They’re not all farm wives anymore. Women are driving combines, ordering feed and seed and owning and managing farms and ranches. Linda Bannwarth, of rural Mitchell, has seen the evolving role of women in agriculture.
“I just think there’s more respect for women now. I have nieces who have ag degrees,” Bannwarth said.
“The glass ceiling for women is getting broken,” she said. “Women can do as much as men now. Today’s woman is more knowledgeable, more confident.”
(Reuters) – A 75-year-old Indiana grain farmer will take on global seed giant Monsanto Co at the U.S. Supreme Court next week in a patent battle that could have ramifications for the biotechnology industry and possibly the future of food production.
The highest court in the United States will hear arguments on Tuesday in the dispute, which started when soybean farmer Vernon Bowman bought and planted a mix of unmarked grain typically used for animal feed. The plants that grew turned out to contain the popular herbicide-resistant genetic trait known as Roundup Ready that Monsanto Continue reading Industrial Ag wary as Monsanto heads to Supreme Court→
London (CNN) — A frozen food producer caught up in a scandal over horsemeat found in beef products in the United Kingdom, Sweden and France said Saturday it will sue the Romanian producer it blames for the problem.
The French arm of Swedish frozen food firm Findus said it would file a legal complaint Monday against the unnamed Romanian business. Findus said it had been told that its products were being made with French beef, not Romanian horsemeat.
“We were deceived,” said a Findus France statement. “There are two victims in this affair: Findus and the consumer.”
NORTHAMPTON – With Wall Street at a low point in public opinion, a group of local worker cooperatives is building a fund to help its members as well as new cooperatives trying to get off the ground.
Valley Alliance of Worker Cooperatives has nine members throughout the Pioneer Valley, from Holyoke to Greenfield. Each of the business is owned and operated by the people who work there, giving them powers and responsibilities not found at other places of work.
Adam and Stever from Collective Copies
“You’re able to use your values and determine where your money is going,” said Adam Trott of Collective Copies, one of the founding members of the group, which has been in existence since 2005.
The latest member is Simple, a Holyoke-based cooperative that offers compostable diapers and chemical-free linen laundering. With Simple about to hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony, Trott said it’s a good time for other cooperative ventures.
“People are more ready for something new when there are difficult economic times,” he said.
To this end, the Valley Alliance of Worker Cooperatives is establishing a fund that can loan money to new and existing cooperatives. As Trott explained it, each member contributes 5 percent of its annual profits toward the fund. The Valley Alliance of Worker Cooperatives has also recently partnered with the Cooperative Fund of New England, availing itself of the fund’s expertise and staff.
The Cooperative Fund of New England, Trott said, has cooperative members throughout New England and eastern New York, and more than $1 million in assets. The local group of cooperatives will look to it for help in vetting and procession loan applications.
“They’re great,” Trott said. “It’s a totally solid organization.”
Its been over 2 years since Wal-Mart made a big announcement about how they were going to support small, local farming operations in the U.S. Personally, I was suspicious and wrote about it in my blog post….
Wal-Mart claims that 11 percent of the produce in its stores now comes from local farms.
Abbie Fentress Swanson/Harvest Public Media
When Wal-Mart calls, Herman Farris always finds whatever the retailer wants, even if it’s yucca root in the dead of winter. Farris is a produce broker in Columbia, Mo., who has been buying for Wal-Mart from auctions and farms since the company began carrying fruits and vegetables in the early 1990s.
During the summer and fall, nearly everything Farris delivers is grown in Missouri. That’s Wal-Mart’s definition of “local” — produce grown and sold in the same state. In winter, it’s a bit tougher to source locally.
In 2010, Wal-Mart pledged to double its local produce sales from 4 to 9 percent by 2015, as part of a new sustainability program and a commitment to support small businesses. While the chain has exceeded that goal – it says 11 percent of its produce sold nationwide comes from local farms — there’s little evidence of small farmers benefiting, at least in the Midwest.
