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Category: Agriculture

  • Peak cherry blossom season in Washington, D.C. is early again

    It’s the most wonderful time of the year in Washington D.C.: cherry blossom time. Even before spring’s official arrival on Sunday, the capitol’s cherry trees had budded, peduncles — the blossom-bearing stalks — were stretched out, and blossoms puffed. On Monday afternoon, the National Park Service announced peak bloom had arrived in a stream of giddy capital letters: “PEAK BLOOM! PEAK BLOOM! PEAK BLOOM!” A frothy, pink-and-white cloud unfurled around the sparkling waters of the Tidal Basin. 

    To many locals, the blossoms are an unequivocal time of celebration, an opportunity to behold something precious and fleeting. Washingtonians share their favorite petal-peeping spots and swap tips for avoiding the crowds. Couples plan engagement shoots and proposals. Residents decorate their porches, plan parties, and make pilgrimages to the National Mall. 

    The last two pandemic years forced the city to heavily scale back its annual National Cherry Blossom Festival; people were invited to tune into a livestream rather than pack themselves like sardines beneath the canopy of petals. Now, some city leaders are framing this year’s celebration as D.C.’s “pandemic comeback,” welcoming visitors back to the Tidal Basin with open arms. “Let me say, without equivocation, that D.C. is open!” said Mayor Muriel Bowser at a press event earlier this month. “We want D.C. to be the face of spring for the nation.” 

    But those springs are warming, prompting the city’s cherry trees to bloom earlier and earlier. Since 1921, the National Park Service has tracked peak bloom dates. This year, it was forecast for March 22-25, about a week earlier than the 30-year average. In a warming world, the blossoms are a climate reality check as much as a harbinger of spring.

    You can chalk this year’s early bloom up to mild weather in February and March. In the days leading up to peak bloom — which in D.C., means 70 percent of the trees have blossomed — the city enjoyed pleasant temperatures in the 70s, which coaxed cherry trees from their winter dormancy. Warming temperatures mean unfurling leaves and blooming flowers appear earlier, according to the EPA. 

    The cherry trees also need a month of cold weather below 41 degrees Fahrenheit to blossom properly. That requirement, known as chilling hours, is a tree’s way of making sure winter is really over — and the pollinating bugs are buzzing — before it flowers. In the long term, peak bloom may actually change course and occur later, since warming winters would impair the trees’ ability to wake up. These shifts represent the ways climate change upends ecosystems, interfering with plants that flower, insects that pollinate plants, critters that feed on insects, and on up the food chain. 

    To be clear, the fact that D.C.’s cherry trees are sensitive to a warming climate is hardly new. Still, some experts say they’re not an ideal indicator of climate change. The last century of data is noisy, meaning the dates vary a great deal year to year, said Dagomar Degroot, an environmental historian at Georgetown University. “There’s not a very clear trend line at all,” he said. “As of right now. That might change in the future.” 

    • A close-up of cherry trees buds shows the stalks that hold the blossoms have lengthened.
    • A close-up of cherry trees buds shows white petals are starting to unfold.
    From left to right, cherry blossoms at the fourth (peduncle elongation) and fifth (puffy white) stages of bloom. Photos by National Mall and Memorial Parks, National Park Service.

    More reliable are the trees in Kyoto, across the Pacific, where more than 1,200 years of data —  spanning records from emperors, aristocrats, and monks — clearly shows peak bloom advances in response to climate change. Last year, Kyoto’s cherry blossoms peaked on March 26, the earliest date yet in the entire record.

    According to Soo-Hyung Kim, a plant scientist at the University of Washington, although the D.C. data varies more than Kyoto’s, “they are saying the same thing.” A decade ago, Kim led a study predicting how climate change would affect the timing of D.C.’s peak blooms. His team predicted that by 2050, peak bloom would arrive an average of five days early at least.

    Recently, Kim was curious how their predictions fared. He revisited their estimates for 2020 and found they were right on track with last year’s peak bloom — a win for their model, but not so much for the planet. That was sobering, Kim said, because their predictions were based on two scenarios offered by the leading climate report at the time: one in which the world’s energy use was balanced between fossil fuels and renewable sources, and the other, dominated by fossil fuels. 2021 looked a lot like the model’s prediction for the latter, a more pessimistic view of the future.

    If D.C. diversified its cherry trees, the city could better manage the blossoms’ early arrivals and delays, said Naoko Abe, author of The Sakura Obsession. Most of D.C.’s trees are Yoshinos, a ubiquitous and easy-to-grow variety, which is why they bloom into a puffy, pink cloud all at once. But there are hundreds of varieties. Embracing diversity would make for a more climate- and disease-resilient population. ”If you have different varieties, they blossom at different times and they are different colors and they fall at different times,” she said, describing mountain groves in Japan where many species grow wild together. “It gives you a totally different impression.”

    All of this suggests D.C. may need to adjust its picture-perfect image of peak bloom. For Degroot, whose walk to work has lately been colored by flowering trees and the perfume of spring, the cherry blossoms represent risk and uncertainty — and what the city stands to lose without dramatic action to curb emissions. “What we’re grappling with is a much more uncertain future where the cherry blossom season really is impaired,” he said. “We risk losing so much.” 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Peak cherry blossom season in Washington, D.C. is early again on Mar 22, 2022.

  • Ecosocialist Bookshelf: Oceans, legal rights, and industrial agriculture

    Climate & Capitalism editor Ian Angus presents five new books for reds and greens.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Koalas doomed by ‘she’ll be right mate’ syndrome

    The PM has announced a funding package to boost the koala’s long-term protection and recovery efforts. But, as Binoy Kampmark argues this avoids the two major causes for its population dwindling: climate change and habitat destruction through other means.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Can cloud seeding help quench the thirst of the US West?

    This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

    Not since Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800 A.D. has the American West been so dry. A recent study in Nature Climate Change found the period 2000 to 2021 was the driest 22 years in more than a millennium, attributing a fifth of that anomaly to human-caused climate change. The megadrought has meant more fires, reduced agricultural productivity, and reduced hydropower generation. Last summer, the United States’ two largest reservoirs — Lake Mead and Lake Powell — reached their lowest levels ever, triggering unprecedented cuts in water allocations to Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico.

    Desperate for water, several Western states have expanded decades-old programs to increase precipitation through cloud seeding, a method of weather modification that entails releasing silver iodide particles or other aerosols into clouds to spur rain or snowfall. Within the past two years, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and California have expanded cloud seeding operations, with seeding a key plank in the Colorado River Basin Drought Contingency Plan.

    Cloud seeding operations have also expanded in water-stressed regions outside the U.S. The United Arab Emirates, which currently gets more than 40 percent of its water through desalination plants, has built a weather enhancement factory that can churn out 250 cloud seeding flares a week. China has long had a far more substantial weather modification infrastructure, with millions of dollars spent each year seeding clouds in the semi-arid north and west, often with anti-aircraft guns launching silver iodide flares into the sky. In 2020, the central government announced that the weather modification program would expand to include more than half of the country, with a grand vision of a “sky river” carrying water from the humid south to the drier north.

    A cloud-seeding rocket is launched in an attempt to make rain on May 15, 2021 in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province of China.
    A cloud-seeding rocket is launched in an attempt to make rain on May 15, 2021 in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province of China. Zhang Haiqiang / VCG via Getty Images)

    Some of the renewed attention on cloud seeding is driven by fresh evidence that it actually works — at least when seeding for snow. In 2020, a group led by researchers at the University of Colorado and the National Center for Atmospheric Research reported the results of a study conducted at a cloud seeding operation in Idaho. Called SNOWIE, the study used sophisticated radar and meteorological methods to demonstrate unambiguously that cloud seeding can increase snowfall.

    “Cloud seeding works,” says Katja Friedrich, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado and lead author of the SNOWIE study. “We know that. We know that from experiments in the lab. We also have enough evidence that it works in nature. Really the question is: We still don’t have a very great understanding of how much water we can produce.”

    Governments and users aren’t waiting for more certainty to pursue projects. In the U.S. West, the need for water is so acute and cloud seeding so cheap that even a very slight increase in precipitation is worth it, says Friedrich. “Cloud seeding is something people consider in areas where they’re desperate for water,” she says.

    But cloud seeding should not be thought of as a response to drought, experts agree. For one, in a drought there are likely to be fewer seed-able storms. And when there are storms, even the estimates from cloud seeding companies themselves show the practice increases precipitation by only around 10 percent in a given area. That might be worth the effort when every acre-foot counts, but it’s not going to end a drought across an entire region.

    Cloud seeding, if it’s done at all, is most effective when practiced continually, seeding in wet years and dry years alike to try to keep reservoirs full and soil moist. Along with conserving and using water more efficiently, “it’s just another tool in the toolbox for water supply,” says Mike Eytel, a senior water resource specialist for the Colorado River District. “It’s not the panacea that some people think it is.”

    Cloud seeding got its start because of a problem with planes. When pilots began to fly through clouds, ice sometimes accreted on the wings, impacting their ability to fly. During World War II, this was a major issue for American planes flying from India over the Himalayas to supply Chinese forces, a treacherous trip known as “The Hump.” Many planes turned back after icing up. After the war, General Electric began studying how supercooled water in clouds — water that is below freezing temperature but still liquid — became ice. “They were creating the supercooled water clouds in this freezer, and they threw some dry ice in there,” says Frank McDonough, a meteorologist at the Desert Research Institute. The dry ice caused the supercooled water to form ice crystals — snow.

    View of a US Army Air Transport Command cargo plane as it flies over the snow-capped, towering mountains of the Himalayas, along the borders of India, China, and Burma.
    View of a US Army Air Transport Command cargo plane as it flies over the snow-capped, towering mountains of the Himalayas, along the borders of India, China, and Burma. PhotoQuest / Getty Images

    Soon, General Electric scientists were running experiments in real clouds, first with dry ice, then with silver iodide, crystals of which resemble ice. When silver iodide particles are released into a cloud, droplets of supercooled water form crystals around them, which fall to the ground as snow. Clouds can be seeded from rockets, planes, or from the ground by burning silver iodide in acetone, so the particles rise in smoke. Warm weather seeding for rain works somewhat differently. Instead of silver iodide, “giant aerosols” such as salt are released into clouds by planes, causing larger droplets to form among the trillions of supercooled droplets too small to fall, which can spark a chain reaction leading to rain.

    The finding that weather modification was possible generated a lot of interest, but attempts to demonstrate that seeding reliably caused more precipitation were inconclusive. Stymied by a limited understanding of cloud physics and the difficultly of running well-controlled experiments in nature, researchers were unable to distinguish the effects of cloud seeding from natural variability. The ambiguous evidence, combined with some overzealous promises, gave weather modification a reputation for charlatanism, and research dwindled.

    In 2003, recognizing that a number of states had continued cloud seeding programs despite the limitations of prior research, the National Research Council revisited the literature on weather modification. “The Committee concludes that there still is no convincing scientific proof of the efficacy of intentional weather modification efforts,” the report found. “In some instances there are strong indications of induced changes, but this evidence has not been subjected to tests of significance and reproducibility.”

    The 2020 study from SNOWIE, which demonstrated that seeding for snow can work in the right meteorological contexts, changes that picture. “In terms of research, this is a really exciting time for cloud seeding,” says Sarah Tessendorf, a researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and another author of the SNOWIE study, though she is careful to qualify the results.

    For one, the SNOWIE findings don’t apply to warm weather seeding for rain, which exploits a different mechanism within different types of clouds. And what worked in Idaho doesn’t necessarily apply elsewhere, Friedrich says; even within the SNOWIE study itself, increased snowfall was not observed after every seeding run. Further, the sophisticated radar methods used in the study are not available to analyze every operation, and many questions remain about when, where, and with what methods cloud seeding is most effective, with robust data in short supply.

    Cloud seeding operators submit annual reports to states estimating additional precipitation caused by their efforts, often claiming hundreds of thousands of additional acre-feet, but “it’s kind of crude,” says Eric Hjermstad, who runs Western Weather Consultants, a cloud seeding company that manages several seeding operations in Colorado. For instance, company reports make comparisons between seeded areas and unseeded areas at different altitudes or with different levels of humidity, or they make assumptions about the amount of snow that actually ends up in river systems. “I don’t think they are really off in what they are saying,” says Friedrich. “But sometimes we need to question these [reports].”

    To address this, Friedrich, Tessendorf, and others aim to use the SNOWIE data to develop more accurate cloud seeding models, which could improve predictions of how much additional precipitation is caused by given operations and determine where and when cloud seeding is most effective — not that cloud seeding operations are waiting around for better models.

    Cloud seeding projects are often funded through cost-sharing agreements between state and local governments, and private parties, such as ranchers or ski resorts, willing to accept some risk that their money is for naught, says McDonough. And many are convinced that cloud seeding is having an effect, despite considerable uncertainty in the annual reports. “They know their local water supplies and snowpack well enough that I think they feel like they’re seeing the results,” he says. “These people don’t have that much money. I think that if they had doubts, they probably would have stopped a long time ago.”

    Aerial view: Lake Mead is a water reservoir formed by Hoover Dam on the Colorado River in the Southwestern United States and is viewed at 30% capacity on January 11, 2022 near Boulder City, Nevada.
    Lake Mead, a water reservoir formed by Hoover Dam on the Colorado River in the Southwestern United States, is viewed at 30 percent capacity in January 2022. George Rose / Getty Images

    Since 2000, more than 800 reports from more than 50 weather modification projects have been submitted to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with most focused on increasing precipitation. State weather modification budgets typically range in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Utah, which has one of the most extensive seeding programs in the U.S., spends a little more than $700,000 a year on seeding, with contributions split between the state, municipalities, and other states in the Lower Colorado River Basin.

    The recent efforts to expand long-standing cloud seeding programs have largely not met opposition, though some projects have been controversial. In New Mexico, which has no active cloud seeding operations, a proposal to begin seeding in the north of the state was abandoned in January after facing public backlash over concerns about environmental impacts, as well as the lack of consultation with tribal governments. Another proposal to seed clouds in the east of the state is under review.

    Cloud seeding costs money, but the cost is relatively low compared to the value of water, even if the reports overstate increased precipitation, proponents say. And there do not appear to be environmental downsides to seeding. People are often concerned about contamination from silver iodide because silver can be toxic in high concentrations, Tessendorf says, but studies have found levels of silver iodide in cloud seeded areas are comparable to levels in unseeded areas and are unlikely to accumulate to toxic levels. Because seeding affects such a small portion of the total moisture in a given cloud, there also aren’t likely to be significant downstream effects where “you’re robbing Peter to pay Paul,” she says. In other words, seeding clouds over Colorado doesn’t deprive Utah of snow.

    In New Mexico, some commenters opposed to cloud seeding expressed concern that it represents a kind of hubris, that humans shouldn’t “play God” or mess around with nature. Such arguments have been made since seeding became possible. It’s worth pointing out, says McDonough, that seeding or not, “clouds aren’t pristine things.” In many cases, car exhaust and other industrial pollution has reduced the efficiency with which clouds precipitate by shrinking the size of cloud droplets. “Cloud seeding may be putting the clouds back to a more efficient state where they may have been prior to humans,” he says. Or at least prior to Charlemagne.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Can cloud seeding help quench the thirst of the US West? on Mar 12, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • A tribe in Maine is using hemp to remove ‘forever chemicals’ from the soil

    The pair was hardly dressed like typical farmers, but this was no typical farm. Sporting white hazmat suits and respirators, Chelli Stanley and Richard Silliboy lugged 5-gallon jugs of water toward bushy plots of hemp, each 30-by-30-foot patch a stark sign of order in the otherwise overgrown field. It was a warm September day in Limestone, a small town on the edge of the Maine-Canada border, and the pair struggled to breathe in the head-to-toe protective gear. Stanley, a founder of the environmental organization Upland Grassroots, recalls telling Silliboy, vice chief of the Aroostook Band of Micmac Nation, “This will be worth it someday.”

    For Stanley and Silliboy, the focus was not so much the hemp they were growing as what it was doing. Their farm, once part of the Loring Air Force Base, is also a Superfund site — an area so polluted it’s marked high-priority for federal cleanup. Later, when the Aroostook Band of Micmacs took over the site’s ownership, they found its soil was rife with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, better known as PFAS, cancer-causing compounds that are so difficult to break down they’re commonly known as “forever chemicals.” 

    Because of their ability to bind to proteins, PFAS tend to bioaccumulate — building up in soil, water, and even human bodies. Under typical environmental conditions, they can persist for hundreds, even thousands of years. But there is hope at Loring: In 2020, researchers discovered that the Micmacs’ hemp plants were successfully sucking PFAS out of the contaminated soil. This practice, known as phytoremediation, could guide farmers across the country who have had to shut down after discovering their soil is tainted with the ubiquitous class of chemicals. 

    Sara Nason, one of the project’s lead researchers from the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, called their results “conservatively promising.” Other researchers see the potential too. David Huff, a senior scientist at the environmental consulting firm Nutter & Associates Inc., said, “At the end of the day, the data support phytoremediation as a viable approach and definitely established proof of concept.”

