Bitter Greens Journal

Philpott lands two pieces on Grist.org

2005-11-29T20:15:00.000-05:00

The first one, a couple of weeks ago, a cheeky piece on how to have a "green" Thanksgiving; the other, just out today, a review of legendary multi-species pastured meat farmer Joel Salatin's new book. These are independent of my regular blogging on Gristmill.org. Check them out.

Philpott deemphasizes Bitter Greens, throws lot (for now) with Grist

2005-11-09T12:52:00.000-05:00

Some readers may have noticed that I haven't been posting much lately. That's because I've essentially moved over to Gristmill, the blog at environmental Web 'zine Grist.org. I've done so not for the lure of cash--Gristmill doesn't pay its bloggers--but in search of a broader readership. While I plan to keep Bitter Greens going long-term, readers interested in following my work should check in at Gristmill. I think if you bookmark this link, you can keep track of what I've been up to. Please comment often, and check in for a couple of paid features I'll be posting there down the line. Meanwhile, the "running critique of industrial agriculture" and the "working manifesto for a liberation politics based on food" goes on.

Seedy business: A sustainable-ag champion gets plowed under at Iowa State

2005-11-03T10:41:00.000-05:00

Plunked down in the land of huge, chemical-addicted grain farms and the nation's greatest concentration of hog feedlots, Iowa State University's Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture has always had a tough row to hoe.

Imagine trying to operate an Anti-Cronyism League from Bush's West Wing, and you get an idea of what the Leopold Center is up against. Industrial agriculture runs the show in Iowa, sustained by regular infusions of federal cash and its government-sanctioned ability to "externalize" the messes it creates. The state grabbed $12.5 billion in federal agriculture subsidies between 1995 and 2004 -- second only to Bush's own home state. Iowa leads all states in hog production: It churned out 14.5 million pigs in 2001 alone, the vast majority from stuffed, environmentally and socially ruinous CAFOs (confined-animal feeding operations).

Yet since springing to life in 1987 by fiat of the Iowa legislature -- funded ingeniously by state taxes on nitrogen fertilizer and pesticide -- the Leopold Center has become an invaluable national resource for critics of industrial agriculture and seekers of new alternatives.

Now, however, a sudden purge at the top has called the Center's much-prized independence from industrial agriculture into question.

The Leopold Center operates under the authority of Iowa State University's College of Agriculture. Last Friday, the college issued a press release announcing that the Leopold Center's director of five years, Fred Kirschenmann, had "accepted a new leadership role as a distinguished fellow of the center."

The college went on to state that it had named an interim director, effective Nov. 1.

Kirschenmann himself, however, tells a more interesting tale than what's contained in the press release's bland prose. He says his move from director to "distinguished fellow" came suddenly and without his own input.

"On Wednesday [Oct. 26] I received a letter from the interim dean asking me to resign by Friday and decide by then if I would accept the position of distinguished fellow at the center," Kirschenmann told me yesterday.

"I wrote her [the interim dean] back telling her I thought she was moving too fast, that there wouldn't be time for a smooth transition. She wrote back that it was a done deal -- she had already named a new director."

Kirschenmann says the interim dean, Wendy Wintersteen, had been on Leopold's advisory board for years and had served on the search committee that hired him in 2000. "She was always very supportive of what we were doing," Kirschenmann says. "Until about two years ago. Then she became very critical."

Her critique centered on the idea that in its work the Leopold Center was neglecting "key stakeholders," Kirschenmann adds. "But she never really clarified who those stakeholders were."

Might she have been refering to agribusiness interests? "You can draw your own conclusions," Kirschenmann says. She never cited any reason for the de facto purge, save for "some verbiage about how I would be free to pursue my own work without having to worry about administrative duties."

To be sure, Iowa State's College of Agriculture draws agribusiness cash the way a penned-up pig wallowing in its own waste draws flies. I have a call into the college for a list of corporate donors; until that call is returned, let it suffice that this is the sort of research the college commonly proffers: A study claiming to show that the genetically modified seed industry deserves a greater "level of intellectual property protection ... than what existed in the North American seed corn market in the late 1990s." Collaborators: a pair of scientists from GM seed titan Pioneer Hi-Bred International Inc., a subsidiary of DuPont.

Here are glowing testimonials from two of the college's "partners": John Deere and Cargill.

Kirschenmann says he accepted the "distinguished fellow" position because Wintersteen assured him he could continue doing his own work on sustainable agriculture. And that work is important. Under Kirschenmann the Leopold Center bluntly criticized and rigorously documented the environmental and social calamities being wrought by industrial agriculture.

Will he continue to be able to do that work at Leopold? "We'll see how it goes," he told me.

In the meantime, I'll be doing some research about which corporations and commodity groups give what to Iowa State's College of Agriculture.

Readers can express their outrage at this violation of academic freedom and blow to independent research on sustainable agriculture by writing to the following parties.

Wendy K. Wintersteen
Interim dean, ISU College of Agriculture
e-mail: wwinters@iastate.edu

Benjamin J. Allen
Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost
Email: theprovost@iastate.edu

This post originally appeared on Gristmill

New posts on Grist and MaverickEats

2005-10-11T13:25:00.000-04:00

Check new posts on Gristmill: here and here; as well as on MaverickEats.

Note to readers: Philpott to blog on Grist

2005-10-05T15:38:00.000-04:00

I've been invited to write about food politics on Grist.org, an environmentalist Web zine that claims 100,000 readers. While the gig pays the exact same amount that Bitter Greens pays, I can't resist the opportunity to reach a broader (by a factor of about 1,000) audience.

My plan is to do shorter, pithier pieces on Grist, and to keep doing longer, more analytical pieces here.

Here's my first post on Grist.

Dominant traits II: Why GM soy looks set to swamp Europe

2005-10-03T11:37:00.000-04:00

Maverick Farms lies on a dirt road halfway up a steep hollow in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Twenty years ago all the land around here was agricultural. Each family generally had a couple of milk cows, a pig or two, and a garden plot to feed themselves; for cash, they planted cabbage (to be sold to a nearby sauerkraut factory, long gone) and tobacco.

All of that has changed. The word "farm" has become a marketing tool to move real estate, and little else. The only other entity with "farm" attached to its name on our road is "Clark's Creek Farm"--a suburban-style subdivision.

Our area is a magnet for SUV-driving second-home seekers and the real-state flacks who serve them. Up the road from us, the dirt flies as machines rip into the mountainside to create new lots for fancy homes. Starting at about 7:00 a.m., the rooster's hoarse cry is drowned out by the steady roar of giant trucks careening up the mountain, carrying construction material and machinery.

Nearly everyone up there wants the road to be paved--it would make construction so much easier, and you could comfortably drive your SUV faster than 20 mph to get up and down the mountain. We say: Hell, no. We're joined in our refusal by two neighbors, people with deep family roots in the area who don't want to see our holler turned into a suburb of Orlando or Charlotte. We refuse to sign the papers that would force the road's paving.

In the end, we will lose and the developers and second-homers will win. They will have forcibly created the logic that makes the road's paving "necessary." Carve enough mini-mansions into the mountainside, cram the road with enough construction trucks and "utility" vehicles, and of course it will have to be paved. It will become a safety issue. The road as it is will have to be condemned; a handsome strip of asphalt will rise up in its place. Progress! And goodbye to our chicken shed and springhouse.

I tell this bitter story to illustrate what's going on with genetically modified (GM) food in Europe. Bear with me.

An organization called Agricultural Biotechnology Europe, a PR front for Monsanto, Syngenta, Dupont, et al, recently commissioned a study of the costs to food conglomerates of pursuing a "GM avoidance" strategy.

First some background. Because of high-profile campaigning from the likes of Greenpeace, a large swath of European society has rejected GM food and demands that it be labeled as such at the supermarket. Those demands have forced grain-processing giants such as Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill to do something they hate doing: make distinctions in what they consider to be a sea of sameness. No longer can a soybean be a soybean be a soybean. Now they must separate GM from non-GM--a service for which they naturally charge a premium.

The dilemma mostly centers on soybeans, which Europe mostly imports from the Americas. The continent grows most of its own corn, which thus far is almost totally non-GM.

When Roundup ready soybeans first sprang to life in US fields in 1996, ADM and Cargill solved the Europe problem by diverting US soybeans away from the European food market (though they kept GM soy flowing into the animal-feed market), and sent the Europeans Brazilian soy. At that time, Brazil had banned GM seeds.

In the meantime, Roundup Ready soy gained a foothold in Brazil, as farmers bought the seeds on the black market from Argentina and then saved them for future planting, thumbing their noses at Monsanto. Then, earlier this year, the Brazilian government approved the planting of GM crops. That means the supply of non-GM soy has been shrinking.

