True, the foundation named 25-year Monsanto veteran Rob Horsch to the position of “senior program officer, focusing on improving crop yields in sub-Saharan Africa.”

Yet its flagship program for African ag, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), explicitly distances itself from GMOs. “AGRA does not fund the development of GMOs,” the organization’s Web site states.

But AGRA—co-funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, proud sponsor of the original Green Revolution—is just part of what Gates does around African ag. What precisely is the foundation getting up to over there? Is it pushing GMOs on African smallholder farms?

[I have a call into the foundation to ask directly about the role GMOs play in its efforts. I’ll report on the response.]

It has been surprisingly hard to say. Until now.

In a speech at the World Food Prize gathering last week (see video below), Bill Gates himself chided the critics of GMOs—and shed some sunshine on the foundation leadership’s philosophy on ag development. At one point, he declared, “some of our grants [in Africa] do include transgenic approaches, because we believe they have the potential to address farmers’ challenges more efficiently than conventional techniques.”

Gates’ speech seems like a significant event to me—the World Food Prize website describes it as his “first major address on agriculture.” One of the major knocks on the foundation’s Africa efforts is the lack of democratic accountability and transparency. Since the foundation’s careful message management makes it hard to figure out precisely what it’s getting up to, I’m glad to see its leading light airing his views freely.

Gates opened with a standard-issue awestruck paean to Norman Borluag, recently deceased architect of the original Green Revolution. Gates delivered a rather unnuanced assessment of Borlaug’s legacy. Gates declared: “He [Borlaug] proved that farming has the power to lift up the lives of the poor.”

Really? To be sure, Borlaug’s “dwarf” hybrid seed varieties, when coupled with the heavy fertilizer and pesticide doses they need to thrive, dramatically increased yields in the places where the Green Revolution took root—the main success story being India.

But higher yields drive down crop prices—and increased use of imported inputs requires the taking on of debt. Rather than boosting the fortunes of most farmers in its purview, the Green Revolution drove hundreds of thousands into ruin. The survivors consolidated land holdings. The big got bigger and the poor tended to leave the land—too many of them ending up as excess labor in urban slum zones.

Maybe Gates didn’t mean that Borlaug’s efforts improved the lives of farmers, but rather the lives of non-farming urban dwellers. As he later says in the speech, also in the context of Borluag’s legacy, “better farming can end hunger and poverty and lift whole countries out of poverty.”

To be sure, many people were predicting famine for India in the 1960s, and the availability of cheap grain engendered by the Green Revolution no doubt forestalled widespread starvation. But it’s demonstrably wrong to claim that the Green Revolution ended hunger and poverty in India.

Indeed, hunger rates remain appalling in India—site of the Green Revolution’s greatest putative success. From a 2008 report by the International Food Policy Research Institute:

According to the 2008 Global Hunger Index, India ranks 66 out of 88 nations (developing countries and countries in transition). Despite years of robust economic growth, India scored worse than nearly 25 Sub-Saharan African countries and all of South Asia, except Bangladesh.[Emphasis added.]

The bit about India faring worse than “nearly 25 Sub-Saharan African countries” is particularly noteworthy, given that the Gates Foundation is explicitly spearheading a “new Green Revolution for Africa.” Of course, the original Green Revolution in India lies in shambles —the water table has been tapped near dry by massive irrigation projects in the zones where the Borlaug program took hold, and the remaining farmers there are struggling mightily with crushing debt loads and heightened pesticide-related cancer rates.

To be fair, Gates did point to “excesses” of the first Green Revolution, naming “too much irrigation and fertilizer” as examples. He vowed to avoid those mistakes in Africa. He insisted, more than once, that ecological sustainability was critical to the foundation’s project. Yet he repeatedly emphasized that increasing gross production—the Borlaug project of squeezing as much yield out of a piece of land as possible—was the key.

And that led him to the most fiery moment of his speech (if this dour man’s demeanor can ever be described as “fiery”): the part where he denounced unnamed “environmentalists” who are somehow blocking GMO seeds from entering Africa.

“This global effort to help small farmers is endangered by an ideological wedge that threatens to split the movement in two,” Gates declared. He decried what he called a “false choice” between a “technological” approach geared to boosting productivity and an “environmental” one geared to sustainability. “We can have both,” he said.

He went on: “Some people insist on an ideal vision of the environment which is divorced from people and their circumstances. They have tried to restrict the spread of biotechnology into sub-Saharan Africa without regard to how much hunger and poverty might be reduced by it, or what the farmers themselves might want.”

The Gates Foundation, by contrast, isn’t so demure. In an apparent reference to this project with GMO seed giant Monsanto, Gates allowed that “one of our [unnamed] private-sector partners” is working on a genetically modified drought-tolerant corn variety for African farmers. The seeds will be available to farmers royalty-free—meaning that farmers will pay market price for the seeds themselves, but not pay the hefty biotech premium Monsanto normally slaps on top. It’s unclear whether seed-saving will be allowed under the arrangement.

According to the above-linked press release, the magic seeds are expected to come online in 2018. Gates emphasized repeatedly that as climate change proceeds apace, greater and greater swaths of Africa will face persistent drought conditions. In pushing for drought-tolerant seeds, Gates is swinging for the fences—looking for a single big solution to feed Africa’s drought-stricken areas.

For me, this deal raises questions that cut to the heart of the Bill Gates approach to African ag.

First of all, it can’t be noted often enough that a) GM agriculture’s much-hyped ability to boost yields, taken as a given by Gates, has thus far proven purely spectral; b) there’s serious evidence, despite a paucity of cash for critical research and heavy-handed control of research by seed companies,  that GMOs cause health problems; and c) GMOs have so far proven quite proficient at generating unintended ecological consequences, such as the rise of “superweeds.”

There’s no room for any of that in Gates’ discourse.

Further, I absolutely agree with Bill Gates that there’s no zero-sum tradeoff between productivity and sustainability. But I urge him to tear his gaze away from the biotech lab and train it toward the field, where the best research on organic ag is being done. Indeed, one of the great benefits of organic farming is its long-term focus on soil health—and healthy soils can increase productivity over time without massive ecological externalities.

Here’s a summary of a 2005 paper published in Bioscience comparing yields of organic and conventional corn. The 22-year study compared yields of corn and soy for the following systems: 1) conventional chemical-based agriculture; 2) organic ag using manure for soil fertility; and 3) organic ag using “green manure” (nitrogen-fixing cover crops) for fertility. From the summary, here’s the key nugget of the study:

“First and foremost, we found that corn and soybean yields were the same across the three systems,” said [researcher David] Pimentel, who noted that although organic corn yields were about one-third lower during the first four years of the study, over time the organic systems produced higher yields, especially under drought conditions. The reason was that wind and water erosion degraded the soil on the conventional farm while the soil on the organic farms steadily improved in organic matter, moisture, microbial activity and other soil quality indicators. [Emphasis added.]

Note well the “especially under drought conditions” bit. Here is a technology for “drought-tolerant” corn that’s ready right now—no need to wait until 2018. It doesn’t rely on the benevolence of Monsanto to waive a technology fee; and there are no questions about seed-saving. It asks no one to accept a drop in long-term productivity as the price paid for sustainability. And not only does it help farmers adapt to climate change with its drought-tolerant qualities, but it helps mitigate climate change by sequestering carbon. From the summary:

The fact that organic agriculture systems also absorb and retain significant amounts of carbon in the soil has implications for global warming, Pimentel said, pointing out that soil carbon in the organic systems increased by 15 to 28 percent, the equivalent of taking about 3,500 pounds of carbon dioxide per hectare out of the air.

Moreover, in a 2008 paper (PDF), the U.N.‘s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) endorsed organic ag as a way to boost food security and improve farmer livelihoods in Africa. Concluded the FAO:

Organic agriculture can increase agricultural productivity and canraise incomes with low-cost, locally available and appropriatetechnologies, without causing environmental damage. Furthermore,evidence shows that organic agriculture can build up natural resources,strengthen communities and improve human capacity, thus improving foodsecurity by addressing many different causal factorssimultaneously ... Organic and near-organic agricultural methods andtechnologies are ideally suited for many poor, marginalized smallholderfarmers in Africa, as they require minimal or no external inputs, uselocally and naturally available materials to produce high-qualityproducts, and encourage a whole systemic approach to farming that ismore diverse and resistant to stress. [Emphasis added.]

