Tag Archives | Agriculture

Turning Back the Timeline: Human Growth Boom Started Before Agriculture

By on October 19, 2012 in News 22

Picture: Margaret A. McIntyre (PD)

Researchers who dare to propose that the development of human civilization started well before the established timeline of approximately 4,000 BC are used to the scorn of mainstream academics. However, as historical anomalies too big to ignore or cover up continue to surface some academics are learning that they don’t like the taste of their own medicine.

Mainstream academia teaches that proper civilizations and its associated sciences, like architecture, began with the birth of agriculture. Crops offered a sustainable source of food, hence ending the need to wander in search for sustenance. Population growth followed, and along with it specialized social strata and trades: artisans, farmers, soldiers and priests. Walls, temples and towers grew to dominate the landscape. Or at least, that’s what generations of students have been taught.

The so-called “Neolithic Revolution” – one part of which was the birth of agriculture – began sometime between 10 and 5,000 years ago.… Read the rest

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Is Modern Wheat A ‘Chronic Poison’?

By on October 16, 2012 in News 40

CBS News ponders whether America is being poisoned by food we “improved” via technology:

Modern wheat is a “perfect, chronic poison,” according to Dr. William Davis, a cardiologist who has published a book all about the world’s most popular grain.

Davis said that the wheat we eat these days isn’t the wheat your grandma had: “It’s an 18-inch tall plant created by genetic research in the ’60s and ’70s,” he said on “CBS This Morning.” “This thing has many new features nobody told you about, such as there’s a new protein in this thing called gliadin. It’s not gluten. I’m not addressing people with gluten sensitivities and celiac disease. I’m talking about everybody else because everybody else is susceptible to the gliadin protein that is an opiate. This thing binds into the opiate receptors in your brain and in most people stimulates appetite, such that we consume 440 more calories per day, 365 days per year.”

To avoid these wheat-oriented products, Davis suggests eating “real food,” such as avocados, olives, olive oil, meats, and vegetables.

… Read the rest

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Food Shortages May Force World Population To Go Vegetarian

By on August 26, 2012 in News 35

Drought Swimming HoleCould this be a conspiracy against freedom-loving, red meat-eating Americans? I have a feeling there will be those in certain quarters who claim just that. John Vidal reports for The Guardian:

Leading water scientists have issued one of the sternest warnings yet about global food supplies, saying that the world’s population may have to switch almost completely to a vegetarian diet over the next 40 years to avoid catastrophic shortages.

Humans derive about 20% of their protein from animal-based products now, but this may need to drop to just 5% to feed the extra 2 billion people expected to be alive by 2050, according to research by some of the world’s leading water scientists.

“There will not be enough water available on current croplands to produce food for the expected 9 billion population in 2050 if we follow current trends and changes towards diets common in western nations,” the report by Malik Falkenmark and colleagues at the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) said.

… Read the rest

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Biotech Giants Are Bankrolling a GMO Free-for-All

By on August 6, 2012 in News 6

Tom Philpott brings the bad news to Mother Jones:

The so-called “Big Six” agrichemical companies—Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow Agrosciences, BASF, Bayer, and Pioneer (DuPont)—are sitting pretty. Together, they control nearly 70 percent of the global pesticide market, and essentially the entire market for genetically modified seeds. Prices of the crops they focus on—corn, soy, cotton, etc.—are soaring, pushed up by severe drought in key growing regions. Higher crop prices typically translate to increased pesticide sales as farmers have more money to spend on agrichemicals and more incentive to maximize yield.

The companies operate globally—and have gained a stronghold in that emerging center of industrial agriculture, Brazil—but the biotech-friendly US is their profit center. They’ve got a big chunk of US agriculture pretty well sewn up—their GMO seeds dominate our corn, soy and cotton crops, which account for more than 53 percent of US farmland, and have won approval for GMO alfalfa (hay), which accounts for another 19 percent.

… Read the rest

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Half Of U.S. Counties Are Now Disaster Areas

By on August 4, 2012 in News 11

America: it was good while it lasted. After a summer of extreme weather patterns, half of the country is classified as disaster zones, Yahoo! News reports:

Nearly 220 counties in a dozen drought-stricken states were added Wednesday to the U.S. government’s list of natural disaster areas as the nation’s agriculture chief unveiled new help for frustrated, cash-strapped farmers and ranchers grappling with extreme dryness and heat.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s addition of the 218 counties means that more than half of all U.S. counties — 1,584 in 32 states — have been designated primary disaster areas, the vast majority of them mired in a drought that’s considered the worst in decades.

As of this week, nearly half of the nation’s corn crop was rated poor to very poor, according to the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service. About 37 percent of the U.S. soybeans were lumped into that category, while nearly three-quarters of U.S.

