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October 17, 2011
· Deep thinking about the future of food
· Ag’s GPS concerns heard in Washington
· Listeria fear devastates Calif. cantaloupes
· Syngenta sees 3Q sales jump 21 percent
· Too few pickers for Washington apples
Deep thinking about the future of food
(The New York Times) – Trying to tap into the best thinking about the future of global agriculture can be an exercise in frustration. Many groups and many bright people go at the problem, but not many of them go at it in a holistic way.
The environmental crowd is worried mainly about the ecological damage from agriculture and is prone to recommend solutions that farmers say would undercut the food supply. Traditional agronomists are mainly worried about supply — and tend at times to recommend fixes that might worsen the environmental damage.
A separate crowd is primarily worried about the inequities in the global food system: that a billion people at the top end are killing themselves eating overly rich diets while a billion poor people live desperate lives circumscribed by malnutrition.
Can’t we figure out how to fix all this at once?
It’s a tall order, but a heartening development in global
agricultural policy is that some people are starting to try. Now comes an
interesting new installment in the literature of the Big Fix. It’s an analysis
by an international team of scientists led by Jonathan A. Foley, director of
the Institute on the Environment at the
Their paper, “Solutions for a Cultivated Planet,” was released online and is scheduled as the cover article of the Oct. 20 issue of the journal Nature. Dr. Foley is also publishing a piece in the November issue of Scientific American, due on newsstands next week, that summarizes the team’s analysis in layman’s terms.
The group finds, as others have before them, that the challenge of doubling global food production in coming decades can probably be met, albeit with considerable difficulty. The interesting thing to me about the analysis is that it doesn’t treat any of the problems confronting the food system as superior to the others — it treats the environmental problem, the supply problem and the equity problem as equally important, laying out a case that they all need to be tackled at once.
“Feeding nine billion people in a truly sustainable way will be one of the greatest challenges our civilization has ever faced,” Dr. Foley says in the Scientific American article, referring to the projected global population at midcentury. (He outlines some of the links between environmental problems and agriculture in this talk, and his group produced a popular animated clip that gives a sense of the scale of the problems here.)
Many elements of the new paper will be familiar to readers who follow these issues. Yet it is interesting to see these building blocks of a smarter food system spelled out in one paper, with hard numbers attached.
For starters, the group argues that the conversion of forests and grasslands to agricultural use needs to stop now; the environmental damage we are doing chopping down the Amazon far exceeds the small gain in food production, it says.
Next, the paper contends that increases in food supply need
to come from existing farmland by a process of intensified production in
regions where yields are low: northeastern
If yields in these regions could be brought to within 75 percent of their known potential using modern farming methods, including fertilizer and irrigation, total global supply of major foodstuffs would expand by 28 percent, the paper found. If yields were brought to 95 percent of their potential, close to those achieved in rich countries, the supply increase would be a whopping 58 percent.
The paper does not say so, but I suspect that either development would be enough to reverse the soaring food prices of recent years.
Another important strategy laid out in the paper is to improve
the efficiency of agriculture in places where yields are already high. If
farmers in Africa need more fertilizer, farmers in the
The paper essentially argues that high yields can be attained with fewer chemicals and less water, which would not only cut pollution but in some cases also cut costs for farmers.
And finally, the paper argues that more of the food we grow needs to wind up on people’s plates. That means cutting food waste, not just the kind so common in Western kitchens but also the tremendous post-harvest losses caused by bad storage conditions in poor countries.
And it means a shift in diets away from meat and dairy products, which are inefficient to produce, and toward plants. The paper acknowledges that a massive transition to vegetarianism is unlikely but argues that even incremental changes — getting many people to move from less-efficient beef to more-efficient chicken, for instance — would make a difference.
The paper studiously avoids taking sides in the ideological wars over the food system. It does not adopt the left-leaning argument that organic production is the answer to the world’s food issues, nor the rightward view that markets will solve all problems.
It does argue for pulling as many good ideas as possible from emerging food movements into the conventional system — but only if they serve the three goals of increasing supply, reducing environmental damage and improving food security.
As a scientific report, not a policy document, the Foley paper does not offer any big new proposals for how to make all these things happen. Many commentators who have studied these issues have come to the conclusion that the barriers are not primarily technical but involve a lack of political will to solve the problems, leading to low public investment in agriculture.
