Blog Posts: Food

Brother Dave Andrews, Senior Representative for Food & Water Watch

This post about our very own Brother Dave Andrews originally appeared on Nourishing the Planet’s blog (he is an advisor to the project). We are reprinting it here with their permission. Congratulations Brother Dave!

Nourishing the Planet Advisory Group Member to be Honored with Distinguished Service to Rural Life Award

By Alison Blackmore

On July, 28 2012 Brother Dave Andrews, Senior Representative for Food & Water Watch and a member of Nourishing the Planet’s advisory group, will be honored with the prestigious Distinguished Service to Rural Life Award for his commitment to enhancing the life of rural people. The award is the highest honor given by the Rural Sociology Society, a professional social science association founded in 1937 with the intent of improving the quality of rural life, communities, and the environment.

Andrews has worked for over 30 years on sustainable development, food and water issues, and public policy, both nationally and internationally, and has a long-standing commitment to bettering the spiritual, social, and economic lives of rural people.

Since the 1970s, Andrews has dedicated his life to ensuring that the dignity of rural people is respected. As the Executive Director of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference for 13 years, he supported rural Catholic congregations, worked with farm communities to determine the best way to care for the earth, and advocated on behalf of rural people on pertinent food policy issues. Today, as a senior representative for Food & Water Watch, Brother Andrews acts as a liaison to the faith community, motivating people of faith to be thoughtful and deliberate about their choices within the food system. Internationally, he represents farmer and peasant voices at various high-profile summits and meetings, including World Food Summits and the last three World Trade Organization meetings. He frequently attends UN Food and Agriculture Organization international and regional meetings on food security, and works with UN officials to advocate for justice for the most vulnerable laborers in the world’s food system.

For his relentless work on behalf of rural society, both national and internationally, Brother Andrews is well-deserving of this award and the Nourishing the Planet team is honored to congratulate him for his service.

Do you know of other outstanding people or work being done to better rural society? Let us know in the comments section!

Alison Blackmore is a research intern with Nourishing the Planet.

By Tim Schwab

This post originally ran on Civil Eats

Unfortunately, today these public institutions are increasingly serving private interests, not the public good. Hundreds of millions of dollars are now flowing from corporate agribusiness into the land-grant university to sponsor buildings, endow professorships and pay for research. One land-grant university, South Dakota State, is headed by a man who sits on Monsanto’s board of directors.  

The influence this money purchases is enormous. Corporate money shifts the public research agenda toward the ambitions of the private sector, whose profit motivations are often at odds with the public good. It strips our public research institutions of the time, resources and independence needed to pursue public-interest research that challenges the status quo of corporate control over our food system or that offers farmers alternative agricultural systems to monocultures and factory farms.

Industry-funded research routinely produces results that are—surprise, surprise—favorable to industry. This “funder effect” produces a well-documented bias on research while weak conflict-of-interest policies throughout academia (including at many scientific journals, which don’t require full disclosure of funding source) mean agribusiness’s pervasive influence over public research is basically unchecked.

It also means that our nation’s regulators and policy makers—always clamoring for science-based rules and regulations—are making decisions about things like the safety of genetically engineered crops based on a body of research and science that is incomplete and, to some degree, biased.

So how do we weed out the agribusiness influence?  A good place to start would be increasing federal support for agriculture research—and directing this money to projects that serve the public interest.  This would go a long ways toward reducing land-grant university’s dependence on corporate funding and allow researchers more independence.

For more information about corporate influence on land-grant universities and recommendations for restoring more independent, objective academic research, read Food & Water Watch’s report Public Research, Private Gain: Corporate Influence Over University Agricultural Research.

Scott Edwards, co-director of the Food & Water Justice project

By Scott Edwards

This originally appeared on the Huffington Post.

Just last week Food & Water Watch broke a story about extremely close ties between Maryland’s Governor Martin O’Malley and the poultry company Perdue.  O’Malley’s closeness to Perdue was evidenced in 70 pages of emails acquired under a state freedom of information request; they are largely between O’Malley and Perdue’s general counsel, Herb Frerichs. As revealing as the emails are, subsequent disclosures indicate that the relationship may be even more of a tangled web than was originally thought. 

