Tom Philpott

Meat Industry Still Denying Antibiotic Resistance

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| Wed Sep. 21, 2011 3:30 AM PDT

Can you can stuff farm animals together by the thousands and dose them daily with antibiotics, without creating resistant pathogens that affect humans?

Yes, of course you can, insists the meat industry. "Not only is there no scientific study linking antibiotic use in food animals to antibiotic resistance in humans, as the US pork industry has continually pointed out, but there isn’t even adequate data to conduct a study,” the National Pork Producers Council declared in a statement last week.

According to the Pork Producers, a recent report from the Government Accounting Office confirms their view. But as Helena Bottemiller in Food Safety News and Tom Laskway on Grist show, what the GAO is really saying is that regulators like the USDA meat-inspection service have done a lousy job of collecting data on factory-farm antibiotic use. The report states the case bluntly, right in the opening paragraph:

HHS [Health and Human Services] and USDA have collected some data on antibiotic use in food animals and on resistant bacteria in animals and retail meat. However, these data lack crucial details necessary to examine trends and understand the relationship between use and resistance. … Without detailed use data and representative resistance data, agencies cannot examine trends and understand the relationship between use and resistance.

So the GAO is chastising the oversight agencies for failing to collect good data; and the industry is pretending that the lack of good data implies the lack of an underlying problem. It would be funny if real people weren't dying from what the FDA calls "treatment failure" after being infected with pathogens that antibiotics would normally wipe out.

Meanwhile, the GAO makes clear that factory farm antibiotic abuse does pose a threat to public health. The report states it in plain English:

Unsanitary conditions at slaughter plants and unsafe food handling practices could allow these bacteria to survive on meat products and reach a consumer. Resistant bacteria may also spread to fruits, vegetables, and fish products through soil, well water, and water runoff contaminated by fecal matter from animals harboring these bacteria. If the bacteria are disease-causing, the consumer may develop an infection that is resistant to antibiotics.

While US regulators dither and the meat industry treats their incompetence as vindication, a team of Danish, Australian, and Canadian researchers have brought forth damning evidence on the link between factory farming and resistance. For a study just published in Foodborne Pathogens and Disease, the team isolated strains of antibiotic-resistant E. coli found in humans and compared them with resistant strains found in pigs, poultry, and cattle.

The result:

Resistance in E. coli isolates from food animals (especially poultry and pigs) was highly correlated with resistance in isolates from humans. This supports the hypothesis that a large proportion of resistant E. coli isolates causing blood stream infections in people may be derived from food sources.

Of course, as I've written before, none of this is a secret. All the relevant US regulatory and disease-tracking agencies—USDA, FDA, CDC—have acknowledged that factory farms are brewing up pathogens that antibiotics are increasingly unable to treat.

The challenge is getting them to act on it. The real hold-up isn't the industry's talent for issuing reality-defying press releases. It's the industry's talent for exerting influence on regulators.

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Walmart Drops $1 Million on Urban-Ag Pioneer Growing Power

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| Tue Sep. 20, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

Eighteen years ago, a former professional basketball player named Will Allen made an unlikely career move: He decided to launch a farm in a low-income neighborhood in Milwaukee. His farmhands would be underemployed or unemployed neighborhood teens.

At the time, brutal economic conditions were pushing the nation's few remaining African American farmers into bankruptcy, and the concept of "urban farming" seemed more like an oxymoron than an answer to the inner city's economic and public health problems.

Since that time, Allen's organization, Growing Power, has established itself as a model for how urban resources can be used to grow healthy, affordable food and revitalize neighborhoods at the same time. Growing Power's model was so successful in Milwaukee that Allen's daughter Erika has established an offshoot in Chicago.

Meanwhile, while the Allens were honing their community empowerment model of food industry, an Arkansas-based company called Walmart was putting a wholly different vision into practice. Using low-wage labor and its vast market leverage as tools, Walmart emerged as the globe's largest retailer, grocery merchant, and private employer by draining economic power from communities.

Recently, the two divergent entities intersected in a dramatic announcement: Walmart will donate $1 million to Growing Power. The grant will bolster Growing Power's efforts to expand its activities from its current bases in Milwaukee and Chicago, to "strengthen 20 community food centers in more than 15 states."

