Blog Posts

By Rich Bindell

The path to a green economy is dotted with many mirages. Eco-compensation is one of them. World Resources Institute (WRI) describes eco-compensation as if it’s a just reward to companies for providing sustainable solutions to environmental problems, but it really just encourages business as usual for big polluters. It doesn’t solve the problem of poor water quality. In fact, it allows companies to profit while they continue to compromise our resources. It’s market-based pollution trading.

WRI uses a water quality trading market as an example of a program that provides a cost-effective solution for agricultural contamination. But the program relies on the good actors to give their earned credits to bad actors, who generally keep on polluting.

This is basically just another way for corporate polluters to buy their way into the green economy. This type of program doesn’t change behavior—polluting—so much as it gives companies an opportunity to manipulate the system and grants them a platform from which they can tout their faux version of environmental stewardship. It some cases, this pollution-trading can even lead to privatization of public water sources.

China faces a potential crisis from lack of safe drinking water, particularly in rural areas, due to pollution from chemical and fertilizer run-off from farms. Instead of creating and enforcing regulations that restrict or eliminate the use of contaminants that cause pollutant run-off, eco-compensation creates a market for it.

Buying credits to keep on polluting (or to pollute even more) does not move us forward in the age of the green economy. In fact, the term “green economy” almost seems like it was created by those who wish to benefit financially from the value of our dwindling natural resources.

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 Kate Fried

It sounds like a story ripped from the pages of a dystopian novel, but the horrors that the residents of Toms River (formerly called Dover Township), New Jersey have experienced thanks to their private water providers are all too real.

In the 1990’s, health officials identified a terrible development among children in Toms River: a high rate of certain types of cancer. After a massive five-year study, state and federal investigators linked this horrific trend to contamination of the area’s drinking water system. Five days before the study was released, United Water Toms River (a local subsidiary of French multinational Suez Environnement) and two chemical companies agreed to make undisclosed multimillion-dollar payments to 69 families of children with cancer. Several months later, they reached another monetary settlement with dozens of other families. In total, United Water paid $12 million, after insurance reimbursements, to settle the $800 million claims for wrongful death and injury.

Over the years Toms River’s water woes persisted, particularly when United Water was fined $64,000 for failing to notify the state and the public when the water contained high levels of radioactive contaminants.

Fast-forward to the present day, and some residents of Toms River have a new problem: their drinking water has turned green. This time the responsible entity is a different private water company—New Jersey American Water. The company has identified the source of the problem—high iron levels—and claims the water is perfectly safe. But given the private water industry’s track record, it’s easy to see why some residents are still leery. 

Even if the green water really poses no hazards, this further illustrates how communities often receive very bad services from private water providers. Residents of Toms River have suffered through enough without having to rely on pricey bottled water for their basic hydration and sanitation needs. Nor we can we entirely trust bottled water to be any safer than Toms River’s current supply since it is often subjected to less stringent testing than municipal water.

It’s beyond time we eliminated the gap between the haves and the have-nots when it comes to accessing water. Since many communities lack the means to provide safe, clean, affordable tap water to their residents, we must look to federal leaders to step up and fill this void.

Establishing a consistent source of federal funding for community water systems is our best bet in achieving that goal. Otherwise, more communities could be stuck with the consequences and inconsistencies of privatized water, as Toms Rivers is.

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.

By Meredith Moore

Fish, Inc.: The Privatization of U.S. Fisheries Through Catch Share Programs

A recent editorial by the New York Times attributed the successful rebuilding of six fish stocks to a management scheme called catch shares. Putting aside the fact that only three of those stocks are under a catch share, the entire comparison is flawed.

The Times criticizes republicans in Congress and their fishermen allies for hating the environment. “Add fish and oceans to the long list of environmental issues that House Republicans do not much care about,” opens the piece. But equating catch shares to any other environmental issue overlooks the larger point: catch shares are a way of managing fishermen, not fish.

Fish sustainability is guaranteed by setting scientifically-based limits on the total number of fish that can be caught each year. These are called annual catch limits, and are mandated under our nation’s key fishing law. The United States is leading the way in setting and enforcing these limits, and the hard work is paying off as more and more fisheries recover. This is the sort of regulation our oceans need—not catch shares.