Organic vegetable grower Jim Thomas, who grows organic vegetables and sells them at the Columbia farmers market, doesn’t know anyone who has sold successfully to Wal-Mart.
“They tend to try to force people into lower prices than feasible,” he says. “My only concern is that they’re willing to pay the price to get the quality that they get from local produce.”
Wal-Mart says they try to be as price competitive as possible, and that their local buyers draw up contracts with farmers a year out, laying out fixed prices for set amounts of crops. Ron McCormick, senior director of sustainable agriculture for Wal-Mart’s U.S. division, says that the number of small farms supplying the company has grown since 2010. But there are challenges – like keeping track of growers, uncertainty about small farms delivering during bad-weather years, and the high costs of strict food safety audits, which are required to supply Wal-Mart.
“There are ways to help the farmer with those costs but it’s a matter of doing that 100 times over if you’re working with small farmers,” McCormick said.
Produce broker Herman Farris, outside a Wal-Mart in Columbia, Mo., was heading to St. Louis to pick up a shipment of bananas for Wal-Mart.
Abbie Fentress Swanson/Harvest Public Media
Wal-Mart claims its emphasis on local has saved customers over $1 billion while helping farmers. But Wyatt Fraas, of the Center for Rural Affairs in Lyon, Neb., would like to see those benefits and cost savings broken down.
“Unfortunately, there’s so little definition and transparency about how that happens that we don’t really know if that happens or how that happens,” he said.
Of the eight farms highlighted on Wal-Mart’s locally grown web site, five are very large farms by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s definition, with annual sales in the millions of dollars.
And then there’s the question of volume. The University of Missouri Extension’s Jennifer Schutter, who helps farmers sell produce to retailers, says many small farmers in Missouri simply can’t grow enough.
“They only have produce for four months out of the year,” she says. “Wal-Mart wants produce consistently from the same distributor pretty much all year long.”
A few small operations in the Midwest have had success working with Wal-Mart, including Divine Gardens, a tomato grower in western Kansas, and Missouri Vegetable Farm, a 200-acre farm 70 miles south of St. Louis.
Missouri Vegetable Farm was created in 2010 specifically to supply Wal-Mart by the Proffer family, which also owns Proffer Wholesale Produce. Proffer Produce has been a middleman for Wal-Mart since the 1990s, and delivers produce to distribution centers in 13 states. Overall, the company has sales of nearly $60 million a year.
In its shipping facility, as workers in hairnets separated green peppers by quality, size and weight, food safety director Jason Landers said farms, regardless of their size, must adapt their business models to compete in the growing local foods market.
“If they want to continue to succeed, they have to modify their operations,” he said.
But LaDonna Redmond, a senior policy associate with the Institute of Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis, says it’s a slippery slope.
“That’s the question: Will it actually benefit [farmers], or will the situation turn out to be one where the benefit really is transferred to Wal-Mart?” Redmond says.
She adds that until Wal-Mart builds the cost of producing local food into its prices, few small farms will truly benefit from the retailer’s push to source more local food.
Abbie Fentress Swanson reports from Missouri for Harvest Public Media, an agriculture-reporting project involving nine NPR member stations in the Midwest. For more stories about farm and food, check outHarvest Public Media.
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2 – Walmart’s big push into groceries is not good for small farmers
When you think of Walmart, you probably think of cheap Chinese products and labor. But about two-thirds of the money Walmart spends to stock up its U.S. stores now goes for domestic products. That’s because, over the last decade, Walmart has moved aggressively into the grocery sector, and most of our food items are grown and produced here in the U.S. Ten years ago, groceries made up less than 25 percent of the retail giant’s sales; they now make up 55 percent. From CNN:
Experts say that this shift was no accident. The nation’s largest retailer adapted to fit the needs of its cash-strapped customers in the midst of a slow economic recovery. Shoppers today are more concerned with buying basics like milk and bread than electronics and apparel, many of which are foreign-made, and the retailer is shifting focus to keep up.