Naturally, the announcement sent shock waves through the sustainable food movement. Allen—whose long list of accolades includes a MacArthur "genius" grant—took to the Growing Power blog to defend the grant.

Wal-mart is the world's largest distributor of food—there is no one better positioned to bring high-quality, locally grown food into urban food deserts and fast-food swamps. We can no longer be so idealistic that we hurt the very people we're trying to help. Keeping groups that have the money and the power to be a significant part of the solution away from the Good Food Revolution will not serve us. At the same time, by accepting grants like these we retain the power for how corporate money is spent, and the grassroots movement stays grassroots.

On Civil Eats, Andy Fisher, cofounder of the Community Food Security Coalition, responded that Walmart's activities do more to harm low-income communities than can be offset by a $1 million grant. Questioning Allen's claim that Walmart, which has aggressively sought to move into urban areas and has met fierce opposition, can help solve urban food deserts, Fisher wrote:

The spectre of Walmart moving into urban areas has other supermarket chains running scared, leading them to demand cutbacks in wages and benefits of their unionized workers across America.

And blogger Michele Simon, author of Appetite for Profit, charged that by giving to Growing Power, Walmart is trying to buy support from community empowerment advocates for its effort to move into urban areas: "By partnering with a group that could otherwise be one of its staunchest critics, Walmart is taking a page right out of the Big Tobacco playbook: Buying silence."

I find myself deeply divided on this issue. The need to build wealth and access to high-quality food and jobs in low-income areas is urgent, and it lacks resources. The federal government, trapped in a spasm of budget cutting, isn't going to increase such funding anytime soon. Growing Power has always been resourceful and pragmatic, and it has demonstrated it can put large amounts of grant money to good use.

[Read more]

The Global Economy in One Neat Chart

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| Fri Sep. 16, 2011 12:46 PM PDT

From The Economist, an interesting snapshot of the global economy. The globe's two largest employers are military operations; the next two are, respectively, a "hypermarket" (supermarket plus department store) and an eatery chain, both renowned for their ability to profitably sell cheap food, in part by low-balling their vast, un-unionized workforces and squeezing their suppliers. Big guns and cheap eats: they make the world hum.

The EconomistThe Economist

 

How Wall Street Fuels Global Hunger

—By

| Fri Sep. 16, 2011 3:00 AM PDT
Women plant sweet potatoes between cassava in Tanzania.

Wall Street loves food—and I'm not talking about expense-account dinners at Manhattan's culinary temples.

When the the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, investment cash began to trickle into an area that had for decades seemed stodgy and boring: food commodities like corn, soy, and rice. And after the housing market started to unravel in 2006-'07, that trickle turned into a gusher.

According to the UN FAO's most recent report, global food prices are hovering at all-time highs, and have risen dramatically over the past year. The FAO's Cereal Price Index is up 36 percent from last year; overall food prices are up 26 percent. The most recent spike is part of a multi-year trend, FAO reports. Inflation-adjusted food prices have tripled since 2004 (see chart below).

To hear Wall Street tell it, the bull market for food reflects the fundamentals of supply and demand. Global population is rising, emerging middle classes in India and China are demanding more grain-intensive meat, and government-backed biofuel schemes in the US and Europe divert ever-larger amounts of food crops in into car fuel. While demand rises quickly, supply—the amount of food grown by farmers—is stagnant: hence, a rapid rise in prices.

That's the story, anyway, and Wall Street is sticking to it. Jeffrey Saut, chief investment strategist at Raymond James, reiterated it it in a note to investors on Monday. Making the case for investments in agriculture, Staut declared:

With per capita incomes rising rapidly in emerging countries, the burgeoning food demand has left global grain consumption exceeding production; and over the next few decades the situation is likely to get worse because food production needs to expand by some 50% just to meet the estimated demand.

It turns out, though, that Wall Street's food pitch, like its previous ones about tech stocks and residential real estate, is so much hot air puffing up a bubble (along with the profits of a few big banks and hedge funds). While the housing bubble caused plenty of misery—hundreds of thousands of foreclosures, the worst recession since the Great Depression—the current bubble is even more catastrophic: millions of people globally priced out of food markets.  

