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

October 27, 2010

Dan Brook, Ph.D. & Richard Schwartz, Ph.D.

Global warming goes way beyond “an inconvenient truth”. We are overheating our planet to alarming levels with catastrophic consequences. Thirteen of the past fourteen years have been the hottest on record and 2010 is on a sizzling pace to break another record. Picture an overheated car (and what we drive), an overcooked dinner (and what we eat), and someone sick with a fever (and how we act). Now imagine that on a planetary scale.

Global warming is perhaps the biggest social, political economic, and environmental problem facing our planet and its inhabitants. Global warming refers to the increasing average temperature of the Earth’s air and water. People are becoming increasingly aware of and concerned about global warming and its serious consequences — despite corporate misinformation and right-wing obfuscation — due to frequent reports regarding record heat waves, blazing wildfires, an increase in the number and severity of storms, the length of droughts, the melting of glaciers, permafrost, and polar ice caps, rising sea levels, flooding, changes in wind direction, acidification of the oceans, endangered species, spreading diseases, shrinking lakes, submerged islands, and environmental refugees. While not all climatic changes can be directly attributed to global warming, most are consistent with the scientific projections for the warmer globe we are creating. Earthlings may be standing at a global precipice.

In recent years, we have been experiencing waves washing across and submerging islands, massive ice shelves breaking off in the Arctic, and the threatening of endangered species, most notably polar bears. Global warming is also endangering penguins, seals, walruses, salmon, elephants, frogs, butterflies, birds, and many other animals, threatening up to one-third of all species. In contrast, increases in carbon dioxide and heat levels will lead to an increase in the number and range of mosquitos, further spreading discomfort and disease.

In 2010 alone, we are witnessing many countries experience unprecedented heat waves, raging wildfires in Russia, profound drought in Australia and Israel, massive flooding in China and Pakistan, along with the continuing disappearance of glaciers — about 80% of the world’s glaciers are shrinking — and the snow on Mt. Kilimanjaro, and other ominous signs of disaster. In August 2010, an “ice island” more than twice the size of San Francisco calved from the Petermann Glacier in Greenland into the sea (earlier, the Ayles Ice Shelf calved entirely in August 2005 and the Markham Ice Shelf broke up in 2008, just to mention a couple of other such alarming events). “Such a path is not merely unsustainable”, according to John P. Holdren, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “it is a prescription for disaster.”

Humanity is threatened as perhaps never before and major changes have to occur to put our imperiled planet on a sustainable path — soon. Even though some individuals still deny the reality of global warming, there is a complete scientific and environmental consensus — among all major scientific and environmental organizations, journals, and magazines, and all peer-reviewed scholarly articles — that global warming is real, serious, worsening, and caused or exacerbated by human activity. The evidence is overwhelming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its Fourth Assessment Report in February 2007, which was researched and written by about 2,500 climate scientists over a six-year period and then vetted by over 130 governments. The Report carefully delineates clear trends and potentially catastrophic consequences associated with climate change, warning of the possibility of irreversible change, unless we make concerted efforts to counter global warming. The IPCC makes it plain that the current and projected climate change is not simply “natural variation”, solar activity, or other cyclical phenomena, but “very likely” (meaning at least 90% certainty) the result of human activity. The case is closed on the problem of global warming, with only the mitigations and solutions to still debate.

It therefore should not be surprising that the U.S. Pentagon states that global warming is a larger threat than even terrorism. “Picture Japan, suffering from flooding along its coastal cities and contamination of its fresh water supply, eyeing Russia’s Sakhalin Island oil and gas reserves as an energy source”, suggests a Pentagon memo on global warming. “Envision Pakistan, India and China — all armed with nuclear weapons — skirmishing at their borders over refugees, access to shared river and arable land.” The Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, has said that climate change needs to be taken as seriously as war and, further, that “changes in our environment and the resulting upheavals from droughts to inundated coastal areas to loss of arable land are likely to become a major driver of war and conflict”. Fighting global warming may be one way to prevent future wars, simultaneously increasing energy security and physical security.

Progressives have additional causes for concern. The people disproportionately affected by global warming are the poor and socially disadvantaged, since they are in the weakest position to guard against environmental damages and will likely suffer the most harm. In the underdeveloped world, and perhaps especially in China, India, and Southeast Asia, as well as much of Africa and the Middle East, global warming will negatively affect urban drinking water systems, agricultural output, and commercial and other transport on rivers.

Further, increased suffering and increasing numbers of environmental refugees, along with greater anxiety over access to food, water, land, and housing — the material essentials of life — often lead to unstable conditions that give rise to anger, ethnic violence, terrorism, fascism, and war.  “It’s the poorest of the poor in the world, and this includes poor people even in prosperous societies, who are going to be the worst hit,” states IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri. Those who needlessly degrade and destroy the environment to satisfy their own selfish pleasures are like the pre-revolutionary Queen Marie-Antoinette, declaring “Let them eat carbon dioxide”!

