" I heard it through the AgLine"

July 8, 2011

 

 

·       Green farming vital to end global hunger

·       FDA seeks $1.4B for food safety programs

·       EU, Russia ban Egyptian vegetable seeds

·       N.M. onion operation takes security seriously

·       Famine: Don’t send food, send the money

 

 

Green farming vital to end global hunger

 

GENEVA (Reuters) - A solid shift to green technologies in world farming is vital if endemic food crises are to be overcome and production boosted to support the global population, the United Nations said on Tuesday.

 

And as a first step, governments and international agencies should focus on boosting small-scale agriculture in developing countries with support services like rural roads and sustainable irrigation, a report from the world body argued.

 

"Food security must now be attained through green technology so as to reduce the use of chemical inputs -- fertilizers and pesticides -- and to make more efficient use of energy, water and natural resources," it declared.

 

The report, the U.N.'s latest World Economic and Social Survey, said a sharp move away from large-scale, intensive systems of agriculture was essential if growing environmental and land degradation was to be halted.

 

The food crisis of 2007-08 and a price spike this year "have revealed deep structural problems in the global food system and the need to increase resources and innovation in agriculture so as to accelerate food production," the survey declared.

 

Food output, it said, would have to increase between 70 and 100 per cent by 2050 to sustain a world population that would have grown by 35 per cent from the present 6.9 billion to around 9 billion by that time.

 

SMALL FARMERS

 

The main policy focus "should be promotion and development of sustainable agriculture, with an emphasis on small farm holders in developing countries," declared the survey, from the U.N's Department of Economic and Social Affairs, which concentrated on short and medium term solutions to hunger.

 

"Evidence has shown that for most crops the optimal farm is small in scale and that it is at this level that most gain in terms of both sustainable productivity increases and rural poverty reduction can be achieved," it said.

 

Presenting the survey, U.N. Under-Secretary General Sha Zukang said in the long-term "large-scale agriculture is the way ahead," adding: "But to get started on the way to sustainability you have to invest in small-scale farming."

 

Of the nearly one seventh of the global population, some 925 million people who are undernourished -- or lacking access to enough food to make possible an active and healthy life -- 98 per cent live in developing countries, according to the survey.

 

Two thirds of them are concentrated in seven countries -- Bangladesh, China, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia and Pakistan. Overall, 578 million are in Asia and the Pacific and 239 million in sub-Saharan Africa.

 

The worst drought in 60 years in the Horn of Africa has sparked a severe food crisis and high malnutrition rates, with parts of Kenya and Somalia experiencing pre-famine conditions, the United Nations said last week.

 

The survey said achieving food security through "a truly green agricultural revolution" would provide a long-term solution to hunger and malnutrition and ease price volatility while protecting the environment.

 

It argued that the so-called "green revolution" of the 1960s and 1970s had boosted farm yields as much through intensive practices as through new seed varieties, and had so contributed to the environmental degradation the world suffered today.

 

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FDA seeks $1.4B for food safety programs

 

(Bloomberg) – The Food and Drug Administration, charged with preventing E. coli outbreaks similar to the one that sickened thousands in Europe, is trying to wedge $1.4 billion for a new food-safety law into a budget that Republicans have already cut for next year.

 

A vote in the Republican-controlled House last month to reduce the FDA’s fiscal 2012 food-safety budget by 10 percent to $752 million, the agency estimates, will slow the law’s progress if enacted, say supporters of the January legislation. Representative Jack Kingston, a Georgia Republican who oversees the budgets of the FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said increases are unneccessary because the food supply is “99.9 percent safe."

 

That view may be short-sighted, given the type of epidemic in Europe, said Bill Marler, a Seattle attorney who represents food poisoning victims. The outbreak among those who ate German-grown sprouts was deadlier than earlier E. coli epidemics because it combined traits of two strains, raising risks for a potentially fatal kidney complications.

 

“We have all of the tools to prevent a disaster like Germany’s,” Marler said in an interview. “It’s just a matter of, are we willing to pay for it.”

 

The FDA is working on rules to reduce contamination risks for fresh produce, required under the law that overhauled the food-safety system for the first time since 1938. The statute would cost $1.4 billion through 2015, the Congressional Budget Office estimates. The House cut would need to be passed by the Senate and signed by President Barack Obama to become law.

 

Spinach Outbreak

 

An E. coli outbreak linked to Dole Food Co. spinach five years ago led to 205 illnesses in the U.S. and triggered calls for federal safeguards. Cases since then included a 2008 salmonella outbreak tied to imported peppers, and peanuts contaminated with salmonella that killed at least nine people and sickened more than 700 in 2008 and 2009. Nestle ice creams and Keebler cookies from Battle Creek, Michigan-based Kellogg Co. (K) were among peanut- containing items that had to be withdrawn.