Gates cash could go a long way in dispersing the skills and (relatively low-cost) equipment needed for effective organic farming in Africa. Why not, for example, fund a dramatic expansion of the Soil, Food, and Healthy Communities project that’s proving so successful in Malawi?

So where’s the Gates cash, and the fiery speech from the foundation’s leader defending organic ag from its critics? Now, it’s true that the Gates Foundation does fund research into alternative, low-input agriculture. Just this past spring, the foundation awarded $1.3 million to World Watch to study such techniques for improving ag productivity in Africa.

But let’s look at funding levels. The above-mentioned Monsanto GMO corn project got $42 million from Gates—and an additional $5 million from the Howard Buffet Foundation, run by the son of investor/insurance magnate Warren Buffet. The Worldwatch grant is loose change in comparison. (When I get a Gates official on the phone, i’ll ask about other organic-style programs they’re funding.)

Given the pro-high-technology thrust of Gates’ speech, this imbalance is hardly surprising. As I took in the video of Gates’ speech and heard him go on about the “needs of small farmers” and the critical role of biotech in serving those needs, I couldn’t help but think of him as a kind of unelected agriculture commissioner for the African continent. And I wondered how many African farms will survive the embrace of the great software magnate.

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In the years since, Gourmet sprouted into the nation’s most celebrated and influential glossy food magazine. But this week—in the wake of another Great Crash and years into two grinding wars—hard times spelled doom for the “magazine of good living.”

What does its demise mean? One early reading is that Gourmet had badly lost touch with the times. In a witty Wednesday editorial, the Boston Globe declared Gourmet a “symbol of [a] bygone vision of gourmet life in America,” and a “sign that even upmarket niches can be too confining.”

Judith Jones, the legendary editor who ushered Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking (among many other classic cookbooks) into being, echoed that sentiment. “Gourmet got away from the things that are going on in people’s homes, and seemed to be for an elite that got smaller and smaller,” Jones told the New York Times.

In this view, glossy celebrations of gracious living just don’t mix with 10 percent unemployment and stagnant wages. Move over, Gourmet, and make way for Every Day with Rachel Ray, a practical-minded magazine that has continued to thrive even as Gourmet‘s ad pages plunged.

But I think the out-of-touch explanation is too facile by half. True enough, Gourmet burned through cash like an Italian chef uses olive oil. One well-placed source tells me that a typical Gourmet photo shoot, all gorgeously rustic locations and impossibly beautiful models, could cost as much as $100,000. (To be fair, I’m also told that up until the Great Recession settled in, the magazine consistently turned a profit).

And while the magazine always maintained a reverence for the kind of aspirational living that characterized its post-War heyday, it has also evolved in ways that its post-mortem critics aren’t acknowledging. For years now, alongside elaborate spreads featuring splashy feasts, Gourmet has run plenty of the kind of 30-minute, weeknight-ready, simple-ingredient that have made Rachel Ray an icon. As a home cook on a limited time budget, I’ve successfully used these precisely written recipes dozens of times in the past several years.

More importantly, Gourmet has been a pioneer among its glossy peers in making space for a new and fast-growing appetite among American readers: the desire for critical perspectives on the food system. Since editor Ruth Reichl took the helm a decade ago, the magazine has run excellent articles on the quiet rise to ubiquity of genetically modified foods; the ecological damage wrought by industrial farming; the public health damage wrought by trans fats and the FDA’s limp response to it; and the abominable working conditions in Florida’s tomato fields.

While Reichl trail blazed food politics as a topic for glossies, few of her rival editors had the stomach to make more than baby steps in that direction. Yet given the popularity of books like Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, the foodie public clearly craves more information about where their food comes from.

In a sense, then, far from being out of touch with the times, late-model Gourmet was ahead of its time. No doubt, it was bleeding money, and no doubt, its parent company Condé Nast, could no longer afford to maintain its spendy ways. But rather than kill a vital and iconic asset like Gourmet, you could always simply cut its budget.

And this brings us to the real trend behind the Gourmet story: the power of axe-first, ask-later consultants in molding the media landscape in a time of crisis. For weeks now, according to various reports, grim-faced outsiders in suits have swarmed the Condé Nast offices. Employed by the consultancy McKinsey, their evident task is to scrutinize the books and hack away at anything not turning a profit.

Yet in their search for maximum short-term profit and return on invested capital, they tend to be myopic, unable to see beyond the next quarter’s bottom-line prospects. They are like the cynic in the Oscar Wilde play—they know the price of everything and the value of nothing. More than the dismal economy and ongoing changes in readers’ habits, the biggest threat to good journalism going forward could well be the unaccountable power of consultants.

Indeed, if public interest in the politics and ecology of food continues growing, Condé Nast execs may live to regret their decision to heed McKinsey’s counsel on this one. In throwing Gourmet to the dogs, they’ve sacrificed their one publication with a long track record in telling people where their food comes from—which it did in such a stylish and palatable way.

Note: The essay was first published on Huffington Post Green.

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In the last couple of days, there’s been a sharp turn toward the status quo. As I reported yesterday,  Obama plucked Islam “Isi” Siddiqui from the nation’s most powerful agrichemical lobby group and made him our chief negotiator on ag issues in global trade talks. This is a major coup for Big Ag. Ramming open foreign markets for our cheap food commodities and pricey ag inputs is critical to the industry’s future profits—and perilous for global food security and the environment.

And today, Obama’s Big Ag side got the best of him again. He tapped Roger Beachy, long-time president of the Danforth Plant Science Center, as chief of the USDA’s newly created National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA).

A creation of the 2008 Farm Bill, the NIFA “replaces the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service, which distributes $200 million in competitive grants and about $280 million in ‘formula funding’ to land-grant universities,” Science blog reports.

Science continues:

The Farm Bill adds another $106 million annually of competitive funding for research into organic farming, biomass, and fruits and vegetables. It also calls for a “distinguished scientist” to be appointed for a 6-year term as director.

So this is a critical post. If the sustainable farming movement is going to scale up and really start providing a large portion of the nation’s calories—and deliver on its potentially huge environmental promises—than we’re going to need a significant commitment of federal research dollars.

Roger BeachyPhoto: Courtesy of the Danforth CenterAnd what are we getting with the appointment of Beachy? The Danforth Plant Science Center, nestled in Monsanto’s St. Louis home town, is essentially that company’s NGO research and PR arm. According to its website, the center “was founded in 1998 through gifts from the St. Louis-based Danforth Foundation, the Monsanto Fund (a philanthropic foundation), and a tax credit from the State of Missouri.”

Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant sits on the center’s board of trustees, along with execs from defense giant McDonnell Douglas and pharma titan Merck. Another notable board member is Alfonso Romo, a Mexican magnate who cashed in big during his country’s notoriously corrupt privatization /liberalization bonanza in the early ‘90s.

Romo used his connections to build a company called Seminis into the globe’s biggest vegetable-seed concern, with dreams (as yet unrealized) of loads of new GMO veggie varieties. Monsanto bought Seminis in 2005. Here’s a revealing Wall Street Journal profile of Romo from 1999; and here’s what I wrote about him and the Monsanto/Seminis tie up back in 2005. (Interesting tidbit: Romo claims credit for innovating those insipid and ubiquitous “baby carrots”; and for reducing the spiciness of jalepeno peppers.)

On its short list of “partners” we find several research-oriented universities and one corporation: Monsanto. In the Danforth Center’s 2007 annual report (PDF), Monsanto is mentioned no fewer than ten times funding this or that project.

So essentially, the public face of Monsanto’s research efforts now has his fingers on the USDA’s research purse strings. Score a big one for agribusiness!

So Obama has become an agribiz shill, right? Well, it’s not nearly so simple.

