As a veteran urban farmer, I often get questions from friends and family about backyard gardening. So it wasn’t a surprise when my buddy Martin texted me with some questions for how to get a vegetable scene started. “Is it OK to start tomatoes outside now? Or better to start indoors?”

Martin is a chef—a longtime fixture of the Bay Area’s food-to-table scene—and with his restaurant closed, he has time on his hands, some of which he’s using to make sure he keeps his family well fed. He told me that he has 10 pounds of rice and 15 pounds of split red lentils socked away (just in case) and thought he should also begin a little home-scale food production. Nothing unusual, he said—just tomatoes and squash, beans along with some herbs. “I’m trying to ride the line between being prepared and being a prepper,” he told me.

Martin isn’t alone in his sudden enthusiasm for backyard food production. As the crisis of the pandemic settles into the new normal, many people have pivoted from panic buying to what’s being called “panic planting,” and seed companies are reporting an unprecedented surge in demand from home gardeners. Poultry-raising operations and feed stores are experiencing such a spike in interest for laying hens that they are nearly running out of young chicks. As Katie Brimm wrote recently for Civil Eats, “We may be on the verge of a resurgence of World War II-style ‘Victory Gardens.’”

Searching for a silver lining to a deadly pandemic is dangerous business. But it seems to me that among the other encouraging signs to come out of this crisis—the countless examples of selfless service, generosity toward others, and mutual aid—the renewed interest in local food production and home gardening represents one positive consequence of this waking nightmare.

The pandemic is forcing people to think hard—and to feel deeply—about their connection to food. There’s nothing like the sight of stripped grocery store shelves to focus people’s attention on where their food comes from. This explosion of interest in food production can help create a new cultural landscape for long-term community and ecological resilience once the pandemic has passed. And it couldn’t have come soon enough.

For the past 15 years, I’ve been both a chronicler of and a partisan for the sustainable food movement. As a journalist, I have written about food safety regulations, local food systems, and the benefits (and limitations) of organic certification. In 2005, I co-founded a nonprofit educational garden and orchard called Alemany Farm along with some guerilla gardeners, public housing residents, and community activists.

Today, Alemany Farm is the largest urban farm in San Francisco—a 3.5-acre smidgen of soil tucked between 8 lanes of Highway 280 and a public housing complex. Every year, we grow more than 25,000 pounds of organic fruits and vegetables, all of which we give away for free while educating thousands of people annually in the basics of regenerative agriculture.

Farming at Alemany Farm, pre-pandemic. (Photo by Jason Mark)

My belief in the importance of urban agriculture as a social, cultural, and ecological good is as strong as it was when I first planted my spade at Alemany. I’ll admit, though, that in the last couple of years, I’ve begun to experience doubts about the long-term sustainability of the sustainable food movement. The momentum has stalled.

Despite the best efforts of “ag-tivists,” it has proven impossible (so far, at least) to reform the perversities of a federal agricultural policy that sustains an unhealthful and even deadly American food system. Many beginning farmers have found their dreams dashed on the hard realities of exorbitant land values and insultingly low prices for their product; there have been whispers that we are in the midst of “a second farm crisis” like the one that wiped out many family farmers in the 1980s. A lack of critical infrastructure continues to bedevil the efforts to establish more regionalized food systems. Those of us in the nonprofit farm education sector saw philanthropies’ interests move to other issues.

The movement suffered sustained, small-arms fire from journalists and academics who argue that school gardens and urban farms are nothing more than a privileged affectation. And while it’s true that the sale of organic foods continues to skyrocket, the food sovereignty movement remains far from its goal of transforming chemically intensive agriculture and addressing the poverty that grips farm owner-operators as well as farm laborers.

Now, the world has been turned upside down, and the winter of doubt has turned into a spring of guarded hope among food sovereignty activists.

The pandemic has allowed people to see the world with fresh eyes. It’s as if the casing on the machinery of society has been opened up and, with a jolt, afforded us the opportunity to inspect the inner workings of things. Among other revelations, the pandemic has also illustrated the fragility of our food system.

We’re entering a spring of guarded hope among food sovereignty activists.

The waves of panic buying and hoarding prove how totally dependent we are on global chains of production and distribution, one that is sustained largely by people of color who are putting themselves especially at risk to keep the rest of us fed. It has also revealed a society-wide gut feeling that such a system might not be all that dependable: If people were confident there would be plenty of rice and pasta tomorrow, there wouldn’t be any need to squirrel away staples today.

No wonder people are finding a solace in reconnecting to their food via backyard planting. To feel grounded, folks are getting their hands in the dirt.

During the past week, I’ve been talking with other urban farmers and food sovereignty activists here in California, and in conversation after conversation I’ve heard many of the same things: A sense of gratification that mainstream society is finally heeding their calls for local and regional food systems, combined with a worry that, once the pandemic passes, people will abandon the newfound interest in where their food comes from.

“This is our 15th anniversary, and for 15 years we’ve been telling people, ‘In times of crisis, we need to grow our own food.’ Well, here we are,” Doria Robinson, the founder of Urban Tilth in the Bay Area industrial city of Richmond told me. Urban Tilth operates a three-acre farm along with seven smaller community gardens, and employs mostly local youth of color to grow and distribute the crops.

Before the pandemic hit, the organization had about 50 members in its community supported agriculture (CSA) program. In the last few weeks, the number of CSA members has more than tripled to 170. “Having a local source of some portion of your food just seems like a no-brainer, as opposed to depending on really long supply lines and food coming from way, way, way away.”

