seems to be lacking. That’s called dopamine. And dopamine is simply an essential life chemical. Without it, there’s no life. Mice in a laboratory who have no dopamine will starve themselves to death, because they have no incentive to eat. Even though they’re hungry, and even though their life is in danger, they will not eat, because there’s no motivation or incentive. So, partly, one way to look at ADD is a massive problem of motivation, because the dopamine is lacking in the brain. Now, the stimulant medications elevate dopamine levels, and these kids are now more motivated. They can focus and pay attention.

However, the assumption underneath giving these kids medications is that what we’re dealing with here is a genetic disorder, and the only way to deal with it is pharmacologically. And if you actually look at how the dopamine levels in a brain develop, if you look at infant monkeys and you measure their dopamine levels, and they’re normal when they’re with their mothers, and when you separate them from mothers, the dopamine levels go down within two or three days.

So, in other words, what we’re doing is we’re correcting a massive social problem that has to do with disconnection in a society and the loss of nurturing, non-stressed parenting, and we’re replacing that chemically. Now, the drugs—the stimulant drugs do seem to work, and a lot of kids are helped by it. The problem is not so much whether they should be used or not; the problem is that 80 percent of the time a kid is prescribed a medication, that’s all that happens. Nobody talks to the family about the family environment. The school makes no attempt to change the school environment. Nobody connects with these kids emotionally. In other words, it’s seen simply as a medical or a behavioral problem, but not as a problem of development.

AMY GOODMAN: Gabor Maté, you talk about acting out. What does acting out mean?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, it’s a great question. You see, when we hear the phrase “acting out,” we usually mean that a kid is behaving badly, that a child is being obstreperous, oppositional, violent, bullying, rude. That’s because we don’t know how to speak English anymore. The phrase “acting out” means you’re portraying behavior that which you haven’t got the words to say in language. In a game of charades, you have to act out, because you’re not allowed to speak. If you landed in a country where nobody spoke your language and you were hungry, you would have to literally demonstrate your anger—sorry, your hunger, through behavior, pointing to your mouth or to your empty belly, because you don’t have the words.

My point is that, yes, a lot of children are acting out, but it’s not bad behavior. It’s a representation of emotional losses and emotional lacks in their lives. And whether it’s, again, bullying or a whole set of other behaviors, what we’re dealing with here is childhood stunted emotional development—in some cases, stunted pain development. And rather than trying to control these behaviors through punishments, or even just exclusively through medications, we need to help these kids develop.

AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned you suffered from ADD, attention deficit disorder, yourself—

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN:—and were drugged for it. Explain your own story.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, I was in my early fifties, and I was working in palliative care at the time. I was coordinator of a palliative care unit at a large Canadian hospital. And a social worker in the unit, who had just been diagnosed as an adult, told me about her story. And as a physician, I was like most physicians who know nothing about ADD. Most physicians really don’t know about the condition. But when she told me her story, I realized that was me. And subsequently, I was diagnosed. And—

AMY GOODMAN: And what was that story? What did you realize was you?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Oh, poor impulse control a lot of my life, impulsive behaviors, disorganization, a tendency to tune out a lot, be absentminded, and physical restlessness. I mean, I had trouble sitting still. All the traits, you know, that I saw in the literature on ADD, I recognized in myself, which was kind of an epiphany, in a sense, because you get to understand—at least you get a sense of why you’re behaving the way you’re behaving.

What never made sense to me right from the beginning, though, is the idea of ADD as a genetic disease. And not even after a couple of my kids were diagnosed with it, I still didn’t buy the idea that it’s genetic, because it isn’t. Again, it has to do with, in my case, very stressed circumstances as an infant, which I talked about on a previous program. In the case of my children, it’s because their father was a workaholic doctor who wasn’t emotionally available to them. And under those circumstances, children are stressed. I mean, if children are stressed when their brains are developing, one way to deal with the stress is to tune out.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about holding on to your kids, why parents need to matter more than peers.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Amy, in 1998, there was a book that was on the New York Times best book of the year and nearly won the Pulitzer Prize, and it was called The Nurture Assumption, in which this researcher argued that parents don’t make any difference anymore, because she looked at the—to the extent that Newsweek actually had a cover article that year entitled “Do Parents Matter?” Now, if you want to get the full stupidity of that question, you have to imagine a veterinarian magazine asking, “Does the mother cat make any difference?” or “Does the mother bear matter?” But the research showed that children are being more influenced now, in their tastes, in their attitudes, in their behaviors, by peers than by parents. This poor researcher concluded that this is somehow natural. And what she mistook was that what is the norm in North America, she actually thought that was natural and healthy. In fact, it isn’t.

So, our book, Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers, is about showing why it is true that children are being more influenced by other kids in these days than by their parents, but just what an aberration that is, and what a distortion it is of normal human development, because normal human development demands, as normal mammalian development demands, the presence of nurturing parents. You know, even birds—birds don’t develop properly unless the mother and father bird are there. Bears, cats, rats, mice. Although, most of all, human beings, because human beings are the least mature and the most dependent for the longest period of time.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the importance of attachment?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Attachment is the drive to be close to somebody, and attachment is a power force in human relationship—in fact, the most powerful force there is. Even as adults, when attachment relationships that people want to be close to are lost to us or they’re threatened somehow, we get very disoriented, very upset. Now, for children and babies and adolescents, that’s an absolute necessity, because the more immature you are, the more you need your attachments. It’s like a force of gravity that pulls two bodies together. Now, when the attachment goes in the wrong direction, instead of to the adults, but to the peer group, childhood developments can be distorted, development is stopped in its tracks, and parenting and teaching become extremely difficult.

AMY GOODMAN: You co-wrote this book, and you both found, in your experience, Hold on to Your Kids, that your kids were becoming increasingly secretive and unreachable.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, that’s the thing. You see, now, if your spouse or partner, adult spouse or partner, came home from work and didn’t give you the time of day and got on the phone and talked with other people all the time and spent all their time on email talking to other people, your friends wouldn’t say, “You’ve got a behavioral problem. You should try tough love.” They’d say you’ve got a relationship problem. But when children act in these ways, we think we have a behavioral problem, we try and control the behaviors. In fact, what they’re showing us is that—my children showed this, as well—is that I had a relationship problem with them. They weren’t connected enough with me and too connected to the peer group. So that’s why they wanted to spend all their time with their peer group. And now we’ve given kids the technology to do that with. So the terrible downside of the internet is that now kids are spending time with each other—

AMY GOODMAN: Not even in the presence of each other.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: That’s exactly the point, because, you see, that’s an attachment dynamic. One of the basic ways that people attach to each other is to want to be with the people that you want to connect with. So when kids spend time with each other, it’s not a behavior problem; it’s a sign that their relationships have been skewed towards the peer group. And that’s why it’s so difficult to peel them off their computers, because their desperation is to connect with the people that they’re trying to attach to. And that’s no longer us, as the adults, as the parents in their life.

AMY GOODMAN: So how do you change this dynamic?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, first we have to recognize its manifestations. And so, we have to recognize that whenever the child doesn’t look adults in the eye anymore, when the child wants to be always on the Skype or the cell phone or twittering or emailing or MSM messengering, you recognize it when the child becomes oppositional to adults. We tend to think that that’s a normal childhood phenomenon. It’s normal only to a certain degree.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, they have to rebel in order to separate later.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: No. They have to separate, but they don’t have to rebel. In other words, separation is a normal human—individuation is a normal human developmental stage. You have to become a separate, individual person. But it doesn’t mean you have to reject and be hostile to the values of the adults. As a matter of fact, in traditional societies, children would become adults by being initiated into the adult group by elders, like the Jewish Bar Mitzvah ceremony or the initiation rituals of tribal cultures around the world. Now kids are initiated by other kids. And now you have the gang phenomenon, so that the teenage gang phenomenon is actually a misplaced initiation and orientation ritual, where kids are now rebelling against adult values. But it’s not because they’re bad kids, but because they’ve become disconnected from adults.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Maté, there’s a whole debate about education in the United States right now. How does this fit in?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, you have to ask, how do children learn? How do children learn? And learning is an attachment dynamic, as well. You learn when you want to be like somebody. So you copy them, so you learn from them. You learn when you’re curious. And you learn when you’re willing to try something, and if it doesn’t work, you try something else.

Now, here’s what happens. Caring about something and being curious about something and recognizing that something doesn’t work, you have to have a certain degree of emotional security. You have to be able to be open and vulnerable. Children who become peer-oriented—because the peer world is so dangerous and so fraught with bullying and ostracization and dissing and exclusion and negative talk, how does a child protect himself or herself from all that negativity in the peer world? Because children are not committed to each others’ unconditional loving acceptance. Even adults have a hard time giving that. Children can’t do it. Those children become very insecure, and emotionally, to protect themselves, they shut down. They become hardened, so they become cool. Nothing matters. Cool is the ethic. You see that in the rock videos. It’s all about cool. It’s all about aggression and cool and no real emotion. Now, when that happens, curiosity goes, because curiosity is vulnerable, because you care about something and you’re admitting that you don’t know. You won’t try anything, because if you fail, again, your vulnerability is exposed. So, you’re not willing to have trial and error.

And in terms of who you’re learning from, as long as kids were attaching to adults, they were looking to the adults to be modeling themselves on, to learn from, and to get their cues from. Now, kids are still learning from the people they’re attached to, but now it’s other kids. So you have whole generations of kids that are looking to other kids now to be their main cue-givers. So teachers have an almost impossible problem on their hands. And unfortunately, in North America again, education is seen as a question of academic pedagogy, hence these terrible standardized tests. And the very teachers who work with the most difficult kids are the ones who are most penalized.

AMY GOODMAN: Because if they don’t have good test scores, standardized test scores, in their class—

DR. GABOR MATÉ: They’re seen as bad teachers.

AMY GOODMAN:—then they could be fired. They’re seen as bad teachers, which means they’re going to want to kick out any difficult kids.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: That’s exactly it. The difficult kids are kicked out, and teachers will be afraid to go into neighborhoods where, because of troubled family relationships, the kids are having difficulties, the kids are peer-oriented, the kids are not looking to the teachers. And this is seen as a reflection. So, actually, teachers are being slandered right now. Teachers are being slandered now because of the failure of the American society to produce the right environment for childhood development.

AMY GOODMAN: Because of the destruction of American childhood.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: That’s right. What the problem reflects is the loss of the community and the neighborhood. We have to recreate that. So, the schools have to become not just places of pedagogy, but places of emotional connection. The teachers should be in the emotional connection game before they attempt to be in the pedagogy game.

Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!.

© 2010 Democracy Now! All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/149325/

Until very recently, food was invisible as a political issue. Something is stirring. Pollan reviews five books that address the heart of the food movement.

Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front by Joel Salatin, Polyface

All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America? by Joel Berg, Seven Stories

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, Little, Brown

Terra Madre: Forging a New Global Network of Sustainable Food Communities by Carlo Petrini, with a foreword by Alice Waters — Chelsea Green


The Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society by Janet A. Flammang — University of Illinois Press

1. Food Made Visible

It might sound odd to say this about something people deal with at least three times a day, but food in America has been more or less invisible, politically speaking, until very recently. At least until the early 1970s, when a bout of food price inflation and the appearance of books critical of industrial agriculture (by Wendell Berry, Francis Moore Lappé, and Barry Commoner, among others) threatened to propel the subject to the top of the national agenda, Americans have not had to think very hard about where their food comes from, or what it is doing to the planet, their bodies, and their society.

Most people count this a blessing. Americans spend a smaller percentage of their income on food than any people in history—slightly less than 10 percent—and a smaller amount of their time preparing it: a mere thirty-one minutes a day on average, including clean-up. The supermarkets brim with produce summoned from every corner of the globe, a steady stream of novel food products (17,000 new ones each year) crowds the middle aisles, and in the freezer case you can find “home meal replacements” in every conceivable ethnic stripe, demanding nothing more of the eater than opening the package and waiting for the microwave to chirp. Considered in the long sweep of human history, in which getting food dominated not just daily life but economic and political life as well, having to worry about food as little as we do, or did, seems almost a kind of dream.

The dream that the age-old “food problem” had been largely solved for most Americans was sustained by the tremendous postwar increases in the productivity of American farmers, made possible by cheap fossil fuel (the key ingredient in both chemical fertilizers and pesticides) and changes in agricultural policies. Asked by President Nixon to try to drive down the cost of food after it had spiked in the early 1970s, Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz shifted the historical focus of federal farm policy from supporting prices for farmers to boosting yields of a small handful of commodity crops (corn and soy especially) at any cost.

The administration’s cheap food policy worked almost too well: crop prices fell, forcing farmers to produce still more simply to break even. This led to a deep depression in the farm belt in the 1980s followed by a brutal wave of consolidation. Most importantly, the price of food came down, or at least the price of the kinds of foods that could be made from corn and soy: processed foods and sweetened beverages and feedlot meat. (Prices for fresh produce have increased since the 1980s.) Washington had succeeded in eliminating food as a political issue—an objective dear to most governments at least since the time of the French Revolution. But although cheap food is good politics, it turns out there are significant costs—to the environment, to public health, to the public purse, even to the culture—and as these became impossible to ignore in recent years, food has come back into view. Beginning in the late 1980s, a series of food safety scandals opened people’s eyes to the way their food was being produced, each one drawing the curtain back a little further on a food system that had changed beyond recognition. When BSE, or mad cow disease, surfaced in England in 1986, Americans learned that cattle, which are herbivores, were routinely being fed the flesh of other cattle; the practice helped keep meat cheap but at the risk of a hideous brain-wasting disease.