    A woman in respirator and hazmat suit waters a bushy plot of hemp.
    Chelli Stanley waters hemp plants on Micmac-owned land in Limestone, Maine. Courtesy of Upland Grassroots

    PFAS were once considered to be human-made miracle compounds. Due to their oil- and water-repelling properties, they were long used in all kinds of products from firefighting foam to stain-resistant carpets to nonstick pans. They’ve been linked to a host of health problems, including kidney and testicular cancer, liver damage, and suppressed immunity. 

    Although some companies have voluntarily decided to phase out the use of PFAS in their products and packaging, the chemicals are already ubiquitous, pervading farms and military sites alike. In states like Maine and New Mexico, where PFAS have been detected in soil, milk, and vegetables, they have been traced to “biosolids” — byproducts from sewage treatment plants that are sometimes used as fertilizers. In former military bases like Loring, the main source is thought to be firefighting foam. Indeed, part of the land that the Micmac obtained in 2009 was previously used as a firefighting testing area.

    Loring has undergone years of cleanup since the base closed. In 2007, the Environmental Protection Agency deemed it ready for reuse, albeit with limits due to contamination that persists at the site. According to the EPA, the Air Force has confirmed the presence of PFAS in the groundwater, surface water, and soil, and promised future study.

    The tribe sought the land for economic development, but it is “unhealthy,” Silliboy said. It’s the latest in what he sees as the Micmac’s long history of obtaining poor land. He pointed to reservations on swamps and steep hills, land where no one can garden. “When the tribe is given any property for reservation land, it’s not prime property,” he said. So when Stanley, seeking a site to test hemp’s ability to pull PFAS out of the ground, approached him about a partnership, he was eager to work together. “Protecting the land is part of the Micmac beliefs,” said Chief Edward Peter-Paul of the Aroostook Band in a report on the project. “Anything we can do to contribute to making the environment better, we want to be a part of.”

    In the spring of 2019, the Micmac Nation, Upland Grassroots, and their research partners began their experiment. They collected data on three plots (others didn’t survive a drought). Two years later, they reported early signs of success: The hemp lowered PFAS in the soil. 

    Phytoremediation is an attractive option for cleaning land of certain types of contaminants because it’s relatively affordable and limits disturbances to soil. In addition to PFAS, plants have been used to leach lead from abandoned mines and pesticides from retired orchards. While people have long used plants to help clean soil and water, the term was coined in 1994 by Rutgers University biologist Ilya Raskin. Raskin’s early experiments involved using mustard to extract heavy metal pollutants half a mile from Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which unleashed catastrophic amounts of radioactive material when a reactor melted down in the mid-1980s. 

    Hemp is a good candidate for phytoremediation because it grows fast across much of the United States. Its roots are deep and profuse — the better to uptake pollutants from soil. Stanley believes their success using hemp to remove persistent contaminants like PFAS holds promise for many other farmers. Before hemp’s widespread legalization in 2018, “huge companies could excavate or do these very intrusive processes” to deal with polluted land, she said. “But there was nothing the layperson could really do to clean land.”

    Nason, the researcher with Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, agreed the practice has potential, though she was more cautiously optimistic. “It’s a possibility, but I think we still have a lot to learn,” she said. It’s still unclear how much of the chemicals hemp can remove. Although the Loring project successfully extracted some PFAS, plenty remained in the soil. Also unclear is how many rounds of hemp planting it would take to return levels to a “safe” baseline — something that doesn’t technically exist yet without national standards from the EPA.

    The team lacked good control data to measure their efforts because “pretty much everywhere has some amount of PFAS,” Nason said. 

    A brown building sits in empty grass field.
    A former firefighting training site at the Loring Air Force Base is now home to the hemp phytoremediation project. Courtesy of Upland Grassroots

    Assuming phytoremediation of PFAS breaks out of its experimental phase, it should shine in cost comparisons to other removal techniques, according to David Huff, the environmental consultant. Currently, the standard approach to PFAS cleanup involves excavating the affected soil. The costs can be astronomical: One estimate for the contaminated soil on a 100-acre dairy farm in Maine ran upward of $25 million. Using plants, Huff said, can cost 75 percent less at least. That’s not to say plant-based PFAS removal comes cheap exactly: Soil testing can cost anywhere from $250 to $600 per sample. And for any given field, samples at multiple points across the field are needed to measure progress, especially as PFAS levels can vary from spot to spot within the same parcel of land.

    Huff, who has studied various grasses and trees’ ability to extract PFAS, said plants work best when the contaminant levels are lower and the cleanup area is larger — around two acres or more. By that measure, most farms would be considered large projects. 

    And size isn’t the only limitation — phytoremediation takes more time compared to other approaches. 

    Leah Penniman, co-director and manager of the community farm Soul Fire Farm in New York state, wrote about using plants like geranium or sunflowers to clean lead-contaminated soil in her book Farming While Black. “It takes at least one year and very careful monitoring, so it’s not for everyone,” she wrote. After the first year, if tests still indicate high lead levels, it may take another round of planting (or two or three). Developers might prefer the expensive, quicker route of excavation over a long wait. But faced with steep costs, small farmers may have no choice besides a plant-based approach.

    For farmers hoping to put plants to work, there are other challenges ahead. If a farm’s soil is polluted, odds are the water will be too. That was the case at Loring, so the EPA doesn’t allow the use of the water supply, Stanley said. She and Silliboy had to truck in water each week for their hemp, which limited how much they could grow. Some states are already addressing these needs; the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, for example, installs filters for farm wells that exceed a certain level of contamination.

    Future studies will also need to develop guidelines for how people should dispose of the PFAS-laden plants once their job is done. That could entail drying first to reduce the sheer mass, Huff said. The key is safely discarding waste to avoid creating another mess. 

    Meanwhile, the work at Loring continues. A new water tank will help Stanley and Silliboy plant more hemp this year. The research effort has gained a new partner, a chemical engineer from the University of Virginia interested in using enzymes to break down PFAS. 

    The Aroostook Band of Micmacs is considering plans to build a campground, once the land proves clean. The woods have grown back over the years and run with bears, moose, and deer. Although, Silliboy said, state officials have recently cautioned against consuming wild venison — there’s PFAS in it.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A tribe in Maine is using hemp to remove ‘forever chemicals’ from the soil on Feb 22, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Promised Debt Relief, Some Black Farmers Instead Get Collection Notices

    Norman Greer, 84, and William Ballard repair a grain table on Greer's farm as the threat of rain delays their plans to harvest soybeans on October 11, 2021 in Princeton, Indiana.

    After amassing more than $100,000 in debt over more than two decades of farming, a Georgia-based farmer named Denver got welcome news last year from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Farmers like him would be eligible for a new debt relief program. USDA would pay off certain loans and give him a little extra for tax liabilities.

    Denver did not receive a payment. But almost a year later, he received another letter: A notice that USDA intends to take legal action to collect the money he owes the agency. Denver asked the Center for Public Integrity not to use his last name out of fear of retaliation.

    “We know that institutional discrimination is systemic within USDA,” said Tracy Lloyd McCurty, executive director of the Black Belt Justice Center. “So then the question is, how many other Black farmers around the country are experiencing this and they just don’t know who to reach out to about it?”

    How Denver and other farmers like him got here is a confusing mix of bureaucracy, policy choices and litigation. Farmers and advocates fear massive land loss and foreclosures if this legal muddle doesn’t get straightened out. Data the Center for Public Integrity received through a Freedom of Information Act request also suggests that the USDA violated its own promise to suspend debt collections during the pandemic.

    But we’ll start from the beginning.

    In January 2021, USDA promised it would suspend debt collections, foreclosures and other adverse actions on borrowers with direct farm loans, made between the Farm Service Agency and the borrower, given the economic hardship posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

    That decision was followed up by the American Rescue Plan Act. The new law included a $4 billion program to cancel certain farm loan debts farmers of color owe the Farm Service Agency, a USDA subagency that provides loans to agricultural producers. The law energized Black and other farmers of color who have long faced discrimination by the department, which has approved access to credit at lower rates and provided inequitable program payments than white farmers received.

    Eligible farmers such as Denver received notices from USDA that spelled out exactly how much it would pay to wipe out their debts, including 20% to cover tax liabilities.

    As USDA prepared to implement the new law last year, eligible farmers were told they wouldn’t be punished for failing to make payments. So Denver stopped.

    But legal challenges from white farmers claiming reverse discrimination were filed in several states. Eventually a federal judge stopped USDA from implementing the program and allowed a class action lawsuit to proceed.

    “That’s one of the most heartbreaking situations that I’ve observed in my 30-plus years as a lawyer working with farmers,” said Susan Schneider, director of the LL.M. Program in Agricultural and Food Law at the University of Arkansas School of Law. “The USDA’s enjoined. They can’t really do anything.”

    Advocates and farmers including John Boyd, president of the National Black Farmers Association, say they’ve received little communication about the status of the debt relief program. Boyd said last July the White House promised a meeting with President Biden. Weeks ago, he requested another with USDA Secretary Thomas Vilsack, but neither has happened.

    As the year drew to a close, Denver and other farmers began receiving notices that USDA wanted to collect their debts. Some had liens put on their crops and initially weren’t paid so that the funds could be used to pay their loans.

    “Why won’t they stop sending us papers if you done promised us they’re going to do something for us?” said Denver, a peanut and livestock farmer.

    The USDA announced Feb. 1 that it was required by law to send the notices and “doesn’t intend to take any action that’s indicated,” Zach Ducheneaux, administrator of the Farm Service Agency, said in a video. That law, the Agriculture Credit Act of 1987, was designed to help borrowers learn about various loan-serving tools so that they can get out of financial trouble. Direct loan borrowers can expect another letter that more fully explains their loan servicing options, which they can exercise without having missed a payment.

    “USDA’s recent actions to provide clarity to struggling farmers is a step in the right direction,” U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., said in a statement to Public Integrity. Warnock alerted Secretary Vilsack to Georgia farmers facing potential adverse actions in a letter dated Dec. 10.

    Despite the attempts to clear up the confusion, the USDA letters have sowed confusion and distress among borrowers.

    “It’s very confusing for the farmers, and they’ve needed a lot of information from our offices because they’ve been told one thing, and then they’re getting documentation that says another thing,” said Dãnia Davy, director of land retention and advocacy at the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund. “It just hasn’t been very clear to farmers what their obligations are.”

    The USDA’s suspension of debt collections, foreclosures and other adverse actions is expected to continue so long as the national COVID-19 disaster declaration is in place, now set to expire March 1. But data the Center for Public Integrity obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request suggests that the department has continued to collect eligible debts.

    The USDA did not respond to requests for comment.

    Is USDA Garnishing Earnings?

    The USDA offers two types of loans. Direct loans are made between the Farm Service Agency and the borrower. Guaranteed loans are made by a traditional lender but backed by the Farm Service Agency. Both programs are directed to borrowers that cannot get reasonable credit terms elsewhere.

    In January 2021, the USDA suspended debt collections and foreclosures on direct loans. It asked agency-guaranteed lenders to follow its lead, but they are not bound by USDA’s policy.

    Despite the suspension, the USDA collected about $538,000 in debts from Feb. 1 to Nov. 25, 2021, according to data the Center for Public Integrity obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. About 16.1% of those funds were collected among people of color.

    The USDA told Public Integrity it needed to clarify some of the data, but did not follow up with any information including a response to specific questions such as why debt offsets and wage garnishments appear to have continued after USDA announced their suspension.

    Meanwhile, a coalition of groups representing farmers and ranchers of color is trying to learn whether farmers will see similar collections as a result of the debt relief program being on hold, but it’s a tough question to answer, Davy said. Based on conversations with USDA officials, she thinks they’re trying to be optimistic about the program still going forward.

    “I think they don’t want to concede any negative outcome pending the litigation,” Davy said. “I think they’re hoping there’ll be some other ways to work around this case scenario of massive foreclosures and land loss.”

    As for Denver, his next USDA loan payment is due in coming months. He’s going to restart payments even if they’re not required. He doesn’t want to fall further behind.

    “I work too hard to get where I’m at,” Denver said. “I’m not finna give these people my land because you done promised me something, and you don’t live up to your end of the bargain.”

    This story was produced in partnership with the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Salt of the Earth and Foot Soldiers

    Context of this Article

    This article didn’t just arise from nowhere. It is preceded by decades of my researching and writing about America’s “corpocracy,” or what I call the “Devil’s Marriage” between the superior power elite of corporate America, particularly throughout eleven sectors of organized endeavor, and the subordinate power elite of government America in firstly its shadow government and secondarily in the Oval Office and in the other branches of the government. The corporate elite tell the government elite what to spend from the taxpayers’ pockets, what do with the money, and what to say.

    About the Title

    Yes, it’s an odd title. Let’s turn to Merriam-Webster for definitions. “Salt of the Earth:” — “a very good and honest person or group of people,” and “foot soldiers:” — “a person likened to an infantryman especially in doing active and usually unglamorous work in support of an organization or movement.” I have several synonyms for foot soldiers: functionaries, lackeys, toadies, water carriers, and courtiers. Whatever we name them, they have in common doing the biding of people in power, or the power elite.

    Where the Salt of the Earth Work

    They are most likely to work in benign jobs that do not require any wrongdoing or evildoing. Typical jobs include trades’ people such as carpentry, plumbing, electricians, retail clerks, and sanitation workers. Sanitation workers are by far the most indispensable but typically are the most unappreciated and taken for granted. Without sanitation workers, however, we would all sink in our own detritus.

    Profile of Foot Soldiers’ Work

    Foot soldiers work primarily in 11 sectors of organized endeavors to be identified shortly. Over time I have compiled hundreds of examples of foot soldiers in action in those 11 sectors. The actions described range from “ordinary” wrongdoing such as incompetent and slothful behavior, to heinous evil doing, such as deliberately killing millions of people. Bear in mind that it was the power elite in each sector that ordered directly or obliquely the actions carried out by the foot soldiers usually far removed from the power elite’s locations.

    For this article I have picked some examples from each sector. The harm done ought to be implicitly recognized. It is beyond the scope of this article to include descriptions of the consequences such as up and close personal depictions like the narrative of a real foot soldier suffering the post-traumatic syndrome just before he committed suicide.

    I want to emphasize that there are exceptions to my listings. Not every CEO, for instance, fits the typical profile of the power elite who authorize wrongdoing and evildoing. Some earn their wealth honestly and live honestly. For instance, I knew personally very well one member of the power elite who was a very good and honest person, Robert Allen (1935-2016), the late CEO of AT&T. Bob was a high school classmate of mine.

    1. Agriculture, Chemical and Food Sector

    Conducts false tests of products.

    Uses unsafe antibiotics and growth hormones on animals.

    Manufactures unhealthy pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers for feed production.

    To get their genetically modified products approved, coerces, infiltrates and bribes government officials around the globe.

    1. Ammunition, Gun and War Sector

    Promotes gun sales by stoking fear and racism.

    Makes and sells products deliberately intended to kill.

    Contractors’ personnel torture captives at secret overseas bases.

    Abandons contractor waste at military bases dotting the globe

    Leaves land mines and cluster bombs behind.

    Contaminates air, soil and drinking water supplies with toxics.

    Drone operators guide armed, pilotless planes to bomb targeted sites

    1. Communication and Entertainment Sector

    Hollywood produces movies glorifying war.

    Publishes ads designed to look like news.

    Shows commercials disguised as talk shows, panel discussions, self-improvement seminars, etc.

    Plays to the lowest common denominator of audience/readership with sensationalism, sex, and violence.

    Dupes and distracts the American people.

    1. Education Sector

    Dumbs down the teaching of children, such as, for example, teaching the what of history but avoiding the why.

    After the draft was abolished by Congress to avoid the recurrence of massive protests against the Vietnam War, recruiters swarm high school hallways recruiting poorly educated students from impoverished homes who would otherwise be jobless eventually.

    1. Energy Sector

    Operating carelessly built and maintained nuclear power plants that leak radioactive waste.

    Digging and operating offshore oil rigs that leak huge amounts of pollutants into the water and adjacent land.

    Running pipelines through sacred Native American land.

    Operating tar sands fracking.

    1. Financial Sector

    Peddles falsified debt documents to collection firms.

    Gets default payments by filing thousands of collection lawsuits against consumers expecting them not to contest the claims.

    Preys on customers, hiding costs and penalties, downplays the effects of variable rates, and issues unaffordable loans for the purchase of fraudulently overvalued homes.

    Constantly raises deductibles while shrinking coverage.

    Auto insurers coerce car repair shops to use cheap and sometimes dangerous parts.

    Asks claims adjusters to lie to customers and to overestimate their losses and vastly overprice premiums.

    Soaks credit card holders with excessive rates.

    Finances wars, even on both sides.

    Launders drug money.

    1. Government Sector

    Breaks its own laws (e.g., Articles 1 and 3 of the Constitution; 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th Amendments; all laws protecting human nature such as homicidal laws against murder; and international laws such as the 1928 Kellogg–Briand Peace Pact.

    Refuses to join the International Criminal Court.

    Lies to the American people.

    Forcefully enters homes with falsified warrants.

    Detains citizens without trial.

    Established an extra judicial court to rubber stamp illegal activities.

    Maintains data on over one million Americans.