Last winter, the administration tapped Kathleen Merrigan as deputy USDA secretary. This is traditionally a powerful position within the agency; under Bush, a paid-up industrial corn man held the post. Merrigan has pristine credentials as an organic advocate—and from the whispers I’ve heard, has been pushing that agenda within USDA.

I’m told she’s met with many prominent sustainable-ag advocates—folks who were completely frozen out by the Bush USDA. The latest: On Twitter, Michel Dimock of California’s Roots of Change recently announced he has “4 mtngs w/ USDA nxt 2 days.” That sort of access simply wasn’t available at Bush’s USDA.

Then there’s Merrigan’s brainchild, “The Know Your Farmer Know Your Food” initiative (complete with splashy new web site). It’s essentially an attempt to alert players in the sustainable food movement to possibilities of getting existing USDA funding. (I wrote briefly about its limits and promise lat week.) Again, you can call the initiative largely symbolic, but nothing remotely like it was happening under Bush.

It’s certainly energizing sustainable ag NGO chiefs.  On Chews Wise blog, Sam Fromartz reports that such folks are “pumped” by the initiative. He asked several for their reactions. Words like “fantastic,” “thrilling,” and “quite encouraging” tripped off their tongues.

Meanwhile, Michelle Obama—and her food ambassador, White House assistant chef/gardener Sam Kass—continues to push sustainable ag from the East Wing. One can assume she has some influence in the Oval Office.

So what’s going on here? Whither the Obama administration on food and ag—toward a food future that seeks big, top-down, corporate-led answers, always straining to leapfrog ecological limits—and creating new sets of problems to be (lucratively) solved? Or toward one that works within ecological limits, builds resilience, and generates wealth and health within communities?

Right now, we’re getting a kind of policy whiplash. But I have a conjecture—based completely on my own observation, not on any inside info. I’ll give it here; and I urge readers to give their own conjectures below.

My conjecture is this: Obama likes cutting-edge ideas. You look at the ag landscape, and you see two distinct areas with great innovation, energy, and movement: biotech and organic/sustainable. So he’s coming out strong behind both camps, and plans to sit back and see which one develops the best ideas.

The problem is that the biotech side has a massive advantage in terms of resources; and, as I’ve shown before, has benefitted from years of government cronyism and coddling. Moreover, it utterly dominates the university research agenda, aided by the draconian intellectual rights the government has awarded it.

So if Obama is setting up a kind of contest between the two camps, the game is rigged in advance.

That’s what I think. Please write what you think below.

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A lot of folks have asked what I think of the essay “The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals,” by Missouri corn/soy farmer Blake Hurst, published in The American, the journal of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute.

My first reaction is that I’m thrilled this debate is taking place. The sustainable-food movement needs to step up and start grappling with big questions. I’ve said for a while that I see three big challenges for the sustainable-food movement as it scales up: 1) soil fertility—in the absence of synthesized nitrogen and mined phosphorous and potassium, how are we to build soil fertility on a larger scale?; 2) labor—sustainable farming requires more hands on the ground; who’s going to work our farm fields, and at what wages?; and 3) access—in an economy built on long-term wage stagnation, how can we make sustainably grown food accessible to everyone?

Hurst’s essay begins to engage these questions—sort of. I don’t have the time or energy right now to take it on point by point. But I will say that the discussion would be much richer if he acknowledged a few serious questions about the industrial-farming model he champions.

For example, he barely acknowledges climate change. The EPA reckons [PDF] that half of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions from agriculture come from fertilizer-related nitrous oxide—a greenhouse gas some 300 times more potent than carbon. The Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist, has concluded [PDF] that the EPA is dramatically underestimating the amount of nitrous oxide produced by industrial farming. Given that reality and the looming climate emergency, how long can U.S. farmers keep churning out titanic corn harvests? Hurst never goes there. Of course, he’s vice president of his state’s branch of the American Farm Bureau Federation, which has both been vigorously fighting climate legislation (on the grounds that climate change is a myth) [PDF] and campaigning to make sure that any bill that gets though Congress has plenty of goodies for agribusiness. So maybe be doesn’t consider nitrous oxide emissions a problem?

Another limiting factor is petroleum scarcity. According to Hurst’s byline at the bottom of the article, “In a few days he will spend the next six weeks on a combine.” A combine is a massive, diesel-sucking machine. How long does Hurst expect to be able to casually spend six weeks burning gallon after gallon of diesel amid limited global petroleum supplies (not to mention climate impacts)? Again, no mention of energy scarcity. (Cue “drill, baby, drill” plea from the Farm Bureau?)

Then there’s the whole problem of ecological blowback. Hurst venerates large-scale confinement livestock operations—but he doesn’t mention that these facilities rely on a prodigious cocktail of antibiotics to keep animals alive and growing. Now we’re getting outbreaks of antibiotic-resistant salmonella and staph (MRSA) directly linked to factory animal farms. There’s the distinct possibility that the latest novel swine flu strain emerged from the fecal mire of a vast hog operation. How long does Hurst think we can control these potentially deadly diseases? Also on the topic of ecological pushback, Hurst champions the practice known as chemical no-till—planting herbicide-tolerant GM seeds and then dousing the field with weed killer. There’s little evidence that this practice sequesters carbon in the soil (see here and here)—but plenty of evidence that it’s generating herbicide-resistant “superweeds.” Again, what’s the plan—just a steady rollout of new poison-tolerant seed combos to clean up the messes of the previous ones?

Finally—and this may be the most egregious omission, given that he’s writing for a Cheneyite rag—Hurst fails to acknowledge that his farming style depends on a steady stream of government aid. I personally believe that our society should support farmers, and that our commodity-subsidy system could be re-jiggered to support sustainable farming. Indeed, for the reasons given above, I believe sustainable farming will remain forever a niche unless that happens. Yet if I were writing for a think tank that’s devoted itself for decades to dismantling state spending (except for on military adventures and hardware), I might feel obliged to defend or at least acknowledge this position. Yet Hurst is silent.

Let’s have a look—shall we not?—at the Environmental Working Group’s commodity-subsidy database. it’s the black book of right-wing Farm Bureau types. According to his bio, Hurst farms in Atchison County, Mo. EWG informs us that farmers in Atchison drew in a cool $131 million in government commodity payments between 1995 and 2006. That’s good enough for 11th place among Missouri’s 50 counties. Drilling down, we find that Hurst himself took home $242,600 in that period; and three close relations took in $400,000, $388,000, and $347,000, respectively. That’s a cool $1.4 million in U.S. treasury cash for the family over 12 years.

Now, hold your howls of outrage. These are corn and soy farmers. They buy tremendous amounts of fertilizers and poisons; they buy pricey GMO seeds from Monsanto; they’re paying huge notes on those combines, which they have to maintain and supply with diesel; and they’re selling their produce into a grain market largely controlled by two companies (Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland) that for most of those years paid them less than the price of production. In other words, your $1.4 million payment to the Hursts didn’t likely stay long in family bank accounts. More likely, it quickly passed into the coffers of Monsanto, John Deere, Mosaic (the fertilizer giant two-thirds owned by Cargill), and other input suppliers. (Of course, in the past couple of years, corn/soy farmers have seen lower subsidies and higher grain prices—borne up by another government program, corn ethanol.)

You see, while their friends at the American Enterprise Institute might mock them as such, it’s not the Hursts who are “welfare queens” here. It’s their agribusiness suppliers and buyers. And we can’t really debate the food system until we acknowledge their massive vested interest in it—and their vast political power, which they’re not shy about using to maintain their income streams.

I look forward to participating in this debate as it plays out.

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——————-

The House will vote today on a momentous, controversial plan to overhaul a large swath of the nation’s food-safety system.

The vote comes amid yet another round of recalls. On Tuesday, the FDA announced the voluntary recall of “one lot” of salmonella-tainted cilantro, distributed by a company called Frontera Produce.

The agency did not define how much cilantro makes up a lot, but it must be, well, a lot, because “the lot in question, 118122, was distributed to two retail store chains in Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Louisiana, and New Mexico,” the press release states.