Yes, we need our governments, corporations, schools, religious institutions, and other organizations to get actively involved in fighting global warming. Yes, we need to stop deforestation and increase reforestation. Yes, we need more resource conservation and more energy-efficient buildings, houses, cars, appliances, electronics, batteries, and light bulbs. And, yes, our society needs to switch away from fossil fuels and toward renewable ones, such as solar, wind, tidal, wave, biomass, hydrogen, geothermal, and others. But while we are struggling for these important and positive large-scale social changes, we also need to say “yes!” to personal changes.

In fact, the latest IPCC report states that “Changes in lifestyles and consumption patterns that emphasize resource conservation can contribute to developing a low-carbon economy that is both equitable and sustainable.” A major study showing how personal “changes in lifestyles and consumption” can affect global warming is in the 2006 UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report, entitled “Livestock’s Long Shadow”. It states that animal-based agriculture causes approximately 18% of greenhouse gas emissions (in CO2 equivalents), which lead to global warming, an amount greater than that caused by all forms of transportation on the planet combined (about 13.5%). A 2009 report for the respected WorldWatch Institute entitled “Livestock and Climate Change” determined that the FAO underestimated livestock’s contribution by excluding important phenomena and, instead, calculates livestock’s contribution at 51% — a absolute majority of anthropogenic greenhouse gases.

Cars are still problematic, of course, but cows and other animals raised for human consumption are contributing more to global warming, thereby causing more damage to our existence and, indeed, to life on Earth. Therefore, what we eat is actually more important than what we drive and the most important personal change we could make for the environment, as well as for our own health and for the lives of animals, is a switch to vegetarianism.

The world is feeding nearly 60 billion farmed animals, while millions of people, disproportionately children, starve to death each year. Almost 40% of the grain produced worldwide — and about 70% in the U.S. — is inefficiently and immorally diverted to feed farmed animals, simply to satisfy the lust for money and meat. The FAO study reports that the livestock industry, in total, uses and abuses roughly 30% of the planet’s surface, thereby “entering into direct competition [with other activities] for scarce land, water and other natural resources.” Further, overuse of the land by livestock, leading to overuse of fuel and water, also degrades the land and pollutes the water around it, contributing to additional environmental and health problems. While factory farms may be the worst offenders, similar dynamics occur with free-range livestock as well. In fact, free range livestock actually occupy and potentially pollute a greater amount of land.

An animal-based diet also uses energy very inefficiently. Grains and beans require only 2 – 5% as much fossil fuel as beef.  Reducing energy consumption is not only a better choice in terms of fighting climate change, it is also a better choice in terms of being less dependent on foreign oil and the vagaries of both markets and dictators.

Additionally, the editors of World Watch (July/August 2004) concluded that “The human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future — deforestation, erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilization of communities, and the spread of disease.” Lee Hall, the legal director for Friends of Animals, is more succinct: “Behind virtually every great environmental complaint there’s milk and meat.”

While growing concern about global warming is welcome, the many connections between the increasingly globalized western-style diet and global warming have generally been overlooked , marginalized, or outright denied. The production of meat contributes significantly to the emission of the three major gases associated with global warming: carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O), as well as other eco-destructive gases such as ammonia (NH3), which contributes to acid rain, and hydrogen sulfide (H2S), which has been implicated in mass extinctions.

Indeed, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, Unit on Climate Change, “There is a strong link between human diet and methane emissions from livestock.” The 2004 World Watch publication State of the World is more specific regarding the link between animals raised for meat and global warming: “Belching, flatulent livestock emit 16% of the world’s annual production of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.” Likewise with the July 2005 issue of Physics World: “The animals we eat emit 21% of all the carbon dioxide that can be attributed to human activity.” We now know that these statistics are actually underestimates. With the accumulation of scientific studies, the climate picture is getting increasingly — and frighteningly — clearer.

Eating meat and other animal products directly contributes to this environmentally-irresponsible industry and its devastating impact on the environment, including the dire threat of global warming. People who still deny the critical link between meat and global warming are not fundamentally different than those who still deny the critical link between fossil fuels and global warming. Either way, the climate change deniers are fooling while Earth burns.

While carbon dioxide is the most plentiful greenhouse gas (currently about 35% higher than pre-industrial atmospheric levels), methane and nitrous oxide are much more powerful than carbon dioxide in terms of global warming potential. Methane is at least 23 times, and possibly as much as 72 times, more powerful (and about 150% higher than pre-industrial atmospheric levels) and nitrous oxide is a whopping 296 times more potent (and about 20% higher than pre-industrial atmospheric levels). With the livestock industry emitting such a huge amount of methane and given that methane degrades relatively quickly in the atmosphere (in approximately 12 years as compared to hundreds or even thousands of years for carbon dioxide), a sharp decrease in animal consumption, and therefore subsequent livestock (re)production, would provide the necessary near-term alleviation from global warming potentially “spinning out of control”.