    1. Health Care Sector

    Blood testing labs pay doctors a percentage on the business they refer.

    Health insurance companies try to avoid insuring people needing care or deny as many insurance claims as possible.

    HMOs covertly screen out any Medicare applicant viewed as a high risk.

    Prior to accreditation inspections, hospital alters in-house records of problems.

    1. Pharmaceutical Sector

    Uses improper techniques to test drugs.

    Intimidates and threatens their in-house scientists.

    Fabricates drug safety data and lies to the FDA.

    Routinely bribes doctors with luxury vacations and paid speaking gigs.

    Provides drugs to doctors at a discount so they can be sold to patients at a big profit.

    Markets a drug that is more expensive than alternative drugs and deadly among adults and children.

    Compounds drugs that are often too weak or too strong.

    Dilutes cancer drugs to boost profits.

    Mislabels and adulterates several of its drugs used by millions of consumers and then masterminds a massive cover up of its wrongdoing.

    1. Spiritual Sector

    There has never been a war that organized religion did not start, promote, or tolerate.

    Children are taught to see what they believe.

    1. Transportation Sector

    A financially ailing airline routinely ignored vital repairs and maintenance to minimize downtime of planes and then falsified records to make it appear as if the work had been done.

    Airline, knowing a flight departure will be delayed, boards passengers anyway to prevent them from seeking alternative flights.

    Car maker stages a large truck being dropped from a crane onto a new model without telling viewers the car had been reinforced to withstand the impact.

    Automaker sets back the odometer settings and sells the cars as new to dealers.

    Automakers sometimes instruct their dealers to fix certain common defects free of charge or at reduced cost but only if auto owners demand that the repair be made under warranty.

    Imposes demanding and unrealistic schedules on truck drivers.

    Skimps on truck fleet maintenance overhauls.

    Two Foot Soldiers Up Close and Personal

    My graduate school advisor, Dr. Carroll Shartle (1903-1993) personified the foot soldier — and so did I without realizing it. He had a research grant from the U.S. Airforce, the source of my stipends as one of Dr. Shartle’s research assistants. Both my master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation were underwritten by this grant. Dr. Shartle then became chief behavioral scientist for the U.S. Department of Defense War. To my credit, I entered graduate school to maintain my student deferment from being drafted into the Vietnam War, which I loathed. To my discredit, near the end of my graduate school tenure I worked for an aircraft plant making low altitude flying jets for bombing Vietnam and at the same time taught a course for airmen at a nearby air force base. I then took a job with the U.S. government and muted my criticism of the war. It was only after I retired that I became an “armchair” activist for peace and social economic justice.

    In Closing

    My hunch is that by not having sold their soul to any company store the salt of the earth do not experience my kind of guilt feelings over having sold my soul more than once.

    The post Salt of the Earth and Foot Soldiers first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • An ’emerging crisis’: The climate is changing too fast for plants and animals to adapt

    White storks migrating to Northern Europe nest up to a week earlier in warm weather, exposing them to extreme storms and threatening the survival of their chicks. Staple crops like barley, maize, rice, rye, sorghum, soybean, and wheat, along with fruits like apples, cherries, pears, and mangoes, are all experiencing disruptions in their growth and development. Ten years ago, a marine heat wave in the Gulf of Maine sped up the life cycle of lobsters, overwhelming local fisheries that had to harvest them earlier than expected. 

    Scientists have warned for years that climate change is upending the natural life cycles of plants and animals — to potentially devastating effect. Now, a new report released Thursday by the United Nations identifies these changes as one of the world’s most pressing emerging environmental crises, in need of immediate action. 

    The report, Frontiers 2022, comes ahead of the UN Environment Assembly meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, at the end of February. It also highlights as emerging crises the growing destruction from wildfires and the hidden cost of noise pollution, which leads to 12,000 premature deaths each year in the European Union alone. But perhaps most strikingly, it warns that life-cycle changes driven by warming temperatures and extreme weather patterns are affecting the natural rhythms of species around the world, often too quickly for them to adapt. And while these changes may seem subtle season to season, the report argues, they have the potential to devastate commercial agriculture and fisheries, while also threatening vulnerable species, from butterflies to whales.

    “Our Frontiers Report series aims to put the spotlight on key and emerging environmental issues — those that potentially have huge effects on our society, economy, and ecosystems,” said Andrea Hinwood, chief scientist for the UN Environment Programme, during a press event. “We need to be aware of the issues, their causes, so we can look at how we manage them, prevent harm, and implement appropriate preventative actions and solutions.”

    The science of how living things time their birth, growth, reproduction and other life-cycle stages is known as phenology, and changes in these patterns — driven by environmental forces like temperature, the arrival of rains and other cues — are called “phenological shifts.” Particularly in temperate regions of the world, where changing seasons let animals know to hibernate, flowers to bloom, birds to lay their eggs, and fish to spawn, warming temperatures and extreme weather driven by climate change can alter these natural cycles. 

    The world has already warmed 2.14 degrees Fahrenheit (or 1.19 degrees Celsius) from the pre-industrial era. Studies in the early 2000s found that “the life stages of 203 plant and animal species had advanced by an average of about 2.8 days earlier per decade,” according to the report. Since then, more recent research has continued to study how ecosystems, biomes, and taxonomic groups are being affected as the rise in temperatures speeds up. 

    UNEP graphic showing animal and plant life cycle changes.
    Plants and animals are timing their life cycle changes to catch up to a warming climate. Each circle in this graph represents one species that has been tracked. United Nations Environment Programme

    Monarch butterflies have delayed their annual migration by 6 days per decade due to warmer-than-normal temperatures, potentially impacting their access to food sources along the way. In the Arctic, spring vegetation is sprouting up to 2 weeks earlier than normal, meaning caribou calves are born too late to eat it, decimating populations of the endangered species. Certain fish species have shifted their egg laying forward by as many as 10 days per decade, and some plankton species are reaching peak abundance as many as 50 days earlier per decade.

    Animals often can adapt, the report explains, with chicks hatching earlier to catch up with their main food source: caterpillars, themselves emerging earlier to keep up with the plants they feed on — a phenomenon known as “phenological plasticity.” But with climate change occurring so rapidly, “individual or population plasticity may not be able to keep up with the rapid environmental changes we are experiencing,” the report says. 

    These changes aren’t just about the natural world. As the report warns, phenological mismatches could wreak havoc on human societies if left unchecked. Along with a loss in overall biodiversity — which has consequences for human health and the spread of infectious diseases — warming trends have already affected crop yields, threatening food security around the world. When plants flower early because warming temperatures signal to them that spring has arrived, pollinators might not be active in time to reach them, or late-season frosts could destroy the early crop. Warmer temperatures could also encourage the development of pests, threatening yields. 

    “Rehabilitating habitats, building wildlife corridors to enhance habitat connectivity, shifting boundaries of protected areas, and conserving biodiversity in productive landscapes can help as immediate interventions,” the report concludes. “However, without strong efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, these conservation measures will only delay the collapse of essential ecosystem services.” 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline An ’emerging crisis’: The climate is changing too fast for plants and animals to adapt on Feb 18, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • USDA Offers $1 Billion To Help Farmers And Ranchers Fight Climate Change

    The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) will invest $1 billion in projects that encourage farmers, ranchers and owners of forested land to employ practices that help mitigate the effects of climate change by lowering greenhouse gas emissions or catching and storing carbon, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack told Reuters on Monday. The new program is called the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities.

    President Biden has committed to cutting agricultural emissions in half by 2030 and has asked farmers to lead the way, as U.S. agriculture is responsible for more than 10 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates, CNBC reported.

    The post USDA Offers $1 Billion To Help Farmers And Ranchers Fight Climate Change appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Can paying farmers to stop farming save the planet? Experts aren’t so sure.

    Since 1985, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s signature conservation strategy has been straightforward: pay farmers to stop farming. Leaving the land alone deters the erosion and run-off that degrade soil and water quality. And when farmers plant trees and grasses on those acres, they restore wildlife habitats lost to the plow.

    The Biden administration thinks it can do even more. Last year, it rebranded the $2.3-billion Conservation Reserve Program, now a key tactic in its effort to cut agriculture’s carbon footprint, responsible for around 10 percent of the U.S.’s greenhouse gas emissions. Enrollment just opened, meaning farmers can sign their acres up for the cause. Zach Ducheneaux, Administrator of USDA’s Farm Service Agency, which manages the program, said it’s “another way that we’re putting producers and landowners at the center of climate-smart solutions that generate revenue and benefit our planet,” in a recent statement. 

    Can the 37-year-old program, initially designed to conserve land, pivot to taking on climate change? Researchers have their doubts that it can rise to the challenge without big changes. One problem is that contracts don’t last much more than a decade. “The catch is, acres enrolled in the program don’t necessarily stay there,” said Jesse Womack, a conservation policy specialist at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. If land is farmed again, “we lose whatever carbon benefit we gained. That’s definitely a problem.” 

    Erosion has long threatened farmers’ most precious resource, and, in turn, surrounding waterways. For yearly rent checks, participants agree to remove land from production in 10-to-15-year long contracts. They can score additional payments by adopting environment-friendly practices that range from planting prairie strips to restoring wetlands or establishing duck-nesting grounds.

    The program withered under the Trump administration. Its payments are based on local rental rates, and in 2018, the USDA capped payments to 85 percent of the rent. But last April, Biden’s USDA announced new marching orders for the land-conservation program: tackle climate change, by taking advantage of soil’s ability to lock up carbon. The USDA upped the rent and added more climate-specific incentives to coax landowners into participating. “Sometimes, the best solutions are right in front of you,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack in an announcement at the time.

    According to the USDA, the lands conserved under the program locked in an average of 48 million tons of greenhouse gases each year over the past decade — the equivalent to taking 9 million cars off the road every year. So it stands to reason that setting aside more land would lock even more carbon up. 

    When a contract expires, however, landowners may do with the land what they like. A USDA study found about half of the acres wind up back in production, which means they could release that carbon into the atmosphere again. “It’s a pretty hollow victory if we count carbon as sequestered that’s not very likely to stay sequestered over the long-term,” Womack said.

    And soil is complicated, teeming with microbes and minerals, leading experts to doubt whether soil carbon sequestration can meaningfully mitigate climate change. Although conserving land brings a host of benefits to soil, water, and wildlife, there’s little consensus on how long carbon stays in the ground. Soil’s ability to store carbon differs farm to farm and region to region. On top of that, the stuff doesn’t trap carbon infinitely; with time, it has its fill and tapers off.

    Revamping how the USDA scores applications could make the program more climate-friendly, according to Womack. When landowners apply, they’re assessed with a rubric called the Environmental Benefits Index, or EBI. Various factors score points — for instance, whether the conservation will improve water, air, or soil quality, or how likely a parcel is to remain conserved after the contract expires. Higher-scoring applications are more likely to be accepted. 

    At the moment, two criteria relate to climate: carbon sequestration and how likely environmental benefits are to outlast the contract. Together, they account for just 11 percent of the total score (at most, the former earns a measly 1.8 percent). “We probably want to give more weight to those crucial elements of addressing climate,” Womack said. 

    Another way to strengthen the program is by simply creating longer contracts or encouraging conservation more likely to stick around once contracts are up, Womack said. The longer land stays out of production, the longer it can hold onto carbon. He pointed to another version of the USDA’s program focused on grasslands, in which landowners get rent payments from the USDA as well as income from grazing operations. The USDA could foster more such working lands, like agroforestry operations, that would continue to bring in money after contracts expire — providing more incentive for landowners to keep them that way.

    To be sure, there are other challenges that aren’t so easy to fix. Since the Conservation Reserve Program is voluntary, its competition is all the money farmers stand to make when they just keep farming. The USDA has rent and incentives at its disposal to make enrollment more inviting. But even when it offers more money, against the backdrop of corn and soybean prices reaching an eight-year high, conservation acreage has declined.

    Last October, the USDA kicked off a five-year, $10-million effort to track soil carbon on conserved land and “quantify the climate outcomes of the program.” Scientists are going to start monitoring soil carbon across planted grasslands, wetlands, and forests. “This is a critical bit of data that I think we can provide for them and hopefully make [their] models a lot more accurate,” said Austin Himes, an assistant professor at Mississippi State University and one of the project’s lead scientists. 

    Forests like those Himes will study offer another opportunity for long-lasting conservation. His sites are scattered over seven states, including fields that were turned into hardwood forests in the lower Mississippi Delta and pine-filled plots in the coastal plain across Alabama and Tennessee. “One of the benefits to these forestry projects is that it is a lot harder to bring the plow back in and reconvert lands to that agricultural use,” he said.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Can paying farmers to stop farming save the planet? Experts aren’t so sure. on Feb 9, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • There are ‘forever chemicals’ in beef now

    Officials in Michigan last week issued the state’s first-ever advisory for toxic PFAS chemicals in beef after finding elevated levels in cuts of meat from a local farm. 

    Beef from the Grostic Cattle Co. in Brighton, Michigan, contained an average of 1.9 parts per billion of Perfluorooctane sulfonic acid, also known as PFOS, one of the most common types of PFAS, short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. Though the levels weren’t high enough to trigger a recall, state officials said long-term consumption of the meat could pose a public health risk and notified customers, including several local schools. 

    Michigan officials called the event a “rare occurrence,” but PFAS contamination has also shut down operations at dairy farms in New Mexico and Maine in recent years. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, is working on a plan to regulate the chemicals after years of urging from scientists and environmental advocates, who say PFAS use remains widespread despite evidence of the chemicals’ negative health impacts. 

    “Our food supply is global, and we need help at a national level on testing and standards to protect the public from the unknown risks of PFAS entering the food chain,” the executive director of Michigan’s PFAS Action Response Team, Abigail Hendershott, said in a press release. 

    PFAS, a class of chemicals used in everything from firefighting foam to consumer products like nonstick pans and leggings, are known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down naturally in the environment. They are also bioaccumulators, becoming more toxic as they move higher up the food chain, making them particularly hazardous for people consuming tainted meat or fish. 

    According to the EPA, research on the health effects of PFAS exposure in humans is still ongoing, but studies have shown the chemicals can affect the reproductive system and may lead to developmental delays in children. PFAS can also increase the risk of some cancers, interfere with hormone levels, and reduce the immune system’s ability to fight infections — an issue that some researchers have linked to worse COVID-19 outcomes. The chemicals are already found in thousands of drinking water systems around the country, according to the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, as well as in most Americans’ bodies. 

    No federal standards currently exist for PFAS in food or water, although the EPA under the Biden administration has vowed to study and regulate the chemicals more extensively, pledging to set a national standard for PFOS and Perfluorooctanoic acid, another PFAS chemical, in drinking water by 2023. Dozens of bills, including a proposed ban on PFAS in food packaging, have been introduced in Congress, while the U.S. military has already begun destroying PFAS-containing firefighting foam after deeming it too risky to use — itself a process that could spread contamination, an investigation by The Intercept found. 

    Michigan regulators traced PFAS contamination at the Grostic Cattle Co. to “biosolids” that the century-old farm had applied as fertilizer to the crops it feeds its cows. These biosolids — essentially reclaimed sewage — came from a wastewater treatment plant in Wixom, Michigan from 2010 to 2015. In 2018, the facility was identified as having received industrial runoff from an automotive supplier along the Huron River. It has since installed pollution controls to reduce its PFAS releases, but the legacy of its contamination has impacted local drinking water supplies, waterways, and farms. 

    “Needless to say, I and my family are surprised to find ourselves and our beloved farm in the middle of a PFAS contamination issue,” the company said in an unattributed statement on its website. Although the state is offering financial aid to reimburse customers for the affected meat, the farm has been ordered to suspend operations, but with no financial help from the government. It started a GoFundMe page seeking to raise $30,000 to stay afloat.

    “Our family farm has been serving the State of Michigan for 100 years,” the statement says. “It is because of that commitment that we intend to cooperate with all city, state, county, and federal agencies to determine who is responsible for this unfortunate situation.”

    Though Michigan now prohibits farms from applying “industrially impacted” biosolids containing more than 150 parts per billion of PFOS, environmental advocates have called for a ban on all fertilizers containing any amount of PFAS chemicals. 

    The contamination “makes clear that human exposure to PFAS from biosolids could be a significant pathway” for PFAS to reach humans, Charlotte Jameson, chief policy officer for the Michigan Environmental Council, told MLive.com. “We should therefore ban applying biosolids that contain PFAS to crops while we await further sampling and test results.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline There are ‘forever chemicals’ in beef now on Feb 8, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • An Inconvenient Truth:  The Peasant Food Web Feeds the World

    In October 2020, CropLife International said that its new strategic partnership with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) would contribute to sustainable food systems. It added that it was a first for the industry and the FAO and demonstrates the determination of the plant science sector to work constructively in a partnership where common goals are shared.

    A powerful trade and lobby association, CropLife International counts among its members the world’s largest agricultural biotechnology and pesticide businesses: Bayer, BASF, Syngenta, FMC, Corteva and Sumitoma Chemical. Under the guise of promoting plant science technology, the association first and foremost looks after the interests (bottom line) of its member corporations.

