 |
|||
 |
" I heard it |
||
August 9, 2011
· Ag industry goes on the image offensive
· Gates’ high-tech approach has doubters
· Instant corn-soy blend for kids … Yum?
· Michigan fruit growers singing a happy tune
· Scientists decry fear tactics in GM food debate
Ag industry goes on the image offensive
(stltoday.com) – Call them information campaigns or charm offensives. By either name, agricultural companies, commodity groups and even public officials are launching, tractor-first, into efforts they hope will restore luster to the reputation of American farming.
Start with Creve Coeur-based biotech and seed breeding giant, Monsanto Co.
With dozens of reporters from around the world in the room, company executives announced last week that Monsanto would distribute $3 million through its "America's Farmers Grow Communities" program early next year, adding to the roughly $4 million it gave this year, the program's first.
The announcement came during the company's "Monsanto Media Days," a first-ever event attended by some 40 reporters from around the globe, and as the company continues its recent image-buffing efforts.
In 2009, Monsanto launched "
"The thinking behind that was to tell
Monsanto followed that with its first "Farm Mom of the
Year Contest," then the "
In recent weeks, the company also has stressed its own role
in the community through the "St. Louis Grown" campaign, which put
billboards around the
"It's a campaign about celebrating
The company's campaigns to shore up the image of American agriculture - and soften its own reputation in the process - come amid a slew of other recent efforts.
Last year, American Agri-Women launched a campaign called "Common Ground" to put a more feminine, empathetic face on American agriculture - one designed to better connect with the women who are making most of the grocery-buying decisions in American households.
Around the same time, the U.S. Farmers & Ranchers Alliance started to organize, and now the Chesterfield-based organization has nearly 50 affiliates, including most of the major national commodity groups.
The alliance was created to build trust in today's agriculture, said Hugh Whaley, general manager of the alliance. "More and more Americans have become separated from production agriculture. They just have lost touch with how food is produced, and that is fueled by certain organizations and certain individuals that have an agenda of their own."
Even public officials have gotten into the image-polishing game.
In late June, at a meeting of the Midwest Association of State Departments of Agriculture (sponsored by Monsanto, ADM and other big agribusiness companies), state agriculture directors gathered to discuss, among other things, how they can help boost agriculture's image.
"There's a great deal of investment already in getting our message out," said Thomas Jennings, director of the Illinois Department of Agriculture, at the conference.
"We've been on the defensive too long."
Over the past several years, in particular, American agriculture has come under the microscope. With best-selling author Michael Pollan and movies such as "Food Inc." becoming popular, consumers are, increasingly, asking where their food comes from and who produced it.
At the same time, the number of farmers markets has climbed, more than doubling over the last decade, while more small-scale farming operations have broken ground to provide produce to fill their stalls. Meanwhile, media coverage of animal abuses and crowding in concentrated animal feeding operations has sent some shoppers looking for alternatives.
All this combined makes large-scale farmers feel as though they're misunderstood and under siege.
"Since farmers have been out of the conversation, the
public isn't getting information from farmers. They're getting it from activist
groups," said Ron Moore, a grain farmer from
Moore and other production farmers say they feel that consumers hear a lot of misinformation about the American farmer. Asked what misinformation, specifically, he said: "That we abuse animals, or that we indiscriminately apply herbicides. There's an assumption that all farmers care about is profit, and that's absolutely not true."
Farmers are so concerned about this,
they're forming new groups to combat it all the time. In
"They're great farmers," said
Getting that message out, some farmers believe, is so critical that failing to do it threatens their very existence, even at time when commodity growers are making near or record profits.
"The consequence of not doing this is that the future of agriculture as we know it would cease to exist," Whaley said. "And, therefore, there would not be enough food for people to eat."
Gates’ high-tech approach has doubters
(The
Seattle Times)
It goes without saying it would be delicious. High-yielding, too. But Beebe's ideal legume would also be far more nutritious than your average pinto.
"You would want to eat it every day," he said,
squatting between rows of bush beans to finger the leaves of one potential
candidate at a research station outside
A son of
Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the work is part of a broader effort to boost the levels of vitamins and minerals in crops many Africans rely on for the bulk of their diets. The Seattle-based foundation has committed more than $160 million to these so-called biofortification programs.
