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February 2013

Change in the wind on food aid?
Thursday, February 28, 2013

Washington D.C. is a gloomy place these days, with grey skies and a weirdly warm winter, the sour prospect of failure around the sequestration debate, and more cuts on the horizon. It’s possible, however, that on international food aid there just might be a silver lining to all that gloom.  Reuters reports that President Obama might propose new rules in his March budget proposal that would make food aid reach more people, more quickly and more efficiently.

Since the 1950s, nearly all U.S. food aid has been shipped in-kind. There was a certain (though even then, not entirely positive) logic to that practice when this country had vast grain reserves, but that hasn’t been the case for years. Most donor countries now provide more flexible resources for local and regional purchases of food aid, and there has been pressure for years from development and faith organizations for the U.S. government to get with the times and make that shift.

There was a small breakthrough in the 2008 Farm Bill, which created a pilot program to test local and regional purchases of food aid. The evaluation of that experiment found that food aid purchased locally arrived, on average, in about 56 days, compared to 130 days for food purchased and shipped from the U.S.—and at lower cost. Early drafts of the 2012 Farm Bill would have expanded that program and made it permanent, but the Farm Bill, like so many others initiatives these days, is in limbo.

35 groups band together to ask for more on antibiotics in animal agriculture
Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Yesterday, IATP joined 34 other groups in writing to the leadership of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

Our simple ask: That in reauthorizing ADUFA—the law that requires Big Pharma to pay fees to the FDA, in part to hire staff to approve new animal drug products—the FDA ought to make sure the law carries some public health strings attached.

Namely, we urge the FDA collect and then report back to us, the public data on exactly how nearly 30 million pounds of antibiotics are being used in food animals each year. Currently FDA only reports summary data. One cannot easily see how much of that 30 million pounds is sold for use in animal feed, although previous data indicates it’s about 90 percent. The FDA also fails to indicate how much is sold for use in pigs, versus chickens, turkeys or beef cattle. These data are critical for targeting efforts to reduce the overuse of critical human medicines for what are unnecessary uses of convenience, like growth promotion, in animals.

The Senate’s one and only hearing on ADUFA is later this week. Giving testimony are two representatives of industry, and the veterinarian in charge at the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine. Hopefully, the lack of a public health voice won’t also be reflected in the content of the bill.

Read the joint letter.

Resilience means taking the long view on climate change
Friday, February 22, 2013

In our final “Climate change, agriculture and resilience” video—the series we’ve been publishing all week in the lead up to the MOSES Organic Farming conference—it’s all about being different.

Farmer Tom Nuessmeier, from La Sueur, Minnesota, is different. His 200-acre organic farm—producing farrow-to-finish hogs, corn, soy, oats, winter grains and alfalfa—is pretty uncommon in its diversity and size, especially today. As the average size of farms has grown, the number of farms has decreased overall, and so has the variety of crops. According to USDA data highlighted in the video, while corn acres have increased 62 percent, hay and oat acres have decreased 15 and 92 (!) percent respectively in the past 50 years.

This loss of diversity, though, makes sense as markets and policy have developed to encourage monocropping (namely, corn and soy). As Tom puts it:

The market tells people, and the insurance setups dictate to a degree, that that’s what you’re going to do if you want to go after the greatest profit. But I think it’s kind of a short-term way of looking at things that does have long-term implications if you’re talking about just maintaining the farm’s ability to be resilient.

Watch the video, or take a look at the first four of our “Climate change, agriculture and resilience” videos:

In a changing climate, farming’s a risky business
Thursday, February 21, 2013

Farming is risky for anyone: volatile markets and unpredictable weather can make planning and execution from season to season a difficult prospect. Make that double with the extreme weather climate change is bringing. Sure, there is crop insurance in some cases, but what about farmers like Mike Brownfield?

One bad hailstorm and Mike Brownfield’s orchard—the first certified organic orchard in Washington—could lose an entire crop. Being organic means being viewed by the USDA as more risky than conventionally grown fruit (despite studies showing the opposite); being viewed as more risky means paying higher premiums for insurance, but still receiving only conventional-price reimbursement should disaster strike (despite organics being worth more at market).