    Not long after the CropLife-FAO partnership was announced, PAN (Pesticide Action Network) Asia Pacific along with 350 organisations wrote a letter to FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu urging him to stop the collaboration and for good reason.

    A 2020 joint investigation by Unearthed (Greenpeace) and Public Eye (a human rights NGO) revealed that BASF, Corteva, Bayer, FMC and Syngenta bring in billions of dollars by selling toxic chemicals found by regulatory authorities to pose serious health hazards.

    It also found more than a billion dollars of their sales came from chemicals – some now banned in European markets – that are highly toxic to bees. Over two thirds of these sales were made in low- and middle-income countries like Brazil and India.

    The Political Declaration of the People’s Autonomous Response to the UN Food Systems Summit in 2021 stated that global corporations are increasingly infiltrating multilateral spaces to co-opt the narrative of sustainability to secure further industrialisation, the extraction of wealth and labour from rural communities and the concentration of corporate power.

    With this in mind, a major concern is that CropLife International will now seek to derail the FAO’s commitment to agroecology and push for the further corporate colonisation of food systems.

    The July 2019 UN FAO High Level Panel of Experts Report concluded that agroecology provides greatly improved food security and nutritional, gender, environmental and yield benefits compared to industrial agriculture. This report formed part of the FAO’s ongoing commitment to agroecology.

    But agroecology represents a direct challenge to the interests of CropLife members. With the emphasis on localisation and on-farm inputs, agroecology does not require dependency on proprietary chemicals, seeds and knowledge nor the long-line global supply chains dominated by transnational agrifood corporations.

    There does now appear to be an ideological assault from within the FAO on alternative development and agrifood models that threaten CropLife International’s member interests.

    In the report ‘Who Will Feed Us? The Industrial Food Chain vs the Peasant Food Web (ETC Group, 2017), it was shown that a diverse network of small-scale producers (the peasant food web) actually feeds 70% of the world, including the most hungry and marginalised.

    The flagship report indicated that only 24% of the food produced by the industrial food chain actually reaches people. Furthermore, it was shown that industrial food costs us more: for every dollar spent on industrial food, it costs another two dollars to clean up the mess.

    However, two prominent papers have since claimed that small farms feed only 35% of the global population.

    One of the papers is ‘How much of our world’s food do smallholders produce?’ (Ricciardi et al, 2018).

    The other is an FAO report, ‘Which farms feed the world and has farmland become more concentrated? (Lowder et al, 2021).

    Eight key organisations have just written to the FAO sharply criticising the Lowder paper which reverses a number of well-established positions held by the organisation. The letter is signed by the Oakland Institute, Landworkers Alliance, ETC Group, A Growing Culture, Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, GRAIN, Groundswell International and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

    The open letter calls on the FAO to reaffirm that peasants (including small farmers, artisanal fishers, pastoralists, hunters and gatherers and urban producers) provide more food with fewer resources and are the primary source of nourishment for at least 70% of the world population.

    ETC Group has also published the 16-page report ‘Small-scale Farmers and Peasants Still Feed the World‘ in response to the two papers, indicating how the authors indulged in methodological and conceptual gymnastics and certain important omissions to arrive at the 35% figure – not least by changing the definition of ‘family farmer’ and by defining a ‘small farm’ as less than 2 ha. This contradicts the FAO’s own decision in 2018 to reject a universal land area threshold for describing small farms in favour of more sensitive country-specific definitions.

    The Lowder et al paper also contradicts recent FAO and other reports that state peasant farms produce more food and more nutritious food per hectare than large farms. It maintains that policy makers are wrongly focused on peasant production and should give greater attention to larger production units.

    The signatories of the open letter to the FAO strongly disagree with the Lowder study’s assumption that food production is a proxy for food consumption and that the commercial value of food in the marketplace can be equated with the nutritional value of the food consumed.

    The paper feeds into an agribusiness narrative that attempts to undermine the effectiveness of peasant production in order to promote its proprietary technologies and agrifood model.

    Smallholder peasant farming is regarded by these conglomerates as an impediment. Their vision is fixated on a narrow yield-output paradigm based on the bulk production of commodities that is unwilling to grasp an integrated social-cultural-economic-agronomic systems approach that accounts for the likes of food sovereignty and diverse nutrition production per acre.

    This systems approach also serves to boost rural and regional development based on thriving, self-sustaining local communities rather than eradicating them and subordinating whoever remains to the needs of global supply chains and global markets. Industry lobbyists like to promote the latter as ‘responding to the needs of modern agriculture’ rather than calling it for what it is: corporate imperialism.

    The FAO paper concludes that the world small farms only produce 35% of the world’s food using 12% of agricultural land. But ETC Group says that by working with the FAO’s normal or comparable databases, it is apparent that peasants nourish at least 70% of the world’s people with less than one third of the agricultural land and resources.

    But even if 35% of food is produced on 12% of land, does that not suggest we should be investing in small, family and peasant farming rather than large-scale chemical-intensive agriculture?

    While not all small farms might be practising agroecology or chemical-free agriculture, they are more likely to be integral to local markets and networks, short supply chains, food sovereignty, more diverse cropping systems and healthier diets. And they tend to serve the food requirements of communities rather than those of external business interests, institutional investors and shareholders half a world away.

    When the corporate capture of a body occurs, too often the first casualty is truth.

    The post An Inconvenient Truth:  The Peasant Food Web Feeds the World first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Extreme weather is destroying more crops. Taxpayers are footing the bill.

    Farmers across the United States are increasingly seeing the impacts of climate change first hand, with a rise in the severity and frequency of extreme weather events. Beyond the loss of food supplies, new data on agricultural insurance payments shows the financial burden of these disasters on taxpayers. 

    Over the last 25 years, insurance payments to farmers for crop losses due to drought and flooding have increased threefold, according to a report from the Environmental Working Group, or EWG, an environmental research advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. Taxpayers cover 60 percent of crop insurance premiums through subsidies, and additionally cover damages that exceed premiums. Since 1995, more than $143 billion in federal crop insurance has been paid out to U.S. farmers. Of that, 61 percent, or $87.6 billion, was due to climate change-related impacts. 

    “As extreme weather has become more frequent, the climate crisis has already increased insurance payments and premium subsidies,” the report stated. “These costs are expected to go up even more, as climate change causes even more unpredictable weather conditions.” 

    Insuring the country’s crops, the report says, is likely to get more expensive for everyone: insurance companies, farmers, and especially taxpayers. And farmers currently aren’t required to do anything to remediate their risk for crop damage. 

    The national crop insurance program, run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA, doesn’t incentivize or mandate farmers to address or adapt to climate change in their operations, EWG says. The program “disincentivizes farmers from adapting to climate change,” Anne Schechinger, the midwest director for the nonprofit, told Grist. 

    It’s something EWG hopes will change with the next farm bill, slated for the Congressional agenda in 2023. The farm bill is a federal legislative package passed once every five years that includes policies for everything from crop insurance to food access, commodities pricing, and subsidies. 

    “There’s definitely a lot of different things that can be done to the program to encourage farmers to adapt to climate change,” Schechinger said. A place to start, she noted, would be determining premiums by land risk.

    “We need to reevaluate,” she said. “Should we essentially be subsidizing the growth of crops in these high-risk, environmentally sensitive areas?” Instead, farmers could be paid to permanently retire land repeatedly damaged by extreme weather, Schechinger suggested. 

    The relationship between agriculture and climate change is compounding – rising global temperatures fuel more intense and frequent extreme weather events and alter growing conditions, damaging more crops, while agricultural practices and industry contribute significantly to the drivers of climate change. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. agricultural sector was responsible 10 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2019. 

    The Environmental Working Group analysis used existing data from the USDA, and the findings are supported by previous research. In a report published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, scientists estimated that between 1991 and 2017,  rising temperatures caused $27 billion in crop insurance loss nationally. According to the USDA, if emissions trends continue, the cost of insuring crops could rise by as much as 22 percent by 2080, even if farmers adapt what they plant and where.

    “We know crop insurance has already increased because of climate change,” Schechinger said.  “And there are a lot of estimates saying that it is going to get even more expensive in the future.” 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Extreme weather is destroying more crops. Taxpayers are footing the bill. on Jan 28, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Morocco drives a war in Western Sahara for its phosphates

    Thanks to manoeuvring by the United States, the prospects for peace and self determination for Western Sahara have suffered a serious setback, writes Vijay Prashad.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • The British Empire’s dirty secret

    Alex Salmon reviews a new book by historian and author Graham Seal that documents how the British government shipped more than 376,000 men, women and children across the oceans to provide slave labour in its colonies.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • ‘Our resources on the ground aren’t enough’, says UN Tonga official

    UN News

    As news coverage of the Hunga volcano eruption and tsunami that hit Tonga starts to fade, the United Nations Coordination Specialist in the country has a message to the outside world:

    Tonga’s people are going to need sustained support responding to a disaster of this scale.

    “The resources that we have on the ground are not enough”, Sione Hufanga said in an interview with UN News.

    “We ought to always look at the situation and ask, have we done enough, for this very small country, isolated in the Pacific islands?”

    The underwater volcano eruption of a week ago, is believed to be the largest volcanic event to happen for 30 years.

    The huge, 20 km high mushroom cloud of smoke and ash, and the tsunami that followed, affected 84,000 people, more than 80 percent of the population of the South Pacific country.

    In the last few days, the kingdom has started receiving ships with humanitarian aid, and, with the runway now cleared of thick volcanic ash, the international airport is now open to flights with assistance.

    ‘Overwhelmed with the magnitude’
    Despite the positive signs of recovery, Hufanga warned that “the people of Tonga are still overwhelmed with the magnitude of the disaster”.

    Only three people — so far — have lost their lives, but the specialist believes that number provides a somewhat misleading sense of security.

    “Sometimes you can feel that it’s not as bad as it is, based on the fatalities, but that number represents the resilience of the Tongan community in such a disaster,” he said.

    Speaking by cellphone, with most communications with the outside world still suspended, he explained that “most of the focus now is to serve the people who have been severely affected and need help with their essential needs in the next few days”.

    The UN is working with the government to finalise a needs assessment, that should be completed next week and will guide the immediate response and relief efforts.

    “Water, sanitation, hygiene, schools, are among the things that will allow life to return to normal as soon as possible, but there is still a lot of ash that needs to be removed from those premises,” Hufanga said.

    UN agencies are in the field distributing dignity kits to the most affected people, food support, and trying to restart the agricultural sector.

    The World Health Organisation (WHO) is working with the Minister of Health providing medical teams to Ha’apai, one of the most affected islands, and other agencies, like the World Food Programme (WFP), are cooperating to help restore communication services.

    Long-term impacts
    For the UN specialist, the complete magnitude of the problems is still unknown. He points to damages to the agricultural sector or the marine resources as examples.

    Around 60 to 70 percent of livestock-rearing households have seen their animals perish, grazing land damaged, or water supplies contaminated.

    And, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the agricultural sector represents over 65 percent of the country exports.

    Fisheries have been significantly affected as well. The government has advised against fishing amid the ongoing contamination — or consuming fish.

    “These are mid to long-term impacts that are yet to be understood,” Hufanga said.

    Because of this, the specialist believes Tongans might have to rely on imported food for some time, something they have “never experienced before”.

    “Tonga never expected that such a disaster could put us in this very, very difficult situation”, he says.

    Trucks ready to leave Brisbane with supplies for Tonga
    Trucks ready to leave Brisbane bringing aid and emergency supplies for Tonga. Image: Sarah Shotunde/UNICEF

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Living in Epoch-Defining Times: Food, Agriculture and the New World Order

    Farmerless farms manned by driverless machines, monitored by drones and doused with chemicals to produce commodity crops from patented genetically engineered seeds for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be processed and constituted into something resembling food. Data platforms, private equity firms, e-commerce giants and AI-controlled farming systems.

    This is the future that big agritech and agribusiness envisage: a future of ‘data-driven’ and ‘climate-friendly’ agriculture that they say is essential if we are to feed a growing global population.

    The transformative vision outlined above which is being promoted by the likes of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation amounts to a power grab. Whether through all aspects of data control (soil quality, consumer preferences, weather, etc), e-commerce monopolies, corporate land ownership, seed biopiracy and patenting, synthetic lab-made food or the eradication of the public sector’s role in ensuring food security and national food sovereignty, the aim is for a relative handful of corporations to gain full control of the entire global food system.

    Smallholder peasant farming is to be eradicated as the big-tech giants and agribusiness impose their  ‘disruptive’ technologies.

    This vision is symptomatic of a reductionist mindset fixated on a narrow yield-output paradigm that is unable or more likely unwilling to grasp an integrated social-cultural-economic-agronomic systems approach to food and agriculture that accounts for many different factors, including local/regional food security and sovereignty, diverse nutrition production per acre, water table stability and boosting rural development based on thriving local communities.

    Instead, what is envisaged will lead to the further trashing of rural economies, communities and cultures. A vision that has scant regard for the right to healthy and culturally appropriate food and the right of people to define their own food and agriculture systems.

    But is any of this necessary or inevitable?

    There is no global shortage of food. Even under any plausible future population scenario, there will be no shortage as evidenced by scientist Dr Jonathan Latham in his paper The Myth of a Food Crisis (2020). Furthermore, there are tried and tested approaches to addressing the challenges humanity faces, not least agroecology.

    Reshaping agrifood systems

    An organic-based, agrifood system could be implemented in Europe and would allow a balanced coexistence between agriculture and the environment. This would reinforce Europe’s autonomy, feed the predicted population in 2050, allow the continent to continue to export cereals to countries which need them for human consumption and substantially reduce water pollution and toxic emissions from agriculture.

    That is the message conveyed in the paper Reshaping the European Agro-food System and Closing its Nitrogen Cycle: The potential of combining dietary change, agroecology, and circularity (2020) which appeared in the journal One Earth.

    The paper by Gilles Billen et al follows a long line of studies and reports which have concluded that organic agriculture is vital for guaranteeing food security, rural development, better nutrition and sustainability.

    For instance, in the 2006 book The Global Development of Organic Agriculture: Challenges and Prospects, Neils Halberg and his colleagues argue that there are still more than 740 million food insecure people (at least 100 million more today), the majority of whom live in the Global South. They say if a conversion to organic farming of approximately 50% of the agricultural area in the Global South were to be carried out, it would result in increased self-sufficiency and decreased net food imports to the region.

    In 2007, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) noted that organic models increase cost-effectiveness and contribute to resilience in the face of climatic stress. The FAO concluded that by managing biodiversity in time (rotations) and space (mixed cropping), organic farmers use their labour and environmental factors to intensify production in a sustainable way and that organic agriculture could break the vicious circle of farmer indebtedness for proprietary agricultural inputs.

    Of course, organic agriculture and agroecology are not necessarily one and the same. Whereas organic agriculture can still be part of the prevailing globalised food regime dominated by giant agrifood conglomerates, agroecology uses organic practices but is ideally rooted in the principles of localisation, food sovereignty and self-reliance.

    The FAO recognises that agroecology contributes to improved food self-reliance, the revitalisation of smallholder agriculture and enhanced employment opportunities. It has argued that organic agriculture could produce enough food on a global per capita basis for the current world population but with reduced environmental impact than conventional agriculture.

    In 2012, Deputy Secretary General of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Petko Draganov stated  that expanding Africa’s shift towards organic farming will have beneficial effects on the continent’s nutritional needs, the environment, farmers’ incomes, markets and employment.

    A meta analysis conducted by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and UNCTAD (2008) assessed 114 cases of organic farming in Africa. The two UN agencies concluded that organic agriculture can be more conducive to food security in Africa than most conventional production systems and that it is more likely to be sustainable in the long term.

    The 2009 report Agriculture at a Crossroads by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, produced by 400 scientists and supported by 60 countries, recommended agroecology to maintain and increase the productivity of global agriculture. It cites the largest study of ‘sustainable agriculture’ in the Global South, which analysed 286 projects covering 37 million hectares in 57 countries, and found that on average crop yields increased by 79% (the study also included ‘resource conserving’ non-organic conventional approaches).

    There are numerous other studies and projects which testify to the efficacy of organic farming, including those from the Rodale Institute, the Oakland Institute, the UN Green Economy Initiative, the Women’s Collective of Tamil Nadu, Newcastle University and Washington State University. We also need look no further than the results of organic-based farming in Malawi.

    In Ethiopia, agroecology has been scaled up across the entire Tigray region, partly due to enlightened political leaders and the commitment of key institutions. But Cuba is the one country in the world that has made the biggest changes in the shortest time in moving from industrial chemical-intensive agriculture to organic farming.

    Professor of Agroecology Miguel Altieri notes that, due to the difficulties Cuba experienced as a result of the fall of the USSR, it moved towards organic and agroecological techniques in the 1990s. From 1996 to 2005, per capita food production in Cuba increased by 4.2% yearly during a period when production was stagnant across the wider region.

    By 2016, Cuba had 383,000 urban farms, covering 50,000 hectares of otherwise unused land and producing more than 1.5 million tons of vegetables. The most productive urban farms yield up to 20 kg of food per square metre, the highest rate in the world, using no synthetic chemicals. Urban farms supply 50 to 70% or more of all the fresh vegetables consumed in cities such as Havana and Villa Clara.