The approach epitomizes Gates' belief in the power of science to combat hunger, and mirrors many of the giant philanthropy's other investments in improved seeds and fertilizers. But some agricultural experts are skeptical that tweaking nutrient levels and other tech-heavy approaches will make much of a dent in malnutrition, because they ignore the complex social, political and economic roots of the problem.
"Why aren't they focused on helping farmers grow a balanced diet?" asked Eric Holt-Giménez, executive director of the Oakland-based Institute for Food and Development Policy. "Because they think there's a technological solution to everything."
Much of the Gates-funded work involves genetic engineering, including $22 million for Golden Rice, a controversial strain with genes spliced in to boost vitamin A.
But slightly more than half of the foundation's biofortification budget goes to conventional breeding, like
Beebe's. In addition to his iron-rich beans, conventionally bred cassava, corn
and sweet potato high in the vitamin A precursor beta carotene are on the
market or in the pipeline for
Even absent the furor that surrounds genetic engineering, biofortification's focus on single crops and Western-style
agriculture is at odds with several expert panels that concluded a more
sustainable solution for African poverty would use less water and chemicals and
incorporate varied crops, said University of Washington professor emeritus Phil
Bereano. He now leads Seattle-based AGRA Watch, which
monitors Gates' multibillion-dollar push for a new "Green Revolution"
in
The foundation's biofortification
manager agrees the ultimate solution won't come until farmers are lifted out of
poverty and able to afford a balanced diet. But that's not likely to happen
soon in the world's poorest corners, said
"In the meantime, people are suffering. People are dying," he said in an interview monitored by a public-relations representative. "If the starchy staple foods they depend on have higher levels of vitamins and minerals ... that could be a sustainable way to help them get more of the nutrients they need."
A $25 million chance
The World Health Organization estimates 2 billion people, mostly in the developing world, suffer from vitamin and mineral deficiencies. Forty percent of children in poor nations are anemic due to low iron. More than 250 million kids don't get enough vitamin A, and up to half a million go blind every year because of it.
Many African nations distribute pills in urban areas to
combat this "hidden hunger." Fortified foods are also increasingly
available, as in the
But neither approach reaches the poorest people in rural
areas, said
The idea of breeding better nutrition into crops is relatively new. Higher yields and resistance to pests and disease dominate traditional breeding programs, said Howarth "Howdy" Bouis. So scientists were skeptical in the early 1990s when Bouis began pushing to add nutrients to the equation.
Even after he proved it was possible, money was hard to come by.
His HarvestPlus initiative scraped together about $5 million in its first decade, just enough to keep the research alive.
"There were times along the way when we thought about
giving up on it," said Bouis, based at the
International Food Policy Research Institute in
Everything changed in 2003, with a $25 million grant from the Gates Foundation.
"We're willing to take a risk and ... find out if this
will really work,"
Gates funding for HarvestPlus,
which incorporates work at CIAT and several other labs, now stands at $90
million. The commitment by one of the world's richest men helped attract
another $90 million from donors including the World Bank and
Conventional breeding
The infusion of cash was galvanizing for plant scientists like Beebe. But conventional breeding is a slow process, particularly when the goal is a crop with multiple attributes.
"The nutritionally enhanced varieties need to be at least as good as what farmers have now" in terms of yield and hardiness, Beebe said. "We actually aspire to make them superior, to jump-start their adoption by farmers."
His quest for the ultimate bean started with nearly 1,500
"parent" strains, picked from the 25,000 in CIAT's
seed bank. A variety from the northern
Six years, 21 generations and thousands of crosses later, some varieties growing in Beebe's fields are knocking on the door of perfection with nearly double the iron of ordinary beans and the ability to withstand drought and disease.
Likewise, Argentine researcher Hernán Ceballos is now producing yellow-fleshed cassava at CIAT with nearly triple the vitamin A of ordinary white roots.
The cassava root is the main menu item for more than 250
million people in
Unfortunately, without biofortification there's not much to it. "It's only starch," Ceballos said. "Nothing else."
But will African farmers accept these crops?