[Read more]

USDA Finally Bares Fangs to Meat Industry on E. Coli

—By

| Tue Sep. 13, 2011 3:00 PM PDT

Yesterday, I pointed to Cargill's latest salmonella-tainted turkey problem and wondered whether the USDA and other regulatory watchdogs would ever bare their fangs against the meat industry's power and recklessness with public health.

As if in response, the agency let loose a formidable growl. It announced it had ramped up oversight of the industry and its habit of sending out ground beef tainted with various strains of E. coli.

In the past, the USDA had classified only one strain of E. coli, known as 0157, as an "adulterant," making it illegal to sell. The deadly E. coli strain earned its outlaw status after the infamous Jack in the Box outbreak of 1993, which sickened 700 people and killed four.

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For Cargill, It's Tainted Turkey Time Again

—By

| Tue Sep. 13, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

On August 3, agribusiness giant Cargill recalled a stunning 36 million pounds of ground turkey in response to an outbreak of antibiotic-resistant salmonella that had sickened more than 100 people and killed another.

The suspect meat had emerged from a single massive slaughterhouse in Arkansas. The fiasco inspired the company—one of the globe's largest agribusiness firms—to shut down that plant to disinfect it and upgrade safety procedures there. According to the trade journal ThePoultrySite.com, Cargill took the following steps during the plant's hiatus:

[Safety enhancements] include two additional antibacterial washes, intensifying an existing antibacterial system, disassembling and steam cleaning equipment before resuming ground turkey production, and requiring suppliers of turkey meat to add a new antibacterial wash. The company has also implemented the most aggressive Salmonella monitoring and testing programme in the poultry industry.  

Officials from the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) approved the upgrades, Cargill officials told the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and by mid-August, the plant was cranking out vast amounts of ground turkey again.

[Read more]

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California's Fruit-and-Veg Behemoth: Too Productive for Our Own Good

—By

| Fri Sep. 9, 2011 2:13 PM PDT
Giant monocropped strawberry fields forever? Maybe not.

In the United States, when people tell you to "eat your veggies," they are essentially urging you to take a bite out of California—or, more to the point, take a a big swig of its increasingly scarce water supply.

How much do we rely on California for fruits and veg? With its rich soils, variety of microclimates, long growing season, and huge geographical footprint, California should be a major ag producer—certainly a regional food-production hub for the western US. But its sheer dominance of US fruit and veg production (numbers from the the California Department of Food and Agriculture (PDF)) is dizzying.

The state produces 99 percent of the artichokes grown in the US, 44 percent of asparagus, a fifth of cabbage, two-thirds of carrots, half of bell peppers, 89 percent of cauliflower, 94 percent of broccoli, and 95 percent of celery. Leafy greens? California's got the market cornered: 90 percent of the leaf lettuce we consume, along with and 83 percent of Romaine lettuce and 83 percent of fresh spinach, come from the big state on the left side of the map. Cali also cranks a third of total fresh tomatoes consumed in the U.S.—and 95 percent of ones destined for cans and other processing purposes.

As for fruit, I get that 86 percent of lemons and a quarter of oranges come from there; its sunny climate makes it perfect for citrus, and lemons store relatively well. Ninety percent of avocados? Fine. But 84 percent of peaches, 88 percent of fresh strawberries, and 97 percent of fresh plums?

Come on. Surely the other 49 states can do better. And they will likely have to do better—California's fruit-and-veg empire rests on a foundation of highly subsidized and increasingly scarce irrigation water. And that situation will only worsen as climate change makes droughts more prevalent in the western US, as this excellent Grist article by Matt Jenkins demonstrates. It makes sense to think of California's bounty as a kind of bubble puffed up by a history of cheap and unsustainable irrigation-water access—a bubble that will sooner or later have to burst.

But as the explosive recent growth in farmers markets nationwide shows, people are increasingly looking for seasonal produce that emerges from their own food-sheds, not from California's teetering industrial-vegetable complex.  