    It has been calculated by Altieri and his colleague Fernando R Funes-Monzote that if all peasant farms and cooperatives adopted diversified agroecological designs, Cuba would be able to produce enough to feed its population, supply food to the tourist industry and even export some food to help generate foreign currency.

    Serving a corporate agenda

    However, global agribusiness and agritech firms continue to marginalise organic, capture public bodies and push for their chemical-intensive, high-tech approaches. Although organic farming and natural farming methods like agroecology offer genuine solutions for many of the world’s pressing problems (health, environment, employment, rural development, etc), these approaches challenge corporate interests and threaten their bottom line.

    In 2014, Corporate Europe Observatory released a critical report on the European Commission over the previous five years. The report concluded that the commission had been a willing servant of a corporate agenda. It had sided with agribusiness on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and pesticides. Far from shifting Europe to a more sustainable food and agriculture system, the opposite had happened, as agribusiness and its lobbyists continued to dominate the Brussels scene.

    Consumers in Europe reject GM food, but the commission had made various attempts to meet the demands from the biotech sector to allow GMOs into Europe, aided by giant food companies, such as Unilever, and the lobby group FoodDrinkEurope.

    The report concluded that the commission had eagerly pursued a corporate agenda in all the areas investigated and pushed for policies in sync with the interests of big business. It had done this in the apparent belief that such interests are synonymous with the interests of society at large.

    Little has changed since. In December 2021, Friends of the Earth Europe (FOEE) noted that big agribusiness and biotech corporations are currently pushing for the European Commission to remove any labelling and safety checks for new genomic techniques. Since the beginning of their lobbying efforts (in 2018), these corporations have spent at least €36 million lobbying the European Union and have had 182 meetings with European commissioners, their cabinets and director generals: more than one meeting a week.

    According to FOEE, the European Commission seems more than willing to put the lobby’s demands into a new law that would include weakened safety checks and bypass GMO labelling.

    Corporate influence over key national and international bodies is nothing new. From the World Bank’s ‘enabling the business of agriculture’ and the influence of foreign retail on India’s NITI Aayog (the influential policy commission think tank of the Government of India) to the Gates Foundation’s role in opening up African agriculture to global food and agribusiness oligopolies, democratic procedures at sovereign state levels are being bypassed to impose seed monopolies and proprietary inputs on farmers and to incorporate them into a global agrifood chain dominated by powerful corporations.

    But there are now also new players on the block. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and others are closing in on the global agrifood sector while the likes of Bayer, Syngenta, Corteva and Cargill continue to cement their stranglehold.

    The tech giants entry into the sector will increasingly lead to a mutually beneficial integration between the companies that supply products to farmers (pesticides, seeds, fertilisers, tractors, etc) and those that control the flow of data and have access to digital (cloud) infrastructure and food consumers. In  effect, multi-billion dollar agrifood data management markets are being created.

    In India, Walmart and Amazon could end up dominating the e-retail sector. These two US companies would also own India’s key consumer and other economic data, making them the country’s digital overlords along with Google and Facebook.

    The government is facilitating the dominance of giant corporations, not least through digital or e-commerce platforms. E-commerce companies not only control data about consumption but also control data on production, logistics, who needs what, when they need it, who should produce it, who should move it and when it should be moved.

    These platforms have the capacity to shape the entire physical economy. We are seeing the eradication of the marketplace in favour of platforms owned by global conglomerates which will control everything from production to logistics, including agriculture and farming.

    The farmer will be told how much production is expected, how much rain is anticipated, what type of soil quality there is, what type of (GM) seeds and proprietary inputs are required and when the produce needs to be ready.

    E-commerce platforms will become permanently embedded once artificial intelligence begins to plan and determine all of the above.

    In April 2021, the Indian government signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Microsoft, allowing its local partner CropData to leverage a master database of farmers. The MoU seems to be part of the AgriStack policy initiative, which involves the roll out of ‘disruptive’ technologies and digital databases in the agricultural sector.

    CropData will be granted access to a government database of 50 million farmers and their land records. As the database is developed, it will include farmers’ personal details, profile of land held, production data and financial details.

    In addition to facilitating data harvesting and a data management market, the Indian government is trying to establish a system of ‘conclusive titling’ of all land in the country, so that ownership can be identified and land can then be valued, bought or taken away.

    The plan is that, as farmers lose access to land or can be identified as legal owners, predatory global institutional investors will buy up and amalgamate holdings, facilitating the further roll out of high-input, corporate-dependent industrial agriculture.

    This is an example of stakeholder-partnership capitalism, much promoted by the likes of the World Economic Forum, whereby a government facilitates the gathering of such information by a private player which can then, in this case, use the data for developing a land market (courtesy of land law changes that the government enacts) for institutional investors at the expense of smallholder farmers who will find themselves displaced.

    By harvesting information – under the benign-sounding policy of data-driven agriculture – private corporations will be better placed to exploit farmers’ situations for their own ends.

    Imagine a cartel of data owners, proprietary input suppliers and retail concerns at the commanding heights of the global economy, peddling toxic industrial (and lab-engineered) ‘food’ and the devastating health and environmental impacts associated with it.

    As for elected representatives and sovereign state governments, their role will be highly limited to technocratic overseers of these platforms and the artificial intelligence tools that plan and determine all of the above.

    But none of this is set in stone or inevitable. The farmers victory in India in getting the corporate-friendly farm laws repealed show what can be achieved, even if this is only viewed as a spanner in the works of a global machine that is relentless.

    New world order

    And that machine comprises what journalist Ernst Wolff calls the digital-financial complex that is now driving the globalisation-one agriculture agenda. This complex comprises many of the companies mentioned above: Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Amazon and Meta (Facebook) as well as BlackRock and Vanguard, transnational investment/asset management corporations.

    These entities exert control over governments and important institutions like the European Central Bank (ECB) and the US Federal Reserve. Indeed, Wolff states that BlackRock and Vanguard have more financial assets than the ECB and the Fed combined.

    To appreciate the power and influence of BlackRock and Vanguard, let us turn to the documentary Monopoly: An Overview of the Great Reset which argues that the stock of the world’s largest corporations are owned by the same institutional investors. This means that ‘competing’ brands, like Coke and Pepsi, are not really competitors, since their stock is owned by the same investment companies, investment funds, insurance companies and banks.

    Smaller investors are owned by larger investors. Those are owned by even bigger investors. The visible top of this pyramid shows only two companies: Vanguard and Black Rock.

    A 2017 Bloomberg report states that both these companies in the year 2028 together will have investments amounting to 20 trillion dollars. In other words, they will own almost everything worth owning.

    The digital-financial complex wants control over all aspects of life. It wants a cashless world, to destroy bodily integrity with a mandatory vaccination agenda linked to emerging digital-biopharmaceutical technologies, to control all personal data and digital money and it requires full control over everything, including food and farming.

    If events over the last two years have shown us anything, it is that an unaccountable authoritarian global elite knows the type of world it wants to create, has the ability to coordinate its agenda globally and will use deception and duplicity to achieve it. And in this brave new Orwellian world where capitalist ‘liberal democracy’ has run its course, there will be no place for genuinely independent nation states or individual rights.

    The independence of nation states could be further eroded by the digital-financial complex’s ‘financialisation of nature’ and its ‘green profiling’ of countries and companies. If we take the example of India, again, the Indian government has been on a relentless drive to attract inflows of foreign investment into government bonds (creating a lucrative market for global investors). It does not take much imagination to see how investors could destabilise the economy with large movements in or out of these bonds but also how India’s ‘green credentials’ could be factored in to downgrade its international credit rating.

    And how could India demonstrate its green credentials and thus its ‘credit worthiness’? Perhaps by allowing herbicide-resistant GMO commodity crop monocultures that the GM sector misleadingly portrays as ‘climate friendly’.

    As for concepts such as localisation, food sovereignty, self-reliance and participatory democracy – key tenets of agroecology ­– these are mere inconveniences to be trampled on.

    Olivier De Schutter, former UN special Rapporteur on the right to food, delivered his final report to the UN Human Rights Council in 2011, based on an extensive review of scientific literature. He concluded that by applying agroecological principles to the design of democratically controlled agricultural systems we can help to put an end to food crises and address climate variabilities and poverty challenges.

    De Schutter argued that agroecological approaches could address food needs in critical regions and double food production within 10 years. However, he notes there is insufficient backing for organic-based farming which seriously hinders progress.

    But it is not just a case of insufficient backing. Global agribusiness and agritech corporations have leveraged themselves into strategic positions and integral to their strategy has been attacks on organic farming as they attempt to cast it as a niche model which cannot feed the world. From the false narrative that industrial agriculture is necessary to feed a growing population to providing lavish research grants and the capture of important policy-making institutions, these firms have secured a thick legitimacy within policy making machinery.

    These conglomerates regard organic approaches as a threat, especially agroecology which adheres to a non-industrial, smallholder model rooted in local independent enterprises and communities based on the principle of localisation. When people like De Schutter assert the need for a “democratically controlled” agroecology, this runs counter to the reality of large agribusiness firms, their proprietary products and their globalisation agenda based on long supply chains, market dependency, dispossession and the incorporation of farms and farmers into their agrifood regime. And as we can see, ‘democracy’ has no place in the world of the digital-financial complex.

    The 2015 Declaration of the International Forum for Agroecology argues for building grass-root local food systems that create new rural-urban links, based on truly agroecological food production. It says that agroecology should not be co-opted to become a tool of the industrial food production model; it should be the essential alternative to it.

    The declaration stated that agroecology is political and requires local producers and communities to challenge and transform structures of power in society, not least by putting the control of seeds, biodiversity, land and territories, waters, knowledge, culture and the commons in the hands of those who feed the world.

    According to Pat Mooney of the ETC Group, this involves developing healthy and equitable agroecological production systems, building short (community-based) supply chains and restructuring and democratising governance systems that could take 25 years to accomplish: in effect a ‘long food movement’.

    We are currently living through epoch-defining changes and the struggle for the future of food and agriculture is integral to the wider struggle over the future direction of humanity. There is a pressing need to transition towards a notion of food sovereignty based on agroecological principles and the local ownership and stewardship of common resources.

    The post Living in Epoch-Defining Times: Food, Agriculture and the New World Order first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Is A State Program To Foster Sustainable Farming Leaving Out Small-Scale Growers And Farmers Of Color?

    Even when there are funds available, the soils program can be difficult for farmers who grow many crops, as well as immigrant farmers who may not speak English fluently, to access or make use of. It’s also hard for lower-income growers who lease their land year to year to successfully complete an application, because the program requires a three-year commitment for all who participate. And HSP takes a largely prescriptive approach—requiring that one practice be applied to the same plot of land for the entire time. But smaller operations tend to grow a diverse range of crops that require intricate rotation and the ability to swap out crops due to weather, water availability and other factors.

    The post Is A State Program To Foster Sustainable Farming Leaving Out Small-Scale Growers And Farmers Of Color? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • New research shows sustained damage to agricultural land near pipelines

    Before it began digging into the earth to bury its two-and-half-foot-wide, 1,172-mile-long pipeline in the ground, Dakota Access, LLC promised to restore the land to its previous condition when construction was finished. The pipeline company signed that pledge in its contracts with landowners stretching from North Dakota to Illinois, and the project was approved by the South Dakota Public Utilities Commission under that condition. But farmers in the path of the pipeline have a different story to tell – one of broken promises and sustained damage to their land. 

    Now, there’s data to back them up. 

    Researchers at Iowa State University found that in the two years following construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline corn yields in the 150-foot right-of-way declined by 15 percent.  Soybean yields dropped by 25 percent. 

    One of the selling points that energy companies often tout is that pipeline infrastructure is seemingly invisible, buried and forgotten over the long run. The new study, published in the journal Soil Use and Management, seems to contradict that claim.

    The scientists said the major issue is that soil is compacted by heavy machinery during pipeline construction, and that topsoil and subsoil are mixed together. Taken together, the damage “can discourage root growth and reduce water infiltration in the right-of-way,” Robert Horton, an agronomist at Iowa State and the lead soil physicist on the project, said in a statement. He and his colleagues also found changes in available water and nutrients within the soil. 

    The findings are important for a number of planned pipelines across the Midwest. In one instance, the planned Midwest Carbon Express would be built on land already used for the Dakota Access pipeline, leaving farmers reeling from double impact on their crops.

    It also adds to other new research on the long-term effects of pipelines on agriculture. In Ohio, using data collected from 24 different farms, researchers recently announced that corn and soybean yields were still being negatively affected three years after the construction of a series of smaller pipelines. 

    “Every pipeline site is going to be slightly different, but there is a general trend of degradation overall,” Theresa Brehm, one of the researchers and a graduate student at Ohio State University, told Grist.

    For corn, yields were down an average 23.8 percent. 

    “That means [farmers are] losing almost a quarter of the productivity of that land,” Brehem said, adding “it’s not just a 23 percent decrease from one year. There’s actually a longevity impact of that.” 

    Pipeline companies will often agree to reimburse farmers for 100 percent of crop damage in the first year after construction is complete, 75 percent for the second year, 50 percent for the third year, 25 percent for the fourth year, and 0 percent for the fifth year. 

    But, “by year five most people aren’t getting any compensation at all,” Brehm said. 

    Brehm told Grist that’s why they looked at farms where more than three years had passed since a pipeline’s construction, to see the long-term impact on farmers. 

    Greg Sautter owns a 100-acre farm in Wayne County, Ohio and contributed data for Brehm’s research. A natural gas pipeline called the Rover Pipeline intersects his land. Construction started in 2014 and took two years. Sautter told Grist the company’s promise before the pipeline went in was that “there would be no yield loss, and the land would be put back just the way it was before.” 

    But that’s not what happened. 

    In the first year after the pipeline was complete Sautter planted cover crops to try and restore organic matter to the land. In the fourth year, after consulting with a soil scientist, the pipeline company paid for more than 100 loads of topsoil. The next year they were finally able to plant their usual crops. But they noticed a decline in yield. 

    The corn, Sautter said, “was 2 to 3 feet shorter and had very small ears.” 

    Construction of the Rover Pipeline through Sautter’s land. Courtesy of Greg Sautter

    Sautter told Grist the impact of the pipeline’s destruction on his land has been emotional. “Here’s something that happened to your land that you would never think about doing yourself – taking a 150-foot swath, turning the soil upside down, mixing it together with rocks and subsoil, and laying it back down to try to grow something,” he said. 

    Sautter’s story is not unique. In 2017, a family sued DAPL for failing to restore the land how it was before construction and failure to compensate them for damages to their 800-acre farm. In 2021, in Oklahoma, Cheniere Energy missed multiple deadlines to restore private land that was affected when they built a 200-mile natural gas pipeline. Farmers across the country have similar experiences, but often feel they don’t have the money to take pipeline companies to court, leaving them suffering with the economic and emotional consequences of once-abundant farmland now scarred by a pipeline. 

    “They’ll probably win anyway and it’ll just cost you a bunch of money to try to fight it,” Sautter said.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline New research shows sustained damage to agricultural land near pipelines on Jan 7, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • The country’s biggest solar farm is coming to one of the coal-friendliest states

    Among vast fields of corn and soybeans in rural northwest Indiana, construction workers broke ground in October on what will be the largest solar farm in the United States. The project, known as Mammoth Solar, will cover 13,000 acres, spread across two counties, with 60 landowners involved. It will generate enough electricity to power nearly a quarter-million homes in an area with deep ties to the fossil fuel industry. 

    Indiana is home to the largest inland coal refinery in the country. It ranks in the top 10 states for carbon emissions, both overall and per capita. And in 2020, the state used the third most coal in the United States, behind Texas and Missouri. Solar, meanwhile, accounts for less than 2 percent of Indiana’s electricity generation. In April, state legislation to establish renewable energy standards was killed after pushback from local officials. 

    Even in more environmentally progressive states, renewable developers often face a host of challenges that can prevent them from starting new projects. So how did the country’s largest solar farm, owned by Israel-based Doral Renewables, successfully set up shop in the Hoosier state? 

    After decades of reliance on coal, Indiana’s power system was poised for a change, largely due to aging infrastructure and economics. Four of the state’s electric utilities have announced plans to close their coal-fired plants soon. With the declining cost of solar, many utilities and developers have decided that construction of solar facilities is a better investment than new coal plants. Over the next two years, at least 15 solar projects stretching 1,000 acres or more each are slated to go online in the state, in addition to several other smaller solar farms. 

    “One of the implications of being such a coal-dependent state is that when those coal plants retire, it presents a whole host of opportunities for new generation for utilities,” Jesse Kharbanda, executive director of the Hoosier Environmental Council, told Grist. “Utilities simply need to find a way to replace the 9,000 megawatts of predominantly coal-fired power that has been retired over the last 15 years. They have come to the conclusion that they’re better off investing in renewables and gas.” 

    For the small rural counties playing host to these new solar facilities, it often simply comes down to the money. That was the case with the Mammoth Solar facility in Starke and Pulaski counties. The tax revenue from the 1.65-gigawatt project will account for nearly one-fifth of each of their annual budgets. And for many landowners, the payments they will receive from Doral Renewables will be more than they make farming the land or leasing it themselves. Landowners can expect to receive between $600 and $1,000 per acre per year that they lease out for solar panels. About 60 landowners have agreed to lease land to the project. Mammoth Solar in total is expected to bring $1.5 billion in investment to the state. 