The 1993 deaths of four children in Washington State who had eaten hamburgers from Jack in the Box were traced to meat contaminated with E.coli 0157:H7, a mutant strain of the common intestinal bacteria first identified in feedlot cattle in 1982. Since then, repeated outbreaks of food-borne illness linked to new antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria (campylobacter, salmonella, MRSA) have turned a bright light on the shortsighted practice of routinely administering antibiotics to food animals, not to treat disease but simply to speed their growth and allow them to withstand the filthy and stressful conditions in which they live.

In the wake of these food safety scandals, the conversation about food politics that briefly flourished in the 1970s was picked up again in a series of books, articles, and movies about the consequences of industrial food production.Beginning in 2001 with the publication of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, a surprise best-seller, and, the following year, Marion Nestle’s Food Politics, the food journalism of the last decade has succeeded in making clear and telling connections between the methods of industrial food production, agricultural policy, food-borne illness, childhood obesity, the decline of the family meal as an institution, and, notably, the decline of family income beginning in the 1970s.

Besides drawing women into the work force, falling wages made fast food both cheap to produce and a welcome, if not indispensible, option for pinched and harried families. The picture of the food economy Schlosser painted resembles an upside-down version of the social compact sometimes referred to as “Fordism”: instead of paying workers well enough to allow them to buy things like cars, as Henry Ford proposed to do, companies like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s pay their workers so poorly that they can afford only the cheap, low-quality food these companies sell, creating a kind of nonvirtuous circle driving down both wages and the quality of food. The advent of fast food (and cheap food in general) has, in effect, subsidized the decline of family incomes in America.

2. Food Politics

Cheap food has become an indispensable pillar of the modern economy. But it is no longer an invisible or uncontested one. One of the most interesting social movements to emerge in the last few years is the “food movement,” or perhaps I should say “movements,” since it is unified as yet by little more than the recognition that industrial food production is in need of reform because its social/environmental/public health/animal welfare/gastronomic costs are too high.

As that list suggests, the critics are coming at the issue from a great many different directions. Where many social movements tend to splinter as time goes on, breaking into various factions representing divergent concerns or tactics, the food movement starts out splintered. Among the many threads of advocacy that can be lumped together under that rubric we can include school lunch reform; the campaign for animal rights and welfare; the campaign against genetically modified crops; the rise of organic and locally produced food; efforts to combat obesity and type 2 diabetes; “food sovereignty” (the principle that nations should be allowed to decide their agricultural policies rather than submit to free trade regimes); farm bill reform; food safety regulation; farmland preservation; student organizing around food issues on campus; efforts to promote urban agriculture and ensure that communities have access to healthy food; initiatives to create gardens and cooking classes in schools; farm worker rights; nutrition labeling; feedlot pollution; and the various efforts to regulate food ingredients and marketing, especially to kids.

It’s a big, lumpy tent, and sometimes the various factions beneath it work at cross-purposes. For example, activists working to strengthen federal food safety regulations have recently run afoul of local food advocates, who fear that the burden of new regulation will cripple the current revival of small-farm agriculture. Joel Salatin, the Virginia meat producer and writer who has become a hero to the food movement, fulminates against food safety regulation on libertarian grounds in his Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front. Hunger activists like Joel Berg, in All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America?, criticize supporters of “sustainable” agriculture—i.e., producing food in ways that do not harm the environment—for advocating reforms that threaten to raise the cost of food to the poor. Animal rights advocates occasionally pick fights with sustainable meat producers (such as Joel Salatin), as Jonathan Safran Foer does in his recent vegetarian polemic, Eating Animals.

But there are indications that these various voices may be coming together in something that looks more and more like a coherent movement. Many in the animal welfare movement, from PETA to Peter Singer, have come to see that a smaller-scale, more humane animal agriculture is a goal worth fighting for, and surely more attainable than the abolition of meat eating. Stung by charges of elitism, activists for sustainable farming are starting to take seriously the problem of hunger and poverty. They’re promoting schemes and policies to make fresh local food more accessible to the poor, through programs that give vouchers redeemable at farmers’ markets to participants in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and food stamp recipients. Yet a few underlying tensions remain: the “hunger lobby” has traditionally supported farm subsidies in exchange for the farm lobby’s support of nutrition programs, a marriage of convenience dating to the 1960s that vastly complicates reform of the farm bill—a top priority for the food movement.

The sociologist Troy Duster reminds us of an all-important axiom about social movements: “No movement is as coherent and integrated as it seems from afar,” he says, “and no movement is as incoherent and fractured as it seems from up close.” Viewed from a middle distance, then, the food movement coalesces around the recognition that today’s food and farming economy is “unsustainable”—that it can’t go on in its current form much longer without courting a breakdown of some kind, whether environmental, economic, or both.

For some in the movement, the more urgent problem is environmental: the food system consumes more fossil fuel energy than we can count on in the future (about a fifth of the total American use of such energy) and emits more greenhouse gas than we can afford to emit, particularly since agriculture is the one human system that should be able to substantially rely on photosynthesis: solar energy. It will be difficult if not impossible to address the issue of climate change without reforming the food system. This is a conclusion that has only recently been embraced by the environmental movement, which historically has disdained all agriculture as a lapse from wilderness and a source of pollution.1 But in the last few years, several of the major environmental groups have come to appreciate that a diversified, sustainable agriculture—which can sequester large amounts of carbon in the soil—holds the potential not just to mitigate but actually to help solve environmental problems, including climate change. Today, environmental organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Working Group are taking up the cause of food system reform, lending their expertise and clout to the movement.

But perhaps the food movement’s strongest claim on public attention today is the fact that the American diet of highly processed food laced with added fats and sugars is responsible for the epidemic of chronic diseases that threatens to bankrupt the health care system. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that fully three quarters of US health care spending goes to treat chronic diseases, most of which are preventable and linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and at least a third of all cancers. The health care crisis probably cannot be addressed without addressing the catastrophe of the American diet, and that diet is the direct (even if unintended) result of the way that our agriculture and food industries have been organized.

Michelle Obama’s recent foray into food politics, beginning with the organic garden she planted on the White House lawn last spring, suggests that the administration has made these connections. Her new “Let’s Move” campaign to combat childhood obesity might at first blush seem fairly anodyne, but in announcing the initiative in February, and in a surprisingly tough speech to the Grocery Manufacturers Association in March,2 the First Lady has effectively shifted the conversation about diet from the industry’s preferred ground of “personal responsibility” and exercise to a frank discussion of the way food is produced and marketed. “We need you not just to tweak around the edges,” she told the assembled food makers, “but to entirely rethink the products that you’re offering, the information that you provide about these products, and how you market those products to our children.”

Mrs. Obama explicitly rejected the conventional argument that the food industry is merely giving people the sugary, fatty, and salty foods they want, contending that the industry “doesn’t just respond to people’s natural inclinations—it also actually helps to shape them,” through the ways it creates products and markets them.

So far at least, Michelle Obama is the food movement’s most important ally in the administration, but there are signs of interest elsewhere. Under Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, the FDA has cracked down on deceptive food marketing and is said to be weighing a ban on the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in factory farming. Attorney General Eric Holder recently avowed the Justice Department’s intention to pursue antitrust enforcement in agribusiness, one of the most highly concentrated sectors in the economy.3 At his side was Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa, who has planted his own organic vegetable garden at the department and launched a new “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” initiative aimed at promoting local food systems as a way to both rebuild rural economies and improve access to healthy food.

Though Vilsack has so far left mostly undisturbed his department’s traditional deference to industrial agriculture, the new tone in Washington and the appointment of a handful of respected reformers (such as Tufts professor Kathleen Merrigan as deputy secretary of agriculture) has elicited a somewhat defensive, if not panicky, reaction from agribusiness. The Farm Bureau recently urged its members to go on the offensive against “food activists,” and a trade association representing pesticide makers called CropLife America wrote to Michelle Obama suggesting that her organic garden had unfairly maligned chemical agriculture and encouraging her to use “crop protection technologies”—i.e., pesticides.

The First Lady’s response is not known; however, the President subsequently rewarded CropLife by appointing one of its executives to a high-level trade post. This and other industry-friendly appointments suggest that while the administration may be sympathetic to elements of the food movement’s agenda, it isn’t about to take on agribusiness, at least not directly, at least until it senses at its back a much larger constituency for reform.

One way to interpret Michelle Obama’s deepening involvement in food issues is as an effort to build such a constituency, and in this she may well succeed. It’s a mistake to underestimate what a determined First Lady can accomplish. Lady Bird Johnson’s “highway beautification” campaign also seemed benign, but in the end it helped raise public consciousness about “the environment” (as it would soon come to be known) and put an end to the public’s tolerance for littering. And while Michelle Obama has explicitly limited her efforts to exhortation (“we can’t solve this problem by passing a bunch of laws in Washington,” she told the Grocery Manufacturers, no doubt much to their relief), her work is already creating a climate in which just such a “bunch of laws” might flourish: a handful of state legislatures, including California’s, are seriously considering levying new taxes on sugar in soft drinks, proposals considered hopelessly extreme less than a year ago.

The political ground is shifting, and the passage of health care reform may accelerate that movement. The bill itself contains a few provisions long promoted by the food movement (like calorie labeling on fast food menus), but more important could be the new political tendencies it sets in motion. If health insurers can no longer keep people with chronic diseases out of their patient pools, it stands to reason that the companies will develop a keener interest in preventing those diseases. They will then discover that they have a large stake in things like soda taxes and in precisely which kinds of calories the farm bill is subsidizing. As the insurance industry and the government take on more responsibility for the cost of treating expensive and largely preventable problems like obesity and type 2 diabetes, pressure for reform of the food system, and the American diet, can be expected to increase.

3. Beyond the Barcode

It would be a mistake to conclude that the food movement’s agenda can be reduced to a set of laws, policies, and regulations, important as these may be. What is attracting so many people to the movement today (and young people in particular) is a much less conventional kind of politics, one that is about something more than food. The food movement is also about community, identity, pleasure, and, most notably, about carving out a new social and economic space removed from the influence of big corporations on the one side and government on the other. As the Diggers used to say during their San Francisco be-ins during the 1960s, food can serve as “an edible dynamic”—a means to a political end that is only nominally about food itself.

One can get a taste of this social space simply by hanging around a farmers’ market, an activity that a great many people enjoy today regardless of whether they’re in the market for a bunch of carrots or a head of lettuce. Farmers’ markets are thriving, more than five thousand strong, and there is a lot more going on in them than the exchange of money for food. Someone is collecting signatures on a petition. Someone else is playing music. Children are everywhere, sampling fresh produce, talking to farmers. Friends and acquaintances stop to chat. One sociologist calculated that people have ten times as many conversations at the farmers’ market than they do in the supermarket. Socially as well as sensually, the farmers’ market offers a remarkably rich and appealing environment. Someone buying food here may be acting not just as a consumer but also as a neighbor, a citizen, a parent, a cook. In many cities and towns, farmers’ markets have taken on (and not for the first time) the function of a lively new public square.

Though seldom articulated as such, the attempt to redefine, or escape, the traditional role of consumer has become an important aspiration of the food movement. In various ways it seeks to put the relationship between consumers and producers on a new, more neighborly footing, enriching the kinds of information exchanged in the transaction, and encouraging us to regard our food dollars as “votes” for a different kind of agriculture and, by implication, economy. The modern marketplace would have us decide what to buy strictly on the basis of price and self-interest; the food movement implicitly proposes that we enlarge our understanding of both those terms, suggesting that not just “good value” but ethical and political values should inform our buying decisions, and that we’ll get more satisfaction from our eating when they do.

That satisfaction helps to explain why many in the movement don’t greet the spectacle of large corporations adopting its goals, as some of them have begun to do, with unalloyed enthusiasm. Already Wal-Mart sells organic and local food, but this doesn’t greatly warm the hearts of food movement activists. One important impetus for the movement, or at least its locavore wing—those who are committed to eating as much locally produced food as possible—is the desire to get “beyond the barcode”—to create new economic and social structures outside of the mainstream consumer economy. Though not always articulated in these terms, the local food movement wants to decentralize the global economy, if not secede from it altogether, which is why in some communities, such as Great Barrington, Massachusetts, local currencies (the “BerkShare”) have popped up.

In fact it’s hard to say which comes first: the desire to promote local agriculture or the desire to promote local economies more generally by cutting ties, to whatever degree possible, to the national economic grid.4 This is at bottom a communitarian impulse, and it is one that is drawing support from the right as well as the left. Though the food movement has deep roots in the counterculture of the 1960s, its critique of corporate food and federal farm subsidies, as well as its emphasis on building community around food, has won it friends on the right. In his 2006 book Crunchy Cons, Rod Dreher identifies a strain of libertarian conservatism, often evangelical, that regards fast food as anathema to family values, and has seized on local food as a kind of culinary counterpart to home schooling.

It makes sense that food and farming should become a locus of attention for Americans disenchanted with consumer capitalism. Food is the place in daily life where corporatization can be most vividly felt: think about the homogenization of taste and experience represented by fast food. By the same token, food offers us one of the shortest, most appealing paths out of the corporate labyrinth, and into the sheer diversity of local flavors, varieties, and characters on offer at the farmers’ market.

Put another way, the food movement has set out to foster new forms of civil society. But instead of proposing that space as a counterweight to an overbearing state, as is usually the case, the food movement poses it against the dominance of corporations and their tendency to insinuate themselves into any aspect of our lives from which they can profit. As Wendell Berry writes, the corporationswill grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into your mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so.

The corporatization of something as basic and intimate as eating is, for many of us today, a good place to draw the line.