Yet again, the sieve-like nature of our food-safety system comes into relief. According to the FDA:

This product originated in Mexico and was procured by Frontera Produce, who [sic] subsequently routinely tested for contaminants as part of their internal food safety program.

So if the cilantro underwent “routine testing” and showed up with salmonella, why did it go out to two (unnamed) grocery chains with operations in five states? Evidently, the tests got done after the stuff went out to potentially thousands of consumers. Nice one! Just a week before, another Texas company issued a voluntary recall on another (pardon the expression) shitload of salmonella-infected cilantro; and California produce giant Tanimura & Antle recalled 22,000 cases of salmonella-tainted lettuce that had already gone out to 29 states.

It is against this backdrop that the House is debating a major overhaul of the U.S. food-safety landscape, or at least the part of it that doesn’t include meat. The bill, H.R. 2749, or The Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009, would transform the role of the FDA, which oversees food safety of all foods except for meat and eggs, which fall under the (rather timid) purview of the USDA.

On Wednesday, the bill narrowly failed in an attempt by its sponsors to pass it in a special vote that would have required a two-thirds majority in exchange for not having to consider amendments. The tally was 280-150—six votes shy of the necessary margin. Small-farm and sustainable-ag advocates generally opposed the bill, arguing it would place disproportionately heavy burdens on community-scale players within the food system.

But in the late afternoon, the House Rules Committee announced that another vote would be called Thursday—this one requiring only a simple majority. Again, however, no amendments will be considered. Given Wednesday’s vote, its passage seems imminent.

The legislation contains some important provisions for tightening up an absurdly porous food safety system: the FDA would no longer have to rely on “voluntary” recalls but instead will itself have the power to recall tainted food. Moreover, inspections of food-production facilities will be stepped up.

But it also has aspects that would weigh heavily on small-scale farmers and food processors—ones that pose a fraction of the threat that big players pose, and are responsible for a fraction of the recalls, too. One is a $500 per-facility annual fee for processors to help offset the cost of inspections. Few dispute the FDA needs a larger budget; but $500 falls a lot heavier on someone who turns locally grown cabbage onto kraut for a farmers market than on a company that, say, makes “peanut paste” for of the nation’s large-scale food corporations.

A week ago, The Wall Street Journal reported that lobby groups representing large-scale grain and livestock interests zealously opposed the bill, with the reliably pro-agribusiness House Ag committee chair Collin Peterson pushing their agenda. The fear seemed to be that the bill would give the FDA authority to regulate livestock feed rations—which as I’ve reported before likely contribute significantly to food safety issues. Outbreaks of antibiotic-resistant staph (MRSA) and salmonella seem related to routine doses of antibiotics on livestock farms; and the practice of feeding animals an ethanol byproduct called distillers grains has been linked to both E. coli 0157 outbreaks and antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains.

Moreover, cattle producers still routinely feed their cows “chicken litter”—chicken shit mixed up with excess feed and other wastes—even though it can contain cow blood meal (which large-scale poultry farmers often feed to chickens). Appetizing, huh?

That a federal agency might seriously regulate such practices must have made the industry skittish—even more so after a top FDA official recently testified that routine antibiotic applications on livestock farms must end. “Live animals are not ‘food’ until the point of processing, which is why this bill needs to clarify that the FDA does not have regulatory authority on our farms, ranches and feedlots,” a functionary for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association told the Journal.

But by Wednesday’s vote, such concerns had evidently been fixed. Phillip Brasher of the Des Moines Register reported Wednesday afternoon:

Farm-state lawmakers won several last-minute changes, including a provision exempting grain growers from new farming standards. Recordkeeping requirements for livestock farms were restricted. The pork industry kept out of the bill some proposed restrictions on antibiotic use.

The small-producer lobby was less successful; the $500 per-facility fee remained in the version voted on Wednsday. In a Wednesday press release, Ferd Hoefner, policy director of the widely respected National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, said that some small-producer concerns had been taken care of in the version voted on Wednesday. In particular, farms that sell directly to consumers would have access to “limited exemptions from traceability and registration requirements” that would be onerous.

But the legislation would stiill place double bookkeeping and traceability requirements on organic growers, who already follow similar procedures from the USDA’s National Organic Program. And even as it gives factory-scale livestock farms a free pass, the bill comes down hard on the wildlife that might—gasp!—trespass on farms. “The bill contains language that experience shows can do serious harm to wildlife and biodiversity, while failing to specify the positive role that conservation practices can play to address food safety concerns,” Hoefner says.

All in all, Hoefner finds the bill wanting. “This bill ultimately had great potential to economically harm family farms as a result of overreaching provisions that do nothing to advance the important cause of food safety,” Hoefner declared.

He added, though, that “simple, common-sense amendments” could fix the bill’s flaws and make into a decent new framework for food safety.” The Kaptur-Farr amendment [PDF], for example, has generated wide support in the sustainable-ag community.

And therein lies the problem with the Wednesday afternoon machinations of the House Rules Committee. Again, as in Wednesday’s vote, the possibility for amendments has been taken off the table. And this time, a simple majority can seal the deal.

I’m told that Wednesday night, as I write this, representatives are haggling over the final version of the bill due to be voted on Thursday. (Over on the Center for Rural Affairs blog, Steph Larsen has a cogent post on the lamentable haste the House leadership is using to ram through this bill.) I hope House members account for the concerns of small producers. We clearly need a new food-safety regime—and in some respects, this bill makes baby steps in the right direction. Underfunded watchdog agencies and laissez-faire enforcement have allowed the corporations that dominate our food system to routinely put millions at risk. But fixing that problem can’t mean stepping on the necks of the producers hard at work building alternative food systems.

———————

Update: Food safety bill passes

As expected, HR 2749 passed overwhelmingly Thursday afternoon—283-142. Democrats supported it by a margin of 229-20; Republicans clocked in at 54-122.The version voted on was not substantially different from the one that narrowly missed passage Wednesday. To me, the bill still seems too easy on the food giants that pose the most risk, and a little too hard on the small producers who are creating community-based alternatives to Big Food. During the debate, I watched bitterly as House Ag Committee chair Collin Peterson (D.-Minn.), a pit bull in service of ag interests, declared his satisfaction with the bill. He ticked off the names of the groups that supported or were neutral on it: National Pork Producers, National Corn Growers, etc.

However, as with the climate-bill debate, effecting real change in our food-safety regime—the move to create a system that holds corporate food giants to account for the health threats they create—is going to be a long slog, rife with compromise. A split has opened in the progressive food community about how small-scale producers would fare under the regime laid out by the bill. A coalition of groups, including some I deeply respect like Food and Water Watch and Consumers Union, supported the bill. They wrote in a Thursday letter:

The complaints of certain sustainable and organics groups are unfounded.  Great pains have been taken by members on both sides of the aisle, and on several House Committees, to address concerns that have been raised about this legislation. 

Above-mentioned National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition maintained its opposition to the end, sticking by the analysis laid out above. The argument seems to be about how the FDA would interpret the bill if it became law—FWW and CU urge us to believe that the agency would go gentle on small-scale producers, and the NSAC emphasizes that the agency could use its new authority to crack down on them.

This debate will continue when the Senate takes up the issue in the fall.

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Will FDA take quotation marks off “Smart Choices” [UPDATED]

On July 13, Chipotle Mexican Grill announced it was throwing its marketing weight behind Food, Inc., a documentary that takes a highly critical look at the food system.

The fast-food chain would be sponsoring free screenings of the film at 32 theaters nationwide. It would also be distributing material promoting the film at all its restaurants—thus exposing people in search of a tasty burrito to a film quite different from the super-hero blockbusters that get promoted in typical fast-food chains. In addition, there’d be a Chipotle-related “bonus feature” in the film’s upcoming DVD.

The Chipotle/Food, Inc. tie-up caught my eye, because just a month before, a group of food writers and activists signed a letter to Chipotle CEO Steve Ells sharply criticizing the chain for its inaction on farm worker rights. The two signees who topped the list were Food, Inc. director Robert Kenner and co-producer Eric Schlosser, who is also prominently featured in the film. (I signed the letter as well.)