Catch shares, currently being pushed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), are a way of distributing portions of that total catch to individual fishermen, in a way that is often grossly unfair. Catch shares cause significant unemployment and financial hardship among our nation’s traditional small fishermen and their communities. Since catch shares always come packaged with an annual catch limit, the gains made setting sustainable limits are often attributed to catch shares management. But catch limits and catch shares are not the same thing.

Contrary to what the Times editorial board thinks, Congress isn’t trying to hurt fish; they’re trying to stop NOAA from hurting fishermen.

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 Genna Reed

This post originally ran on Grist

Last week, the National Academy of Sciences hosted a summit to discuss “superweeds,”or the widespread problem of herbicide-resistant weeds currently afflicting millions of farm acres across the United States.

Superweeds — the “weeds that man can no longer kill!” — have been in the news for several years. All across the Midwest and Southeast farmers have been photographed and filmed standing in fields surrounded by the giant plants. They bemoan the cost of pesticides and point to industrial rows of crops that don’t have a chance when up against feisty weeds that grow up to three inches a day.

Superweeds have been especially likely to appear alongside genetically engineered (GE) crops, which are engineered to withstand large amounts of pesticide and herbicide use. And these weeds show no sign of going away any time soon.

That’s why scientists and researchers from land-grant universities, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and representatives from several industry and trade groups met at last week’s summit to strategize about the problem. Read the full article…

By Mitch Jones 

By now you’ve probably read about the $2 billion trading loss reported by JPMorgan Chase. The loss was the result of risky trades using ‘innovative’ financial instruments – you know, the sort of thing that turned a domestic housing market crisis into a global financial crisis. What you may not have heard is that there are plans to bring this sort of innovation to our most essential common resources – especially water.

In July of last year Willem Buiter, chief economist at Citigroup, wrote that he expects “to see a globally integrated market for fresh water within 25 to 30 years. Once the spot markets for water are integrated, futures markets and other derivative water-based financial instruments – puts, calls, swaps – both exchange-traded and OTC will follow.” You’d think they can’t be serious, but they are.

Everyday fresh evidence seems to appear that the people who run the Wall Street casino haven’t learned the lesson of the financial crisis. Whether it’s that they feel picked on or that they’re making the same sorts of risky bets they’ve been making for years. Their hubris knows no bounds.

The plans and vision to bring the speculative world of finance to bear on our common resources – the financialization of nature – should give you pause. Next month, leaders from around the world will be meeting in Rio de Janeiro to make plans for a so-called “green economy.” These plan are in the works now. If successful, our common resources could come under the control of hedge fund managers, Wall Street speculators, and big banks making risky bets.

If you thought the current crisis was large you haven’t seen anything yet. As Buiter tells us:

“Water as an asset class will, in my view, become eventually the single most important physical-commodity based asset class, dwarfing oil, copper, agricultural commodities and precious metals.”

That’s a risk we can’t afford.

By Kate Fried

Image courtesy of 2012 Erie Rising (www.erierising.com)

While many of us shower our moms with flowers, cards and special outings on Mothers Day, a group of women in Erie, Colorado has a much more urgent request: that the oil and gas giant Encana call off its plans to frack next to their kids’ schools. Encana intends to frack just a stone’s throw from several local schools as early as May 26.

Fearful of potential health problems associated with fracking, the moms of Erie Rising recently wrote a letter to Encana pleading with the company to help safeguard their childrens’ safety by not fracking within 600 yards of their schools. The fact that anyone would have the audacity to forge ahead with such a plan is almost unthinkable, but given the oil and gas industry’s recent attempts to frack near vital drinking water sources, daycare centers and hospitals, this reality is sadly unsurprising.

Food & Water Watch is working with the courageous moms of Erie to hault Encana’s dastardly plan in its tracks. As we stand with the moms of Erie Rising, we hope you will read their letter to Encana, featured below. Help stop the well in Erie by speaking out today. After that, be sure to visit our Fracking Action Center for information on more ways to get involved. Read the full article…