Tom Philpott

August hasn't been a happy month the for the Monsanto public-relations team. No, I'm not referring to my posts on how Gaza and Mexico don't need the company's high-tech seeds—the ones it will supposedly be "feeding the world" with in the not-so-distant future.

Monsanto's real PR headache involves one of its flagship products very much in the here and now: the herbicide Roundup (chemical name: glyphosate), upon which Monsanto has built a highly profitable empire of "Roundup Ready" genetically modified seeds.

The problem goes beyond the "superweed" phenomenon that I've written about recently: the fact that farmers are using so much Roundup, on so much acreage, that weeds are developing resistance to it, forcing farmers to resort to highly toxic "pesticide cocktails."

What Roundup is doing aboveground may be a stroll through the meadow compared to its effect below. According to USDA scientist Robert Kremer, who spoke at a conference last week, Roundup may also be damaging soil—a sobering thought, given that it's applied to hundreds of millions of acres of prime farmland in the United States and South America. Here's a Reuters account of Kremer's presentation:

The heavy use of Monsanto's Roundup herbicide appears to be causing harmful changes in soil and potentially hindering yields of the genetically modified crops that farmers are cultivating, a US government scientist said on Friday. Repeated use of the chemical glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup herbicide, impacts the root structure of plants, and 15 years of research indicates that the chemical could be causing fungal root disease, said Bob Kremer, a microbiologist with the US Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service.

Now, Kremer has been raising these concerns for a couple of years now—and as Tom Laskaway showed in this 2010 Grist article, the USDA has been downplaying them for just as long. Laskaway asked Kremer's boss at the Agricultural Research Service, Michael Shannon, to comment on Kremer's research. According to Laskaway, Shannon "admitted that Kremer’s results are valid, but said that the danger they represent pales in comparison to the superweed threat."

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When an earthling declares—in no matter what language—"Let's grab a beer," there's a good chance that creature will soon be sitting down to a cold one made by either Anheuser-Busch InBev or SABMiller. Together, these two global entities produce about a third of the beer consumed on the planet.

Here in the United States, their dominance is even greater. How great?

As a jaded observer of the US food scene, I'm accustomed to finding evidence of intense corporate control. Consider that just four giant companies process 60 percent of the 9 billion chickens raised for slaughter in the United States each year, and that just three companies slaughter and pack nearly 80 percent of cows raised here. I've written about how these arrangements are robustly profitable for the participating companies—and pretty awful for everyone else.

But even I'm shocked by the corporatization of beer. Anheuser-Busch InBev and SABMiller produce 80 percent of the beer consumed here. That's four of every five brews. And almost all of them suck!

Yet the US beer industry is paradoxical. Even as these giants have lurched their way to market domination, we've seen an explosion of excellent local and regional brewers. And the United States, home of such swill as Bud Light and Coors Extra Gold, has emerged as the global standard-bearer for beer innovation and, yes, quality.

Here are two graphics that depict both sides of our paradox. The first one is from Phil Howard, a Michigan State professor who tracks corporate consolidation. It illustrates the dizzying variety of brands controlled by our beer overlords. (For a more readable interactive version, go here).

Our second chart tracks the number of beer-brewing facilities in the United States since the 1890s.

Note that breweries plunged to zero in 1930, in honor of that ignoble experiment, Prohibition, and then recovered for a few years after. But then the number peaks in 1936 and steadily declines to fewer than 50 gigantic breweries by 1980. This is the period when big brewers like Anheuser-Busch and Miller were taking over the market, shuttering smaller facilities.

But then the curve takes an utterly unexpected turn and begins to move back up. Today we have 1,759 brewing facilities—more than the pre-Prohibition high of 1,751. What happened? People got sick of corporate swill and started brewing their own. Some of them got really good at it and started small breweries. The circle of people who enjoy a good beer widened, drawing more good brewers in. And so on.

Update: The blog Balloon Juice adds a key detail to the narrative (and alerted me to the nifty chart above, which I have dropped in in place of the more basic one in the original version of this post):

When prohibition was lifted, government tightly regulated the market, and small scale producers were essentially shut out of the beer market altogether. Regulations imposed at the time greatly benefited the large beer makers. In 1979, President Carter deregulated the beer industry, opening the market back up to craft brewers.

Well, what Carter actually did was deregulate the home-brew market—he made it legal to sell malt, hops, and yeast to home brewers. That, I believe as a significant move, because the US craft-beer industry was largely started by enthusiastic home brewers who went pro.

At any rate, the explosion in popularity for real beer has been noted been by the giants, which is precisely why they can longer just peddle name brands like Bud and Miller but also have to roll out phony craft beers like Anheuser-Busch's inglorious "Shock Top" line. And as people consume less flagship swill like Bud and Miller, the companies have responded by desperately buying up smaller regional brands in hopes of keeping as many consumers as possible. Hence the rapid consolidation.

And the need to try to satisfy the rising desire for variety and quality is costing them money. The beer market is "stubbornly diverse," leading to a "high degree of localization," an SABMiller exec recently complained to Bloomberg. This factor makes it "hard to drive real scale benefit" across the group's marketing operations, he added.

Translated, the exec is saying it would be more profitable to just churn out lots of Miller, but those annoying drinkers out there demand at least the illusion of choice, so his firm has to maintain a dizzying number of brands.

What all of this is telling me is that corporations control plenty, but they don't control everything. Their dominance of US beer is a mile wide but paper thin. Grassroots energy and desire rescued beer from true corporate domination starting in 1980. The same can happen in other areas of the food system.