The Italian-born organization Slow Food, founded in 1986 as a protest against the arrival of McDonald’s in Rome, represents perhaps the purest expression of these politics. The organization, which now has 100,000 members in 132 countries, began by dedicating itself to “a firm defense of quiet material pleasure” but has lately waded into deeper political and economic waters. Slow Food’s founder and president, Carlo Petrini, a former leftist journalist, has much to say about how people’s daily food choices can rehabilitate the act of consumption, making it something more creative and progressive. In his new book Terra Madre: Forging a New Global Network of Sustainable Food Communities, Petrini urges eaters and food producers to join together in “food communities” outside of the usual distribution channels, which typically communicate little information beyond price and often exploit food producers. A farmers’ market is one manifestation of such a community, but Petrini is no mere locavore. Rather, he would have us practice on a global scale something like “local” economics, with its stress on neighborliness, as when, to cite one of his examples, eaters in the affluent West support nomad fisher folk in Mauritania by creating a market for their bottarga, or dried mullet roe. In helping to keep alive such a food tradition and way of life, the eater becomes something more than a consumer; she becomes what Petrini likes to call a “coproducer.”

Ever the Italian, Petrini puts pleasure at the center of his politics, which might explain why Slow Food is not always taken as seriously as it deserves to be. For why shouldn’t pleasure figure in the politics of the food movement? Good food is potentially one of the most democratic pleasures a society can offer, and is one of those subjects, like sports, that people can talk about across lines of class, ethnicity, and race.

The fact that the most humane and most environmentally sustainable choices frequently turn out to be the most delicious choices (as chefs such as Alice Waters and Dan Barber have pointed out) is fortuitous to say the least; it is also a welcome challenge to the more dismal choices typically posed by environmentalism, which most of the time is asking us to give up things we like. As Alice Waters has often said, it was not politics or ecology that brought her to organic agriculture, but rather the desire to recover a certain taste—one she had experienced as an exchange student in France. Of course democratizing such tastes, which under current policies tend to be more expensive, is the hard part, and must eventually lead the movement back to more conventional politics lest it be tagged as elitist.

But the movement’s interest in such seemingly mundane matters as taste and the other textures of everyday life is also one of its great strengths. Part of the movement’s critique of industrial food is that, with the rise of fast food and the collapse of everyday cooking, it has damaged family life and community by undermining the institution of the shared meal. Sad as it may be to bowl alone, eating alone can be sadder still, not least because it is eroding the civility on which our political culture depends.

That is the argument made by Janet Flammang, a political scientist, in a provocative new book called The Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society. “Significant social and political costs have resulted from fast food and convenience foods,” she writes, “grazing and snacking instead of sitting down for leisurely meals, watching television during mealtimes instead of conversing”—40 percent of Americans watch television during meals—”viewing food as fuel rather than sustenance, discarding family recipes and foodways, and denying that eating has social and political dimensions.” The cultural contradictions of capitalism—its tendency to undermine the stabilizing social forms it depends on—are on vivid display at the modern American dinner table.

In a challenge to second-wave feminists who urged women to get out of the kitchen, Flammang suggests that by denigrating “foodwork”—everything involved in putting meals on the family table—we have unthinkingly wrecked one of the nurseries of democracy: the family meal. It is at “the temporary democracy of the table” that children learn the art of conversation and acquire the habits of civility—sharing, listening, taking turns, navigating differences, arguing without offending—and it is these habits that are lost when we eat alone and on the run. “Civility is not needed when one is by oneself.”5

These arguments resonated during the Senate debate over health care reform, when The New York Times reported that the private Senate dining room, where senators of both parties used to break bread together, stood empty. Flammang attributes some of the loss of civility in Washington to the aftermatch of the 1994 Republican Revolution, when Newt Gingrich, the new Speaker of the House, urged his freshman legislators not to move their families to Washington. Members now returned to their districts every weekend, sacrificing opportunities for socializing across party lines and, in the process, the “reservoirs of good will replenished at dinner parties.” It is much harder to vilify someone with whom you have shared a meal.

Flammang makes a convincing case for the centrality of food work and shared meals, much along the lines laid down by Carlo Petrini and Alice Waters, but with more historical perspective and theoretical rigor. A scholar of the women’s movement, she suggests that “American women are having second thoughts” about having left the kitchen.6 However, the answer is not for them simply to return to it, at least not alone, but rather “for everyone—men, women, and children—to go back to the kitchen, as in preindustrial days, and for the workplace to lessen its time demands on people.” Flammang points out that the historical priority of the American labor movement has been to fight for money, while the European labor movement has fought for time, which she suggests may have been the wiser choice.

At the very least this is a debate worth having, and it begins by taking food issues much more seriously than we have taken them. Flammang suggests that the invisibility of these issues until recently owes to the identification of food work with women and the (related) fact that eating, by its very nature, falls on the wrong side of the mind–body dualism. “Food is apprehended through the senses of touch, smell and taste,” she points out,

which rank lower on the hierarchy of senses than sight and hearing, which are typically thought to give rise to knowledge. In most of philosophy, religion, and literature, food is associated with body, animal, female, and appetite—things civilized men have sought to overcome with reason and knowledge.

Much to our loss. But food is invisible no longer and, in light of the mounting costs we’ve incurred by ignoring it, it is likely to demand much more of our attention in the future, as eaters, parents, and citizens. It is only a matter of time before politicians seize on the power of the food issue, which besides being increasingly urgent is also almost primal, indeed is in some deep sense proto- political. For where do all politics begin if not in the high chair?—at that fateful moment when mother, or father, raises a spoonful of food to the lips of the baby who clamps shut her mouth, shakes her head no, and for the very first time in life awakens to and asserts her sovereign power.

1. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth made scant mention of food or agriculture, but in his recent follow-up book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis (2009), he devotes a long chapter to the subject of our food choices and their bearing on climate. ↩

2. Ms. Obama’s speech can be read at www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-first-lady-a-grocery-manufacturers-association-conference. ↩

3. Speaking in March at an Iowa “listening session” about agribusiness concentration, Holder said, “long periods of reckless deregulation have restricted competition” in agriculture. Indeed: four companies (JBS/Swift, Tyson, Cargill, and National Beef Packers) slaughter 85 percent of US beef cattle; two companies (Monsanto and DuPont) sell more than 50 percent of US corn seed; one company (Dean Foods) controls 40 percent of the US milk supply. ↩

4. For an interesting case study about a depressed Vermont mining town that turned to local food and agriculture to revitalize itself, see Ben Hewitt, The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food (Rodale, 2009). ↩

5. See David M. Herszenhorn, “In Senate Health Care Vote, New Partisan Vitriol,” The New York Times, December 23, 2009: “Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the Finance Committee, said the political—and often personal—divisions that now characterize the Senate were epitomized by the empty tables in the senators’ private dining room, a place where members of both parties used to break bread. ‘Nobody goes there anymore,’ Mr. Baucus said. ‘When I was here 10, 15, 30 years ago, that the place you would go to talk to senators, let your hair down, just kind of compare notes, no spouses allowed, no staff, nobody. It is now empty.’”↩

6. The stirrings of a new “radical homemakers” movement lends some support to the assertion. See Shannon Hayes’s Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture (Left to Write Press, 2010).↩

Essay originally published in the The New York Review of Books.

By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) — So what’s the biggest time-bomb for Obama, America, capitalism, the world? No, not global warming. Not poverty. Not even peak oil. What is the absolute biggest, one like the trigger mechanism on a nuclear bomb, one that’ll throw a wrench in global economic growth, ending capitalism, even destroying modern civilization?

The one that — if not solved soon — renders all efforts to solve all the other problems in the world, irrelevant, futile and virtually impossible?

News flash: the “Billionaires Club” knows: Bill Gates called billionaire philanthropists to a super-secret meeting in Manhattan last May. Included: Buffett, Rockefeller, Soros, Bloomberg, Turner, Oprah and others meeting at the “home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochemist and president of the private Rockefeller University, in Manhattan,” reports John Harlow in the London TimesOnline. During an afternoon session each was “given 15 minutes to present their favorite cause. Over dinner they discussed how they might settle on an ‘umbrella cause’ that could harness their interests.”

The world’s biggest time-bomb? Overpopulation, say the billionaires.

And yet, global governments with their $50 trillion GDP, aren’t even trying to solve the world’s overpopulation problem. G-20 leaders ignore it. So by 2050 the Earth’s population will explode by almost 50%, from 6.6 billion today to 9.3 billion says the United Nations.

And what about those billionaires and their billions? Can they stop the trend? Sadly no. Only a major crisis, a global catastrophe, a collapse beyond anything prior in world history will do it. Here’s why:

Civilizations collapse fast, crises trigger, leaders clueless

“One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations collapse,” warns Jared Diamond, an environmental biologist, Pulitzer prize winner and author of “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.” Many “civilizations share a sharp curve of decline. Indeed, a society’s demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power.”

Other voices are darker, shrill: “We’re past the point of no return.” “It’s already too late.” “The end is near.” As with Rome’s collapse, it happens fast. Clueless leaders are caught off-guard, like Greenspan, Bernanke and Paulson a couple years ago.

Call it “WWIII: The Population Wars.” A few years ago Fortune analyzed a classified Pentagon report predicting that “climate could change radically and fast. That would be the mother of all national security issues” Population unrest would then create “massive droughts, turning farmland into dust bowls and forests to ashes.” And “by 2020 there is little doubt that something drastic is happening … an old pattern could emerge; warfare defining human life.” War will be the end-game: For capitalism, civilization, earth?

Diamond’s 12-part equation is very simple, fits perfectly with a global warfare scenario: “More people require more food, space, water, energy, and other resources … There is a long built-in momentum to human population growth called the ‘demographic bulge’ with a disproportionate number of children and young reproductive-age people.” And if the “bulge” stops for any reason, game over. Economic “growth” ends, killing capitalism.

So look closely: Diamond’s equation has 12 time-bombs. But note, the first two are the biggest triggers in the formula. The other 10 are derivative variables.

1. Overpopulation Multiplier

According to TimesOnline: A few months before the billionaires meeting Gates noted: “Official [U.N.] projections say the world’s population will peak at 9.3 billion [up from 6.6 billion today] but with charitable initiatives, such as better reproductive health care, we think we can cap that at 8.3 billion.” Still, that’s 23% more than today’s 6.6 billion.

Can it be stopped? In a recent special issue of Scientific American, population was called “the most overlooked and essential strategy for achieving long-term balance with the environment.” Why? Population’s the new “third-rail” for politicians. So they ignore it.

Yet, if all nations consumed resources at the same rate as America, we’d need six Earths to survive. Unfortunately that scenario is unstoppable. Because by 2050, while America’s population grows from 300 million to a mere 400 million, the rest of the world will explode from 6.3 billion to 8.9 billion, with over 1.4 billion each in China and India.

2. Population Impact Multiplier

Diamond warns: “There are ‘optimists’ who argue that the world could support double its human population.” But he adds, they “consider only the increase in human numbers and not average increase in per-capita impact. But I have not heard anyone who seriously argues that the world could support 12 times it’s current impact.” And yet, that’s exactly what happens with “all third-world inhabitants adopting first-world standards.”

Folks, we oversold the American dream. Now everyone wants it. Not just 300 million Americans, but 6.3 billion people worldwide are demanding more, more, more!

“What really counts,” says Diamond, “is not the number of people alone, but their impact on the environment,” the “per-capita impact.” First-world citizens “consume 32 times more resources such as fossil fuels, and put out 32 times more waste, than do the inhabitants of the Third World.” So the race is on: “Low impact people are becoming high-impact people” aspiring “to first-world living standards.” The American dream is now the global dream.

Warning: The “Impact Multiplier” will drive the global “WWIII-Population Wars” equation even if there is zero population growth to 2050!

In Diamond’s masterpiece, “Collapse,” the two key variables are what we call the “Over-Population Multiplier” and “Population Impact Multiplier.” Now let’s closely examine Diamond’s other 10 variables that are driving our “WWIII-Population Wars” equation:

3. Food

Two billion people, mostly poor, depend on fish and other wild foods for protein. They “have collapsed or are in steep decline” forcing use of more costly animal proteins. The U.N. calls the global food crisis a “silent tsunami.” Food prices rise making it worse for the 2.7 billion living below poverty levels on two dollars a day.

In “The End of Plenty,” National Geographic warns that even a new “green revolution” of “synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation, supercharged by genetically engineered seeds” may fail. Why? A joint World Bank/U.N. study “concluded that the immense production increases brought about by science and technology the past 30 years have failed to improve food access for many of the world’s poor.”

Meanwhile, a Time cover story warns that America’s “addiction to meat” has led to farming that’s “destructive of the soil, the environment and us.”

4. Water

Diamond warns: “Most of the world’s fresh water in rivers and lakes is already being used for irrigation, domestic and industrial water,” transportation, fisheries and recreation. Water problems destroyed many earlier civilizations: “Today over a million people lack access to reliable safe drinking water.” British International Development Minister recently warned that two-thirds of the world will live in water-stressed countries by 2015.

Water will trade like oil futures as wars are fought over water and other basic essentials noted earlier in Fortune’s analysis of the Pentagon report predicting that warfare will define human life in this scenario of the near future.

5. Farmland

Crop soils are “being carried away by water and wind erosion at rates between 10 to 40 times the rates of soil formation,” much higher in forests where the soil-erosion rate is “between 500 and 10,000 times” replacement rate. And this is increasing in today’s new age of the 100,000-acre megafires.

