
		" I heard it through the AgLine"

April 20, 2011

· EPA chief softens stance on farm runoff

· Farmworkers grapple with organizing issues

· Industry taking toll on food crops in China

· Broccoli consumption is good for the lungs

· Bee viruses may be spread via flower pollen

EPA chief softens stance on farm runoff

(DesMoinesRegister.com) Washington, D.C. — The head of the Environmental Protection Agency ruled out for now regulating runoff from farms in the Mississippi River basin, saying voluntary measures should be given time to work.

Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson, who visited two Iowa farms Tuesday with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, said she assured a gathering of agricultural leaders that the agency had no plans to impose pollution regulations like those being used to clean up Chesapeake Bay.

"I am ruling out the need for us to move directly to a regulatory mechanism when we have folks stepping up and are willing to do the conservation measures," she told reporters after the visits.

Jackson has been under fire for months from Republicans and agribusiness interests over environmental agency actions or rumors that the agency was going to issue regulations on a range of issues, including dust and pesticides as well as water pollution.

Runoff of nitrogen and phosphorus from farms damages water quality in Iowa and elsewhere in the Mississippi basin and contributes to a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

A recent analysis of Iowa erosion data by the Environmental Working Group found that soil is being washed from the land at a much higher rate than government estimates had indicated or that can be sustained without harm to agricultural productivity.

Jackson, who visited farms at Pleasantville and Prairie City and a biodiesel plant at Newton, said she realized "there's been fear, real fear, that we would take what we're doing in the Chesapeake Bay and translate it here verbatim without regard to what is going on the ground."

Iowa Agriculture Secretary Bill Northey, a Republican, said that cuts in state and federal conservation programs will make it difficult to make the conservation measures needed to reduce farm runoff, such as building wetlands.

Congress has been rolling back planned increases in spending for conservation programs that preserve land or subsidize the cost of soil anti-pollution measures. The programs could face deeper cuts when Congress writes the next farm bill in 2012.

Agencies are reducing personnel needed to work on the programs, and the cost to farmers of doing the earthmoving and other work is rising, he said.

"Water quality efforts are not inexpensive," Northey said.

Voluntary conservation measures have been insufficient to address the water quality problems caused by Midwest farm runoff, said Craig Cox, the Environmental Working Group's senior vice president for agriculture and natural resources.

"We've been working at this a long time now with voluntary programs," Cox said. "The problems aren't getting better and in some cases they're getting quite a bit worse."

The Prairie City meeting with Jackson and Vilsack included leaders of the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation, Iowa Farmers Union and groups representing corn, hogs, cattle, eggs and other commodities.

"What I saw today was an industry that recognizes that the regulations and standards under environmental laws are for the protection of all Americans," Jackson said.

"I didn't have anyone, not one person, walk up and say, 'Please go away. Take EPA away.' What they asked was that regulations reflect reality on the ground, the challenges that farmers and ranchers face."

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Farmworkers grapple with organizing issues

(The Associated Press) WOODVILLE, Calif. — A dozen farmworkers sat in a circle of plastic chairs in a modest living room, listening as a union organizer talked about a bill she said would allow people to organize without fear, rebuild the union and improve conditions in the fields.

The United Farm Workers of America drew national attention when workers led by Cesar Chavez inspired a boycott of table grapes in the 1960s and then forced vineyard owners to sign hundreds of contracts providing better pay and working conditions.

But experts say employer intimidation, high worker turnover and demographic changes have resulted in union membership plummeting in recent decades, despite the problems workers reeled off at the meeting: low or stagnant wages; employers who don’t provide shade from the scorching sun; and foremen who rob workers of their pay or prevent them from taking water and bathroom breaks.

The workers in the room were too afraid of reprisals to agree to be named or even quoted individually by The Associated Press, and that fear is one reason union leaders want to change the way workers organize. In 1975, the union fought for workers’ right to hold secret ballot elections. Now, in a historic shift, it is backing a bill that would move organizing efforts off farms, where leaders believe employer intimidation has helped throw elections.

