By Gary Naban  – Posted in Grist

It is puzzling that Monsanto’s Vice President Robert Fraley recently became one of the recipients of the World Food Prize for providing GMO seeds to combat the effects of climate change, just weeks after Monsanto itself reported a $264 million loss this quarter because of a decline in interest and plummeting sales in its genetically engineered “climate-ready” seeds. And since Fraley received his award, the production of GMO corn has been formally banned by Mexico, undoubtedly seen as one of Monsanto’s major potential markets.

The World Food Prize, offered each year on World Food Day, is supposed to underscore the humanitarian importance of viable strategies to provide a sustainable and nutritious food supply to the billions of hungry and food-insecure people on this planet. Ironically, what is engaging widespread public involvement in achieving this goal is not Monsanto’s GMOs, but the great diversity of farmer-selected and heirloom seeds in many communities. Why? Because such food biodiversity may be the most prudent “bet-hedging” strategy for dealing with food insecurity and climate uncertainty.

Consumer demand in the U.S. has never been stronger for a diversity of seeds and other planting stock of heirloom and farmer-selected food crops, as well as for wild native seeds. One of the many indicators that the public wants alternatives to Monsanto is that more than 150 community-controlled seed libraries have emerged across the country during the last five years. And over the last quarter century, those who voluntarily exchange seeds of heirloom and farmer-selected varieties of vegetables, fruits, and grains have increased the diversity of their offerings fourfold, from roughly 5,000 to more than 20,000 plant selections. During the same timeframe, the number of non-GMO, non-hybrid food crop varieties offered by seed catalogs, nurseries, and websites has increased from roughly 5,000 to more than 8,500 distinctive varieties.

And yet, these grassroots efforts and consumer demand are largely being overlooked by both governments and most philanthropic foundations engaged in fighting hunger and enhancing human health. Even prior to the partial U.S. government shutdown, federal support for maintaining seed diversity for food justice, landscape resilience, and ecosystems services had begun to falter. Budget cuts have crippled USDA crop resource conservation efforts and the budgets for nine of the 29 remaining NRCS Plant Materials Centers are reportedly on the chopping block. As accomplished curators of vegetable, fruit, and grain diversity retire from federal and state institutions, they are seldom replaced, leaving several historically important collections at risk.

It is as if Washington politicians and bureaucrats were failing to recognize a simple fact that more than 68 million American households of gardeners, farmers, and ranchers clearly understand: Seed diversity is as much a “currency” necessary for ensuring food security and economic well-being as money. These households spend on average hundreds of dollars each year purchasing a variety of seeds, seedlings, and fruit trees because of their concern for the nutritive value, flavor, and the quality of food they put in their bodies. While it should be obvious that, without seeds, much of the food we eat can’t be grown, few pundits recognize a corollary to that “food rule.” Without a diversity of seeds to keep variety in our grocery stores and farmers markets, those who are most nutritionally at risk would have difficulty gaining access to a full range of vitamins, minerals, and probiotics required to keep them healthy.

However, despite what portions of the government and agribusiness don’t seem to fathom, consumer involvement in recovering access to diverse seed stocks since the economic downturn began in 2008 has been nothing short of miraculous. Some call it the “Victory Garden effect,” in that unemployed and underemployed people are spending more time tending and harvesting their own food from home orchards and community gardens than they have in previous decades. Public involvement in growing food has increased for the sixth straight year, according to the National Gardening Association. But even financially strapped gardeners are not shirking from using their limited resources to purchase quality seeds of heirloom and farmer-selected vegetables. The Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa, reports that its sales of seed packets have nearly doubled over the last five years. Another nonprofit focused on heirloom and wild-native seeds — Native Seeds/SEARCH of Tucson — saw its seed sales triple since the end of 2009. And there are between 300 and 400 other small seed companies supported by consumers in the U.S. that offer seeds by mail-order, by placing seed packets racks in nurseries and groceries, or via on the internet.

Nevertheless, the U.S. may now be approaching the largest shortfall in the availability of native and weed-free seed at any time in our history due to recent climate-related catastrophes scouring our croplands, pastures, and forests. While a few large corporations focus on a few varieties of corn, soy, and other commodity crops, there is unprecedented demand for diverse seeds to be used for a great variety of human and environmental uses in this country, and elsewhere.

It has become painfully clear that America needs to recruit and support a whole new cohort of dedicated women and men to manage seed growouts, nurseries, and on-farm breeding and crop selection efforts for the public good. To further evaluate crop varieties for their capacity to adapt to climate change, we will certainly need many more participants in such endeavors than a charismatic Johnny Appleseed or two. They must stand ready to harvest, grow, monitor, select, and store a diversity of seeds for a diversity of needs in advance of forthcoming catastrophes. And they must value acquiring and maintaining a diversity of seedstocks, much as a wise investor relies on a diversified investment portfolio. Diverse and adapted seeds are literally the foundation of our food security infrastructure. Without them, the rest is a house of cards.

Fortunately, courageous efforts have been initiated to rebuild America’s seed “caring capacity.” The collaborative effort known as Seeds of Success, which is part of an interagency Native Plant Materials Development Program, has trained dozens of young people at the Chicago Botanic Garden to collect seeds of hundreds of native species over the last few years. In the nonprofit sector, Bill McDorman of Native Seeds/SEARCH has organized six week-long Seed Schools around the country that have trained more than 330 gardeners and farmers to be seed entrepreneurs.