6. Forests

We are destroying natural habitats and rain forests at an accelerating rate. Half the world’s original forests have been converted to urban developments. A quarter of what remains will be converted in the next 50 years.

7. Toxic chemicals

Often our solutions create more problems than they solve. For example, industries “manufacture or release into the air, soil, oceans, lakes, and rivers many toxic chemicals” that break down slowly or not at all. Consider the deadly impact of insecticides, pesticides, herbicides, detergents, plastics … the list is endless.

8. Energy resources: oil, natural gas and coal

Pimco manages $747 billion: equity, bonds and commodity funds. Manager Bill Gross recently described a “significant break” in the world’s “growth pattern.” He’s betting we’re past the “peak oil” tipping point. Consumer shopping will continue declining as economies grow very slowly in the future and “corporate profits will be static.”

A recent issue of Foreign Policy Journal warns of the “7 Myths About Alternative Energy.” Are biofuels, solar and nuclear the “major ticket?” No, they’re not, never will be.

9. Solar energy

Sunlight is not unlimited. Diamond: We’re already using “half of the Earth’s photosynthetic capacity” and we will reach the max by mid-century. In “Plundering the Amazon,” Bloomberg Markets magazine warned that Alcoa, Cargill and other companies “have bypassed laws designed to prevent destruction of the world’s largest rain forest … robbing the earth of its best shield against global warming.”

Free market capitalism may be the enemy of survival.

10. Ozone layer

“Human activities produce gases that escape into the atmosphere” where they can destroy the protective ozone or absorb and reduce solar energy.

11. Diversity

“A significant fraction of wild species, populations and genetic diversity has been lost, and at present rates, a large percent of the rest will disappear in half century.”

12. Alien species

Transferring species to lands where they’re not native can have unintended and catastrophic effects, “preying on, parasitizing, infecting or outcompeting” native animals and plants that lack evolutionary resistance.

In spite of the clear message in Diamond’s 12 time-bombs, he still says he’s a “cautious optimist.” What fuels his hope? Our leaders need “the courage to practice long-term thinking, and to make bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions at a time when problems have become perceptible but before they reach crisis proportions.”

Unfortunately, history tells us that cautious leaders are myopic, driven more by self-interest and nationalism than courage and long-term thinking. Eventually they’re caught off guard and their worlds collapse, fast. They only respond to crises.

And, yes, out of crisis may come opportunity. As Nobel economist Milton Friedman put it in his classic, “Capitalism and Freedom:” “Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change” because in the aftermath of crisis “the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” Too many, however, delay and respond to crises with too little, too late.

Bottom line: The betting odds are 100% that global leaders will wait for a Pentagon-style “black swan” crisis before acting. Unfortunately, that delay positions the “WWIII: The Population Wars” dead ahead.

29 September, 2010
CommonDreams.org

The food crisis of 2008 never really ended, it was ignored and forgotten. The rich and powerful are well fed; they had no food crisis, no shortage, so in the West, it was little more than a short lived sound bite, tragic but forgettable. To the poor in the developing world, whose ability to afford food is no better now than in 2008, the hunger continues.

Hunger can have many contributing factors; natural disaster, discrimination, war, poor infrastructure. So why, regardless of the situation, is high tech agriculture always assumed to be the only the solution? This premise is put forward and supported by those who would benefit financially if their “solution” were implemented. Corporations peddle their high technology genetically engineered seed and chemical packages, their genetically altered animals, always with the “promise” of feeding the world.

Politicians and philanthropists, who may mean well, jump on the high technology band wagon. Could the promise of financial support or investment return fuel their apparent compassion?

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) an initiative of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation supposedly works to achieve a food secure and prosperous Africa. While these sentiments and goals may be philanthropy at its best, some of the coalition partners have a different agenda.

One of the key players in AGRA, Monsanto, hopes to spread its genetically engineered seed throughout Africa by promising better yields, drought resistance, an end to hunger, etc. etc. Could a New Green Revolution succeed where the original Green Revolution had failed? Or was the whole concept of a Green Revolution a pig in a poke to begin with?

Monsanto giving free seed to poor small holder farmers sounds great, or are they just setting the hook? Remember, next year those farmers will have to buy their seed. Interesting to note that the Gates Foundation purchased $23.1 million worth of Monsanto stock in the second quarter of 2010. Do they also see the food crisis in Africa as a potential to turn a nice profit? Every corporation has one overriding interest— self-interest, but surely not charitable foundations?

Food shortages are seldom about a lack of food, there is plenty of food in the world, the shortages occur because of the inability to get food where it is needed and the inability of the hungry to afford it. These two problems are principally caused by, as Francis Moore Lappe’ put it, a lack of justice. There are also ethical considerations, a higher value should be placed on people than on corporate profit, this must be at the forefront, not an afterthought.

In 2008, there were shortages of food, in some places, for some people. There was never a shortage of food in 2008 on a global basis, nor is there currently. True, some countries, in Africa for example, do not have enough food where it is needed, yet people with money have their fill no matter where they live. Poverty and inequality cause hunger.

The current food riots in Mozambique were a result of increased wheat prices on the world market. The UN Food and Agriculture organization, (FAO) estimates the world is on course to the third largest wheat harvest in history, so increasing wheat prices were not caused by actual shortages, but rather by speculation on the price of wheat in the international market.

While millions of people go hungry in India, thousands of kilos of grain rot in storage. Unable to afford the grain, the hungry depend on the government to distribute food. Apparently that’s not going so well.

Not everyone living in a poor country goes hungry, those with money eat. Not everyone living in rich country is well fed, those without money go hungry. We in the US are said to have the safest and most abundant food supply in the world, yet even here, surrounded by an over abundance of food, there are plenty of hungry people and their numbers are growing. Do we too have a food crisis, concurrent with an obesity crisis?

Why is there widespread hunger? Is food a right? Is profit taking through speculation that drives food prices out of the reach of the poor a right? Is pushing high technology agriculture on an entire continent at that could feed itself a (corporate) right?

In developing countries, those with hunger and poor food distribution, the small farmers, most of whom are women, have little say in agricultural policy. The framework of international trade and the rules imposed by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank on developing countries, places emphasis on crops for export, not crops for feeding a hungry population.

Despite what we hope are the best intentions of the Gates Foundation, a New Green Revolution based on genetically engineered crops, imported fertilizer and government imposed agricultural policy will not feed the world. Women, not Monsanto, feed most of the worlds population, and the greatest portion of the worlds diet still relies on crops and farming systems developed and cultivated by the indigenous for centuries, systems that still work, systems that offer real promise.

The report of 400 experts from around the world, The International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), is ignored by the proponents of a New Green Revolution, precisely because it shows that the best hope for ending hunger lies with local, traditional, farmer controlled agricultural production, not high tech industrial agriculture.

To feed the world, fair methods of land distribution must be considered. A fair and just food system depends on small holder farmers having access to land. The function of a just farming system is to insure that everyone gets to eat, industrial agriculture functions to insure those corporations controlling the system make a profit.

The ultimate cause of hunger is not a lack of Western agricultural technology, rather hunger results when people are not allowed to participate in a food system of their choosing. Civil wars, structural adjustment policies, inadequate distribution systems, international commodity speculation and corporate control of food from seed to table— these are the causes of hunger, the stimulus for food crises.

If the Gates Foundation is serious about ending hunger in Africa, they need to read the IAASTD report, not Monsanto’s quarterly profit report. Then they can decide how their money might best be spent.

Jim Goodman is a dairy farmer and activist from Wonewoc, WI and a WK Kellogg Food and Society Policy Fellow.

20 September, 2010
Yes! Magazine

A city in Brazil recruited local farmers to help do something U.S. cities have yet to do: end hunger.

“To search for solutions to hunger means to act within the principle that the status of a citizen surpasses that of a mere consumer.”
CITY OF BELO HORIZONTE, BRAZIL

In writing Diet for a Small Planet, I learned one simple truth: Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy. But that realization was only the beginning, for then I had to ask: What does a democracy look like that enables citizens to have a real voice in securing life’s essentials? Does it exist anywhere? Is it possible or a pipe dream? With hunger on the rise here in the United States—one in 10 of us is now turning to food stamps—these questions take on new urgency.

To begin to conceive of the possibility of a culture of empowered citizens making democracy work for them, real-life stories help—not models to adopt wholesale, but examples that capture key lessons. For me, the story of Brazil’s fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, is a rich trove of such lessons. Belo, a city of 2.5 million people, once had 11 percent of its population living in absolute poverty, and almost 20 percent of its children going hungry. Then in 1993, a newly elected administration declared food a right of citizenship. The officials said, in effect: If you are too poor to buy food in the market—you are no less a citizen. I am still accountable to you.

The new mayor, Patrus Ananias—now leader of the federal anti-hunger effort—began by creating a city agency, which included assembling a 20-member council of citizen, labor, business, and church representatives to advise in the design and implementation of a new food system. The city already involved regular citizens directly in allocating municipal resources—the “participatory budgeting” that started in the 1970s and has since spread across Brazil. During the first six years of Belo’s food-as-a-right policy, perhaps in response to the new emphasis on food security, the number of citizens engaging in the city’s participatory budgeting process doubled to more than 31,000.

The city agency developed dozens of innovations to assure everyone the right to food, especially by weaving together the interests of farmers and consumers. It offered local family farmers dozens of choice spots of public space on which to sell to urban consumers, essentially redistributing retailer mark-ups on produce—which often reached 100 percent—to consumers and the farmers. Farmers’ profits grew, since there was no wholesaler taking a cut. And poor people got access to fresh, healthy food.

When my daughter Anna and I visited Belo Horizonte to write Hope’s Edge we approached one of these stands. A farmer in a cheerful green smock, emblazoned with “Direct from the Countryside,” grinned as she told us, “I am able to support three children from my five acres now. Since I got this contract with the city, I’ve even been able to buy a truck.”

The improved prospects of these Belo farmers were remarkable considering that, as these programs were getting underway, farmers in the country as a whole saw their incomes drop by almost half.

In addition to the farmer-run stands, the city makes good food available by offering entrepreneurs the opportunity to bid on the right to use well-trafficked plots of city land for “ABC” markets, from the Portuguese acronym for “food at low prices.” Today there are 34 such markets where the city determines a set price—about two-thirds of the market price—of about twenty healthy items, mostly from in-state farmers and chosen by store-owners. Everything else they can sell at the market price.

“For ABC sellers with the best spots, there’s another obligation attached to being able to use the city land,” a former manager within this city agency, Adriana Aranha, explained. “Every weekend they have to drive produce-laden trucks to the poor neighborhoods outside of the city center, so everyone can get good produce.”

Another product of food-as-a-right thinking is three large, airy “People’s Restaurants” (Restaurante Popular), plus a few smaller venues, that daily serve 12,000 or more people using mostly locally grown food for the equivalent of less than 50 cents a meal. When Anna and I ate in one, we saw hundreds of diners—grandparents and newborns, young couples, clusters of men, mothers with toddlers. Some were in well-worn street clothes, others in uniform, still others in business suits.

“I’ve been coming here every day for five years and have gained six kilos,” beamed one elderly, energetic man in faded khakis.

“It’s silly to pay more somewhere else for lower quality food,” an athletic-looking young man in a military police uniform told us. “I’ve been eating here every day for two years. It’s a good way to save money to buy a house so I can get married,” he said with a smile.

No one has to prove they’re poor to eat in a People’s Restaurant, although about 85 percent of the diners are. The mixed clientele erases stigma and allows “food with dignity,” say those involved.

Belo’s food security initiatives also include extensive community and school gardens as well as nutrition classes. Plus, money the federal government contributes toward school lunches, once spent on processed, corporate food, now buys whole food mostly from local growers.

“We’re fighting the concept that the state is a terrible, incompetent administrator,” Adriana explained. “We’re showing that the state doesn’t have to provide everything, it can facilitate. It can create channels for people to find solutions themselves.”

For instance, the city, in partnership with a local university, is working to “keep the market honest in part simply by providing information,” Adriana told us. They survey the price of 45 basic foods and household items at dozens of supermarkets, then post the results at bus stops, online, on television and radio, and in newspapers so people know where the cheapest prices are.

The shift in frame to food as a right also led the Belo hunger-fighters to look for novel solutions. In one successful experiment, egg shells, manioc leaves, and other material normally thrown away were ground and mixed into flour for school kids’ daily bread. This enriched food also goes to nursery school children, who receive three meals a day courtesy of the city.

“I knew we had so much hunger in the world. But what is so upsetting, what I didn’t know when I started this, is it’s so easy. It’s so easy to end it.”

The result of these and other related innovations?

In just a decade Belo Horizonte cut its infant death rate—widely used as evidence of hunger—by more than half, and today these initiatives benefit almost 40 percent of the city’s 2.5 million population. One six-month period in 1999 saw infant malnutrition in a sample group reduced by 50 percent. And between 1993 and 2002 Belo Horizonte was the only locality in which consumption of fruits and vegetables went up.

The cost of these efforts?

Around $10 million annually, or less than 2 percent of the city budget. That’s about a penny a day per Belo resident.

Behind this dramatic, life-saving change is what Adriana calls a “new social mentality”—the realization that “everyone in our city benefits if all of us have access to good food, so—like health care or education—quality food for all is a public good.”

The Belo experience shows that a right to food does not necessarily mean more public handouts (although in emergencies, of course, it does.) It can mean redefining the “free” in “free market” as the freedom of all to participate. It can mean, as in Belo, building citizen-government partnerships driven by values of inclusion and mutual respect.