In his Scientific American article, Dr. Foley does make one intriguing proposal. Pointing to the certification system that has encouraged the construction of green buildings, he asks: what about a new certification system for sustainably produced food?
Instead of catering to a single ideological predilection, the way the organic label does now, the new label would be based on a system that awards points for public benefits and subtracts them for environmental harm. Foods produced according to the best practices would get the highest scores, or possibly the highest letter grades. If consumers adopted it, such a certification would put pressure on companies and farmers to clean up their practices.
“This certification would help us get beyond current food labels such as ‘local’ and ‘organic,’ which do not tell us much about what we are eating,” Dr. Foley writes in Scientific American.
I can only imagine the ideological battles that will erupt
if this idea is taken seriously. Yet some of the needed elements are already
falling into place, like attempts in
If scientists with no axes to grind could manage to keep control of the certification system, using it as a vehicle to apply stringent performance criteria to farming systems while turning the label into a global brand, the world might have a powerful new tool for improving the food supply — and the health of the planet.
Ag’s GPS concerns heard in Washington
(FoxNews.com) – Agriculture industry representatives apparently are not convinced that a proposed fix for a controversial new wireless network will be enough to prevent it from interfering with GPS-guided equipment they depend on for everything from driving tractors to watering plants.
House Small Business Committee Chairman Sam Graves, R-Mo., held a hearing last week where critics of the emerging network sounded off about the potential downsides.
At issue is a proposal by
The company last month announced plans to develop filters and take other steps to mostly eliminate the interference problem, taking out full-page newspaper ads defending the technology.
But Rick Greene, an agriculture industry representative, said at the hearing that the interference could still end up hurting crop yields.
"Farmers should not be expected to accept or live with a disruption in their service as a result of LightSquared's actions," he said in submitted testimony. He said farmers use GPS technology for a range of important jobs, like making sure tractors don't overspread fertilizer.
The company found itself in a political controversy last month when sources said an Air Force general was pressured to change prepared testimony to favor LightSquared, which is backed by Democratic donor Philip Falcone. The general did not end up changing the testimony and went on to tell a House panel that LightSquared signals would interfere with GPS receivers based on testing.
Falcone later denied claims of political interference.
But the hearing Wednesday focused on the real-world concerns about LightSquared's system rather than the political back-and-forth on the general's testimony.
"Interference of the GPS signal will cost American small businesses billions of dollars to retrofit their GPS devices," he said in a statement. "But this is about more than the cost, it is also about safety. Pilots rely heavily on GPS to maneuver their planes -- so above all, we must ensure that safety is not compromised."
Separately, the American Soybean Association and a dozen other crop producer groups wrote to the Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday urging them to conduct more testing.
"Perhaps LightSquared's most recently proposed remediation efforts will succeed, but they must be proven to succeed through thorough testing before we can support moving forward," they wrote. "Unfortunately, none of the new proposed solutions have undergone meaningful, independent technical testing."
But LightSquared claims its own tests show the filter they've designed produces little or no interference.
"LightSquared has committed to be a good neighbor," LightSquared Vice President Jeffrey Carlisle said.
Listeria fear devastates Calif.
MENDOTA, Calif. (AP) — On an October day
in the midst of harvest season, two farmworkers sat idly in their home in a
Instead of picking the melons and supervising a work crew,
Dora and David Elias of Mendota were unemployed — laid off along with hundreds
of others as the cantaloupe listeria outbreak traced to
The pangs were particularly felt here in the top cantaloupe-producing
state. Sales of
"We can't sell the fruit," said Rodney Van Bebber, sales manager for Mendota-based Pappas Produce Company. "Retail stores are taking cantaloupes off the shelves, and growers are disking in their fruit because people are afraid to eat them."
Federal officials quickly isolated the contamination to
Jensen Farms in the
But the number of deaths has continued to grow because
symptoms of listeria can take up to two months to appear. As of Wednesday, the
outbreak was linked to 23 deaths and 116 sicknesses, making it the deadliest
known outbreak of foodborne illness in the
The Food and Drug Administration is still investigating its cause. Officials have said they were looking at the farm's water supply and possible animal intrusions among other things.