Urban Tilth, pre-pandemic. (Photo courtesy of Urban Tilth)

For Robinson, the pandemic’s effects on her staff have been just as profound as the effects on her customers. Urban Tilth’s youth workers, Robinson told me, are experiencing a newfound sense of pride and importance in their work; their efforts, city and county officials agree, are quite literally essential.

“In this moment, [Urban Tilth’s youth workers] are stepping up like no one else,” Robinson said. “They are getting food to families every week. And they are hearing that all the work they have been doing matters. They’re saying, ‘I’m going to be a farmer in the ‘hood, and that matters, it really matters.’”

Ron Finley, the self-described “gangsta gardener” of South-Central Los Angeles, expressed something similar to me. Since his 2013 Ted Talk went viral, Finley has traveled the world like a sort of Paul Revere of the food sovereignty movement—and he says this moment of crisis is finally bringing home the message he’s been spreading for years.

“We are in this dire, hoarding, oh-my-God, the sky-is-falling, the world-is-ending mode, when we really don’t have to be,” said Finley, who has been keeping himself busy tending his home garden and his public garden at the corner of Exposition and Chesapeake in L.A. since he started sheltering in place on March 11. “It’s like, are you listening now? You can’t eat fucking diamonds. You can’t eat money. People have been valuing all of this dumb shit, and now they see how valuable food is. [The pandemic] has hit a values-system reset button.”

Ron Finley working in his urban farm. (Photo CC-licensed by the U.S. Embassy on Flickr)

Debbie Harris, a longtime organic grower who is now the farm manager at Urban Adamah, a two-acre urban farm in Berkeley inspired by Jewish ideals of service, agreed. “More than anything, this [new interest in food and farming] isn’t intellectual, it’s about connection,” she told me. “That’s the basis of a transformed food system, transformed planet, transformed way of living. People are catalyzed on an emotional and personal level. Right now, people are being forced to think about how their food is grown and who their neighbors are.”

But Harris also worries that this passion for local foods might evaporate once life returns to the status quo. “I feel that once COVID is over, I fear people won’t have the same fire to get involved in their community farm or to reform our food systems. Because we have so much amnesia as a culture, because of the privileges that late capitalism has afforded us.

It’s a concern shared by Finley and Robinson. “How long until we go back to how it was, with kids killing other kids over tennis shoes?” Finley wondered. Robinson told me: “People have that amnesia and [some of them] will go back to In N Out Burger, or whatever.” And still, she holds onto a measure of hope that some of this beneficial change might hold. “When people get introduced to [gardening], they start to crave it. So I actually feel like a lot of folks who are being introduced to us right now, and they will stay planted on the ground. Not all of them, but some of them.”

Will this emergency-fueled reaction deepen into a lasting way of life, or will people cast aside their gardens as relics of the germ-times? That is just one of the questions society will face as we come out of this dangerous moment. As Arundhati Roy wrote in a recent commentary for the Financial Times, the pandemic “is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world.”

I am cautiously optimistic that backyard food production may sink down roots in that other world. I’d like to imagine, as Doria Robinson does, that once people get a taste of gardening and come to know their farmers, some significant portion of them won’t want to return to “normal.”

Not because backyard food production is an exercise in “living simply”—a home-scale back-to-the-land effort, as it were—but because it’s an example of living more resiliently. The habits of mind taught by home food production will prove themselves valuable long after this crisis passes (as it will), when we find ourselves confronted by climate change and other crises (as we will).

For one thing, to be a home gardener creates a routine of attentiveness toward the natural world, if only because a gardener must become, by necessity, a meteorologist, hydrologist, soil scientist, and entomologist. This kind of attention to more-than-human nature is a necessity if we are to navigate this hot and crowded century with as few regrets as possible.

Bonds we develop through community gardening are what we need—and will continue to need—to get through tough times together.

Community gardening and backyard food cultivation also create bonds between neighbors. At the very least, you need others to help you eat all of those beans and summer squash you’re going to be growing; at the very best, you find yourself relying on your community to share seeds and starts, gardening dos and don’ts. Such bonds are what we need—and will continue to need—to get through tough times together.

And, finally, I think that the plain physicality of gardening might help rebalance our lives away from the virtual and toward the real. As Ron Finley said, you can’t eat diamonds—and you can’t eat ones and zeroes, either. When you wring your sustenance out of the soil, you can’t help but understand that all life on land, the entirety of human civilization, depends on nothing more than the thin epidermis of the earth.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve seen some of this in action. My next-door neighbor, Josie, is normally a flower grower, but this spring she’s putting in a vast new vegetable garden. Our neighbor to the north, Brad, is doubling the size of his garden and building a hops trellis to fuel his home brewing hobby. They’ve been exchanging vegetable starts, and they decided to go in together on a bulk delivery of top soil. The whole thing has the feel of an old-fashioned barn-raising—just with everybody dancing around each other at six feet apart.

The scene of communal crop growing on my little block gives me hope: a popular passion for food sovereignty might just be one unlooked-for harvest to come from this awful scourge.

The post The Rebirth of Urban Ag is a Coronavirus Silver Lining appeared first on Civil Eats.

“My compost rates more than doubled–from $225 per month to $460 per month. That’s huge, it’s really huge,” Lillian told me. “When I suddenly have to spend almost $3,000 more [annually] for compost, for a service I was already happy with, that is really hard to swallow. I don’t know where to come up with that.”