“Consumers have been shopping more for ‘needs’ than for ‘wants,’ and that’s why groceries are still the number one thing in their budgets,” said Craig Johnson, president of independent consulting firm Customer Growth Partners. “In return, Wal-Mart has become a needs-oriented store.”
Walmart’s crushing the competition, with higher sales than Kroger, Safeway, and SuperValu grocery chains combined. Its house “Great Value” brand boasts the biggest sales of any food brand in the U.S. To assert its dominance in the grocery sector, Walmart “leverages its scale” so its suppliers can pay lower prices to farmers, as investing site Trefis reports — which is bad news for small farmers across the country. Sure, god made a farmer, but god also made an American profit motive. From NPR’s The Salt blog:
Wal-Mart claims its emphasis on local has saved customers over $1 billion while helping farmers. But Wyatt Fraas, of the Center for Rural Affairs in Lyon, Neb., would like to see those benefits and cost savings broken down.
“Unfortunately, there’s so little definition and transparency about how that happens that we don’t really know if that happens or how that happens,” he said.
Of the eight farms highlighted on Wal-Mart’s locally grown web site, five are very large farms by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s definition, with annual sales in the millions of dollars.
Walmart’s claim that it supports small-scale farmers just doesn’t add up. One of the retail behemoth’s suppliers says that all farms, big or small, “have to modify their operations” if they want to succeed in this new age of Walmart groceries.
But LaDonna Redmond, a senior policy associate with the Institute of Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis, says it’s a slippery slope.
“That’s the question: Will it actually benefit [farmers], or will the situation turn out to be one where the benefit really is transferred to Wal-Mart?” Redmond says.
Oh come on, NPR, you don’t need to he-said she-said on this one. We know who benefits: Walmart sold $244 billion of groceries last year.
We’ve got to break out of the old ways of thinking about the economy.
Most activists tend to approach progressive change from one of two perspectives: First, there’s the “reform” tradition that assumes corporate control is a constant and that “politics” acts to modify practices within that constraint. Liberalism in the United States is representative of this tradition. Then there’s the “revolutionary” tradition, which assumes change can come about only if the major institutions are largely eliminated or transcended, often by violence.
But what if neither revolution nor reform is viable?
Paradoxically, we believe the current stalemating of progressive reform may open up some unique strategic possibilities to transform institutions of the political economy over time. We call this third option evolutionary reconstruction. Like reform, evolutionary reconstruction involves step-by-step nonviolent change. But like revolution, evolutionary reconstruction changes the basic institutions of ownership of the economy, so that the broad public, rather than a narrow band of individuals (i.e., the “one percent”) owns more and more of the nation’s productive assets.
1. A People’s Bank
One area where this logic can be seen at work is in the financial industry. At the height of the financial crisis in early 2009, some kind of nationalization of the banks seemed possible. It was a moment, President Obama told banking CEOs, when his administration was “the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” The president opted for a soft bailout, Continue reading Six Economic Steps to a Better Life and Real Prosperity for All→
Sprinklers water crops in Bakersfield, California, during a heatwave.
The world’s food crisis, where 1 billion people are already going hungry and a further 2 billion people will be affected by 2050, is set to worsen as increasing heatwaves reverse the rising crop yields seen over the last 50 years, according to new research.
Severe heatwaves, such as those currently seen in Australia, are expected to become many times more likely in coming decades due to climate change. Extreme heat led to 2012 becoming the hottest year in the US on record and the worst corn crop in two decades.
New research, which used corn growing in France as an example, predicts losses of up to 12% for maize yields in the next 20 years. A second, longer-term study published on Sunday indicates that, without action against climate change, wheat and soybean harvests will fall by up to 30% by 2050 as the world warms.
“Our research rings alarm bells for future food security,” said Ed Hawkins, at the University of Reading, who worked on the corn study. “Over the last 50 years, developments in agriculture, such as fertilisers and irrigation, have increased yields of the world’s staple foods, but we’re starting to see a slowdown in yield increases.”