“You’re talking about voting on the employer’s site, with foremen and supervisors making eye-contact with you after they’ve alluded to or flat out threatened you with the loss of your job, your housing or calling immigration agents,” said Armando Elenes, a UFW vice-president who runs the union’s organizing out of Delano. “It takes a lot of strength to even vote.”

The bill would allow majority signup elections, also known as card-check. Workers away from the fields would sign and turn in state-issued representation cards. If state labor officials determined the cards had been signed by a majority of workers, they would certify the union without holding an on-site election.

Introduced by Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, the bill is awaiting a vote in the state Assembly. Labor officials say it could become a national model as the first card-check process to cover a large group of private employees — especially as hope for a national majority signup election law has waned.

Experts also say such a system would boost the union’s membership, which has fallen from more than 70,000 in the 1970s to what officials say is about 27,000 today. That’s based on the number of people who work under union contract at least one day a year. However, the union has reported only about 5,000 members to the U.S. Department of Labor in each of the past eight Decembers, an admittedly slow month for farming.

Growers oppose the card-check bill, saying secret ballot elections work well and most employers follow the law.

“We don’t believe there’s been adequate justification for eliminating the right of workers to a secret ballot election,” said John Aguirre, president of the California Association of Winegrape Growers. “Where improvements need to be made, we should focus on those specific problems rather than create a new system which opens the door for unions to pressure workers to sign cards.”

The penalties for unfair labor practice violations under current law are limited, Aguirre conceded, but he said the “real world” costs, such as lawyers’ fees, are high.

Labor organizers say that’s not enough, pointing to a hotly contested 2005 election at Giumarra Vineyards, one of the country’s largest table grape growers. The union had collected cards signed by more than 70 percent of the vineyard’s 3,000 workers, setting the stage for a victory. But it lost the election with only 48 percent of the vote.

A state examiner found the vineyard had committed misconduct, but it didn’t matter; by that time, the union could have called for a new election anyway, making the only available sanction — nullifying the election — irrelevant. The state Agricultural Labor Relations Board acknowledged the situation illustrated “a larger systemic problem” and called the process “a meaningless exercise” that only encourages employer misconduct.

“It’s almost to the point of, what for?” said Elenes, the UFW vice-president. “We realized we have to change the process.”

The union has been criticized for failing to unionize more of California’s 460,000 agricultural workers. ALRB data shows the union filed for fewer than 30 elections during the past nine years. It has not filed for a single election in the San Joaquin Valley, the heart of California’s agriculture, since 2006.

Along with employer intimidation, organizers say changing demographics and high turnover have created obstacles.

Farmworkers are a transient labor force and leave agriculture as soon as they can, said Philip Martin, an agriculture professor at the University of California, Davis. Many today are in the U.S. illegally and come from poorer areas of Mexico and Central America, where they speak indigenous languages — a major change from Chavez’ day, when most spoke English or Spanish and had legal documents.

Not only do the newcomers know little or nothing about unions, but they don’t want to take any risks, having already taken one very expensive one in crossing the border illegally, Martin said. Some of the workers in Woodville, a small town 60 miles north of Bakersfield, had never even heard of the UFW.

Union officials say the shift in workers’ legal status also has made them more vulnerable to intimidation. They can’t get drivers’ licenses or unemployment insurance and rely on their employers for housing and transportation as well as their jobs, said Giev Kashkooli, the UFW’s strategic campaigns director. And many now work year-round for labor contractors rather than short stints on individual farms, making them even more reluctant to antagonize their employers.

While the check-card bill would address some of these problems, it won’t solve them all, Martin said. Workers may continue to reject representation, he said, because they find little appeal in a union that doesn’t bring substantial economic gains. Recent contracts have involved raises of only 2 percent to 3 percent per year, and union members pay 3 percent in dues.