Elsewhere, Daniel Bowman Simon, now a graduate student at Columbia University, has helped hundreds of low-income households (eligible for USDA Food and Nutrition Program assistance) to use their “SNAP” benefits to purchase diverse seeds and seedlings of food crops at farmers markets in order to produce not just one meal, but many. In light of recent unjustified critiques of the SNAP program during farm bill debates, it is surprising that fiscal conservatives did not acknowledge how providing financially strapped families with seedstock may be one of the most cost-effective means of reducing food insecurity over the long haul. It is tangibly giving the poor the “means to fish” rather than a single meal of a fish. With more than 8,150 farmers markets in the U.S. today, compared to 1,775 in 1994, the potential for this seed dissemination strategy to help meet the nutritional needs of the poorest of the poor has never been greater.

Regardless of whether U.S. states ever require GMO labeling or ban GMOs entirely as Mexico has done, there is abundant evidence that we need to shift public investment — from subsiding market control by just a few “silver bullet” plant varieties, whether genetically engineered or not, to supporting the rediversification of America’s farms and tables with thousands of seedstocks and fruit selections. Instead of spending a projected forty to one hundred million dollars on developing, patenting, and licensing a single GMO, perhaps we should be annually redirecting that much public support toward further replenishing the diversity found in our seed catalogs, nurseries, fields, orchards, pastures, and plates. With growing evidence of the devastating effects of climate uncertainty, now is not the time to put all of our seeds into one basket.

By RICHIE DAVIS – Gazette Contributing Writer – Thursday, October 17, 2013

Honeybees are on the job from the moment they emerge from their nest. But their work, which helps create one-third of the earth’s food, is in jeopardy.

That crisis in the hives is what drew more than 150 people to a special Communities Involved in Sustaining Agriculture showing of “More Than Honey,” a 2012 Swiss documentary last week at Amherst Cinema. Yet the mystery of Colony Collapse Disorder, a set of conditions that’s killed off more than 10 million beehives since 2006 in this country and, the film suggests, has decimated 50 to 90 percent of all bees, depending on what part of the planet you’re on, remains as mysterious as its name.

“If bees ever die out, mankind will die out four years later,” is a message in the film attributed to a quote by Einstein. A panel consisting of Dan Conlon of Warm Colors Apiary and Ben Clark of Clarkdale Fruit Farm, both in Deerfield, and Phil Korman, executive director of CISA, agreed the threat posed to the food supply is serious.

“These bees live a hard life,” said Conlon, reflecting on the rigors of dealing with industrialized agriculture, pesticides and other factors shown in the film.

But this area suffers less from some of the causes of the die-off of honeybees, including pesticide use by farmers and their working with migrating pollination contractors, said Conlon, who rents his hives to just half a dozen area fruit and other growers. “The kind of farmers I deal with would never spray my bees.”

Unlike professional pollinators delivering millions of bees to North Dakota, many dead on arrival after a 1,700-mile drive from California as part of an annual migration, Conlon’s hives are moved 20 to 30 miles and fed honey rather than a corn-syrup mixture that he says is a mainstay of commercial apiaries.

“It’s a stark contrast for us,” said Clark about the dependence of migrant colonies for California’s 810,000-acre almond-growing industry. Without bringing in any man-made hives, “We use all native pollinators. We have diverse crops, with peaches, apricots and cherries early on, so there’s a long feeding time for bees and other pollinators. I was really alarmed at the commercialization of that whole industry,” as shown in the documentary, including daytime spraying of almond orchards where bees collect fungicide along with pollen.

Clarkdale uses an “integrated pest management approach” that minimizes pesticide use and during pollination season sprays only at night, when pollinators are in their hives. “That’s your livelihood. If you wipe out the bees, you’re not going to have anything there. As farmers, that’s something we just don’t do.”

But Conlon, who lost about 30 percent of his hives over the past winter, because of everything from bears to a seemingly worsening breed of small hive beetles, said, “It’s a much bigger thing than just pesticides. … It’s the whole environment that’s coming into play with the bees.”

Honey producers, who feed their brood honey rather than corn syrup, have seemed to fare better because honey helps bees activate their immune system to filter out toxins, said Conlon.

The top problem for beekeepers around the world, especially since the late 1980s and early 1990s, is the Varroa destructor mite, followed by the loss of genetic diversity. Another key problem is loss of habitat for honeybees, with large areas of this country no longer growing food to support pollinators.

“One of the reasons Ben can still rely on native pollinators is that western Mass. is still pretty much intact, with a lot of native species doing pretty well around here,” Conlon said.

That is in sharp contrast to parts of China where pollution has so decimated the bee population that humans have to physically go from flower to flower in orchards brushing petals with pollen.

A real concern for beekeepers, said Conlon, is lawn-care applications of “neonicotinoid” insecticides which indiscriminately destroy the nervous system of any insect.

Although restrictions may finally be tightening, Conlon said, “You can buy them in any store by the gallon, and any homeowner can spray their entire yard with the stuff without any kind of licensing or training.”

Until parasitic mites became a problem a some 15 years ago, common practice among beekeepers was to let their queen bees mate with wild drones. But those fertile populations were also killed by the mites, “so for the first time, beekeepers have become critical to keeping bees going. They probably would have died off by now. Historically, we’ve moved the bee from being a wild creature to a domesticated creature.”

