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Speaking Truth To Power, NOT

A Chinese blogger's entry on her country's melamine tainted baby milk powder scandal was reprinted in the Washington Post this morning, and should be read by everyone with a stake in reforming the industrial food system.

It is a soul searching piece that reaches behind the immediate, shocking reality of how industrialization and globalization of the food supply can lead to huge, widespread problems that the older, more regionalized system contained inherently -- due to scale, rather than any basic superiority or goodness.

Think back a year or so. Then it was American pet deaths ...now it is Chinese infants. What to do?

What Cui recounts is an anecdote, related by a country cousin, about a deeper corruption, what she sees as a moral failing of her countrymen that is a sort of perverse playout of the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) principle -- though NIMBY is by its nature, rather, a hypocritical anti-principle.

It involved tainted rice (I'll let you read the post yourself, here) which farmers in the cousin's region knew was poisoned, but sent off to market anyway, knowing it would end up far away and untraceable. This ability, this "freedom" to dump waste at a distance (NIMBY) is something that is only possible when the scale of production (of anything, but here, in this case, and especially, food) puts the scope of the production process "over the horizon," out of sight, out of mind in the same way that toxic trash from the American lifestyle is "exported" to the developing world.

Organic and Fair Trade certification systems (as well as previous government standards) were developed in response to this problem; the question of whether or not they are up to the task depends, I guess, on your assessment of essential human nature. No system can cure human moral weakness, and it is on the socialization, the institutionalization of moral weakness that Cui writes so movingly.

Industrialization, Scale and Chinese Food Scandals

An excellent article in the New York Times today gives a lot of the background on the Chinese baby milk powder scandal, and both its background, and how it was allowed to fester in the background while the government was focused on the Olympics. There is also a good discussion of the sweetheart relationship between large producers and the goverment, and how a one party state reduces the ability of a system to root out its own problems and heal them.

This is something I first became aware of in 1990, when I was sent by Organic Gardening magazine to write an article on the state of sustainable agriculture in recently "liberated" Central Europe. While each of the Soviet bloc countries had a unique agricultural situation based largely on how early and how completely its agricultural production had been socialized, one thing was the same for all: industrialization. Industrialism was more important than socialism in predicting how quickly each country would be able to recover and vibrant agricultural system...

We're Getting A New Look

Look for a design overhaul and relaunch of Big MACC Attack around Columbus Day. For now, I'm off to the BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas....

Grass, Gas and Glomalin

I received an interesting article this morning from the USDA about some new research into glomalin, a sugar-protein produced by beneficial soil fungi. Here a few interesting tidbits I picked up.

1. Soils with native grasses had higher levels of glomalin than those planted with non-native grasses. This makes perfect sense since glomalin is produced by beneficial soil fungi (known as arbuscular mycorrhizae) that have a symbiotic relationship with plant roots. (Fact is more than 80% of the plant species benefit from symbiotic interaction with soil microbial life.)
2. Soils with high glomalin content are richer (in terms of plant nutrition) and less erosion prone than soils with lower glomalin content. This is because the glomalin helps soil particles stick together, forming aggregates that are more stabile in the presence of wind and water pressure.
3. But there is also a carbon sequestration effect that is significant. Plants remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (just as mammals like us remove oxygen) to fuel photosynthesis. Some of the results of this process -- on which all higher life on Earth is dependent -- end up in the plant roots, where the root fungi process some of the resulting organic compounds into glomalin.

General estimates have about 1,500 gigatons (yes, that is billion of tons) of carbon is stored in the soil. If the efficiency of that storage process could be improved by even 10%, that is another 150 billion gigatons removed from the atmosphere, which would have a more profound effect on the greenhouse gas content than just about any other action. Not all of it will remain in the soil of course -- especially in the case of switchgrass, on which the article focuses, because it would be converted into ethanol and then burned to feed our passion for the (formerly) open highway -- but still, it would be a help.

That is why restoring wetlands, prairies and savannahs -- as well as degraded forests -- especially in the tropic latitudes, where growth is fastest -- is so important. And restoring our farming methods as well. the researchers also found that glomalin levels were a good indicator of how "soil friendly" farming practices on the studied land were. Decades of research at the Rodale Institute have shown that organic farming stores far more carbon in the soil than conventional farming and thus helps fight globa warming.

To read the whole report, see the online version of the July Issue of Agricultural Research.

Tiny Cars, Fuzzy Thinking

In an Op-Ed column in today's Washington Post, Anne Applebaum raises the important relationships between technology, equity and quality of life in our developing world. (Tiny Car, Tough Questions, Page A13)  She focuses on the developing world, using the introduction of the Tata Nano as an example of the double edge that making a middle class live accessible to a much larger population on earth will have. Comments posted on the WaPo site indicate that a fair number of people sense her conflation of ability to pay some sort of righteousness - when they are actually unrelated to the logical question at hand.