And when imagining food as a right of citizenship, please note: No change in human nature is required! Through most of human evolution—except for the last few thousand of roughly 200,000 years—Homo sapiens lived in societies where pervasive sharing of food was the norm. As food sharers, “especially among unrelated individuals,” humans are unique, writes Michael Gurven, an authority on hunter-gatherer food transfers. Except in times of extreme privation, when some eat, all eat.

Before leaving Belo, Anna and I had time to reflect a bit with Adriana. We wondered whether she realized that her city may be one of the few in the world taking this approach—food as a right of membership in the human family. So I asked, “When you began, did you realize how important what you are doing was? How much difference it might make? How rare it is in the entire world?”

Listening to her long response in Portuguese without understanding, I tried to be patient. But when her eyes moistened, I nudged our interpreter. I wanted to know what had touched her emotions.

“I knew we had so much hunger in the world,” Adriana said. “But what is so upsetting, what I didn’t know when I started this, is it’s so easy. It’s so easy to end it.”

Adriana’s words have stayed with me. They will forever. They hold perhaps Belo’s greatest lesson: that it is easy to end hunger if we are willing to break free of limiting frames and to see with new eyes—if we trust our hard-wired fellow feeling and act, no longer as mere voters or protesters, for or against government, but as problem-solving partners with government accountable to us.

Frances Moore Lappé wrote this article as part of Food for Everyone, the Spring 2009 issue of YES! Magazine. Frances is the author of many books including Diet for a Small Planet and Get a Grip, co-founder of Food First and the Small Planet Institute, and a YES! contributing editor.

The author thanks Dr. M. Jahi Chappell for his contribution to the article.

Interested?
Walking Through Fear: interview with Frances Moore Lappé.

YES! Magazine encourages you to make free use of this article by taking these easy steps. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Silly me. Here I had thought that world leaders would want to keep their nations from collapsing. They must be working hard to prevent currency collapse, financial system collapse, food system collapse, social collapse, environmental collapse, and the onset of general, overwhelming misery—right? But no, that’s not what the evidence suggests. Increasingly I am forced to conclude that the object of the game that world leaders are actually playing is not to avoid collapse; it’s simply to postpone it a while so as to be the last nation to go down, so yours can have the chance to pick the others’ carcasses before it meets the same fate.

I know, that sounds unbearably cynical. And in fact it may not accurately describe the conscious attitudes of leaders of some smaller nations. But for the U.S. and China, arguably the countries most likely to lead the way for the rest of the world, actions speak louder than words. (Mental health advisory: readers with a low tolerance for bad news should turn back now; there are lots of cheerier articles on the Internet and this might be a good time to find and enjoy one.)

For these two nations, avoiding collapse would require solving a range of enormous problems, of which at least four are non-negotiable: climate change; peak fossil fuels (in effect, stagnating and, soon, declining energy supplies); the inherent instability of growth-based financial systems; and the vulnerability of food systems to factors like fresh water scarcity and soil erosion (in addition to global warming and fuel scarcity). If they fail to address any one of these, societal collapse is inevitable—in a few decades certainly, but perhaps in just the next few years.

So how are our contestants doing? There’s not much to report on the climate score—just vague promises for future action. So their apparent strategy in this case is to delay (not to delay the impacts, mind you, but to delay efforts to address the problem).

Likewise, there is little positive action occurring regarding food systems: the assumption appears to be that conventional industrial agriculture—which is responsible for most of the global food system’s enormous and growing vulnerabilities—will somehow shoulder the task of feeding seven to nine billion humans. We just need to continue with what we are already doing, but on a larger scale and using more gene-engineered crop varieties.

Officially, peak energy is not even a concern, so evidently the strategy being adopted here is denial. We’ll see how that works out.

How about the financial mess? Here the U.S. and China are in situations so different that a more extended discussion seems justified.

China Surges to the Lead!

The U.S. is in debt up to its eyeballs and has mortgaged the paychecks of every generation approximately until hell freezes over in order to bail out its “too-big-to-fail” banks. In contrast, China has piles of cash (resulting from its enormous trade surpluses) and has bought a mountain of U.S. debt in order to keep its main customer’s currency from losing value. It would seem that, in this department, one nation is set to flag while the other is poised to leap into first place as world economic superpower.

And that happens to be the conventional wisdom on the subject. It’s not hard to find commentators who say the United States is a has-been for a variety of reasons. In addition to its huge debt burden, the U.S. also suffers from a shrinking manufacturing base, a big trade deficit, eroding quality of education, and a foreign policy that serves the interests of arms manufacturers while undermining the long-term interests of the nation. Regarding the last of these items, a 2006 World Public Opinion poll showed large majorities in four leading ally nations (Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan, and Indonesia), together accounting for a third of the Muslim world’s population, believe the U.S. is determined to destroy or undermine Islam. Within those countries, most people surveyed support attacks on American targets. And it just so happens that most of the world’s future oil supplies will be coming from Muslim nations. Brilliant.

By contrast, China is enjoying springtime on amphetamines. It now has the biggest car market in the world. And, according to Stuart Staniford in a recent fact-filled article, “if present trends continue, the Chinese expressway system will likely grow larger than the U.S. interstate highway system within the next couple of years, and Chinese car ownership will exceed U.S. car ownership by somewhere in the neighborhood of 2017.” As of 2010 China is the leading producer of hydroelectric and solar power and by 2011 will be the top producer of wind power. China’s smart grid investments dwarf those of the U.S. by 200 to one. The Chinese are also investing heavily in nuclear energy. Staniford goes on: “Oversimplifying greatly, it’s as though the U.S. borrowed a pile of money from China in order to fight a war to free up oil supply in Iraq in order that China could become the greatest industrial power the world has ever seen.”

China’s foreign policy consists largely of buying friends by purchasing rights to oil, gas, coal, and other resources (in Canada, Australia, Venezuela, Iraq, Kazakhstan, and throughout Africa), while the U.S. spends money it doesn’t have rooting out bad guys and making more enemies in the process.

In an October, 2009 lecture, George Soros showed refreshing candor about the seriousness of the continuing global financial crisis: “What differentiated [the recent economic crisis] from the Great Depression is that this time the financial system was not allowed to collapse, but was put on artificial life support. In fact [however], the magnitude of the credit and leverage problem we have today is even greater than the 1930s.” Soros then went on to discuss the relative positions of the U.S. and China:

In the short term, all countries were negatively affected. But in the long term, there will be winners and losers. . . . To put it bluntly, the U.S. stands to lose the most, and China is poised to emerge as the greatest winner. . . . China has been the primary beneficiary of globalization, and it has been largely insulated from the financial crisis. For the West, and the U.S. in particular, the crisis was an internally-generated event [that] led to the collapse of the financial system. For China, it was an external shock [that] has hurt exports, but left the financial, political, and economic system unscathed.

China Stumbles!

But remember: without solutions to climate change, peak energy, and the looming food crisis, winning the financial contest is only temporary solace. Consider just the energy conundrum: China may be building nukes and windmills, but there’s no way it can maintain 8 percent annual growth for long with flat or declining energy from coal. China and India, between them, are currently planning to build 800 new coal-fired power plants by 2020. Where will the coal come from? Both countries are already experiencing domestic production shortfalls and are starting to import the fuel. But coal-exporting countries will be unable to keep up with their growing combined demand.

Moreover, there is a school of thought that says China’s apparently unstoppable economic miracle is a bubble waiting to burst. Beijing’s housing market is overheated, like that of Las Vegas circa 2006. Last year, the Chinese economy enjoyed 9 percent GDP growth—on paper. But in order to achieve that goal, the government and banks had to loan out 30 percent of China’s GDP (the rate of growth in loans accelerated during the latter part of the year; at year-end rates, banks were on track to loan out an amount equal to the nation’s entire GDP in 2010). In any case, much of that growth probably occurred through speculation on real estate and questionable stocks.

Generally, China is at a Wild West stage of economic development: it is a collection of powerful local capitalist power bases unaccountable to anyone, all jockeying to create and inflate assets and credit. While the central government has recently exerted control over the banks, its ability to halt regional Ponzi schemes is still limited.

In January the Chinese banking regulatory commission attempted to rein in lending in order to slow the rapid increase in real estate and stock market values. (On the other hand, during the same month, China’s cabinet agreed to permit margin trading and short selling of stocks and to launch a stock futures index.) Significantly, there is evidence that China’s central bank’s attempts to harmlessly deflate the housing and stock market bubbles may be going badly. The sudden suspension in lending has, according to Joe Weisenthal in Business Insider, “caught importers, along with many other companies, by surprise and could cause turbulence in China’s import orders. Letters of credit (LoC) suddenly became unavailable, despite previous agreements. We believe that this will inevitably lead to delays or cancellations in China’s imports. Import orders for commodities and machineries could be affected most.” Translation: the government was faced with the options of letting a rapidly growing bubble burst, taking the economy down; or deliberately deflating the bubble, risking taking the economy down by another route. The central bank chose the latter, and the risked takedown may be unfolding.

Meanwhile Google and the Obama Administration have been exerting external pressure on China to relax its censorship of electronic communications—moves that some see as reducing the central government’s options for controlling both information flow and the economy.

In a recent op-ed, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman countered worries about a bursting of the China bubble with a robust display of confidence in Beijing’s unstoppable expansionary momentum. Given Friedman’s record (remember his columns in 2003 extolling the benefits that would flow to America from an invasion of Iraq?), this alone should be cause to doubt whether the Chinese locomotive can stay on its tracks much longer.

What Does It Mean to “Win”?

In his book Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects, Dmitry Orlov discusses the “collapse gap” between the United States and the old Soviet Union: the latter, he argues, was in effect much better prepared for economic crisis and the fall of its central government; when the U.S. eventually goes the way of the U.S.S.R., the pain and suffering of its citizens will be much greater. (I can’t adequately summarize Orlov’s evidence and reasoning here, but they are persuasive; if you haven’t read the book, do yourself a favor.)

So: How is the U.S. doing today in terms of collapse preparedness as compared to China?

After six decades of nearly uninterrupted economic growth, Americans have developed unrealistic expectations about the future. They are urbanized consumers whose manufacturing capability has shriveled and whose practical survival skills are in most cases vestigial. The Chinese, in contrast, have less of a steep fall ahead of them. Most still dwell in the countryside, and many who live in the cities are only one generation removed from subsistence agriculture and can still draw on their own, or their parents’, practical skills learned during decades of poverty and immersion in a traditional farming culture.

Both nations face fierce political challenges. In the U.S., the central government has reached nearly complete paralysis: it is evidently incapable of solving even relatively minor problems, and confidence in it among the citizenry has largely evaporated. Political leaders have succeeded in polarizing the people geographically with “hot-button” issues, few of which have anything to do with the factors currently undermining the nation’s ability to survive. The Chinese central government appears far more capable of acting decisively and strategically, but it is confronted with nasty facts of geography and history: there is an extreme and growing economic and social division between the wealthy coastal cities and the poor, rural interior; and a demographic schism between those 40 years old or younger who have high economic expectations, and the older generation who grew up under Mao, with an ethic of collectivism and self-sacrifice. The young, especially, have accepted a trade-off between civil freedoms and economic prosperity. If the latter is not delivered, there will be shrill demands for the former. These divisions are so deep and profound that they could tear society apart if expectations are dashed—and the leaders know this.

Thus, in the event of collapse, both nations face the possibility of a breakdown in their political systems, entailing widespread violence (uprisings and crackdowns).

China still maintains a crucial advantage in one key area: its food system. Far more of its citizens still grow food, even taking into account recent trends toward rapid urbanization (in the U.S., full-time farmers make up only about two percent of the population and the average farmer is approaching retirement age). This is not to say that China will have the capacity to feed all its people; it is already moving in the direction of being a major net food importer. Meanwhile, the U.S. remains a significant food exporter. The key difference has to do with the resiliency of the two nations’ respective food systems: that of the United States is more centralized, more highly fuel dependent, and therefore probably more vulnerable.

The Geopolitics of Collapse

It’s easy to see the advantage of collapse preparedness for the citizenry—with better preparation, more will survive. But does a higher survival rate during and after collapse translate to some sort of geopolitical advantage?

The process of collapse will be determined by many factors, some hard to predict, and so it is difficult to know the size or scope of the political power structure that might re-emerge in either country. It’s possible that one nation, or both, could devolve into smaller political units squabbling among themselves and unable to engage much in global jockeying for resources. All new political units emerging within the present territories of China or the U.S. would be immediately beset with enormous practical problems, including poverty, hunger, environmental disasters, and mass migrations.

Presumably some potent weaponry from the age of global warfare would remain intact and usable, so it is possible in principle that one or another of these smaller political entities could assert itself on the world stage as a short-lived, bargain-basement empire of limited geographic scope. But even in that case “winning” the collapse race would be small comfort.

The possibility of armed conflict between the two powers prior to mutual collapse is not to be entirely excluded if, for example, U.S. efforts to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions were to set off a deadly chain reaction of attacks and counter-attacks possibly involving Israel, with world powers being forced to choose sides; or if the U.S. were to persist in arming Taiwan. But neither the U.S. nor China wants a direct mutual military confrontation, and both nations are highly motivated to avoid one. Thus all-out nuclear war—still the worst-case imaginable scenario for homo sapiens and planet Earth—seems thankfully unlikely, though in the few decades ahead the use of some of these weapons, on some occasions, by one nation or another, is probable.