Changing from the Standard American Diet (SAD) to a vegetarian or, better yet, vegan diet, according to geophysicists Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin at the University of Chicago, does more to fight global warming than switching from a gas-guzzling Hummer to a Camry or from a Camry to a Prius. It has been said that “eating meat is like driving a huge SUV… [and] a vegetarian diet is like driving a [hybrid]”, while local, organic, vegan eating (LOVE) [www.truth-out.org/love-environment59878] is like riding a bicycle.

Shifting away from SUVs, SUV lifestyles, and SUV-style diets, to energy-efficient, life-affirming empowering alternatives, is essential to fighting global warming. Planetary sustainability and the well-being of humanity are greatly dependent on a shift toward plant-based diets. One easy and effective way to fight global warming every day is with our forks, knives, spoons, and chopsticks! If we don’t, the “procrastination penalty” will be painful.

It is increasingly clear that eliminating, or at least sharply reducing, the production and consumption of meat and other animal products is imperative to help reduce global warming and other grave environmental threats, in addition to greatly benefitting one’s physical and spiritual health and the lives of animals. For some people, this means becoming vegetarian or vegan; some vegetarians are leaning towards or becoming vegans; many omnivores are engaging in Meatless Mondays or otherwise increasing their number of meatless meals; others are becoming “weekday vegetarians”, “vegan before dinnertime”, or other types of flexitarians. Which path are you on?

Are you taking global warming personally? You should. Mark Twain once quipped that “Everybody talks about the weather, but no one ever does anything about it.” Now you can!

Richard H. Schwartz, Ph.D., is the author of Judaism and Vegetarianism, Judaism and Global Survival, and over 150 articles and interviews located at www.JewishVeg.com/schwartz. He is President of Jewish Vegetarians of North America (JVNA) at www.JewishVeg.com, Director of the Veg Climate Alliance at www.vegclimatealliance.org, Coordinator of the Society of Ethical and Religious Vegetarians (SERV) at www.serv-online.org, and can be contacted via President@jewishveg.com.

This article was reposted from World.edu.

I gave a talk in South Texas recently on the environmental virtues of a vegetarian diet. As you might imagine, the reception was chilly. In fact, the only applause came during the Q&A period when a member of the audience said that my lecture made him want to go out and eat even more meat. “Plus,” he added, “what I eat is my business — it’s personal.”

I’ve been writing about food and agriculture for more than a decade. Until that evening, however, I’d never actively thought about this most basic culinary question: Is eating personal?

We know more than we’ve ever known about the innards of the global food system. We understand that food can both nourish and kill. We know that its production can both destroy and enhance our environment. We know that farming touches every aspect of our lives — the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the soil we need.

So it’s hard to avoid concluding that eating cannot be personal. What I eat influences you. What you eat influences me. Our diets are deeply, intimately and necessarily political.

This realization changes everything for those who avoid meat. As a vegetarian I’ve always felt the perverse need to apologize for my dietary choice. It inconveniences people. It smacks of self-righteousness. It makes us pariahs at dinner parties. But the more I learn about the negative impact of meat production, the more I feel that it’s the consumers of meat who should be making apologies.

Here’s why: The livestock industry as a result of its reliance on corn and soy-based feed accounts for over half the synthetic fertilizer used in the United States, contributing more than any other sector to marine dead zones. It consumes 70 percent of the water in the American West — water so heavily subsidized that if irrigation supports were removed, ground beef would cost $35 a pound. Livestock accounts for at least 21 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions globally — more than all forms of transportation combined. Domestic animals — most of them healthy — consume about 70 percent of all the antibiotics produced. Undigested antibiotics leach from manure into freshwater systems and impair the sex organs of fish.

It takes a gallon of gasoline to produce a pound of conventional beef. If all the grain fed to animals went to people, you could feed China and India. That’s just a start.

Meat that’s raised according to “alternative” standards (about 1 percent of meat in the United States) might be a better choice but not nearly as much so as its privileged consumers would have us believe. “Free-range chickens” theoretically have access to the outdoors. But many “free-range” chickens never see the light of day because they cannot make it through the crowded shed to the aperture leading to a patch of cement.

“Grass-fed” beef produces four times the methane — a greenhouse gas 21 times as powerful as carbon dioxide — of grain-fed cows, and many grass-fed cows are raised on heavily fertilized and irrigated grass. Pastured pigs are still typically mutilated, fed commercial feed and prevented from rooting — their most basic instinct besides sex.

Issues of animal welfare are equally implicated in all forms of meat production. Domestic animals suffer immensely, feel pain and may even be cognizant of the fate that awaits them. In an egg factory, male chicks (economically worthless) are summarily run through a grinder. Pigs are castrated without anesthesia, crated, tail-docked and nose-ringed. Milk cows are repeatedly impregnated through artificial insemination, confined to milking stalls and milked to yield 15 times the amount of milk they would produce under normal conditions. When calves are removed from their mothers at birth, the mothers mourn their loss with heart-rending moans.