The letter was written on behalf of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a farm-worker-led group that has been fighting to improve sub-poverty wages, dismal living conditions, and sometimes outright slavery in Florida tomato country—source of 90 percent of the winter tomatoes consumed in the United States. The CIW wants Chipotle to commit to pay an extra penny per pound for tomatoes, in an arrangement that would ultimately deliver the hike directly to workers. Chipotle claims it supports the penny-per-pound principle, but refuses to sign an agreement with the CIW.

Off-screen drama at a Food, Inc. showing.“We view the CIW’s struggle for dignity as a non-negotiable part of the struggle for a sustainable food system,” the letter states. “Therefore, we strongly urge you to enter into an agreement with this worker-led organization that has been fighting tirelessly to improve conditions in tomato country since 1993.”

When Chipotle announced it was sponsoring Food, Inc., I assumed an agreement with the CIW was imminent. In its uphill fight to get decent wages for tomato pickers, the CIW has won agreements from some of the most profit-focused companies in the food industry, including Burger King, McDonald’s, and Yum Brands, owner of Taco Bell. More recently, two sustainability-minded companies—Whole Foods and Bon Appetit Management—have signed agreements with the CIW. Surely Chipotle, which strives to serve “food with integrity” and has a history of working with mid-sized sustainable farmers, couldn’t be far behind ... right?

But then I checked the CIW’s Web site—and it turned out there was just as much distance as ever between the farm-worker group and the burrito chain. (Ironically, the Mission-style burritos served by Chipotle probably evolved from a hearty lunch staple developed for Mexican farm workers in California’s Central Valley in the 1950s.)

I found that activists from a CIW-allied group, the Campaign for Fair Food, had been attending the Chipotle-sponsored free screenings and handing out copies of the letter signed by Kenner and Schlosser. They held up a banner reading “Food, Inc.: great film/Chipotle: Don’t believe the hype.”

Chipotle clearly resents such critical statements at events designed to demonstrate its sustainability cred. At one of its screenings in Denver, Chipotle employees barred people from the Campaign for Fair Food to speak after the screening—overturning an arrangement that had been made with Food, Inc’s public-education campaign.

I asked Chipotle communications director Chris Arnold about the incident. He referred me to Matt Cowal of Magnolia Pictures, which is distributing the film. “What happened with the Campaign for Fair Food was a mixup,” he told me. “The Chipotle screenings and what we’re doing with our social-action partnerships were always meant to be separate initiatives. Chipotle was under the correct impression that their screening was intended to be exclusively for their guests and what happened was a scheduling error on our part.”

In other words, people wanting to discuss the CIW issue aren’t to be given stage time at the Chipotle-sponsored Food, Inc. screenings. Damara Luce of Just Harvest USA tells me that after the Denver screenings, Chipotle representatives were equally inhospitable to CIW allies at showings in Kansas City, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore.

So what gives? How did a film made by Kenner and Schlosser end up being sponsored by a company being called out by Kenner and Schlosser? I contacted all the principal actors in this drama to find answers.

Food, Inc. director Robert Kenner

Standing with the farm workersSchlosser and Kenner, for their part, stand by their support of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. As the film’s co-producer and director, they have limited say over how it’s marketed and distributed. Those decisions ultimately lie with the film’s production company, Participant Media, and its distributor, Magnolia Pictures.

Participant declined to comment for this article. Cowal of Magnolia Pictures told me he was unaware of the situation in Florida’s tomato fields when he linked up with Chipotle, which he called a leading player in the movement to reform the food system. “They’re doing a lot of great things around sustainability,” he said. He added: “We do hope something positive will come of this—that it [the controversy]  will inspire Chipotle to rethink their position on the Coalition.”

As for Schlosser and Kenner, as you might expect from writer/filmmaker types, they have strong opinions. Schlosser wrote the following in an email:

I like the food at Chipotle. I think their efforts on behalf of sustainability, animal welfare, and the misuse of antibiotics are terrific.  But I care more about human rights than any of those things.

If Taco Bell, Subway, Burger King, and McDonald’s can reach agreement with the CIW, I don’t see why Chipotle can’t. It will not cost much—and it will help to end human trafficking in Florida.

Although I’m grateful for the support that Chipotle has given to Food, Inc., my views haven’t changed since I signed that letter.

Kenner took a similar position in a phone conversation. He said he admires Chipotle’s commitment to sustainability—in fact, he seriously considered featuring it in Food, Inc. as an example of a large player that’s “moving in the right direction.” “I don’t regret that they’re sponsoring the film,” he emphasized.

But he made clear that he disagreed with the company’s position on the CIW. “The film is really about fair food,” he said. “People are aware that animals are being abused [in the food system]. There’s a lot less consciousness about workers.”

In fact, just as Kenner nearly included a section on Chipotle, he also seriously considered honing in on the situation in Immokalee. If the film hadn’t ended up shining a light on harsh working conditions in the pork-proccessing industry, “we would have gone to Immokalee and told that story.”

“I was hopeful that by associating itself with a film that promotes workers’ rights, [Chipotle] might be inclined to sign with the Coalition,” he said. “And now I’m not confident they will.”

He repeated: “Frankly, I don’t understand their position.”

In the heat of the grillSo what exactly is Chipotle’s position on Florida’s ruthlessly exploited tomato-field workers? (I visited Immokalee myself last spring, and filed two reports—here and here.)

First, a little setup. Florida’s tomato pickers are currently locked in a battle with the area’s farm owners over the penny-per-pound raise the CIW wrung out of McDonald’s, Burger King, and Yum Brands. The Florida Tomato Growers Exchange is refusing to pass on the raise to workers, whose real wages have plunged to well below poverty level in the past two decades. So the CIW is locked in a bitter fight with the Growers Exchange.

Whole Foods and Bon Appetit recently intervened by signing on to the CIW’s penny-per-pound pledge, while also working with the Coalition to identify sustainable tomato growers who pay their workers decently. Chipotle has chosen to chart its own path—it has set up its own escrow account to hold an extra penny-per-pound for workers. And, like the CIW, it claims to be looking for growers willing to pass it on.

“We are escrowing a penny per pound for any tomatoes we buy from Florida, with that money earmarked for the farm workers,” Chipotle’s Arnold wrote in an email message. He continued:

But we would rather have that money get to the workers rather than simply amassing in an escrow account. That is why we are working (with assistance from the CIW) to try to find growers who will actually pay the additional money to the workers, rather than support the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange in blocking payments to the workers.

That last bit doesn’t make any sense to me. If they want to help break through the Growers Exchange and get the workers their much-needed raise, why not join McDonald’s. Burger King, Whole Foods, etc, and work hand-in-hand with the CIW?

I asked CIW staffer Greg Asbed about the situation. Why aren’t Chipotle’s efforts sufficient? “Chipotle has made no commitment, signed no enforceable agreement, behind their decision to pay the penny per pound.” he wrote in an email. He added:

All our agreements, from Yum Brands to Bon Appetit, are signed, enforceable agreements with no fixed term for the penny per pound—and so the agreement to pay the surcharge is not dependent on the whim of the company. Chipotle, on the other hand, could rescind its decision to pay the penny more tomorrow (even assuming they are really paying it today) and we would have no recourse but to protest.

Asbed also points out a stark contrast in Chipotle CEO Steven Ells’s approach to food issues. “Ells is clearly, for whatever reason known only to him, far more comfortable walking arm in arm with a small farmer than embracing farmworkers leading the fight for human rights in the fields,” Asbed wrote. “And that disparity, that contradiction, is what is so very wrong about Chipotle and its efforts to position itself at the forefront of the sustainable food movement.”

Ironically, by embracing Food, Inc., Chipotle is highlighting the whole vexed issue of how America treats the people who harvest and prepare its food—which is exactly what Kenner intended the film to do in the first place.