Trade wars are another matter, and we might even see one this year, according to Michael Pettis at Financial Times, who notes that

. . . trade imbalances are more necessary than ever to justify increased investment in surplus countries [i.e., China], but rising unemployment makes them politically and economically unacceptable in deficit countries [i.e., the U.S.]. Rising savings in the U.S. will collide with stubbornly high savings in China. Unless a long-term solution is jointly worked out immediately, trade conflict will worsen and it will become increasingly hard to reverse offensive policies. Most importantly, if deficit countries demand structural change faster than surplus countries can manage, we will almost certainly finish with a nasty trade dispute that will . . . poison relationships for years.

How likely is the prospect for the last nation standing to be able to, as I put it in the first paragraph above, “pick the carcasses” of its competitors? Such a scenario presupposes that one nation will be able to stay on its feet for at least a few years after others fall. But this may not be possible. Recall the prophetic words of Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988):

“A nation today can no longer unilaterally collapse, for if any national government disintegrates, its population and territory will be absorbed by some other [or bailed out by international agencies]. . . . Collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse.”

When the U.S.S.R. crashed, the U.S. and various multinational corporations were able to sweep in and gobble up some of the treasure left lying around. One example: U.S. nuclear power plants have for many years been using uranium fuel cannibalized from old Soviet missile warheads. Soon, international institutions such as the World Bank and IMF helped organize new financial structures for Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Estonia, and the other nations born from Soviet political and economic disintegration, so as to limit and reverse the process of social disintegration that had already passed beyond its early stages.

But now the game has changed. A collapse of the U.S. would leave China devastated. Not only would Beijing lose its main customer, but the hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of treasury notes it has accumulated would be rendered worthless. If China were internally stable, such impacts could be absorbed with difficulty. But in light of China’s own simmering social and financial predicaments, a U.S. collapse would almost certainly be enough to tip Beijing’s economy into a tailspin, resulting in both social and political crises.

A collapse of China would similarly devastate the U.S. Obviously, the loss of a source of cheap consumer products would discomfit WalMart shoppers, but the shock soon would go much deeper. The Treasury would lose its main foreign buyer of government debt, which means that the Fed would be forced to step in and monetize that debt (in common parlance, “turn on the printing presses”), undermining the dollar’s value. The result: a hyperinflationary economic crash. Such a crash is probably inevitable at some point anyway, but a collapse of the Chinese system would hasten and worsen it.

In neither instance would international institutions be capable of preventing substantial social and political fall-out. The last nation standing would not stand for long. We have reached the stage where, as Tainter says, “World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.”

The Transition Marathon

Okay, so there is no serious effort on the part of U.S. or Chinese leaders to avoid collapse in the long run (say, over the next 10 to 20 years). Perhaps this is because they have concluded that it is impossible to do so—there are just too many trends leading in the same direction, and actually dealing with any of those trends head-on would entail huge, immediate political risks. In reality, however, it is much more likely that they simply refuse seriously to think about these trends and their implications, because they do have another option—to postpone collapse through deficit spending, bailouts, and more financial bubbles, while enacting their parts in a climate-policy kabuki play and engaging in resource geopolitics. This way blame will at least fall on the next set of leaders. Postponing collapse is itself a big job, enough so as to take all of one’s attention away from having to contemplate the awfulness and inevitability of what is being postponed.

Do these short-term efforts in any way reduce the risk of dissolution? Hardly. In fact, the longer the reckoning is delayed, the worse it will be.

What would make more sense than just trying to put off the inevitable is quite simply to build resilience throughout society, re-localizing basic social systems involving food, manufacture, and finance. There is no need to rehearse the existing discourse about this strategy: readers who are not familiar with it can find plenty of useful pointers at www.transitiontowns.org, or in the books and articles of authors such as Rob Hopkins, Albert Bates, David Holmgren, Pat Murphy, and Sharon Astyk (and in some of my own writings, including Museletter #192).

It is understandably hard for national politicians to think along those lines. Building societal resilience means disregarding the dictates of economic efficiency; it means systematically reducing the power of the central government and national/global commercial institutions (banks and corporations). It also means questioning the central dogma of our modern world: the efficacy and possibility of unending economic growth.

So if the best outcome lies in a strategy of resilience and re-localization, and our national leaders can’t even contemplate such a strategy, that means those leaders are, in one sense at least, irrelevant to our future.

Some blog readers are so in tune with this line of thinking that they no longer see any point in paying attention to the global scene. They may even think this article is a waste of time (and I expect to get an email or two to that effect). But following world events is more than a matter of infotainment: when and how China and the U.S. come apart at the seams is a question of far greater consequence than that of whether the New Orleans Saints or the Indianapolis Colts will win the Superbowl. The reality is that no nation, and no community will be able to completely protect itself from the sudden, harsh winds that will rush to fill the vacuum left by an implosion of either superpower.

By the way, my apologies to the other 190 or so nations of the world, large and small: my singling out of the U.S. and China for discussion does not signify that other countries are unimportant, or that their destinies will not be as unique as their cultures and geographies; merely that those destinies will probably unfold in the context of a global collapse spreading from the two nations we have been discussing. For any nation—India, Bolivia, Russia, Brazil, South Africa—and for any community or family, survival will require some comprehension of the direction of large events, so as to get out of the way when debris is flying and to anticipate opportunities to regroup.

So: Pay attention to the weather reports from Washington and Beijing, but meanwhile build local resilience wherever you are. If the roof needs mending, don’t dawdle.

Meanwhile, after a long day of organizing neighborhood Transition gardens, you may want to get a foretaste of post-collapse America by reading James Howard Kunstler’s A World Made by Hand; or savor an entertainingly erudite discussion of collapse as an extended process (which it will likely be), rather than as a sudden, all-out event, by reading John Michael Greer’s books The Long Descent and The Ecotechnic Future.

Just because the sky is falling, that doesn’t mean it’s time to stop thinking.

Countercurrents.org

The single greatest challenge facing our modern economic food chain is the insanely unnatural low cost of food to the consumer, making the simple and necessary act of eating dependent on food that is almost free. The global edifice of cheap food rests on the volatility of a single input; the exponentially depleting supply of easy, cheap oil. We are gorging ourselves at the $1.99 all-you-can-eat oil buffet. Food is too cheap, a “correction” is coming, and there is not a damn thing anybody can do about it.

Eat, or Die Trying

For the most part of human history, the cost of eating was a brutal, hard day of death defying exertion. You found food or you died, and you probably died trying. As civilization advanced, the cost of food fell. Social organization added efficiencies to food gathering, freeing time to reinvest in technology, develop specialists, get drunk, or fight. Commerce grew, trade developed, and the production of food ceased to be simple individual effort, becoming pooled resources that traded food for other commodities in ever increasingly complex exchanges. This primitive separation of end user from producer in no way relieved the individual from contributing to the general pool of wealth – idle laggards still starved to death with nothing to trade in the markets for food. Whether you bartered in kind, or used some form of money, you still had to expend a hard life’s toil to eat. Again, many died trying.

This is what has essentially driven the pace of history; ever-creative ways to produce more food per unit of person labour. It worked well enough. People ate better, mortality rates improved, populations grew, and technology and specialized work gained from the surplus of labour that could be directed their way. In the western world, and in particular England, receding amounts of arable land were required to feed more and more people. By the end of the 13th century, land became fenced and enclosed in a crude form of assembly line privatization; surplus people were forced into small subsidiary “cottage” industries, or streamed by the thousands into the safety of larger communities and cities. The factory, and unemployment, was born. Starvation was no longer reserved for lazy n’er-do-wells and became the providence of the economically displaced. Human exertion and effort became unlinked from the land.

Of course, as private property displaced whole communities, the new landed parvenu aristocracies gained control of the lands complete suite of resources. These new “capitalists” drafted up the economically useless as modern workers, returned to the land now as wage slaves who toiled for meagre subsistence, exchanging the better part of their labour for wretched scraps at the edges of the growing marketplace. The landowner took the rest as personal wealth, which we call profit now. Technology advanced at greater rates and civilization picked up steam…literally.

In 1712, at the Conygree Coalworks in England, the local capitalist – Lord Dudley – was having a devil of a time improving his bottom line. Half-starved and wretched labourers slogged below the earth’s surface in claustrophobic blackness, hacking coal from stubborn seams under his private lands. The mines kept filling with water, drowning his workers and cutting into profits. At this time, a remarkable new device appeared saving the unhappy aristocrat from such frustrating declines in production. Thomas Newcomen had perfected his “atmospheric engine”, a steam propelled device that could pump the water out of the mines with only a handful of dimwitted attendants. Free from the prospect of drowning, workers could now beaver away at an increased rate (we call that productivity now), padding the pockets of the Dudley’s at a pace never before encountered. It was a miracle, and the beginning of the glorious Industrial Revolution. Another separation became enshrined between humans and the earth.

For the first time, human beings were considered as productive chattel and productivity the measure of increasing profits. Commerce exploded and people left the land in droves, crowding into cities of productive convenience where labour became plentiful and the distribution of goods, cheap. Food became one of those goods. The aristocracy of private ownership rejoiced at the gap between sustenance wages and profitable consumer goods. Machines provided economies of scale that allowed a growing middle class to expend only a part of their lives trying to eat, and the aristocrats – none at all.

Law followed. Growing and complex states began to learn how to utilize the expanding power of the marketplace. Trade laws, taxation, and growing defences of private capital grew. Economies of scale visited both the growing hordes of urbanized landless, as well as the increasing foothills of private capital. Conglomerates of vested interests pooled resources, dragging legal scripture behind them. The earliest known “corporation” was founded in the 14th century in Sweden, however the concept of a legally protected business venture with an infinite life of its own quickly spread. By 1602, with the Dutch East India Company established in Amsterdam, the “conglomeration of vested interest” became the principle means by which sophisticated nation states launched the age of exploration and colonization.

Not since the advent of the steel plough – when tilling fields moved from dragging a sturdy stick across hard land – had the productivity of food taken such a monumental leap. Where once an individual could feed only himself and his dependents, now organized teams of agricultural workers employing wondrous new machines could feed dozens, and then hundreds of humans with ever decreasing human effort. For the emergent middle classes, less and less time was required working to feed one’s self. With the falling cost of food, more and more people could spend their time and money on other goods or pursuits. Machine made clothes, machine made furnishings, machine made gewgaws of all manner and description (we call that consumerism today). In a very real sense, western humanity was liberating itself from the tyranny of essential sustenance, and investing the freedom in greater liberty – and pointless, mass produced crap. Snow globes sold like hot cakes. Exactly like hot cakes.

The global food chain became organized thus; grow it, ship it to a central location, distribute it back to regional and then local markets and retailers, sell it to hungry consumers. At each step along the way, “value” was added to calories, where value meant profit. Where little value was realized there was malnutrition and starvation, where lots of value was available, there became increasing participation by corporations. By their nature, corporations squeegeed out the inefficiencies and brought increasing amounts of capital to bear. No profit, no food. Or snow globes. As the Industrial Revolution gripped the earth, colonization and mercantilism gave way to capitalism. Market places expanded and stratified, layers of value added enterprise employed less and less people to produce more and more food. Horses gave way to tractors; local farm markets gave way to dedicated food retail chains. Rail lines and steamships moved food across nations, continents, and the globe. Economies of scale at every step lowered the cost of eating along with everything else.

As the 20th century clicked forward, for the burgeoning masses of wealthy western nations, cheap food became a right, and then just simply assumed. Poverty and squalor remained the providence of the economically marginal, as it always had and in that sense, little had changed. However, for increasing members of affluent western societies, prodigious amounts of capital moved away from food production and into all the things that make powerful capitalist states breathless nations of discretionary consumers. Rich meant less and less time feeding one’s self, and more and more time accumulating stuff.

In 1914, western humanity inexplicably took time out to spend three decades denuding the earth of healthy, well-fed men, women, and children. A blind and irrational invisible hand swatted from the earth about 200 million or so. All these human folk had to be properly fed and supplied prior to their excruciating death, and industry celebrated by rising to the challenge. Machines leapt into the breach in a symbiotic reciprocating engine of feeding and killing on a truly industrial scale. “Total war” entered modern lexicon. Airplanes moved food and bombs in alternating waves. With the entire continent of Europe momentarily out of the food making business, America and good old Yankee know how took up the slack. America was an island fortress, island as in thousands of miles away by sea. Transport logistics was born; convoys of hundreds of specially designed ships moved back and forth across the oceans. The costs were staggering, food went short, and rationing was imposed on the rich and middle classes. For the last time in history, the cost of food rose to life and death again. And then peace broke out.

The next great step forward in food history came at the close of global hostilities in mid century. Having invested the no-cost-too-high capital of military supply and distribution, the ships, trains, trucks, and airplanes manufactured in the thousands were returned to civil use. Private, corporate industry vacuumed up legions of military logistics specialists. Transport and distribution costs collapsed around the world. The “container” ship was born. At the same time, complex munitions processes moved into synthetic, inorganic fertilizer production that dramatically increased crop yields. Incredible plenty drove prices down at the same time transportation costs fell. Abundance rejoiced. Farmers went broke. In their place arose massive agricultural conglomerates that vacuumed up the great diversity of the world’s local farms, replacing them with hectares upon hectares of dedicated crops, mechanically worked, industrially fertilized, and hooked by rail, sea, and air to far-flung markets offering the maximum return on investment.

Welcome to the Machines

Today, entire heartlands of biodiversity, countless expanses of small rural farms and communities, have been purchased by syndicates of corporate finance wizards from the urban bowels of Wall Street. Banks, hedge funds, and trusts receive billions of dollars worldwide from the accounts of thousands of scattered investors – most unwittingly – through pension funds and other retirement and savings vehicles. None of whom would recognize a carrot in the ground if it kicked them in the groin. Their only task is to maximize their clients return on investment. And food is a reliable investment it turns out. Once assembled and sold forward to international agri-businesses, hundreds of hectares are mechanically and scientifically ploughed under and replanted with “monocultures” of single crops. Electronically monitored machines prepare and renew the soil with mountains of synthetic fertilizer, more machines plant the crop, and more machines harvest it.