“The union might say it’s not just wages. But if you talk to workers, who are young target earners, they really want money. That takes priority,” Martin said. “The punch line to the whole story is, when you win the election, the question is can the union deliver something?”

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Industry taking toll on food crops in China

(Bloomberg) -- Across the road from Zhao Yuanyi’s wheat field in China’s Shandong province, Chonche Group is expanding a rail-car factory on what used to be 227 hectares of farms. Nearby, Geely Automobile Holdings Ltd. makes sedans on an 87 hectare site that four years ago was covered by crops.

The factories sprawling from Jinan city, 350 kilometers (220 miles) south of Beijing, put Zhao on the front line of a clash between a policy of food self-sufficiency and industrial growth that made China the world’s second-biggest economy. Industrialization is winning, signaling prices for crops like wheat and corn will rise as China is increasingly unable to feed itself and vies for supplies on global markets.

“This year, maybe next, they’ll develop my field,” Zhao, 63, explains as he stands beneath a China Mobile Ltd. cell-phone tower on the edge of the land he’s tended all his life. The local government will buy his land, paying compensation through an annual allowance of 1,800 yuan ($276) per mu, which amounts to about 2,700 yuan for each person in the village.

China’s farmland shrank by 8.33 million hectares (20.6 million acres) in the past 12 years, Premier Wen Jiabao’s top agriculture adviser Chen Xiwen told reporters March 24. Land under cultivation has already fallen almost to the government’s 120 million hectare limit after being consumed by apartments, factories, desertification and a forestation campaign. Drought has also hit the country’s main wheat-growing region.

“China’s increased demand for agricultural commodities will mean an increase in prices for the entire world market,” said David Stroud, chief executive officer of New York-based hedge fund TS Capital Partners. “China can outlast any other bidders for the commodities it desires.”

Price Forecasts

Investors should bet on crops in shortest supply in China, with wheat and corn now offering the best opportunities, he said.

Wheat futures in Chicago may average $8.05 a bushel this quarter, 89 percent higher than the past year’s low, as farmers struggle to rebuild global stockpiles, according to Rabobank International’s Agri Commodities Monthly e-mailed April 18. Corn futures may reach a record, jumping to as high as $10 a bushel, Alex Bos, an analyst at Macquarie Group Ltd. said April 6.

“As China continues to grow, demand and supply will struggle to keep up,” said Abah Ofon, a Singapore-based commodities analyst at Standard Chartered Plc. “This would be a problem for any country. For China, the world’s biggest consumer and producer, a small deficit can result in huge demand for imports.”

Riots, Poverty

A 5 percent shortfall in China’s overall grain harvest would potentially require 20 percent of current global grain exports to meet the country’s annual needs, Ofon said. Wheat in Chicago reached its highest level since 2008 in February on concern drought was damaging China’s crop, raising the risk the country would drain the world market.

Rising food prices cause riots and civil conflict, and widen the gap between rich and poor, according to an International Monetary Fund working paper by economists Rabah Arezki and Markus Brueckner published last month on the organization’s website. World Bank President Robert Zoellick said in February that the price surge was “an aggravating factor” in uprisings sweeping the Middle East.

Hong Kong-listed Geely and closely held Chonche are using land that China needs to offset shortfalls in more developed areas. The spread of cities and factories in wetter grain- growing coastal regions such as Jiangsu and Zhejiang has put more pressure on drier provinces like Hebei and Shandong.

“Food production is increasingly being focused in northern areas that have water shortages,” agricultural adviser Chen wrote in December. That’s “very worrying for food security.”

Wen Focus

Wen has pledged to rein in food costs and has said that inflation, which threatens social stability, was the government’s top priority.

Scope for raising yields my be limited as wheat farmers in China are already 51 percent more productive than their American counterparts per land area, according to data from the Department of Agriculture in Washington.

While investment in irrigation and technology such as genetically modified crops may boost that, land and water shortages and migration of labor to cities is putting grain production “on a shaky base,” said Qian Keming, head of the Agriculture Ministry’s market and economic information division.