So Lillian and other Oakland restaurant owners decided to push back. She organized a press conference on the steps of city hall denouncing the rate increases and complaining that the new fees create a disincentive for businesses to compost. Some businesses–notably Luka’s Taproom & Lounge, a downtown Oakland institution that says its monthly composting fee has gone up by $700–say they have stopped composting altogether. Oakland landlords and residents are also upset as some multi-unit apartment buildings in the city experience increases of almost 200 percent on their trash and composting bills, along with an increase for recycling services.

The backlash from Lillian and others has sparked something of a political firestorm in the city of 400,000 people located across the bay from San Francisco. Two weeks ago the city council convened a special meeting to address residents’ and businesses’ concerns–a meeting that gave locals a chance to vent, but resulted in no action from the council other than a directive to city staff to examine how the rates can be restructured. As Oakland city staff tries to figure out how to diffuse the controversy, local media coverage has focused on whether elected officials understood that the new deal with trash giant Waste Management, Inc. would–as the contract stated quite clearly–lead to a jump in trash and compost fees.

“Yes, I should have checked their math,” Oakland City Councilwoman Rebecca Kaplan told the San Francisco Chronicle, “But I shouldn’t have to check their math.” For her part, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf has promised to work with Waste Management to “find a thoughtful resolution.”

To an outsider, the whole thing might sound trés Bay Area–a tempest in a green bin, as it were. But the stakes involved in this compost kerfuffle are much bigger than they might seem. The Bay Area has long been a national leader in waste reduction. Berkeley was the first city to launch curbside recycling, and San Francisco is on track to be the nation’s first zero-waste city, having reached an 80 percent diversion rate in 2012. Alameda County–which includes the cities of Oakland and Berkeley–has an ambitious plan to ensure that, by 2020, less than 10 percent of what winds up in the county’s landfills is readily recyclable or compostable. What happens in the San Francisco Bay Area in terms of trash, compost, and recycling has an influence far beyond the region.

The Oakland compost controversy, then, is so important because it illustrates the economic and political challenges of reaching a zero-waste goal. If we want to reduce our environmental footprint by recycling and composting more while throwing away less, someone is going to have to pay for such services. And that “someone,” waste industry experts agree, is probably going to be you.

There’s No Such Thing as Free Lunch Leftovers Disposal

People involved in the Bay Area’s waste management sector universally acknowledge that the sharp increases in the trash and compost fees in Oakland are a tough pill to swallow.

“We recognize–and share–the concerns [about the higher rates],” Sean Maher, the City of Oakland’s Zero Waste Outreach Program spokesperson, told me.  “We started hearing the restaurant community’s displeasure with the composting rates being higher than the trash rates. Everyone at the table recognizes that’s a problem.”

At the same time, trash disposal insiders say the new, (relatively) high composting fees facing Oakland businesses and residents reflect the true cost of providing the service. And, more to the point, it was inevitable that those fees would eventually have to rise–just as they eventually will rise for communities nationwide.

In part this has to do with the specifics of Oakland’s situation. The last time the city negotiated a citywide garbage contract was in 1995. When the 15-year contract expired in 2010, city officials decided to extend the old rates. The country was in the grip the Great Recession, and officials didn’t think ratepayers could handle an increase in garbage fees. “We had had small, incremental increases,” during those 20 years, city spokesman Maher says, “but nothing that kept pace with the costs of the service. As a matter of necessity the rates were going to go up.”

But the fee increases sending shockwaves through Oakland are also connected to long-term, structural imbalances in the garbage disposal sector. For the last couple of decades, waste experts say, recycling and composting fees have been kept artificially low to encourage residents and business to sort their trash into separate bins. Customers have not paid the real costs of turning kitchen scraps into agricultural soil or of transforming cardboard into recycled paper cups.

“The way things were arranged back in the day was to incentivize recycling,” says Amy Kiser of the Berkeley Ecology Center, which pioneered curbside recycling starting in 1973. “So the smaller your trash can was, the more you were recycling, and you’d pay less with a smaller can … That inadvertently made people think that recycling was free. And the same thing is now happening with composting. People think that you shouldn’t have to pay for it, even though the logistics of picking up your [green waste] and taking it someplace is still costly.”

For a while the “pay-as-you-throw” system worked as trash fees subsidized low recycling and composting fees. But as trash diversion rates have increased, the system has become economically unviable. In communities that have been composting and recycling for years, there’s not enough trash disposal to prop up composting and recycling. The economics are further complicated by the fact that, while hauling and dumping trash is relatively cheap and easy, recycling and composting are complicated and expensive.

In a sense, waste diversion in environmentally progressive places like Berkeley and Oakland has become a victim of its own success. The more green waste people put into their compost bin and the more paper, glass, and plastic they put into the recycle bin, the less trash there is to cover the costs of those services. But then when people are asked to pay those services, it leads to a populist revolt.

Asked if she thought whether her businesses should pay the true costs of composting and recycling, Gail Lillian of Liba Falafel said, “Yeah, I can see that.” Then she quickly added: “But the rates are so out of whack right now, that basing that rate structure off of the actual dollar cost that we have right now doesn’t make any sense.”

Lillian’s resistance points to a quirk of environmental social psychology: People think they should be rewarded for doing the planet a favor. So shouldn’t trash disposal be more expensive than recycling and composting? Normally, environmental economics would say Yes. Gas taxes or proposed carbon taxes are an obvious example: You should pay more to pollute.

But waste experts say that, in this case, we need to view the situation differently–doing Earth a favor is actually going to cost us something. Which is to say: There’s no such thing as free lunch leftovers disposal.