The fourth in IATP’s “Climate change, agriculture and resilience” video series focuses on the risk involved for farmers who grow our food, how they deal with it, and how that risk is increasing as weather extremes due to climate change shake our system’s very foundations. Without conventional crop insurance to protect his orchard, Mike Brownfield has instituted other methods of risk-management:

For us, having a diversity of crops has made a difference. A certain variety of apple is not always going to have a great year for you, and so that's why we diversified so much in our crops—and in our marketing.

 

Watch the video or check out the rest of the series:

Finding a balance: A farmer’s role in climate change
Wednesday, February 20, 2013

How can we balance the environmental impacts of farming with our need to continue producing food?

Today, in part three in our “Climate change, agriculture and resilience” video series, father and daughter team Maurice and Beth Robinette of Lazy R Ranch talk about their approach to farming grass-fed beef and why carbon sequestration and protecting their ecosystem is so important. As Beth Robinette puts it:

So much of what we do here is about ‘How do we create maximum functioning ecosystems in our pasture?’ and to me that’s what resilience is. If you have an ecosystem that’s at peak function, it can take a lot more damage or uncertainty than an ecosystem that is not at peak function. That’s about the sum of what we’re trying to do here: Grow grass that’ll keep growing.

But making changes like the Robinette’s isn’t easy, or cheap. As direct marketers of their beef, the Robinettes command a premium price, and can put those dollars toward protecting their farm’s ecosystem. For farmers that are just getting by due to market prices or input costs, this kind of adaptation would be impossible.

More long-term thinking in policymaking, and programs that encourage practices like those Lazy R Ranch has piloted would go a long way in building a food system that can withstand the shocks of climate change while contributing less to the factors that are known to cause it.

Watch the video, or check out the rest of the series:

Building stability through biodiversity: Facing climate change with Martin and Loretta Jaus
Tuesday, February 19, 2013

“I think we came in April and it was within a month or two when all the ground was still bare and black and we had one of those two- or three-day blows and I had drifts of soil on my window sills and I'm thinking ‘Hmmm this isn't good.’ That was probably what sparked us to start making some of the changes we did.”

That’s Loretta Jaus speaking about the extreme soil erosion she and her husband faced on their farm due, in part, to modern tiling practices that replaced the region’s prairies and wetlands with more dry, tillable soil.

Part two of our “Climate change, agriculture and resilience” series features the Minnesota organic dairy farm of Martin and Loretta Jaus who farm the same 410 acres that Martin’s great grandfather homesteaded in 1877. In order to combat the eroding soil, and remain more resilient in the increasing incidences of drought and flood, Martin and Loretta have worked to increase their farm’s biodiversity. From the video:

They improved and expanded a pasture made up of deep-rooted perennials that could better access soil moisture during dry spells and serve as a sponge when it rains. They put in shelter belts of trees and they restored a marsh and a pond. Not only did these measures decrease erosion but the Jaus's found that their farm became more resilient as well, both in times to drought and wet weather.

Watch the video, or check out the rest of the series: 

Climate change meets resilience: Real farmers solving real climate problems with sustainable solutions
Monday, February 18, 2013

Update: All five videos are now available at the following links: 

Earlier this month, the USDA released its draft climate adaptation plan. The plan recognizes the serious challenges faced by farmers as climate-related weather events, like extreme droughts or floods, wreak havoc on agriculture. The agency is accepting comments through April. The good news is that many farmers are already ahead of the curve in building resilient farming systems to face climate change. 

This week, in the lead up to the MOSES Organic Farming conference, IATP will be releasing a series of new videos that look at individual farmers and how sustainable practices on the farm help them stay resilient to a changing climate and increasingly common hurdles like the 2012 drought.

The tip of the food justice iceberg
Wednesday, February 13, 2013

In last night’s State of the Union address, President Obama called for the federal minimum wage to be raised to $9 an hour and linked hereafter to the cost of living, so that it will rise along with inflation. He pointed out that a couple with two children working full time at the current minimum wage are still living below the poverty line. If Congress responds to this call, it will be a step in the right direction for building a just food system in America. Workers in fields, food processing plants, restaurants and supermarkets are among the lowest paid in the country. A higher minimum wage would be an important step toward ensuring that the people who feed our society can also feed their own families.

But it’s not enough. We also need comprehensive immigration reform, and stronger protections for the rights of farm workers. We need paid sick leave, so that food workers aren’t forced to endanger their health and ours when they become ill. And we need more effective enforcement of existing laws, so that workers in the food system are no longer routinely subject to wage theft and sexual harassment.