For European food conglomerates bending to consumer pressure to produce "non-GM" food, that will mean higher prices for non-GM soy, the study argues. Already, the study reckons that 51 percent of the soy grown globally is GM; and fully 90 percent is "dominated by GM-origin material," meaning soy that's stored without any careful separation of GM and non-GM material. So supplies of non-GM soy are already tight.

Right now, non-GM soy draws a 5-10 percent premium over GM soy on the market. As supplies dwindle, the study says, the premium could go as high as 25 percent. (Interestingly, Brazilian farmers get no premium for growing non-GM soy; all the extra cash now accrues to the processor, the study reports.)

Bottom line: If you want GM-free processed food, you must pay Archer Daniels Midland a nice premium. I predict that as the premium grows, European consumer resistance to GM food will fade--and Monsanto's seeds will take over the Brazilian savanna much as they have the Midwestern plains and the pampas of Argentina.

And here is where we arrive at the conceptual link between land politics in my area of North Carolina and food politics in Europe. Just as developers and vacationers here have created the necessity of fulfilling their goal--turning our road into a suburban-style throughway--the GM seed trusts have overwhelmed the food system with their seeds, creating conditions that will eventually force acceptance.

Like so many BGJ posts, this one will end with a plea for consumers to remove themselves from the commodity system as much as possible by avoiding the supermarket and seeking sustenance at the farmers market and from backyard and neighborhood plots.

Dominant traits: Can the seed trusts be busted?

2005-09-28T16:56:00.000-04:00

According to a recent study by ETC Group, the world's ten-largest seed vendors control about half of the global seed market.

By the standards of late capitalism, that's a modest concentration level. In the United States, for example, the top four beef packers pack more than 80 percent of the nation's beef. Microsoft famously owns more than 90 percent of the world's computer operating system market. Consolidation of suppliers is as American as the SUV and the Apache helicopter.

Nevertheless, seeds lie at the heart of all organized food production, and thus at the heart of human culture for the past 10,000 years. Perhaps the seed trade deserves a closer look.

At the top of the seed pile, the above-linked ETC report shows, we find Monsanto, the former "life-sciences" giant that mutated into a gene-splicing agribusiness behemoth . It vaulted over rival Dupont as the world's largest seed supplier in March, when it snapped up fruit-and-vegetable seed titan Seminis for $1.4 billion. Below Monsanto and Dupont we find Syngenta, the Swiss agribusiness firm. The three companies, like genetic experiments they might conjure up in one of their labs, share at least two sinister traits.

The first is that they are all among the world's largest pesticide companies. I'll address that topic another time.

The other shared trait is this: In addition to peddling physical seeds, they also peddle what's known in the business as "traits." This is the precise genetic coding that's artificially inserted into a seed's germoplasm to create a desired characteristic--say, the ability to withstand herbicides like Monsanto's Roundup, which otherwise obliterate all plant life on contact. These companies can and do license these "triats" and sell them to other seed purveyors.

To put it in computer terms, we're looking at a kind of software/hardware model: the seeds are the hardware and the traits are the software.

In the computer world, these functions tend to be distinct: Microsoft dominates desktop software; Dell tops the market in PCs. Even Bush's Justice Department and SEC, both of which operate squarely under the heel of Wall Street in anti-trust matters, might squack if those two behemoths merged. In seeds, however, the giants perform both functions without raising a regulatory eyebrow.

At first glance, comparing the the seed market to the PC market looks like a stretch. Microsoft owns nearly 100 percent of the desktop software market, while Monsanto, Dupont, and Syngenta together control only about a quarter of the seed market.

But a closer look at individual at the fast-emerging genetically modified (GM) seed market shows Monsanto weilds a Microsoft-like heft. The ETC report reveals that 88 percent of the world's GM crop acreage is planted with seeds containing Monsanto-owned traits. More than 90 percent of the world's genetically modified soybean crops contain Monsanto's genetic goodies. For maize (field corn, the stuff that's ground into industrial-food inputs like high-fructose corn syrup or fed to confined livestock, not the food you eat off the cob), that number is 97 percent.

As for cotton, Monsanto traits account for 61 percent of the GM seed market. In April of this year, Monsanto spent $300 million to snap up Emergent Genetics, the third-largest cotton seed company in both India and the US.

Let's think about what that deal means. Before its sellout, Emergent, like many independent seed purveyors, could buy GM traits from the three giants: Monsanto, Dupont, and Syngenta; it could shop around for the best price. Now, it will presumably only use Monsanto traits.

By selling both physical seeds and traits--hardware and software--Monsanto puts itself in the position of cornering individual markets. That's the sort of thing that used to set an attorney general's teeth on edge. Our last couple of AG's though, have been much more interested in spying on citizens and justifying torture of suspected enemies of the state.

Now, so far, Monsanto's dominance extends only to the largest, most lucrative, and (not coincidentally) heavily subsidized crops: soybeans, cotton, corn. What happens if it turns its R&D attention to fruits and vegetables? Can the debut of GM bitter greens be far off? (Rather than sue me, maybe Monsanto should corner the market on the seeds of arugula, watercress, Tokyo bikuna, etc. That would bring Maverick Farms to its knees!)

Here we run against the sinister implications of Monsanto's Seminis buy. To date, attempts to genetically alter fruits and vegetables have failed miserably. A few years ago, Monsanto magnanimously bestowed upon Kenya the gift of a GM sweet potato, designed in a lab to increase yield. It was easy, then, to paint GM opponents as racist. The trouble was, the Monsanto sweet potato proved a bust in the field, as this article shows.

And Seminis itself grew out of the dashed GM hopes of a Mexican plutocrat named Alfonso Romo, whose late 1990s buying binge eventually made Seminis the world's largest fruit and vegetable seed company. (Romo is part of that generation of Mexican businessmen, the leading figure of which is the telecom baron Carlos Slim, who attained lavish wealth in the 1990s aided by a great burst of state-sponsored cronyism applauded by the IMF, Wall Street, and Washington.) Here's how the Wall Street journal described Romo's GM dreams in 1999:

[Romo] envisions creating utopian vegetables: non-browning lettuce, broccoli with enhanced cancer-fighting properties, and produce of all kinds that won't wrinkle, spoil or blemish. Whether his own scientists or others develop the means to accomplish those goals, he believes he will benefit. "Seeds are software," he says. "And we have the seeds."

The above-linked article hails a joint venture between Romo's company and Monsanto to create Roundup Ready lettuce--an effort that seems, thankfully, to have gone bust. Romo's company claims responsibility for those ignominious and flavorless "baby carrots" one finds stuffed into bags on supermarket shelves, and it brought to market seeds for a "cucumber that yields a hamburger-size pickle slice designed to lie perfectly between a pair of buns," the Journal reports.

That's bad stuff; but what I really found offensive was that "Mr. Romo's company lowered the heat factor of the jalapeno pepper, helping salsa pull even with ketchup in the U.S. in dollar sales." The man seems intent on breeding any flavor at all out of American food.

Luckily, to my mind, the market eventually frowned on Romo's efforts. Within two years of the Journal article, the U.S. business press had knocked Romo from his pedestal. His biotech schemes faltered on the supermarket shelf or on the petri dish, and his company became sodden with debt.

Here is Business Week in 2001:

Today, it's a chastened Romo who surveys the wreckage of his worldwide empire. The 50-year-old, hailed as a visionary seven years ago when he first invested in agricultural biotechnology and seed companies, now is struggling to pay creditors and remain afloat. An agreement restructuring Romo's corporate debt is expected with the banks any day. But Romo's problem remains: He grew too big, too fast.

Eventually, Romo restructured his seed holdings and created Seminis, which, as stated above, he recently sold to Monsanto for $1.4 billion. A corporate tightrope walker, he managed to stay on as chief of the division.

The deal immediately posed moral problems for small-scale farmers, including Maverick Farms. Both of our main seed suppliers--Johnny's and Fedco--buy and resell seeds from Seminis. As this thoughtful articleby Matthew Dillon of the Seed Alliance shows, Johnny's and Fedco will likely have to continue buying certain seeds from Seminis; its market heft is so great that it essentially holds a monopoly position in certain varieties, including heirlooms like Early Girl tomatoes.

And it's that market heft, combined with Monsanto's R&D muscle, that conjures a dire picture: What if Monsanto plunges seriously into GM vegetables? Many Wall Street analysts thought Monsanto wildly overpaid for Seminis, a slow-growing business with loads of debt. The only way the deal made sense was if Monsanto really thought it could cash in on GM veggies. Will it be allowed to dominate both the vegetable seed market and germoplasm market?

Today's Senate approval of the pro-industry zealot John Roberts as chief justice of the Supreme Court bodes ill for the future of U.S. antitrust law.

Ladies and gentlemen of the small-scale sustainable-farming world, it's time we got more serious about seed saving.