The Fingerprint of Big Trash

So far, much of the local media narrative has depicted this as a story of a feckless city council that failed to read the fine print of a major contract after being bullied into a bad deal by a giant, out-of-state corporation. The corporation in this case is Waste Management, Inc.

Waste Management is the largest waste disposal company in the world, and has distinguished itself by its ruthless pursuit of increased marketshare. The company manages 399 collection operations and close to 250 landfills, which consume roughly 97 million tons of waste annually. Last year the Houston-based company grossed around $14 billion. You’ve heard of Big Oil and Big Auto? Well, you can think of Waste Management as “Big Trash.” The company is the unrivaled king of the garbage disposal sector.

The company’s twin-fisted tactics were on display in Oakland last August, when the now-controversial garbage contract went before the city council. At first, the city council awarded the contract to a local company called California Waste Solutions. Waste Management quickly sued the city and at the same time began collecting signatures for a ballot measure that would overturn the decision. In the face of this onslaught, the city council backed down, and awarded the garbage contract to Waste Management just five weeks after the lawsuit was filed.

This kind of pugilism seems to come easily to the company. Last month, for example, Waste Management filed a similar lawsuit against the City and County of San Francisco. The company contends that a $130 million waste disposal contract signed with local trash hauler Recology “betrayed the city’s obligation to the competitive procurement process.” Waste Management is so well known for its intimidation of critics that some people would only speak off-the-record when discussing the company.

“Waste Management’s business model is landfilling,” said one industry veteran with more than 30 years of experience in the field, who insisted on anonymity. “Waste Management is making a lot of money on landfills because you don’t employ a lot of people there. But in a recycling plant, you have to employ a lot people. So they make their bigger margins on landfill.”

According to this point of view, the problems in Oakland stem from Waste Management’s lack of enthusiasm for trash diversion in general. The company’s CEO, David Steiner, was recently featured in a Washington Post story  focused on the declining state of the recycling industry. The company has shuttered 10 percent of its recycling facilities in recent months, and Steiner told the Post: “We won’t stay in the [recycling] industry if we can’t make a profit.”

But the company’s critics say that is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Waste Management, they argue, has created a business model that is reliant on dumping trash–not diverting it. According to a March slideshow prepared for Wall Street investors, the company earns twice as much revenue from landfills as it does from recycling operations.

Martin Bourque, executive director of the Berkeley Ecology Center, which manages that city’s recycling program, told me: “This is what happens when publicly traded garbage monoliths control the waste stream. Waste Management is a garbage company first and foremost. Composting … is bad for their business model.”

Waste Management disputes that charge.

“We are committed to the city’s zero waste goals,” says Karen Stern, a Waste Management spokeswoman. “We wouldn’t have bid on this contract if we weren’t committed to Oakland’s goals of diversion.”

How (Not) to Make a Buck in Trash Collection

Given Waste Management’s history of labor disputes, illegal accounting practices, and intimidation of municipal governments, it can be easy to view the company as the villain here. But that may be too simplistic an analysis. By prioritizing cheap landfilling over expensive composting and recycling, Waste Management is just being a rational market actor, seeking to make the most bang for its buck. In that sense, the garbage and compost controversy in Oakland follows a script that is all-too-familiar to environmental activists: Solid waste is yet another sector of the economy (like fossil fuel burning, like the production of useful yet deadly chemicals) in which free market accounting fails to include a host of hidden costs while also neglecting environmental benefits.

According to the U.S. EPA, solid waste landfills are the third-largest source of human-related emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas that is about 50 times more heat-trapping than carbon dioxide. Those significant GHG emissions have a real impact on society by speeding up global warming–but they aren’t counted for in the market arithmetic.

On the other side of the ledger, taking food and yard scraps and processing them into compost is a benefit to society, as compost is an important ingredient of healthy soils, and healthy soils have been proven to help capture and store CO2. And yet compost-making is a kind of loss-leader for garbage hauling companies, or a break-even proposition at best. You can’t sell dirt for a lot of money, the industry veteran who spoke on condition of anonymity reminded me.

For the market to recognize that true value of these services there would need to be a systemic change that would require a whole new economic paradigm. In the absence of such sweeping reform, the best strategy may be to convince residents and business owners that recycling and composting are valuable services for which they should be willing to pay the full cost.

Ruth Abbe–who has worked as a recycling consultant for more than 25 years and serves on the Zero Waste Committee of the Bay Chapter of the Sierra Club–says that the level of service that most Bay Area residents receive for compost and recycling pick-up is quite extraordinary, and that people should appreciate the value of what they are getting. “Even though you are paying more than you paid last year, you are getting weekly collection of compost and recycling – every week,” she says. “ It’s much lower than your cable bill. It’s much lower than your gas bill.”

Making Sure the Price Is Right

There’s a sort of economic Gordian Knot at work here. If the rates charged for compost and recycling pickup and processing are too low, then the garbage hauling companies will have few long-term incentives for sustaining the practice. But if the rates reflect the actual cost of doing business–making recycling and composting more expensive than tossing things in the garbage can–then businesses and residents will have few incentives to do what’s best for the environment. So, how to cut this knot?

The short answer: divorce incentives from both sides of the equation; mandate that waste haulers and residents compost and recycle; and provide a way for the garbage companies to turn a profit.

Sounds wonky, but some cities are already making it happen. Recycling consultant Ruth Abbe says that the cities of Palo Alto, California, Napa, California, and Seattle, Washington, have all put in place systems that guarantee the trash haulers a steady profit while charging retails and commercial customers reasonable rates.