Then comes the slaughterhouse, an operation that’s left with millions of pounds of carcasses — deadstock — that are incinerated or dumped in landfills. (Rendering plants have taken a nose dive since mad cow disease.)

Now, if someone told you that a particular corporation was trashing the air, water and soil; causing more global warming than the transportation industry; consuming massive amounts of fossil fuel; unleashing the cruelest sort of suffering on innocent and sentient beings; failing to recycle its waste; and clogging our arteries in the process, how would you react? Would you say, “Hey, that’s personal?” Probably not. It’s more likely that you’d frame the matter as a dire political issue in need of a dire political response.

Vegetarianism is not only the most powerful political response we can make to industrialized food. It’s a necessary prerequisite to reforming it. To quit eating meat is to dismantle the global food apparatus at its foundation.

Agribusiness has been vilified of late by muckraking journalists, activist filmmakers and sustainable-food advocates. We know that something has to be done to save our food from corporate interests. But I wonder — are we ready to do what must be done? Sure, we’ve been inundated with ideas: eat local, vote with your fork, buy organic, support fair trade, etc. But these proposals all lack something that every successful environmental movement has always placed at its core: genuine sacrifice.

Until we make that leap, until we create a culinary culture in which the meat-eaters must do the apologizing, the current proposals will be nothing more than gestures that turn the fork into an empty symbol rather than a real tool for environmental change.

James E. McWilliams, an associate professor of history at Texas State University at San Marcos and a recent fellow in the agrarian studies program at Yale University, is most recently the author of “Just Food.”

Republished from The Washington Post

Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain has never made a secret of his disdain for vegetarians and vegans. In his best-selling book Kitchen Confidential the former New York cook remarked somewhat amusingly, “Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn.” After his book became a hit, Bourdain moved into television and currently hosts No Reservations, a rather unusual and unorthodox travel show which examines far-flung cultures and exotic cuisines of the world.

Over the course of his career, Bourdain has cultivated a cool, bad-ass image and during his program he sports a black leather jacket. On one of his shows shot in San Francisco, he made a point of taking on political correctness by heading to an old steak house and feasting on prime rib. “To me,” he has written, “life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.”

A few days ago Bourdain took his relentless campaign against vegetarians and vegans to new heights on CNN. Speaking on Larry King Live, the TV personality remarked that we were designed by evolution to eat meat. “We have eyes in the front of our head. We have fingernails. We have … teeth and long legs. We were designed from the get-go … so that we could chase down smaller, stupider creatures, kill them and eat them,” he said. 

The conversation focused on contaminated burgers that had sickened, paralyzed and even killed some people who had eaten them. Bourdain conceded that factory farms and large meat processors had developed “unconscionable” practices which “bordered on the criminal.” Expressing concern about chopped meat, Bourdain said “The stuff they’re putting in these burgers would not be recognized by any American as meat.”

Still, the popular Travel Channel personality could not bring himself to turn against a carnivorous lifestyle. “I think certainly we could eat better in this country,” he remarked. “It would probably not be a bad thing if we ate less meat, if the ratio of animal protein to vegetables changed along the lines of the Chinese model. But to talk about eradicating meat is silly.”

At this point another panelist on King’s show, Jonathan Foer, rightly took Bourdain to task. Foer, a best-selling writer and author of the upcoming book Eating Animals, declared “What Anthony didn’t say, and I wish he had, is that 99 percent — upwards of 99 percent of the animals that are raised for meat in this country come from factory farms.” Foer added, “When we’re talking about meat, when we’re talking about the meat they sell in grocery stores, when we’re talking about the meat we order in restaurants, we are effectively talking about factory farms. I think it’s a wonderful thing for someone with a reputation and as much intelligence as Anthony has to come out against factory farms. The crucial part of the picture is to say to America, this is almost everything.”

Foer is right about how enmeshed Americans have become in the factory farm system. Yet, the discussion on Larry King about meat and its downsides did not go far enough. Today, meat production is putting our planet in peril and hastening global climate change. It’s an issue which has been ignored by the likes of CNN but one which I deal with at considerable length in my upcoming book, No Rain in the Amazon: How South America’s Climate Change Affects the Entire Planet (Palgrave-Macmillan, April 2010).

Here’s the problem which Bourdain and other blissful carnivores choose to ignore: the world-wide cattle industry is linked to destructive deforestation and our climate destiny. Worryingly, deforestation is currently the second largest driver of carbon dioxide emissions after the burning of fossil fuels. To put it in concrete terms, tropical deforestation accounts for a whopping 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The Amazon rainforest is of particular concern and accounts for nearly half of the carbon dioxide emissions resulting from tropical deforestation.