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• Assess current food program challenges and opportunities• Identify capacity needs and regulatory priorities• Develop plans for allocating fiscal year 2010 resources• Develop the FDA’s budget request for fiscal year 2011• Plan implementation of new food safety legislation

Taylor’s new position isn’t his first in government. He’s a veteran apparatchik who has made an art of the role-swapping dance between the food industry and the agencies that regulate it. (The FDA’s press release highlights his government service while delicately omitting his Monsanto daliances.) In her 2002 book Food Politics, the nutritionist and food-industry critic Marion Nestle describes him like this (quote courtesy of La Vida Locavore):

Mr. Taylor is a lawyer who began his revolving door adventures as counsel to FDA. He then moved to King & Spalding, a private-sector law firm representing Monsanto, a leading agricultural biotechnology company. In 1991 he returned to the FDA as Deputy Commissioner for Policy, where he was part of the team that issued the agency’s decidedly industry-friendly policy on food biotechnology and that approved the use of Monsanto’s genetically engineered growth hormone in dairy cows. His questionable role in these decisions led to an investigation by the federal General Accounting Office, which eventually exonerated him of all conflict-of-interest charges. In 1994, Mr. Taylor moved to USDA to become administrator of its Food Safety and Inspection Service ... After another stint in private legal practice with King & Spalding, Mr. Taylor again joined Monsanto as Vice President for Public Policy in 1998.

“Vice president for public policy” means, of course, chief lobbyist. Monsanto had hired him to keep his former colleagues at USDA and FDA, as well as Congress folk, up to date on the wonders of patent-protected seed biotechnology.

“Since 2000,” the FDA press release informs us, “Taylor has worked in academic and research settings on the challenges facing the nation’s food safety system and ways to address them.”

Watchdog in flack’s clothing?

And somewhere along the away, according to his erstwhile critic Nestle, Taylor had a moment like Saul’s on the road to Damascus: the one-time company man suddenly became a valorous industry watchdog. In a surprising blog post Tuesday, Nestle declared Taylor “a good pick” for the FDA. “I say this in full knowledge of his history,” Nestle wrote. Here’s her rationale:

Watch what happened when he moved to USDA in 1994 as head of its Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS). Just six weeks after taking the job, Mr. Taylor gave his first public speech to an annual convention of the American Meat Institute. There, he announced that USDA would now be driven by public health goals as much or more than by productivity concerns. The USDA would soon require science-based HACCP systems in every meat and poultry plant, would be testing raw ground beef, and would require contaminated meat to be destroyed or reprocessed. And because E. coli O157.H7 is infectious at very low doses, the USDA would consider any level of contamination of ground beef with these bacteria to be unsafe, adulterated, and subject to enforcement action.  Whew.  This took real courage.

Nestle goes on to report that Taylor, after serving a stint as Monsanto’s chief lobbyist, became a kind of food-safety intellectual, issuing wise papers on how the regulators should oversee food companies. She points us to an “excellent report” [PDF] co-written by Taylor, released this year.

That paper must be read carefully: Given Taylor’s new status, it—along with new guidelines released by the White House Food Safety Working on Tuesday—will likely serve as a kind of blueprint for the Obama FDA food oversight.

Two things jump out immediately from Taylor’s paper. First, it amounts to a forceful push to shift much more of the burden for funding food-safety operations to the state and local level. Its very title is “An Agenda for Strengthening State and Local Roles in the Nation’s Food Safety System.” The paper promotes a “Joint Funding Responsibility” between federal and local/state agencies.

Why is this a problem? For one, state and local budgets are parched dry, drained by the most severe economic downturn since the Depression. Is, say, California now going to fund a robust food-safety platform—with IOUs, perhaps?

Moreover, we’ve seen the sort of federal-state partnership Taylor promotes in action—and there have been spectacular failures. Remember the great peanut-butter calamity of 2008-‘09, the one that killed at least seven people and sickened hundreds? In that case, the FDA had farmed out inspections of the ofending factory to Georgia authorities, who dutifully documented atrocious sanitary lapses even as tainted product got distributed nationwide.

The other immediate problem with Taylor’s blueprint relates to scale. A sane food-safety policy would do two things:  1) rein in the gigantic companies that routinely endanger millions with a single lapse at a single plant—say, a gigantic beef company that can send out 420,000 pounds of E. coli-tainted beef from a day’s processing; and 2) do so in a way that doesn’t harm the thousands of small-scale, community-oriented operations rising up in new alternative food systems.

Again and again, we’ve seen regulations designed to rein in big players actually consolidate their market power by wiping out small players. As a recent Food & Water Watch report showed, regulations that make sense for industrial slaughterhouses can spell the end for community- and regional-scale ones. The Taylor report only addresses this critical point once in its 80 pages: “Due regard should be given to making the traceback requirement feasible for small businesses.” Clearly, the small-scale producer issue isn’t a priority for Monsanto’s man at FDA.

A technocrat’s tinkering

With the widely respected Marion Nestle throwing her support behind the Taylor pick, I went looking for other perspectives. I asked Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food & Water Watch, for her take. FWW has been actively working to promote a scale-appropriate food-safety regime that checks Big Food without crushing small producers.

Lovera does not share Nestle’s enthusiasm. “Taylor basically promotes a risk-based approach, and we don’t think that’s adequate,” she told me. Lovera explained that in a risk-based approach, regulators focus limited resources on areas of the food system that pose the most risk. Sounds logical, she said, but it’s proven difficult to predict where risk factors really lie. I asked her if the peanut-butter debacle was a good example. Who would have foreseen multiple deaths from a factory that produces peanut paste for processed food manufacturers? She concurred. She added that the USDA’s FSIS program, which oversees meat safety, has largely failed in a 10-year effort to identify the riskiest parts of the meat-production process.

Then there’s the emphasis on what Nestle praised in her blog post as “science-based HACCP systems.” HACCP stands for “hazard analysis and critical control point.” In an HACCP system, you identify the points in a process that pose the most risk and “fix” the problem.

“That approach is really geared to techno fixes,” Lovera told me—stuff like ammonia washes, irradiation, etc. These procedures don’t seek to, say, keep salmonella-tainted peanut butter out of cookies, but rather to make salmonella-exposed cookies safe to eat. Moreover, the HACCP approach “hasn’t proven friendly to small producers,” she adds. To see the Obama FDA appear to embrace it, she told me, “makes us cringe.” In the end, the food safety system doesn’t just need to tinker with the use of scarce resources, leveraged by increasing the burden on states and localities. It needs to devote more resources to actual inspections.

As for Taylor, here’s my take: Despite massive marketing budgets, the food industry has become widely distrusted over the last several years, with high-profile outbreaks a major reason. “Consumers are increasingly wary of the safety of food purchased at grocery stores,” declares a recent study. “And their confidence in—and trust of—food retailers, manufacturers and grocers is declining.”

The industry knows it needs an improved safety system; technocrats like Taylor can deliver a marginally improved food safety system while preserving profit margins and market share.

Perhaps the FDA’s new food czar can save some lives—I hope he does. It’s abominable when people die from eating pre-fab peanut butter cookie or salad from a bag. Taylor’s tinkerings could well reduce such disasters.

But what we really need is a food safety system that takes the shit out of industrial meat and the salmonella out of peanut butter, without dumping on small producers. And I don’t think Taylor will deliver that—or even try.

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What were those people thinking? Turns out, Paumgarten relates that during the flush times, many in the world of finance had a “moment of clarity, an inkling of doom” about what was coming. “The sky was full of signs,” Paumgarten writes.

For many, the awakening came while driving through some overbuilt exurb in California or Florida, or watching a commercial for a subprime lender (“Mortgage consultants are standing by!”), or studying a chart depicting total debt to the gross domestic product.

Paumgarten’s tale is essentially about high-level fecklessness: people with degrees from the nation’s finest universities, rewarded with nine-figure annual salaries, knowingly driving the global economy right over a cliff. Paumgarten doesn’t go there, but the same analysis applies to financial policymakers and regulators; they, too, could gawk at obviously overbuilt exurbs, or wince at debt-to-GDP charts.

The whole sorry spectacle got me thinking of the global food system, the juggernaut that feeds billions every day. It’s not hard to make analogies with the financial sector whose rubble now lays scattered about, ready to be cleaned up on the public’s dime.