Roundup, ready

2005-09-22T16:10:00.000-04:00

Over the past 72 hours, Organic Consumers Association network members have deluged the U.S. Senate with 35,000 emails and 10,000 telephone calls. Thank you for your support. This nearly unprecedented grassroots upsurge has temporarily rattled Congress and the industry, delaying the initial Sneak Attack in the Senate on organic standards, resulting in a compromise amendment September 21 calling for “further study of the issue."

The OCA warns, however, that "another, possibly even more serious, Sneak Attack" is brewing in the House/Senate Conference Committee." Check out its latest missive on the issue here.

Organically groan: working conditions on California's organic farms
While it's important to preserve the organic label's integrity in the supermarket shelf, it's even more important to interrogate what it means in the field. Bitter Greens Journal recently became aware of an interesting study published in the Winter-Spring 2005 edition of the University of California-Davis' Sustainable Agriculture Newsletter.

Authored by Aimee Shreck, Christy Getz, and Gail Feenstra, the study examines the attitudes of California organic growers toward farm labor. The results make melancholy reading.

The authors point out that:

A common misperception among farmers and consumers is that organic certification already addresses working conditions for farmworkers, and that because organic agriculture rules forbid many toxic pesticides, it is often assumed that organic is “better” for farmworkers than conventional agriculture.

U.S. organic accreditation standards have no work-place conditions stipulations, the authors write. And given the defensive posture that the organic movement finds itself taking viz. industry, it's hard to imagine that changing any time soon (see above).

But the study doesn't paint a picture of mega-farms shamelessly exploiting workers. The authors sent their survey to 500 organic farmers; 188 returned them. Here's how the authors describe their respondents:

Like most organic farmers in California, the majority of the farmers responding to our survey operate at a small-scale in terms of area farmed and annual sales. Almost three-quarters (73.8 %) of respondents farm 50 acres or less, and 64 % of the farms reported less than $50,000 in annual sales...Two-thirds of the farmers responding hire workers in addition to their families at least part of the year.

I can tell you from experience that farming at that scale throws off little spare income for worker benefits; I'm surprised that such a high percentage can afford to hire help. That they can illustrates the relative abundance of cheap immigrant labor in California (although, as I reported reported recently, the cheap pool of labor to which California vegetable growers have grown addicted may be drying up.)

Not surprisingly, there's little support among this hard-scrabble lot for adding a workers' rights amendment to organic standards, the authors report. Here's a key sentence:

Most employers in the study do not (and perceive that they cannot afford to) provide things like living wages and health insurance. Indeed, many small-scale farmers like those who participated in this study do not provide insurance for themselves.

Nor, evidently, is their strong support for the right of collective bargaining, a right agricultural workers won in California some 30 years ago. Fully 40 percent of respondents told the authors they "strongly disagree" that ag workers should have the right to unionize. Amazing.

The report really ends up being as much about the sad state of organic farming as it is about labor conditions in the field. As corporations such as Kraft and Dean Foods rush into organic food to exploit its 20 percent compounded annual growth rate in the retail market, farmers--even in the California, land of Berkeley and Alice Waters, the promised land of organic ag--are languishing.

"Our findings question expectations that organic agriculture systems necessarily foster social, or even economic sustainability for most farmers and farmworkers involved," the authors declare. "Indeed, many farmers themselves forgo the kinds of employment benefits available to workers in most other sectors."

Their conclusion seems spot-on:

We suggest that to create production conditions that are favorable to a broader conception of social justice, change is needed in the entire food system, not just at the point of production. Indeed, to move beyond the silence about labor within the sustainable agriculture and organic communities, we must situate these issues in the context of the entire food chain (production, processing, distribution and consumption).

Wal-Mart invades Guatemala, Chili's does the Middle East
In the West, overall food sales have stagnated, growing at about the same anemic rate as the population. That has made multinational food corporations scramble to keep profits growing at a rate that please their investors.

One strategy has been to move into organic foods, sales of which, as stated above, are growing at a 20 percent annual clip. The results of that trend have been well-documented by the Organic Consumers Association.

The other major strategy has been to expand to the global south, where traditional food customs largely hold out. The dominance of small, informal marketing networks in places like Guatemala are seen as an "opportunity" by corporate strategists seeking high returns on invested capital. This post, from way back in March, analyzes that phenomenon.

Thus Wal-Mart, which relies increasingly on grocery sales, has conquered Mexico, establishing itself in less than 10 years as the nation's largest employer and number-one grocer. And now, like Cortez himself, it's gazing south to Guatemala.

Meanwhile, Brinker Inc. owner of several dreadful restaurant chains including Chili's, has announced it's moving into "Latin America, the Middle East and eventually China and India." The company hopes eventually to have 40 percent of its total stores in those places.

I wish both corporations a hostile and disastrous reception in their adopted new homes.

New blog launched: MaverickEats

2005-09-21T21:59:00.000-04:00

We've launched a food-oriented blog at Maverick Farms called MaverickEats. Check it out.

The organic label controversy: an update and an exchange

2005-09-21T14:18:00.000-04:00

As I reported here Monday, the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) raised an alarm that a Senate Committee might, as early as Tuesday, "acting in haste and near-total secrecy," make serious changes to national organic standards.

Nothing substantial has happened yet, and OCA now reports that the vote in question, involving a rider on the 2006 Agriculture Appropriations Bill, could still take place sometime this week.

Meanwhile, Bitter Greens has been trying to sort out the complicated politics behind what's happening on the Hill. I thank two people who have supplied me with some of the e-mails that have been flying around the sustainable-ag world in response to the doings on the Hill: Steve Gilman, an authority on community-supported agriculture and owner of the Ruckytucks Farm in Stillwater, NY, (see his comment on my post from yesterday); and Tana Butler, who runs the excellent California blog Small Farms.

As you'll see from the exhange below, the debate is more complicated than the Organic Consumers Association lets on. I don't have time to comment on or contexualize the exchange below; I leave it for readers to sort out.

What I will add to the debate is this:
1) While I think the Organic Consumers Association is simplifying things a bit, I agree absolutely that no changes to organic code should be made in a secretive senate committee as a rider on a huge bill. The organic movement should hash these issues out on its own, in public, and present Congress with a unified agenda; failing that, Congress should hold public hearings about the future of organic and decide how to proceed on that basis. Therefore, I agree with OCA that consumers and farmers should call their senators and demand that they vote down this rider.
2) Over time, as consumers increasingly flock to organic products and as organics continue to outperform a stagnate overall food market, the likes of Kraft and Dean Foods will exert more and more pressure to bend organic code to their own ends. While I understand why organic-farming pioneers like Steve Gilman will always fight to keep the organic label meaningful, and I support them, I also think it's time to start thinking beyond organic. For consumers, it's not enough to shop at Whole Foods (which calls itself a "certified organic supermarket," or some such nonsense) or eat Amy's Organics TV dinners. They'll have to do the work at identifying and supporting the growers in their area who are practicing ecologically and socially sound farming--certified organic or not.

What follows is a debate between two women who have been deeply involved in the organic movement about the wisdom of changes now before the Senate. The debate took place on SANET, a list serve operated by Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education, known widely as SARE.

[Note: The OTA they bandy about is the Organic Trade Association, the group that's behind the rider in the Senate. In my post yesterday, I characterized OTA as "essentially a front group for industry players that want to squeeze the organic label for profit; its member list includes Kraft and Horizon, the organic arm of dairy giant Dean Foods." While Kraft and Horizon are members, my characterization now looks too broad. As Steve Gilman commented on my blog yesterday, " I understand that even some of [OTA's] own Board members were not consulted concerning this hasty and dangerous action of opening the Organic Foods Production Act to further meddling by the powers that be."

In fact, Emily Brown Rosen, whose letter below establishes her as a sharp critic of OTA's agenda on the Hill, works for a group that's a member of OTA.]

Here is the debate:

Emily Brown Rosen
Organic Research Associates, LLC
P.O. Box 5
Titusville NJ 08560
609-737-8630
fax: 609-737-6652
ebrownrosen@earthlink.net

Dear SANET,
Yes, there are a lot of broad, simplistic statements being made on both sides about the proposed change to OFPA put forth by OTA and industry . Unfortunately we are dealing with a sudden action that has not been open to public debate, and the resulting tendency to overstate the issues, perhaps on both sides, in an effort to engage action one way or the other. OTA's proposed amendment was not provided to OTA members or the public until Sept. 19th, at least 10 days after it was circulated to the Senate.

Regarding the impact of a prohibition of synthetics in processing, it is true that many multi-ingredient processed food contains synthetics. These will be impacted by the Harvey ruling, and require a large number of products to be labeled "made with organic" ingredients, or to reformulate. It won't necessarily be harder to make organic TV dinners, but it will be required to labeled them as "made with organic ingredients" TV dinners- which might not be such a bad thing. Some consumer groups think this is a very good thing.