The crop is delivered to massive central terminals by rail and truck, where it is rerouted towards regional complexes and ports. Sometimes travelling the breadth of a continent, and sometimes travelling the expanse of the sea on huge ships designed for the purpose, the happy crop is delivered to yet more terminals where it is assembled, packaged, and labelled with paper, tin, and other things – all of which arrive in exactly the same way – for sale to food distributors. Large retail grocery outlets contract to have the increasingly angry crop loaded on yet more trucks, rail, or ships, after which it is finally delivered to urban hubs of people in the form of canned creamed corn, lined up on brightly lit shelves and slathered in marketing. Two cans for under a buck and a hat for your kid.

Millions of western homemakers in mini vans will spend twice that on fuel to drive to the store; pouring out of their urban sprawl like microbes, leaving behind their suburban castles, hot tubs, motorbikes, and heated driveways, bitching about the cost of food the entire way. They will spend twice what they can eat and throw out the rest. They will have money left for IPods and plasma TV’s. Absolutely none of them will toil from sun up to sun set for the single purpose of eating. None. A can of creamed corn from the other side of the planet for nothing more than a few moments worth of inconvenience.

The cost of food is almost zilch.

Humanity may have landed a man on the moon, but nothing compares with two cans of creamed corn for under a buck. It’s a freaking miracle. A miracle when one considers all the open palms that creamed corn had to pass through from seed to plate, throwing off profit into every sweaty one. Food is now corporate, and driven by the bottom lines of dozens of invisible enablers, corporate charters all regulated by law and designed for no other reason than the maximization of each shareholders value. Built atop every golden kernel of corn is a golden edifice of economic interconnectivity.

According to the US Department of Agriculture, US households may have spent as much as a third of their disposable income on food at the dawn of the corporate age in the early 20th century. By 1933, that number had shrunk to 25%. Well into the post war era, 20%. When the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan, 15%. Iraq war – 10%. Economic meltdown…9.7%.

Food, clearly, is too big to fail.

Consider then, that all the efficiencies that are the miracle of cheap food rest entirely on technology and mechanization. Consider further, that each and every technological piece depends on – in its turn – nothing more substantive than gooey black oil. No oil, no food. The global edifice of cheap food rests on the volatility of a single input; the exponentially depleting supply of easy, cheap oil.

But of course, oil is infinite – or so we think. We don’t actually believe that, but we think it just the same. To a certain point, we are correct. When we worry about oil, we worry about it running out, which is in all probability not going to happen. However, while we fret away our time worrying about the earth’s supply of fossil fuels we completely miss the point. We will never run out of oil if only because the cost of slogging it out of the planet will become so exorbitant, we may never get a chance to pump that last, precious barrel. As the price of oil rises, and those costs are passed along the conga line of civilization, the real question becomes the effect those rising costs will have on everything. Everything, including creamed corn and snow globes.

The oil community has a name for this – peak oil. Peak oil is the place on the graphs where the easy, cheap to access oil runs out, and there is nothing but expensive stuff ahead. While all agree that the oil supply bell curve is real (the “Hubbard curve”), and that we are very near to conquering the air thin summit of said Hubbard curve, there is dispute about when the actual downward part of the trip will begin. Pessimists argue that we are there now, while sunny optimists say we won’t reach it for years…say about 2015. 2015 as in five years from now, when we will in all probability be bitching and screaming about spending eight or nine percent of our disposable income on food.

Let Them Eat Really Expensive Cake

The cost of food will rise with the cost of oil and the problem with that problem is that our technology won’t save us. Food in the ground can be made cheaper by simply making more of it. However, the issue is that all that food is way over there, and all of us rich westerners live way over here, tightly packed into teeming centers of urban sprawl. Between our food and us is a complex system of oil dependent logistics. Planes, trains and automobiles; combine harvesters, container ships, and mini vans.

Quick fact: it can take as much as 50 barrels of oil to produce a single calorie of food energy. Healthy people need about 2100 calories a day. If that seems ridiculous, consider that the average American calorie travels over 1500 miles, or that nearly 70% of seafood products are imported. Nearly 10% of beef stocks are also imported, and all those rump roasts require 35 parts of energy to produce a single unit of beef food energy. Grain is grown in one place, cows in another, fertilizer in another, and mountains of manure are collected and shipped to yet another. Think about all the things that have to happen, and all the places and people your Big Mac passes through in order for you to eat for under five bucks. Think about how many of these people, places, and things are powered by oil in some way. All of them – including you, the consumer. You don’t need to be an economist to get it; as the price of oil rises, the cost of food will keep in step. One only need think about it.

Oil prices must rise, and food prices must rise with them. What does that mean? It means that we will have less disposable income because we have to eat. We just have to, and so we will have to pay the price no matter what. We will have less money for other things. Less for cars. Less for plasma TV’s. Less for Target, American Eagle, and Home Depot, all of whom will have their own oil/price issues. Our growing food expense, which is not negotiable, will cannibalize our spending on everything else. If you are thinking at all about it at this point, you will quickly realize that you will be working more for food, and less for gewgaws. America is a gewgaw nation, and so you are also starting to realize that even more jobs will disappear, more companies fail, more banks will go broke. Banks that aren’t in the food business at least.

All that technology, all those machines and synthetics and drive and energy and Yankee know how that are directly responsible for food production are not owned by the humans that depend on them. Every link in the modern food chain is owned and operated by legal bundles of contracts and agreement called corporations. Absolutely every one of which is required by law to increase profits and return on investment. Not one is going to take a “haircut” on food. Not one cares who eats, and who does not. Instead, guaranteed an end user who must purchase by a separate law of nature, all will simply pass along the costs, no matter what they become. Falling purchases of calories will simply be made up by increased margins from smaller and smaller pools of rich folks who have the wherewithal to pay. History will regress and retrace its steps, back to times when great swaths of humanity spent the better portion of their lives simply trying to eat. Or more correctly, paying to eat.

For several generations now we have taken food for granted, its collapsing cost ensuring that it became a small but necessary evil every grocery day. Spending even 10% of our hard work on the necessity of food was too much for us. Our scorecards are measured in the amount of useless crap we can consume, free of the burden of eating. The sudden reversal of that historic trend, and its effects on every other facet of our consumer societies, is indeed the greatest challenge facing us today. Food is too cheap, a “correction” is coming, and there is not a damn thing anybody can do about it.

Think about it.

Aetius Romulous, Historian, Economist, Accountant, Writer, and blood sucking CEO. Born at the wrong end of the Baby Boom Generation – too late to enjoy the ride, too early to have missed it, and stuck in the middle with the mess. Aetius writes and blogs from his frozen perch atop the earth in Canada, spending the useful capital of a life not finished making sandwiches and fomenting revolution. t’s a living.

http://screambucket.com/aetiusromulous@rogers.com

Patrick O. Brown, a Stanford University biochemist, has changed science twice by giving stuff away. In the early 1990s Brown invented the DNA microarray, a tool that measures how cells make use of their DNA; he then showed researchers how to make their own, transforming genetic research. In 2000 he was one of three scientists who launched a free, online scientific journal called the Public Library of Science (PLOS); it has already broken the stranglehold of $200-a-year scientific publications like Science and Nature.

Now he is tackling an even bigger foe. Over the next 18 months Brown, 55, will take a break from his normal scientific work (finding out how a small number of genes are translated into a much larger number of proteins) in order to change the way the world farms and eats. He wants to put an end to animal farming, or at least put a significant dent in our global hunger for cows, pigs and chickens.

Brown, who has been a vegetarian for more than 30 years and a vegan for 5, notes that while livestock accounts for only 9% of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions, it accounts for 37% of human-caused methane (most of it emanating from the animals’ digestive systems) and 65% of human-caused nitrous oxide, according to the Food & Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Both are far better at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, meaning that cows, chickens and their ilk have a larger greenhouse effect than all the cars, trucks and planes in the world.

The green cognoscenti are choosing animal husbandry as their new enemy. Jonathan Safran Foer, the bestselling novelist, has published articles declaring that he is raising his kids vegetarian because of the environmental consequences of meat farming and that if people are going to eat meat, they should consider eating dogs. Lord Stern, a professor at the London School of Economics, told the Independent that the West would have to become more vegetarian in order to combat global warming; without change in present trends, meat and milk output will double by 2050.

Brown brings scientific clout to the debate–he’s a member of the National Academy of Sciences and an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute–and a realization that the arguments for change need to be economic, not just ethical. Growing crops to feed animals requires a lot more land, energy and fertilizer than growing them to feed people, he says: 70% of the land that was once Amazon rain forest is dedicated to grazing. Even if scientists figure out how to make milk with stem cells, it’s unlikely they will be able to create milk with the same efficiency as they can corn or wheat.

“There’s absolutely no possibility that 50 years from now this system will be operating as it does now,” says Brown. “One approach is to just wait, and either we’ll deal with it or we’ll be toast. I want to approach this as a solvable problem.” Solution: “Eliminate animal farming on planet Earth.”

Diets are malleable. Thirty years ago nobody drank high fructose corn syrup. Now it’s a dominant part of the American diet. As Western diets move into China, people there are eating more beef. Brown argues that the key to removing meat from diets is to give foodmakers an incentive to make yummy vegetable-based fare. If vendors push the new foods, palates will follow.

Incentive? Brown thinks if he can convince food manufacturers that the costs of selling meat are too high, and rising, they’ll come around. Seemingly tiny changes in economics could make animal farming a lot less affordable. At the moment farmers around the world are arguing they should be immune from taxes and ceilings on greenhouse gases; if they are not exempt, the cost of meat will go up. Raising the price of water would have the same effect. It takes 1,000 liters of water to produce a liter of milk.

Brown plans to spend the first six months of his project hammering out economic models with colleagues, illustrating ways that animal farming is likely to become onerously expensive. Then he’ll take a year off to work with famous chefs and food researchers on tastier vegetarian dishes, and to develop a strategy to tackle the political, economic, legal, behavioral and food-security issues he’s sure to face.

If Brown can work it so that McDonald’s puts less meat in each Big Mac, that could count as a win. Until now little research has gone into making foods friendly to the environment.

“If you’re a big food producer now, this is absolutely inevitable,” he says. “You’d better start thinking ahead. You’d better seriously start investing and trying to find alternatives in order to stay alive.”

Republished from Forbes.com

Signatories of a statement issued by leading thinkers in development include five World Food Prize laureates, former heads of development agencies, former Ministers of Agriculture, and heads of the world’s leading alliance of agricultural research centers.

“No credible or effective agreement to address the challenges of climate change can ignore agriculture and the need for crop adaptation to ensure the world’s future food supplies,” according to the statement.

Crop adaptation refers to agriculture’s ability to withstand climate change. Farmers will encounter problems they have never before experienced: much greater weather variability, higher average temperatures, increased numbers of extremely hot days, shorter growing seasons, higher solar radiation, much greater moisture stress, added salinity from salt water incursion and irrigation systems, and new combinations of pests and diseases.

“The negative impact of climate change on agriculture, and thus on the production of food, could well place at risk all other efforts to mitigate and adapt to new climate conditions,” the signatories said. “The magnitude of change now being forecast, even in relatively optimistic scenarios, is historically unprecedented, and our agricultural systems are still largely unprepared to face it.”

The group called on negotiators to recognize the importance of crop diversity conservation and use as an essential element in the commitments they will make for climate change adaptation.

“It may be becoming more widely understood that agriculture will have to adapt to climate change, but just because it has to adapt, it does not mean it will,” said Gebisa Ejeta, winner of this year’s World Food Prize and Distinguished Professor of Agronomy at Purdue University. “Adapting crops to unprecedented conditions cannot be taken for granted. It requires rigorous research and complex, painstaking work and a serious commitment of public funding. This needs to be made an urgent priority for the sake of the billions whose future depends upon it.”

Studies by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) predict that climate change will have dramatic impacts on food production. Some estimate that crop yields in some regions could drop by as much as one third in just two decades without immediate investments in developing new crop varieties.

“Getting agriculture ready for such dramatically new growing environments is not a trivial matter,” warned the signatories. “For agriculture to adapt, crops must adapt, but there is no ‘climate change gene,’ no single characteristic, that can ensure that they will retain, much less increase, their productivity in new climates. Concerted adaptation efforts will be required crop-by-crop, country-by-country, and internationally.”

The basis for crop adaptation is the genetic diversity found in more than 1500 seedbanks around the world. This irreplaceable resource is under threat due to poor funding and institutional politics around access to seed collections. The issue of crop diversity received worldwide attention in 2008 after the opening of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a fail-safe, safety back-up facility in the Arctic.

“Current institutional and financial arrangements, however, are inadequate to guarantee conservation of this priceless resource,” according to the statement. “Indeed, diversity is being lost—diversity that almost certainly holds the key to future crop adaptation. Moreover, the time required to integrate new traits into crop varieties can be a decade or more. We cannot wait for disaster before initiating action.”

The group is calling for small investments now that could easily ensure the availability of crop diversity. “Billions of dollars were promised this year for food security. Billions will likely be promised for climate change at Copenhagen. We ask the negotiators at Copenhagen to recognise how interwoven these issues are. Without effective investment in agricultural adaptation right now, future food security will quickly fall victim to climate change,” said Cary Fowler, Executive Director, Global Crop Diversity Trust.

