We’ve been hearing more and more about the impact of pesticides on insects, other wildlife, and ecosystems, but this research puts a magnifying glass on another huge concern about the explosive use of pesticides around the world: their impact on people.

When I learned about this study, I thought: finally. For years, I had been tracking the global estimates for pesticide poisonings and fatalities. Over this time, I had noticed something strange—the numbers I saw reported in various outlets had stayed the same, about 1 million pesticide poisonings and about 200,000 fatalities, annually. The fatality figure made headlines most recently in 2017 when the United Nations released a report on pesticides and human rights, and one article after another repeated the figure like it was breaking news: “U.N. report estimates pesticides kill 200,000 people per year,” read one headline.

But dig behind these headlines and you would find these numbers were old—really old. The poisoning and fatality estimates that we’d been hearing for years actually came from a 1990 World Health Organization (WHO) report. In other words, we have not had solid global data on how many people are getting sick and dying every year from pesticide exposure for decades—and even that 1990 figure was more back-of-the-napkin math than systematic review.

This new study—based on a review of more than 170 studies from 140 countries—finally provides up-to-date estimates for occupational pesticide poisoning incidents and unintentional fatalities. The conclusions should alarm us all and kick policy makers into gear on long-standing commitments to crack down on the world’s most toxic pesticides, like the insecticide chlorpyrifos still widely used even though it’s a known brain-damaging chemical with no safe level of exposure for children.

I had a chance to dive into the study with two of its authors, Wolfgang Boedeker, an epidemiologist and board member of Pesticide Action Network-Germany, and Emily Marquez, a staff scientist with the Pesticide Action Network-North America. Boedeker shared what this study reveals about how widespread pesticide poisonings are and Marquez helped highlight what can do about it, particularly in the United States.

Let’s start with the headline: you estimate that 44 percent of farmers worldwide experience unintentional acute pesticide poisoning (UAPP). What is a UAPP?

Boedeker: WHO defines acute pesticide poisoning as when one or more symptoms—such as headaches or dizziness, developing a rash, or feeling dizzy or nauseous—have been reported by workers or farmers within 48 hours of contact with these chemicals. In most cases, these poisonings are experienced as unspecific symptoms after you’ve used pesticides in your field. They may show up a couple of hours after applying pesticides, then be gone again.

What you found about the prevalence of UAPPs was shocking: You estimate that 44 percent of all farmers are poisoned by pesticides every year. But what about the person who may ask, “So what? A farmer feels a little sick in their field, why should we care about these illnesses—and not just mortality?”

Boedeker: If you get intoxicated by pesticide poisoning, you get sick, you often can’t work, you lose income. And, every acute exposure can lead to long-term, chronic disease. Acute intoxication is an unacceptable sign of an exposure to dangerous chemicals. We have to take it very seriously. This is one of the key messages in this paper: not just to look to the fatal intoxication, but enlarge our perspective to the non-fatal intoxication because these poisonings are an expression of dangerous exposure to chemicals.

Many of these acute exposures can lead to chronic illnesses, like cancer. We didn’t include an investigation into that literature because it would have made this study much more complicated, but we need a systematic review on the chronic effects of pesticides, too. And while in this study, we didn’t include the public health effects of the uptake of pesticides via food either, we know there are residues in food and drinking water—and that’s another important issue that needs systematic review. systematic

You estimate 11,000 fatalities every year from unanticipated pesticide poisonings, a much lower figure than the previous one from WHO, but notably, yours does not include fatalities from intentional poisoning. And, your paper notes how widespread that is: An estimated 14 million people have died by suicide using pesticides since the advent of the Green Revolution in the 1960s.

Boedeker: Right. Our fatality figure is lower but as you say we don’t include suicides. Suicides by pesticide poisoning have been investigated for a long while now, and yes, the numbers are alarming.

One reason for the number of poisonings is that pesticide use has skyrocketed: up 81 percent in the past 35 years. In certain regions, you note, that increase has been dramatic. South America saw almost a 500 percent increase while Europe saw just a 3 percent bump.

Boedeker: Yes, the profile of pesticide use has changed dramatically in these 35 years. The amount of pesticides used has grown and the size of rural populations has become larger, so more people are being exposed to more pesticides.

What did you find in terms of geographic hotspots for pesticide poisonings?

Boedeker: Countries in the Global South are most affected, which is to be expected: Not only are these regions where pesticide use is high, but also where there are fewer protective measures against exposure.

What did you hope for the report’s impact?

Boedeker: Our first aim was to have a more reliable figure on pesticide poisoning. The old figure was still cited in every policy paper when it comes to the public health impacts of pesticide use. We wanted to widen the scope beyond fatal poisoning. Secondly, our hope was to show that even after decades of policy interventions, pesticide poisoning is still a big problem. While our number of fatalities is smaller than the old figure, our UAPP figure is so much higher. Our analysis shows that this is a big public health problem and there is urgent need to address it.

What are policy approaches that could address this crisis?

Boedeker: There was a push years ago to stop the export to the Global South of highly hazardous pesticides, or HHPs, but then it got quiet. [There are nearly 300 HHPs on the market, these are pesticides that are known to be highly toxic to humans, linked to cancer or endocrine disruption or those that have shown to be particularly damaging to the environment]. We have a new push for this discussion based on this data. In Germany, for instance, we have governmental discussions on the prohibition of the export of HHPs and we are hoping to see this throughout Europe.

Marquez: Pesticide Action Network-North America got its start campaigning on the export of HHPs banned in the United States but sold in other countries where they weren’t banned. It’s important to keep watchdogging this, as PAN Germany, PAN Europe, and other partners in PAN International like Public Eye do with their “double standards” campaigns.

Right, there’s been organizing around HHPs for a long time. In your paper, you mention a 2006 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization recommendation for a progressive ban on highly hazardous pesticides, so what happened?

Boedeker: We haven’t seen more progress on this ban, I believe, because of successful international lobbying by the chemical industry, which has made sure these recommendations have not come far. There is a United Nations ethical code of conduct on pesticide use and management with clear messages that these pesticides—which are dangerous and not to be used in certain conditions because they need to be applied with protective measures—should not be exported or used in certain countries. We hope this study will help policy makers realize how getting these codes of conduct in place, and putting real restrictions on HHPs, is an urgent public health issue.

What are national policy priorities that you think could make a difference?

Marquez: In the United States, I think we could do a lot more to prevent pesticide poisonings in agriculture by strengthening protections for farmworkers. Every year in California, for example, there is news about farmworkers—sometimes large groups, all at the same time—getting poisoned while they’re working. Another very important way to get at this problem is transitioning off agriculture that depends so heavily on pesticides to manage the system. Research on nonchemical alternatives to pesticides is really important and it doesn’t get as much funding as it needs.

And what can we do as individuals?

Marquez: As a voter, I would pay attention to what your representatives have to say about farmworkers, supporting small farmers, and research initiatives on non-chemical alternatives to pesticides—especially if you are from a state that has a lot of agriculture. You can also engage your local representative and ask them what they’re doing about pesticide poisonings. Any place where pesticides get used has the potential for people to get poisoned.

There are other policy processes you can engage in—some states have taken the step of banning or phasing out a particular pesticide, for example, as with action around the insecticide chlorpyrifos in Hawaii, New York, and California. Five other states are now pursuing regulatory action on the insecticide. There are other processes, too, like participating in comment periods in your state or county or weighing in during comment periods from national agencies. Our organization, Pesticide Action Network, provides updates on key comment periods for public engagement, helping people around the country engage in these important policy battles.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The post New Study Shows the Growing Risks of Pesticide Poisonings appeared first on Civil Eats.

Without radically reducing emissions from agriculture, the research shows we won’t meet the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit average warming to 1.5°C – 2°C degrees. And yet, even those targets still position us to face some pretty extreme climate impacts.

Civil Eats talked with Michael Clark, a researcher at the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford and one of the lead authors on the study, about the findings, what they teach us about collective action to move the needle on climate, and how we might build the political will to do so.

Why does the food system have such a big climate toll?

One of the main sources of greenhouse gas emissions from food systems is meat, and within that red meat from ruminants: beef, sheep, goats, and—to a lesser extent—other livestock like pork. The reason why ruminants have a relatively large impact is two-fold: They’re particularly inefficient at converting grass into things we can eat; or, if they’re not being fed grass, converting soy or other feed into food for humans. This matters because you have to include the climate impacts of producing the feed we then give to cows and other ruminants. Another reason why ruminants are particularly high emitters is because during their digestive process, they convert their food into methane, a potent greenhouse gas that they then burp.

The other large source of emissions within food systems is from fertilizer use—from how it is processed to emissions from application. Nitrogen naturally converts into nitrous oxide, which is one of the other very potent greenhouse gases.

This I think has been a blind spot. We’ve disrupted the carbon cycle, but we’ve disrupted the nitrogen cycle, too.

Exactly. Estimates are that humans have doubled the amount of reactive nitrogen in the world—that is human sources of reactive nitrogen are at least as large as the amount of reactive nitrogen that is naturally available. Not ideal.

Your findings paint a picture based on current trends. What trends did you track?

Very broadly speaking, emissions from the food system are a function of what we eat, how it’s produced, and the size of the population. We looked at these three factors and trends to date and projected out if these patterns continue over the next several decades.

What we found at a global scale is that the most important driver is changes in dietary habits; populations eating more food and eating a larger proportion of that food from animal sources, either meat, dairy, or eggs. Population growth is an important driver, but it’s not as important as dietary habit change. And while changes in food production—like having better management techniques and reducing emissions per unit of food—could counter those shifts, it would not be by a huge amount.

Now, all this is at a global scale; for any single country, that global pattern may not match up. Diets are changing, but not uniformly. For instance, diets are not changing by a huge amount in the United States, but if you go to a place like China or Brazil, countries experiencing large economic transitions, there are massive dietary shifts happening and with them those emissions are going to be driven up.

Do you feel the story of food systems emissions has been late to the game in climate change?

Rightfully, a lot of the effort, focus, and political will has targeted emissions abatement through fossil fuels. That makes a huge amount of sense. But we’re getting better knowledge about the impact food has had on the environment—and the trajectory of emissions—and starting to see, thankfully, food becoming a bigger part of the conversation.