In the Amazon the cattle sector is the largest driver of rainforest destruction, accounting for 60 to 70 percent of deforestation. To put it in concrete terms: every eighteen seconds on average one hectare of Amazon rainforest is being lost to cattle ranchers. As if the carbon emissions resulting from cattle deforestation were not enough, consider bovine methane emissions (or cow farts, if you want to be less delicate). While much of the debate surrounding global warming has centered upon carbon dioxide–the world’s most abundant greenhouse gas–methane, which has twenty-one times the warming potential of carbon dioxide, is seldom mentioned.

In Brazil, rainforest cattle has accounted for much of the country’s domestic demand in recent years. But now, the cattle and climate dilemma is becoming internationalized as the South American giant moves into the global marketplace. So far Brazil has exported most of its beef to Europe, though the country’s meat may have qualities that some markets view as favorable. Indeed Amazonian cattle are certainly free range, grass fed, and possibly organic, depending on your definition of the term. Ever wonder where that hamburger you just ate came from? There’s a chance it might contain meat from the Amazon rainforest.

In light of our climate difficulties, we’re going to have to reconsider our dietary choices. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization finds that meat production gives rise to more greenhouse gases than either transportation or industry. Furthermore, beef is the most carbon-intensive form of meat production. Consider: a one-pound patty results in about 36 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, or thirteen times the emissions from chicken.

But wait, there’s more: in order to feed the world’s rapacious demand for meat, Brazil has turned large tracts of land over to soy production. Soy has long been popular among vegetarians but it is now prized as a quick, cheap, and safe animal feed for poultry, pigs, and cattle. The Chinese and Europeans have become voracious consumers of Brazilian soy, catapulting the South American nation to agribusiness giant status. In China soy imports have increased exponentially, in large part because of growing affluence and a shift in the local diet. For many Chinese, consuming meat and dairy products symbolizes wealth, status, modernity, and escape from rough rural life.

Though the average American eats more than 250 pounds of meat ever year, the Chinese are now catching up and currently consume 115 pounds. Per capita consumption of pork in China has meanwhile almost doubled. Though China produces a lot of soy on its own, it is now the world’s largest importer of soy to feed its growing livestock sector. In Europe meanwhile, demand for soy has skyrocketed.

Though the soy planters cut down some forest, their influence is often more indirect. Once ranchers have cleared land in the Amazon the soy planters buy up property and move in. But as they take up cleared land, savanna, and transitional forests, the soy magnates push others such as slash-and-burn farmers even further into the forest. Soy then acts as a significant push factor and catalyst of climate change. The farmers who get pushed into the rainforest by agribusiness quickly find that Amazonian soils are notoriously low in fertility. After several harvests crop yields start to disappoint and eventually farmers abandon the land altogether or convert it to cattle pasture. In addition to pushing ranchers and slash-and-burn farmers into the forest, soy magnates exert pressure on the Amazon in other ways. For example, they lobby for highways and infrastructure projects which pave the way for yet more deforestation.

In Brazil, it is large international companies which are fueling the soy bonanza — companies like Minnesota – based Cargill. It’s a fact which apparently eludes Bourdain: speaking on CNN he remarked that it would be “ridiculous” and “silly” to replace Cargill, a huge corporation, with a food system based on fruits and vegetables. Bourdain has apparently failed to consider the nefarious social and environmental costs associated with corporate agribusiness. Perhaps he should talk to poor farmers in Brazil who have been displaced by soy production and must head to the rainforest to practice subsistence agriculture — all in the name of fueling agribusiness exports and expanding the global meat-eating lifestyle.

It’s perplexing how Bourdain, whose show is easily one of the most lively and intelligent on TV, has become such an impassioned foe of “silly” vegetarians and their “Hezbollah-like” vegan cousins. Considering all the disadvantages, perhaps one of the best things anyone can do to tackle climate change is to have one meat-free day a week and gradually decrease meat intake thereafter. It’s not enough, however, to simply transition toward a vegetarian diet which includes lots of milk, butter, and cheese–this probably won’t reduce emissions significantly as dairy cows would still release methane through flatulence. While it may sound a bit naive to think that people will change their eating habits any time soon, such a move is certainly much less complicated than getting people to switch their mode of transport.

Tony Bourdain has a cool show though his overall coolness is rapidly wearing thin. Maybe he should channel his constructive energy into lambasting corporate cattle ranching and agribusiness as opposed to vegetarians and vegans. The host of No Reservations has a great appreciation for traditional cultures and local folk. Why not air a program about how soy and our unsustainable consumerist lifestyle are displacing poor people while simultaneously fueling deforestation and climate change? Now THAT would be a show worth tuning in for.

Nikolas Kozloff is the author of the forthcoming No Rain in the Amazon: How South America’s Climate Change Affects the Entire Planet (Palgrave-Macmillan, April 2010). Visit his blog at http://senorchichero.blogspot.com/

The return of the food riot

Across the world, from Mozambique to Mexico, from the Philippines to Pakistan, countries have been surprised by the re-emergence of one of the oldest forms of social protest – the food riot. Food is getting more expensive, and many people are less able to afford it. In 2006, food prices increased by 9 per cent. Last year, they went up by at least 37 per cent. This year doesn’t look like it will be any better.