The organic industry claims this will reduce sales and devastate the market for organic, but according to OTA's own figures, in 2003 the combined sales of packaged food plus sauces/condiments and snack foods categories totals $2.039B, or 19.6% of total organic food sales. (2004 Manufacturers Survey) Although this is a substantial portion of the organic food market, it is not a majority of the marketplace, and it is likely that quite a good percentage of these products will be able to figure out ways to reformulate with natural additives, and that adjustments to the National List can be made on a number of substances now listed as synthetic that are in fact available in natural or organic forms.

OTA has also been repeating some misinformation - that baking soda is synthetic (it is not, it is on the list at 205.605(a) as natural), that all pectin will be ruled out (high methoxy pectin is natural) and that processors must relabel without the USDA seal by the end of 2005 ( not true - they have until June 2007.)

While it is possible there does need to be a change to OFPA to define and limit the types of synthetics allowed in organic processing, there has been no public discussion of the strategy to do this, nor an attempt to consider mitigation of the problem through regulation change. As OTA has noted in the summary they sent to Congress (still not public) , the original intention of Congress was to limit and control the number of synthetics allowed in organic production. This is reflected in the limited categories allowed in crop and livestock production, (copper, sulfur, vitamins, minerals etc) . OTA's proposal does not "control" the use of synthetics in processing, it is a wide open allowance with no restriction on categories, and no criteria for evaluation (those that are currently in use have been struck down by the Harvey suit.)

The OTA language also needs close vetting as there are a number of other consequences, such as lack of inclusion of processing aids, and a completely vague and unrestricted process proposed for determination of commercial availability.

The proposed OTA "fix" on dairy feed allows for 3rd year transitional feed to be feed to animals in conversion, which is a long time NOSB recommendation and in the current NOP rule. It is arguable whether a law change is needed to restore this provision. It does not address the critical issues of dairy herd replacement animals. It is likely that USDA will remove the requirement that "once entire distinct dairy herd has been converted to organic.. . all animals must be under organic management from the last third of gestation" since it is connected in the regulation to the allowance of the 80/20 feed exemption that was overturned by Harvey. This means young animals could be managed conventionally for the first year of life, including the use of antibiotics before conversion on an ongoing basis. If the OFPA is to be changed, this should be on the table.

Organic farmers have put up with a steady raising of the bar on organic standards - such as the requirement for organic seed, organic transplants, 100% organic feed, no list 3 inerts, strict composting standards, no transitioning slaughter stock, no pressure treated wood in contact with crops….the list goes on and on. It is understandable that processors need to have stability in the regulations, but at this point, to open OFPA and add synthetics in processing with no restrictions, with a lack of criteria, and vague allowances for "emergency" non organic ingredients is a step backward, and could undermine consumer confidence in the label.

A working group organized by the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture made a good faith attempts made to date to avoid this so called "cut off your nose" situation. This included some members the NCSA Organic Steering Committee, RAFI, CFS, National Organic Coalition, Beyond Pesticides, Consumers Union, National Cooperative Grocers Association, and several others who invited OTA and the industry to come to the table to work out possible middle ground solutions. The hope was to find solutions could actually strengthen OFPA while addressing some of the critical impacts of the Harvey decision. However, repeated efforts at communication and compromise were rebuffed, finally after a 5 hour meeting on Sept 15 in Washington. Although productive discussion and many points of common ground were established, OTA chose not to come back to the table and went forward with its proposal to the Senate unchanged.

The organic community has a lot of clout with Congress when unified, it is too bad that these issues could not have been addressed in a more inclusive and public manner to avoid this type of division. Quite a few people tried hard.
regards,

Emily Brown Rosen
Organic Research Asociates
OTA Member, and co-author of the 1999 OTA American Organic Standards
NOFA NJ Board of Directors
Midwest Organic Services Association Advisory Council
Pennsylvania Certified Organic staff

----------------------------------------------------------------

Grace Gershuny wrote:

Dear SANET:
I'm pasting in below the Organic Trade
Association's action alert on the same subject
but opposite position as that circulated by the
Organic Consumers Association (OCA). Most of
OCA's statements are flat out lies, and if the
results of the Harvey lawsuit are allowed to
stand there will be a dramatic loss of markets
for organic farmers, as well as products
available to organic consumers. Talk about
reversing 35 years of effort by the organic
community--OCA's position is a classic case of
trying to cut off your nose to spite your
face. Check out the factual information
presented by OTA and decide for yourself.

Thanks for listening,

Grace Gershuny

P.S. I have been working as a consultant to OTA
for the past year or so, most recently in helping
its members with various strategies to mitigate
the damage done by Harvey. But I am writing this
on my own nickel, as a longtime organic advocate,
author, grower, teacher, and, yes, former NOP staff member.

Action Alert from the Organic Trade Association

Sept. 19, 2005

This News Flash includes a summary of OTA's
proposal to Congress. The OTA Board of Directors
has given its unanimous support. If you receive
inquiries about this issue from your customers,
please use the information OTA is providing in
this News Flash to clarify any misperceptions or misunderstandings.

OTA's stance: The Organic Trade Association
Supports a Return to the Status Quo and Requests
that Congress Act after June 2005 Court Ruling.

Key Points

* The federal rules authorizing the use of
the USDA Organic seal on food products are five
years old, and are the touchstone of mainstream consumer acceptance of organic products.
* The current organic rules are the result of
adoption by USDA of recommendations from a
citizen advisory board created by Congress and 10
years of notice and comment rulemaking based on those recommendations.
* As might be expected with a new federal
program as comprehensive as the nearly 500-page
organic rule, certain parts of the rules were
found to be inconsistent with the statute.

The June 2005 Court Ruling Threatens the Booming Organic Market
* The June 2005 court ruling impacted three parts of the federal rules.
* First, it effectively blocked the common
use of harmless substances like baking soda,
pectin, ascorbic acid, vitamins and minerals,
etc., the so-called "allowed synthetics" in
processed food products bearing the USDA Organic seal.
* Second, it required the rules relied upon
by small dairy farms transitioning to organic
management practices be revised, with the
unintended result that making the change will be
significantly more costly after the ruling.
* Third, it disallowed the procedure
implemented by the Secretary's organic certifying
agents for recognizing the commercial
unavailability of organic agricultural products.

The Court Preserved the Status Quo for One Year=20
to Allow Congress to Remedy the Problem

* To avoid consumer confusion and market
disruption, the Court declined to immediately
vacate the rules to allow Congress to consider its ruling.
* Due to crop cycles and the lead time
necessary for product formulation, labeling, and marketing of organic products to consumers,
legislative clarification must be immediate.
* The businesses that produce and market the
majority of America's certified organic farm
products will have to drop product lines or
re-label them without the USDA seal by the end of 2005.
* Some have estimated that up to 90% of the
multi-ingredient products that today bear the
USDA Organic seal will have to be removed or
relabeled without using the USDA seal.
* To compensate for the lower value consumers
place on products not "organic enough" to carry
the USDA seal, some companies may reformulate
with less organic content or discontinue certain product lines.

The Solution is to Clarify the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990
* It is critical that Congress seize the
opportunity created by the Court and act before the end of the year.
* The necessary clarifications will stabilize
the marketplace for farmers, and businesses that
contract with farmers for organic agricultural
commodities, and do nothing more than restore the
status quo -- an interpretation of the statute by
the citizen advisory board that was created by
Congress to advise the Secretary on organic matters.

The organic label and beyond

2005-09-20T16:47:00.000-04:00

What, precisely, is going on with the organic label in Congress?

I found the e-mail I received last night from the Organic Consumers Association (posted here) troubling, important---and somewhat confusing.

Why, suddenly, was the Senate "acting in haste and near-total secrecy" to water down organic?

From what I can tell, the story goes like this. In 2002, a Maine organic blueberry farmer and National Organic Program inspector named Arthur Harvey took exception to the USDA's newly rolled out Organic Food rule, which sought to codify organic standards. Harvey charged that certain aspects of the Rule amounted to a de facto loosening of Organic Foods Production act of 1990.

For one, the Organic Rule allowed processors to use conventional ingredients “not commercially available in organic form” in foods that would be labeled organic--which certainly cedes a lot of power to processors that are using the organic label only as a marketing tool. Next, it sanctioned the use of synthetic substances in food processing. Finally, it allowed dairy farmers to use 20 percent conventional feed in the first nine months of a dairy herd’s one-year conversion to organic.

So Harvey sued the USDA, using the agency's then-chief Anne Veneman. The case is now inscribed in the annals of agriculture history as Harvey v. Veneman.