Like the financial sector, the food system has dramatically globalized over the past generation, even as it has become increasingly concentrated (PDF). Just as traders in New York, Tokyo, and London—often employed by the same mega-banks—can make, say, the Argentine peso plunge or soar with a few keystrokes, global food commodity markets have become tightly intertwined.

Just last year, the U.S. policy of diverting massive amounts of corn to biofuel—in concert with similar European Union policy on soybeans—sparked steep increases in food prices worldwide, pushing hundreds of millions of people into hunger. In essence, decisions made in Washington and Brussels reduced Haiti’s urban poor to eating mud cakes.

The analogy between food and finance also extends to the concept of leverage. During the boom, a typical Wall Street firm held a dollar in liquid assets for every 25 it used to make speculative bets in stuff like derivatives and credit default swaps. Execs were so confident that real-estate prices go only one way—up!—that 25-to-one leverage seemed like a sound business model. Paumgarten shows that many of them had doubts; but that only makes the situation more stunning.

Whereas Wall Street’s leverage was financial, the food industry’s is mostly ecological and social. (Financial leverage does play a role, as in the case of teetering, debt-gorged Pilgrim’s Pride, the globe’s largest chicken producer.) Companies like Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, and Tyson have built globe-spanning empires by taking vast amounts of cheap, monocropped corn and soy and turning it into everything from sweetener to meat to car fuel. Mega-processors like Kraft and fast-food chains like McDonald’s and Wendy’s suck in these inputs and churn out cheap, ready-made meals.

These giant entities behave as if soil is an easily renewable resource, that the climate can absorb endless amounts of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (a synthetic fertilizer byproduct), and that communities and the biosphere can endlessly bear the toxic footprint of industrial meat production.

And just as in the financial world circa 2006, signs of imminent trouble abound, discernible by anyone who dares look. Consider just a few of the most obvious ones:

• Industrial corn and soy are the lifeblood of the industrial food system, providing livestock feed, cooking oil, sweeteners, and a dizzying array of processed additives. They’re also the feedstock of choice for the biofuel industry, of which food giants like ADM and Cargill form a major part. And, they’re massive contributors to climate change. Industrial corn needs heavy lashings of synthetic nitrogen to reach maximum yield—and recent studies (PDF) suggest nitrogen fertilizers emit four to five times more nitrous oxide into the atmosphere than previously had been assumed. Meanwhile, the expansion of soy into Brazil’s agricultural frontier, egged on by ADM and Cargill, has led to massive deforestation in the Amazon, perhaps the globe’s most important carbon sink. Under the industrial-food regime, we’re literally warming the planet bite by bite.

• Large doses antibiotics are fundamental to the industrial livestock model. Animals crammed together in close quarters over their own waste become immune-comprimised, requiring steady doses just to stay alive. Meat producers also favor antibiotics because they promote fast growth. “An estimated 70 percent of antibiotics produced in this country—nearly 13 million pounds per year—are used in animal agriculture for these nontherapeutic purposes,” claims the Union of Concerned Scientists. A growing body of evidence links intensive hog production with MRSA, an antibiotic resistant staph infection that kills 20,000 Americans per year—more than AIDS. The situation with flu viruses may be even more dire. The current swine flu strain sweeping the globe has been traced to a hog raised by a large-scale operation in North Carolina from 1998; and even conventional veterinary scientists have been warning for years that hog CAFOs create ideal environments for fast-evolving, species-jumping flu strains.

• Industrial-scale vegetable and fruit production relies heavily on domesticated honey bees for pollination—and commercial beekeepers have been haunted since 2006 by large die-offs. Scientists have yet to settle on a single explanation for “colony collapse disorder”—but widespread insecticide use almost certainly plays a role.

One can easily imagine a rollicking New Yorker piece about the aftermath of a food-system meltdown: quotes from wistful agribiz execs about how they saw, and ignored hints of a coming calamity.

But there’s no need to wait fearfully for that day. Just as signs industrial food’s fragility abound, there’s also evidence of robust alternatives nationwide. For 20 years, farmers markets and CSAs have grown dramatically, providing links between consumers and farmer unmediated by transnational food corporations.

In places as diverse as Woodbury County, Iowa, and Hardwick, Vermont, citizens are organizing to use municipal policy as a tool to revitalize and support local food networks. Across the nation, municipalities are launching “food policy councils”—based on the theory that just as cities develop strategies for securing sufficient water and regulating growth, they also need to think about nurturing their foodshed.

And in inner-city Chicago and Milwaukee, Growing Power and the Institute for Community Resource Development are putting the lie to the idea that low-income people tend to eat industrial food because they like it better. These groups—along with Brooklyn’s East New York Farms and Added Value, Oakland’s People’s Grocery, and others—are thriving as they bring fresh food to neighborhoods that too often only have access to ill-stocked corner stores.

All of this activity, vibrant and promising as it is, produces a small fraction of the food consumed in the United States—likely less than 3 percent. Unlike the industrial food system, it’s disaggregated, decentralized, and unsubsidized by the federal government. Yet these shadow food systems represent the best hope we have as Big Food lumbers toward disaster.

Here is where the analogy to the financial system offers some hope. Commenting on how difficult it was for most people not to get swept up in the bubble economy, Paumgarten writes: “The sad fact is that betting against the global financial system requires more than pluck; you need to be a participant. Most of the mechanisms in place for the implementation of pessimism are known only to the members of the guild.”

In other words, nearly anyone could have seen that the U.S. economy had entered a precarious bubble phase. But you pretty much had to have been running a hedge fund to, say, make money by betting against the value of collatoralized-debt obligations.

Food is different. There are multiple ways for individuals and communities to get involved with alternative-food efforts. And unlike shorting securities like a Wall Street “bear,” betting on alternative food expresses optimism, not pessimism.

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Swine flu: how very two weeks ago.

Sure, H1N1 transmission is “still on the upswing” in the United States, and the World Health Organization warned that as much of a third of the globe’s population could eventually catch it, Reuters reported last week.

But the disease is turning out to be little more virulent than the common flu. It resists older anti-viral treatments, but fortunately, new ones like Tamiflu have its number. For now, anyway. “We all pray this remains sensitive to antivirals,” CDC chief virologist Rubin Donis recently told Science—not exactly inspiring confidence.

Thus sensationalist media spotlight on swine flu is beginning to fade. Out of sight, out of mind. In our culture of instant amnesia, the 2009 swine flu outbreak appears to be skulking into the shadows to join such forgotten one-time burning media fixations as the Teri Schiavo and Elian Gonzalez  episodes.

Worrying about future outbreaks, it seems, is for professionals. “Vast amounts of time and resources are being invested in planning for the next influenza pandemic,” declares an article published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine. If a truly virulent strain breaks out, we’ll be glad that public-health professionals are taking the threat seriously.

Yet even as the public-health system “plans for the next pandemic,” we as a public have some hard questions to ponder. So-called “triple-reassortant swine influenza viruses”—containing genetic material from human, swine, and avian genetic strains—first appeared in 1998, and have been evolving rapidly since. Until very recently, they haven’t been very efficient at infecting humans— and even worse at jumping from human to human. All of that changed this spring in Mexico.

While public health professionals prepare for the next outbreak—no doubt praying, like the CDC’s Donis, that the antivirals being stockpiled remain effective—what are we doing as a society to make a pandemic less likely? That question leads to the the place where many scientists believe the new H1N1 strain originated: the confined-animal feedlot operation, or CAFO.

A couple of weeks ago, I caused a mini-sensation by pointing out that U.S. pork behemoth Smithfield Foods runs massive hog-rearing operations near the village in Mexico where the swine flu evidently reared up; and that local residents believed the mysterious, virulent flu-like outbreak was tied to flies emanating from the vast cesspools that abut the hog factories (For an excellent on-the-ground report from Mexico, see Steve Fainaru’s piece from Sunday’s Washington Post). Critics rebuked me, correctly charging that there’s no proof linking the Smithfield confinements to the disease—and added that no visible signs of sickness have been reported within Smithfield’s Mexican or U.S. herd. (It’s important to note, however, that hogs can carry flu viruses without falling ill—and the only actual testing being done on Smithfield’s Mexico hogs is controlled by the company itself; and that U.S. regulators have no system in place for testing domestic hogs).

