Living Democracy, Feeding Hope

Originally published by GlobalPost on 12/03/2013 A low-wage earning Indian day laborer removes excess rice from a bag at a grains depot near New Delhi on August 27, 2013, one day after the Indian parliament passed a flagship $18 billion program to provide subsidized food to the poor that is intended to "wipe out" endemic hunger and malnutrition in the aspiring superpower. Credit: Roberto Schmidt BALI, Indonesia — In the lead-up to this week’s World Trade Organization negotiations, the Obama administration has tried to block the implementation of a new program approved by the Indian government that could help feed its 830 million hungry people in a cost-effective way. The Obama administration’s objection to the program is a direct attack on the right to food, and it threatens to kill the chances for any agreement at the WTO. The Indian government’s newly approved Food Security Act is one of the world’s most ambitious efforts to reduce chronic hunger. Under the new program, the Indian government will buy staple foods from small farmers at administered prices, generally above market levels, thereby supporting the incomes of some of the country’s most impoverished people. From those stocks, the government will provide food to the poor, generally at below-market prices, and to public initiatives such as school-based lunch programs. This is a cost-effective way to address chronic hunger, particularly in rural areas. It does not come cheap; the annual cost is estimated at $20 billion. But neither does the United States’ Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), costing about $78 billion last year to assist a much smaller number of people. And in its budget negotiations and farm-bill proposals, the Obama Administration has made a point of defending funding for SNAP. So what’s the problem with India’s plan? The Obama administration’s objection is that such a program violates the trade rules agreed to when the WTO was set up in 1994. And it does, because those arcane and biased rules treat government-supported prices to farmers as a form of “trade-distorting support,” even if that support is for food security and supports only domestic production for the domestic market. That is why India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and other countries that make up the G-33 group have been proposing since 2006 that the rules be updated to allow developing country governments to buy farmers’ crops at supported prices if the programs address food security. Such programs, these countries argue, should not be treated as “trade distorting.” That proposal had largely been accepted when these WTO negotiations — called the Doha Development Round — stalled in 2008, also over US objections to food security proposals. In preparation for the Bali ministerial, which runs Dec. 3-6, President Obama’s trade negotiators have taken a hard line on the G-33 proposal. The US, Mexico and Pakistan have withdrawn support for the food security proposal, instead offering a four-year “peace clause,” which states that no WTO member can sue any other member for such violations. After four years, all bets are off, unless there is an agreement to extend it or members reach a more comprehensive resolution of Doha issues. India and the G-33 have rejected the proposal. In a letter to the Indian prime minister, Indian farmers argued that their country should not be expected “to mortgage its right to food and the right to livelihoods of the poor and the needy enshrined in the Constitution.” As UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Olivier De Schutter has pointed out , the WTO largely marginalizes the issue, treating “food security as a deviation from the primary objective of agricultural trade liberalization.” And in a statement released Monday, De Schutter said that developing countries must be allowed to use their reserves to improve food security without facing sanctions. “Trade rules must be shaped around the food security policies that developing countries need, rather than policies having to tiptoe around WTO rules,” he said. The WTO’s new director general, Roberto Azevedo of Brazil, has tried to breathe new life into the comatose Doha Round by urging an “early harvest” of a limited set of measures, largely agreed upon previously, that make good on the development promise of the round. Disagreements forced Azevedo to suspend negotiations last week, saying that he did not see the political will to conclude an agreement. Bali will be the battleground where the US government seems determined to display its cynical use of trade policies to undermine the ideals it claims to support at home, like food security. What is really on display, though, is US hypocrisy. India’s Food Security Act uses the same measures that were part of US agricultural policy for years coming out of the Great Depression. They worked for us, but India is not allowed to use them. More galling, US domestic agricultural support was estimated to be $130 billion in 2010. Much of that support goes to crops like corn and soybeans that we not only export directly, we feed to livestock, making our meat exports cheaper. Talk about trade distortions. Worse still, a longstanding US and EU commitment of the Doha Round to quickly reduce or eliminate export subsidies and credits — the most directly trade-distorting government support of all — remains vague, with no firm timetables. Meanwhile, the US and EU had their own peace clause, written into the 1994 Agreement on Agriculture to protect them from suits over excessive subsidies. No four-year limit there, while a raft of trade-distorting support resulted in the widespread dumping of surplus goods by the US and EU on developing countries, undermining their producers. We don’t need a peace clause, we need a hypocrisy clause . We need a commitment to reduce trade-distorting hypocrisy, with the deepest cuts coming from the most developed hypocrites.