As a matter of fact, a higher minimum wage by itself will be of limited help to some of the lowest-paid Americans: the restaurant workers whose wages come partly in the form of tips. This issue is one that many people aren’t aware of, but if you think the regular minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is inadequate, the “tipped minimum wage” is a mere $2.13! It has been at this level since 1991, when the non-tipped minimum wage was $4.25. And while there may be some folks at high end bistros who do very well on tips, waitstaff overall have three times the poverty rate of other workers.

State of the Union: Green energy and rural
Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Rural resistance has helped slow the development of renewable energy. It doesn't have to be that way. For the President's green-energy plans to succeed, he needs to reach out to the rural leaders who are ready to act on climate change.

President Barack Obama made urgent calls for new steps to address climate change in his State of the Union address yesterday, “for the sake of our children and our future.” While the focus was on renewable energy, he missed an opportunity to talk about the essential ingredient for addressing climate change: the support of rural communities.

Due to the structure of our legislative system, representatives from rural America—and their constituents—have played a disproportionate role in derailing federal climate action over the last several years. Rural resistance is due, in large part, to the complete neglect of this constituency by U.S. climate policymakers and activists, which allowed climate issues in rural America to be defined primarily by the fossil fuel industry and its surrogates.

Without positive, pro-rural voices, or proposals on the table that emphasize the opportunities, climate change deniers have been able to—correctly—focus on the additional burdens that new regulation or taxation would bring to parts of the country that already have lower incomes and higher energy costs than cities. 

Encouragingly, some rural perceptions about climate change are changing. Rural people are already experiencing and responding to the climate crisis in myriad ways. One of the most severe droughts in U.S. history is still unfolding, forcing farmers and ranchers across the country to rethink crop and livestock production systems.

EU takes a crucial step toward market regulation
Tuesday, February 12, 2013

After the disastrous financial collapse in 2008, the commodity  and  financial market regulatory reform process on both sides of the Atlantic has been a series of promising but halting steps, all too often two steps forward and one step back. This week the EU Parliament decided not to take that one step back, when it withdrew a resolution to object to standards for the centralized clearing of over-the-counter (OTC) financial and commodity derivatives contracts. Such a centralized system is essential for effective market regulation. Joost Mulder, of the Brussels-based NGO Finance Watch, said, “the decision to withdraw the resolution is a victory for the real economy.”

The new standards will make transparent pricing and other information previously hidden in the privately negotiated, but market-dominant, OTC contracts and will prevent a repeat of the 2008-09 cascades of counterparty defaults. According to the standards, Centralized Clearing Platforms (CCP) authorized by the European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR), would ensure that the counterparties to an OTC contract are credit worthy and able to cover their losses. Lack of centralized clearing of OTC trades (called swaps) was a major factor in the financial industry crisis of 2008-09, which triggered taxpayer bailouts of the industry and a real economy crisis on both sides of the Atlantic, wreaking price havoc in agriculture and energy markets.

Food crisis update: Main drivers of price volatility still not addressed
Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Last year international food markets suffered their third price spike in five years. The trigger was a terrible drought in the United States—a major agricultural producer and exporter. An unstable climate met low levels of international grain reserves, while U.S. ethanol gobbled up maize supplies. The resulting high and volatile prices struck yet another blow at the world’s already fragile food systems.

This is exactly the scenario we warned of a year ago when we published Resolving the Food Crisis, a comprehensive assessment of the international community’s response to the global food price crisis.

High and volatile food prices in international markets will continue until structural reforms to trade, finance and agriculture are put in place to address the real drivers of the food crisis. It’s time for meaningful limits on financial speculation, reformed mandates for biofuels made from food crops, a system of internationally coordinated public food reserves and strong regulation on land investments. Donors should continue to invest in developing country agriculture, respecting their commitment to recipient country leadership. If the private sector engages, it, too, must respect the rights of the people it engages with.

Here is our review of progress on these issues in 2012:

Funding for agricultural development: Instead of renewing their 2009 L’Aquila commitment to invest significant aid money in agriculture, the G-8 group of powerful nations rolled out the “New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition.” Most of the funding comes from private sector partners like Monsanto and Yara, a global fertilizer company. The aid comes with strings: To qualify, governments must “refine policies in order to improve investment opportunities.”