Talk about some of the main levers for change. First, plant-rich diets: Let’s get into what you mean by that and why this diet shift makes a difference.

We mean a reduction in meat, dairy, and eggs and an increase in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, legumes, and so on. What’s critical here is that while the endpoint is similar for everyone in the world, the direction you might need to go to get there will be really different. In the United States, for instance, this shift in diets might mean a typical person eating much less meat and much more fruits and vegetables. The second thing I really want to stress is that these plant-rich diets are associated with pretty large increases in health outcomes. While for this paper we focused on climate, plant-rich diets have enormous co-benefits.

Let’s talk about another lever for reducing food system emissions; what you and your co-authors call “healthy calories.”

Approximately half the global adult population is eating too much or not enough. In certain countries the figures are even more extreme. For my co-authors and me, the healthy diet lever means—independent of a plant-rich diet—what proportion of calories are coming from fruit, vegetables, and other healthy sources of calories. We know that so many people are not getting the right amounts of food for a healthy diet. Similar to the plant-rich lever, this means in some places, eating a lot less, in other places, it will mean people eating more [healthy foods].

Food waste has gotten a lot more attention in the past few years—in part, I think, because the percent of food that is wasted is so high and because addressing food waste feels so doable.

Yes, it’s pretty shocking: About one-third of all food that is produced remains uneaten, ether because it’s thrown away, rots, or otherwise doesn’t get to the people who want to eat it. The sources differ widely by country, sometimes it’s a lack of refrigeration, lack of storage, grain silos, and so on. In the United States, a family of four wastes on average $1,600 worth of produce a year. That’s a pretty big incentive to act.

It always surprises people that if the emissions associated with food loss were a country, it would be the third largest emitter in the world.

Let’s talk about what you are seeing in terms of policy responses.

One of the joys and complications of working on a global study is that the policy responses are going to look very different wherever you are. We talked earlier about the climate impacts of nitrogen fertilizer use. One policy that has really been effective has been the 1991 European Union Nitrates Directive. Now, when it was passed, it was designed to reduce nitrogen runoff because agricultural sources of runoff were one of the main causes of water pollution in Europe. Since then, fertilizer applications per hectare have decreased by about half, yet crop yields have continued to increase as they were before. It’s just one example of a relatively large geographically scaled policy that is working. While it wasn’t specifically designed to address emissions, it most certainly has had emissions benefits.

We can look at farmers choosing different production pathways. Like in some cases adding more crop rotations into their planning or using agroecological approaches, such as planting hedgerows, agroforestry, and more. Honestly, there really is a huge amount that can be done. But it’s important to stress that no single action is going to solve the problem.

One of the big food-climate debates is about soil carbon sequestration and livestock. What do you think about those who argue for livestock’s ability to rehabilitate soils?

We know for sure we can be doing a lot better in terms of soil carbon storage. And we are seeing incredible results from a range of strategies, like some I mentioned: planting cover crops, intercropping, and silvopasture, planting hedges between fields that can prevent soil loss—and more. All of these can help sequester more carbon in the soil, but I think the key message should be: Soil carbon sequestration is part of the solution, but it isn’t the only solution.

Now, for the debate about cows! The instances where I’ve seen cows or other ruminants’ potential to be net negative in terms of greenhouse gas emissions—after accounting for methane emissions—is over short timescales, in certain conditions, on previously degraded land. So, yes, it may be possible for cows to play a helpful role, but in a limited way. How the cows are raised matters; but how many cows you’re raising matters more.

Do you feel like any parts of your paper have been misunderstood as this complex story gets translated for the general public?

I actually think the coverage has been good. There are basically three main points and I think the media has been capturing them well: One, food matters to climate and if we continue eating the way we are, it will result in catastrophic climate change; two, there is a lot we can do; third, everyone has a role to play—consumers, businesses, food processors, everyone.

I know one question those who work on climate often gets asked is, “Are you optimistic or pessimistic?”—but, I feel I should ask the same of you.

I’m laughing because it’s an uncomfortable question to answer. We are starting to move in the right direction, but honestly, we’re not moving anywhere close to as fast as we need to. We need to start acting now. It would have been great to have made these changes years ago, but we didn’t.

Right. As they say, the best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago. The second best time is today.

Exactly.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post New Research Confirms What We Eat Is Central to the Climate Crisis appeared first on Civil Eats.

Civil Eats recently spoke with one of the lead authors, Francisco Sánchez-Bayo of the University of Sydney, about the implications of these findings, the underreported connection to agriculture, and what we can do about it.

While the story of environmental collapse, particularly climate change, has focused on species other than humans, it has been focused mainly on the fate of “charismatic megafauna” such as the iconic polar bear. Can you explain more about why your findings about insects, animals that often fly under the radar, are so significant?

We don’t always appreciate insects. They’re small, many are perceived as a nuisance. But their role in an ecosystem is essential; a large proportion of vertebrates depend on insects for food. To put it bluntly, most vertebrates on the planet would not be here if it weren’t for insects. There’s also the function they play in aquatic systems: Insects help purify and aerate water. Together with micro-organisms and worms, they’re vital to soil health. It’s important to realize that insects essential. If we remove them, we disrupt all life on the planet.

What surprised or alarmed you most about these findings?

When we first started, we expected to see declines. We knew that from the start. I have been following the fate of bees for years and I knew that we were seeing significant declines. We had also come across a few studies on butterflies from as far back as 20 years ago that portended decline. But what surprised us was the numbers: One-third of insects are endangered. And it’s not just butterflies and bees; it’s all groups. It’s particularly [alarming] for aquatic insects and specific groups like the dung beetles.

You compiled data from more than 70 studies around the world, and you noted that most of the data in your studies came from the global North. How confident are you that this sampling is representative of global insect decline?

We looked at 73 studies, and we are now including three more that were brought to our attention since we published our first article. The fact that most of these studies are from the Northern Hemisphere is undeniable: We were looking for long-term trends, in particular, and only Europe and North America have records that go back 100 years or more.

Unfortunately, countries with the largest biodiversity—China, Brazil, Australia, for example—don’t have good studies we could rely on. There were none in China and Australia, and only one from Brazil. But the 20 percent of studies that came from regions beyond North America and Europe, Central America, Southeast Asia, etc., all showed the same problems. And the drivers of this decline are common to all these countries no matter what region we’re talking about.

Can you say more about those drivers?

It’s a combination of habitat loss, pollution, biological factors, and climate change. But if you go deeper, you realize that the biggest drivers—habitat loss and pollution—are jointly found in agriculture expansion. So, without a doubt, agriculture is the main driver of the decline of insects, more than all the other factors combined.

What has been the response from your peers?

We’ve received hundreds of emails, saying essentially, “Yes, you are right.” Some publications have criticized us for being alarmist. We only use the word “catastrophic” once, and we use it very carefully. We chose that word deliberately: If 30 percent of insects, the largest group of animals on Earth, are in danger, that is catastrophic. Damage from a tropical cyclone can be characterized as catastrophic, but that is localized. This is global. This is a true catastrophe.

The paper points very clearly to the damaging impacts of agricultural chemicals around the world; considering that, what has the reaction been from the chemical industry?

We haven’t had much pushback. I received one email from someone from a chemical company. He was very polite, but said that I was unfairly blaming pesticides. [He pointed out that] there are other causes: light pollution, for instance. I demonstrated he was partially right, but mostly wrong. The fact that we point to agriculture as the main culprit and to pesticides as one of the main factors is based on the evidence, examples from the literature. Understand that our study is not an experimental study that can be subject to criticism or misinterpretation. It is based on actual numbers derived from 73 studies all over the world over 30 years. If that’s not evidence enough, then tell me what is?

Let’s talk about the pesticides that you flagged as most concerning: neonicotinoids [also known by the shorthand “neonics”] and fipronil. Why are these particularly worrisome?

These insecticides have been introduced in last 25-30 years and there are features that make them different from older chemicals. First, they’re extremely toxic, particularly fipronil: it’s the most toxic ever produced to all insects and to many other organisms. Neonics are also highly toxic. They’re also soluble in water. So when they’re applied, they don’t just stay in the place you spray or in the soil. When you get that first rainwater, they go everywhere.

Because they’re soluble, they thought they could be used as systemic pesticides that you would apply at the time of planting and because there would be no drift, there would be less impact on the environment. But the risk of drift is minimal compared with the risk to insects in water: Residues from these insecticides flow into the rivers and streams and go out the sea. We know that the waters in North America are completely contaminated with neonics and the same is true in Japan, Canada, and in many other places. All the insects in these waterways are rapidly disappearing.

These insecticides have a delayed and long-term effect, which is not well understood by the authorities that regulate them. When you apply them, they eliminate certain species, which never recover—particularly species with a long life-cycle, like dragonflies. These are the insects we’re seeing disappear the quickest. These insecticides are also causing havoc among pollinators.

With many companies using these insecticides as coating on seeds—corn or oilseed rape [canola], sunflower crops, or soya beans in North America—this problem is only getting worse. And it goes against all principles of IPM [integrated pest management]. You’re using these on all seeds. When there is no evidence that there is even a pest problem, why should a whole field be contaminated? This makes no sense from a pest control and management perspective and it makes no economic sense, either.

Then there’s the basic question: What’s the point of using them? They say they boost productivity but recent studies out of the EU show that there is no gain in yield by using neonics. We are using massively enormous amounts of this insecticide for no gain whatsoever.

The EU has evaluated this and determined that coating seeds with these insecticides should be banned. These insecticides should be used only when needed, when there is a problem. The current approach—to use on all the crops, all the time, year after year—makes no sense from any perspective.

What about herbicides? You note that they’re not as toxic to insects, but they’re also really damaging.

Yes, we could have written much more about that. We were particularly struck by the studies showing the impact on wetlands. About half of all herbicides are water soluble, so they end up in wetlands and eliminate many weeds, which are an important food and breeding ground for insects.

What about the speed of decline?

