Agriculture // Current

Monsanto: feeding a company to starve a country

Monsanto purchased a brazilian sugarcane ethanol company for 290 million dollars. Who the hell is that going to feed?

From the article:

At a time when many people were questioning causes of the recent food crisis, many more were investigating how our food systems can move forward to sustainably feed the increasing world population. Recently, the U.N. Task Force on Trade, Environment and Development released a report touting the noteworthy yields and economic benefits of organic agricu... in Africa. Even recognizing that organic production offers significant hope for increasing food security. Another report released earlier this year by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Scien... noted that a "radical change" was needed for agriculture, and that agricultural biotechnology held little promise. But corporations like Monsanto took a different approach to the problem -- exploiting the food crisis as a means to sell more of their own biotech seeds.

Monsanto's website is rife with articles discussing how its applications of biotechnology will supposedly solve the food crisis. Back in June, on the cusp of the World Food Summit, Monsanto announced plans to double crop-yields by 2030 with biotechnology. The New York Times covered the story including a quote from a soybean genetics expert at the University of Nebraska who stated, "The hype-to-reality ratio of that one is essentially infinity ... seeing an exponential change in the yield curve is unlikely." But while experts were doubting Monsanto's claims, a Business Week article quoted Hugh Grant, the head of Monsanto, saying, "That isn't a feel-good thing ... Satisfying the demand curve is a great business opportunity." Grant may consider that quote a gaffe, but it was a telling sign regarding where Monsanto's true interests lie: not with people, but with profits.

Last week Monsanto purchased Aly Participacoes Ltda, a Brazilian company involved in sugarcane breeding and sugarcane ethanol. Monsanto's press release noted, "Global demands for raw sugar and biofuels are beginning to rise at a faster pace than the current production levels in sugarcane, a crop that is essential to meeting these demands," said Carl Casale, executive vice president of global strategy and operations for Monsanto. Last time I checked, hungry people can't eat ethanol and probably can't afford sugar. So why, in the middle of a food crisis, is Monsanto investing in sugarcane ethanol?Monsanto purchased a brazilian sugarcane ethanol company for 290 million dollars. Who the hell is that going to feed? From the... more

JanforGore
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1 day ago

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The Real Price of Farmed Salmon

Salmon aquaculture is devastating the world's oceans and an international coalition of scientists, Canadian First Nations and tourism operators have called for a global moratorium.

"We've seen a regional collapse of all sea life in the 20 years since the salmon farms moved in," said Chief Bob Chamberlin of the Kwicksutaineuk Ah-kwa-mish Canadian First Nation in the province of British Columbia on Canada's west coast.

Scientific studies have linked sharp declines in wild salmon populations in British Columbia to disease and parasites originating in open-ocean salmon farms. Millions of non-native salmon have escaped ocean net-pens in Chile and have become an invasive species, transforming the ecology of local river systems.

There is little debate that salmon aquaculture is both unsustainable and environmentally destructive. Three or more kilogrammes of wild fish is needed to produce one kilo of farmed salmon. The ocean bottoms under and around the open-ocean net pens are usually devoid of any life, buried under the excrement of up to a million salmon overhead.

"Salmon farm 'shadows' can extend three or four kilometres depending on the current," said Wolfram Heise, director of the marine conservation programme at the Fundación Pumalin (Pumalin Project), a private conservation initiative in Chile.

These shadows are dead zones where there is nothing but mud and faeces along the bottom of the ocean. "Oxygen levels in the water are so depleted it sometimes forces the farms to move to new locations," Heise told IPS from Puerto Varas, located 1,000 kilometres south of Santiago.

Like land-based factory farms where far too many animals are being raised in confined quarters, heavy doses of antibiotic drugs and hormones are fed to the fish. Despite this, a potent virus swept through Chile's salmon farms last year and has cut production in half. Unable to stem the outbreak, the farms simply moved to new locations hundreds of kilometres away, abandoning their local employees and the contaminated waters and seabed.

On Canada's west coast scientists have connected the decline in wild salmon stocks to the region's 100-plus salmon farms. After publishing their research in the prestigious journal Science, marine biologists warned that one wild salmon species will be extinct by 2011 because of infestations of parasites that originate in salmon farms. More than 80 percent of the annual pink salmon in the Broughton Archipelago, 300 kms north of the city of Vancouver, has been killed by these parasites since 2001.

North America's northwest coast is home to several species of wild salmon that remain one of the natural wonders of the world and are a key part of the coastal ecosystem. After spending two or more years feeding in the open ocean, they return to their natal streams and rivers to spawn and die. Many species, including eagles, bears and wolves, feed on the dying or dead salmon. They also bring large quantities of salmon carcasses into forests, which decay, enriching the soil and feed many plants, including the region's giant red cedars and sitka spruce trees.Salmon aquaculture is devastating the world's oceans and an international coalition of scientists, Canadian First Nations and... more

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22 days ago

Biotech snake oil: a quack cure for hunger

Commercialized GM crops are confined to soybeans, corn, cotton and canola. Soybeans and corn predominate, and are used mainly to feed animals or fuel cars in rich nations. For instance, Argentina and Brazil export the great majority of their soybeans as livestock feed, mainly to Europe and Japan, while more than three fourths of the U.S. corn crop is either fed to animals or used to generate ethanol for automobiles. Expanding soybean monocultures in South America are displacing small farmers, who grow food crops for local consumption, and thus contribute to food insecurity, especially in Argentina and Paraguay. The only other commercial GM crops are papaya and squash, both grown on miniscule acreage.