Touted as a nutritional savior for more than decade, genetically engineered Golden Rice has yet to be grown commercially. But HarvestPlus' focus on conventional breeding avoids the political and social storms that surround genetic-engineering quagmire, Bouis pointed out.
"We're not opposed to transgenics, but there are all sorts of hoops we don't have to worry about."
(About 3 percent of HarvestPlus' budget goes to transgenic research.)
HarvestPlus' first crop to market is a sweet potato high in vitamin A. In a two-year test with 25,000 Ugandan households, those who ate the new crop saw their vitamin A levels roughly double. And while Ugandans traditionally prefer white-fleshed potatoes, mothers were eager to try the new variety once they learned about the health benefits.
HarvestPlus is now working to expand distribution and educational programs. Like all varieties developed under the program, the sweet potato is not patented. Seeds and cuttings of biofortified crops should be no more expensive than existing varieties and can be freely replicated, Bouis explained.
A "Band-Aid approach"
The 1,200-acre CIAT complex was founded in 1967 as one of the original outposts of the Green Revolution. With the goal of fending off famine in the developing world, Western scientists raced to produce higher-yielding varieties of rice, wheat, corn and other staple crops.
But agricultural experts, including Bouis, acknowledge the vitamin and mineral deficiencies that biofortification programs now seek to solve were caused in large part by that focus on single-crop systems.
The mix of traditional foods that provided a varied diet was skewed in favor of starchy staples. While the price of rice, wheat and corn fell, the cost of vegetables soared. At the same time, small farmers were pushed onto smaller, more marginal plots, Holt-Giménez said.
"So now the Gates Foundation comes with another green revolution solution — which is not to diversify agriculture, not to address the needs of land reform, but just: 'Let's inject some nutrients into the monocrops we have forced on the world,' " he said.
HarvestPlus may focus on conventional breeding, but Gates is also pouring millions into other programs to develop transgenically biofortified cassava, bananas and sorghum — projects Holt-Giménez sees as "Trojan horses" to open the door for genetically modified crops.
"Biofortification is a small, Band-Aid approach," he said.
Johns believes a better use of money would be to encourage farmers to add traditional crops back to their fields and prevent nutrient deficiencies through a more balanced diet.
Even Beebe, who's devoted his career to improving beans, sometimes wonders whether it might be more helpful to boost spending on microcredit — small loans that help farmers expand production, improve their methods and sell produce.
But he can't stop thinking about those families for whom beans are a daily staple. A bump in iron might be enough to restore the vitality drained by anemia.
"If we can double the amount of iron," Beebe said, "that's like eating twice as many beans."
Instant corn-soy blend for kids … Yum?
(USDA-ARS) – U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists have developed a fully cooked food-aid product called Instant Corn Soy Blend that supplements meals, particularly for young children.
The work was led by food technologist Charles Onwulata at the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Dairy
Processing and Products Research Unit at the agency's Eastern Regional Research
Center (ERRC) in
ARS is USDA's chief intramural scientific research agency, and this research supports the USDA priority of promoting international food security.
Onwulata worked with a team of USDA scientists, program managers, policy administrators and international aid agencies for more than a decade while developing the new emergency aid meal. Food aid humanitarian efforts are the result of collaborations involving multiple national and international government managers, aid agency officials, and policy administrators.
Onwulata developed the new food
product using the same type of machines that are used to make fully cooked
puffed snacks and cereals. "Cheese puffs" and "cereal
puffs," for example, have been popular in the
The ARS technology significantly enhances the uniform distribution of added vitamins and minerals in a supplemental food ration that can be used for overseas delivery for mass-feeding of young children and others.
Instant Corn Soy Blend could also soon be purchased for the
USDA Foreign Agricultural Service-administered McGovern-Dole International Food
for Education and Child Nutrition Program, which provides
Michigan
The state's cherry crop has been late this year because of the cool, wet spring, but above-average yields are forecast, The Detroit News reported. Blueberries, peaches and grapes are also forecast to deliver heavy yields. The apple crop is projected at 25 million bushels, about the same as 1995's record.
"We've had a real nice spring here," said Tony Blatner, 42, an apple farmer with a 125-acre orchard in
Keith Creagh, director of the
state Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, said the food and
agriculture industry is a bright spot in
"You've got to have product to sell," Creagh said. "This year, we're pretty optimistic."