    Doral leadership at the groundbreaking ceremony in October. Doral Renewables

    “You have communities that are struggling, especially in rural America, for revenue,” said Nick Cohen, president and co-founder of Doral Renewables. 

    It is a win-win for Doral as well. “Indiana has a competitive advantage for solar: It’s flat, the grid [transmission lines] system is there, and it’s in a rural place, which is perfect for solar,” said Cohen. 

    Cohen works with both Democratic and Republican governors and voters on other renewable projects throughout the country. “Renewable energy is the one thing that brings everybody together,” he said. “They might be coming together for different reasons, but they’re all together in one room.” 

    One landowner, Lori Meyer, told Grist that with droughts, pests, and the fluctuating commodities market, her farm’s success has been “really up and down” over the last several years. She co-owns land with her sister that’s been farmed in the family for several generations. Last year, they grew potatoes. Now, part of the family’s Fishburn Farm is being leased to Mammoth Solar. Her decision was also partly based on environmental concerns. 

    “One of the big reasons that both my sister and I decided to do this was because of our carbon footprint that we’re leaving for our kids,” she said.

    Residents in Starke and Pulaski counties had previously turned down opportunities for wind development, because of concerns over noise and visual aesthetics. So, Cohen approached them about solar instead, which residents were more amenable to. To address the aesthetic concerns, Doral Renewables plans to plant trees along the edges of the solar farm, to hide the panels from view. 

    Cohen told Grist that Doral Renewables is working on strategies so that farmers can lease their land while still farming on it. Instead of soybeans and corn, farmers will likely grow blueberries and other orchard crops, he said. There’s also the possibility of sheep that graze underneath the panels. 

    But the project isn’t being welcomed by everyone. Many are concerned about the loss of quality farmland to industrial solar projects. In Pulaski County, 10 landowners filed lawsuits seeking to overturn the Board of Zoning Appeals’ approval of the Mammoth Solar project. A Facebook group called “Pulaski County Against Solar Project” has over 500 members united over concerns about farmland loss and an impact on property value.

    One landowner, Harold Gerstandt, owns 80 acres of farmland where he grows corn and soybeans. Mammoth Solar asked him if they could put transmission lines through his land to connect the project’s different solar plots. Gerstandt hasn’t given the developers a final answer, but, he told Grist, he is almost certain to say no. The transmission lines could impact his irrigation, he worries. 

    Harold Gerstandt on his farm. Courtesy of Harold Gerstandt

    “I want guarantees that if for any reason the irrigators wouldn’t be able to make their complete sweep on the farm, that they’re going to have to pay me,” he said. Gerstandt said that Mammoth Solar didn’t guarantee him that insurance would cover all crop damage. 

    “I’ve been wrestling with this thing since spring. About letting them come through, or not come through, and it’s just they’re so vague on stuff,” he said.

    Even with the lawsuits, Mammoth Solar is proceeding with its plan. Full-scale construction is set to begin in the spring and is expected to take 18 months to finish. When complete, nearly 3 million solar panels will provide clean energy for homes across the state.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The country’s biggest solar farm is coming to one of the coal-friendliest states on Jan 5, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • To get rural Americans involved in climate crisis, see them for who they are

    I like small towns. I grew up in the Hudson Valley of New York state, just beyond the reach of the commuter trains to Manhattan; spent 15 years in rural Colorado, living in a town with no traffic lights and a population well under 2,000; then moved to a similarly tiny town in southwestern Washington state, where I live today. I could, in theory, settle anywhere with reliable internet service and a reasonable cost of living, and sometimes I wonder why I continue to choose places that by any conventional measure are both inconvenient and unhip. 

    I’m drawn to the big landscapes that surround them, but most of all, I think, I value my membership in these cranky, intimate communities. I like that my neighbors come from many different walks of life, and that they regularly (and sometimes uncomfortably) puncture my assumptions about their experiences and interests and political leanings — just as I puncture theirs. I like that I know the librarians by name, and that they know when I have books overdue.

    Since the 2016 election, the national media has frequently used the term “rural Americans” as shorthand for middle-aged, white Trump supporters. The conflation obscures the fact that about one out of five rural Americans identify as Black, Latino, or Indigenous, and that immigrants are responsible for much of the recent population growth in rural areas. An estimated 15 to 20 percent of LGBTQ Americans live in rural places, and rural youth are now just as likely to identify as LGBTQ as their urban peers.

    Rural Americans are also politically diverse; while it’s accurate to say that I live in a deep-red county, it’s also accurate to say that I live in a powder-blue town surrounded by precincts that range from pale pink to brick red. And though both rural and urban Americans are more politically polarized than they used to be, the politics of rural voters don’t always fit neatly into partisan categories. Many rural people are deeply skeptical of both parties. Others are suspicious of government regulations, but also critical of the environmental damage done by unregulated industry. (The decline of local news, which is most acute in rural places, means that nuanced reporting on rural issues is scarce, and that media stereotypes often go unchallenged.)

    In my experience, there’s only one characteristic that essentially all rural people share: We hate being told what to do, whether by a neighbor who doesn’t like our political yard signs or a state wildlife official charged with enforcing new hunting regulations. When it comes to addressing climate change, this reflexive independence can pose a stubborn obstacle, but it also holds opportunity — renewable energy, for instance, can appeal to those who prize autonomy. Turning opportunity into progress, though, requires a willingness to see rural people clearly.

    Rural Americans value the protection of their air, water, and soil as much — or even more — than their urban counterparts, but boy do they use different words for it. While progressive urban activists might consider “conservation” and “environmental” to be more or less interchangeable, for instance, many rural people may cautiously accept the former but reject the latter, assuming that those who call themselves conservationists will be less confrontational and friendlier to hunting, fishing, and farming. (That said, plenty of people worldwide are wary of the term “conservation,” too, given the movement’s history of violating the land claims of Indigenous and other rural people.) 

    “‘Environmentalism’ is seen as intrusive, top down, and driven by people who don’t make their living from the land,” says Virginia farmer and rural economic development consultant Anthony Flaccavento. “Anyone who has the term in the name of their organization is going to have a hell of a time, even if they’re trying to come down on the side of farmers and fishermen.” 

    Farmers who support sustainable agricultural practices may nonetheless react to terms like “regenerative agriculture,” offended by the implication that other forms of agriculture are somehow non-regenerative. Campaigns against the environmental and economic sins of “Big Ag,” however warranted and well-documented, are similarly unlikely to sit well with farmers who are forced, however unwillingly, to depend on Big Ag for a living. 

    People eating at a diner
    The Dinky Diner is a prime gathering spot in Decatur City, Iowa, which had a population of 175 in the 2020 census. Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

    “Climate change” is another loaded term, given that many rural people associate climate fixes with government regulation. As Kate Yoder reported for Grist recently, urban climate activists may make more headway with potential rural allies by talking about the need to mitigate and adapt to floods, fires, and heatwaves — independent of their root causes. 

    Like almost all urban-rural misunderstandings, these and other language barriers result from both real grievances and deliberately inflated resentments. But by avoiding hyper-polarized words and phrases, climate activists can start a conversation that would otherwise be shut down.

    Over the past 40-plus years, U.S. economic policies have widened the gaps between rich and poor, Black and white, and rural and urban. Farmers and farmworkers have been hit hard by corporate consolidation, losing land and livelihoods to international agricultural conglomerates; many of the manufacturers that employed generations of rural families have moved overseas. Recent history has compounded these troubles, as rural employment rates have never recovered from the Great Recession, and rural economies have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic. 

    The cost of rural living is rising, too: In my small town, for instance, telecommuters with far deeper pockets than I have are driving up real estate prices, and trailer parks are being replaced with second homes. These and other genuine economic disparities aren’t just practical problems; they’re often emotionally agonizing, and in recent years they’ve increased the risk of farmers and farmworkers dying by suicide. They’ve also created a rural audience receptive to divisive messages, with some eager to blame their troubles on city people, Democrats, government workers, and — in the case of some white rural residents — people of color. (The sheriff in my county recently attracted national attention, and not a little local support, by threatening to arrest any public employees, from schoolteachers to county commissioners, who tried to enforce COVID-related health regulations.) 

    Meanwhile, the real causes of rural suffering, such as inadequate healthcare, chronically underfunded schools and the persistent technology gap, are rarely prioritized by either party — fueling yet more toxic resentment. The result, says Flaccavento, is that “many rural people, especially white folks, may simultaneously have a greatly exaggerated sense of grievance and real and long-standing grievances that have not been addressed.”

    Two Black men on horses in a bronc riding competition
    A bronc-riding competition at the Bill Pickett Invitational in Memphis in 2017, the only national touring Black rodeo. Nearly one in five rural Americans identify as Black, Latino or Indigenous. Scott Olson / Getty Images

    Bridging the rural-urban divide is rarely easy. Rural resentment of city dwellers is pervasive and sometimes poisonous. Rural places can be hard to get to, and can take years to get to know. At the same time, rural places are often heartbreakingly gorgeous and surprisingly diverse, and they’re almost guaranteed to upend whatever expectations you might bring to them. By taking the time to understand rural issues, and by seeking climate solutions that restore livelihoods as well as landscapes, the climate movement can broaden its reach and increase its power. Which looks more and more like a matter of survival, no matter where you happen to live.

    Some of the most promising solutions to the climate crisis lie in the rural places I call home. The conservation of Indigenous lands and privately owned rural landscapes is central to the Biden administration’s America The Beautiful plan, an ambitious initiative designed to benefit the climate as well as biodiversity. Much of our wind and solar energy production — existing and potential — is located in rural areas, as are our best remaining opportunities to sequester carbon in forests and grasslands. 

    Yet surveys of rural Americans find that most of us are wary of concerted climate action. We value clean water, wildlife, and parks as much as urban dwellers, and we’re at least as well-informed about environmental policy. We’re also facing some of the worst effects of climate change, from megafires to storm surges to landslides to drought-induced crop failures. But in our experience, environmental regulations tend to burden the wrong people. Government policies designed to stablize the climate, many of us worry, will mean more of the same.

    When nurtured by the right-wing media ecosystem, these concerns too often blossom into paranoia. But understanding their legitimate roots is key to building rural support for climate action, and that’s politically essential, especially given that the Founding Fathers gave rural people an outsized voice in the U.S. Senate. 

    To be clear, I’m not suggesting that anyone indulge the lies and conspiracy theories so common in what passes for political discourse today. I firmly believe that seeing rural people as the complex human beings we are is a form of resistance — resistance to the disinformation, and the climate disruption, that threatens us all. 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline To get rural Americans involved in climate crisis, see them for who they are on Jan 3, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Industrialized Farming Has Unleashed an Insect Apocalypse

    A French farmer sprays glyphosate herbicide "Roundup 720" made by agrochemical giant Monsanto in Piacé in northwestern France, on April 23, 2021.

    Most of us are familiar with the story of the passenger pigeon, so numerous in the late 1700s that flocks of billions of birds darkened the sky for hours as they passed. Humans exterminated them in a little over 100 years, the last wild passenger pigeon being shot in 1901. In contrast, few have ever heard of the Rocky Mountain locust, but its story is similar. Once very common, swarms would occasionally erupt from their core range in the eastern Rocky Mountains, spreading eastward across the Great Plains. In 1875, a particularly large swarm of this grasshopper was estimated to contain perhaps 12.5 trillion individuals, possibly the most common organism ever witnessed by man. Within just 28 years it was extinct, the last one being recorded in 1902. The cause of this most dramatic of extinctions is unclear, but it seems that the core breeding ground of this species was river valleys in Montana and Wyoming, where the locust laid its eggs in sandy soils. These areas were fertile and easily cultivated, so were among the first settled and ploughed by farmers, destroying the eggs of the insect.

    The contrast between public awareness of the fate of the passenger pigeon and that of the Rocky Mountain locust reflects a more general bias. We tend to identify with and care about large creatures (mammals and birds in particular), while paying little or no attention to the much smaller creatures, the insects and their kin. Children are often fascinated by insects, but sadly they usually grow out of this, and the first reaction of many teenagers or adults to anything that buzzes or scuttles near them is likely to be an attempt to swat it or stamp on it. Even the common names we give insects, such as “bugs” and “creepy-crawlies,” reflect this negative attitude.

    I fell in love with insects when I was just 5 or 6 years old. I never grew out of my childhood obsession, and I have been lucky enough to make a career out of studying their often weird and wonderful lives. My mission is to persuade others to care for and respect them, for we all need insects, whether we know it or not. The 1.1 million known species of insect comprise more than two-thirds of all known species on our planet. Insects pollinate roughly three-quarters of the crops we grow, including most of our fruit and vegetables, such that many of us would starve without them. They also pollinate the large majority of wildflowers; recycle dung, leaves and corpses; help to keep the soil healthy; control pests; and much more. They are food for numerous larger animals such as most birds, freshwater fish, frogs and lizards. Ecosystems would grind to a halt without insects.

    It should thus be of concern to all of us that insects are in decline. Every year there are slightly fewer butterflies, fewer bumblebees — fewer of almost all the myriad little beasts that make the world go round. Estimates vary and are imprecise, and many insects, particularly those in the tropics, are simply not being systematically counted by anyone, but the data we do have overwhelmingly suggest a pattern of decline. For example, in Germany, the biomass of flying insects fell by 76 percent in the 27 years to 2016. In the U.S., monarch butterfly numbers have fallen by 80 percent in 25 years. In the U.K., butterflies have halved in abundance since 1976, when I was 11 years old. These changes have happened in our lifetimes, on our watch, and they continue to accelerate.

    My youngest son is now 11; he is growing up in a world where butterflies are half as common as they were when I was his age. How many butterflies will his children ever see?

    The famous American biologist Paul Ehrlich likened loss of species from an ecological community to randomly popping out rivets from the wing of a plane. Remove one or two and the plane will probably be fine. Remove 10, or 20 or 50, and at some point, that we are entirely unable to predict, there will be a catastrophic failure, and the plane will fall from the sky. In his analogy, insects are the rivets that hold ecosystems together.

    What is driving the decline of insects? There are many factors, but clearly the industrialization of farming, particularly the move toward large-scale monoculture cropping dependent on a blizzard of pesticides is playing a major role. In 1962, three years before I was born, Rachel Carson warned us in her book Silent Spring that we were doing terrible damage to our planet. She would weep to see how much worse it has become. The problems with pesticides and fertilizers Carson highlighted have become far more acute. Some of these new pesticides, such as neonicotinoids, are thousands of times more toxic to insects than any that existed in Carson’s day. The U.S. in particular has an especially gung-ho attitude to pesticides, with U.S. farmers accounting for nearly 20 percent of all global use. About one-quarter of the pesticides used in the U.S. are now banned in the European Union due to concerns over risks to human or environmental health. The U.S. allows several pesticides now banned in China and Brazil, neither of which is famed for its sensitive approach to environmental protection.

    The Rocky Mountain locust may be extinct, but other grasshoppers are still common in the same area, and occasionally there are outbreaks that spill out into surrounding states. The grasshoppers eat grass, competing with livestock and hence impacting ranchers. One such outbreak occurred in the summer of 2021, prompting the federal government to fund aerial spraying of about 1 million acres of rangeland in Montana and neighboring states with an insecticide, diflubenzuron. Those responsible for this decision argue that the chemical does little harm to other insects, but this is clearly nonsense, since elsewhere the same chemical is applied commercially to kill various butterflies, moths, beetles, flies and termites, and it is highly toxic to bumblebees. The chemical is even toxic to many plants. So what is the collateral damage from this carpet-bombing of the landscape? There are tens of thousands of native insect species in Montana; this spraying will kill untold trillions of individual insects (including monarch butterfly caterpillars). This in turn will impact the functions that these insects perform; fewer pollinators for crops and wildflowers, fewer insects for birds to eat. Grasshoppers and other insects are an essential protein source for chicks of many birds such as the endangered greater sage grouse. In turn, the birds help to keep the grasshoppers in check. If the birds decline further, along with other natural enemies of the grasshoppers, future outbreaks will be worse, and more insecticide will be sprayed. It is a self-defeating war on nature that can never be won. I find myself wondering if the crop duster pilots play “Ride of the Valkyries” on their cockpit radio, while muttering “I love the smell of insecticide in the morning.”

    Pesticides are not the only problem insects face in the modern world. Ongoing habitat loss — particularly of tropical forests — and the spread of invasive species and non-native insect diseases are all taking their toll. Light pollution attracts countless night-flying insects to bash themselves to death on artificial lights, and disrupts the ability of insects to judge day length and emerge from hibernation at the correct time of year. Many soils have been degraded, rivers choked with silt and polluted with chemicals or simply so much water extracted that they run dry. Climate change, a phenomenon unrecognized in Rachel Carson’s time, is now threatening to further ravage our planet. The recent failure of COP26 to achieve any meaningful international progress on tackling climate change means that in the future, insects will have to cope with more frequent droughts, wildfires, floods and storms. It is death by a thousand cuts.