Most of this increase is in the dairy and grain sectors, but the entire planet feels the effect. In its understated way, the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations puts it like this: ‘Rarely has the world felt such a widespread and commonly shared concern about food price inflation, a fear which is fuelling debates about the future direction of agricultural commodity prices in importing as well as exporting countries, be they rich or poor.’

Agflation (as it’s somewhat inelegantly called) hurts those least able to afford it. It is they who spend the greatest part of their income on food, and they who will find it hardest to span the price jump.

In Haiti, one of the most mercilessly punished countries on the planet, the poor in Port-au-Prince are finding themselves priced out of the market for food. Never let it be said, though, that the market cannot provide. In the poorest districts, there is now a brisk trade in mud cakes. Mothers feed the biscuits, made with water, salt, margarine and clay, to their children. The cake puts a dampener on hunger, at least for a couple of hours, but leaves your mouth dry and bitter for several hours more.

In some respects, the city’s clay cookie eaters are the lucky ones. At least they’re in a position actually to buy something, no matter how awful. By far the largest number of people who die from hunger die in rural areas, where the food is produced, and not ultimately for want of food, but for want of money to be able to buy the food that is available.

There’s a bitter irony here. Most of the world’s poorest people are the farmers and farm workers who actually produce food. One might think that they’d benefit from the fact that food prices are going up. And some farmers will undoubtedly be better off, particularly those growing cereals for export.

But most countries in the global South have a very particular pattern of agricultural production, which involves a few, very large scale farmers producing the bulk of export crops. The majority of poor rural people – and four out of five poor people on the planet live in rural areas – either work on or, if they’re lucky, own a very small amount of land. Their food production has been largely destined for the home market. With the World Bank and World Trade Organisation (WTO) pushing for increased levels of free trade, they’ve found themselves shut out of their own markets by imports dumped from the global North.

Consider rice, a source of income and sustenance for more than two billion people. As part of its ‘structural adjustment’ policies, the World Bank has insisted that countries in the South reduce government support for agriculture. This has meant that in order to feed the people, governments have become increasingly reliant on the global economy.

But the giants of the international economy, particularly the US and EU, haven’t had to play by the same rules. While the WTO removed tariff barriers in order to ‘level the playing field’ in developing countries, many large scale farmers in the North remained heavily subsidised by their governments, with inducements to export surplus production. So when US rice farmers sold their product overseas, the subsidies they received undercut the local competition. That is why a 50-kilo bag of rice will sell in the US for $19, but in the Ghanaian market the same bag will cost you $15. The latest available data show import prices running at a third of what you’d be able to get for a similar locally produced bag at wholesale prices. No Ghanaian farmer can compete with that for long.

Following the money

Between 2000 and 2003, this dumping of rice into the countries of the South was compounded by another feature – low rice prices. It meant that the poorest farmers were ground out of the market, unable to make a living. Again, the World Bank puts the positive spin on trade liberalisation. In its 2005 Global Agricultural Trade report, the Bank put it like this: ‘The real story is the large transfers between consumers and producers that lead to these net gains. In [rice] importing countries consumers gain US$32.8 billion, while producers lose $27.2 billion.’ But since those farmers were among the countries’ poorest, transferring money away from them to slightly richer working people in the cities meant that poverty deepened.

What are ex-rice-farmers to do? The World Bank would like them to move to the city. In countries where they have followed the Bank’s advice, there have been explosions in urban poverty. The industrial jobs that should have been there to feed the displaced rural poor had themselves been whittled away by the same liberalisation policies that had just put the boot in to agriculture. It is a double whammy that millions of farmers continue to face, and one that has recently been adopted as an official development policy by the World Bank, under the banner of ‘agriculture for development’. And it becomes a triple whammy when displaced agriculturalists end up in cities forced to pay far more for food than they ever thought possible.

So what’s behind the food price rises, and why aren’t poor farmers benefiting? We’ve got an intuition that helps us here. When the price of oil goes up, we don’t think for a minute that the beneficiaries are oil workers or the people on the petrol station forecourts. We understand that oil is a commodity controlled by a few powerful corporations, and that it is they, and more specifically the oil financiers, who are getting fat pay cheques. This intuition helps us understand why most farmers aren’t getting rich off the price rises – if they’re involved with the international economy, it is, with few exceptions, invariably as peons.

That explains why farmers aren’t getting the lucre. But where, then, does it go? One clue is to be found through a longer historical view. We’d like to think that food price rises are new, but if you look at the real cost to consumers, the price of food has been increasing, while at the same time the price that farmers receive on that food, the farm gate price, has been falling in real terms. Driving a wedge between the consumers and farmers are the food corporations, and it’s unsurprising that they’ve been one of the most consistently desirable stocks on the market.