 

Potential cuts are “enormously worrisome” for officials tracking an increasingly complex global food- supply chain, FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said. “We’re facing a situation where we are being asked to do more with less, and we really feel that this is of enormous concern to the American people,” she said on a June 20 conference call with reporters.

 

The FDA regulates 80 percent of the U.S. food supply, including produce, while the Department of Agriculture oversees the safety of meat, poultry and egg products.

 

$152-Billion Cost

 

Food poisoning strikes an estimated 48 million people in the U.S. each year, leading to 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Foodborne illnesses cost the nation’s economy about $152 billion a year in health-care expenses and lost productivity, according to a 2010 report by Georgetown University’s Produce Safety Project in Washington.

 

The CDC has been tracking E. coli since 1993, when the bacteria killed four children and sickened more than 700 people who had eaten undercooked hamburgers from the Jack in the Box fast-food chain, based in San Diego. There have been 234 beef recalls in the U.S. related to the pathogen since then, the CDC said June 7 in a report.

 

The food-safety law was prompted partly by the 2006 recall of E. coli-tainted spinach from Westlake Village, California-based Dole, the world’s largest producer of fresh fruits and vegetables.

 

Idaho-grown sprouts caused 21 salmonella illnesses in five states starting in April, the Atlanta-based CDC said June 28.

 

‘A Wakeup Call’

 

The unrelated outbreak in Europe, also linked to sprouts, was the world’s biggest E. coli epidemic, sickening more than 4,100 people in 13 European countries and killing at least 49. Though most of the illnesses occurred in Germany, the E. coli strain sickened as many as 18 people in France, the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention said July 1.

 

“What’s happened in Europe is a wakeup call,” U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said June 13, responding to questions after a speech at the National Press Club. “It requires us to be continually vigilant about food safety. It’s an everyday responsibility.”

 

The produce regulations will deal with sprout safety, said Douglas Karas, an FDA spokesman. Raw and lightly cooked sprouts have caused at least 30 foodborne illness outbreaks in the U.S. since 1996, according to the CDC.

 

Raw sprouts are riskier than most other types of produce because they are grown in warm, humid conditions where E. coli and salmonella can thrive, according to the federal FoodSafety.gov website. The E. coli strain found in Europe hasn’t been identified in U.S. food sources.

 

‘Nanny State’

 

The House-approved spending bill reduces USDA food safety program funding by 3.9 percent from fiscal year 2011 to $972.7 million. Total FDA spending, including its food- safety programs, would be $2.2 billion, a 12 percent decline from fiscal 2011.

 

The CDC estimate of 48 million foodborne illnesses a year is less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the 340 billion meals consumed annually by 311 million people in the U.S., Kingston, the Georgia congressman, said June 15 on the House floor.

 

“Something’s working without the FDA and without the USDA and without the nanny state saying, ‘We’re in charge of everything,’” Kingston said.

 

The law aims to improve coordination among federal and state officials for faster detection of outbreaks and their sources. It may help more agencies emulate states such as Minnesota and Oregon that have been instrumental in solving nationwide foodborne epidemics, said Marler, the Seattle attorney.

 

Minnesota’s Experience

 

In Minnesota, a group of investigators traced one of the 2008 salmonella scourges to peanuts and another to Mexican-grown peppers. Oregon identified spinach as the cause of the 2006 E. coli outbreak.

 

Budget reductions in Minnesota and other states may hinder such efforts and “cut an enormous hole in our food- safety net,” Marler said.

 

The House-approved budget cuts probably won’t hamper the FDA’s development of produce-safety rules, said David Gombas, senior vice president for food safety and technology at the Washington-based United Fresh Produce Association.

 

Spending reductions may slow implementation of other aspects of the food-safety law, said Gombas, in an interview.

 

Rules the FDA develops in the next two years will “shape food safety for the next few decades,” said Scott Faber, vice president for federal affairs at the Grocery Manufacturers Association, a Washington trade group with members including Nestle SA (NESN) of Vevey, Switzerland, and Northfield, Illinois-based Kraft Foods Inc. (KFT), the world’s two biggest food companies.

 

Resources Needed

 

“The funding needs ultimately will grow, not in fiscal 2012 or 2013, but in subsequent years to meet inspection mandates,” Faber said in an interview. “If the agency doesn’t have more resources further down the road, the FDA won’t be able to retrain its inspectors and fulfill the promise of the food-safety reforms.”

 

Agriculture Department rules are also evolving, with a proposal submitted to the White House in January to test for E. coli strains beyond the so-called O157 type implicated in the Jack in the Box recall. The plan is being evaluated by the White House Office of Management and Budget, said Alfred Almanza, head of the department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, in a June 29 interview.