He said increasing frequency of hot days across the world could explain some of this slowdown. “Current advances in agriculture are too slow to offset the expected damage to crops from heat stress in the future,” said Prof Andy Challinor, at the University of Leeds. “Feeding a growing population as climate changes is a major challenge, especially since the land available for agricultural expansion is limited. Supplies of the major food crops could be at risk unless we plan for future climates.”
Hawkins, Challinor and colleagues examined how the number of days when the temperature rose above 32C affected the maize crop in France, which is the UK’s biggest source of imported corn. Yields had quadrupled between 1960 and 2000 but barely improved in the last decade, while the number of hot days more than doubled.
By the 2020s, hot days are expected to occur over large areas of France where previously they were uncommon and, unless farmers find ways to combat the heat stress that damages seed formation, yields of French maize could fall by 12% compared to today. Hawkins said there will be some differences with other crops in different locations, but added: “Extreme heat is not good for crops.”
The second study is the first global assessment of a range of climate change impacts, from increased flooding to rising demand for air conditioning, of how cutting carbon emissions could reduce these impacts, published in Nature Climate Change. “Our research clearly identifies the benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions – less severe impacts on crops and flooding are two areas of particular benefit,” said Prof Nigel Arnell of the University of Reading, who led the study, published in Nature Climate Change.
One example showed global productivity of spring wheat could drop by 20% by the 2050s, but such a drop in yields is delayed until 2100 if firm action is taken to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
River flooding was the impact which was most reduced if climate action is taken, the study found. Without action, even optimistic forecasts suggest the world will warm by 4C, which would expose about 330m people globally to greater flooding. But that number could be cut in half if emissions start to fall in the next few years. Flooding is the biggest climate threat to the UK, with over 8,000 homes submerged in 2012.
Another dramatic impact was on the need for air conditioning as temperatures rise. The energy needed for cooling is set to soar but could be cut by 30% if the world acts to curb emissions, with the benefit being particularly high in Europe. However, climate action has relatively little effect on water shortages, set to hit a billion people. Just 5% of those would avoid water problems if emissions fall.
“But cutting emissions buys you time for adaptation [to climate change’s impacts],” said Arnell. “You can buyfive to 10 years [delay in impacts] in the 2030s, and several decade from 2050s. It is quite an optimistic study as it shows that climate policies can have a big effect in reducing the impacts on people.”
Ed Davey, the UK’s secretary of state for energy and climate change, said: “We can avoid many of the worst impacts of climate change if we work hard together to keep global emissions down. This research helps us quantify the benefits of limiting temperature rise to 2C and underlines why it’s vital we stick with the UN climate change negotiations and secure a global legally binding deal by 2015.”
The world produces enough food for everyone. But not everyone has enough food.
The IF campaign is a unique chance to show that you won’t accept injustices in the global food system any more. IF we turn up the pressure on world leaders to act, we can change lives around the world.Make 2013 the year everyone starts to have enough food.
There are some big issues driving hunger around the world. With your support in 2013 we can tackle them and make sure there’s enough food for everyone.
We’re in the Enough Food for Everyone…IF campaign so that small-scale farmers can grow their way out of poverty. Here’s why it matters:
Land and water: IF we make sure poor farmers have secure access to resources like land and water. More.
Aid and investment: IF we give enough of the right kind of support to help people feed themselves. More.
Transparency and tax: IF we make sure governments and big corporations are honest and open about their actions. More.
The Agricultural Fulcrum: Better Food, Better Climate
By Diana Donlon
The National Climate Assessment, released this week, predicted increasingly negative impact of weather extremes on crops. But with industrialized farming as a key player in greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, the vicious cycle needs breaking.
Jacky Chen/Reuters
This past year treated us to a climate change preview in spades: crazy heat waves, prolonged drought, and epic storms like Sandy. To help us stabilize the climate, before we reach the point of no return, we must tap the immense potential of our food system.