But farmers said the outbreak's source mattered little. In
recent weeks, Van Bebber fielded more than 300 phone calls from customers
asking whether his cantaloupes were contaminated. This despite the fact that
the company has put
Growers are making similar efforts in
Cindi Pearson of Santa Rosa Produce in Maricopa,
"Consumers don't understand that the
Pearson said she'll have to walk away from half of her crop.
In
"I say we should just quit," Van Bebber said. "There is no reason for us to keep picking."
At Westside Produce in Firebaugh, a few miles from Mendota, company president Stephen Patricio laid off 150 of his 400 workers — including the Eliases — three weeks before the end of the season.
"If it was because of an actual outbreak in
California-grown cantaloupes have never been linked to any
foodborne illness outbreak, Patricio said. In fact, growers here funded
research that helped refine their food safety practices.
But even those safety measures have not saved
"I think there is so much background noise about
food-borne illnesses and food safety that consumers are nervous," said
Hank Giclas, senior vice president of science and technology for Western
Growers, an industry group that represents
Spinach sales, Giclas said, have still not fully recovered
from the 2006 E. coli outbreak — despite heightened protections put in place by
the industry. Before the outbreak, spinach brought in more than $188 million in
gross revenue into
Efforts to restore consumer confidence with new requirements for food safety known as the Leafy Green Marketing Agreement have been only partially successful.
That doesn't bode well for farmworkers in Mendota, many of
whom had lost jobs in previous years due to the drought that swept through
"Before, there was no water, and now this outbreak. It's always something," Dora Elias said. "We're just here waiting, hoping to get a phone call about a job."
Syngenta sees 3Q sales jump 21 percent
(RTTNews) - Swiss agribusiness Syngenta AG (SYT: News ) reported Friday a 21 percent rise in third-quarter sales, reflecting improved volume and prices mainly in crop protection segment. Looking ahead for the full year, the company said it expects substantial top line growth, higher profitability at constant exchange rates and a significant increase in free cash flow.
Third-quarter sales grew to $2.66 billion from last year's $2.20 billion. At constant exchange rates, sales rose 16 percent.
The strong performance reflected 13 percent rise in volume, representing the sixth consecutive quarter of double digit growth, and 3 percent increase in prices.
Mike Mack, chief executive officer, said, "In the third quarter of 2011, positive volume momentum continued and crop protection pricing improved as a result of the actions we have implemented. Our performance reflects the breadth of our portfolio, augmented by rapid growth in new crop protection products and the expansion of our corn trait coverage."
Segment-wise, crop protection sales were $2.18 billion, representing reported growth of 23 percent and constant currency growth of 19 percent from last year. Seeds sales also grew 13 percent to $500 million, and the increase was 8 percent in constant currency.
Latin American sales increased strongly across the
portfolio. In Europe, Africa and the Middle East, sales growth was led by
France and the CIS, and growth in
In Crop Protection segment, sales of selective herbicides
surged 50 percent driven by Latin America and by early orders in the
Too few pickers for Washington
In the
“We’re not getting anybody to take a bite on these jobs, so we don’t have anybody to do these jobs,” Gregoire told the News Tribune.
The governor returned home Friday after leading a 15-member
delegation of farm group representatives to the nation’s capital. The group
urged members of Congress to oppose a Republican bill that would force
employers to use a federal database called E-Verify to determine whether their
employees are eligible to work in the
Gregoire criticized anti-illegal-immigration rhetoric
prevalent in
Gregoire and farm groups want nothing to do with E-Verify. Roughly 66,000 of the 92,000 workers who are needed for seasonal harvests – nearly 72 percent – are in the country illegally, according to the state’s farm groups.
“All we’re going to do is penalize employers. We’re going to
lose jobs and we don’t have any way to get those jobs back,” Gregoire said in
an interview at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, where she and her
entourage had met earlier with the office’s chief agricultural negotiator. “Now
why – in this recession, as hard-hit as we are – would we, the state of
Jon Wyss, president of the Okanogan County Farm Bureau, called the potential results of the bill catastrophic. He represents more than 900 farm families in the county and said growers are facing a bleak harvest this year. He read an email that he’d just received from one of them, who complained about a harvest that was two weeks behind schedule because the farmer was 200 pickers short and it had rained on four of the past seven days. Wyss said all of his growers were struggling to find labor this fall.
“You can’t drive down a road in the
Wyss said Congress should streamline the procedures to allow more foreign workers to be hired as farm laborers.
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