Maryland is home to the Perdue chicken empire, a multibillion-dollar industry that has managed to game the system to avoid responsibility for its waste in a way that few companies have achieved. Proper disposal of the hundreds of thousands of tons of manure from its very profitable enterprise is critical given that agriculture, including Perdue’s chicken farms, remains the largest source of pollution in the Chesapeake Bay and many other waterways across the country.   Read the full article…

By Tim Schwab

Last week, President Obama visited Albany, New York to tout the role that academic institutions like the University of Albany’s NanoCollege play in driving “the future of our economy.”

Unique in academia, Albany’s NanoCollege is dedicated to tinkering with tiny nanoparticles to create new materials that are increasingly used in consumer products. Nanomaterials could revolutionize your kitchen, for example, by making your ketchup easier to pour and your cutlery sterile through the use of embedded nano-pesticides.

If these innovations sound more like gimmicks than miracles, it’s because they are.  The promise and potential of nanotechnology is, predictably, being used by industry to gloss over the need for regulations, consumer protections and more science about the safety of these nanomaterials. It’s the same logic that brought us “better living through chemistry” – and lead paint and asbestos in our homes or dangerous agrochemicals like DDT in the environment.

Like yesteryear’s chemical blunders, nanomaterials have enormous potential to cause harm to human health, the environment and biodiversity. Materials on the nanoscale exhibit properties and behaviors that can be completely different from larger particle sizes of the same substance, and scientists do not yet really understand how these materials operate in nature or our bodies. While this field presents innovators with a whole new class of chemicals that can do unique things, it also presents society with a whole new class of potential hazards – some of which have already come to light, as researchers are linking nanoparticle exposure with potential problems like “asbestos-like pathogenicity.”

Still, folks at the White House and at the dozens of corporate “strategic partners” at Albany’s NanoCollege see nanotechnology as the next big thing. As the head of the “nanoeconomics constellation” says, “…ultimately, if you think about it, everything on this planet and in this universe is made up of atoms.  And if we can control, manipulate and manage and build …from the atom up, the world is your oyster.”  

That’s a big “if.” Another big “if” that the school may not be fully addressing are the consequences nanomaterials could have on human health or the environment if they should be commercialized irresponsibly. In the absence of a sound, fundamental understanding of the science surrounding nanomaterials, does it really make sense to embrace nanoproducts that are not evaluated for safety, or for that matter, labeled?   

Yes we can, but should we?

Check out Food & Water Watch’s report on nanotechnology, Unseen Hazards: From Nanotechnology to Nanotoxicity. 

By Wenonah Hauter 

Image By: Maryland Office of the Governor, Maryland State Archives (flickr.com/MDGOVPICS)

*Updated May 9

During the 2012 Maryland legislative session, the burning of pollutant-laden chicken poop was embraced as a Tier I renewable energy resource, while readily available, clean wind power was dead. In Maryland, chicken is truly king. Or, as a series of emails obtained from Martin O’Malley’s office to a Perdue official indicate, it’s at least Governor. 

Food & Water Watch obtained the emails through a Public Information Act request for all correspondence between the Governor’s office and the giant Eastern Shore poultry company. 

In one back-and-forth between O’Malley and the Perdue representative from March 2011, the Governor acknowledges that wind energy may cost the poultry industry “18 cents to $2 additional per month at the outset,” but suggests that the cost is well worth it because “kids keep dying in the middle east.”

Eighteen cents a month to keep kids from dying in the Middle East was, apparently, a price too high to pay for the industry; Perdue responded by complaining of the additional costs to the integrators and stating that wind “is not high on [its] list of concerns.” Perdue, however, did buy into the chicken manure-to-energy scheme as a way to offload some of its mountains of waste in the state. And thanks to companies like Perdue, today in Maryland chicken crap is renewable, and wind is not. 

The 70 pages of emails we obtained were almost exclusively between O’Malley and Perdue’s General Counsel, Herb Frerichs. Mr. Frerichs is also a partner at the law firm that represents Perdue in the Clean Water Act suit bought by environmentalists for pollution coming from one of the company’s contract growers’ facilities. The emails depict a very close and personal relationship between the Governor and Frerichs, who were classmates at the Maryland School of Law in the mid-to-late 1980s. Read the full article…

Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter

It used to be that unscrupulous salesmen would try to sell you the bridge; nowadays, they’ve climbed a rung lower – they’re trying to sell you the public trust water flowing under the bridge. A recent website, thebaybank.org, has planted a giant “For Sale” sign on the Chesapeake Bay and the stage is now set to create a marketplace out of this sacred common resource, with the Bay being sold off credit-by-credit.