Since becoming an agrarian society, we’ve known that growing food successfully depends on climate stability. Not enough water, crops wither and die. Too much, they rot. Beyond this, we know that crops have specific climatic requirements. Wheat, for instance, grows best in a dry, mild climate. Stone fruits like cherries need a minimum number of “chill hours” in order to blossom and later fruit. Intense heat disrupts pollination and can even shut down photosynthesis. These are basic parameters. If we continue to disregard them, food will become more scarce over time and we will go hungry. Indeed, as the National Climate Assessment, the government’s 1,146-page report released earlier this week states: “The rising incidence of weather extremes will have increasingly negative impacts on crop and livestock productivity because critical thresholds are already being exceeded.”
Agriculture, positioned as it is at the intersection of food and climate, presents a unique fulcrum. Pushed in the direction of industrial agriculture, it contributes egregiously to our climate problem: As activist Bill McKibben has noted, industrial agriculture — predominant in the U.S. — “essentially insures that your food is marinated in crude oil before you eat it.” This is because at every step, from the production of fertilizers and pesticides to the harvesting, processing, packaging, and transporting of materials, the industrial food system depends on climate-changing fossil fuels. Indeed, in a new report on climate change and food systems, the agriculture research organization CGIAR concluded that our global food system is responsible for nearly a third of all greenhouse gas emissions.
But we can tip the scale in the other direction toward sustainable agriculture, working in concert with natural systems instead of depleting them. This side of the scale presents an elegant, under-recognized opportunity to stabilize the climate. Not only do agro-ecological, organic and other sustainable farming methods emit significantly less greenhouse gas (GHG) overall, they can also sequester or store excess carbon. Given our long list of existing environmental worries — erosion, polluted watersheds, dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico — strengthening our top soil is a lot smarter than loading it up with nitrogen and washing it down the Mississippi.
Sustainable agriculture not only recaptures GHG, it eliminates the need for synthetic fertilizers like manufactured nitrogen which emits nitrous oxide. According to the EPA, agriculture is directly responsible for 68% of U.S. nitrous oxide emissions (a potent GHG; each molecule has 310 times the atmospheric warming potential of one molecule of carbon dioxide). By favoring biodiversity, productivity, resource efficiency and resilience — sustainable agriculture also offers tangible benefits like cleaner water, preserved wildlife habitat, and reduced exposure to pesticides.
Despite these obvious advantages, sustainable systems are often dismissed as backward or as some romanticized fantasy, particularly by multi-national chemical companies with a vested interest in maintaining the industrial system. In reality these low-impact methods of farming are rooted in the realities of local climate and culture and provide promising models of resilience. Consider, for instance, Angelic Organics, a biodynamic farm in north central Illinois: it grows more than 55 different crops on 100 acres while using cover crops that sequester atmospheric carbon in the soil, harvest nitrogen from the air, protect the soil from erosion, and provide habitats for beneficial insects. Examples of such productivity combined with critical ecosystem services can be found all over the country and on every continent. Most importantly, a 2009 scientific report known as the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) concluded that sustainable agriculture is, in fact, more resilient in the face of climate change than industrial mono-cropping — the mile after mile of corn and soy that now dominates our farming states.
Imagine what we could do for the climate if instead of blanketing 30 percent of the nation’s farmland with a single industrial crop (corn), the U.S. were to create a thriving network of rural farms and urban gardens. To tip the climate scale in our favor we need the energetic,good food movement to care as much about politics as peaches. By flexing its growing political muscle, the movement can support legislation that promotes research and training in sustainable agricultural practices. These practices mitigate climate change and put good food on our tables. Legions of young people who understand the climate change imperative are turning to agriculture. As a country we must make it as easy as possible for them to pursue careers in sustainable farming, and support them with forward-looking agriculture policies that are grounded in the climate reality of 2013.