 

Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations agriculture subcommittee, said the White House is dragging its feet. The food safety agency “should not be deterred from its work to protect the public health from known risks in the meat and poultry supply,” she wrote in a June 22 letter to the Obama administration.

 

Multiple Strains

 

A government surveillance network that tracks foodborne illnesses in 10 states identified 442 cases of O157 E. coli last year, down from 459 in 2009. The system, known as FoodNet, found 451 cases of other E. coli strains last year, a 71 percent increase over 2009.

 

The FDA hasn’t decided whether its produce-safety rule will require testing for other E. coli strains, such as the one found in Europe, Karas said.

 

Tests for non-O157 forms of E. coli aren’t advanced enough to give reliable results, said Jim Hodges, executive vice president of the American Meat Institute, a trade group whose members include Tyson Foods Inc. (TSN), the largest U.S. meatpacker.

 

The European outbreak highlighted a need for better science in learning more about the virulence of E. coli strains, not the type, Hodges said.

 

“There is going to be a lot we can learn from this,” he said.

 

Fallout From Europe

 

The food-safety law also calls for FDA pilot programs that will test faster ways of tracing outbreak sources.

 

“The big thing that I think will come out of what happened in Germany is going to be the pilot projects,” said David Plunkett, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a public policy group in Washington. The FDA should “look at the German experience and look for the failures and ask, how can we model this so we can see whether or not we can develop a system that will avoid that problem,” he said.

 

Faster traceability will reduce costs for companies linked to outbreaks, said Erik Olson, director of food programs at the Pew Health Group in Washington.

 

“The better the traceback system is, the more companies will save when there are recalls,” Olson said. “If they can wall off just a very limited number of shipments that are contaminated, that means the vast majority of the food can continue to be consumed and will not recalled.”

 

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EU, Russia ban Egyptian vegetable seeds

 

(Voice of America) – Russia has banned vegetable seeds and sprouts from Egypt over fears of E. Coli contamination.

 

Russia's sanitary watchdog agency said Wednesday it reached the decision after experts from the European Commission said the E.Coli bacteria that hit Europe earlier this year began in the north Africa country.

 

The RIA Novosti news agency says Egypt has denied being a source of the E. Coli outbreak.

 

The ban affects seeds and sprouts of beans, including beets.

 

The European Commission also banned the importing of seeds from Egypt.

 

The agency's ban runs through October.

 

The E. Coli outbreak in Europe during May and June killed at least 48 people and sickened more than 3,000 others across 16 countries.

 

In recent weeks, the E. Coli outbreak had been largely blamed on organic vegetable sprouts from northern Germany.

 

In early June, Russia imposed a 26 day ban on vegetables from the Netherlands and Belgium.

 

Russia lifted the ban after reaching an agreement with the European Union that the vegetable shipments must be safe.

 

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N.M. onion operation takes security seriously

 

SALEM, N.M. (AP) - Walk through the office door and be prepared to sign in on a clip board. And don't forget the security badge. No, you're not in a federal office. Nor an elementary school, where such measures might be a given.

             

Rather, it's an onion-packing and shipping shed in Salem, about 40 miles north of Las Cruces. Throughout the summer, tens of thousands of onions will arrive, be sorted by size and quality, packed into boxes or bags and shipped out to various places throughout the country and even Canada.

 

It's a process that over the past decade has taken a turn toward tighter security, as increasing scrutiny is placed on the safety of the nation's food supply.

 

At Chile River Corp. in Salem, co-owner Shayne Franzoy said he reduced numbers of workers, from about 80 last year to 25 this year. He bought a piece of machinery that handles the bagging of onions, instead.

 

That wasn't because the cost of wages was too high, Franzoy said, but rather he wanted to reduce human involvement, which in turn cuts chances for food contamination.

 

"The less people you have actually handling the onions, the better off you are," he said. "Everything we're doing is automated."

 

And Franzoy said employees must adhere to strict rules. There's no personal food allowed on the operating floor. No chewing gum. No sodas. No tobacco products.

 

Also, the onion shed is fully enclosed, which guards against trespassers and, just possibly, anyone with bio-terrorism in mind. For farmers, processors and shippers of fresh vegetables in particular, that food-safety focus has intensified since a 2006 e. coli outbreak tied to spinach in California, said New Mexico Department of Agriculture Secretary Jeff Witt, whose background includes ag security expertise. Much of it is driven by large-scale buyers of produce who want to ensure sound products. "A lot of it is just to deal with the changing marketplace; they're requiring food safety," he said.