Most of the declines have occurred in the last 30 years. We know that the sales of pesticides worldwide have increased exponentially in that period, mostly in underdeveloped countries in tropical areas where they spray with no controls whatsoever. Increasingly, many departments of agriculture are cutting back on the number of personnel dedicated to advising farmers on growing practices, known as extension officers. As a result, farmers don’t have pest management advice from anyone with expertise. So where do they get the advice? From chemical companies. They’re told if you have a problem, just apply this or that product. This is one reason pesticide sales have increased.

I recently met two entomologists from Oaxaca who expressed their dismay that the most recent annual meeting for professionals in their field they attended had been sponsored by Bayer, one of the largest makers of chemical pesticides in the world.

I’m not surprised. That happens everywhere.

Your study’s findings are sobering and alarming. It left me wondering, what do you think can be done to avert this impending insect apocalypse?

Farmers can adopt different pest-management practices. The key is to apply practical and effective solutions to eliminate pesticide use and also restore habitat across farmland. That can be done through farmer education and through policy. Governments can give incentives for using IPM to change the paradigm: Pesticides should be the tool of last resort. At the moment, many countries encourage the use of pesticides. That has to stop. Why don’t they do the same thing with IPM? Say to the farmers, “we’ll give you a tax rebate if you use less pesticides.”

I also think banning products in some cases makes sense. Certain compounds, like DDT, should be banned for agricultural use, even if it’s still allowed in certain tropical countries to control malaria. If we took the time to educate farmers and put sensible practices into place to produce food without dependence on chemicals, the whole thing would change overnight.

I would encourage everyone to read the conclusions in the paper: we cannot have monocultures covering hundreds of square miles. We have to plant trees and other habitats for insects. Biodiversity is the only thing that will help crops be resilient and sustainable in the long term and keep balance in the soil. When we [grow diverse crops], we can reverse this trend, but that means taking on a system completely dominated by chemical corporations.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

The post What the ‘Insect Apocalypse’ Has to Do With the Food We Eat appeared first on Civil Eats.

June 24, 2020 update: Bayer has agreed to pay $10 billion to settle tens of thousands of cases in the United States that claim glyphosate, the primary ingredient in its Roundup herbicide, caused cancer in people who sprayed the chemical or lived and worked near where the chemical was sprayed.

A San Francisco jury has ruled in the first court case against the chemical company Monsanto, finding that its signature products, glyphosate-based herbicides Roundup and Ranger Pro, are associated with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma—and that the company acted with malice and negligence in failing to warn consumers. They awarded the plaintiff, 46-year old Dewayne “Lee” Johnson, $39.2 million in compensatory damages and $250 million in punitive damages.

This is a huge win for those who have been sounding the alarm about the dangers of these widely used herbicide products for years. This is also a huge hit to Monsanto: the majority of its $14.6 billion in annual sales come from herbicides containing glyphosate and seeds genetically engineered to withstand those herbicides. This is the first case to challenge the chemical behemoth (which was recently acquired by Bayer Chemical) about its weed-killers, but it won’t be the last: There are more than 4,000 other plaintiffs waiting in the wings.

I attended the closing arguments of the trial and I couldn’t stop watching Johnson, with his back to the public seating and his broad shoulders pressed against his dark-blue fitted suit. Johnson sat still as his lawyer described his cancer as a “death sentence.” His trial had been expedited because these would be his last weeks, possibly months — or by some miracle, years — on the planet.

I thought about the photographs we were shown of his cancerous lesions and how, under that suit, his skin was rubbed raw. I thought about his three sons. I thought about his wife who, we heard, couldn’t be present in court because she was at working 14-hour days, unable to get a paid day off and unable to miss work because the family has bills to pay. And I thought about my own family’s fights with cancer and my father’s death sentence: a diagnosis of glioblastoma at age 61 and the nine months he lived, in deteriorating health, as his cancerous brain tumor grew.

With cancer you always ask: Why? With that question comes the challenge of connecting any one cancer irrefutably to any one chemical exposure. In my father’s case, we speculated: was it the formaldehyde he had used in his lab?

Overwhelming Evidence

In Johnson’s case, his lawyers argued that the Roundup and Ranger Pro—proprietary mixtures of glyphosate and other toxic ingredients —he had used while working as a groundskeeper at a San Francisco Bay Area school was a substantial factor in his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. In the course of his job, he would disperse upwards of 150 gallons a day during the spraying season. His lawyers argued that Johnson was exposed multiple times over the years he worked there, particularly when his sprayer malfunctioned and he was soaked with the herbicide and when his backpack applicator leaked, dripping it down his back.

Monsanto’s lawyers claimed, not surprisingly, that they were wrong.

Over the course of the trial, Johnson’s lawyers worked to explain complicated stuff: the epidemiology, toxicology, and mechanism of the carcinogenicity of the products. The plaintiff’s lawyers had on their side reams of evidence, including the International Agency on Cancer Research’s (IARC) 2015 determination that  glyphosate was a probable human carcinogen.

To argue the case, Johnson’s lawyers had to present this complex science to a jury made up of everyday people. But unlike you and me, the jury had to process what they heard and make a judgment without doing any research on their own, discussing the case with anyone they knew, or digging into any of the evidence outside of the courtroom. And they had to do so with limitations of what they could learn about the case in that courtroom.

The judge had ruled as inadmissible, for instance, the fact that the California EPA follows the assignations of IARC’s rulings. In other words, this California-based jury had no idea that after the IARC classification that glyphosate is a probable carcinogen, the state’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment had demanded cancer warnings be placed on Monsanto’s glyphosate products sold in the state. (Implementation is tied up in the courts, as Monsanto sued to block the warnings). So when the Monsanto lawyer claimed in closing arguments that “no one has said that glyphosate should carry a cancer warning except plaintiff’s lawyers,” it was, to put it generously, a “slippery comment” as journalist and glyphosate expert Carey Gillam noted. (To put it plainly, it was a lie.)

Johnson’s lawyer argued that it was exposure to formulated product—glyphosate plus much more—that was the precipitating factor in his cancer. But the judge had struck from the record, after Monsanto petitioned the court, the witness commentary that referred to the decision by European regulators to demand Monsanto change its formulations for the herbicide sold. The European Food Safety Authority was particularly concerned with the ingredient polyethoxylated tallow amine (or POEA); it is now banned in glyphosate formulations there.

Similarly, the jury also wasn’t given an opportunity to peruse for themselves all of the pages of court documents to understand how the company has worked to obfuscate the science and instill doubt about the IARC ruling.

The jury also had no chance to learn that George Lombardi, counsel for Monsanto, has been defending the tobacco industry in court for years. Lombardi’s bio boasts that he “has secured numerous victories for client Philip Morris (PM) in its ongoing tobacco litigation cases.” Would the jury have been less inclined to trust Lombardi’s judgment about cancer and risk if they knew he defended Philip Morris for misleading consumers about the safety of Marlboro Lights in a massive class action lawsuit in Missouri?

The tobacco industry has known for decades that light cigarettes are no safer and that smokers assume otherwise, exploiting these two facts to market light cigarettes on safety claims. Yet Lombardi helped defeat the class action, saving Philip Morris a potential $1.8 billion claim. Today, more than 11,000 people die every year in Missouri from tobacco-related illnesses or second-hand smoke.

On the conclusion of closing arguments, the jury adjourned. It was nearly three days before they reached the verdict. And despite all of these limitations to the information they could access, the jury ruled unanimously on behalf of Johnson—on every single count.

Shifting Sands

Chemical pesticides have been in use since the end of World War II, and we have learned a number of lessons in that time: Chemicals that we thought (and were told) were perfectly safe have been found to be profoundly damaging to the birds and bees — and to us.

The insecticide chlorpyrifos, for instance, developed as a Nazi nerve gas, was promoted in the post-war period as an effective pesticide to kill cockroaches and other indoor pests and to stave off insects on farmland. It was not until 2000 that the evidence had piled high enough to show the brain-damaging properties of this insecticide, and advocates pushed hard enough to overcome industry lobbying, to pass an indoor ban. Another nearly 20 years have passed and we are still fighting over chlorpyrifos.

Hawaii was the first to pass a state-wide ban on chlorpyrifos in June and, just last week, the 9th Circuit Court ruled that the EPA must heed its own science and ban the insecticide as well. Now we know glyphosate formulations, which had been promoted as perfectly safe for human health for years, is irrefutably linked to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. At the press conference after the ruling, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., attorney of counsel Baum Hedlund, who tried the case, noted that “Monsanto has other problems.” The science on these glyphosate formulations is “cascading” with increasing evidence that these products may also be associated liver cancer and endocrine disruption, he added.

We’ve also learned that many of the companies that produce the chemicals we interact with daily have suppressed data, manipulated science, and lied to regulators. It has been reported that Dupont, for example, knew about the toxicity in the chemicals used in its Teflon products, but marketed the products as safe nonetheless. It has also been shown that Monsanto well knew the impacts of its PCBs and fought communities in court for years before settling lawsuits worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Now we know, through this case’s discovery process, that Monsanto has done all of this to keep its glyphosate products on the market. At that same press conference, Johnson’s lawyers noted that they were only able to use a fraction of the evidence against Monsanto in this trial. But more will likely come out in the proceeding cases.

We have been witness to this decades-long history of chemical companies dismissing the science about the human and environmental harm of specific chemicals — sometimes for years, sometimes for decades — all while their products remain in use.

My father died of cancer 13 years ago and I still think about him nearly every day. When Dewayne Johnson dies, he too will live on through his children. The tragedy for Johnson and his family is that it didn’t have to be this way. As his lawyer stated in his closing remarks, Monsanto had a choice: a choice to warn consumers about the cancer risk, a choice to undertake the studies that its own scientists recommended, and a choice not to mislead the public by ghostwriting literature that pushed the narrative of safety. The company now faces the choice to accept this unanimous verdict, take responsibility, and take action to protect others from harm. With their declaration to appeal the verdict, that seems to be another choice they are not making.

This ruling won’t reverse Johnson’s fate. But it may give his sons some solace, knowing that the company may yet be held to account for their loss. And it should give them pride knowing that their father’s case is moving us one step further toward warning communities about this threat and removing these weed-killers from the marketplace altogether.