The University of Illinois’ College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) in Champaign-Urbana made a momentous announcement: it has accepted a $250,000 grant from genetically modified seed/agrichemical giant Monsanto to create an endowed chair for the “Agricultural Communications Program” it runs with the College of Communications.
The university’s press release quotes Monsanto’s vice president of technology communications giving a taste of its vision for the investment:
With the population expecting to reach 9 billion by 2030, farmers from Illinois and beyond will be asked to produce more crops while using fewer resources. At Monsanto we are committed to bringing farmers advanced ag technologies to help them meet this challenge. Effectively communicating farmers’ efforts to feed, clothe and fuel a rapidly growing population is a major part of the solution.
A cynic might translate that statement this way: In order to maintain our highly profitable and hotly contested business model, we’ll need a new generation of PR professionals to construct and disseminate our marketing message.
Monsanto’s latest gift isn’t its first dalliance with the prestigious college, which is located in a city surrounded by millions of acres of fields planted with Monsanto’s GMO corn and soy seeds, both treated with regular doses of the company’s Roundup herbicide. Back in 2002, Monsanto donated $200,000 to ACES for the Monsanto Multi-Media Executive Studio, to be “used by faculty and staff of the college for presentations and seminars and for conferences involving companies and organizations with ties to the college and its mission.”
Nor is Monsanto the only gigantic food and ag company bestowing cash upon ACES. A cursory look at the college’s web site turned up a recent paper touting a novel infant formula that “boosts babies’ immunity”—funded by Nestle Infant Nutrition and co-authored by a researcher in its employ.
Then there’s this study, also by ACES researchers, which purports to show that soy protein “alleviates symptoms of fatty liver disease.” It’s brought to you by grants from the agribiz-aligned Illinois Soybean Association and Solae, a joint project of agrichemical giants DuPont and Bunge that calls itself “the world leader in developing innovative soy technologies and ingredients for food, meat and nutritional products.”
The most remarkable thing about all of this is that it isn’t remarkable at all. A few weeks ago, I pointed to a great Chronicle of Higher Education article documenting how university animal-health research has become dominated by the pharmaceutical industry—and how the products that emerge from that process are much more about pharmaceutical industry profits than animal health. Now there’s this eye-opening new report from Food & Water Watch (FWW) that documents in painstaking detail how the food and agrichemical industries have transformed our national public agricultural research infrastructure into essentially an R&D and marketing apparatus for their industry. (Similar trends hold for other areas of science research, most prominently medicine.)
FWW reminds us how ag-research institutions like the University of Illinois started: as so-called land-grant universities, launched by the federal government on public land in 1862. The idea of the land grants was to generate agricultural research, funded by the federal government, that benefited society as a whole. And that’s pretty much how things went for the first century. “Well into the 20th century, seed-breeding programs at land-grant universities were responsible for developing almost all new seed and plant varieties,” FWW writes. It might have added that those varieties were public resources, not owned or patented by any company. Farmers were free to save them for the next season, and many did.
But then, starting in the 1980s, the federal government started to level off its investment in ag research—and meanwhile, after passage of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, began to encourage professors to behave like entrepreneurs who could benefit financially from their research, not public employees creating ideas for the public domain. That’s when food and agribusiness companies, which were then in the process of consolidating into the vast global enterprises we know today, began to funnel huge amounts of cash into the land grants.
By the early ’90s, industry funding had begun to outpace USDA research support for the land grants. And now, as fiscal austerity further pinches federal research funding, the gap between the industry and the USDA as land-grant paymaster has hit an all-time high. Here’s FWW:
Food & Water Watch
And it’s not only research. Just as sports franchises have turned to corporate sponsors to fund stadiums, the land grants have turned to their agribiz benefactors for building funds, FWW found. At University of Minnesota, seed breeders toil in the Cargill Plant Genomics Building; while University of Missouri ag-science grad students attend seminars in the Monsanto Auditorium. Iowa State undergrads lounge in the Monsanto Student Services Wing; and food-science researchers at Purdue can bounce between the Kroger Sensory Evaluation Laboratory and the ConAgra Foods, Inc. Laboratory.