    Our planet has coped remarkably well so far with the blizzard of changes we have wrought, but we would be foolish to assume that it will continue to do so. A relatively small proportion of species have actually gone extinct so far, but almost all wild species now exist in numbers that are a fraction of their former abundance, subsisting in degraded and fragmented habitats and subjected to a multitude of ever-changing man-made problems. We do not understand anywhere near enough to be able to predict how much resilience is left in our depleted ecosystems, or how close we are to tipping points beyond which collapse becomes inevitable. In Paul Ehrlich’s “rivets on a plane” analogy, we may be close to the point where the wing falls off.

    To learn more about insect declines and what you can do to help reverse them, read Silent Earth by Dave Goulson, published by HarperCollins in 2021.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Key Body Demands Complete Ban on Glyphosate in India

    In October 2020, Pesticide Action Network India and PAN Asia Pacific released the report ‘State of Glyphosate Use in India’. It concluded that the use of the world’s most widely used herbicide is rampant. Despite this, it noted that its disturbing effects on the environment and the health of farmworkers and the public are not being addressed (see: State of Glyphosate Use in India).

    Although Punjab, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and several other states have moved towards banning glyphosate due to their concerns for consumers, farmers and environment, the report – based on a field survey in seven states (300 respondents – 30 retailers, 270 farmers/farmworkers) – noted at least 20 non-approved uses of glyphosate, with 16 of them in food crops.

    It concluded:

    In the light of mounting evidences on the unacceptable health and environmental outcomes of glyphosate, the ground reality of its use in India is seen as an ‘anarchic’ scenario. This would have undesirable impacts on soil health, farm productivity, food safety, agriculture trade, public health as well as environmental wellbeing in the country. The scenario of glyphosate use thus necessitates the urgent need of eliminating it from India.

    The report documented many disturbing features of glyphosate use, not least in terms of its impacts on farmers and farmworkers.

    Now in December 2021, the influential Swadeshi Jagaran Manch (SJM) has demanded a complete ban on the use of glyphosate in India, arguing it is carcinogenic and damages ecology and that it adversely impacts cultivators and their livelihoods.

    The SJM has close ties to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and has consistently adopted a critical stance on the government’s pro-foreign direct investment policies and the ‘globalisation’ (dependency) agenda.

    National Co-convenor of the SJM Ashwani Mahajan recently submitted a petition with 201,609 signatures of people favouring a complete ban on glyphosate to Union Minister for Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Narendra Singh Tomar.

    The organisation argues that the government’s stated intent to restrict (not ban) the use of glyphosate (see Government moves to restrict use of glyphosate – The Hindu BusinessLine) is meaningless.

    The SJM informed the agriculture minister that, though there is a restriction on the use of glyphosate (aside from on tea plantations and non-crop areas), the weedicide is blatantly being used for illegally grown genetically engineered herbicide tolerant (HT) cotton. It added that this has been going on for years with the full knowledge of the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee and the state governments.

    The minister was informed that, at present, some “miscreant seed companies” are trying to illegally spread HT Bt cotton, on hundreds of thousands of acres of land, to promote the use of glyphosate.

    The SJM says glyphosate is being used both for weed control and to desiccate crops prior to harvesting and there is a strong opposition to this as the weedicide and its adjuvants are absorbed by the plant and consumed by humans.

    Glyphosate is a known carcinogen and endocrine disruptor and is linked with several serious illnesses. The SJM informed the minister that there are more than 100,000 cases pending against Monsanto/Bayer company for damages by the users of its glyphosate based herbicide after they (the litigants) developed 10 different types of cancer, including non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. The herbicide has been declared carcinogenic by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).

    Despite this, the push to get illegal HT genetically engineered crops into Indian fields persists. In 2017, for instance, the illegal cultivation of HT soybean was reported in Gujarat. There are also reports of HT cotton illegally being cultivated in the country.

    In a 2017 paper in the Journal of Peasant studies, Glenn Stone and Andrew Flachs show how cotton farmers have been encouraged to change their ploughing practices, which has led to more weeds being left in their fields. The authors suggest the outcome in terms of yields (or farmer profit) is arguably no better than before. However, it (conveniently) coincides with the appearance of an increasing supply of HT cotton seeds.

    Stone and Flachs observe:

    The challenge for agrocapital is how to break the dependence on double-lining and ox-weeding to open the door to herbicide-based management…. how could farmers be pushed onto an herbicide-intensive path?

    They show how farmers are indeed being nudged onto such a path via the change in practices and also note the potential market for herbicide growth alone in India is huge. Writing in 2017, the authors note that sales could soon reach USD 800 million with scope for even greater expansion. Little wonder we therefore see the appearance of HT seeds in the country. These seeds are designed to be used with glyphosate or other similar toxic argrochemicals such as glufinosate.

    A report in the Indian press (June 2021) (Sale of illegal HT Bt cotton seeds doubles – The Hindu) states that the illegal cultivation of HT Bt cotton has seen a huge jump over a 12-month period, with seed manufacturers claiming that the sale of illegal seed packets had more than doubled. Industry lobbyists had been openly encouraging farmers to plant the seeds in violation of government regulations.

    Industry lobbyists and industry-funded scientists often refer to regulatory agencies across the globe which have approved the use of glyphosate in their attempts to invalidate calls for imposing a ban. But if we turn to Europe, long-time campaigner against glyphosate Dr Rosemary Mason says:

    The only reason it has to date remained on the market in Europe is because of the companies behind the European Glyphosate Renewal Group (GRG).

    The GRG is a collection of companies seeking the renewal of the EU authorisation of glyphosate in 2022. Its current members are Albaugh Europe SARL, Barclay Chemicals Manufacturing Ltd., Bayer Agriculture bvba, Ciech Sarzyna S.A., Industrias Afrasa S.A., Nufarm GMBH & Co.KG, Sinon Corporation and Syngenta Crop Protection AG.

    In the run up to the decision on whether to relicense glyphosate in 2022, Mason adds:

    These member companies joined forces to prepare a dossier with scientific studies and information on the safety of glyphosate. This dossier was submitted to the evaluating member states and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) as part of the EU regulatory procedure to continue the authorisation of glyphosate and glyphosate-containing products on the EU market.

    It is telling that researcher Claire Robinson (see: Glyphosate: EU assessment report excludes most of the scientific literature from its analysis (gmwatch.org)) now notes that the preliminary EU report on glyphosate prepared by the Dutch, Hungarian, French and Swedish (the states tasked with evaluating glyphosate) regulators, failed to take into account the overwhelming majority of studies published in the scientific literature.

    Robinson notes that of the 1,550 studies on the toxicity of glyphosate that the organisation Générations Futures found had been published in the literature over the last ten years, only 11 were deemed reliable by the evaluating states. Of the 1,614 ecotoxicity studies identified, once again only 11 were considered reliable. The rate is even lower for endocrine disruption effects: out of 4,024 published studies, only eight are considered reliable by the evaluating states.

    Générations Futures notes that the studies presented by the manufacturers were treated with greater leniency and ended up forming the basis of their (the evaluating member states) assessment – in spite of there being “significant methodological flaws”.

    Key studies indicating the toxicity of glyphosate from Asia or South America were not accounted for in the evaluation.

    Robinson asks:

    Are the studies provided by pesticide manufacturers in support of the glyphosate re-authorisation application subject to the same scrutiny?

    She goes on to explain that this has not been the case. The system is designed to favour the manufacturers.

    Rosemary Mason has been compiling data and citing official and peer reviewed reports on glyphosate for more than a decade. In her dozens of reports (on the academia.edu website), she has been documenting the devastating health and environmental impacts of glyphosate.

    In an era defined by the notion of ‘protecting public health’ and ‘flattening the curve’ to reduce the strain on health services, it must be asked why the agrochemical companies are granted free rein to continue to roll out their health damaging products that – as Mason and many others show – are fuelling a decades-long spiralling public health crisis and result in burdening health services.

    The post Key Body Demands Complete Ban on Glyphosate in India first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • India: Victory for farmers protesting fascist farm laws

    The Indian farmer’s movement is a demonstration that people power can preserve the public sector and has become an inspiration for labourers around the world to take on neoliberalism and fascism, writes Gauri Gandbhir.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Trees and Crops Don’t Have to Compete. Climate Crisis Calls for Agroforestry.

    A view of an organic pepper plant on a farm where plantations compensate the carbon footprint of its visitors, in Heredia, Sarapiqui, Costa Rica, on October 28, 2020.

    Growing up in North Texas, farming to me meant fields of single crops stretching as far as the eye could see. Like many Americans, I’d come to assume that trees had no place in that vista. In fact, most of us probably assume a trade-off between forests and food.

    Now that the climate crisis calls for vastly more trees, it’s time to take in the good news that trees and crops can do well together.

    In fact, from Burma, to India, to the Philippines and countless other places, this is not news at all. Farmers have long known that crops and trees don’t compete — they complement each other. South and Southeast Asia have been credited as the “cradle” of agroforestry.

    In this practice, Africa offers inspiring lessons today.

    The African Sahel, a strip of 10 countries south of the Sahara, was for decades linked in my heart to great suffering due to its recurring famine. From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, drought combined with the legacy of colonialism caused many to die of starvation. Niger — one of the world’s poorest countries — was hit particularly hard.

    However, once crops were able to grow again in the mid-1990s due to improved rainfall, farmers began reviving their traditional, pre-colonial practice of growing trees and crops in the same fields, also called agroforestry.

    You see, with the right mix, trees and crops help each other thrive.

    In Niger, through farmer-to-farmer learning, more and more families came to see that tree stumps — along with tree roots and seeds in the soil — could all be nurtured, sprout and become trees. Farmers also embraced the traditional practice of growing legumes like cowpeas and peanuts that fix nitrogen — so they need not turn to chemical fertilizer, which can be costly and environmentally damaging.

    Ultimately, their work protected and regenerated perhaps as many as 200 million trees, all of which sequester carbon, improve soil fertility and significantly increase crop yields, experts on the ground have explained to me. They also offer fruit, fodder and firewood, and their foliage reduces soil temperature, helping retain soil moisture.

    To underscore farmers’ role as the leaders in this process, these practices are called “farmer-managed natural regeneration.”

    So effective were these practices that by 2009, Niger generated food security for 2.5 million people — then about 17 percent of the population. No one knows for sure how widespread these practices are in sub-Saharan Africa today, but Gray Tappan of the U.S. Geological Survey offered me an extrapolation from what is known: On-farm trees may have spread to more than half-a-million square miles in the region.

    That’s more twice the size of Texas! Amazing.

    And what does this big shift to agroforestry feel like? To help me understand, agronomist Tony Rinaudo shared a comment from a child in Ghana: “We eat fruits any time we want to, and if our parents have not prepared food, we can just go to the bush.”

    West Africa’s revitalization of integrating crops and trees has echoes here in the U.S.

    One is in the spread of alley cropping — a twist on agroforestry. Since 2013, the Savanna Institute in Wisconsin — inspired by native ecosystems — has been working with farmers to spread this practice to Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin. In alley cropping, widely spaced “alleys” of trees thrive among companion crops that also help store carbon. The practice increases each acre’s total yield by at least 40 percent.

    Plus, alley cropping helps farmers by sequestering carbon, diversifying their income sources, preventing soil erosion and providing wildlife habitat, Jacob Grace of the Savanna Institute explains.

    Almost a quarter of “all Midwestern farmland would be more profitable with rows of trees in it, compared to corn and soybean monocultures,” Grace writes.

    Beyond the Midwest, another contributor to agroforestry’s reach is Soul Fire Farm in upstate New York. It offers immersion learning for those of Black, Indigenous and Latinx heritage in regenerative farming — including Afro-Indigenous agroforestry.

    Agroforestry — from Africa to our Midwest and beyond — holds the technical potential to sequester a significant percentage of total global emissions.

    These leaders, and so many more, build on millennia of experience integrating trees and crops. So, let’s spread the word that trees and crops are natural allies whose relationship we can nurture for the benefit of all.

    Note: This article features topics discussed in the 50th anniversary edition of the author’s book, Diet for a Small Planet, released September 2021. This version features a brand-new opening chapter, simple rules for a healthy diet, and updated recipes by some of the country’s leading plant- and planet-centered chefs. You can join in the Democracy Movement at www.democracymovement.us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Indian Farmers Achieve “Victory of Global Significance” After a Year of Revolt

    Farmers Celebrate As PM Narendra Modi Announces Repeal Of Three Contentious Farm Laws

    Workers’ rights activists around the globe rejoiced on Friday after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that his government will repeal three corporate-friendly agricultural laws that the nation’s farmers have steadfastly resisted for more than a year.

    The Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM), a coalition of over 40 farmers’ unions that led the protests, called the development a “historic victory” for those “who struggled resolutely, unitedly, continuously, and peacefully for one year so far in the historic farmers’ struggle,” India Today reported, citing a statement from SKM.

    “Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s announcement to repeal three farm laws is a welcome step in the right direction,” said SKM, though the organized labor coalition did not commit to ending its mobilization. “SKM hopes that the government of India will go the full length to fulfill all the legitimate demands of protesting farmers, including statutory legislation to guarantee a remunerative MSP [Minimum Support Price].”

    Rakesh Tikait, a leader of the Bharatiya Kisan Union, welcomed Modi’s announcement but said that “we will wait for the day when the farm laws are repealed in Parliament,” where the winter session starts on November 29. He added that in addition to the MSP demand, “the government should talk to farmers on other issues.”

    Modi’s announcement — and the sustained resistance of India’s farmers —were celebrated by progressives worldwide.

    Al Jazeera reported that Modi’s “sudden concession comes ahead of elections early next year in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, and two other northern states with large rural populations.” Opposition parties attributed the prime minister’s move to sinking poll numbers, characterizing it as part of an effort to appeal to voters who support or sympathize with the nation’s struggling farmers.

    According to CNN, “Farmers are the biggest voting bloc in the country, and the agricultural sector sustains about 58% of India’s 1.3 billion citizens. Angering farmers could see Modi lose a sizable number of votes.”

    As India Today noted, “Hundreds of farmers have been camping at three places on the Delhi border since November 2020, demanding the repeal of the Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020; Farmers’ (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, 2020; and the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020.”

    For over a year, CNN reported, “Indian farmers have fought the three laws, which they said leave them open to exploitation by large corporations and could destroy their livelihoods.”

    Al Jazeera explained that “the legislation the farmers object to,” passed last September, “deregulates the sector, allowing farmers to sell produce to buyers beyond government-regulated wholesale markets, where growers are assured of a minimum price.”

    Modi’s cabinet said the laws are “aimed at giving farmers the freedom to sell directly to institutional buyers such as big trading houses, large retailers, and food processors,” Reuters reported. While Modi claimed the legislation “will ‘unshackle’ millions of farmers and help them get better prices,” opposition parties said that “farmers’ bargaining power will be diminished.”

    Small farmers expressed alarm about the legislation, saying that “the changes make them vulnerable to competition from big business, and that they could eventually lose price support for staples such as wheat and rice,” Al Jazeera reported.

    Beginning last September, farmers from regions of India that are major producers of wheat and rice blocked railway tracks, which was followed by larger, nationwide protests, including some that used trucks, tractors, and combine harvesters to block highways leading to New Dehli, the nation’s capital.

    By last December, “protests spread across India, as farm organizations call[ed] for a nationwide strike after inconclusive talks with the government,” Reuters reported, adding that demonstrations also took place throughout the Sikh diaspora.

    In January, “India’s Supreme Court order[ed] an indefinite stay on the implementation of the new agricultural laws, saying it wanted to protect farmers and would hear their objections,” the news outlet noted.

    Over the course of several months, which included a brutal winter and a devastating Covid-19 surge, farmers continued to agitate for full repeal of the three laws. Repression from Modi’s right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party resulted in hundreds of deaths.

    At the largest rally to date, more than half a million farmers gathered in Uttar Pradesh on September 5, roughly 10 weeks before Modi announced that he will repeal the laws.

    In response to Modi’s decision on Friday, “farmers at [the] protest sites of Ghazipur, Tikri, and Singhu borders celebrated by bursting crackers, distributing sweets, and welcoming the [government’s] move,” India Today reported.

    The Transnational Institute praised “the resilience, courage, and determination of India’s farmers who succeeded in overturning the pernicious farm laws,” calling it “the power of movements.”

    That sentiment was shared by numerous other observers.

    “The repeal of the three farm laws — unconstitutional, with no demonstrable benefits, and aimed to expand corporate control over agriculture — is a major political victory for India’s peasant movement,” said R. Ramakumar, an economics professor in the School of Development Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai. “Their resolute struggle has shown and amplified the power of dissent in our democracy.”

    Priyamvada Gopal, a professor of postcolonial studies at the University of Cambridge, placed the overturning of Modi’s unpopular reforms in a broader context, arguing that “the victory of farmers in North India is not a local matter.”

    “This is a victory of global significance,” she added. “Immense class and oppressed caste solidarity, fierce determination, [and] deep courage defeated the combine of chauvinist authoritarianism and corporate greed — our common enemy.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • In the Name of Saving the Climate, They Will Uberise the Farmlands

    Mining Cryptocurrency, 2021

    Mining Cryptocurrency, 2021.