We may never know precisely where this version of H1N1 originated—the “pig zero” in whose body the strain incubated.

But we do know that raising animals by the thousands in tight quarters is a U.S. invention—one that characterizes close to 100 percent of hog, poultry, and cow fattening. It’s a model that’s spreading rapidly across the globe, pushed aggressively by U.S.-based multinational meat giants like Smithfield, Cargill, and Tyson. A growing number of scientists is pointing to the factory-style farms as ideal sites for flu bugs and other pathogens to mutate rapidly and spread to human populations via workers.

Read the veterinary literature on swine flu and you get a strong sense of what might be called vaccination treadmill: the hog industry is literally scrambling to generate new vaccines for the rapidly evolving flu strains that sweep through CAFOs. Writing in the Journal of Infectious Diseases [PDF] in 2008, Eileen Thacker and Bruce Janke of Iowa State University paint a stark picture: “A number of genetically diverse viruses are circulating in swine herds throughout the world and are a major cause of concern to the swine industry,” they write. “Influenza virus infections in swine and poultry are potential sources of viruses for the next pandemic among humans.”

They describe a kind of fast-changing viral alphabet soup flowing through hog confinements:

An increased rate of genetic change has occurred among both H1 and H3 subtypes [since 1998], with multiple genetically and antigenically diverse viruses of both major subtypes (H1 and H3) circulating in swine herds. Recently, there have been reports of H3N1 viruses circulating in Asia and the United States. Even more recently, an H1N1 virus composed of only human influenza virus genes has entered the US swine population. In addition to the influenza viruses described above, which are isolated fairly commonly from US swine herds, H3 and H1N1 avian influenza virus subtypes have been isolated from pigs in Canada, and transmission of human and swine influenza viruses between the two species has been well documented.

The industry tries to stay on top of this highly dynamic situation by vaccinating sows to “to protect young pigs through maternally derived antibodies,” the authors note. But “influenza viruses continue to circulate in pigs after the decay of maternal antibodies, providing a continuing source of virus on a herd basis.” As the good veterinary scientists they are, the authors end on a bland note: “Control of influenza virus infection in poultry and swine is critical to the reduction of potential cross-species adaptation and spread of influenza viruses, which will minimize the risk of animals being the source of the next pandemic.”

Writing in Newsweek, Laurie Garrett, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, took a more blunt approach. Factory-scale animal farming, she writes,  creates “the ecology that, in the cases of pigs and chickens, is breeding influenza. It is an ecology that promotes viral evolution. And if we don’t do something about it, this ecology will one day spawn a severe pandemic that will dwarf that of 1918.”

“Doing something about it,” though, is quite a trick. Industrial meat is a vast industry with billions of dollar of investments across the globe. Garrett is arguing that its signature practice of stuffing the same species together by the thousand is creating a vast public-health menace. Surely, the industry can’t be expected to roll up and go away—and is predictably enough scrambling to distance itself from the flu pandemic.

For me, the key now is to resist instant amnesia as the current pandemic fades out of the news cycle—to keep the flu story alive by continuing to investigate the industry’s practices and the government’s feeble oversight efforts.

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Michael Pollan ended The Omnivore’s Dilemma with this line: “we eat by the grace of nature, not of industry, and what we’re eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.”

Sustenance, it seems to me, has always been humanity’s most persistent and direct link to the landscape. But at least since the rise of agriculture 10,000 years ago, class relations have had the power to obscure that link. It’s doubtful, for example, that Queen Victoria knew very much about what it took to supply her table, which (telegraphing today’s food-miles debate) included delicacies from all over Britain’s massive empire.

Even Victorian-era Britain’s notoriously exploited workers enjoyed class privilege of a sort. They received a huge portion of their calories from sugar—grown and processed under dire conditions by out-of-sight, out-of-mind black workers all the way in the West Indies, as the anthropologist Sidney Mintz shows in his great book Sweetness and Power. One shudders contemplating the vast swaths of carbon-sucking tropical forest that came under the ax to make way for those sugar plantations.

The rise of industrial agriculture in the 20th century dramatically expanded our distance from the processes that sustain us. In a sense, most of us now live like royalty—separated from the land, as removed as we choose to be from the drudgery of growing and cooking food, with the ability to procure food from dizzying distances with little more than a finger snap.

It’s because of this separation from the land, I think, that food has been slow to catch on as an issue for the modern environmental movement. From the start, of course, there were rumblings that how we feed ourselves exerts a huge environmental impact. Rachel Carson‘s landmark Silent Spring (1962) revealed dirty secrets about what agricultural pesticides were doing to ecosystems; and Frances Moore Lappé‘s Diet for a Small Planet (1971) delivered a cogent, ahead-of-its time look at the vast ecological footprint of meat.

Despite the popularity of these books and the stirrings they created, food mainly stayed at the margins of environmental debate. The first Earth Day celebrations focused on population growth, industrial pollution, and threats to wildlife. Activists likely plotted them over Big Macs of beef from the nation’s emerging corn-sucking feedlots, jacked up on coffee from vast mono-crop plantations in Brazil. Food was merely fuel for the body; protecting the environment meant saving the whales.

Over the past five years, food has moved much closer to the center of the movement. Probably the signal moment was the publication of Livestock’s Long Shadow in fall 2006, a lengthy report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The report, lavishly documented and bluntly written, delivered a bombshell whose full effects we have yet to see the last of: “The livestock sector is a major player [in global climate change], responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2 equivalent. This is a higher share than transport.”

A higher share than transport. From that point on, it became impossible to credibly discuss climate change without discussing food. Not that policymakers don’t try. The draft Markey-Waxman legislation, which would cap greenhouse gas emissions, stunningly exempts agriculture from regulation. In doing so, the bill’s sponsors are bowing to the influence of the agriculture lobby, which has brazenly demanded (PDF) that not only should the greenhouse gas emissions generated by industrial farming not be capped, but that its alleged carbon-sequestration services be fully credited.

Official acceptance of such claptrap may soon crumble under the weight of its absurdity. Another recent study (PDF) may prove even more important than the FAO report, even if it lacks its headline-grabbing power. The paper, published by the International Council for Science (ICSU), examines the impact of the synthetic nitrogen fertilizer on which industrial agriculture relies. Scientists have long known that a portion of that fertilizer enters the atmosphere as nitrous oxide, a gas with nearly 300 times more heat-trapping power than carbon. The question is, how much? Most climate assessments, including the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the FAO’s livestock study, have assumed about 1 percent of fertilizer turns into nitrous oxide. But the ICSU paper pegs the true level at 4 percent or as much as 5-meaning that old estimates may be dramatically undercounting agriculture’s role in climate change.

As the political class lurches toward acceptance of this harsh reality, the rapidly converging environmental and sustainable-food movements still have plenty of work ahead of them.

The main task, I think, is ramping up accessibility. Historically, people of limited means have tended to scrape by on what’s locally available, while the wealthy have used their resources to draw in fancy food from far away. Now, that situation has turned upside down. Micro-farms dot the areas outside metropolises, producing hand-picked, highly nutritious, and pungent microgreens to be plopped on lawyers’, accountants’, and high-tech professionals’ plates for astronomical prices. Meanwhile, the people who staff the vast services economy get the dreck served up by environmentally abusive companies like Smithfield Foods.

At this point, no more than 3 percent of the food consumed in the United States is grown under ecologically sustainable conditions, the Kellogg Foundation estimates. We’ve created a greenhouse gas-intensive, lavishly subsidized system for delivering cheap food to a public that has seen real wages stagnate since the 1970s—and that is now enduring the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Under such conditions, simplistic calls for people to “pay the true cost” of their food aren’t enough. We need to figure out new economic models to make sustainably produced food a viable option for everyone. For food to reach its full potential as a green issue—for our society to feed itself in a way that’s not literally destroying our habitat—that’s our challenge going forward.

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