And all of this cash buys more than just symbolic power. In addition to landing their names on buildings, agribiz giants also “fill seats on academic research boards and direct agendas,” the report shows. At Iowa State University, reps from the agribiz-aligned Iowa Farm Bureau and Summit Group, an industrial-scale producer of hogs and cows, have won seats on the governing Board of Regents. The report brims with examples of agribiz employees occupying seats on advisory boards of various ag-related centers within the land grants. My favorite is the way the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safety forms its advisory board. Get this, from the center’s web site:
We invite food processing and related companies who are not presently members of the Center for Food Safety to join more than 40 food processors who are actively involved in the Center’s programs. There are different ways in which you can be involved with the Center. You may want to become a member of the Center’s Board of Advisors. The role of the Board is to provide input on food safety research needs of the industry. In addition, the Board provides suggestions on unique (not routine) opportunities/services the Center can offer to industry. For example, Center faculty can offer specialized workshops on food safety and quality issues or training on advanced equipment and techniques. A $20,000 annual contribution to the Center entitles a company a seat on the Board. [Emphasis added.]
Sometimes, compliant administrators are rewarded generously for their work. Monsanto tapped South Dakota State University president David Chicoine for its own board of directors in 2009, FWW reports. According to Inside Higher Education, Chicoine stood to make more from Monsanto in his first year on the board than he did from his state job. It gets better:
At some of the more prestigious schools, professors have morphed into something that looks a lot like house researchers for the agrichemical industry. Check out this snapshot from Iowa State. Using the Freedom of Information Act, Food and Water Watch analyzed the grants received by a selection of professors between 2006 and 2010, and calculated what percentage of their grants came from private sources. Here’s what they found: The corporate sector’s generosity might be commendable if it produced research that benefitted the public as a whole—such as new open-source seed varieties that are well adapted to organic ag, or techniques for rotating cattle and crops on land that improve soil and reduce fertilizer use. But that’s not what’s happening, FWW shows. Instead, the companies are funding strings-attached research that serves their own narrow interests. The report cites numerous studies to show this, and several concrete examples like these two:
When an Ohio State University professor produced research that questioned the biological safety of biotech sunflowers, Dow AgroSciences and [DuPont’s] Pioneer Hi-Bred blocked her research privileges to their seeds, barring her from conducting additional research. Similarly, when other Pioneer Hi-Bred-funded professors found a new [genetically engineered] corn variety to be deadly to beneficial beetles, the company barred the scientists from publishing their findings. Pioneer Hi-Bred subsequently hired new scientists who produced the necessary results to secure regulatory approval.
To be sure, while corporate cash has come to dominate university ag research, the USDA still funds a substantial amount of it: more than $300 million (vs. about $600 million from industry) in 2010. In addition to its research grants for land-grant professors, the agency also employs its own scientists and maintains its own labs; its total research budget stands at about $2 billion per year. Yet rather than act as a counterweight to the corporations, the USDA essentially mimics them. It “prioritizes commodity crops, industrialized livestock production, technologies geared toward large-scale operations, and capital-intensive practices,” FWW shows.
Here’s a startling example: the USDA dedicates more money to research on sweetener crops like sugar beets ($18.1 million per year) and oilseed crops ($79.4 million) than it does to nutrition education ($15.5 million).
Such expenditures of public cash help sweeten the fortunes of the food and agrichemical industries, but foretell a bitter harvest for society as whole.
Dave Gilson
Food & Water Watch
The corporate sector’s generosity might be commendable if it produced research that benefitted the public as a whole—such as new open-source seed varieties that are well adapted to organic ag, or techniques for rotating cattle and crops on land that improve soil and reduce fertilizer use. But that’s not what’s happening, FWW shows. Instead, the companies are funding strings-attached research that serves their own narrow interests. The report cites numerous studies to show this, and several concrete examples like these two:
UMass Sustainable Food and Farming 