The suit initially failed--a U.S, judge and a Maine judge essentially sided with Veneman. But in January of 2005, an appeals court sided with Harvey--but it didn't spell out how the ruling should be enforced.

To make a complicated story simple, while stakeholders with a genuine interest in preserving "organic" as a meaningful label tried to sort out how to respond to Harvey v. Veneman, the big processors, under the flag of the Organic Trade Association (OTA), cobbled together a pro-industry agenda and presented it to the Senate a solution to the problem of how to enforce Harvey v. Venemen.

The OTA is essentially a front group for industry players that want to squeeze the organic label for profit; its member list includes Kraft and Horizon, the organic arm of dairy giant Dean Foods. (Horizon, the number-one seller of organic milk, is notorious for keeping many of its cows on feedlots.)

The strategy seems to be to use the dispute over issues raised by Harvey to get Congress to take power from the National Organic Standards Board’s (NOSB), which has a strict view of what organic means, and hand it over to the USDA, generally the handmaiden of industry. Such a legislative move would be difficult to challenge in court,

Thus Harvey's perfectly reasonable lawsuit appears to have had the unintended consequence of giving industry the chisel with which to puncture federal law around what "organic" means.

While I fully agree with the Organic Consumers Association that everything must be done to fight this shady effort, and I applaud Harvey for doing his best to preserve "organic," I also think it's time to go back to basics: Grow your own food when you can, buy from growers in your area whenever possible, and reject as much as you can processed food.

Urgent: Organic standards under attack

2005-09-19T23:12:00.000-04:00

I'm on the e-mail list of the the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), which sent me the following urgent missive this evening. Key sentence: 'In the past, grassroots mobilization and mass pressure by organic consumers have been able to stop the USDA and Congress from degrading organic standards. This time Washington insiders tell us that the “fix is already in.' So we must take decisive action now."

Here's the e-mail, along with information on how to respond:

The Organic Consumers Association (OCA) needs your immediate help to stop Congress and the Bush administration from seriously degrading organic standards. After 35 years of hard work, the U.S. organic community has built up a multi-billion dollar alternative to industrial agriculture, based upon strict organic standards and organic community control over modification to these standards.

Now, large corporations such as Kraft, Wal-Mart, & Dean Foods--aided and abetted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) are moving to lower organic standards by allowing a Bush appointee to create a list of synthetic ingredients that would be allowed organic production. Even worse these proposed regulatory changes will reduce future public discussion and input and take away the National Organic Standards Board’s (NOSB) traditional lead jurisdiction in setting standards. What this means, in blunt terms. is that USDA bureaucrats and industry lobbyists, not consumers, will now have more control over what can go into organic foods and products. (Send a quick letter to your Congressperson online here: http://www.organicconsumers.org/sos.cfm)

Tomorrow, Tuesday, Sept. 20, acting in haste and near-total secrecy, the U.S. Senate will vote on a “rider” to the 2006 Agriculture Appropriations Bill that will reduce control over organic standards from the National Standards Board and put this control in the hands of federal bureaucrats in the USDA (remember the USDA proposal in 1997-98 that said that genetic engineering, toxic sludge, and food irradiation would be OK on organic farms, or USDA suggestions in 2004 that heretofore banned pesticides, hormones, tainted feeds, and animal drugs would be OK?).

For the past week in Washington, OCA has been urging members of the Senate not to reopen and subvert the federal statute that governs U.S. Organic standards (the Organic Food Production Act—OFPA), but rather to let the organic community and the National Organic Standards resolve our differences over issues like synthetics and animal feed internally, and then proceed to a open public comment period. Unfortunately most Senators seem to be listening to industry lobbyists more closely than to us. We need to raise our voices. (Send a quick letter to your Congressperson online here: http://www.organicconsumers.org/sos.cfm)

In the past, grassroots mobilization and mass pressure by organic consumers have been able to stop the USDA and Congress from degrading organic standards. This time Washington insiders tell us that the “fix is already in.” So we must take decisive action now. We need you to call your U.S. Senators today. We need you to sign the following petition and send it to everyone you know. We also desperately need funds to head off this attack in the weeks and months to come. Thank you for your support. Together we will take back citizen control over organic standards and preserve organic integrity.

* Call the Capital Switchboard here: 877-762-8762
* Send a quick letter to your Congressperson online here:
http://www.organicconsumers.org/sos.cfm

Thanks,

ORGANIC CONSUMERS ASSOCIATION
6771 South Silver Hill Drive
Finland, MN 55603
Phone: (218)-353-7454 Fax: (218) 353-7652

The fault lines of industrial agriculture, Part I: an overview

2005-09-14T13:31:00.000-04:00

"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain a conception of history that is in keeping with that insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism."
--Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," 1940 (see Benjamin, Illuminations, editor Hannah Arendt)

The news from industrial agriculture's trenches has been bleak lately, providing a stark glimpse at the fault lines that run through our food system--and possible openings for a new system that values the local, the delicious, the environmentally sane, and the socially just.

The crises of industrial agriculture
Hurricane Katrina has exposed just how much grain farmers rely on foreign markets to sop up their huge surplus. The hurricane knotted up the Mississippi close to the port, pushing down the price of grain and leaving farmers in the southern grain belt holding mountains of product they can't sell. (Farmers in the northern grain belt haven't harvested yet; the Mississippi is expected to be open by the time they do.)

Then there’s the energy crunch. Well before Katrina caused a spike in gas prices, analysts were already fearing that soaring fuel and fertilizer prices would force farmers to pay about $3 billion more in energy costs this year than they did last year.

In Montana, before Katrina reared up, a bushel of wheat was fetching $2.85--40 cents less than the cost of production. "I've lost more money in the past five years than I made in the previous 35," one farmer complained to the Billings Gazette).

While that farmer can still count on the USDA to step in and make up for at least some of those losses, the subsidy system is under attack. The World Trade Organization looks increasingly serious about forcing the industrialized nations to slash agricultural subsidies. The United States subsidies its farmers at the rate of about $17 billion per year, the bulk of which goes to large-scale grain farmers in the Midwest. The next Farm Bill, due in 2007, could well be considerably less generous.

Things aren't much better in central California, home to a huge concentration of the nation's fruit and vegetable production. Fuel and fertilizer prices, of course, are taking their toll. But unlike their counterparts in the Midwest, who rely on huge gas-guzzling combines to harvest their crops, fruit and vegetable farmers still need human hands for picking. For years, California landowners have quietly relied on a steady influx of cheap, undocumented workers from Mexico for that task.

Now, reports Associated Press, that stream is drying up. Nativist political pressure has inspired the federal government to more tightly enforce the southern border, making it more difficult and dangerous to cross. Meanwhile, a nationwide housing boom has been drawing more and more migrant workers out of the fields and orchards and onto construction sites, where the work is steadier and higher paid.

Raisin growers are complaining that a brewing labor shortage has put their harvest in jeopardy. "We just don't have enough people, and it's a perishable crop," one grower told the Associated Press.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, more than half of the nation's farm workers are here illegally. A dearth of undocumented workers could thus force up wages among pickers. As I've said before, that would seriously squeeze farm profits, since farm owners have little leverage to increase prices for their goods in a buyers' market dominated by a few huge processors and retailers.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the labor-rights movement among undocumented workers in California is showing signs of life. Last week, the United Farm Workers (UFW) declared victory in a two-year contract battle with Gallo, the behemoth that's responsible for one in four bottles of wine produced in California.

Now, all of these crises can and will be managed in ways that preserve the status quo. It's not for nothing that Bush chose Chuck Conner, former de facto lobbyist for industrial-food warhorse Archer Daniels Midland, as his deputy secretary of agriculture.

But it's not too late for sustainable-agriculture advocates to grab the initiative. Over the next weeks, Bitter Greens Journal will focus on the crises of industrial agriculture, and the opportunities they present for real change.

Saxby Chambliss and family values

2005-09-06T22:17:00.000-04:00

Note: Readers coming in to review my recent brush with Monsanto should scroll down to the three posts below this one.

Saxby Chambliss, R.-Ga, who serves as chair of the powerful Senate Agriculture Committee, has been a vigorous advocate of agricultural subsidies. When President Bush hinted earlier this year he might have to cut ag subsidies to help offset surging military spending, Chambliss rushed to the rescue. He got Bush to agree to preserve subsidies for high-volume commodities like corn, soybeans, and (particularly dear to Chambliss' Georgia heart) cotton. Any cuts that need to be wrung out of the USDA will come from conservation and poverty programs such as food stamps, not commodity programs.

Bitter Greens Journal does not oppose ag subsidies per se, but finds the current way they're doled out to be farcical--a giveaway to huge commodity buyers like Archer Daniels Midland disguised as a gift to family farmers. I've laid out a partial critique of the subsidy system here; I'll return to the topic soon, addressing some thoughtful points in defense of the system raised in a recent issue of Albert Krebs' Agribusiness Examiner.