“In a zero-waste world, I would like to see rates [for customers] and compensation [for haulers] de-linked,” Abbe says. “The way it works is that a city sets the rates, and then they essentially pay their service provider a monthly fee for both commercial and residential collection, for the infrastructure of the whole system. All the routes, all the drivers. The costs are not unit-based. The costs are spread out over the whole route, or the whole city. It separates the service provider from the decisions of the customers. ”

But such a system still involves its own tricky politics. “It’s the responsibility of the city to ensure that they raise enough money to pay the compensation,” Abbe says. “You can see why a city council might be reluctant to get involved in that.”

Indeed, you can. All you have to do is look at the mess in Oakland right now.

Ultimately, there’s no getting around the fact that it’s expensive to have someone come to your house and cart away your crap. “The collection still costs more than the value of the materials,” Martin Borque of the Ecology Center says. Achieving the zero-waste goals many cities have set for themselves will require putting new emphasis on the first R on the three-R icon: That is, before reusing and recycling, it’s important to reduce consumption.

As Borque put it to me: “Eventually we have to realize that we want to waste less, not just recycle more.”

A longer version of this story originally ran in Earth Island Journal.

Photo credits: Photo of green bins by Ariel Dovas via Flickr; composting facility by Marc on Flickr; Oakland waste management truck by Mike Linksvayer on Flickr; Berkeley bins by John Lambert Pearson on Flickr; San Francisco Municipal Waste Transfer Station by Todd Lappin via Flickr.

The post Tempest in a Green Bin appeared first on Civil Eats.

Food system reformers look to be 0-for-2 in their efforts to require GMO labeling, having lost a similar referendum last year in California. A defeat in Washington would force “good food” activists to step back and reevaluate their strategies for creating a more transparent food system. Among other takeaways from the latest food fight, it seems to me there is a key lesson embedded in the 522 experience: If you want GMO labeling, then find a way to drive a wedge between Big Food and Big Ag.

Figures via Maplight. Follow image link to a larger version.

Like California’s GMO labeling measure that was on the ballot last year, the fight over Washington’s 522 was characterized by massive campaign spending. According to figures compiled by the watchdog group Maplight, supporters and opponents of the initiative raised close to $30 million to fund their efforts, making the 522 campaign the most expensive ballot initiative in the Washington’s history. Most of that money poured in from out-of-state, as partisans on both sides turned Washington into a proxy battleground for the larger contest over the kind of food we eat, and how much we know about that food. Not surprisingly, the industrial food interests vastly outspent (and therefore out-advertised) the folks fighting for greater food transparency. Dr. Bronner’s, the Organic Consumer Association and fellow travelers raised $7.7 million in support of GMO labeling, while Monsanto, DuPont and others raised almost three times as much, about $22 million, to defeat the measure.

The important story here revolves around who, exactly, gave to the GMO-labeling opposition. Along with Monsanto and DuPont, some of the top donors to the “NO” campaign are Dow Agroscienes, Bayer, and BASF. All of these companies are major seed producers that have a direct stake in genetically modified crops. All five are members of the Biotechnology Industry Organization. These seed and chemical companies comprise much of the roster of Big Ag’s usual suspects.

Now look at the rest of the NO donors, including some of the top givers. They’re all food processors and marketers: Pepsi, Nestle USA, Coca-Cola, General Mills, and Conagra. This is Big Food’s varsity team. Without a doubt, these companies have a major stake in maintaining the food system’s status quo. They do not, however, have a direct stake in genetically modified crops. After all, Coca-Cola could (and once did) make its soda with non-GMO corn syrup. General Mills could (and once did) make Cheerios and Wheaties with non-GMO corn and soy, just as it today sells Gold Medal flour that comes from non-GMO wheat. And Nestle appears to be doing just fine in Europe, where its corporate parent is based and where GMO-labeling has been in place for years.

In a conversation we had last month (for an interview that will appear in the Winter edition of Earth Island Journal), Michael Pollan explained the situation like this:

“They [the food processors and marketers] put a lot of money into [opposing the California initiative] and they found themselves in this really uncomfortable place, which is – are you against 50 percent of your consumers? And realizing: ‘Hey what’s in it for us? We could make our food, we could make our cereal, from any kind of grain. We don’t need GM grain; it offers us no advantages. It’s that just Monsanto scared us into thinking it would be really expensive to switch.’”

I wish I were as sanguine as Pollan. As the 522 fight shows, the marketers are still in thrall to the seed and chemical companies. But Pollan is right that there isn’t perfect alignment between the interests of the chemical and seed companies and the interests of the food marketers – and that the daylight between then can be exploited.

To put this all in the plainest terms: In order to win the long-term fight for GMO labeling, activists will have to find a way to divide Big Ag and Big Food, and convince the food processors and marketers that their interests are not served by waging these costly fights against their own customers.

The long-running campaigns targeting Big Oil and Big Auto can be instructive here. A decade ago, the Sierra Club, Rainforest Action Network, Global Exchange, and others were waging a corporate campaign against the automakers in an effort to get them to make dramatic increases in the fuel economy of cars and trucks. For decades the automakers had successfully fought off government-mandated increases in fuel economy. Yet the automakers had no real interest in selling inefficient cars; after all, they were in the personal transportation business, not the oil business. The environmentalist campaigners hoped to convince the auto companies of this fact, and to peel away Big Auto’s historic resistance to fuel economy increases.