“With rising living standards, and more consumption of meat, eggs and dairy produce, grain consumption is inevitably on the rise,” Qian said.

Chicken, Pork

The Chinese ate 20 percent more chicken last year than in 2006, while pork consumption rose almost 11 percent, USDA data show. It takes 2 kilograms of feed to produce one kilogram of chicken, and about double that for pork, according to the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute.

China, the world’s biggest grain producer, was a net exporter of soybeans until 1995. This year it’s forecast to import 57 million tons, or almost 60 percent of global trade in the oilseed used in animal-feed and tofu.

Archer Daniels Midland Co., Bunge Ltd. and Cargill Inc. were among U.S. food companies that in January won $6.68 billion of deals to supply China with soybeans, the U.S. Soybean Export Council said.

China’s imported food as a percentage of domestic consumption is “tiny” at about 3 percent, said Frederic Neumann, a Hong Kong-based economist for HSBC Holdings Plc. “If you doubled that to 6 percent, that implies enormous purchases on the world market. The guy with the most financial firepower is going to drive up the price and smaller countries are just going to have to cough up.”

Global Shortage

Global food output will have to climb 70 percent between 2010 and 2050 as the world population swells to 9.1 billion people and rising incomes boost meat and dairy consumption, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization said last year.

Soybean futures in Chicago are up about 36 percent in the past year. Wheat is up 62 percent, while corn more than doubled.

By 2015, 51.5 percent of China’s population will live in towns and cities, Wen said in March. That’s up from 36 percent in 2000, World Bank data show. China’s population is currently more than 1.3 billion.

Growth of cities in China is part of a global trend pushing up food prices, said Jeffrey Currie, London-based head of commodities research at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

With acceleration in demand because of “urbanization and the shift in diet to more protein, we need to grow more acreage,” Currie said in February in Hong Kong. The trouble is, “we have a finite amount.”

Illegal Use

China’s farmland per capita is less than half the world average, and one-sixth that of the U.S., according to China Comment, a Communist Party magazine. Actual land loss may be greater than the government’s numbers suggest, as local officials fudge figures and illegal use proliferates.

The Land Ministry said there were 53,000 cases of illegal land use in 2010, including factories, industrial parks and golf courses. Demand for land was more than double the 400,000 hectares the government allocated, according to the ministry.

Local governments made 2.7 trillion yuan in 2010 selling rights to farmland for non-agricultural purposes, with total land sales constituting 60 to 70 percent of revenue, according to Landesa, a Seattle-based organization that works to secure land rights for the poor.

A few villages north of Zhao’s field, Zhao Daochun, 43 and who is no relation, was supervising a team of 10 men building a factory on what used to be 2 hectares of fields. His boss wouldn’t tell him what the building would be used for, he said.

About 120 kilometers south, near Qufu, the home of Confucius, wheat farmer Hu Bo, 36, said officials forced villagers to sell about 33 hectares of land to build a coal- washing factory that’s now shuttered.

“The officials don’t give a damn if the business is profitable,” Hu said. “They just want to receive kickbacks from investors who get the money from banks and probably don’t care much about profitability either.”

“I don’t know what I’ll do” once the land has been rezoned, said Zhao Yuanyi.

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Broccoli consumption is good for the lungs

(Medill) – Think twice before skipping broccoli at the dinner table, if you are living with COPD.

According to a new study in Science Translational Medicine, a compound found in the vegetable may help those prone to severe lung infections to prevent and reduce them.

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease affects the lungs. Blockage in the airways creates difficulty breathing, and infections can aggravate the problem.

The compound sulforaphane activates a protein found in white blood cells in the lungs, according to researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“They’re generally regarded as a front line of immune defense,” said Chris Harvey, a graduate student working on the study. “If you have a bacterial or viral infection, those are the cells that are first activated to fight off the infection.”

In a normal person, these cells are responsible for breaking down harmful materials such as bacteria and other unwanted debris. However in those with COPD, these white blood cells are unable to clear out infections that cause illness.