For now, let's just say that it's no surprise that Sen. Chambliss, whom I have already taken to task here and here, is such a popular beneficiary of big-ag cash.

But his rock-solid support for commodity subsidies may also have a familial angle. I learned from this interview that Sen. Chambliss' son-in-law is one Joe Baker, owner of Baker Farms in Norman Park, Ga., and boardmember of the Georgia Fruit & Vegetable Growers Association.

According to the Environmental Working Group's invaluable Farm Subsidy Database, Baker Farmsgot about $171,000 in federal subsidies between 1995 and 2003, the great bulk of them from the controversial cotton program.

Now, in the grand scheme, $170k isn't so very much. By comparison, Georgia's top-20 most-subsidized farms all received in excess of $2 million over the same period.

Still, comparing Baker Farms' annual take with that of the state of Georgia as a whole yields an interesting trend: Baker Farms' percentage share of its state's total subsidy allotment increases consistently over the period.

And that period--1995 to 2003--roughly coincides with Chambliss' ascent from member of the U.S. House (where he was first elected in 1994) to his entry into the Senate (2002).

Looks like Baker grew savvier about how to "farm the government" (as the practice is known in the trade) as his daddy-in-law scaled the heights on the shoulders of big-ag cash.

Roundup, ready

2005-09-02T13:43:00.000-04:00

"Roundup, ready" is an occasional feature of Bitter Greens Journal. Named in honor of Monsanto's famed line of seeds genetically engineered to withstand its herbicide Roundup, this feature will give a brief overview of recent news, trends, and topics in the food-politics world. Each of them is a candidate for expansion in the days and weeks to come.

Dust-up with Monsanto
Bitter Greens Journal bows humbly before the outpouring of support it has gotten since receiving that absurd and distressing e-mail from Monsanto's trademark bounty hunter.

There's a slave morality ingrained in this culture that makes people shuffle along meekly when a corporate flack armed with a law degree starts barking orders. Refusing requires little real courage, in the grand scope of things, and is actually quite fun. Let's all pledge to do more of it.

On a practical note, it would certainly be awful to be sued by Monsanto. Although a certified letter has not arrived at my doorstep, and my friend the lawyer has yet to reply to my blunt letter of a few days ago, legal action remains a possibility. As this supurb report by the Center for Food safety shows, Monsanto rather takes pride in suing and bankrupting farmers.

So I very much appreciate all of the efforts to get the word out. The best defense against a dark beast like Monsanto is a bright blast of sun. And that's precisely what all of your comments and blog links have been.

Politics and disaster
"Don't you dare politicize a human tragedy."

Words to that effect arrived in my e-mail box this morning amid a heated list-serve debate about the unfolding calamity in New Orleans. It's conventional claptrap. Every disaster, no matter how "natural," has a political and social history. Politely disregarding it dishonors the victims and allows the perpetrators and profiteers to skulk off scott-free.

Mike Davis' fiercely argued and devastating "Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World" (2001) makes this point with unsparing force. The book documents how the European empires, along with the United States and Japan, used three major droughts in the late 19th century to consolidate their economic grip on what would become the Third World.

What turned drought into famine? According to Davis, in British-controlled India during the drought of 1876:

The newly constructed railroads, lauded as institutional safeguards against famine, were instead used by merchants to ship grain inventories from outlying drought-stricken districts to central depots for hoarding (as well as protection from rioters). Likewise the telegraph ensured that price hikes were coordinated in a thousand towns at once, regardless of local supply trends. Moreover, British antipathy to price control invited anyone who had the money to join in the frenzy of grain speculation...As a result, food prices soared out of the reach of outcaste laborers, displaced weavers, sharecroppers, and poor peasants. 'The dearth,' [a contemporary British publication] pointed out, 'was one of money and labor and not food.'

Before British rule, famine had been rare on the subcontinent. During droughts, food moved from unaffected areas to stricken areas through informal networks. Davis claims that these networks crumbled under pressure from the "theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham, and Mill."

Thus began the great game of "development" in the southern hemisphere, a project lately taken over by the IMF, the World Bank, and the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization.

Davis claims that at the time of the French Revolution, "the difference in living standards between a French [peasant] and a Deccan farmer were relatively insignificant compared to the gulf that separated both from their ruling classes." By the end of the 19th century, though, after as many as 50 million perished from famine in India, Africa, and South America, "the inequality of nations was as profound as the inequality of classes."

The New Orleans calamity needs a Mike Davis to parse its vicous race/class angle, the feeble response of a war-addled administration, and the ruinous reign of developers in Louisiana politics.

Roundup(R) the usual suspects
What do you get when Monsanto and the Farm Bureau (whose sorry politics are discussed
here) teams up with the National Corn Growers Association, the United Soybean Board, the U.S. Grains Council, and the National Cotton Council (discussed here)?

If your answer is vast-scale, heavily subsidized, and environmentally ruinous agriculture, you have a point. But I was thinking of a different response: television that promises to be so bad that it might qualify as camp.

The above-mentioned crew have pooled funds to create a public-television series called "America's Heartland." According to its Web site, the show is:

[A] new weekly public television series...which will celebrate our nation’s agriculture. Profiling the people, places, and processes of agriculture, the series will tap into—and strengthen—the ties that bind us all together: the love of our land and the respect for the people who live on and from it, a national fascination with food, curiosity about unfamiliar places and ways of life, and the bedrock American values of family, hard work and the spirit of independence.

In other words, rather than focus on the wretchedly depressed conditions reigning in most rural areas and a dismal food system that has made the U.S. the fattest nation on earth--or on alternatives such as the budding local-food movement--the series will paint a portrait of noble, stoic family farmers cranking out "miraculous" amounts of commodities so that "American consumers [can] spend less to feed themselves than any other country in the world."

Is it crude of me to point out that this is just the sort of nonsense that issued forth from both Soviet and Nazi propaganda mills?

Bitter Greens responds to Monsanto

2005-08-29T11:53:00.000-04:00

As I reported Friday, Monsanto contacted me to "request" that I cease using the headline "Roundup, ready," a title I use for an occasional feature that rounds up food-politics news. Below find Monsanto's letter followed by my response.

Dear Mr. Philpott,
I am the trademark and copyright attorney for Monsanto Company, the owner of the Roundup Ready(R) trademark. The attached link is to the Bitter Greens Journal which features the name "Roundup, ready" as the title of one of its features. Roundup Ready(R) is a well known trademark which is registered by Monsanto not only in the United States, but in many countries throughout the word [sic]. As you have pointed out in the column, Roundup Ready(R) is famous in the agricultural industry.

While you have stated in your column that you chose the name "Roundup, ready" in honor of Monsanto's famed line of seeds, we must object to this use and request that you change the name for the following reasons:

1) You are using our trademark without our consent. This use of the term could cause your readers to think that your journal is in some way sponsored by Monsanto or that Monsanto supports the positions set out in your journal.

2) You are using our trademark in an incorrect manner (with a comma and in a way that genericizes the mark). This weakens our trademark rights.

I would appreciate your confirmation that you will change the name of this column and cease using "Roundup, ready" or any form of our trademark as the name of a feature or in an incorrect manner in your journal. We appreciate your cooperation in this matter.

http://bittergreensgazette.blogspot.com/

Very truly yours,

Barb
Barb Bunning-Stevens
Monsanto Corp.
Assistant General Counsel - Trademarks

Dear Ms. Bunning-Stevens,
Although it's comical for a corporation with upwards of $5 billion in annual revenue to harass an obscure blogger who helps run a 2.5-acre farm, the tone of your letter is earnest; so I will reply earnestly.

Your arguments seem specious to me, and I therefore I must refuse to cease using "Roundup, ready" as the title for an occasional feature on my Web log.

You write that "[t]his use of the term could cause your readers to think that your journal is in some way sponsored by Monsanto or that Monsanto supports the positions set out in your journal." Yet my journal clearly presents itself as a "running critique of industrial agriculture," and from its first post on has made no secret of its distaste for Monsanto and its particular style of industrial agriculture.

I doubt you will be able to dig up a single reader who, after perusing a "Roundup, ready" post, will think to himself, "Now this fellow must be on the Monsanto dole!"

To further clarify my position on Monsanto, and to underline my institutional, financial, and ideological independence from it, I'm considering placing a new feature along the left-hand side of my blog. Titled "Bitter Greens on Monsanto," it would be a compilation of clickable headlines to the 15 or so posts that have mentioned your company. Would that go some way toward distancing our two entities?

