Tag Archives: Economy

Greed is Good for Poisoning the Food Supply?

For many years big agro has treated the world’s health as an economic externality, a problem for somebody else that did not affect its own bottom line. That is starting to change, most recently in Argentina.

Anthony Gucciardi wrote for NaturalSociety 11 April 2012, Explosive: Monsanto ‘Knowingly Poisoned Workers’ Causing Devastating Birth Defects,

In a developing news piece just unleashed by a courthouse news wire, Monsanto is being brought to court by dozens of Argentinean tobacco farmers who say that the biotech giant knowingly poisoned them with herbicides and pesticides and subsequently caused ”devastating birth defects” in their children. The farmers are now suing not only Monsanto on behalf of their children, but many big tobacco giants as well. The birth defects that the farmers say occurred as a result are many, and include cerebral palsy, down syndrome, psychomotor retardation, missing fingers, and blindness.

This would be the same Monsanto that was convicted of chemical poisoning in France.

But this is once again far away in a small country of which we know nothing, right? Wrong:

The farmers come from small family-owned farms in Misiones Province and sell their tobacco to many United States distributors. The family farmers say that major tobacco companies like the Philip Morris company asked them to use Monsanto’s herbicides and pesticides, assuring them that the products were safe. Through asserting that the toxic chemicals were safe, the farmers state in their claim that the tobacco companies ”wrongfully caused the parental and infant plaintiffs to be exposed to those chemicals and substances which they both knew, or should have known, would cause the infant offspring of the parental plaintiffs to be born with devastating birth defects.”

Still, it must be some obscure poison only sold in the third world, right?

Wrong:

The majority of the farmers in the area used Monsanto’s Roundup, an herbicide with the active ingredient glyphosate that has shown to be killing human kidney cells. What’s more, the farmers say that the tobacco companies pushed Monsanto’s Roundup on the farmers despite a lack of protective equipment. In other words, these farmers — many in dire economic conditions — were being directly exposed to Roundup in large concentrations without any protective gear (or even experience or skills in handling the substance). Still, the farmers say the tobacco giants required the struggling farmers to ‘purchase excessive quantities of Roundup and other pesticides’.

That would be the same Roundup that farmers use around here all the time, without protective equipment. The Roundup we already knew was Continue reading →

McDonald’s failure in Bolivia: two different takes

So, what Bolivia ejecting McDonalds a blow against capitalism, or was it capitalism in action?

Stephanie Garlow wrote for Global Post 1 November 2011, McDonald’s failure in Bolivia: The country closed its stores and left Bolivia in 2002. Why couldn’t it succeed there?

It’s the country that turned its back on McDonald’s.

The fast food giant added the traditional llajwa sauce to its classic patties, but still Bolivians weren’t conviced.

So after five years, McDonald’s closed its eight branches and left the country in 2002.

Now a new documentary, “¿Por qué quebró McDonald’s en Bolivia?”, explores why McDonald’s failed. Filmmaker Fernando Martinez focuses on social and cultural aspects to explain the company’s lack of success. “Culture beat a transnational, globalized world,” he said.

Here’s the movie trailer. Yes, it’s in Spanish, but I think you’ll get the general idea from the pictures without needing to follow the dialog. Or here’s another version with even less dialog and some English subtitles. Continue reading →

Pesticide spray drift finally gets legal rebuf

Tired of hacking and coughing after cotton fields get sprayed to open their bolls? Tired of losing your garden or organic crops to Roundup drift? Now there are two precedents for legal recourse.

Ethan A. Huff wrote for NaturalNews.com 3 August 2011, Court rules organic farmers can sue conventional, GMO farmers whose pesticides ‘trespass’ and contaminate their fields

Purveyors of conventional and genetically-modified (GM) crops — and the pesticides and herbicides that accompany them — are finally getting a taste of their own legal medicine. Minnesota’s Star Tribune has reported that the Minnesota Court of Appeals recently ruled that a large organic farm surrounded by chemical-laden conventional farms can seek damages for lost crops, as well as lost profits, caused by the illegal trespassing of pesticides and herbicides on its property.

Oluf and Debra Johnson’s 1,500-acre organic farm in Stearns County, Minn., has repeatedly been contaminated by nearby conventional and GMO farms since the couple started it in the 1990s. A local pesticide cooperative known as Paynesville Farmers Union (PFU), which is near the farm, has been cited at least four times for violating pesticide laws, and inadvertently causing damage to the Johnson’s farm.

The first time it was realized that pesticides had drifted onto the Johnson’s farm in 1998, PFU apologized, but did not agree to pay for damages. As anyone with an understanding of organic practices knows, even a small bit of contamination can result in having to plow under that season’s crops, forget profits, and even lose the ability to grow organic crops in the same field for at least a couple years.

And all most people have done so far is let it slide. But the Johnsons did something. Continue reading →

Organic farming better for bottom line

And you don’t have to owe your soul to the bank or to Monsanto!

Margaret Reeves wrote for GroundTruth 12 October 2011, Organic farming better for bottom line:

Agronomy Journal… reports on an 18-year study demonstrating that organic crop rotation is consistently more profitable than conventional corn and soybean production, even when organic price premiums are cut by half. That is very good news for both organic producers and the agricultural economies in which they operate.

The report is especially important in that it comes from one of the major U.S. professional trade journals for agricultural research — not known as a bastion of progressive thinking on alternative agriculture.