The researchers discovered a transcription factor inside the white blood cells called Nrf2, “which promises to restore the function of lung macrophages and help in increasing lung innate immune defenses in COPD patients,” Shyam Biswal, Hopkins researchers and study co-author, said in an email.

“A transcription factor, in its most generic term, is a protein that regulates the expression of many different needs in the body,” Harvey said. “And Nrf2, classically, is a transcription factor that is associated with antioxidants.”

The researchers found that the Nrf2 allows the white blood cells to function at a higher level.

“More recently data has been showing that it does a lot more than just antioxidant function,” he added. “That’s part of what are paper’s doing.”

Other researchers and the ones involved with the study noticed a decline in Nrf2 in the lungs and white blood cells of people with COPD.

According Harvey, the researchers isolated two common infections found in those with COPD. Mice were infected with the strains, and they monitored the effect of the compound sulforaphane.

The sulforaphane jumpstarts a chain reaction that already exists inside the human body. In simple terms, the sulforaphane activates the Nrf2, which in turn triggers a process within the cell that enhances its bacteria-fighting capabilities.

Eileen Lowery, manager of the Lung Health Initiatives at the Respiratory Health Association of Metropolitan Chicago, warns that the study is still in the research phase, and it may be years before the Food and Drug Administration approves the compound.

“The information looks really promising, but it looks like we need more research,” she said.

Lowery added that COPD is often under-researched and underfunded even though it is the third leading cause of death in the United States.

Dietician Melinda Johnson, a spokeswoman for the Chicago-based American Dietetic Association, also found the findings exciting.

“It just gives you one more reason to eat your veggies,” she said.

Other cruciferous vegetables contain the compound, but broccoli sprouts were found to contain the highest amounts according to the study.

Johnson has heard of other compounds found in plants that have been used to help prevent diseases, such as slowing prostate cancer with lycopene from tomatoes.

“We know that they’re in there, and we know that there are more we haven’t named,” she said.

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Bee viruses may be spread via flower pollen

(National Geographic) – Viruses that could play a role in the recent decline in honeybee colonies may be spreading through flower pollen, new research finds.

What's more, a number of wild pollinators, such as bumblebees, yellowjackets, and wasps, can also become infected with viruses in the pollen.

In hives affected by colony collapse disorder—a phenomenon that surfaced in U.S. honeybee colonies in 2006—worker bees vanish en masse. Some studies have suggested that Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV), first identified in 2002, may be contributing to the bees' demise.

Scientists knew that several viruses that infect honeybee colonies are transmitted from one bee to another within the hive through the bugs' saliva or from an infected queen to her eggs.

But how the viruses moved from hive to hive was relatively unknown, said study leader Diana Cox-Foster, an entomologist at Pennsylvania State University.

"People suspected the viruses were being transmitted by bees visiting other colonies, but no one really knew there was evidence for the virus moving into other [insect] species," she said.

Contaminated Pollen Infecting Bees

Bees collect nectar to make into honey and to make "bee bread"—pollen packed by workers into tiny balls with a bit of nectar added.

When Cox-Foster's team collected university-owned honeybees as the insects were harvesting pollen, they found that some bees were healthy but their pollen loads were contaminated. This indicated that at least one type of virus—deformed wing virus, another fatal bee disease—was spreading from the pollen to the bees, and not always the other way around.

In a separate experiment, the team collected and examined wild bumblebees and wasps and discovered molecular evidence of viruses that can infect honeybees.

When bees from a healthy hive visited the same flowers previously visited by sick bumblebees, the colony contracted the virus within a week, the team found.

Cox-Foster noted that bee viruses in general don't have to be lethal: "It's sort of like the common cold. If you're healthy, you may not catch the cold your neighbors have. We need to ask why the bees are more susceptible to these viruses."

For instance, other stressors, such as pesticides and a lack of good nutrition, may be behind the bees' lack of resistance, she said.