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A roof-top vegetable garden in Gaza.

Climatewire recently ran a rather tedious article rehashing Monsanto’s familiar talking points, on the occasion of a media conference put on by the GMO seed/agrichemical giant. Here's a sample:

The company's pipeline is teeming with seeds aimed to protect farmers from losses due to pests, heat, drought and nutrient deficiencies. Nitrogen-efficient corn is expected in the next three to 10 years, as are high-yielding soybeans.

These Wonder Seeds of the Future are vital, the company insists, because (as the Climatewire reporter puts it) "The world will need to double its crop output to satisfy 9 billion people on just a sliver more of available land." According to its marketing pitch, Monsanto will solve that problem by conjuring up seeds that allow farmers to "produce more, conserve more, [and] improve lives."

While contemplating the Cilmatewire piece—which was, to be fair, balanced by withering analysis from Union of Concerned of Scientists' Doug Gurian-Sherman—I got to to thinking about a Guardian article I read a while back on how people are scraping by in the Gaza Strip under the twin hardships of occupation and blockade.

Under siege from Israel, Palestinian farmers in Gaza have limited land, little access to water, and face ruinously high fertilizer costs (when they can get fertilizer at all): In other words, the very conditions Monsanto claims its seeds will save the world from. But these farmers don't have access to the wonder seeds, partly because they don't exist yet (Gurian-Sherman is skeptical that they ever will); and partly because Palestinian farmers don't have the resources to buy pricey patented seeds anyway. (How farmers resource-strapped farmers are ever supposed to afford Monsanto's premium-priced super-seeds—if and when they do come into existence—has never really been explained.)

So what are Palestinian farmers doing? According to The Guardian, they're turning to a technology that has been proven to conserve water, recycle crop nutrients, and generate robust yields: diversified organic agriculture. The newspaper quotes an official from the UN's Gaza emergency food program:

In so many other places, this is terribly trendy and green. But in Gaza the resource scarcity is so bad this is actually becoming a necessity.

Where organic ag has taken root, The Guardian reports, food security has been bolstered and dependence on food aid for survival has decreased. The UN is pushing organic ag as a response to resource scarcity, and last year Hamas government rolled out a a 10-year strategy "aimed at skirting the blockade and developing sustainable agriculture," The Guardian reports.

Already, concrete steps are being made. According to The Guardian, Palestinian farmers are barred by the blockade from buying synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, which could be used to make explosives. All they have access from the import market is "fertilisers made from Israeli waste water run-off," which is expensive—$200 per metric ton—and of "uncertain safety." But a local initiative called Palestinian Environmental Friends (PEF) is generating a homegrown fertilizer from manure and crop waste collected from local farms. It costs just $100 per metric ton to make, and profits from it stay within Gaza.

Farms are also solving the fertilizer problem by setting up closed-loop aquaculture/crop systems that recycle nutrients and generate bounties of food:

In a rural area of the central Gaza Strip, Eyad Najjar plucks organic carrots from the sandy soil of his tiny farm. Najjar no longer uses fertilisers or pesticides for his plot, which also grows tomatoes, parsley, rocket, lettuce and spinach. Instead, a fishpond on the field's far edge delivers water rich in nutrients via drip irrigation.

Smiling, Najjar squeezes an almost-ripe fruit hanging from the branch of a lemon tree. "The onions and lemons are bigger and better," he says.

Now, Gaza's push for organic ag as a response to severe resource challenges hardly settles the question of how to "feed the world" going forward. The effort is too new, and the results remain anecdotal. But it's entirely consistent with the emerging consensus among development experts that low-input, locally adapted appropriate technologies, not expensive high-tech solutions from the likes of Monsanto, are key to feeding ourselves amid population grown and resource depletion. And it surely contradicts the old agribusiness claim, recently parroted by The Economist, that organic food is a "luxury of the rich."
 

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Here's how not to avoid salmonella superbugs.

I've been writing a bit recently about the problem of antibiotic-resistant pathogens on factory animal farms, which are emerging as a lethal—and expensive—public-health threat.

The two major regulatory agencies that have a say in the matter—the USDA and the FDA—have acknowledged the severity of the problem, as has our main public-health-monitoring outfit, the CDC.  Even the Government Accounting Office (GAO) has gotten into the act! None of this has led the federal government to actually crack down on the practice of feeding animals daily subtherapeutic doses of antibiotics.

Judging from the inaction, you'd think there's simply no alternative to antibiotics as an integral part of livestock feed—and resistant bacteria as an inevitable product of meat factories, along with all the pork chops and chicken wings.

Turns out though, there is an alternative: Just ban antibiotics on farms, and force producers to adopt organic standards. In a study just published in Environmental Health Perspectives, a team of researchers looked at 20 large-scale chicken facilities—10 conventional, and 10 that had recently converted to organic standards, which include a ban on antibiotics. The result: The organic facilities had sharply lower presence of drug-resistant bacteria.

Here's how lead researcher Amy Sapkota of the University of Maryland School of Public Health described the findings in an interview with the Washington Post:

We initially hypothesized that we would see some differences in on-farm levels of antibiotic-resistant enterococci when poultry farms transitioned to organic practices...But we were surprised to see that the differences were so significant across several different classes of antibiotics even in the very first flock that was produced after the transition to organic standards. [Emphasis mine.] 

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