What that means, though, is that the bees that remain “aren’t as resilient, they aren’t as tough,” said Conlon, who this year began working exclusively with Russian bees under a U.S. Department of Agriculture program. Those hardy bees have many of the same immunities to pests and disease resistance as harder-to-manage Africanized bees.

Sponsored by the Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture

Video trailer on the Web: http://binged.it/1gkT2QM

Original post.

Mark Bitman – October 14, 2013 – New York Times

It’s been 50 years since President John F. Kennedy spoke of ending world hunger, yet on the eve of World Food Day, Oct. 16, the situation remains dire. The question “How will we feed the world?” implies that we have no choice but to intensify industrial agriculture, with more high-tech seeds, chemicals and collateral damage. Yet there are other, better options.

Something approaching a billion people are hungry, a number that’s been fairly stable for more than 50 years, although it has declined as a percentage of the total population.

“Feeding the world” might as well be a marketing slogan for Big Ag, a euphemism for “Let’s ramp up sales,” as if producing more cars would guarantee that everyone had one. But if it worked that way, surely the rate of hunger in the United States would not be the highest percentage of any developed nation, a rate closer to that of Indonesia than of Britain.

The world has long produced enough calories, around 2,700 per day per human, more than enough to meet the United Nations projection of a population of nine billion in 2050, up from the current seven billion. There are hungry people not because food is lacking, but because not all of those calories go to feed humans (a third go to feed animals, nearly 5 percent are used to produce biofuels, and as much as a third is wasted, all along the food chain).

The current system is neither environmentally nor economically sustainable, dependent as it is on fossil fuels and routinely resulting in environmental damage. It’s geared to letting the half of the planet with money eat well while everyone else scrambles to eat as cheaply as possible.

While a billion people are hungry, about three billion people are not eating well, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, if you count obese and overweight people alongside those with micronutrient deficiencies. Paradoxically, as increasing numbers of people can afford to eat well, food for the poor will become scarcer, because demand for animal products will surge, and they require more resources like grain to produce. A global population growth of less than 30 percent is projected to double the demand for animal products. But there is not the land, water or fertilizer — let alone the health care funding — for the world to consume Western levels of meat.

If we want to ensure that poor people eat and also do a better job than “modern” farming does at preserving the earth’s health and productivity, we must stop assuming that the industrial model of food production and its accompanying disease-producing diet is both inevitable and desirable. I have dozens of friends and colleagues who say things like, “I hate industrial ag, but how will we feed the poor?”

Let’s at last recognize that there are two food systems, one industrial and one of small landholders, or peasants if you prefer. The peasant system is not only here for good, it’s arguably more efficient than the industrial model. According to the ETC Group, a research and advocacy organization based in Ottawa, the industrial food chain uses 70 percent of agricultural resources to provide 30 percent of the world’s food, whereas what ETC calls “the peasant food web” produces the remaining 70 percent using only 30 percent of the resources.

Yes, it is true that high-yielding varieties of any major commercial monoculture crop will produce more per acre than peasant-bred varieties of the same crop. But by diversifying crops, mixing plants and animals, planting trees — which provide not only fruit but shelter for birds, shade, fertility through nutrient recycling, and more — small landholders can produce more food (and more kinds of food) with fewer resources and lower transportation costs (which means a lower carbon footprint), while providing greater food security, maintaining greater biodiversity, and even better withstanding the effects of climate change. (Not only that: their techniques have been demonstrated to be effective on larger-scale farms, even in the Corn Belt of the United States.) And all of this without the level of subsidies and other support that industrial agriculture has received in the last half-century, and despite the efforts of Big Ag to become even more dominant.

In fact if you define “productivity” not as pounds per acre but as the number of people fed per that same area, you find that the United States ranks behind both China and India (and indeed the world average), and roughly the same as Bangladesh, because so much of what we grow goes to animals and biofuels. (Regardless of how food is produced, delivered and consumed, waste remains at about one third.) Thus, as the ETC’s research director, Kathy Jo Wetter, says, “It would be lunacy to hold that the current production paradigm based on multinational agribusiness is the only credible starting point for achieving food security.” This is especially true given all of its downsides.

As Raj Patel, a fellow at the Institute for Food and Development Policy, puts it, “The playing field has been tilted against peasants for centuries, and they’ve still managed to feed more people than industrial agriculture. With the right kinds of agroecological training and the freedom to shape the food system on fair terms, it’s a safe bet that they’ll be able to feed themselves, and others as well.”

Yet obviously not all poor people feed themselves well, because they lack the essentials: land, water, energy and nutrients. Often that’s a result of cruel dictatorship (North Korea) or war, displacement and strife (the Horn of Africa, Haiti and many other places), or drought or other calamities. But it can also be an intentional and direct result of land and food speculation and land and water grabs, which make it impossible for peasants to remain in their home villages. (Governments of many developing countries may also act as agents for industrial agriculture, seeing peasant farming as “inefficient.”)

The result is forced flight to cities, where peasants become poorly paid laborers, enter the cash market for (increasingly mass produced) food, and eat worse. (They’re no longer “peasants,” at this point, but more akin to the working poor of the United States, who also often cannot afford to eat well, though not to the point of starvation.) It’s a formula for making not only hunger but obesity: remove the ability to produce food, then remove the ability to pay for food, or replace it with only one choice: bad food.

It’s not news that the poor need money and justice. If there’s a bright side here, it’s that the changes required to “fix” the problems created by “industrial agriculture” are perhaps more tractable than those created by inequality.