Eventually the internal logic of the campaign manifested itself (though it probably had more to do with the financial meltdown and government bailout of GM and Chrysler than with any grassroots activism). Last year, the Obama administration put in place strict new fuel economy rules: by 2025 the US auto fleet will have to average 54.5 miles per gallon. Significantly, all of the major auto companies endorsed the proposal. Big Auto finally recognized that its interests weren’t the same as Big Oil’s.

The analogy might be imperfect, but there are some important similarities to the food and agriculture realm. Just as oil fuels cars, commodity crops fuel processed and packaged foods. And just as Big Auto isn’t selling gasoline (but rather transportation), Big Food isn’t selling GMOs (but rather taste). On the GMO issue at least, Big Food doesn’t need what Big Ag is offering.

The Detroit automakers fought stricter fuel standards for years because they feared the switch to more fuel economic models would be inconvenient and hard; but in the end it was just a matter of delaying the inevitable. Today, Big Food is making what could be a similar mistake – fighting its own customers to forestall what it fears would be an inconvenient and perhaps costly switch back to non-GMO crops. If the GMO labeling forces can keep picking fights, eventually the food processors and marketers will realize that defending the likes of Monsanto and DuPont is even more costly and inconvenient.

This story first appeared on Earth Island Journal.

The post Want GMO Labeling? Drive a Wedge Between Big Food and Big Ag appeared first on Civil Eats.

A range of flying invertebrates—from the iconic monarch butterfly, to moths you’ve never heard of, to a number of once-common bumblebees—are suffering significant declines. Some biologists are warning that the losses could have serious consequences for the food web and for human agriculture, especially since native pollinators are far more important for food crop pollination than the domesticated European honeybee.

No doubt you’ve heard the buzz by now: Honeybees (Apis mellifera) are in serious trouble. In 2005, beekeepers in Europe and North America started to report worrisome declines in their hives, sometimes with annual loses exceeding 50 percent. The epidemic, dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder (or CCD), sparked a race to figure out the cause, or causes, of the die-offs.

Suspicion swirled around the varroa mite (a pest that had long plagued honeybees); poor bee nutrition due to a limited diet from monocrop agriculture; and a new class of pesticides called neonicotinoids, which European regulators have since temporarily banned.

The plight of the honeybee has become a cause célèbre. This summer, TIME put the bee on its cover and warned: “Eliminate the honeybee and agriculture would be greatly diminished.” Whole Foods launched a public education campaign—which quickly went viral—showing what the produce section of the grocery store would look like without the aid of the honeybee: Out of the 425 items in the produce area, 237 vanished from the picture when honeybees are removed from the agricultural equation.

All of this attention on the honeybee’s poor health is important because it’s an opportunity to illustrate our utter reliance on other creatures. But often lost amid the honeybee anxiety is a much bigger story: The decline of native bumblebees, butterflies and moths, which are even more important for pollination.

Several butterfly species are in real trouble. In June, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared that two Florida butterflies—the rockland grass skipper (Hesperia meskei pinocayo) and the Zestos skipper (Epargyreus zestos Oberon)—are likely extinct. The iconic monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) seems cursed to follow its Florida cousins. The most recent census of monarchs, taken at their winter grounds in Mexico, found the species has declined by 59 percent from the previous year.

“Earlier this year people were getting very worried, because they weren’t seeing monarchs very far north,” says Lincoln Brower, a research professor of biology at Sweet Briar College and a butterfly expert. “Our predictions have proven to be true. There have been very few sightings in August and now into September. Right now things are looking very grim. I have seen a total of five monarchs in my garden since October 2012. I would normally see a couple of hundred, at least.”

Several species of native bumblebees are also suffering.

“As dramatic as the honeybee declines have been, they pale in comparison to what we have seen with our native bumblebees,” says Eric Mader, a program director at the Xerces Society, an Oregon-based group working to raise awareness about the role of native pollinators. “Honeybees are not going extinct, and that’s the crucial difference with our native pollinators.”

Franklin’s bumblebee (Bombus franklini), a bee native to Southern Oregon and Northern California, is likely extinct. The rusty-patched bumblebee (Bombus affinis) is on the verge of disappearing. Once common across eastern North America, its range has shrunk by 90 percent. The Xerces Society has filed a petition with the federal government to have it listed as an endangered species.

The rollcall of threatened bumblebees goes on. The yellow-banded bumblebee (Bombus terricola) used to be found throughout the Northeast and Upper Midwest, but has disappeared from much of its range. At one time the Western bumblebee (Bombus occidentalis) could be spotted from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean and was reared commercially to pollinate greenhouse tomatoes and cranberries, as well as blueberries, apples, and cherries. Today the Western bumblebee has can no longer be found in its historic range from Southern British Columbia to Central California.

“We’re still trying to get a handle on a number of these bumblebees,” the Xerces Society’s Mader says. “We are seeing steady declines in about a quarter of our bumble bee species.”

What’s driving the loss of bumblebees and butterflies? As with the honeybee, pesticides are partly to blame. In a widely publicized episode that occurred in June, some 25,000 bumblebees were killed in Oregon after workers at a shopping mall sprayed trees with a pesticide called “Safari” designed to combat aphids.

Usually, though, pesticide-related damage is less dramatic. According to the Xerces Society, pesticide spraying by the forestry industry (used to keep down insects that can harm trees) has depressed bumblebee numbers, contributing to a drop in blueberry pollination in the Northeast and Eastern Canada.

Some burrowing bees can be harmed by pesticides sprayed on lawns. And neonicotinoids appear to be harming bumblebees just as they do honeybees, if not outright killing them, then at least compromising their cognitive abilities, including their navigation.