So what exactly do you get when you buy a credit on Baybank’s website? You don’t actually get a cup of Bay water. The water bottling companies have already figured out how to commoditize our water resources by pouring it into containers and selling it in the supermarkets. Baybank actually promotes a much more insidious way to market our waterways – they’re facilitating the sale of the right to pollute the Bay with more of the same contaminants that are already threatening the very future of this important watershed.

Here how water pollution trading—also known as water quality trading—is supposed to work: instead of recognizing that waterways are owned by everyone as a public trust and enforcing the prohibition on polluting our water, these market-based approaches allow some polluters to claim they’ve decreased their pollution and then sell that alleged decrease, in the form of pollution credits, to other polluters who want to increase their pollution. Read the full article…

By Wenonah Hauter

The Wall Street Journal reports that China is importing 100,000 heifers — 25 ships’ worth — to boost domestic dairy production in the wake of melamine and other milk-powder scandals that have decimated China’s relatively small dairy industry since 2008.

Where to begin? There are so many problems with this scenario, but here are just five reasons why this is a terribly bad idea:

1) The cows are destined for factory farms. China may be importing the cattle from Uruguay, Australia and New Zealand, but they are importing the model for factory farming from the U.S. The animals’ long nightmare starts on a harrowing journey overseas in ships, where they are confined tightly and face multiple health issues that may result in death. Those buried at sea might be the luckiest cattle, because once the animals get through the 45-day quarantine, they will continue their confinement in “football-field-size sheds” that resemble electronics factories more than farms and are milked three times a day on “bovine merry-go-rounds,” according to Wall Street Journal reporter Alex Frangos. Read the full article…

Patty Lovera, Assistant Director and Food Policy Director, Food & Water Watch

By Patty Lovera

Yesterday, the Senate Agriculture Committee passed its version of the 2012 farm bill. The next step in the process is for the bill to go to the Senate floor. We do not know when that will happen, although the Chair of the committee, Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan), says it will be in “a few weeks.” 

Overall, this is not the fair farm bill we have been fighting for, although there are a few bright spots (mostly on existing programs that were threatened but survived.) The Senate bill cuts support for nutrition programs that feed the neediest families, fails to provide an adequate safety net for farmers when prices are low and costs are high, and does nothing to address the power of big agribusiness over farmers and consumers. While it increased funding for some local food systems and organic farm programs, the funding for these programs remains about one out of every thousand dollars spent by this bill.

The Senate Agriculture committee kept the bill secret for months and only released it to the public less than a week before it was passed out of committee. Over a hundred amendments were listed when the committee met to consider the bill, however many of them were never introduced for a vote. Some of the potential amendments would have been dramatic improvements to the bill, such as Senator Grassley’s packer ban amendment and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s (D-New York) amendment to fund research into non-GE seeds and animal breeds, but these were not put up for a vote. Read the full article…

By Darcey Rakestraw

After I wrote a blog last week about banned pesticides and nuclear fallout in tea—looking at how the Fukushima disaster and use of banned pesticides in the growing of tea might affect consumers—I immediately wanted to work on a blog showing the other side of the coin: how environmental disasters harm the very farmers that seek to bring us our food sustainably.

That’s why we work on energy issues like fracking. The oil and gas industry injects millions of gallons of a mixture of water, sand and chemicals under high pressure to fracture rocks deep below ground and release oil or natural gas, posing a risk to not only surface waterways (from spills or inadequate treatment of waste) but also groundwater resources. Read the full article…

Today, the USDA announced that a dairy cow in California’s Central Valley tested positive for Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), otherwise known as mad cow disease. Mad cow disease is spread among cattle when their feed contains infectious material from other cattle or sheep, which get a similar disease called scrapie.

While the U.S. has strengthened some rules to protect the public from mad cow disease, they have not gone far enough. Practices are still allowed which can spread mad cow disease, such as allowing cows to eat waste from the floors of poultry houses, cattle blood, and processed leftovers from restaurants. Testing for the disease should also be expanded.

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