We might begin by ditching the narrow focus on yields (as Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, says, “It’s not ‘grow baby grow’ ”), which seem to be ebbing naturally as land quality deteriorates and chemicals become less effective (despite high-tech “advances” like genetically engineered crops). Better, it would seem, would be to ask not how much food is produced, but how it’s produced, for whom, at what price, cost and benefit.

We also need to see more investment in researching the benefits of traditional farming. Even though simple techniques like those mentioned above give measurably excellent results, because they’re traditional — even ancient — “technologies,” and because their benefits in profiting multinationals or international trade are limited, they’ve never received investment on the same scale as corporate agriculture. (It’s impossible not to point out here that a similar situation exists between highly subsidized and damaging fossil fuels and oft-ignored yet environmentally friendly renewables.)

Instead, the money and energy (of all kinds) focused on boosting supply cannot be overstated. If equal resources were put into reducing waste — which aside from its obvious merits would vastly prevent the corresponding greenhouse gas emissions — questioning the value of animal products, reducing overconsumption (where “waste” becomes “waist”), actively promoting saner, less energy-consuming alternatives, and granting that peasants have the right to farm their traditional landholdings, we could not only ensure that people could feed themselves but also reduce agriculture’s contribution to greenhouse gases, chronic disease and energy depletion.

This isn’t about “organic” versus “modern.” It’s about supporting the system in which small producers make decisions based on their knowledge and experience of their farms in the landscape, as opposed to buying standardized technological fixes in a bag. Some people call this knowledge-based rather than energy-based agriculture, but obviously it takes plenty of energy; as it happens, much of that energy is human, which can be a good thing. Frances Moore Lappé, author of “Diet for a Small Planet,” calls it “relational,” and says, “Agroecology is not just healthy sustainable food production but the seed of a different way of relating to one another, and to the earth.”

That may sound new age-y, but so be it; all kinds of questions and all kinds of theories are needed if we’re going to produce food sustainably. Supporting, or at least not obstructing, peasant farming is one key factor, but the other is reining in Western-style monoculture and the standard American diet it creates.

Some experts are at least marginally optimistic about the second half of this: “The trick is to find the sweet spot,” says Mr. Foley of the University of Minnesota, “between better nutrition and eating too much meat and junk. The optimistic view is to hope that the conversation about what’s wrong with our diet may deflect some of this. Eating more meat is voluntary, and how the Chinese middle class winds up eating will determine a great deal.” Of course, at the moment, that middle class shows every indication that it’s moving in the wrong direction; China is the world’s leading consumer of meat, a trend that isn’t slowing.

But if the standard American diet represents the low point of eating, a question is whether the developing world, as it hurtles toward that nutritional nadir — the polar opposite of hunger, but almost as deadly — can see its destructive nature and pull out of the dive before its diet crashes. Because “solving” hunger by driving people into cities to take low-paying jobs so they can buy burgers and fries is hardly a desirable outcome.

Mark Bittman is a food journalist, author and contributing opinion writer for The New York Times.

Massachusetts Food Policy Alliance (MFPA), formed in 2007, is a statewide networking and information sharing entity that tracks policy, fosters advocacy, and plays a leadership role in Massachusetts’ food system planning efforts. Massachusetts Food Policy Alliance is also engaged with efforts in neighboring states to develop a New England network to advance interstate food systems collaboration and planning.

Massachusetts News
MA Farm Bureau Federation Raises Concerns About APR Program
The State’s Agricultural Preservation Restriction (APR) Program was launched in 1979 as the nation’s first statewide program that incentivizes farmers to keep land in agricultural use by purchasing deed restrictions that prevent farmland from being divided or otherwise developed. But the MA Department of Agricultural Resource (MDAR) is over-reaching the original intent of the program of preventing commercial development and protecting soil resources, says the Massachusetts Farm Bureau Federation (MFBF), and “denying [APR-protected] farms the ability to do both non-agricultural and agricultural activities on their farms, which are commonplace and allowable on non-APR farms.”

Proposed Nutrient Management Rules Coming Soon
Last year, the Massachusetts Legislature directed the Massachusetts Department of Agriculture (MDAR) to “promulgate regulations that specify when plant nutrients may be applied and locations in which plant nutrients shall not be applied.” The draft regulations have not been released for a public comment period yet but should be coming soon, since they scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2014.

Waste Not: Commercial Food Waste Ban Coming to MA
Beginning on July 1, 2014, any Massachusetts entity that disposes of at least one ton of organic waste per week will be required to donate or re-purpose the useable food. Any remaining food waste would be required to be shipped to an anaerobic digestion facility that converts food waste into renewable energy, a composting operation or an animal-feed operation. Residential food waste is not included in the ban.

Greenfield Publishes Food Plan
Greenfield Community College and Central Connecticut River Valley Institute collaborated to publish “The Greenfield Food Study,” which sets goals and examines opportunities for the town’s food system around issues of cultivation, processing, distribution, waste and more. “Greenfield has food processing and storage resources unique to the Pioneer Valley … (and) can capitalize on these resources and become a food processing, storage and distribution hub for the Franklin County and the Pioneer Valley.”

Food and Jobs in the Pioneer Valley
The Massachusetts Workforce Alliance published “Local Food, Local Jobs: Job Growth and Creation in the Pioneer Valley Food System,” describing current work in the Pioneer Valley food system, with an emphasis on jobs that are within reach of lower-skill workers, identifying promising segments of the food system that are currently generating these jobs, and looking at ways job creation and growth in this system can be fostered. “This research showed that the Pioneer Valley food system is already creating jobs. Job growth is evident on farms; business growth and development is evident in food manufacturing; innovation and business development is happening in food distribution; and, food waste management is poised to change in ways that hold possibility for business expansion and job creation.”