Habitat loss is also an issue. Bumblebees thrive in highly diverse ecosystems, and monoculture agriculture has reduced their forage areas. Species that are found only in a few places are particularly vulnerable. Take the Karner blue, an endangered butterfly that is endemic to the Great Lakes. Its primary host plant is the wild lupine, which mostly grows in the region’s sand barrens, the very same sand barrens that are now at the center of a mining boom for the sand used in fracking.

“Wisconsin has the best sandy soils for this host plant to grow on,” Mader says. “And this same sand has a lot of value for oil and natural gas extraction.”

The monarch butterfly is suffering a similar double whammy as industrial agriculture has destroyed its host plant. The monarch larvae feeds almost exclusively on milkweed, which has disappeared across huge areas of the Midwest with the spread of glyphosate-tolerant, aka Roundup-Ready, corn and soybeans. According to one study, from 1999 to 2010 milkweed in the Midwest declined by 58 percent.

“What I am concerned about is that Monsanto and these other companies that have these very powerful pesticides and genetically engineering crops, it’s destroying the milkweed habitat where the monarchs lay their eggs,” Brower says.

The decrease in native pollinators could have a major impact on crop pollination. Here’s how the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service explains it: “Of the hundred or so crops that make up most of the world’s food supply, only 15 percent are pollinated by domestic bees, while at least 80 percent are pollinated by wild bees and other wildlife.”

In a study published earlier this year, researchers concluded that “wild insects pollinated crops more effectively” and “increase in their visitation enhanced fruit set by twice as much as an equivalent increase in honey bee visitation.” The main reason industrial agriculture has come to rely on the less efficient honeybee, Mader says, is because the honeybee is easy to control and move around in massive quantities. Our crop monocultures have bred their own insect monocultures.

It’s not just humans’ food source that is at risk. Mader says that “probably 25 or more percent of the dietary sources of birds and mammals” are fruit or seeds that come from plants that require direct pollination. A diminishment of native pollinators could send a shudder through the food web.

Fortunately, the decline of bumblebees and butterflies seems to be catching the public’s attention, especially the disappearance of the monarch butterfly. The monarch would seem to be a classic example of what you could call charismatic micro-fauna: a small creature with a big hold on popular imagination. The prospect of its extinction could serve as a wakeup call, forcing people to take action to stem the worldwide loss of biodiversity.

“The monarch is the most popular butterfly in the world,” Brower says. “If we lose it, we lose an educational tool. We lose the most fabulous insect migration in the world. It’s a symbol of the degradation to the environment due to pesticide agriculture, due to development, due to climate change, and gross overpopulation. And in the end we will lose our own quality of life.”

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Photo: Monarch butterfly by Shutterstock

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The problem of insecure land tenure is especially pressing for urban farmers in many cities, who have to contend with limited space and high real estate values. Brooke Budner and Caitlyn Galloway, the co-founders of San Francisco’s Little City Gardens, understand this better than anyone. They don’t own the three-quarter acre lot they farm and scrape by on a month-to-month lease.

“Small scale farming is already a high risk proposition,” Budner told me recently. “Anything we can do to make it a little less risky is important.”

A new law proposed by California Assemblyman Phil Ting (who represents San Francisco and San Mateo) might give Little City Gardens a bit more security so the small business can thrive. The idea is simple: Property owners who commit to leasing their land to agricultural enterprises for at least 10 years will be able to receive a re-valuation of their parcels that will lower their property tax bill.

If it becomes law, the measure could prompt more landowners with vacant parcels to open up their properties to aspiring urban farmers—and give existing farmers like Budner and Galloway the peace of mind they need.

“I’m really excited about [the Ting legislation],” Budner says. “Reevaluating the tax code for landowners so they want to rent to farmers is just a really solid idea. It’s the best idea that has come to my mind, the best idea I have heard of in terms of private lands.”

The proposed legislation, formally dubbed the Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones Act (or AB 551, for those of you with a Sacramento statehouse scorecard), is loosely modeled on an existing California law called the Williamson Act that provides property tax relief for landowners who rent to farmers or ranchers.

Unlike the Williamson Act, the urban ag version of the idea wouldn’t allow for property transfers based on the lower valuation; that is, it wouldn’t change the sales value of an urban property. The act would work on an opt-in basis, with California’s 58 counties getting to decide if they want to participate in giving urban farmers a hand.

The measure has a natural champion in Ting, the former county assessor for San Francisco, which has a thriving urban ag scene. “During my time as assessor, I learned about, and was impressed with, the vibrant and growing community of people engaged in urban farming throughout San Francisco,” Ting wrote to me in an e-mail.

“When I was elected to the Assembly, I reached out to them [San Francisco’s urban farmers] to have a conversation about what could be done at the state level to encourage more urban farming. One of the obstacles they pointed to was the difficulty in accessing unused parcels of land because the high rate of taxation on those lands in urban areas made it financially infeasible for a landowner to allow farming on the property.”

This kind of law wouldn’t be so necessary in the shrinking Rust Belt cities like Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia that are the epicenter of the urban farming movement. Land in those places is plentiful and often dirt cheap. But California is another story. The median home price in San Francisco is approaching $800,000.

In Los Angeles it’s $575,000 and in San Diego it’s just below half a million bucks. If you own an empty parcel here on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, you’d have to be just about crazy to let some hipsters grow tomatoes on your vacant plot rather than sell it to a developer.

Urban agtivists in San Francisco (a group in which I count myself) are cautiously optimistic that the law could open up some new properties for agricultural uses. One parcel that aspiring growers have their eye on is a full city block (about two acres) of abandoned greenhouses in the city’s Portola District.