Nor am I persuaded by the claim that my use of a comma in "Roundup, ready" somehow "weakens [Monsanto's] trademark rights." If I were in the business of genetically altering seeds so that they could withstand copious applications of herbicides, and I were marketing my product under the brand "Roundup, ready," cheekily trying to leverage Monsanto's marketing might and hoping the comma would protect me from copyright troubles, I would certainly tremble in fear on being contacted by a Monsanto attorney. And I would immediately cease and desist that dubious practice.

However, I am selling nothing. I am a polemicist employing (in the case of "Roundup, ready") satire to advance the cause of locally based, organic agriculture. If I'm able with my writing to stop a farmer from buying your product, then it will be due to the force of my arguments, not to any confusion regarding your trademark.

With all due respect, it seems to me that rather than protect your trademark from any serious threat, what you're really trying to do is intimidate a political opponent into ceasing what is surely Constitutionally protected speech. And so, as I stated above, I must decline your request. And I will redouble my efforts to study and write about the practices of your company.

Respectfully,
Tom Philpott
Bitter Greens Journal

Monsanto to Bitter Greens: "Cease" and Desist

2005-08-26T10:35:00.000-04:00

Yesterday the farming project I work for, Maverick Farms, received the following extraordinary e-mail. I don't have time to respond now, as we're scrambling to put on our monthly farm dinner. Given Monsanto's record of suing farmers, I suppose I should stifle guffaws and take it seriously. For now, though, I'll delight in having tweaked a transnational corporation valued in the marketplace at a cool $17 billion. Here's the letter. I will respond when I get a chance. (Readers should also note that I'm putting the finishing touches on a post about the current oil crunch.)

Dear Mr. Philpott,
I am the trademark and copyright attorney for Monsanto Company, the owner of the Roundup Ready(R) trademark. The attached link is to the Bitter Greens Journal which features the name "Roundup, ready" as the title of one of its features. Roundup Ready(R) is a well known trademark which is registered by Monsanto not only in the United States, but in many countries throughout the word [sic]. As you have pointed out in the column, Roundup Ready(R) is famous in the agricultural industry.

While you have stated in your column that you chose the name "Roundup, ready" in honor of Monsanto's famed line of seeds, we must object to this use and request that you change the name for the following reasons:

1) You are using our trademark without our consent. This use of the term could cause your readers to think that your journal is in some way sponsored by Monsanto or that Monsanto supports the positions set out in your journal.

2) You are using our trademark in an incorrect manner (with a comma and in a way that genericizes the mark). This weakens our trademark rights.

I would appreciate your confirmation that you will change the name of this column and cease using "Roundup, ready" or any form of our trademark as the name of a feature or in an incorrect manner in your journal. We appreciate your cooperation in this matter.

http://bittergreensgazette.blogspot.com/

Very truly yours,

Barb
Barb Bunning-Stevens
Assistant General Counsel - Trademarks

Roundup, ready

2005-08-07T15:52:00.000-04:00

By leveling the playing field for our products, CAFTA will help create jobs and opportunities for our citizens. As CAFTA helps create jobs and opportunity in the United States, it will help the democracies of Central America and the Dominican Republic deliver a better life for their citizens. By further opening up their markets, CAFTA will help those democracies attract the trade and investment needed for economic growth.

My purpose now is not to debunk those faith-based banalities--I partially did so a while back here--but rather to establish that this is a president with a strong rhetorical commitment to what he calls free trade. What follows will show that this commitment is purely rhetorical--it evaporates when the dictates of free trade conflict with big-money U.S. industrial interests.

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal ran an astonishing piece about US cotton farmers' efforts to win favor with their counterparts in Africa, who for years have been undercut by US agriculture subsidies.

Between 1995 and 2003, US cotton farmers received more than $14 billion in federal handouts. Last year alone, the Journal reports, the government doled out $4.5 billion in cotton subsidies.

That means that US cotton farmers can afford to sell their wares on global markets at a fraction of the cost of production. African farmers, who produce cotton much more cheaply, are therby squeezed out of world markets and into misery. It's important to note here that global institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank, and the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization have for years prodded African farmers to produce for the global commodity markets--it helps their governments earn foriegn exchange to pay back debts run up by national elites.

As it stands now, the Journal reports, US cotton farmers, whose production costs are among the world's highest, export three-quarters of their produce and own 40 percent of the global market.

Clearly, here is a situation that violates the tenets of free trade. Forced to compete without government support, the US cotton industry would likely collapse--what the free traders hail as "creative destruction." To a zealous free trader, the situation described above is tantamount to thundering the Lord's name in vain during Sunday service (or, to allude to recent news item, flushing a Bible down the toilet).

So how does our White house-enthroned Adam Smith acolyte react to these desecrations being committed by his government at the service of big cotton farmers?

Rather than kick them off the dole like a bunch of welfare mothers, he's sending USDA flacks out to Africa, accompanied by worthies from the National Cotton Council, to sweet-talk African farmers into not challenging US subsidies at the World Trade Organization.

The Journal article opens:

WEREKELA, Mali -- Drummers and dancers greeted Jim Butler when he arrived at this settlement of dirt roads and mud houses in January. The deputy undersecretary at the U.S. Department of Agriculture met with local cotton farmers and promised American help to boost productivity. He presented the village headman with a pewter paperweight embossed with a USDA seal. The headman, who has neither a desk nor paper, hid it for safekeeping.

The trip was part of an extraordinary effort to lend a hand to African cotton farmers. But the prime motivation wasn't altruistic. West African nations, newly assertive in global trade negotiations, are agitating for the abolition of subsidies essential to the prosperity of many American farmers. By offering tips on improving mills, analyzing dirt and chasing away bugs, the U.S. cotton industry is hoping to win some regional goodwill and maintain its domestic privileges a little while longer.[Emphasis not in original]

I find it remarkable that neither the Journal reporters nor their editors saw anything odd about the conflation of the USDA and the US cotton industry. Sure, the USDA exists to promote the interests of domestic farmers. But it has clearly gone to extreme lengths to promote a single kind of farming--the vast-scale sort that's more interested in conquering foreign markets than feeding and clothing people.

Not surprisingly, the USDA/cotton industry's African charm offensive has largely fallen flat among the continent's cotton farmers. Here is the Journal again:

Several months after Messrs. [Cotton Council official John] Pucheu and [USDA official] Butler visited Werekela, the villagers' enthusiasm had dissipated. "If we all go to the market together, the Americans have no problem with the low price, because they get subsidized support," says Mr. Traore, who is missing his front teeth. "But for us, cotton sales are all we have."
He's sitting under a big shade tree with five other farmers escaping the afternoon heat. Chickens scratch in the dirt at their feet. "The Americans," he says, "promised they would help us develop. But they never mentioned subsidies."
Adds fellow farmer, Niantili Fomba: "The only thing we've gotten since is lower prices [for their cotton]."

••••••

The joys of industrial dairy
It's a little-known fact that California recently passed Wisconsin as the nation's most prodigious dairy-producing state.

California's San Joaquin Valley alone boasts 2.5 million dairy cows--about a fifth of the nation's total herd. It also ranks right up there with Los Angeles and Houston among the areas with the country's most polluted air.

Coincidence? As this LA Times article shows, the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District says no. After a recent study, the agency concluded that "the average dairy cow produces 19.3 pounds of gases, called volatile organic compounds ... [these] gases react with other pollutants to form ground-level ozone, or smog." Multiplying 19.3 by 2.5 million gets us about 50 million pounds of cow gas wafting into the Valley's atmosphere each year.

"The dairy industry will be forced to invest millions of dollars in expensive pollution-control technology in feedlots and waste lagoons, and may even have to consider altering animals' diets to meet the region's planned air-quality regulations," the paper reports.

Aha! Here is an attempt to charge the dairy industry for what are known as "externalities"--costs that are normally pushed off the ledger of industrial farming and onto that of society as a whole. (Right now, citizens of the Valley are bearing some of those burdens in the form of an extremely high asthma rate, the Times reports.) If industrial farming had to pay for the messes it creates, I think we'd see a huge push toward valuing small-scale, sustainable-minded farming.

In the Land of Arnold, however, the industry stands an excellent chance of rebuffing this bold attempt to hold it responsible for its reaking, hazardous mess.
•••••

Cheap labor, cheap food, Part I: A farm labor crisis?
Bitter Greens Journal has long argued that US society relies on a cheap, plentiful supply of labor from points south to maintain its beloved cheap-food system.

No good nativist should enjoy a $5 lunch from McDonald's without reflecting on the contribution illegal immigrants make to delivering such a hefty dose of calories for so scant a price.

Are these patriots on the verge of delivering a decisive blow to the American way of eating? Are their efforts to "secure our borders" going to spark a rise in food prices?

It's way too early to tell. But as this well-researched, nuanced article from the Fresno (California) Bee shows, trouble is brewing in Big Ag's trenches. Once again, San Joaquin Valley, that (evidently quite aromatic) epicenter of vast-scale West Coast farming, displays industrial agriculture's logical extremes.