But there are other factors at work too, ones outside the control of even the most powerful food companies. Most important, the harvest has been incredibly poor over the past year because the weather in several key growing regions has been erratic. Some are already calling this the first climate-change famine and the harbinger of worse to come. In Africa, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, studies suggest that within a century, crop revenues could be down by up to 90 per cent as a result of climate change. This could be compounded by up to 50 per cent of animal species becoming endangered (so no relying on tourism) and up to 250 million people being affected by water stress as a result of a very conservative one-degree temperature increase.

The oil we eat

At the heart of this, of course, lies oil, and oil matters to food more than global warming. Take, for instance, the price of oil. It makes sense that, with higher energy prices, the costs of food distribution have soared. But this isn’t the only way that oil matters for our food. Industrial agriculture, by definition, involves the use of inorganic fertiliser. Making inorganic fertiliser requires a great deal of energy, and one of the primary elements in fertiliser manufacture is natural gas. Dearer oil means dearer gas means dearer fertiliser means dearer food.

Ironically, one of the other major reasons why prices are going up is because of an intervention to wean us away from oil: agrofuels (the combustible plant products that we’re being induced to call ‘biofuels’). The source of these fuels varies from country to country – from palm oil in Indonesia to sugar cane in Brazil. Their production is peddled by politicians as an unmitigated good in the battle against climate change, even though study after study suggests precisely the opposite.

This research will come as small comfort to those displaced to grow agrofuels, those going hungry because of them, or even those directly involved in growing them. The International Labour Organisation estimates that there are 50,000 slaves in Brazil, mainly on sugar cane plantations. The cane is thirsty, and is drying up the largest aquifer in South America- the Guaraní. In the US, the government has backed the transformation of corn (maize) into ethanol, a move that has pleased farmers and delighted the ethanol producers (food giants Cargill, ADM, Bunge, joined by the more familiar ConocoPhillips and Exxon Mobil) who lobbied hardest for it.

The demand for agrofuel corn means that there’s less corn around to eat, and the price goes up. Farmers being astute and very aware of the market, see the bright future for corn, and switch to it from other crops. This means that not only has the price of corn gone up but there’s less of the other cereals, leading again to higher prices. And tilting the market yet further, the US and EU have explicit policy targets and subsidies for agrofuels to reach the political nirvana of ‘energy independence’.

As a result, there is less food on the market. But there’s a further force at work, which means that an even smaller fraction of it ends up in the bellies of the hungry. As the incomes of the new middle classes in India and especially China increase, the demand for meat has spiked. To produce a kilo of chicken requires two kilos of grain, to produce a kilo of pork needs four kilos, and to produce one kilo of beef needs seven. The demand for millions of tons of meat means that multiple millions of tons of grain are being fed to animals, rather than people. Reducing the demand for meat loosens some of the supply constraints on grain, which means that it’s more accessible to the poor. And that’s independent of the ethical reasons to cut out meat, and ignoring the environmental damage done by livestock, not only through methane emissions but through toxic levels of agricultural run-off from the farms that breed them.

The peasant way

There is a gamut of reasons both why prices are higher and why farmers are seeing less and less of the revenue. Those hurt the hardest are rural workers and small farmers. So it shouldn’t come as too big a surprise that farmers are at the forefront of understanding the effects of international agricultural trade. For decades, they’ve been schooled in the violence of the market, and in the use of food as a political weapon by agribusiness.

Recently, though, modern communications technologies have allowed conversations between different struggles in different parts of the world. One of the largest farmers’ movements in the world, La Via Campesina (Spanish for ‘the peasant way’) is an international association of millions of farmers, peasants, and landless labourers. It has long organised against the predations of international capitalism. It was in 1992, for instance, that farmers were reading and critiquing, in the fields of Karnataka, India, a Kannada translation of the charter text that was to found the World Trade Organisation. This was fully seven years before the Seattle WTO protests.

One of the movement’s major outcomes has been the development of a coherent international alternative to modern industrial agriculture. It’s called ‘food sovereignty’. To fully understand it, it’s important to contrast it with the dominant liberal goal – food security. Food security has a technical definition, along the lines of this, taken from the US government: food security is characterised by ‘access by all people at all times to sufficient food and nutrition for a healthy and productive life’. This sounds all well and good until you realise that it’s compatible with everyone getting vouchers for McDonald’s and a baggie of vitamins to fill the nutritional gaps.

Crucially, what the definition of food security omits is any idea of who controls what and how food is grown and distributed. The definition of food sovereignty is fairly long; Wikipedia has a good summary. The most recent iteration of it is this: ‘Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations.’

It’s a bold vision, and it has two sets of demands. The first is that food policy must be decided by everyone in a democratic manner, rather than a small cabal of plutocrats in a smoke-filled room. Nonetheless, there is a second set of demands that are non-negotiable, demands that protect women’s rights and ecological sustainability. The insistence on women’s rights is, incidentally, the clearest indication that what Via Campesina is lobbying for is not some misty-eyed recuperation of traditional agriculture, but a thoroughly modern and socially just system of food production and consumption.