A version of this post ran on Medium. 

The post The Man Who Fought Monsanto Will Leave a Lasting Legacy appeared first on Civil Eats.

What we eat is responsible for a whopping one-third of all atmospheric warming today. Global meat and dairy production together accounts for roughly 15 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, making the livestock industry worse for the climate than every one of the world’s planes, trains, and cars combined.

At the meetings, Christine Figueres, who led the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, reminded us that climate stability requires limiting warming to under 1.5 degrees Celsius. To do that, we need to start reversing current emissions trajectory, start a downward turn, by 2020. Yes, 2020. That means engaging every sector, food included.

“We must all swallow the alarm clock,” Figueres said. “We cannot give it to the next generation. We must solve this.”

You might be thinking, “But we have to eat. We don’t have a choice the way we do for (ahem) flights to Paris.” Except we do. If we’re lucky, we choose what we eat three times a day. And we make choices as societies all the time when we decide what research to fund, which farms to subsidize, and what foods to serve in our schools and institutions.

So how do we change food and farming to help prevent catastrophic climate change? First, we need an absolute reduction in methane and nitrous oxide—gases with as much as 298 and 36 times the heat trapping power of carbon dioxide respectively—and food is key. To do this, we’ll have to slow, then reverse, the spread of the industrial livestock model into new markets around the globe.

We’ll also have to halt the growing demand for meat and dairy that’s sending soy for feed production soaring. And, we’ll need to dramatically reduce industrial farms’ use of synthetic fertilizers, the overuse of which releases significant nitrous oxide into the atmosphere.

We also must stop agribusiness from encroaching on forests and carbon-rich peatland, as it is with palm plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia. As the processed foods industry increasingly turns to this relatively cheap palm oil, production is rising. Palm oil is now nearly ubiquitous in cookies, granola bars, and other processed foods. (Like your peanut butter pre-mixed? Thank palm oil). We need to reduce demand—for us consumers that means going for less processed fare—and call on suppliers to source only from sustainably harvested palm.

Christine Figueres noted that we also must also cut—by half—the amount of food we waste, which stands at a staggering 30 to 50 percent globally. This means those emissions associated with wasted food are contributing to the climate crisis while conferring no social benefit, but it also means food is adding up in landfills, where as it decomposes converts to the powerful greenhouse gas methane.

In fact, food is the single largest component of solid waste found in municipal landfills, according to the NRDC. That means addressing waste at home, ensuring that farmers have access to markets, and ending our obsession with picture-perfect produce. Like the recent consumer campaign launched in France says, we need to embrace fruits et légumes moches.

And, we’ll need to manage farm and ranchland to maintain carbon in the soils. “Carbon is like real estate,” Figueres said. “It’s all about location, location, location. Carbon in the atmosphere is your enemy. Carbon in the soil is your friend.” At the meetings outside of Paris, experts shared research on how agroecological farming practices and managed grazing can promote greater soil organic matter, AKA carbon, and how these practices might enable us to sequester a significant portion of atmospheric carbon, especially in the short term, when we need it most.

At the heart of these solutions are farmers. By 2050, there will be 750 million peasant farmers—and they’re vital to securing a resilient food supply and ensuring that we store carbon in our soils, stressed Dr. Sonja Vermeulen, a leading food and climate expert who spoke at the summit.

I also met with Elizabeth Mpofo, the international coordinator of the global peasant movement, La Via Campesina. With 164 member organizations worldwide, La Via Campesina’s 200 million members are on the frontlines of the fight against catastrophic climate change. As Mpofo reminded us, we can’t have a sustainable food system without small-holder farmers.

Protecting indigenous communities is also key. Phrang Roy of the Indigenous Platform for AgroBiodiversity, who I also interviewed, has said, “Seventy-five percent of the world’s biodiversity today is located on indigenous people’s lands… The loss of this land could mean the loss of planet Earth as we know it.”

Meanwhile, those of us living in the United States and much of the industrialized world must radically change our diets, shifting away from diets filled with processed foods and loaded with industrial meat products toward whole foods and plant-centered fare. For those who eat meat, it means eating less and better: grass-fed beef, for instance, and organic-certified poultry and pork.

And so, there is a kind of glorious coincidence: Every one of the bold actions around food is also a step forward for farmers, communities and our health. Oh, and these changes can be delicious, too!

Today, the global food sector is an extractive industry destroying forests to make way for commodities (think: corn, soy, and palm fruit) plantations. It relies on polluting natural gas or gasifying coal to generate nitrogenous fertilizer. It devastates topsoil and dries up aquifers—irreplaceable in our lifetimes. Instead, we need a regenerative food system—and we already know many of the pathways to get us there.

Thankfully, this message is resonating. Ten years ago, when I was starting to report on my book Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork, I found virtually no food advocacy groups running a major climate campaign and few environmental groups turning their attention to agribusiness. Now, many are.

Ten years ago, policy responses to food’s impact on climate were barely a blip on the radar. Today, there are groups like California Climate and Agriculture Network that has real policy in play to encourage farmers to embrace more climate-friendly practices. And at the last climate negotiations in Paris, 38 countries and provinces signed the “4 per 1,000” commitment to increase soil fertility through a focus on carbon sequestration in soils.

Summits like the ones I attended near Paris are bringing experts together to explore real action; global leaders are taking note. In President Obama’s first public presentation abroad since leaving office, his remarks zeroed in on how food will be impacted by climate change and how agriculture contributes to the crisis, noting the sector is the second-largest contributor to emissions after energy—and those emissions are going up. And this week, I joined with more than 200 others to co-sign a letter published in The Lancet calling on the World Health Organization to confront factory farming.

I’m heartened. I am also frustrated to the bone. We don’t have the luxury of time. To date, the major global climate negotiations—known as COPs—have largely ignored tackling food sector emissions. The next COP will take place in Bonn, Germany this November. Hopefully, food will finally be on the menu. It has to be. The clock is ticking.

The post Eating on the Brink: How Food Could Prevent a Climate Disaster appeared first on Civil Eats.

This year, Big Soda spent nearly $39 million to stop taxes on sugary beverages in five U.S. cities. They filled mailboxes and flooded the airways with misleading ads, they engaged lawyers in legal battles, and padded the pockets of local progressives to try to turn them against the tax all to convince people to vote against a penny per fluid ounce tax—in the case of Boulder, Colorado, a two-cent per fluid ounce tax—on the distributors of sugar-sweetened beverages.

But it’s too late: The cultural tipping point on soda is already here. Philadelphia passed a tax in June. And yesterday, three Northern California cities—San Francisco, Oakland, and Albany, which borders Berkeley to the north—and Boulder all passed taxes with sizable margins.

“Despite the billions spent on marketing and more than $30 million in deceitful campaign ads, voters saw the truth and sent a clear message that their families’ health comes first,” said Jim Krieger of Healthy Food America.

These wins are proof that the conversation about soda is changing. It’s a conversation backed by solid science. We now know that liquid sugar is the single largest source of added sugars in our diets and is a leading cause of heart disease, liver disease, and Type 2 diabetes. We know regularly consuming just one or two sugary drinks a day will increase your risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. Soda and other sweet beverages are also the main cause of cavities and dental decay. What’s more, consuming liquid sugar doesn’t send the same signals of fullness to our minds, so we don’t register these drinks’ calories in the same way we do as when we eat calories.

With these wins, ballot measures taking on soda taxes could be “the new normal for Big Soda,” said Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) in a statement. Today, Cook County, Illinois, home to Chicago, will vote on a similar tax on sugary drinks; other municipalities nationwide are exploring soda tax ballot measures as well. [Editor’s note: Cook County, with 5.2 million residents, today became the largest region in the nation to put in place a soda tax.]

In its recent Commission on Ending Childhood Obesity, the World Health Organization (WHO)’s clearest recommendation was for governments to implement a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages. As Dr. Margaret Chan, director of the WHO, said in a speech last month, “Diabetes is one of the biggest global health crises of the 21st century … The interest of the public must be prioritized over those of corporations.”

While some of the research is still taking shape around the benefits of soda taxes, we know they work for several reasons: First, they decrease consumption, which translates into lives saved and health care costs diverted. In Mexico, where a soda tax passed in 2014, consumption dropped by 12 percent in the first year.

They also help raise awareness about the harms of these products, including energy drinks and “flavored waters,” like VitaminWater. Many of these drinks have just as much sugar as a classic soda or more. For instance, a 20-ounce Power-C Vitamin Water contains 32 grams of sugar, nearly as much as a 12-ounce Coke. Meanwhile, an Orange-Mango Nantucket Nectar has 58 grams of sugar and an Odwalla Vanilla Protein Shake has 43 grams. (To put those figures in perspective, the American Heart Association recommends that women consume 24 grams of added sugar a day.)

Another reason soda taxes work is because they raise revenue that can tip the scale back toward health equity. Berkeley’s soda tax revenue has topped $1.4 million a year and is funding programs like a popular gardening program in the city’s public schools, hydration stations at the public high school, and health outreach in communities of color, where diabetes rates are the highest.

Research from Healthy Food America estimates that the three soda taxes in the Bay Area will raise $22 million annually for health programs and diabetes prevention. In Boulder, the soda tax there will dedicate revenue raised to address health inequities, including helping to make clean water, healthy food, and sports accessible and affordable for the people who can least afford it.

But while these taxes are proving to be popular with voters, the battle over soda taxes has also revealed that Big Soda will pull out all the stops to thwart them. All told, since 2009, Big Soda has spent $94 million fighting these taxes and other measures to decrease soda consumption, according to CSPI. As New York University nutrition professor and author Marion Nestle explains in her latest book, Soda Politics, these companies are taking a page out of Big Tobacco’s playbook. The soda industry is fighting hard against any regulation, whether limits to marketing to kids, warning labels on sugary drinks, or taxes popping up worldwide.

In leaked internal strategy documents from Coca-Cola Europe, for example, that soda taxes are the policy that would have the biggest impact on their sales and were the most likely to materialize. There’s little doubt of similar projections in North America.