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Even winter farmers markets

We already know that the long trend in growth in farmers markets continued this year as more farmers markets opened, including even winter farmers markets, such as Indy Farmers Market in Indianapolis:

And it’s not just about food, it’s about the local food chain and economy, and “in that food chain you find relationships.”

Henderson said she wasn’t looking to start a business when she started Indy Winter Farmers’ Market. Her efforts, she joked, were more about making Indianapolis into a place she wanted to live.

But on that first day at 25th and Central, with people lined up outside the door, she realized her goals were similar to those of many others in the community. Her market and others like it, she explained, are about more than food.

“It’s not just about the market,” she said. “We should be proud to be Indiana, the Heartland, a farm state.”

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Farmers markets: twice as many as ten years ago

According to USDA’s Farmers Market Growth: 1994-2010, there are more than twice as many farmers markets in the U.S. as ten years ago, and the growth rate is 6% a year.

Further:

Farmers markets are an integral part of the urban/farm linkage and have continued to rise in popularity, mostly due to the growing consumer interest in obtaining fresh products directly from the farm. Farmers markets allow consumers to have access to locally grown, farm fresh produce, enables farmers the opportunity to develop a personal relationship with their customers, and cultivate consumer loyalty with the farmers who grows the produce. Direct marketing of farm products through farmers markets continues to be an important sales outlet for agricultural producers nationwide. As of mid-2010, there were 6,132 farmers markets operating throughout the U.S. This is a 16 percent increase from 2009.
USDA is updating their directory now.

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Genetic engineering based on obsolete science and regulatory capture –peer-reviewed research

Here is peer-reviewed evidence that we are the guinea pigs for worldwide experimentation on the food supply using fatally-flawed science. Experimentation that isn’t needed because we already know how to do it right.

We already knew Monsanto is blocking independent GMO research in the U.S. (L.A. Times op-ed) and there are numerous examples of Monsanto gaming regulatory systems. Now Ken Rosenboro of The Organic and Non-GMO Report tells us there’s peer-reviewed research that says:

…the technology is based on obsolete science, that biotechnology companies such as Monsanto have too much influence on government regulators and “public” universities, and that university scientists are ignoring the health and environmental risks of GM crops.
The research is published as two papers by Don Lotter in the International Journal of the Sociology of Agriculture and Food:

Part 1: The Development of a Flawed Enterprise

Part 2: Academic Capitalism and the Loss of Scientific Integrity

In a 7 August 2009 article in FoodFirst, The Genetic Engineering of Food and the Failure of Science, Don Lotter explains what’s in those two papers: Continue reading →

Forbes admits it was wrong about Monsanto

Robert Langreth writes in Forbes that Forbes Was Wrong On Monsanto. Really Wrong.
Forbes made Monsanto the company of the year last year in The Planet Versus Monsanto. I know because I wrote the article. Since then everything that could have gone wrong for the genetically engineered seed company….has gone wrong. Super-weeds that are resistant to its RoundUp weed killer are emerging, even as weed killer sales are being hit by cheap Chinese generics. An expensive new bioengineered corn seed with eight new genes does not look impressive in its first harvest. And the Justice Department is invesigating over antitrust issues. All this has led to massive share declines. Other publications are making fun of our cover story.
Maybe Forbes should improve its “invesigating” [sic] skills.

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Farmland for Food, Wildlife, Flood Control, Air Quality, and Agrotourism

Gretchen found this one, too (think I can get her to blog?). Judi Gerber writes about Why Saving Farmland Is So Important:
…without local farms, there’s no local food, or, as the American Farmland Trust (AFT) puts it: “No Farms, No Food.”.

And it’s not even just food:

Farmland is green space, even though most people don’t think of it that way. It is a significant contributor to environmental quality. As AFT states, “Farm and ranch lands provide food and cover for wildlife, help control flooding, protect wetlands and watersheds, and maintain air quality. They can absorb and filter wastewater and provide groundwater recharge. New energy crops even have the potential to replace fossil fuels.”

And there’s more:

Farmland provides fiscal stability to local governments and boosts the economy. It does this by contributing to a community’s infrastructure and helps a local economy through sales, job creation, and support services or businesses.

One of the most unique of these support services is tourism, or more specifically, agri-tourism. There are plenty of places that people visit to see rural scenery or to enjoy the food or drink of a specific region including the wineries in California’s Napa Valley, or popular farm stays like those found in Italy, and increasingly, here in the United States.

There are some plans afoot about agrotourism in Lowndes County.

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The Art of Managing Longleaf

The surprising thing is so few people have heard of Leon Neel. Here’s a very interesting biography of this very influential pioneer in southeastern forestry and agriculture, including many interesting stories of south Georgia and north Florida life and politics:
The Art of Managing Longleaf:
A Personal History of the Stoddard-Neel Approach,
by Leon Neel, with Paul S. Sutter and Albert G. Way.
Leon Neel was a atudent, apprentice, and successor of Herbert Stoddard, who was originally hired by quail plantation owners around Thomasville to figure out why their quail populations were decreasing. The answer included a need to thin and especially to burn their longleaf pine tree forests. Stoddard and Neel studied and practiced for almost a century between them on how to preserve and increase the amount of standing timber and species diversity while also selectively harvesting trees to pay for the whole thing. Their Stoddard-Neel Approach is written up in textbooks. In this book we learn how it came about, and how it is basically different from the clearcut-thin-thin-clearcut “efficient” timbering cycle that is the current fad among pine tree growers in the southeast.

It starts back in the old days of Leon Neel’s youth when his daddy taught him to hunt quail: Continue reading →