The effort is even getting a boost from urban agriculture, especially in rust-belt cities where abandoned land is plentiful. According to a new study from Ohio State researchers, people in Cleveland are already spending a cool $1.5 million on fruits and vegetables grown within the city. I visited Cleveland in the summer of 2010, and what I saw was a beautiful city teaming with robust community gardens and even commercial farms.

According to the Ohio State study, if Cleveland's citizens and government made a concerted effort to utilize its vast base of abandoned land for growing food, it could dramatically ramp up production—and not just of fruits and vegetables, but also meat, eggs, and honey:

The first scenario utilizes 80 percent of every vacant lot for growing produce and raising chickens, with beehives being kept on 15 percent of those unoccupied lots. This arrangement, the study found, can meet between 22 and 48 percent of Cleveland's fresh produce demand, 25 percent of its poultry and shell egg needs, and 100 percent of the honey consumed in this city of almost 400,000 residents.

And if if just 9 percent of residential lawn property is brought under the roto-tiller, and some commercial-building roofs are devoted to agriculture, Cleveland could become nearly self-sufficient in fruit, vegetables, chicken meat, eggs, and honey, the study concludes. And in doing so, as much as $115 million in food expenditures would remain within Cleveland, building wealth inside the city instead of leaking out to shareholders in large grocery and fast-food chains. Detroit, which I also visited in summer in 2010, has a similar situation with regard to growing its own food.

Meanwhile, reports The New York Times, the depressed economy is inspiring a vegetable-gardening resurgence in rural and urban areas alike:

It is not just eastern Kentucky. Vegetable gardening has been on the rise across the country, according to Bruce Butterfield, research director at the National Gardening Association, driven by rising food prices and a growing contingent of health-conscious consumers. Garden-store retailers have reported increased sales over the past two years, he said, and many community gardens have waiting lists.

“Our sales have skyrocketed,” said George Ball, chief executive of Burpee, one of the largest vegetable-seed retailers. The jump, he said, began around the time Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, when anxiety about money started to rise.

I mention all of this to make the point that yes, we are way too dependent on California's water-challenged agriculture; but moving away from it need not mean scarcity and poor diets.

Monsanto Superinsects Eating Your Corn? Diversify!

—By

| Fri Sep. 9, 2011 11:50 AM PDT
A corn field in Iowa: excellent habitat for corn rootworms.

Yesterday I showed that Monsanto's formidable Bt corn empire, whose domain extends to about 65 percent of corn grown in the United States, appears to be on the verge of being brought to its knees by a humble insect called the corn rootworm. Make that the Bt-resistant corn rootworm.

What to do about it?

One approach, of course, is to do what Monsanto did about its other festering resistance problem: weeds resistant to its flagship herbicide, Roundup. Bill Freese, science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety, points out that—similar to Bt-resistant rootworms today—Roundup-resistant "supwerweeds" first appeared in isolated fields in the early 2000s, and Monsanto's first reaction was to deny the problem existed. Yet Roundup resistance soon exploded, and now affects a stunning 11 million acres—and growing—nationwide.

Today, Monsanto deigns to acknowledge the problem—and claims it has the solution: It will engineer crops that can withstand multiple powerful herbicides. This approach could be described as "ignore the problem, let it careen out of control, then dramatically escalate the response with profitable and questionable new technologies."

Something similar seems to be afoot with the superinsect problem. The Wall Street Journal reported that Monsanto is developing a new genetic technology called RNA interference to, "among other things, make crops deadly for insects to eat." In other words, "forget that our current technology is failing—look at this wonderful technology that beckons!"

In a recent blog post, Union of Concern Scientists senior scientist Doug Gurian-Sherman warns that it will likely be "years, at least" before that novel technology is available to farmers. Moreover, "there is no reason to believe that [RNA interference] would not also face resistance problems." In the meantime, farmers could muddle along by spraying toxic chemicals in their effort to control Bt-resistant rootworms, just as they are now spraying increasingly toxic herbicide cocktails to try to knock down Roundup-resistant weeds. And, it will be difficult to wean farmers from Monsanto's Bt corn any time soon, because the company's market dominance makes it quite difficult to find non-Bt seed. The Center for Food Safety's Freese points to research from University of Illinois crop scientist Michael Gray suggesting that in Illinois corn country, 40 percent of farmers lack access to high-quality non-Bt corn seed.