Two years ago, when Berkeley became the first American city to pass a soda tax, the industry portrayed the win as an aberration. Those of us following the movement nationally believed it was a bellwether. We were right. We’ll have to wait and see whether under the Trump presidency there are attempts to preempt any of these policies. But in the meantime, there are more soda tax battles on the horizon.

The post A Big Blow for Big Soda appeared first on Civil Eats.

We’ve long heard from proponents of industrial agriculture—and the synthetic fertilizer industry driving it—that we need these products to feed the world. But is the risk of another West, Texas the price we have to pay for a well-fed world? More and more scientists have uncovered data that suggests it’s not.

Take the recent study lead by Professor John Reganold at Washington State University (WSU). In a first-of-its kind effort, researchers there have analyzed studies covering 40 years of data comparing the “long-term prospects” of organic and chemical farming. In a peer-reviewed article released last month in Nature, Reganold and his team made a strong endorsement of organic farming.

They wrote: “Organic agriculture is a relatively untapped resource for feeding the Earth’s population, especially in the face of climate change and other global challenges.” Organic systems are especially compelling, the authors note, when considering not only productivity, but also the environment, economics, and community well-being—the four pillars of sustainability.

What’s perhaps most important to note about these findings is what they tell us about feeding our growing population. Researchers looking narrowly at yield-to-yield comparisons found that organic production systems have lagged behind those of chemical ones in most cases. But that science was based on historic data.

And we can safely say the climate of 10 or 20 years ago is not the climate of today. With climate change will come greater extremes in weather and temperature—from droughts and floods, to unusual heat waves and cold snaps. And Reganold and his team found ample evidence that organic production fares better during these extreme conditions.

For one, the WSU study found that organic agriculture had yielded more food “in severe drought conditions.” This was the case in large part because of the “the higher water-holding capacity of organically farmed soils.” The authors also note that organic farms “consistently have greater soil carbon levels, better soil quality, and less soil erosion compared with conventional systems” and they can withstand flooding better as a result. Organic farming production is also generally more energy-efficient, the researchers found.

Keep in mind that the historic yield performance of organic systems is also a reflection of the knowledge and seed varietals of the past. Innovations in organic farming are ongoing and will certainly increase the performance of future organic farmers. Only a fraction of agricultural research worldwide goes toward organic agriculture. Investing in this research would reduce the yield gap.

The WSU team also notes that those comparing these farming systems should take into account the other costs of chemical farming, including the ones beyond the “field boundaries.” Biodiversity loss, environmental degradation, and water and air pollution are all associated with conventional farming systems, but are often not accounted for in the studies they reviewed.

What else is beyond those “field boundaries?” The industrial fertilizer supply chain. Widen the lens and you end up in places like West, Texas or any of the other 1,300 facilities that house potentially explosive chemical fertilizer components. Widen the lens even further and you end up at the industrial operations of BASF, Dupont, or other agricultural chemical producers. Places like Midland, Michigan, where Dow Chemical manufacturing has generated the highest levels of dioxin ever detected in waterways in the United States.

These manufacturers have a powerful voice on Capitol Hill. Trade groups like the Fertilizer Institute, whose mission is to “protect, promote and represent the fertilizer industry from the point of production to the point of use,” lobby to promote the industry’s interest in the Halls of Congress. In 2015, the Fertilizer Institute alone had a lobbying budget of more than $8 million.

The political influence of Koch Industries is also well documented, with millions spent to protect its business interests; Koch Fertilizer manufactures and distributes more than 13 million tons of nitrogen, phosphate, potash, and sulphur-based products through 90 facilities at locations across the United States and around the world.

Meanwhile the citizens of places like West, Texas don’t have well-paid lobbyists to defend their interests.

Nationwide, communities are at risk from an industrial accident at a fertilizer production facility. And countless other communities are affected by the industrial food supply chain, from Midland, Michigan to the many communities in the shadow of chemical manufacturing plants nationwide. But research like WSU’s recent survey of studies offers a clear reminder that it doesn’t have to be this way. We can feed the world without having to resort to risky agricultural practices and potentially explosive inputs.

The post Are Fertilizer Explosions Just Another Cost of Doing Business for Big Ag? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Schlosser eventually found a publisher willing to take the leap and today, 15 years and more than two million copies later, Fast Food Nation has proven that there’s an appetite for powerful investigative reporting about the journey our food takes to get to our plates.

Schlosser, who has since published three nonfiction books and has been working on a book about the American prison system for over a decade, remains connected to the food world. He continues to speak on the issue, and just last year he served as an executive producer of the documentaries Food Chains and Hannah Ranch.

I spoke with Schlosser recently by phone about food workers and the movement for fairness in the food chain. Tonight, he will join Joann Lo from the Food Chain Workers Alliance and food worker leaders in a conversation as part of the Voices of the Food Chain launch at the David Brower Center in Berkeley, California.

You’ve spent a lot of your career focused on labor issues. Is there one front where you feel like food workers are winning? Alternately, where are they losing?  

I got involved with labor issues in the food system in 1994—that was my introduction to America’s industrialized food system. That was when I followed workers through the strawberry harvest in California. It was my interest in labor issues that lead me to write Fast Food Nation a few years later.

I’m most encouraged by the victories of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) in Florida. Because as bad as things were in the strawberry fields of California, what’s been going on in Florida is as bad as anywhere in the United States in terms of the low wages and working conditions, including sexual harassment, and even slavery, in Central Florida.

The ability of this one small farmworker organization to force the food corporations of the U.S. to adopt an enforceable code of conduct has been amazing and encouraging to watch. The CIW is incredibly disciplined, sticks to the facts, and is willing to tolerate defeat after defeat in order to eventually gain victory.

What I am most discouraged about is the exploitation of meat packing workers. I’ve seen no improvement whatsoever in the years since Fast Food Nation came out: the job is much more dangerous. The crackdown on immigrants in the U.S. has only made it more difficult and has only increased the risks for those immigrant workers who want to speak out and protest those conditions.

Why do you think the CIW has been effective in securing victories when other farmworker organizing has not?

I think the CIW recognized how the power structure has changed in American agriculture in the last 30 years. In the era of Cesar Chavez, there was effective organizing against the growers, but in the 21st Century, the real power lies with the multinational corporations which are purchasing these commodities. The growers are increasingly trapped and squeezed by this system as well.

The thing about a right-to-work state like Florida is that it doesn’t have a great tradition of labor unions; the CIW was in a very difficult position in trying to figure out how to help these poor workers. So instead of creating a union—which has become all the more difficult because of the large proportion of immigrant workers in agriculture and the fear that some of these immigrants have of being deported—the CIW decided to go after those with the greatest power: Burger King, McDonalds, Walmart. They have succeeded in a way that other worker groups and other industries can now emulate.

Thirteen years went by between the CIW’s launch of its Campaign for Fair Food and Walmart’s decision to sign on to their Fair Food Program in 2014. And their code of conduct only protects relatively few farmworkers. What do you say to those who say that was a lot of work for not much change?

Well, change has to begin somewhere. Ideally, you’d have the U.S. government on the side of farmworkers simply enforcing the labor laws that exist, increasing the minimum wage, penalizing growers who are engaged in wage theft and companies that are connected to wage theft and minimum wage violations, etc. But in the absence of this, communities are going to have to do it. You can see the triumph of the CIW as a form of community organizing and there’s no reason why communities throughout the U.S. can’t do the same sort of thing.

You have said: “One of the problems with our food system … is it’s ultimately based on the exploitation of poor workers, mainly recent immigrants.” How do you respond to people who say paying food workers fair wages will result in food that is priced out of reach for most Americans?

Well there are two answers: We’re paying the price for this food anyway, it’s just that the price isn’t reflected at the checkout stand. The cost of having this inequality and poverty in our midst is huge. We’re paying for it—not just in quality of life—but in all kinds of services that state and local governments and the federal government have to provide. So this is a way for the agricultural industry to shift its external costs on to the rest of society.

When I did my investigation of the exploitation of farmworkers in the U.S., and did a rough calculation of what it would cost to provide a decent income to every farmworker in the country, I found it would increase the annual food bill of a typical American family by between $35 and $50 a year. So for less than it costs a family of four to go to the movies and buy popcorn, you could eliminate poverty among migrant farmworkers. It’s a solvable problem.

How would you define today’s food movement? Where are you seeing the movement flexing its muscle or having an impact?

The food movement I’m proud of is a subset of a larger movement for social justice in this country. The food movement that is about status—about finding narrow distinctions between olive oils and one-upping one another with obscure ingredients or the latest trend in restaurants—I have absolutely no interest in whatsoever.

I really liked the proposed national food policy Mark Bittman and others put together. I have profound admiration for the success of the CIW. And I have profound admiration as well for Alice Waters and the Edible Schoolyard and the movement to bring nutrition into the classrooms of the U.S. in a way that is tangible and meaningful. There are so many people whose work I really admire.

What is missing in our national discussion about food?

I think one of the issues that isn’t discussed enough in the context of our food system is racism. I think racism plays a central role in the exploitation of workers throughout the food system. It’s an unpleasant topic, but I think it’s one that we all have to confront to understand why things are as bad as they are at the moment.

The greatest outcry about the exploitation of farmworkers in the U.S. occurred during the only decade in the last century in which most of our farmworkers were white. After the publication of The Grapes of Wrath and the powerful photographs of the farmworkers in California in the Great Depression, there was enormous interest in the plight of farmworkers. But that was really an anomaly. For more than a century, the people who have harvested our food have belonged to racial and ethnic minorities.

When you look at the United States right now, in meatpacking, in farm labor, increasingly in the restaurant industry, you see people of color—and that’s one of the reasons why this society is abusing and exploiting them. That’s a major issue that we need to address. These are the people who feed us.

What do you think of the new, somewhat stricter pesticide exposure regulations the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency just passed?

The pesticide regulations to protect farmworkers are absolutely essential. One of the main reasons to eat organic is not because there may be some minor pesticide residue on the food that will harm you, but because farmworkers are being poisoned on a monumental scale. There are thousands of injuries each year due to overexposure to pesticides.