Public Investment in Land Conversation Yields Measurable Benefits
“The Trust for Public Land conducted an economic analysis of the return on the Commonwealth’s investment in land conservation through a variety of state funding programs and found that every $1 invested in land conservation returned $4 in natural goods and services such as water quality protection, air pollution removal, and stormwater management to the Massachusetts economy.”

Eat for a Cure
Community Servings’ recent report Food as Medicine reveals that medically tailored, home-delivered meals can  improve health outcomes for people with critical and chronic disease. Community Servings and Harvard Law School’s Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation and Food Law and Policy Clinic will co-host a symposium on the role of food in health care initiatives on October 30 from 6-8 p.m. at Harvard Law School, Room 1015 Wasserstein Hall, Caspersen Student Center (WCC 1015). Contact Jean Terranova for more information.

Honoring a Champion of Direct to Consumer Farm Sales
Former MA Ag Commissioner Gus Schumacher is being honored by the James Beard Society for “his lifelong efforts to improve access to fresh local food in underserved communities.”

Federal Updates

Food Safety
After numerous extensions, lots of wading through thousands of pages of proposed regulations, and many hearings and listening sessions and workshops, the comment period for the proposed regulations for the federal Food Safety Modernization Act is slated to come to an end on November 15. The proposed regulations include many items of concern for Massachusetts farmers – regulations which, if implemented, could have significant negative economic and operational impacts on small farms.

The Massachusetts Food Policy Alliance urges all Massachusetts organizations to learn about these proposed rules, spread the word to your membership, and consider submitting comments that support regulations promoting a safe food system that does not saddle small farms with unfairly burdensome oversight and regulations. You do not have to be an agricultural organization to comment on these rules. If enacted, these regulations will have an impact not just on our state’s farms, but on our economy as a whole, our environment, and our food security.

For details, see the following resources:

• The FDA’s page has the full text of the proposed rules, along with a link to a form where you can submit comments.
• New England Farmers Union has an excellent summary that will help you understand what the rules will mean for small farms.
• The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition also has a regularly updated page with information about the potential impact of the rules, and a great piece entitled “Top 10 Reasons for Farmers, Consumers, and Organizations to Weigh in on Proposed Food Safety Rules.”
• The Massachusetts Farm Bureau Federation lists some proposed comments that they feel are particularly relevant to Massachusetts farms.
• American Farmland Trust hosted a webinar entitled “Why and What You Need to Know About the Food Safety Modernization Act.”
• Southeastern Massachusetts Agricultural Partnership (SEMAP) also offers a recording of a listening session they held.

Comments Needed on SNAP Retail Store Eligibility Rules
The Food and Nutrition Service at USDA is accepting comments regarding the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) Enhancing Retail Food Store Eligibility policy. The RFI requests information to enhance retailer definitions and requirements that will improve access to healthy food choices for SNAP clients, as well as program integrity. The comment period ends Monday, October 21, 2013.

Farm Bill/SNAP
Somewhat lost in the news of the federal government shutdown and the debt limit crisis, the Federal Farm Bill expired in early October. In early October the House appointed members for a conference committee to resolve differences between the two bodies’ bills. Key sticking points include The U.S. House of Representatives’ proposal to cut $40 billion over ten years from the nation’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and to separate the nutrition and agriculture portions of the bill, potential cuts to subsidies for commodity crops, proposed cuts to funding for conservation programs, and possible changes to the federal dairy support program. Additional details are available from American Farm Bureau, Food Research and Action Center, National Farmers Union, The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, and farmpolicy.com.

What the Federal Government Shutdown Means for Agriculture
The partial shutdown of the federal government has had a real impact on agriculture programs, such as NRCS, and nutrition programs, such as WIC. New England Farmers Union offers a run-down on what the shutdown means for farmers and consumers, and this article details what it means for the USDA.

McGovern Champions Federal Government’s Role in Addressing Hunger
Between February and September, Massachusetts Congressman Jim McGovern (D-2nd) made 23 ‘End Hunger Now’ speeches on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Alliance News

Invitation to participate in a Leadership Group for MFPA
This group will serve for one year in an informal, volunteer advisory capacity to assist the MFPA managing consultants in identifying and implementing MFPA goals and objectives. These individuals will also help develop and establish a membership model to provide sustainable financial support for MFPA. Leadership Group members will participate through small group and one-on-one conversations and may be individuals as well as representatives of organizations and groups working at municipal, sub-regional, state and regional levels. This Leadership Group may choose to organize itself with a chair or elected executive committee and will assess its efficacy one year after formation. Contact us at manager@mafoodpolicyalliance.org if you are interested in participating.

MFPA Listserv
The MFPA listserv is open to anyone concerned about food systems in Massachusetts. It is an open forum for individuals and organizations to post events, queries and resources, and to connect with each other as we all pursue our work. To subscribe, send an email to sympa@elist.tufts.edu with the subject line “subscribe mfpa Firstname Lastame”  Then you can send items to MFPA@elist.tufts.edu to share them with the list.

MFPA Newsletter
As we develop this monthly newsletter we want to hear from you. Please email manager@mafoodpolicyalliance.org to suggest news, resources or other items for inclusion. If your organization has an e-newsletter or press list, please consider adding us to the list. And please forward this newsletter widely and encourage your colleagues to subscribe!