###

To view the full statement and list of signatories, please visit: www.croptrust.org/climateadaptation.

The mission of the Global Crop Diversity Trust is to ensure the conservation and availability of crop diversity for food security worldwide. Although crop diversity is fundamental to fighting hunger and to the very future of agriculture, funding is unreliable and diversity is being lost. The Trust is the only organization working worldwide to solve this problem. For further information, please visit: www.croptrust.org.

The challenge of feeding billions of people as fuel supplies fall is staggering. And yet leaders’ heads remain stuck in the sand

I don’t know when global oil supplies will start to decline. I do know that another resource has already peaked and gone into free fall: the credibility of the body that’s meant to assess them. Last week two whistleblowers from the International Energy Agency alleged that it has deliberately upgraded its estimate of the world’s oil supplies in order not to frighten the markets. Three days later, a paper published by researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden showed that the IEA’s forecasts must be wrong, because it assumes a rate of extraction that appears to be impossible. The agency’s assessment of the state of global oil supplies is beginning to look as reliable as Alan Greenspan’s blandishments about the health of the financial markets.

If the whistleblowers are right, we should be stockpiling ammunition. If we are taken by surprise, if we have failed to replace oil before the supply peaks then crashes, the global economy is stuffed. But nothing the whistle-blowers said has scared me as much as the conversation I had last week with a Pembrokeshire farmer.

Wyn Evans, who runs a mixed farm of 170 acres, has been trying to reduce his dependency on fossil fuels since 1977. He has installed an anaerobic digester, a wind turbine, solar panels and a ground-sourced heat pump. He has sought wherever possible to replace diesel with his own electricity. Instead of using his tractor to spread slurry, he pumps it from the digester on to nearby fields. He’s replaced his tractor-driven irrigation system with an electric one, and set up a new system for drying hay indoors, which means he has to turn it in the field only once. Whatever else he does is likely to produce smaller savings. But these innovations have reduced his use of diesel by only around 25%.

According to farm scientists at Cornell University, cultivating one hectare of maize in the United States requires 40 litres of petrol and 75 litres of diesel. The amazing productivity of modern farm labour has been purchased at the cost of a dependency on oil. Unless farmers can change the way it’s grown, a permanent oil shock would price food out of the mouths of many of the world’s people. Any responsible government would be asking urgent questions about how long we have got.

Instead, most of them delegate this job to the International Energy Agency. I’ve been bellyaching about the British government’s refusal to make contingency plans for the possibility that oil might peak by 2020 for the past two years, and I’m beginning to feel like a madman with a sandwich board. Perhaps I am, but how lucky do you feel? The new World Energy Outlook published by the IEA last week expects the global demand for oil to rise from 85m barrels a day in 2008 to 105m in 2030. Oil production will rise to 103m barrels, it says, and biofuels will make up the shortfall. If we want the oil, it will materialise.

The agency does caution that conventional oil is likely to “approach a plateau” towards the end of this period, but there’s no hint of the graver warning that the IEA’s chief economist issued when I interviewed him last year: “We still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau … I think time is not on our side here.” Almost every year the agency has been forced to downgrade its forecast for the daily supply of oil in 2030: from 123m barrels in 2004, to 120m in 2005, 116m in 2007, 106m in 2008 and 103m this year. But according to one of the whistleblowers, “even today’s number is much higher than can be justified, and the International Energy Agency knows this”.

The Uppsala report, published in the journal Energy Policy, anticipates that maximum global production of all kinds of oil in 2030 will be 76m barrels per day. Analysing the IEA’s figures, it finds that to meet its forecasts for supply, the world’s new and undiscovered oilfields would have to be developed at a rate “never before seen in history”. As many of them are in politically or physically difficult places, and as capital is short, this looks impossible. Assessing existing fields, the likely rate of discovery and the use of new techniques for extraction, the researchers find that “the peak of world oil production is probably occurring now”.

Are they right? Who knows? Last month the UK Energy Research Centre published a massive review of all the available evidence on global oil supplies. It found that the date of peak oil will be determined not by the total size of the global resource but by the rate at which it can be exploited. New discoveries would have to be implausibly large to make a significant difference: even if a field the size of all the oil reserves ever struck in the US were miraculously discovered, it would delay the date of peaking by only four years. As global discoveries peaked in the 1960s, a find like this doesn’t seem very likely.

Regional oil supplies have peaked when about one third of the total resource has been extracted: this is because the rate of production falls as the remaining oil becomes harder to shift when the fields are depleted. So the assumption in the IEA’s new report, that oil production will hold steady when the global resource has fallen “to around one half by 2030″ looks unsafe. The UK Energy Research Centre’s review finds that, just to keep oil supply at present levels, “more than two thirds of current crude oil production capacity may need to be replaced by 2030 … At best, this is likely to prove extremely challenging.” There is, it says “a significant risk of a peak in conventional oil production before 2020″. Unconventional oil won’t save us: even a crash programme to develop the Canadian tar sands could deliver only 5m barrels a day by 2030.

As a report commissioned by the US Department of Energy shows, an emergency programme to replace current energy supplies or equipment to anticipate peak oil would need about 20 years to take effect. It seems unlikely that we have it. The world economy is probably knackered, whatever we might do now. But at least we could save farming. There are two possible options: either the mass replacement of farm machinery or the development of new farming systems that don’t need much labour or energy.

There are no obvious barriers to the mass production of electric tractors and combine harvesters: the weight of the batteries and an electric vehicle’s low-end torque are both advantages for tractors. A switch to forest gardening and other forms of permaculture is trickier, especially for producing grain; but such is the scale of the creeping emergency that we can’t afford to rule anything out.

The challenge of feeding seven or eight billion people while oil supplies are falling is stupefying. It’ll be even greater if governments keep pretending that it isn’t going to happen.

Republished from the Guardian Online.

Kraft Foods, on the other hand, is still neck-deep in the program and insists it will continue to use the “Smart Choices” symbol on its own processed, factory-made food products. The Smart Choices organization itself also continues to defend its position, declaring that labeling processed, sugared-up dead foods as “Smart” is a great idea. “Our nutrition criteria are based on sound, consensus science,” said Smart Choices chair Mike Hughes (in all seriousness).

As NaturalNews previously reported (http://www.naturalnews.com/027077_n…), the fraudulent Smart Choices food labeling program was being led by a Tufts University dean named Dr. Eileen Kennedy, a woman who continues to insist that sugary breakfast cereals made with 40% sugar, artificial coloring chemicals and partially-hydrogenated oils are really, really healthy for kids! (Eat more!) To paraphrase her view, they’re smart choices because they are “better than a donut.”

The whole purpose of the Smart Choice program, of course, was to influence gullible parents into buying highly-processed, dead food products that earn more profits for participating food companies. And in order to accomplish that, this group had to abandon commonsense nutrition and push processed food products onto a nation full of children who are already obese, diabetic and increasingly diagnosed with ADHD.

That’s why Michael Jacobson from the CSPI resigned from the group early on. He said publicy, “It was paid for by industry and when industry put down its foot and said this is what we’re doing, that was it, end of story.”

The American Society for Nutrition pretends to invoke science

This Smart Choices program was also engineered in part by the American Society for Nutrition, a corporate-sponsored group that caters to the financial and political interests of its members like GlaxoSmithKline, Eli Lilly, Monsanto, Procter & Gamble, the Sugar Association, Abbott Laboratories, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, ConAgra Foods, National Dairy Council, PepsiCo and the drug giant Wyeth. (http://www.nutrition.org/media/abou…)

(Are you starting to get the picture here yet?)

The American Society for Nutrition has now removed their former page touting the Smart Choices program (http://www.nutrition.org/news/smart…). Now, the page just says, “The page you requested is forbidden. The page you are looking for is restricted.”

For its role in the Smart Choices scheme, the American Society for (Mal?)Nutrition has received the Integrity Disgrace Award from TheNewIQ.com. (http://www.thenewiq.com/integritywa…).

Page 19 of its 2007-2008 annual report explains that the American Society for Nutrition seeks to “Position [itself] as an authoritative leader in nutrition through science.”

It’s laughable, of course, when you’re pushing refined sugar to children and calling it a “smart” choice. Where’s the science in that? Maybe all the scientists they hired are whacked out on a sugar high from eating too much Froot Loops…

Complete marketing hoax

I find it fascinating that the minute the FDA says it’s going to investigate the Smart Choices labeling program, the big food companies who funded the project flee like cockroaches scurrying under the kitchen counter. If the Smart Choices program was really based on such great nutritional science as its hucksters claim, then why did these food companies distance themselves as quickly as possible the minute a hint of scrutiny was announced?

The reason, of course, is because the entire Smart Choices program was a fraud to begin with. Nutritionally, it was a complete joke, and from a regulatory point of view, it was a disaster… did anybody really think the processed food industry could police itself?

If a genuine Smart Choices labeling program were ever put into place, it should have required large red warning symbols on virtually all the products from the participating companies. “Warning: Don’t eat this unless you, too, want to get cancer, diabetes and heart disease! (50 cents-off coupon on back!)”

I can’t think of a single product made by PepsiCo that’s actually good for you. Kellogg has some products that could qualify as somewhat nutritious, but Kraft Foods manufactures primarily nutrient-depleted, processed dead foods that in my opinion no parent should ever feed a child. It’s difficult to imagine any of these being labeled “smart” anything. Processed, dead foods loaded with sugar and refined carbohydrates actually make children obese and diabetic, and diabetes has been scientifically linked to impaired cognitive function (http://www.naturalnews.com/027281_d…). So if you really do the math on processed foods, they tend to make kids stupid, meaning this “Smart Choice” program would have been more accurately named, “Stupid Foods!”

Why did the FDA tolerate this fraud for so long?

It’s a relief to see this fraudulent Smart Choices program falling apart so quickly. The program was an outright fraud that pushed health-harming disinformation onto parents and families.

Of course, that was the whole point of the program, and it would have succeeded if it wasn’t so blatantly stupid to begin with. With Smart Choices, the food industry tried to hoodwink the entire American population, and they got schooled on it by a few outspoken nutritionists who exposed the program as complete bunk. Dr. Eileen Kennedy also got an earful, most likely, for her role as head honcho of the fraudulent program, if not for her hilarious comment about processed foods being “smart” because they’re better than donuts.

Any person who tries to push 40% sugar cereals onto children while labeling it a “Smart Choice” probably deserves to be caned in a public square in Singapore. Or better yet, they should have their hands tied behind their backs and thrown into a neck-deep marsh pit full of soggy Froot Loops then ordered to try to eat their way back to shore without getting diabetes…

But here’s my real question: You know how the FDA conducts raids on herbal companies that dare to tell the truth about their herbal products, like the fact that astragalus supports immune function? (http://www.naturalnews.com/027303_t…) Well, why isn’t the FDA threatening PepsiCo, Kraft Foods, Unilever and Kellogg with the confiscation of their products that are being sold through these fraudulent labeling claims?

In other words, why does the FDA threaten companies that tell the truth on their labels, but it completely ignores (influential) companies that lie on their labels? If the FDA had any real credibility left, it would have sent nasty warning letters to these big food companies long ago, threatening their CEOs with criminal arrest and prosecution, confiscating their products, shutting down their companies and listing them on the FDA website as violators of federal law.

But that never happened. Care to guess why? The answer, as you well know, is because in the food and drug industries, MONEY TALKS. The companies with the big bucks get a wink and a nod instead of a threatening letter. In fact, it was only after a huge public outcry forcing the FDA’s hand that these food companies decided to flee the Smart Choice labeling program at all. Had nobody raised a stink about it, absolutely zero enforcement action would have taken place.

Food companies will get away with everything the public lets them get away with. They will use dangerous chemical additives in their products, they’ll target children with obesity-promoting sugary cereals, they’ll engage in blatant labeling fraud to promote junk products as “smart,” they’ll use clever packaging illusions to make a small quantity of food look larger, and they’ll even lobby lawmakers in Washington to stop the passage of any new laws that might hamper their ability to keep on selling disease-promoting products to a gullible population of hungry (but nutritionally deficient) consumers.

The only way to stop these crooks is to stand up and shout the truth about what’s they’re trying to shove down our throats. From processed white sugar via genetically modified sugar beets to snack chips laced with monosodium glutamate, these companies are in the business of selling poison to a population that’s already among the sickest in the world.

When will the criminal investigations begin?

What we really need in America goes way beyond any labeling program. What we really need is an army of deputized nutritional investigators to arrest and prosecute these food company executives for poisoning our children with aspartame, MSG, chemical food additives and nutrient-depleted processed ingredients like sugar and white flour. We need food company executives to start serving jail time for the crimes of negligence they’ve committed against our people.

People have a right to nutritious food. When they are forced to eat from a national food supply that makes them diseased and nutrient deficient, that’s a crime. When sodas and junk foods are sold in vending machines in public schools, that’s a crime against children. And when food companies engage in blatant marketing fraud to try to push their dangerous, disease-causing products onto gullible consumers, that’s a violation of federal labeling laws and should be prosecuted as such.

It’s time we took the crooked food companies to task. It’s time we demanded honest, nutritious food that prevents disease and supports both mental and physical health. And as long as we tolerate the shenanigans of both the FDA and the big food companies it is protecting, we’ll never get a national food supply that promotes a healthy population.

Here are some things you might want to check out to learn more:

This report from Yale University researchers details the marketing of sugary cereals to children:
http://www.cerealfacts.org/media/Ce…

Be sure to watch the movie Food, Inc.:
http://www.foodincmovie.com/

You’ll find the trailer on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eKY…

Reposted from NaturalNews.