This is primarily a food, farming and technology blog so I want to point out how her general misunderstanding of the sociology of technology bleeds over into our world here in the food and farming biz because has apparently bit the biotech booster message big time and isn't even aware of it. Here's how:

 

Bt, Beta Carotene and the Big MACCs

Commodification and the Destruction of Efficacy

     On the one hand American agriculture can be seen as a huge success: the number of Americans required to till our fields has dropped from more than 60% to less than 2%, and only six percent of the farmers produce 56% of the crops; corn yields increased 333% over sixty years, to a point where agricultural products make up 10% of all exports. Whole industries have arisen to supply materiel to the farmer: in 1992 for example, 1.1 billion pounds of pesticidal chemicals (worth a solid eight billion dollars to GNP) and over four billion pounds of fertilizer (and this is only the active ingredient weights).1
     But there have been costs, too: falling water tables on a continental scale; chemical contamination of drinking water; eutrophication of lakes and streams; damaging outflows of both topsoil and nutrients into coastal estuaries. And these are just the environmental costs; there are social and economic costs as well, related to the eventual cleanup of pollution, the high energy input of modern, conventional agriculture, and the urban and suburbanization that result from the migration of farm populations into other employment sectors.      All this has been created by viewing agriculture strictly through an economic lens, though it is essentially a natural process. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists,

Industrial agriculture views the farm as a factory with 'inputs' (such as pesticides, feed, fertilizer and fuel) and 'outputs' (corn, chickens and so forth). The goal is to increase yield (such as bushels per acre) and decrease costs of production, usually by exploiting economies of scale.2

     This view of agriculture as a system of inputs and outputs has led, according to critics like Richard Lewontin of Harvard, to a situation where farmers are receiving a steadily declining portion of the 18% of the United States economy that flows from their farms and fields.3 Other factors are mechanization and the resultant plant and animal monocultures. Monoculture, at its current level, means growing literally thousands of contiguous acres of the same plant, which is an incredible biological incentive to the explosion of pest and disease populations. Both of these incentivize an increase in farm size, and a decrease in the number of crop varieties grown within the monoculture itself.4

Iron Containing Nanoparticles Found to be Toxic to Nerve Cells

Notice the synergetic effect below. This is a fairly rare surfacing of the hidden secret of reductionism at the heart of the scientific method as it is currently applied. If you rigorously study things only in isolation, then the results and inferences of that study really only apply at that same level -- in isolation. But neither we, nor any other organism lives in isolation; we are completely immersed in a soup in interacting substances and states, and those interactions are easily as important as the "actors" themselves. Certainly, when studying gestalts, the conclusions we can reach are less clean and precise, but they will, in fact, have considerably more operative value.

Here is the summary, retrieved from a nanotechnology newsletter:

Researchers from the University of California, San Diego in the U.S. report that tests conducted on the biomedical applications of iron oxide nanoparticles have found that the nanoparticles can be toxic to nerve cells and can interfere with their ability to form signal-transmitting neurites. In a study intended to find a method for manipulating nerve cells remotely with magnetic force, the researchers coated the iron oxide nanoparticles with a polymer coating to prevent them from clumping in an aqueous environment and to enable their uptake by PC12 nerves cells from rats. After adding nerve growth factor to the nanoparticle-containing cells, the researchers observed dose-dependent incidents of cell death and diminished ability to produce neurites. Researcher Thomas Pisanic said, "It's worth noting that neither iron oxide nanoparticles alone, nor the coating material alone are overtly toxic, but combining the two to create water-soluble nanoparticles has a completely different effect. . . Our experience leads us to conclude that any analysis of the biocompatibility of nanoparticles should include not just a toxicological study of the component parts, but also an examination of the total structure as a whole." The article can be viewed online at the link below.

http://www.azonano.com/news.asp?newsID=3909

The Link Between GMOs and the Ethanol Fantasy

Ethanol production from corn will mean more GMOs, according to a Reuters article posted on Yahoo today. The whole ethanol craze is getting out hand. Mexican farmers -- whose ancient seed stocks have already been contaminated by GMO corn -- are suffering because of subsidized corn from the north, and now that their economic competitiveness has been damaged, lo and behold, prices will go back up due to demand for ethanol. But the corn grown to meet that demand will now be high tech, input sensitive varieties rather than the adapted land races they had been growing, without the need for expensive irrigation and fertilizers, and once again they will be caught behind the eight ball.

What is so distressing about all this is that none of it has anything to do with their livelihood or their needs; it is all driven by the global companies of the north, and the gas guzzling global consumers of the USA they created via media and marketing to provide themselves with a steady sink for an increasingly threatened basket of natural resources cum entropic wastes. Throughput....throuhgput...throughput...build GNP and to hell with the fate of the world.

Here is a link to the Reuters piece: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070210/sc_nm/usa_corn_gmo_dc_1 . I can see that I am going to have to got out and get the rest of the ethanol articles and try to sort out where the weirdness is here, because it just doesn't smell right.

The Language of Biotechnology

Terminate or be Terminated

The debate over transgenic technology in food and farming has been remarkably unproductive, due largely to the constant battle over how to describe these techniques. Are they radical and dangerous new innovations, capable of shattering the stability of societies and ecosystems, or merely incremental steps within a long tradition?

     We should not be surprised at either the location or the virulence of the battle. In the post-deconstruction world, neither religion nor science, faith nor reason can provide solid foundation for a defense of ones ideas, and language – its vocabulary – becomes a hypothesis offered for the description of the world that we hope others will accept. This can be messy, asserts Richard Rorty in his 1989 book, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity:

Europe did not decide [emphasis in the original] to accept the idiom of Romantic poetry, or of Socialist politics, or of Galilean mechanics. That sort of shift was no more an act of will than it was a result of argument. Rather, Europe gradually lost the habit of using certain words and gradually acquired the habit of using others. […] after a hundred years of inconclusive muddle, the Europeans found themselves speaking in a way which took these interlocked theses for granted. Cultural change of this magnitude does not result from applying criteria….(Page 6)