… Read the rest

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World Must Be About To End: USDA Promotes Meatless Mondays

By on July 26, 2012 in News 4

A searingly hot summer that’s affecting 88% of the United States’ corn crop has the government forecasting meat prices up to 5% higher next year. Perhaps that what caused the USDA, normally a staunch meat booster, to promote Meatless Mondays. This seemingly sage advice (vegetables are farm crops too, remember) to take a weekly day off from meat has many Americans even more hot and bothered. Amy Harmon reports for the New York Times:

The message seemed innocuous enough, coming as it did from the federal agency tasked with promoting sustainable agriculture and dietary health: “One simple way to reduce your environmental impact while dining at our cafeterias,” read a United States Department of Agriculture interoffice newsletter published on its Web site this week, “is to participate in the ‘Meatless Monday’ initiative.”

Thousands of corporate cafeterias, restaurants and schools have embraced the idea of skipping meat on Mondays in favor of vegetarian options, an initiative of the nonprofit Monday Campaign Inc.

… Read the rest

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California To Vote On Labeling Genetically Modified Foods

By on June 14, 2012 in News 0

Should people have a right to know what corporations are feeding to them, or is it none of their business? The Guardian on a referendum this November which could change how food is sold across the country:

Last month, nearly 1m signatures were delivered [in] California calling for a referendum on the labeling of genetically engineered foods. If the measure, “The Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act”, passes, California will become the first state in the nation to require that GM foods be labeled as such on the package.

Lawmakers in states like Vermont and Connecticut have also proposed labeling legislation, which has gone nowhere in the face of stiff industry opposition. What makes the referendum in California different is that, for the first time, voters and not politicians will be the ones to decide. And this has the food industry worried. Understandably so, since only one in four Americans is convinced that GMOs are “basically safe”, according to a survey conducted by the Mellman Group.

… Read the rest

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Guerrilla Labeling Of GMO Foods

By on May 25, 2012 in News 7

NoGMOWhen your government is so beholden to agribusiness that it won’t listen to overwhelming consumer demand for foods to be labeled if they contain genetically modified organisms, what do you do? Create your own labels and hit the supermarket! Amy Harmon and Andrew Pollack report for the New York Times:

Great Barrington, Mass. — On a recent sunny morning at the Big Y grocery here, Cynthia LaPier parked her cart in the cereal aisle. With a glance over her shoulder and a quick check of the ingredients, she plastered several boxes with hand-designed stickers from a roll in her purse. “Warning,” they read. “May Contain GMO’s (Genetically Modified Organisms).”

For more than a decade, almost all processed foods in the United States — cereals, snack foods, salad dressings — have contained ingredients from plants whose DNA was manipulated in a laboratory. Regulators and many scientists say these pose no danger.

… Read the rest

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Futureconomics of Food

By on May 4, 2012 in News 2

Vandana Shiva writes on the intersections of capitalism, the state, agribusiness, and a burgeoning organic movement in South Asia. Via Al Jazeera:

The economic crisis, the ecological crisis and the food crisis are a reflection of an outmoded and fossilised economic paradigm — a paradigm that grew out of mobilising resources for the war by creating the category of economic “growth” and is rooted in the age of oil and fossil fuels. It is fossilised both because it is obsolete, and because it is a product of the age of fossil fuels. We need to move beyond this fossilised paradigm if we are to address the economic and ecological crisis.

Economy and ecology have the same roots “oikos” — meaning home — both our planetary home, the Earth, and our home where we live our everyday lives in family and community.

But economy strayed from ecology, forgot the home and focused on the market.

… Read the rest

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Farmers & Food Co’s Rally Against GM Seeds & Chemicals

By on April 19, 2012 in News 4

SOCC_logoThe dangers of using bio-engineered seeds and chemical pesticides in agriculture have been warned against by activists for many years, but now many farmers and food companies are sounding the alarm too, calling for government intervention. From Reuters via Yahoo Finance:

A coalition of more than 2,000 U.S. farmers and food companies said Wednesday it is taking legal action to force government regulators to analyze potential problems with proposed biotech crops and the weed-killing chemicals to be sprayed over them.

Dow AgroSciences, a unit of Dow Chemical, and Monsanto Co. are among several global chemical and seed companies racing to roll out combinations of genetically altered crops and new herbicides designed to work with the crops as a way to counter rapidly spreading herbicide-resistant weeds that are choking millions of acres of U.S. farmland.

Dow and Monsanto say the new chemical combinations and new crops that tolerate those chemicals are badly needed by corn, soybean and cotton farmers as weeds increasingly resist treatments of the most commonly used herbicide – glyphosate-based Roundup.

… Read the rest

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