Having the regulations in place is terrific. What’s even more important is enforcement. So many of the consequences of pesticide exposure aren’t apparent for years afterwards. People shouldn’t be poisoned in order to feed us.

Next week is International Food Worker Week. Do you have any suggestions about how readers can help support food workers?

The most important thing we can do is increase the minimum wage so it’s a living wage. Restaurant workers, migrant farmworkers will be helped enormously by this and other low-wage workers throughout the economy will as well. All the wages at the bottom will go up if the minimum wage is increased to $12 or $15 an hour.

Secondly, educate yourself and, to the degree you can, buy food from companies that are treating workers well. Help boycott companies that are treating workers poorly.

The last thing is fight against the demonization of immigrants in this country. Speak out against the demagogues who are trying to get votes by scapegoating some of the poorest and most hard-working people in the United States.

Hear the stories of workers in the fight for fairness throughout the food system at the Voices of the Food Chain website.

The post Eric Schlosser on the People Behind Our Food appeared first on Civil Eats.

In just a few years that has changed. Somewhat.

Today, many serious “big green” environmental groups are looking at how the food system can reduce its emissions and how agriculture can be harnessed for the cause. Many food-focused groups are also increasingly seeing the work they do–to promote organic farming, to fight petrochemicals and synthetic fertilizer, to protect biodiversity–as part of promoting climate solutions.

More ordinary people are drawing these connections, too. I witnessed this firsthand at the People’s Climate March in September, when I stood shoulder-to-shoulder with 410,000 eaters, food activists, and farmers proudly waving signs with sentiments like “cook organic, not the planet!”

Still, there’s much awareness-raising to be done, as a new report out recently from the London-based think tank, Chatham House, tells us. The report is based on a first-ever poll of 1,000 people from 12 countries—including Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Poland, Russia, South Africa, the UK, and the U.S.—on their attitudes about climate and food.

The folks at Chatham were especially curious to learn just how aware people are about the climate impact of meat production, since the livestock industry is a key culprit in emissions. Responsible for 14.5 percent of the total global GHGs, the livestock sector is responsible for as much emissions as every single train, plane, and car on the planet, combined.

The survey also tested people’s awareness specifically about beef and dairy, since these products account for “65 percent of the GHGs emitted by livestock,” reports Chatham. Based on average global assessments, Chatham notes, emissions from beef are “around 150 times those of soy products, by volume, and even the least emissions-intensive meat products–pork and chicken–produce 20–25 times more GHGs.”

Certain countries are particularly critical to this conversation, especially China, a country expected to grow its demand for meat and dairy in the coming decades “over four times that of the next fastest-growing consumer, Brazil,” according to Chatham.

So, what did the researchers hear in their interviews?

Eighty-three percent of respondents agreed that “human activities contribute to climate change.” But among believers, only one-third see the meat industry as a significant contributor. By comparison, two-thirds pointed the finger at transportation, even though “the contribution to overall emissions is almost equal between the two sectors,” says Chatham.

The Chatham poll also explored whether learning the facts would shift food choices. What they found was a clear and resounding yes in countries like Brazil,Italy, India, and France. While in the U. S., only 26 percent indicated that it would impact their choices.

It was particularly encouraging that people in Brazil and India–countries slated to see big growth in meat and dairy consumption in the coming years–showed high levels of accepting both the reality of climate change and the willingness to consider the climate in reducing meat consumption.

One reason consumer change is so key is because we’re in a major “policy vacuum” regarding this issue. The industry is largely unchecked by national regulators and absent from scrutiny in climate negotiations, the report notes. What’s more the food industry is heavily subsidized: Chatham estimates livestock subsidies in OECD countries added up to a whopping $53 billion in 2013, which has the effect of incentivizing more meat production. It also notes national governments have by and large excluded livestock from emissions reductions targets. (The U.S. is no exception: agriculture is exempt from many Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations regarding emissions).

Chatham makes a strong case that consumer action is critical, but as groups and governments consider a focus on food, there are two important caveats.

First, the messaging must be sophisticated. Cutting back on carbon-intensive foods—like feedlot beef—does no good if we don’t simultaneously talk about better choices. If you replace your burger with processed food filled with palm oil from Indonesia and high-fructose corn syrup from the chemical-intensive American cornbelt, you may have not reduced carbon “foodprint” at all.

We can also stress not all beef is created equally. Scientific literature is mixed on the relative benefits of grassfed beef versus feedlot cattle, but some recent studies suggest that grazing can offset the climate impact of pasture-raised beef, for example. Of course, this potential needs to be put in context of the planet’s carrying capacity for grassfed cattle and the simple fact that in most countries pastured beef is largely unavailable.

Second, as we focus on consumers, we must not let industry and government off the hook. Agribusiness companies driving rainforest destruction to grow animal feed need to be in the hot seat alongside energy giants like Chevron and BP, while meat producers, like Tyson and Smithfield, must also be held accountable for their climate impacts. And we should speak up to ensure that governments monitor and regulate the worst climate-change culprits in the food sector, not subsidize them.

“It’s encouraging that people in emerging economies are open to changing how they eat once they know about the meat-climate connection,” Mia MacDonald, executive director of Brighter Green, said in an email about the Chatham survey. “But in these places, policies that would create more sustainable, humane food systems—and not replicate the U.S. model—are really lacking. And agribusinesses are very powerful. As a result, people, local and global environments, and animals (both domesticated and wild) are all losing out.”

This report is an important step in raising awareness about food-sector emissions—especially important because, as Chatham notes, emissions from this sector will increase by 30 percent by 2050 if we don’t change these trends. But as we sharpen our focus on our plates, let’s keep our eyes on politics, too.

The post Dinner and Climate Change: Global Poll Shows Eaters Connecting the Dots appeared first on Civil Eats.

I met Leu in October at the IFOAM’s Organic World Congress, held this year in Istanbul, Turkey. The tri-annual event brought together nearly 1,000 farmers, scientists, processors, and other experts for an impressive, inspiring meeting of the minds. When I asked Leu who takes care of his farm while he’s on the road—about 300 days of the year—he said, “It takes care of itself, all I have to do is manage the biodiversity.”

When Leu bought his 150-acre farm 20 years ago in the Daintree region of northern Australia, the land had been degraded, the native tropical rainforest destroyed. He knew most of the property would be worth far more by returning it back to the natural primary forest, so that’s just what he did. Today, 100 acres have been returned to rainforest and he grows more than 100 different species of tropical fruit on the other 50 acres.

“Instead of a reductionist approach,” Leu told me, “we’re looking at how we can use biodiversity to help foster a productive farm.” As the forest has returned, so have keystone species like the duckbilled platypus that now calls his creeks home, the rare Victoria’s Riflebirds, Buff-breasted Paradise Kingfishers and the six foot tall, flightless Cassowary, which nest in his restored tropical rainforest and wetlands.

“They were all rare and threatened species, now they’re back and breeding,” said Leu. “I am showing we can build productive agricultural systems alongside strong, local ecosystems.”

I interview Leu recently over Skype on his way to Kazakhstan.

We’ve come a long way since advertisements in the 1950s were telling us “DDT is good for me!” Thanks in large part to Rachel Carson’s 1962 wakeup call, Silent Spring, we banned DDT in the U.S. in 1972. Are there other toxic chemicals we should be worrying about?

Most people don’t realize that the number of pesticides and the total tons used in farming have actually increased exponentially since Carson wrote Silent Spring. Bird, bee, and butterfly species continue to decline. At the same time there have been increases in huge impacts on pollinators and cancers, degenerative diseases, reproductive problems, behavioral disorders, and numerous other diseases in humans. Hundreds of scientific studies show that these are linked to pesticide and other chemical residues. Many of the new pesticides are just as pervasive as the few pesticides that have been banned; hundreds of chemical and pesticide residues can be found in the tissues of all living species, including humans. The Environmental Working Group has found as many as 232 chemicals, including pesticides, in the placental cord blood of newborn babies in the U.S. Sadly, the problem is far worse now than at any time in history.

In the U.S., many articles have come out recently reporting that studies show organic food isn’t any healthier than food grown using chemical pesticides. You have an international perspective and have your finger on the scientific pulse. What’s your response?

Consider the latest study by Newcastle University, based on a systemic review and analysis of 343 scientific papers, which found that organic foods do have significantly higher levels of beneficial antioxidants as well and lower levels of heavy metals—especially cadmium—and significantly lower residue levels of synthetic toxic pesticides.

The problem is the mainstream media doesn’t question the mantra that the current residue levels of the cocktails of chemicals and pesticides in our food are safe. They’re ignoring hundreds of published scientific studies that show that they are linked to many of the diseases and behavioral problems that are increasing today.

By 2050, we’re told we will need to feed 9 billion people and some say we’ll need high-yielding, industrial techniques to meet that global demand. Do you think organic agriculture has the potential to feed the world?

A critical area where research is showing higher yields for organic systems is in traditional smallholder farming systems. The majority of the world’s undernourished people are farmers or landless laborers who do not produce enough food or income to feed their families. Given that, the only logical way to feed the world is by increasing the production of the smallholders who produce vast majority of the world’s food. Significant yield increases can be achieved by teaching smallholder to do things like recycling organic matter, using water efficiently, and promoting biodiversity as a way to improve pest and disease control without chemicals.

All this works. In one study of 114 agricultural projects in 24 African countries covering 2 million hectares and 1.9 million farmers, organic practices increased yields from 54 to 176 percent. Meanwhile, despite the introduction of chemical agriculture in Africa, food production per person is 10 percent lower now than it was in the 1960s.

This all sounds so exciting, so possible, and yet certified organic agriculture was only practiced on 0.87 percent of the world’s farmland in 2012. Why don’t we see organic practices embraced by more farmers?

Organic is the fastest growing agricultural production system in the world, despite the fact that most governments, research universities, and institutions ignore it. One of the main reasons for the slow uptake is that research in organic systems has been largely ignored. Fifty-two billion dollars is spent annually on agriculture research worldwide, but less than 0.4 percent is spent on organic farming systems.