Most revealing, however, is what the biotech industry has engineered these crops for. Hype and promises of future innovations notwithstanding, there is not a single commercial GM crop with increased yield, drought-tolerance, salt-tolerance, enhanced nutrition or other attractive-sounding traits touted by the industry. Disease-resistant GM crops are practically non-existent.

We have yet to see genetically modified food that is cheaper, more nutritious or tastes better, says Hope Shand, research director for the Ontario-based ETC Group. Biotech seeds have not been shown to be scientifically or socially useful.

The industry's own figures reveal that GM crops incorporate one or both of just two traits; herbicide tolerance and insect resistance. Insect-resistant cotton and corn produce their own built-in insecticide to protect against certain, but far from all, insect pests. Herbicide-tolerant crops are engineered to withstand direct application of an herbicide to kill nearby weeds. These crops predominate, with 82 percent of global biotech crop acreage.

Herbicide-tolerant crops (mainly soybeans) are popular with larger farmers because they simplify and reduce labor needs for weed control. They have thus helped facilitate the worldwide trend of consolidating farmland into fewer, ever bigger farms, like Argentina's huge soybean plantations. According to a 2004 study by Charles Benbrook, former executive director of the Board on Agriculture of the National Academy of Sciences, herbicide-tolerant crops have also led to a substantial increase in pesticide use. Benbrook's study found that adoption of herbicide-tolerant crops in the United States increased weed-killer use by 138 million pounds from 1996 to 2004 (while insect-resistant crops reduced insecticide use by just 16 million pounds over the same period).

The vast majority of herbicide-tolerant crops are Monsanto 's Roundup Ready varieties, tolerant to the herbicide glyphosate, which is sold under the brand-name Roundup. The dramatic rise in glyphosate use associated with Roundup Ready crops has spawned an epidemic of glyphosate-resistant weeds, just as bacteria evolve resistance to an overused antibiotic. Farmers respond to resistant weeds by upping the dose of glyphosate and by using greater quantities of other herbicides, such as the probable carcinogen 2,4-D (a component of Agent Orange) and the endocrine-disrupting weed killer atrazine, recently banned in the European Union. Glyphosate-resistant weeds and rising herbicide use are becoming serious problems in the United States, Argentina and Brazil.

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30 days ago

Re-building America's food culture: An open letter to the President-elect

This is a great article - the one issue not realized in Michael Pollan's address here is that the way we build our buildings is also an enormous contributor to carbon output, but that aside, if "we the people" are to re-create a healthy viable world for ourselves and future generations, we must understand the way we farm, and eat, needs to be implemented with wisdom. We have recently seen we cannot eat our money or stocks and bonds, our true treasures are the "God" given ones - the natural world! This is an excerpt, the full letter is found at the link above.

Open Letter to the President-Elect by Michael Pollan: Farmer in Chief
Farmer in Chief
By Michael Pollan
New York Times, October 10, 2008
Straight to the Source

Dear Mr. President-Elect,

"Did you notice when you flew over Iowa during the campaign how the land was completely bare - black - from October to April? What you were seeing is the agricultural landscape created by cheap oil. In years past, except in the dead of winter, you would have seen in those fields a checkerboard of different greens: pastures and hayfields for animals, cover crops, perhaps a block of fruit trees. Before the application of oil and natural gas to agriculture, farmers relied on crop diversity (and photosynthesis) both to replenish their soil and to combat pests, as well as to feed themselves and their neighbors. Cheap energy, however, enabled the creation of monocultures, and monocultures in turn vastly increased the productivity both of the American land and the American farmer; today the typical corn-belt farmer is single-handedly feeding 140 people.

This did not occur by happenstance. After World War II, the government encouraged the conversion of the munitions industry to fertilizer - ammonium nitrate being the main ingredient of both bombs and chemical fertilizer - and the conversion of nerve-gas research to pesticides. The government also began subsidizing commodity crops, paying farmers by the bushel for all the corn, soybeans, wheat and rice they could produce. One secretary of agriculture after another implored them to plant "fence row to fence row" and to "get big or get out."

The chief result, especially after the Earl Butz years, was a flood of cheap grain that could be sold for substantially less than it cost farmers to grow because a government check helped make up the difference. As this artificially cheap grain worked its way up the food chain, it drove down the price of all the calories derived from that grain: the high-fructose corn syrup in the Coke, the soy oil in which the potatoes were fried, the meat and cheese in the burger."

Excerpt continued in link below.

This is a great article - the one issue not realized in Michael Pollan's address here is that the way we build our buildings... more