Last year, frost destroyed young buds and hurt fruit yields statewide. This year, the cold and rainy spring put farmers behind schedule.
For some other crops such as wheat, conditions this year
were almost ideal. The quality of
Farmers were late in planting corn and soybeans, however, because of the wet weather. In some cases, crops are a month behind schedule, he said.
"It's not going to be a banner year for corn and soybeans, but we're going to be OK," Byrum said.
Scientists decry fear tactics in GM food debate
(Malaya.com)
"Fear mongering is easy to do," said Dr. Frank Shotkoski, Director of the Agricultural Biotechnology
Support Project II (ABSPII) based in
"We are reaching a phase when the campaign against agricultural biotechnology is at a high peak," he said.
Shotkoski said sentiments against GM crops are driven by the desire to get more money out of well-meaning donations given to activist groups.
"The money they get from donations associated with the anti-GM movement is huge," Shotkoski said. "This is a multi-million business."
"It is not done for fun, this is a money making program," he added.
He also pointed to the generic pesticides industry which he implied may be supporting anti-GM groups because many genetically-modified crops do not require the application of some pesticides.
"The generic pesticides industry has a lot to lose with disease- and insect-resistant crops," said Shotkoski, an agricultural biotechnologist who is trained in agroeconomy and studied entomology, or insect science, for his graduate studies.
It stands to lose "hundreds of millions of dollars," he said. "It’s a business, mostly for financial reasons," he added, referring to the anti-GM movement.
"It’s not that they don’t like the technology, they don’t understand the technology," he said.
He cited the case of
The moratorium was made amid science-based evidence that the GM eggplant is safe, said Shotkoski speaking in a workshop here attended by media from eight Asian countries.
The workshop was convened by the ABSPII; Southeast Asian
Regional Center for Tropical Biology based in
Shotkoski said the criticisms against biotechnology and GM crops are not science-based and are allegations that are not backed by scientific evidence.
He said that anti-GM activists withdraw from discussions whenever scientific data are presented against their arguments.
"If you give the anti-GM campaign a millimeter, they’ll get a mile. It’s hard to argue with them, and they don’t want scientific peer review to substantiate their claims," he said.
"Well-resourced special interest groups undermine
scientific understanding and rational public discussion," said Dr. Desiree
Hautea, a biotechnology scientist and ABSPII regional
coordinator for
Public perception in Europe about the potential risks of GM crops has "nothing to do with science, it’s all about politics," said Dr. Gra ham Brookes, an agricultural economist at PG Economics UK, an analyst consultancy company in the United Kingdom.
Most European consumers "don’t care about biotech crops" if they are affordable, of good quality and safe, he said, adding it’s only "a small vocal minority" that is against any biotechnology product.
The European Union consumes about 35 million tons of soya beans and its derivatives and no more than 10 percent of that is required to be certified as non-GM and mainly used in the food industry, said Brookes.
There are accusations in
"There is no evidence to date of any negative health and environmental impact of biotechnology," he said. "Biotechnology is regulated far more rigorously."
"Not a single food safety issue has been verified, there is no evidence of a safety issue in the 15 years and so many million hectares of Bt crops planted," said Dr. Randy A. Hautea, Global Coordinator for ISAAA. "The safety consensus is recognized internationally."
"The record speaks for itself," he added. "Nobody is taking anything for granted, there is always a good sense of responsible stewardship; even with the long experience, post commercial monitoring continues every year."
Like all good things, biotechnology is not without its critics, said Dr. Gil C. Saguiguit Jr., SEARCA Director. "Well organized and funded organizations warn of the risks to humans and the environment. Combine this with the dire effects of changing climate and you have the ingredients to convince people to look the other way, especially if the arguments are placed in an anecdotal manner.
"SEARCA and its partners’ answer would appropriately be, here is where science can help," he said.
"Painting the issues and questions objectively and providing and promoting science-based, responsible and accurate information and evidence would eliminate all doubts on the potentials of agricultural biotechnology in contributing to increased agricultural production which in turn will contribute to food security," he said.
End Transmission