Compare the small yield difference achieved with trillions of dollars and thousands of researchers to what organic farmers have achieved when left largely to their own devices and I’d argue that conventional agriculture has been a very poor use of valuable funds. Also given that the new research into organic systems is starting to show very impressive increases in yields, organic agriculture is a far better use of research dollars.

Is there one place in the world that you think they’re getting organic farming right? What can the rest of us can learn from them?

In Tigray, Ethiopia, the Institute of Sustainable Development has been working with farmers to restore local ecology and learn practices like composting and using biogas digesters. Farmers in this network are re-vegetating marginal areas—like gullies, slopes, and field borders—and sustainably harvesting the biomass. This has provided a steady source of nutrients helping build soil fertility and replacing nutrients lost when crops are taken off the farm. Farmers are also learning how to plant deep-rooted legumes for nitrogen production, taller species for windbreaks, and a variety of crops to attract beneficial pests.

The farmers have also been encouraged to use seeds of their own landraces, developed over millennia to be adapted to the local climate, soils, and pests. These farmer-bred varieties produced high yields under organic conditions. The major advantage of this system is that the seeds and the compost are sourced locally at no or little cost to the farmers, whereas the seeds and synthetic chemical inputs in the conventional system have to be purchased. In just a few years, they’ve seen more than 100 percent increases in yields and higher income for farmers.

The post 5 Questions for an International Organics Expert: IFOAM’s Andre Leu appeared first on Civil Eats.

We all know the bad news—melting ice caps, rising seas, mass extinctions—but here is the good: We actually have solutions at our fingertips; we just need the political will to embrace them. New data from Cornell, Univeristy of California at Davis, and Stanford University shows that we have enough clean energy sources to power our country. The Solutions Project is using that data to help all Americas access to clean energy, across all economic, demographic, and political divides.

We also have a blueprint for how to reshape the global food system so that instead of being one of the key drivers of the climate crisis, food becomes a central solution. Embracing a “low carbon diet” can help us both reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and survive on a hotter, less predictable planet.

Consider the worst culprits of global warming and you might think of dirty coal-fired power plants or gas-guzzling SUVs. While its true that the majority of current human-produced GHGs come from the fossil fuel industry, the global food system—from agricultural land use to processing plants and food waste in landfills—contributes to as much as one third of these emissions.

Finish Your Peas, the Ice Caps are Melting

While nearly one billion go hungry every year globally, we waste as much as half of all food we produce. That’s a tragedy for the hungry; it’s also tragic for the climate. Not only are GHGs produced in the process of growing and making that food, but the landfills where much of it ends up belch methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that if food waste were a country, it would represent the world’s third largest GHG emitter, after China and the United States.

Around the world, folks are tackling the food waste problem with creative solutions. Urban Gleaners in Portland, Oregon is taking extra food going from restaurants and grocery stores and connecting it with food banks and other institutions in need. Love Food Hate Waste out of the UK has been pioneering education for reducing home and institutional food waste for years. And the Food Waste Recovery Network on U.S. college campuses has already saved more than 350,00 pounds of food since it was founded just two-and-a-half years ago.

Don’t Panic, Go Organic

Even when feeding billions, agriculture need not contribute to the climate catastrophe. One solution is to promote sustainable farming like organic agriculture that uses ecological strategies to manage weeds and pests and promote soil fertility. Organic farms use far less energy than those that rely on petroleum-based chemicals and synthetic fertilizer, which requires enormous amounts of energy to produce. In one long-term study comparing organic and non-organic corn production, the Rodale Institute found that the organic fields used 30 percent less energy. A Canadian life-cycle analysis found that organic farmers use less than half of the energy conventional ones do.

Healthy soil also retains water and withstands extreme weather events, like flooding and droughts, more effectively than soil from conventional operations. A University of Minnesota study also found that organic farms lost 41 percent less water. Rodale Institute’s long-term field trials research shows that organic farms produce much better than conventional ones in drought years, delivering yields up to one third higher. Moreover, healthy soil stores more carbon, meaning it stays out of the atmosphere. Andre Leu, from the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements, has estimated that organic agriculture practices could enable the earth’s soils to capture as much as 20 percent of current total emissions; add in agroforestry practices and that number could jump to as high as 36 percent.

Stir Your Peanut Butter

Multi-syllabic ingredients are red flags for your health, for sure, but one of them—palm oil—is a big red flag for the planet. In Indonesia and Malaysia, carbon-rich peatlands are being drained and destroyed to make way for giant palm oil plantations. Food processors’ are increasingly buying up this oil, no matter the ecological cost. And the cost is huge. One study by Rainforest Action Network (on whose board of directors I sit) found that deforestation for palm plantations in Indonesia causes 80 percent of that nation’s carbon dioxide emissions, making the country one of the world’s leading contributors to global warming.

You can now find palm oil in most processed foods, from cookies and crackers to granola bars and peanut butter. It’s cheaper than other vegetable oils and it’s often used to increase shelf life or create the right consistency. You can thank palm oil for peanut butter than doesn’t need mixing. I would guess many of us might be willing to stir our own peanut butter if we knew it meant keeping Indonesian rainforests intact.

The Meat of the Matter

The United Nations estimates that livestock production is responsible for 14.5 percent of all GHG emissions, in large part because of the deforestation driven by global demand for feed as well as the emissions from intensive animal operations. But not all livestock is equally to blame: Think of beef as the Hummer on your plate. One study looking at emissions by animal type found that sheep accounted for nine percent of global livestock-related emissions, pigs five percent, and goats only four percent; whereas beef and dairy cattle account for a combined 71 percent.

One reason is that beef is a major user of farmland: It requires about three-fifths of the world’s agricultural land for either pasture or feed, yet the production delivers less than 5 percent of the planet’s protein and less than 2 percent of global calories, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

And there’s water to consider, too. You don’t have to live in drought-stricken California to know that water will become even more precious as weather becomes weirder. And beef production is water-intensive, extremely so. Producing a pound of beef uses almost 50 times more water than a pound of vegetables; about 40 times more than potatoes and other root crops; and about nine times more than grain.

As participants in today’s climate march in New York City head home, spreading back out to Queens and Brooklyn and across the country, they’ll take with them the knowledge that these moments of popular expression are key to sparking real change in the halls of Congress and the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies.

But whether we take to the streets or not, we can all take action in our own communities—and our own kitchens.

The post March Today, Eat a Low-Carbon Diet Tomorrow appeared first on Civil Eats.

So should we be stockpiling Chef Boyardee and plowing down forests for farms to forestall famine? Not so fast. The climate crisis will indeed have colossal consequences to agricultural yields, as the IPCC documents in the report. Continuing on the current path, we could see an average of two percent productivity declines over each of the coming decades, with some developing countries experiencing much steeper declines.

But these stark predictions need not result in more hunger. In fact, they can also be the wake-up call we need to make “climate-smart” food decisions. And for once there is some good news in the story of global warming: We already have a solution. We know how to grow food in ways that cuts emissions, creates more resilient landscapes, and ensures ample yields, all while reducing the use of non-renewable resources, fossil fuels, and land. And we know how to get more nutrition from what we’re already producing. Does this sound too good to be true? It’s not.

Here are four climate-smart food strategies:

1. Reduce food waste. Globally, we’re wasting as much as 30 percent of all food that could be eaten. In the United States, Dana Gunders at the Natural Resources Defense Council estimates the figure is as high as 40 percent. Food waste is often the single largest component of municipal solid waste, making it a major source of methane emissions methane, a greenhouse gas (GHG) with 21 times the heat-trapping capacity of carbon dioxide. Indeed, if food waste were a country, it would rank as the world’s third worst GHG emitter, says the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Just think about all the energy and resources wasted in producing food that doesn’t even make it to our bellies! When we hear dire predictions about agricultural yield declines, consider the calories we could unleash, if only we didn’t waste so much food.

2. Guard the soil. Across the planet, ecosystems on the land—soils, forests, prairies—absorb about one third of the greenhouse gases humans emit each year. Though protecting forests is often presented as a frontline strategy to reduce emissions, soil stores even more carbon than our forests. Healthy soils, therefore, are essential in absorbing already emitted carbon dioxide. What’s more, industrial agriculture practices now going global—including synthetic fertilizer, monocropping, chemical use, and tillage—destroy soil carbon, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Much of the farmland across our Midwest that had levels of 20 percent carbon as recently as the 1950s, now contain only one or two percent, according to the Pennsylvania-based Rodale Institute.

Prairies in the United States are also being lost and once those acres—carbon-rich homes for grasses, forbs, and sedges—are destroyed “they are virtually impossible to bring back,” writes Jocelyn Zuckerman in The American Prospect. So what can be done? The Environmental Working Group estimates that 97 percent of soil loss is preventable with the most basic conservation measures. We also know that organic farming works: In the longest-running side-by-side trial of organic and chemical farming systems, the Rodale Institute found that over more than two decades organic practices increased soil carbon 30 percent, while the “petroleum-based system showed no significant increase in soil carbon in the same time period.”

3. Protect the oceans. Keeping oceans healthy is key to food security. After all, the majority of people in developing countries rely on fish for at least one third of their daily protein. But the IPCC reports that increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide will exacerbate ocean acidification, as carbon dioxide is increasingly absorbed in oceans, increasing acidity and disrupting aquatic ecosystems. While climate change jeopardizes this key source of human nutrition, we can tackle the other main stress for aquatic ecosystems: Dead zones. Numbering more than 400 around the globe, dead zones are created by an increase in nutrients, especially phosphorus and nitrogen runoff from industrial farms and livestock operations.

This nutrient spike triggers algal blooms that, when they die and decompose, draw oxygen from oceans, creating a “dead zone” no longer inhabitable by most aquatic life. Without dramatically changing American farm production, we could reduce this harm to our oceans: In a typical season, only 30 to 50 percent of nitrogen applied is absorbed by crops; the rest is lost as leaching or runoff, ending up in rivers and oceans. (Poorly managed soils also lose nitrogen to the atmosphere, another source of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide, with 310 times the heat-trapping potential of carbon dioxide).