We Can Help!
The Alliance is here for you. We can help you engage your members in policy advocacy by writing articles for your newsletter, working with your staff on developing policy outreach plans, speaking at your meetings, and more. Contact us at manager@mafoodpolicyalliance.org.

The Massachusetts Food Policy Alliance (MFPA) formed in 2007 as a committed group of leaders working on food, public health, nutrition, agriculture, hunger, land preservation, and related policy issues in the Commonwealth. The MFPA worked closely with MA Representatives Stephen Kulik and Linda Forry to pass legislation establishing the Massachusetts Food Policy Council.

Christa Drew and Winton Pitcoff, co-lead consultants
manager@mafoodpolicyalliance.org

Original Post

United Nations urges governments to do more to support small farmers to curb hunger, poverty and climate change

Claire Provost in Geneva
theguardian.com, Wednesday 18 September 2013 17.33 BST

Governments in rich and poor countries alike should renounce their focus on agribusiness and give more support to small-scale, local food production to achieve global food security and tackle climate change, according to a report from Unctad, the UN trade and development body.

The 2013 Trade and Environment Review, calls on governments to “wake up before it is too late” and shift rapidly towards farming models that promote a greater variety of crops, reduced fertiliser use and stronger links between small farms and local consumers.

Persistent rural poverty, global hunger, population growth and environmental concerns must be treated as a collective crisis, argues the report, which criticises the international response to the 2008 food-price crisis for focusing on technical “quick-fixes”.

“Many people talk about energy, transport, etc, but agriculture only comes on to the agenda when there is an acute food-price crisis, or when there are conflicts at the national level over food,” said Ulrich Hoffman, senior trade policy adviser at Unctad. “At the international scene most of the discussion is on technicalities, but the matter we have before us is far more complex.”

The report warns that urgent and far-reaching action is needed before climate change begins to cause big disruptions to agriculture, particularly in vulnerable regions of poorer countries.

It says that while the 2008 crisis helped to reverse the long-term neglect of agriculture and its role in development, the focus has remained on increasing yields through industrial farming.

The report, which includes contributions from 60 international experts – covering topics from food prices and fertiliser use to international land deals and trade rules – demands a paradigm shift to focus efforts on making farming more sustainable and food more affordable through promoting local food production and consumption.

Several of the contributors call for a focus on food sovereignty, a concept introduced more than a decade ago by the international peasants’ movement La Via Campesina. Unlike food security, often defined as ensuring people have enough to eat, food sovereignty focuses on questions of power and control. It puts the needs and interests of those who produce and consume food at the heart of agricultural systems and policies.

The report argues that industrial, monoculture agriculture has failed to provide enough affordable food where it is needed, while the damage caused to the environment is “mounting and unsustainable”. It echoes the work of Nobel prize-winner Amartya Sen in arguing that the real causes of hunger – poverty and the lack of access to good, affordable food – are being overlooked.

Agricultural trade rules must be reformed, it says, to give countries more opportunity to promote policies that encourage local and regional food systems.

The report follows last week’s publication of Unctad’s annual trade and development report, which urged governments to focus more on domestic demand and inter-regional trade and rely less on exports to rich countries to fuel growth.
“Export-led growth is not the only viable development path,” said Nikolai Fuchs, president of the Geneva-based Nexus Foundation and a contributor to the trade and environment report. “We don’t say ‘no trade’, but … trade regimes should secure level playing fields for regional and local products, and allow for local and regional preference schemes, for example in public procurement.

“Highly specialised agriculture does not create enough jobs in rural areas where most of the poor are.” He argued that industrial, export-oriented farming typically offers a few highly skilled and specialised jobs, or low-skill, seasonal and precarious employment.

The report says governments should acknowledge and reward farmers for the work they do to preserve water sources, soil, landscapes and biodiversity.

Hoffman acknowledged it would be difficult to implement the agenda the report was suggesting. “Subsidies are a key hurdle … at a national level but also [in terms of] dealing with subsidies in the context of the WTO [World Trade Organisation],” he said. There must be more scrutiny of agricultural subsidies, he argued, including those that appear to promote environmentally sustainable farming, as there were “ample opportunities for abuse or misuse”.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/07/06/5547890/viewpoints-why-overlook-agriculture.html?goback=%2Egde_2612649_member_257641615#storylink=cpy

13 Books on the Food System That Could Save the Environment
By Food Tank: The Food Think Tank

LINK: http://foodtank.org/news/2013/06/thirteen-books-on-the-food-system-that-could-save-the-environment

Changing the ways consumers purchase, eat, and discard food is important for creating a more sustainable food system. Check out these books that identify and explain the problems in the food system—and how to make changes.

1. Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan takes back the “single most important thing [to] do as a family to improve our health and well-being”: cooking. A poetic exploration of the beauty and simplicity of preparing food, this book will help readers get off the couch and into the kitchen.

2. VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00 to Lose Weight and Restore Your Health . . . for Good by Mark Bittman

Mark Bittman delves into the benefits – to the environment, to personal health, and to the economy – of reducing meat consumption. Without forbidding or condemning meat, this is a great book for the environmentally-conscious omnivore.

3. Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food by Frederick Kaufman

Bet the Farm starts with an unnerving statistic: in 2008, “farmers produced more grain than ever, enough to feed twice as many people as were on Earth. In the same year… a billion people went hungry.” Kaufman delves into the problems with our food system and uncovers the financial underpinnings that motivate this dysfunctional system.

4. Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America by Wenonah Hauter

A farmer from Virginia and an advocate for healthy eating, Hauter explores the “corporate, scientific, industrial, and political” aspects of our food system in an effort to understand the problems with mainstream production and distribution systems, and how to fix them in order to incorporate healthy, mindful eating.

5. Behind the Kitchen Door by Saru Jayaraman

Exploring the food system from a different angle, Jayaraman points to the deeply troubling labor practices that exist in the food industry. With personal stories and interviews, Jayaraman unveils the low wages and grueling positions that farm and kitchen workers endure.

6. The Last Hunger Season: A Year In An African Farm Community On The Brink Of Change by Roger Thurow

Thurow spent a year with four women smallholder farmers in western Kenya to document their struggles in supporting and feeding themselves and their families. He evaluates the extent to which the work of initiatives like the One Acre Fund can help these farmers pull themselves up and defeat hunger and poverty.

7. American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half Its Food (And What We Can Do About It) by Jonathan Bloom

Focusing on food waste in the United States, this book takes the issue beyond big farms and corporations to a very personal level. A great introduction to the ways that our own actions are impacting the food system, and what we can do about it.

8. The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way We Feed Cities by Peter Ladner

According to the World Health Organization, more than half of the world’s population now lives in cities. The Urban Food Revolution looks at the ways in which urban food systems need to change in order to become healthier and more sustainable

9. Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It by Anna Lappe

Anna Lappe’s Diet for a Hot Planet outlines the ways in which the current food system contributes to climate change, the barriers to a true reform, and what consumers can do to provoke change.

10. WASTE: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal by Tristram Stuart

Uncovering waste in production and processing, the role of supermarkets in passing on wastefulness to suppliers and consumers, and consumers’ wasteful practices at home, Stuart’s book explores the many pathways of waste that exist in our food system. Even better, his book provides examples of countries where the food system is working, and offers tips on reducing and reusing our food.

11. The Backyard Homestead: Produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre! edited by Carleen Madigan

The Backyard Homestead tells would-be farmers how to farm on just a quarter of an acre.

12. The Perfect Protein: The Fish Lover’s Guide to Saving the Oceans and Feeding the World by Andy Sharpless

Sharpless argues that seafood will be the best source of sustainable protein for a rapidly growing global population. And he highlights the importance of protecting the health and biodiversity of wild fish populations.

13. The Essential Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter and Willow Rosenthal

For those without a backyard, the Essential Urban Farmer is the essential tutorial to begin growing food in cities.

By JO ROBINSON  in the NY Times, May 26, 2013

WE like the idea that food can be the answer to our ills, that if we eat nutritious foods we won’t need medicine or supplements. We have valued this notion for a long, long time. The Greek physician Hippocrates proclaimed nearly 2,500 years ago: “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” Today, medical experts concur. If we heap our plates with fresh fruits and vegetables, they tell us, we will come closer to optimum health.

This health directive needs to be revised. If we want to get maximum health benefits from fruits and vegetables, we must choose the right varieties. Studies published within the past 15 years show that much of our produce is relatively low in phytonutrients, which are the compounds with the potential to reduce the risk of four of our modern scourges: cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and dementia. The loss of these beneficial nutrients did not begin 50 or 100 years ago, as many assume. Unwittingly, we have been stripping phytonutrients from our diet since we stopped foraging for wild plants some 10,000 years ago and became farmers.

These insights have been made possible by new technology that has allowed researchers to compare the phytonutrient content of wild plants with the produce in our supermarkets. The results are startling.

Wild dandelions, once a springtime treat for Native Americans, have seven times more phytonutrients than spinach, which we consider a “superfood.” A purple potato native to Peru has 28 times more cancer-fighting anthocyanins than common russet potatoes. One species of apple has a staggering 100 times more phytonutrients than the Golden Delicious displayed in our supermarkets.

Were the people who foraged for these wild foods healthier than we are today? They did not live nearly as long as we do, but growing evidence suggests that they were much less likely to die from degenerative diseases, even the minority who lived 70 years and more. The primary cause of death for most adults, according to anthropologists, was injury and infections.

Each fruit and vegetable in our stores has a unique history of nutrient loss, I’ve discovered, but there are two common themes. Throughout the ages, our farming ancestors have chosen the least bitter plants to grow in their gardens. It is now known that many of the most beneficial phytonutrients have a bitter, sour or astringent taste. Second, early farmers favored plants that were relatively low in fiber and high in sugar, starch and oil. These energy-dense plants were pleasurable to eat and provided the calories needed to fuel a strenuous lifestyle. The more palatable our fruits and vegetables became, however, the less advantageous they were for our health.

The sweet corn that we serve at summer dinners illustrates both of these trends. The wild ancestor of our present-day corn is a grassy plant called teosinte. It is hard to see the family resemblance. Teosinte is a bushy plant with short spikes of grain instead of ears, and each spike has only 5 to 12 kernels. The kernels are encased in shells so dense you’d need a hammer to crack them open. Once you extract the kernels, you wonder why you bothered. The dry tidbit of food is a lot of starch and little sugar. Teosinte has 10 times more protein than the corn we eat today, but it was not soft or sweet enough to tempt our ancestors.