The 17 greenhouses there have been out of operation since 1994. Before that, the structures were used for close to 80 years by a family named Girabaldi for rose production. Now a group called the San Francisco Greenhouse Project hopes to revitalize the property and bring back an agricultural enterprise to the neighborhood.

“When we stumbled across this parcel and started to develop an idea, we reached out to the various members of the family [who own it],” says Nik Reed of the Greenhouse Project. “Some of them were entertaining our vision. But some of them were skeptical.”

A re-evaluation of the property and a reduction in the family’s tax burden could help make a convincing argument for returning the spot to its agricultural roots. “If we were ever able to bring down the property tax costs, that would make a commercial enterprise possible,” says Juan Carlos Cancino, another Greenhouse Project partner.

A green space in place of busted up buildings would be a positive change for the neighborhood landscape. And also a positive change for San Francisco’s food system. Here’s Assemblyman Ting, right on message: “I see the urban ag movement as a strong link that brings a closer connection between people and the food we eat.  I believe it is important for the state to find ways to foster this very positive activity at the neighborhood level.

“Slow-local food tastes better, it’s healthier for you, and it’s better for the environment.  When I see these types of gardens sprouting up throughout the city I am inspired by them, and am committed to helping expand this movement.”

Originally published by Earth Island Journal.

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The NPR story was based on a new study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine which concluded, based on a review of existing studies, that there is no “strong evidence that organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional foods.” The study, written by researchers at the Stanford School of Medicine, also found that eating organic foods “may reduce exposure to pesticide residues and antibiotic-resistant bacteria.”

The interwebs were soon full of headlines talking down the benefits of organic foods. “Stanford Scientists Cast Doubt on Advantages of Organic Meat and Produce,” the NY Times announced, as reporter Kenneth Chang pointed out that pesticide residues on industrially grown fruits and vegetables are “almost always under the allowed safety limits.” CBS news, running the AP story on the Stanford study, informed readers: “Organic food hardly healthier, study suggests.”

Organic agriculture advocates were quick with their rebuttals. The Environmental Working Group put out a press release playing up the researchers’ findings that organic produce has less pesticide residue. Charles Benbrook, a professor of agriculture at Washington State University and former chief scientist at The Organic Center, wrote a detailed critique you can find here. Benbrook noted that the Stanford study didn’t include data from the USDA and US EPA about pesticide residue levels. He also pointed out that the researchers’ definition of “significantly more nutritious” was a little squishy.

Is this the last word on the nutritional benefits of organic foods? Hardly. As Benbrook said, in the coming years improved measurement methods will hopefully allow for better comparisons of food nutritional quality. (You can find an Earth Island Journal cover story on this very issue here.)

I’ll leave it to the PhDs and MDs to fight this out among themselves. As they do, I’ll keep buying (and growing) organic foods. Why? Because even if organic foods are not demonstrably better for my health than industrial foods, I know that organics are better for the health of other people—the people who grow our nation’s food.

To his credit, NPR’s new ag reporter, Dan Charles, was careful to note that organic agriculture “can bring environmental benefit[s].” One of the most important environmental benefits organic agriculture delivers is a boost to public health and safety.

Let’s say you’re not worried about the relatively small amounts of pesticides that end up on the industrial foods at the supermarket. (Though you should read this Tom Philpott dissection of the Stanford report when considering your risk of eating pesticide residue.) Well, you should still be concerned about the huge amounts of pesticides that end up in the air and water of farming communities—chemicals that can lead to birth defects, endocrine disruption, and neurological and respiratory problems.

When pesticides are sprayed onto farm fields, they don’t just stay in that one place. They seep into the water and waft through the air and accumulate on the shoes and clothes of farm workers. In recent years in California (the country’s top ag producer) an average of 37 pesticide drift incidents a year have made people sick. Pesticides also find their way into the homes of farm workers. A study by researchers at the University of Washington found that the children of farm workers have higher exposure to pesticides than other children in the same community. When researchers in Mexico looked into pesticide exposure of farm workers there, they found that 20 percent of field hands “showed acute poisoning.”

The health impacts on those workers were serious and included “diverse alterations of the digestive, neurological, respiratory, circulatory, dermatological, renal, and reproductive system.” The researchers concluded: “there exist health hazards for those farm workers exposed to pesticides, at organic and cellular levels.”

There are shelves’ worth of studies documenting the health dangers of pesticide exposure. A study published last year found that prenatal exposure to organophosphate pesticides—which are often sprayed on crops and in urban areas to control insects—can lower children’s IQ. A follow-up investigation into prenatal pesticide exposure concluded that boys’ developing brains appear to be more vulnerable than girls’ brains. A study by Colorado State University epidemiologist Lori Cragin found that women who drink water containing low levels of the herbicide atrazine are more likely to have low estrogen levels and irregular menstrual cycles; about three-quarters of all US corn fields are treated with atrazine annually. British scientists who examined the health effects of fungicides sprayed on fruits and vegetable crops discovered that 30 out of 37 chemicals studied altered males’ hormone production.

I think you get the point: many synthetic herbicides and pesticides are dangerous to humans and should be avoided. And the best way to avoid putting those chemicals into our surroundings is to buy organically grown foods.

Yes, the health benefit to you might be modest. But the health benefits to farming communities, farm workers, their children, and their unborn children can be huge. Reason enough, I think, to look for the organic label.

Photo by School of Natural Resources

Originally posted on Earth Island Journal

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