Incentivizing the precision use of synthetic fertilizer would reduce runoff, while at the same time decreasing a major on-farm source of greenhouse gas emissions: fertilizer use and production. In the long run, we can also further incentivize transitioning to organic farming, supporting farmers who use ecological, renewable sources of fertility, like planting nitrogen-fixing legumes.

4. Grow (and eat) food, real food. Take a look at all the corn planted in the United States in 2013, 87 million acres of it, and you’ll find only 1.8 percent was eaten, as cereals or food. The rest was grown for feedlots, ethanol plants, or industrial products. We’re wasting farmland—often prime farmland—to grow crops that we don’t consume, or eat directly. Climate-smart food means using land for real food. I know that may not seem like an earth-shattering idea, but it is. Consider palm oil, the most widely traded vegetable oil in the world. Today, precious carbon-rich peatlands in Indonesia and Malaysia are being destroyed for oil palm plantations, producing a product that ends up in the gas tanks of cars in Europe or in processed foods to enhance shelf life, improve texture or, like in peanut butter, to bind ingredients. I don’t know about you, but I’m willing to stir my own peanut butter, if it means slowing the climate crisis.

These are just four of the many climate-smart steps we can take today, without waiting on global emissions reduction commitments or breakthroughs in energy innovation. I don’t want to downplay the challenges in implementing these steps, especially on the scale needed; but I do want to stress how doable these strategies are. Already, many governments are starting to catch on with support from international agencies like the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

If we absorb the fear mongering of the neo-Malthusians, however, we could find ourselves blindly adhering to pseudo-food security solutions focused on bumping up yield, without fully grasping the complexity of food system change. As the outgoing U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food wrote in his final report [PDF] in March:

Any prescription to increase yields that ignores the need to transition to sustainable production and consumption, and to reduce rural poverty, will not only be incomplete; it may also have damaging impacts, worsening the ecological crisis and widening the gap between different categories of food producers.

With the IPCC’s latest warnings ringing in our ears, we now have no excuse but to alert our elected leaders—from mayors to governors to heads of states—that the time for climate-smart food is now. If we don’t, we might be hearing Malthus’s name again in 50 years. But by then it will be for real.

The post Don’t Panic, Go Organic: The IPCC Report Should be a Wakeup Call for Climate-Smart Food appeared first on Civil Eats.

I launched the Contest last year along with a coalition of amazing food and farming organizations—from Real Food Challenge to Sustainable Table to the Food Chain Workers Alliance—to create a platform for creative new voices to share the untold stories of our food system: The good, the bad, and the exquisite.

With some fabulous advisers, we took on the arduous task of pairing down 156 films to 10 finalists. Now, we’re calling on you—the voting public—to weigh in on a “People’s Choice” Award at RealFoodMedia.org. Judges from the food and film industry–including Michael Pollan, Padma Lakshmi, and Alice Waters–will then cast their votes for the top three films by March 2nd and all the winners will be announced on March 4, 2014.

It’s no surprise to me that the national interest in our food system has spiked to unprecedented levels, but I would have never guessed we’d get such a great response to our first call for entries. The films range in topic from the crisis in commercial beekeeping to the success of an urban gardening program in the South Bronx, and they prove just how hungry young filmmakers and community advocates are for a deeper exploration of our food. The archive of over 150 short films may be one of the largest ever created in service of the Good Food Movement.

Here’s are three films to whet your appetite:

Hands in the Orchestra

Go behind the scenes in San Francisco restaurant kitchens in this rocking short about the hands that feed us.

The Berry Picker

A college student in Oregon spends her summers picking berries with her parents.

Reaping the Whirlwind

The Dust Bowl is not just a chapter in U.S. history books. This short doc talks about why we could face another Dust Bowl and what we can do about it.

Now head on over to RealFoodMedia.org to watch the rest of the films and cast your vote. While you’re there, you’ll also find materials to help you host screening parties and spread the word on social media.

The post Fixing Food In Four Minutes or Less: Short Films to Watch (and Vote on) Right Now appeared first on Civil Eats.

After meandering about in the woods for the past six months, Johnson, who positions himself as open and searching on this issue, says he’s come to this conclusion: “The most astonishing thing about the vicious public brawl over GMOs is that the stakes are so low.”

Imagine two alternate futures, he writes, “one in which genetically modified food has been utterly banned, and another in which all resistance to genetic engineering has ceased. In other words, imagine what would happen if either side ‘won’ the debate.” In both cases, he says, not much would really change at all. “The point is that even if you win, the payoff is relatively small in the broad scheme of things. Really, why do so many people care?”

Well, a lot of people care for good reason. In Johnson’s attempt at a clever journalistic gesture, his thought experiment misses the heart of what many of the people I’ve met and interviewed over the past 12 years are not just against, when it comes to GE crops, but what they’re for.

What they’re fighting for is a kind of sustainable agriculture that is gaining an international consensus of support from reports by the National Academies of Press to the United Nations Committee on Trade and Development to the clumsily named, but hugely important, International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD).

What’s become abundantly clear is that there are at least seven things we need to get right in agriculture, right now. We need to:

• Reduce reliance on fossil fuels in agriculture;
• Conserve water in agriculture systems;
• Free ourselves from dependence on chemicals, especially those most toxic to humans and wildlife;
• Promote on-farm resilience to climate change;
• Protect biodiversity and the food security it engenders;
• Limit the expansion of confinement livestock operations; and
• Support farmers to learn practices for productivity that don’t come at the high, and rising, cost of inputs such as chemicals, seeds, or technology fees to chemical companies, especially Monsanto.

Like most, you’re probably not an expert on agricultural systems, but you’re still likely nodding, yes: Less oil, less wasted water, less chemicals, and more food? Sign me up!

This is not just me saying this. The sense of urgency around meeting these seven needs is a growing consensus among top agricultural researchers around the world, like those 400 experts who spent four years developing the IAASTD report, endorsed by over 60 governments from across Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America.

We care so much about genetic engineering because the technology sends us in exactly the opposite direction of where global consensus says we need to head. (Excellent reporting by Tom Philpott at Mother Jones, formerly of Grist, has reminded us of this, time and time again.)

The GMO technology commercialized to date has not reduced fossil fuel use or chemical and water dependency. At the same time, it’s decreased biodiversity and entrenched farmer dependence on purchased inputs. What’s more, the technology, with its focus on commodity crops like corn and soy largely for feed in factory farms, spurs the confinement model of animal agriculture, with terrible implications for the climate and our health.

The evidence-based IAASTD report confirms the disappointing “contributions” of the technology, while noting that to date the technology’s main beneficiaries have been its corporate manufacturers, rather than resource-limited farmers struggling to feed their communities.

Let’s also remember why proceeding with caution is just plain smart: Not just because we’re talking about our food supply—kinda important, people—but also because we should learn from history. Monsanto and Dow, two of the biggest producers of GMOs, are chemical companies with long histories of failures to protect human and ecosystem health—with tragic consequences.

Consider Monsanto and Dow’s chemical 2,4-D used in an herbicide concoction called Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, which caused untold cancers, birth defects, and other serious illnesses among Vietnamese and veterans. (And the companies are now pushing the chemical again through corn and soybean seeds engineered to be resistant to, and therefore used with, 2,4-D.)

Perhaps my biggest concern about this technology—and a concern that Johnson plays right into—is that it is a grand distraction of time, money, and resources away from the kind of technologies we could be developing for truly sustainable food production. (Remember those seven things we need to do right now?) Even the fact that I’m sitting here writing, once again, about why I’m no fan of GMOs or the companies pushing them, is itself a distraction from focusing on the solutions at hand.

Over the past decade, I’ve learned a lot about the intersections of climate change, food security, and agriculture and what’s been most exciting is to learn that we have so many of the answers for feeding the future in the incredible innovations of agroecology.

Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, senior scientist at Pesticide Action Network and a co-author on the IAASTD report, describes these solutions as practices that “blend indigenous knowledge with the latest research findings produced by farmers and scientists and offer a vibrant and sustainable way forward for the planet.”

Studies from the Global South (like the case studies in this UK-commissioned report) are showing fabulous results in yield and nutritional content from agroecological practices, without the risks and costs of the current crop of commercialized GMOs. Studies from Europe are showing that agroecological practices can yield comparable harvests, or even better, than conventional farming, while promoting biodiversity, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and fossil fuel use.

All this despite agroecological practices getting just a sliver of the funding that goes toward chemical agriculture and genetic engineering, which is one reason IAASTD authors highlight the importance of governments increasing investments in and policy supports for agroecology.

Ishii-Eiteman has written extensively about the emergence of these really exciting results from agroecology. As she says, “farmers and scientists around the world are co-creating the ecologically and economically resilient farming solutions we so urgently need to meet the pressing climate, water, environmental and energy challenges of the 21st Century.

Conventional farmers from India to Iowa are gradually abandoning pesticide-intensive GE agriculture and transitioning to non-GE, while many more farmers around the world are already adopting highly sophisticated, biodiverse ecological farming systems to meet not only basic survival needs, but also the multifaceted priorities of their communities.”

Johnson says that “genetic engineering is just one tool in the tinkerer’s belt,” but as long as the funding for alternative tools in that toolbox is so limited, and the consolidation of power in the food system is so great, we won’t get the support for real innovation where we need it.

To paraphrase one of my favorite New York City mayoral candidates: The stakes are too damn high. Sadly, one of the few online outlets dedicated to reporting on the environmental crisis and how we can respond to it–in our cities, homes, and our farm fields–has just helped confuse one of the most important questions of our time.

Grist likes to say it’s a beacon in the smog. When it comes to Johnson’s reporting on genetic engineering in agriculture, I’m sure missing that beacon.

The post Grist’s Coverage on GMOs: What’s Really at Stake appeared first on Civil Eats.

In 1993, six farmworkers gathered in a local Catholic church in Immokalee, Florida, two hours northwest of Miami. Seated in a circle of folding chairs, they began to recount the human rights abuses they had suffered and witnessed while working in the tomato fields of Florida.

One of the farmworkers produced a nondescript booklet and began to read from the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, a set of basic human rights that the nascent Coalition of Immokalee Workers would look towards when designing their own Code of Conduct to end the abuses faced by farmworkers.