Here is the Bee:

The supply of farmworkers is shrinking in the San Joaquin Valley, and some farmers are concerned it will take longer for workers to finish picking crops this summer.

They also worry the labor shortage will intensify in the coming years.

Farmworker crews are typically made up of 20 to 25 people. But on some farms this year, there are as few as 13 workers per crew, says Manuel Cunha Jr., president of the Fresno-based Nisei Farmers League.

The article cites the California Institute For Rural Studies for this startling fact: "More than 400,000 farmworkers toil in San Joaquin Valley fields, and more than 40% of them are illegal immigrants."

Yet the number of illegal immigrants streaming into the Valley has decreased for five years running, as it has in the nation as a whole. The article states that annual illegal immigration into the US peaked at about 750,000 people in the late 1990s and now stands at about 700,000. (This reflects the number of people who sneak in each year, not the total number living in the US).

The reason: "Fewer migrant workers are crossing the border illegally because of more border patrol agents, human smugglers raising their prices and the Minuteman Project that put civilian patrols on the U.S.-Mexico border, workers and federal officials say."

And the ones who do make it in are increasingly spurning agriculture in favor of higher-paid fields like construction and landscaping, the article states.

Farmers tell the Bee that they've been able to harvest their crops despite the labor shortage. Long-term, however, they fear they'll have to pay more to attract more workers.

That could spark a crisis. As grocery retailing consolidates--and Wal-Mart gobbles up more market share in the industry--the number of large-scale buyers falls. That gives buyers like Wal-Mart tremendous leverage to demand low prices from farmers. Thus farmers in place like the Joaquin Valley will find themselves squeezed between rising labor costs and stagnant prices for their goods.

One possible scenario is that the Wal-Marts of the world will simply buy more and more produce from countries like Mexico and Chile. That will mean farm closings on in the Joaquin Valley.

Another, more likely scenario is that the US government will ease up on patrolling the border. That has been its traditional response to labor shortages within industrial agriculture.
•••••

Cheap labor, cheap food, Part II: Bitter chocolate
Have Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, and Nestle been knowingly buying cocoa beans from farms that utilize slave labor?

That's what a lawsuit filed by three people from Mali claims, according to this AP article.

The lawsuit charges that:

[T]he plaintiffs were each forced from their homes in Mali in 1996 while still in their teens to toil without pay at cocoa bean plantations in the neighboring nation of Ivory Coast.

The plaintiffs, who worked in separate plantations, claim they worked 12 hours a day or more, were barely fed and were subject to beatings if they didn't work properly or attempted to escape.

All the while, the deep-pocketed transnationals knew of these conditions in the cocoa fields and looked the other way, the suit claims.

"It is unconscionable that Nestle, ADM and Cargill have ignored repeated and well-documented warnings over the past several years that the farms they were using to grow cocoa employed child slave laborers," said a lawyer for the plaintiffs told AP. "They could have put a stop to it years ago, but chose to look the other way. We had to go to court as a last resort."

Down and dirty: the fate of soil in industrial society

2005-08-02T13:39:00.000-04:00

"Common as dirt," goes the old insult. Despite its antique nature, the saying may sum up industrial (and post-industrial) society's take on soil: low, squalid, filthy, annoyingly abundent, beneath dignity and respect.

Consider the zeal to clean, to wash, to sterilize and scrub. Claudia Hemphill, a doctoral student in environmental science at the University of Idaho, has been doing some interesting work on the recent social history of soil. As US society mutated from primarily rural to overwhelmingly urban and suburban in the span of less than a century--today about 3 percent of the population engages directly in agriculture--dirt came to be demonized, Hemphill argues.

By the dawn of the 20th century, when immigrants (many of them former farmers) and our own displaced rural populations flocked into US cities, they found themslves confronted with a stark public-health slogan: "Dirt, Disease and Death.”

A society washing its hands of agriculture didn't want dirt clinging to its trousers. Hence the cult of detergent.

“So dirt became the major symbol of disease,” Hemphill says in a recent University of Iowa press release. “Anyone who was considered socially inferior--such as immigrants or different ethnic groups--was called dirty. Dirtiness was a huge insult. Housecleaning became an obsession. Even outdoors, dirt is eliminated--backyards are turned into concrete patios or covered up with gravel or bark-mulch. Dirt is so intrinsically bad, we don’t even want to see it outdoors.”

It's a well-known irony that the campaign against dirt delivered dire health consequences of its own. Modern parents who essentially sterilize their children with "anti-bacterial" soap, and forbid them to play in the dirt, have managed to wreck their charges' immune systems. It turns out that after all "we need to have some dirt in our lives," as Hemphill says. All along, it's been our metaphor for disease that's helped shield us from disease.

Yet despite better recent press, dirt still gets short shrift. Hemphill points out that even environmentalists tend to neglect the ground beneath their feet, focusing their energies on water and air.

The fragmentation of the broader society cleaves environmentalism and subverts it. Groundwater runoff from chemically fertilized fields is a significant source of water contamination; industrial agriculture's addiction to fossil fuel contributes to air pollution and global warming. Yet mainline environmentalism is curiously silent on the question of agriculture and soil stewardship. (There are a couple of proud exceptions, including Greenpeace's bare-knuckled fight against genetically modified crops.)

I think even consumers who try to shop locally for sustainably grown produce don't think enough about the soil and what it means. Every apple you eat, every carrot and every clove of garlic, represents nutrients leached from the soil--nutrients that must be replaced one way or another for agriculture to sustain itself. Same with meat. Whether a cow feeds freely on meadow grass or has field corn shovelled into its tiny hovel, soil somewhere is being leeched of nutrients.

I wonder if many vegans ponder the ultimate source of their nutrition. Small-scale farmers who reject synthetic inputs have essentially two options for replenishing the nutrients they pull out of their soil: animal manure and what's known as "green manure," plants capable of leeching nitrogen out of the air and depositing it into the soil. (Compost could be considered a third option, but farm-scale composting typically relies on a heavy dose of manure--not the green kind.)

Most small organic farms use both methods. Green manure by itself would be a tricky option. First, the seeds tend to be expensive (for example, hairy vetch), and small-scale market farming is a notoriously seat-of-the-pants proposition.

Second, using green manure as the only fertility strategy imposes opportunity costs. Say a farmer wants to use the same bed to grow several different crops in succession over a single season. Green manuring would require her to devote parts of her fields all season to growing cover crops for the sole purpose of tilling them in. Again, that's tough to pull off on a typical small farm, where there's intense financial pressure to produce as much as possible for market. In the heat of the season, it makes more sense to simply work in some well-composted manure before planting the next bed.

Thus vegans who shop at the farmers market are faced with a stark fact: that beautiful carrot you just enjoyed likely spent its growing life swaddled in a rich bed of decomposed animal shit. Try as we might, we can't shake off the scatological origins of life, any more than we can meaningfully win any war against dirt.

I mention this not to take a poke at the vegans, but rather to remind them of the importance of animals in the nutrient cycle of farming.

And this points up another vexation of small-scale farming in an industrial-scale world. Fertilizing by manure is less difficult than a purely plant-based strategy, but not by much. Industrialization has rent farming in two. For the most part, there are animal farms and meat farms; few do both. Thus vegetable farmers tend to spend a lot of time wrangling and making deals to get tremendous loads of manure delivered to their farms. And since small-scale meat and dairy production has collapsed in most areas, even the most conscientious organic farmers end up using manure from industrial farms.

Vegans and anyone else interested in organic local vegetables thus have an interest in supporting humane, pasture-based animal farming in their areas.

Scientists, too, have tended to neglect dirt. Hemphill conjectures that they recoil from the inherently murky nature of the stuff. Water can be filtered to its elements: two hydrogen atoms linked to one oxygen. No such luck for soil. Hemphill puts it well:

If you take a sample of water from the stream and filter out the leaf bits and twigs, insects and impurities, you’re left with pure water. If you take a handful of soil and remove the rock particles, pollen grains, decomposing wood bits, water and microorganisms, you’re left with nothing. Philosophically, this makes it cognitively unmanageable because it bypasses our tendency to want to sort things out into little piles that are all the same.

Healthy soil literally lives and breathes; it's made up of decomposing matter and live organisms, from tiny bacteria to earthworms as big as your finger. Healthy soil is like a decadent poem: fevered activity, death, life, rebirth, green leaves and lovely flowers rooted in a bed of seething scatology.

A society that fails to study that poem risks extinction. Consider that field corn--the fodder that's fed to confined animals and makes its way into food-proccessing factories and ethanol plants, not the sweet stuff you eat off the cob--is the number-one U.S. crop, heavily underwritten by federal subsidies. No crop erodes soil faster than field corn.