Gurian-Sherman suggests a more robust and surer path to solving the problem than muddling along with the status quo and waiting for Monsanto to come out with its next blockbuster: crop rotations, and not just between corn and soy, but employing a variety of crops. The corn rootworm menaces industrial agriculture because industrial agriculture is so tightly focused on corn, which covers millions of acres of our farm land, providing a vast habitat for its pests. "The rootworm is not much of a problem if sensible crop rotations are used," Gurian-Sherman writes.

He adds:

And long [i.e., more than just corn and soy] crop rotations reduce more than rootworm damage. They greatly reduce most pests, including other insects, diseases, and weeds, thereby greatly reducing pesticide use as well. Long crop rotations also improve soil fertility, and reduce fertilizer use, cost and pollution. And they can be just as productive as our current corn obsession.

But as Gurian-Sherman points out, moving farmers away from their fixation on corn and soy means transforming federal farm and energy policy. Until that happens, Monsanto, despite its history of failed technologies, evasions, and denials of the obvious, is poised to keep dominating our agriculture and minting profits.

The Agrichemical Industry's Business Model in One Paragraph

—By

| Fri Sep. 9, 2011 11:39 AM PDT

I've been writing a lot about how the agrichemical industry leverages its failures to to sell ever more toxic herbicides, insecticides, and genetically modified crops to replace ones that have lost effectiveness, trapping farmers on an ever-accelerating pesticide/technology treadmill. In the latest major media article on the rise of "superweeds" resistant to Monsanto's flagship herbicide, this one from Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant makes my point for me:

Monsanto Chief Executive Officer Hugh Grant says competitors’ efforts to develop their own herbicide-tolerant crops isn’t a threat to the company’s flagship business. Seed companies will cross-license each others’ genetics to create crops able to withstand multiple weedkillers, he says, and spraying fields with a mix of herbicides will kill the superweeds and give Roundup Ready crops new life. Monsanto itself is adding resistance to dicamba, an older weedkiller, to Roundup Ready crops for sale by 2015. “The cavalry is coming,” Grant says.

Dicamba, it should be noted, is listed by Pesticide Action Network as a "bad actor"—it's an established developmental/reproductive toxin with the potential to contaminate groundwater. If Dicamba Ready crops become anywhere near as prolific as their Roundup Ready cousins, the result could be disastrous. Farmers are currently applying so much Roundup that US Geological Survey researchers are finding it at "significant" levels in water and air samples in farm states. Roundup enjoys a reputation as a relatively benign herbicide, but new research on its effect on both soil and human health is undermining that assumption.

Monsanto Denies Superinsect Science

—By

| Thu Sep. 8, 2011 3:25 PM PDT
Superinsect problem? Show me the evidence!

As the summer growing season draws to a close, 2011 is emerging as the year of the superinsect—the year pests officially developed resistance to Monsanto's genetically engineered (ostensibly) bug-killing corn.

While the revelation has given rise to alarming headlines, neither Monsanto nor the EPA, which regulates pesticides and pesticide-infused crops, can credibly claim surprise. Scientists have been warning that the EPA's rules for planting the crop were too lax to prevent resistance since before the agency approved the crop in 2003. And in 2008, research funded by Monsanto itself showed that resistance was an obvious danger.

And now those unheeded warnings are proving prescient. In late July, as I reported recently, scientists in Iowa documented the existence of corn rootworms (a ravenous pest that attacks the roots of corn plants) that can happily devour corn plants that were genetically tweaked specifically to kill them. Monsanto's corn, engineered to express a toxic gene from a bacterial insecticide called Bt, now accounts for 65 percent of the corn planted in the US.

The superinsect scourge has also arisen in Illinois and Minnesota. "Monsanto Co. (MON)’s insect-killing corn is toppling over in northwestern Illinois fields, a sign that rootworms outside of Iowa may have developed resistance to the genetically modified crop," reports Bloomberg. In southern Minnesota, adds Minnesota Public Radio, an entomologist has found corn rootworms thriving, Bt corn plants drooping, in fields.

[Read more]

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