Over several thousand years, teosinte underwent several spontaneous mutations. Nature’s rewriting of the genome freed the kernels of their cases and turned a spike of grain into a cob with kernels of many colors. Our ancestors decided that this transformed corn was tasty enough to plant in their gardens. By the 1400s, corn was central to the diet of people living throughout Mexico and the Americas.

When European colonists first arrived in North America, they came upon what they called “Indian corn.” John Winthrop Jr., governor of the colony of Connecticut in the mid-1600s, observed that American Indians grew “corne with great variety of colours,” citing “red, yellow, blew, olive colour, and greenish, and some very black and some of intermediate degrees.” A few centuries later, we would learn that black, red and blue corn is rich in anthocyanins. Anthocyanins have the potential to fight cancer, calm inflammation, lower cholesterol and blood pressure, protect the aging brain, and reduce the risk of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

EUROPEAN settlers were content with this colorful corn until the summer of 1779 when they found something more delectable — a yellow variety with sweeter and more tender kernels. This unusual variety came to light that year after George Washington ordered a scorched-earth campaign against Iroquois tribes. While the militia was destroying the food caches of the Iroquois and burning their crops, soldiers came across a field of extra-sweet yellow corn. According to one account, a lieutenant named Richard Bagnal took home some seeds to share with others. Our old-fashioned sweet corn is a direct descendant of these spoils of war.

Up until this time, nature had been the primary change agent in remaking corn. Farmers began to play a more active role in the 19th century. In 1836, Noyes Darling, a onetime mayor of New Haven, and a gentleman farmer, was the first to use scientific methods to breed a new variety of corn. His goal was to create a sweet, all-white variety that was “fit for boiling” by mid-July.

He succeeded, noting with pride that he had rid sweet corn of “the disadvantage of being yellow.”

The disadvantage of being yellow, we now know, had been an advantage to human health. Corn with deep yellow kernels, including the yellow corn available in our grocery stores, has nearly 60 times more beta-carotene than white corn, valuable because it turns to Vitamin A in the body, which helps vision and the immune system.

SUPERSWEET corn, which now outsells all other kinds of corn, was born in a cloud of radiation. Beginning in the 1920s, geneticists exposed corn seeds to radiation to learn more about the normal arrangement of plant genes. They mutated the seeds by exposing them to X-rays, toxic compounds, cobalt radiation and then, in the 1940s, to blasts of atomic radiation. All the kernels were stored in a seed bank and made available for research.

In 1959, a geneticist named John Laughnan was studying a handful of mutant kernels and popped a few into his mouth. (The corn was no longer radioactive.) He was startled by their intense sweetness. Lab tests showed that they were up to 10 times sweeter than ordinary sweet corn. A blast of radiation had turned the corn into a sugar factory!

Mr. Laughnan was not a plant breeder, but he realized at once that this mutant corn would revolutionize the sweet corn industry. He became an entrepreneur overnight and spent years developing commercial varieties of supersweet corn. His first hybrids began to be sold in 1961. This appears to be the first genetically modified food to enter the United States food supply, an event that has received scant attention.

Within one generation, the new extra sugary varieties eclipsed old-fashioned sweet corn in the marketplace. Build a sweeter fruit or vegetable — by any means — and we will come. Today, most of the fresh corn in our supermarkets is extra-sweet, and all of it can be traced back to the radiation experiments. The kernels are either white, pale yellow, or a combination of the two. The sweetest varieties approach 40 percent sugar, bringing new meaning to the words “candy corn.” Only a handful of farmers in the United States specialize in multicolored Indian corn, and it is generally sold for seasonal decorations, not food.

We’ve reduced the nutrients and increased the sugar and starch content of hundreds of other fruits and vegetables. How can we begin to recoup the losses?

Here are some suggestions to get you started. Select corn with deep yellow kernels. To recapture the lost anthocyanins and beta-carotene, cook with blue, red or purple cornmeal, which is available in some supermarkets and on the Internet. Make a stack of blue cornmeal pancakes for Sunday breakfast and top with maple syrup.

In the lettuce section, look for arugula. Arugula, also called salad rocket, is very similar to its wild ancestor. Some varieties were domesticated as recently as the 1970s, thousands of years after most fruits and vegetables had come under our sway. The greens are rich in cancer-fighting compounds called glucosinolates and higher in antioxidant activity than many green lettuces.

Scallions, or green onions, are jewels of nutrition hiding in plain sight. They resemble wild onions and are just as good for you. Remarkably, they have more than five times more phytonutrients than many common onions do. The green portions of scallions are more nutritious than the white bulbs, so use the entire plant. Herbs are wild plants incognito. We’ve long valued them for their intense flavors and aroma, which is why they’ve not been given a flavor makeover. Because we’ve left them well enough alone, their phytonutrient content has remained intact.

Experiment with using large quantities of mild-tasting fresh herbs. Add one cup of mixed chopped Italian parsley and basil to a pound of ground grass-fed beef or poultry to make “herb-burgers.” Herbs bring back missing phytonutrients and a touch of wild flavor as well.

The United States Department of Agriculture exerts far more effort developing disease-resistant fruits and vegetables than creating new varieties to enhance the disease resistance of consumers. In fact, I’ve interviewed U.S.D.A. plant breeders who have spent a decade or more developing a new variety of pear or carrot without once measuring its nutritional content.

We can’t increase the health benefits of our produce if we don’t know which nutrients it contains. Ultimately, we need more than an admonition to eat a greater quantity of fruits and vegetables: we need more fruits and vegetables that have the nutrients we require for optimum health.

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