It’s ambitious, yes, but it offers to solve some of the biggest troubles with food. First, the demands of ecological sustainability mean that industrial agriculture and agrofuels are off the table. There are ways of growing food agro-ecologically, free of inorganic fertiliser, that have a far smaller ecological footprint, foster biodiversity, and provide outputs at levels in excess of conventional agriculture. These techniques have been pioneered in Cuba, which used to be one of the largest importers of fertiliser and pesticides on the continent, but has since turned its agricultural production around. The fall of the Soviet Union, in combination with the US trade embargo, forced the country first towards two years of widespread hunger, and then the development of some of the most sophisticated oil-free agricultural science on the planet. Today 70 per cent of food eaten in Havana comes from Havana.

Cuba has become an agricultural leader by reforming its land tenure system, offering relevant and public scientific support to farmers, and paying attention to the effects of geography and town planning on access to food. They are lessons from which the rest of the world can profit. But in order to be able to implement them, the South needs to have a little more wiggle room in agriculture than it currently does. Which means that agricultural concerns should be removed from the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank (responsible for a great deal of damage to agriculture over the past 30 years) should be defunded, and the subsidy systems in the global North and South need to be overhauled to benefit the poorest, rather than the wealthiest, to promote local food democracies.

From ethical shopping to political hedonism

While there are elements of Cuban agriculture to wish for everywhere, it’s easy for the majority of us, living in cities, to feel rather disconnected from agrarian struggles. The solution we’re offered, to eat sustainably, is sold to us as a lifestyle choice for a kind of consumerism that somehow aspires to short-circuit capitalism. This is a deep contradiction in terms, of course, but it has its seductions. After all, which Red Pepper reader hasn’t bought fair trade coffee? I certainly have.

But while fair trade is preferable to its alternative (super-exploitative trade), it’s not going to do anything about the major inequities of the farming system. Most of the poorest and most militant farmers are demanding not slightly higher prices for a sack of beans, but land reform and comprehensive agrarian change. This isn’t the sort of thing that one can shop for, and even the best fair trade programmes don’t pretend to be advancing this agenda. This is precisely the limitation of consumer activism – that it makes us feel that through judicious shopping we’re engaging in structural change when our behaviour is entrenching precisely the structures of domination we would range ourselves against.

So what are we to do? The principles of food sovereignty suggest that the solution doesn’t lie in abdicating responsibility and doing whatever passing fancy crosses one’s mind. One solution to put growers and eaters back at the heart of the food system is to be found, paradoxically, in a particular kind of hedonism, one that comes from a country where leftist politics and food are both treated very seriously: Italy.

One of the triumphs of the Italian left has been the staking out of a particular territory of joy. In 1986, the Italian communist daily Il Manifesto published an eight-page insert fighting for, among other things, the right to food. The publication was called Gambero Rosso – meaning ‘red shrimp’ but also a play on the words ‘bandiera rossa’, ‘red flag’. The thinking behind it was this: why should pleasure be only the domain of the bourgeoisie? Is it not every worker’s right to be able to enjoy food?

From a class analysis of pleasure came a realisation that in order to enjoy food, workers needed two things: time and money. And the getting of these things was to be a social and collective pursuit, in defiance of, rather than through the market. The organisers worked with unions for an increase in wage rates, and then campaigned for a two-hour lunch break, freeing time in the middle of the day for agricultural workers to be able not just to eat but to savour their food. Soon, the original founders were joined by a range of activists, artists, writers, workers and cooks from across the world. They wrote their vision into a manifesto, with lines like ‘In the name of productivity, Fast Life has changed our way of being and threatens our environment and our landscapes.’ Their answer became the name of their organisation: Slow Food (see Red Pepper, Oct-Nov 2007).

The Slow Food movement suggests that enjoying food more is a way of reclaiming our nourishment from capital. The kind of enjoyment they’re fighting for involves not just individual choices but social ones, and requires more than simply opting for a more ethical shopping basket. It is in the direction of Slow Food that the principles of food sovereignty point those of us living in cities.

Food sovereignty offers a paradoxical solution to agflation. The answer isn’t to lower prices – most farm workers and farmers see little enough as it is. The solution is simultaneously to increase farm-gate prices, to promote land reform, appropriate technology and women’s rights, and also to increase wages and social supports. These outcomes can’t be shopped for. They’re the fruits of organising and agitation, a necessary step if we are all to be able to savour our food. And they’re fruits well worth struggling for.

Footnote

Raj Patel is the author of Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System (Portobello Books) www.stuffedandstarved.org. He is a researcher at the University of California, at Berkeley’s Center for African Studies, and at the University of KwaZulu-Natal

Reprinted from Red Pepper.