    As the last private plane takes off from the Glasgow airport and the dust settles, the detritus of the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP26, remains. The final communiqués are slowly being digested, their limited scope inevitable. António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, closed the proceedings by painting two dire images: ‘Our fragile planet is hanging by a thread. We are still knocking on the door of climate catastrophe. It is time to go into emergency mode – or our chance of reaching net zero will itself be zero’. The loudest cheer in the main hall did not erupt when this final verdict was announced, but when it was proclaimed that the next COP would be held in Cairo, Egypt in 2022. It seems enough to know that another COP will take place.

    An army of corporate executives and lobbyists crowded the official COP26 platforms; in the evening, their cocktail parties entertained government officials. While the cameras focused on official speeches, the real business was being done in these evening parties and in private rooms. The very people who are most responsible for the climate catastrophe shaped many of the proposals that were brought to the table at COP26. Meanwhile, climate activists had to resort to making as loud a noise as possible far from the Scottish Exchange Campus (SEC Centre), where the summit was hosted. It is telling that the SEC Centre was built on the same land as the Queen’s Dock, once a lucrative passageway for goods extracted from the colonies to flow into Britain. Now, old colonial habits revive themselves as developed countries – in cahoots with a few developing states that are captured by their corporate overlords – refuse to accept firm carbon limits and contribute the billions of dollars necessary for the climate fund.

    Cloud Ccomputing, 2021.

    Cloud Computing, 2021.

    The organisers of COP26 designated themes for many of the days during the conference, such as energy, finance, and transport. There was no day set aside for a discussion of agriculture; instead, it was bundled into ‘Nature Day’ on 6 November, during which the main topic was deforestation. No focused discussion took place about the carbon dioxide, methane, or nitrous oxide emitted from agricultural processes and the global food system, despite the fact that the global food system produces between 21% and 37% of annual greenhouse gas emissions. Not long before COP26, three United Nations agencies released a key report, which offered the following assessment: ‘At a time when many countries’ public finances are constrained, particularly in the developing world, global agricultural support to producers currently accounts for almost USD 540 billion a year. Over two-thirds of this support is considered price-distorting and largely harmful to the environment’. Yet at COP26, there was a notable silence around the distorted food system that pollutes the Earth and our bodies; there was no serious conversation about any transformation of the food system to produce healthy food and sustain life on the planet.

    Instead, the United States and the United Arab Emirates, backed by most of the developed states, proposed an Agriculture Innovation Mission for Climate (AIM4C) programme to champion agribusiness and the role of big technology corporations in agriculture. Big Tech companies, such as Amazon and Microsoft, and agricultural technology (Ag Tech) firms – such as Bayer, Cargill, and John Deere – are pushing a new digital agricultural model through which they seek to deepen their control over global food systems in the name of mitigating the effects of climate change. Stunningly, this new, ‘game-changing’ solution for climate change does not mention farmers anywhere in its key documents; after all, it seems to envisage a future that does not require them. The entry of Ag Tech and Big Tech into the agricultural industry has meant a takeover of the entire process, from the management of inputs to the marketing of produce. This consolidates power along the food chain in the hands of some of the world’s largest food commodity trading firms. These firms, often called the ABCDs – Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus – already control more than 70% of the agricultural market.

    Ag Tech and Big Tech firms are championing a kind of uberisation of farmlands in an effort to dominate all aspects of food production. This ensures that it is the powerless smallholders and agricultural workers who take on all the risks. The German pharmaceutical company Bayer’s partnership with the US non-profit Precision Agriculture for Development (PAD) intends to use e-extension training to control what and how farmers grow their produce, as agribusinesses reap the benefits without taking on risk. This is another instance of neoliberalism at work, displacing the risk onto workers whose labour produces vast profits for the Ag Tech and Big Tech firms. These big firms are not interested in owning land or other resources; they merely want to control the production process so that they can continue to make fabulous profits.

    Genetic Patent, 2021

    Genetic Patent, 2021.

    The ongoing protests by Indian farmers, which began just over a year ago in October 2020, are rooted in farmers’ justified fear of the digitalisation of agriculture by the large global agribusinesses. Farmers fear that removing government regulation of the marketplaces will instead draw them into marketplaces controlled by digital platforms that are created by companies like Meta (Facebook), Google, and Reliance. Not only will these companies use their control over the platforms to define production and distribution, but their mastery over data will allow them to dominate the entire food cycle from production forms to consumption habits.

    Earlier this year, the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil held a seminar on digital technology and class struggle to better understand the tentacles of the Ag Tech and Big Tech firms and how to overcome their powerful presence in the world of agriculture. Out of this seminar emerged our most recent dossier no. 46, Big Tech and the Current Challenges Facing the Class Struggle, which seeks to ‘understand technological transformations and their social consequences with an eye towards class struggle’ rather than to ‘provide an exhaustive discussion or conclusion on these themes’. The dossier summarises a rich discussion about several topics, including the relationship between technology and capitalism, the role of the state and technology, the intimate partnership between finance and tech firms, and the role of Ag Tech and Big Tech in our fields and factories.

     The section on agriculture (‘Big Tech against Nature’) introduces us to the world of agribusiness and farming, where the large Ag Tech and Big Tech firms seek to absorb and control the knowledge of the countryside, shape agriculture to suit the interests of the big firms’ profit margins, and reduce agriculturalists to the status of precarious gig workers. The dossier closes with a consideration of five major conditions that are behind the expansion of the digital economy, each of them suited to the growth of Ag Tech in rural areas:

    • A free market (for data). User data is freely siphoned off by these firms, which then convert it into proprietary information to deepen corporate control over agricultural systems.
    • Economic financialisation. Data capitalist companies depend on the flux of speculative capital to grow and consolidate. These companies bear witness to capital flight, shifting capital away from productive sectors and towards those that are merely speculative. This puts increasing pressure on productive sectors to increase exploitation and precarisation.
    • The transformation of rights into commodities. The fact that public intervention is being superseded by private companies’ meddling in arenas of economic and social life subordinates our rights as citizens to our potential as commodities.
    • The reduction of public spaces. Society begins to be seen less as a collective whole and more as the segmented desires of individuals, with gig work seen as liberation rather than as a form of subordination to the power of large corporations.
    • The concentration of resources, productive chains, and infrastructure. Centralisation of resources and power amongst a handful of corporations gives them enormous leverage over the state and society. The great power concentrated in these corporations overrides any democratic and popular debate on political, economic, environmental, and ethical questions.
    The Fragmentation of Work
, 2021

    The Fragmentation of Work, 2021.

    In 2017, at COP23, participating countries set up the Koronivia Joint Work on Agriculture (KJWA), a process that pledged to focus on agriculture’s contribution to climate change. KJWA held a few events at COP26, but these were not given much attention. On Nature Day, forty-five countries endorsed the Global Action Agenda for Innovation in Agriculture, whose main slogan, ‘innovation in agriculture’, aligns with the goals of the Ag Tech and Big Tech sector. This message is being channelled through CGIAR, an inter-governmental body designed to promote ‘new innovations’. Farmers are being delivered into the hands of Ag Tech and Big Tech firms, who – rather than committing to avert the climate catastrophe – prioritise accumulating the greatest profit for themselves while greenwashing their activities. This hunger for profit is neither going to end world hunger, nor will it end the climate catastrophe.

    Connected Cables, 2021.

    Connected Cables, 2021.

    The images in this newsletter come from dossier no. 46, Big Tech and the Current Challenges Facing the Class Struggle. They build on a playful understanding of the concepts underpinning the digital world: clouds, mining, codes, and so on. How to depict these abstractions? ‘A data cloud’, writes Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s art department, ‘sounds like an ethereal, magical place. It is, in reality, anything but that. The images in this dossier aim to visualise the materiality of the digital world we live in. A cloud is projected onto a chipboard’. These images remind us that technology is not neutral; technology is a part of the class struggle.

    The farmers in India would agree.

    The post In the Name of Saving the Climate, They Will Uberise the Farmlands first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Study shows that a ‘silent spring’ is a real threat following dramatic decline of Europe’s birds

    A study has found that a dramatic decline in the abundance of Europe’s birds has taken place over the last 40 years. Included in the plummeting populations are traditionally common species like house sparrows. In fact, this species’ drop topped the list, with 247 million fewer of them in recent years than there were in 1980.

    In line with previous assessments, the study suggests that policymakers need to do much more to tackle the rapidly evolving biodiversity crisis to avoid the threat of a silent spring.

    Huge decreases

    Researchers from the RSPB, Birdlife International, and Czech Society for Ornithology produced the study. They looked at data on birds native to the EU and the UK, analysing findings on 378 species in particular between 1980 and 2017.

    House sparrows have experienced a loss of half of their population since 1980, the study asserted. Yellow wagtails took the second worst hit, with populations 97 million lower over the same period. Starlings have seen a decrease of 75 million, and skylarks have decreased by 68 million. Overall, the study said that declines represent the loss of between 17% and 19% of birds since 1980.

    Birds who are associated with farmland and grasslands suffered the biggest overall losses. But species that aren’t associated with a particular habitat have also faced large net declines. It pinpointed shorebirds and long-distance migrating birds as being of “pressing conservation concern”.

    The research showed a slowing rate of decline over the last decade. This is potentially related to increased legal protections and conservation efforts. But no less than 175 species that the researchers analysed faced declines, with eight species making up 69% of the total losses. Meanwhile, 203 species had increased. Eight of these species accounted for 66% of the total increases.

    Birdlife International put these figures into context, highlighting that “some 900 million birds have been lost” during the studied period and that “this is set against an increase of around 340 million in certain species”.

    Silent spring

    Commenting on the findings, lead author of the study and RSPB senior conservation scientist Fiona Burns said:

    Our study is a wake-up call to the very real threat of extinctions and of a Silent Spring. We need transformative action across society to tackle the nature and climate crises together.

    BirdLife Europe’s interim head of conservation Anna Staneva asserted that:

    Common birds are becoming less and less common, largely because the spaces they depend on are being wiped out by humans. Nature has been eradicated from our farmland, sea and cities.

    The demise of once common birds is of particular concern because they are indicators of ecosystem health. On the one hand, their loss suggests that the ecosystems that once supported them have deteriorated. On the other, common species play key roles in ecosystems. So their absence “may have large implications for the health our of our ecosystems” going forward, Birdlife International said.

    Staneva urged European policymakers to “establish legally binding targets for nature restoration” or face “severe” consequences,  “including for our own species”.

    Nature restoration

    Officials from around the world will gather in China next year for the UN Biodiversity Conference – COP15 – to address the biodiversity crisis and lay out plans to tackle it going forward. They held the first segment of that conference virtually in October. It yielded the Kunming Declaration, which lays out the broad ambitions of policymakers. It notes that they need to take “urgent and integrated action” for “transformative change, across all sectors of the economy and all parts of society” in order “to shape a future path for nature and people”.

    As The Canary previously reported, however, the action global leaders promised on agriculture – the main driver of biodiversity decline – at the recent UN climate conference lacks such transformative change. And although the UK government has stated that it’s “leading the way through our new agricultural system in England” that will incentivise farmers to “create space for nature”, its wider biodiversity-related plans allow for the continued destruction and disruption of species and their habitat.

    Featured image via Keith Laverack / Flickr

    By Tracy Keeling

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • The COP26 pledges on agriculture are missing vital ingredients

    The UK announced that it had secured the support of 45 governments “in new pledges to protect nature” at COP26 on 6 November. A number of these promises focused on agriculture and how to make farming more “sustainable for the future”.

    Many civil society and small farmer-focused organisations argue that agroecology is key to truly sustainable farming. This is the practice of cooperating with nature to yield agricultural produce, rather than using artificial inputs like pesticides and fertilisers. It’s an ecological, not a technological, approach.

    But the word agroecology doesn’t feature in the UK government’s announcement on the nature-focused pledges. And that wasn’t the only omission either.

    Not an outlier

    As the University of California’s Miguel A Altieri explained in a report titled Agroecology: The Bold Future of Farming in Africa:

    Agroecology is deeply rooted in the ecological rationale of traditional small-scale agriculture, representing long established examples of successful agricultural systems characterized by a tremendous diversity of domesticated crop and animal species maintained and enhanced by ingenuous soil, water and biodiversity management regimes, nourished by complex traditional knowledge systems.

    It is, in a nutshell, an approach that works with and harnesses local ecosystems to produce food that’s fitting for – and benefits – the environment its grown or produced in. It largely shuns artificial and damaging inputs like pesticides and fertilisers. And it’s already practised by many small-scale farmers around the world.

    Beyond the “new pledges to protect nature”, the membership organisation Climate Land Ambition and Rights Alliance (CLARA) highlighted that the word agroecology has also been missing elsewhere during the COP26 negotiations.

    The UN describes the Koronivia Joint Work on Agriculture – the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) only programme that focuses on agriculture – as a “landmark decision” that “recognizes the unique potential of agriculture in tackling climate change”. Co-facilitators have put forward draft conclusions during COP26. CLARA pointed out on 5 November that the different versions on offer at that point talked about taking into account “the diversity of agricultural and ecological systems”, sustainability, climate-resilience, and “integrated systems” approaches. But it said none mentioned the word agroecology. The organisation raised the question:

    Who’s afraid of the term ‘agroecology’? Why the heavy resistance?

    No inputs? Heaven forbid

    Nigerian environmental justice advocate, poet, and author Nnimmo Bassey told The Canary at COP26 that the omission isn’t surprising. He said that the UN’s system in relation to agriculture has been “contradictory”. He gave the example of the body characterising plantations – areas where a single tree species or other cash crops are grown – as forests.

    As academics have previously pointed out, monoculture (single species) plantations are hugely inferior to diverse forests in terms of storing carbon. Plantations are also terrible for biodiversity.

    Bassey highlighted that “agroecology would not tolerate” the artificial inputs that the current corporate-led and globalised system of agriculture demands. This of course threatens the interests of big business who profit from those inputs. And Bassey says that such corporations have an “overbearing influence” over the negotiations at events like COP26.

    He also asserted that in some countries, these artificial inputs are “political tools” and governments may resist supporting practices like agroecology, which would benefit the majority of farmers, due to the “political clout” that big agriculture has. However, Bassey suggested that eventually, hopefully, governments may “come around to” agroecology.

    No one size fits all

    The UK government argues that it has recognised the potential of agroecology, both inside and outside of COP26.

    When asked by The Canary about the lack of the word in its pledges announcement, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) pointed to the COP26 “Policy Dialogue” on the transition to sustainable agriculture and the “Policy Action Agenda“. The former includes one reference to “agro-ecological approaches”, in relation to where countries could direct investment. The policy action agenda doesn’t mention the word, either in its “principles” of what constitutes sustainable agriculture or elsewhere. It does, however, concede that artificial inputs can be detrimental to the climate and environment. A Defra spokesperson also said:

    To keep 1.5 degrees alive, we need action from every part of society, including an urgent transformation in the way we manage ecosystems and grow, produce and consume food on a global scale.

    The UK government is leading the way through our new agricultural system in England, which will incentivise farmers to farm more sustainably, create space for nature on their land and reduce carbon emissions.

    Defra further asserted that the government has avoided being “prescriptive” about sustainable agriculture, in order to recognise that “that there is no one size fits all”.

    One corporate size for all

    But the agricultural pledges suggest that a ‘one size fits all’ is, in practice, dominating the corporate-heavy COP26 approach. That’s despite the UK’s environment secretary promising that “farmers, indigenous people and local communities” will play “a central role in these plans”.

    In its announcement on 6 November, the UK asserted that billions of public money will fund “agricultural innovation” in pursuit of “sustainable agriculture”. It seems these innovations are heavily rooted in technology and include the creation of “new” crop and livestock “varieties”, aspects of agriculture that are dominated by corporations. Meanwhile, the Policy Action Agenda’s list of ‘allies’ includes some of the biggest agricultural chemical and seed names in the business, including Syngenta and Bayer (a company that merged with Monsanto).

    In short, the COP26 proposals and plans, with their talk of ‘innovation gaps’ and “technology development”, largely sound like the “technofix mess” that small farmer-focused organisations and advocates have long-criticised.

    That criticism stems from the fact that the corporate-led, industrial agriculture system imposed on people around the world after the second world war has been a recipe for disaster in terms of the climate and biodiversity. Moreover, it has stripped farmers of their sovereignty over seeds, lands, and food.

    Notably, the phrase food sovereignty was also missing from the “new pledges to protect nature” announcement and related policy documents.

    Corporate-capture

    Many have criticised COP26 for the corporate capture on display, particularly in relation to its fixation on what many argue are false solutions and its shielding of the fossil fuel industry. But the reach of corporations is wide, and it continues to strangle real progress on many issues at the conference.

    The agricultural pledges, with their absence of focus on agroecology, food sovereignty, and indeed no mention of the meat and dairy industry, have got corporations’ fingerprints all over them.

    Featured image via Ivan Radic / Flickr

    By Tracy Keeling

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Path to extinction or path to a livable future?

    In a new book, Stan Cox dismisses the anti-science and racism of climate denialists such as Donald Trump, strips bare the insincerity of the early Joe Biden administration, and uncovers the lurking dangers of energy denial, writes Don Fitz.