 

The goal of the produce industry is to voluntarily regulate itself, by creating standards and using third-party inspectors, in order to avoid more government regulation, Franzoy said. And he said buyers are seeking the assurance, too. He said his operation relies on "Good Agricultural Practices" certification.

 

It entails audits and inspections to make sure processors are minimizing the chances for microbial contamination during the harvest.

 

The inspectors visit fields, too. A contracted supervisor overseeing the harvest of onions near Garfield declined to provide her name, but said the stricter rules do create tougher working conditions for personnel in the fields. There's no eating allowed, and workers are restricted to one water container, she said. Other rules prohibit the wearing of jewelry and fake fingernails.

 

In addition to rules for employees, Franzoy said there's a greater focus on labeling and lot numbers that allow produce to be tracked. Some grocery stores want individual onions to be labeled with stickers, he said.

 

"The most important thing about food safety is being able to trace everything back," he said.

 

In the end, not only is the eventual consumer safer, Witt said, but crop industries and individual companies are better protected from risk. He highlighted an extreme case of food handling gone wrong: Peanut Corporation of America, which went out of business after its products were implicated in a salmonella outbreak in 2008. It faces massive lawsuits.

 

Nine people died after eating contaminated peanut products. Several hundred were sickened.

 

"If you can maintain your market share and a safe food supply, that's the benefit," Witt said. "Peanut Corporation of America - they don't exist today."

 

Perhaps the biggest food safety lapse in Dona Ana County came to light last December, when U.S. marshals seized imported red chile from a warehouse north of Hatch. Federal officials alleged it had been stored in a warehouse infested with rodents and insects. The owner, Carl Duran, however, said the chile already had been marked for destruction.

 

Of course, the extra rules and compliance measures add expense to the operation, Franzoy said.

 

"It costs a lot of extra money to do the food safety, but that's where we're going," he said.

 

And that cost eventually trickles down, making its way into the final price consumers pay for produce, Witt said

 

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Famine: Don’t send food, send the money

 

(Forbes) – Ft would seem that a few people are finally managing to grasp what to do in a famine: don’t send food, send money.

 

“In Kenya, Save The Children is giving people vouchers to buy food in local markets. Several other aid groups are piloting similar schemes, some of them simply handing out cash to people who need food, or transferring it to their mobile phones using the country’s wildly popular Mpesa mobile money system. At a stroke, this boosts businesses and cuts out the sometimes months-long lag between food aid being bought, shipped and distributed by the big international agencies.

 

“If you had people needing extra food in the West, you wouldn’t give them food parcels, you’d pay money into their bank accounts,” says a veteran British aid worker in Nairobi. “The US gives food stamps. Why has it taken so long to come around to the same thinking in Africa?”

 

That why can be easily explained. Politics.

 

Amartya Sen won his Nobel Prize in part for pointing out that in our modern times it’s not a shortage of food that causes famines. It’s a shortage of purchasing power in a part of the population that does. The solution is thus to give those poor (more accurately, destitute) people money so that they can buy the available food.

 

There are plenty of those within the aid structure (like Owen Barder) who understand this. For a start, money can be got there much faster: one airplane from the Treasury to Africa can carry enough cash to beat a famine for hundreds of thousands. It takes, on average, 6 months or more for food to be purchased, shipped and delivered: meaning that food aid normally arrives at around the time of the next harvest (many tropical areas have two harvests a year). After everyone who is going to die has and ruining the farmers ability to sell that subsequent harvest.

 

The reason that food is shipped, not money, is straight old politics. For the EU, it’s easier to persuade people that the near insane excess production of the coddling of European farmers be sent of to feed the starving than it is to reform said system. In the US, purchases are made from US farmers, the shipping must be US owned and operated shipping, so there’s a good constituency militating for no change in ways.

 

As an example of what should be done and why it isn’t, a few years back one of George Bush’s budget requests asked that a famine in Niger be dealt with by sending money. There was plenty of sorghum (the local staple crop) in nearby countries and either buying and shipping it by truck or perhaps even just giving money to starving people and watching the market get food to them would be quicker than anything else that could be done.

 

That request was beaten back by Congress: it’s hard not to be cynical here but perhaps too many votes in the farming and shipping lobby?

 

We do actually know what to do. We’ve the theoretical explanation, that Nobel winning one, that famine isn’t a shortage of food, it’s a shortage of effective demand, the ability to pay for the food there. We’ve the practical results, people are indeed being stopped from starving by being given money. We’ve most certainly got the public desire to solve these sorts of problems: the outpourings of money from the general public to the victims of famines and natural disasters show that.

 

That we don’t change the aid system in the light of this knowledge, that the official system still insist on sending expensive food late: well, perhaps some of my cynicism about the practice of politics and politicians can be explained, eh?

 

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