Originally published by PRI on 12/09/2013 Fake dice are placed by activists from La Via Campesina while they hold a protest against the WTO at the 9th World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference in Bali. Credit: Adek Berry BALI, Indonesia — A tense and acrimonious four-day standoff ended Saturday morning at the World Trade Organization meeting in Bali. A last-minute objection by Cuba and three Latin American allies held up the agreement Friday night, with Cuba objecting to the hypocrisy of a “trade facilitation” agreement – one part of the so-called Bali package – that ignored the United States’ discriminatory treatment of the island nation under the US trade embargo. Overnight, text was added to reflect Cuba’s concern even if it did nothing to resolve the issue. Call it the story of the WTO. Leading up to this week’s meeting, the US and other rich countries had attempted to declare India's food security program in violation of the WTO's archaic and biased rules and sought to discipline the program as “trade distorting.” India and other developing countries fended off the challenge to these programs, which support small farmers and help feed the hungry. But the final agreement is no green light. Countries considering such programs would not be protected by the “peace clause” that will shield India and some others for the next four years. And onerous reporting requirements put the onus on the developing country to prove that its stock-holding program is not "trade distorting." In return for the modest protections for food security programs, and a vague package of reforms for the least developed countries, developing countries also agreed here to a trade facilitation package that could benefit some of them but might demand more than they can give. The package comes with binding commitments for developing countries to streamline customs and other trade systems. Though the timetable for fulfilling these commitments is flexible, developed countries have not promised funding to support such improvements. A cash-strapped government, then, could end up bound to prioritize improving its port computer systems over public health or education. In the end, the main beneficiaries of trade facilitation measures are transnational firms that are positioned to export and import and are looking for improved access to developing country markets. And that is the never-ending story of the WTO in the age of globalization. The Bali Package in no way deviates from that script. But the right to food won an important defensive battle in the larger war for a global trading system worthy of the lofty development ideals of the Doha Round. The next battle will come within four short years, by which WTO members have committed to resolve this issue for good. If they resume negotiations, they should begin with the original G33 proposal to remove WTO obstacles to Food Security, as over 300 global civil society organizations demanded in a letter last month . A similar call came from civil society groups from the Least Developed Countries, the Africa, Caribbean, and Pacific Group, and the Africa Group. They could begin with the simplest solution proposed by India: agreeing to update the antiquated international reference price from the 1980s, which makes any administered price today seem like a massive subsidy. A barely above-market price of 1,250 rupees per ton for rice looks like a 986 rupee subsidy when compared to the 264 rupee per ton reference price from the 1980s. The actual subsidy was trivial. The US and other developed countries refused to update the reference point, arguing that they didn’t want to reopen any part of the Agreement on Agriculture. Of course they don’t. They wrote those rules, which favor rich country exporters. The hope is that all of this attention on subsidies will put the issue front and center in negotiations to come. “Public stock-holding is just the tip of the subsidies iceberg,” said Martin Khor of the Geneva-based South Centre. “Hopefully we can reveal the rest of the iceberg now and try to fix it.” Anuradha Talwar of India’s Right to Food Campaign seemed exhausted by the WTO meddling in India’s policy-making. “The agreement on the table today is going to make it even more difficult to achieve food security for our people,” she said. “And it was hard enough already.”

This is the second of a five-part, weekly series celebrating Earth Day. Honduras watershed management, Photo by EcoLogic The biggest question facing our planet might be this one: How do we protect, not what we own individually, but those indivisible goods we inherit, share, and yearn to pass on unharmed or enriched to our children? You know... those things we take for granted but can’t survive without: like air, water, soil, forests, oceans, and diverse species — treasures many call our “ commons .” The “commons” comes with a lot of baggage, though. As a young woman just beginning to think about the big questions, the whole idea of the commons had just been slammed. At the time, a framing metaphor capturing a lot of imaginations was the “tragedy of the commons,” the title of a 1968 Science Magazine article by ecologist Garrett Hardin. What stuck was the idea that, because each of us is motivated to pursue our immediate self-interest, anything held in common gets trashed — even though the effect is to mess the whole thing up for everybody. The idea grabbed people, I think, because it fit into the bigger frame that humans hate rules. But however memorable Hardin’s “tragedy” metaphor has proven to be, it’s mistaken. Sure, instances abound of exactly the behavior he spoke to — like today’s massive ocean overfishing. But the classic commons — grazing animals in seventeenth-century England, for example — generally worked well, as do many modern examples. In Törbel, Switzerland, communally owned grazing meadows, forests, irrigation systems, and roads all function well and have for at least five centuries. Then, history in our thinking about the commons was made again: More than forty years after Hardin’s powerful metaphor, the late Elinor Ostrom received a Nobel Prize in economics for showing the conditions under which commons do work: when participants make and enforce fair rules for their use. Certainly, we know that a commons fails — as global climate chaos proves — when power imbalances are so extreme that it’s not possible to hold each other accountable. Part of the problem is that when a small minority is in control, the rest of us can feel off the hook and fail at the basic human task of protecting what we love. A great place to keep learning about the commons is at OntheCommons.org . The point of commons care is to prevent harm before it occurs. And that means learning to “think like an eco-system,” developing what I love to call an “ eco-mind. ” From a perspective of connectedness, we shift from the dominant way of thinking about solutions — doing less harm to something outside of us—to that of positive alignment within our ecological home. We come to see natural treasures no longer as merely divisible property but as gifts protected by boundaries we create and honor, knowing that all life depends on their integrity. The shift is underway. In Ecuador, for decades indigenous people have fought to keep oil companies from despoiling rain forests. And in 2010 they finally won. The UN Environmental Program and the government of Ecuador signed a first-in-the world agreement to keep oil reserves untouched forever beneath the Yasuni National Park — a rainforest that’s almost the size of Connecticut. In exchange, the world’s nations — because we’ll all benefit — are establishing a $3.6 billion trust, to be forfeited if the oil is ever drilled. Ecuador gets to use the interest earned, about 7 percent, or $252 million each year, for conservation and green energy, as well as for health and educational programs benefiting the indigenous people. So, if you’re one who doubts the human capacity to think long term, as any commons requires, let this sink in: In a poll before the Yasuni deal was settled, three-fourths of Ecuadorans opposed oil drilling, effectively relinquishing a near-term financial gain of $7.2 billion in revenue. Costa Rica made a similar choice with its moratorium on oil exploration. Rules for commons care involve a lot more than big-time treaties and reserves. In India, for example, it’s what neighbors take on together. Since the 1990s, villagers have been cooperating to ensure their forests’ regrowth. Today about 10 million rural households take part in roughly 100,000 forest-management groups. Each creates and enforces rules to prevent overuse of nearby woodlands. Motivation is high, especially for women, because firewood still provides three-fourths of the energy they use for cooking. So, groups with a larger proportion of women — a quarter or more — have done particularly well in improving forest condition, reports economist and environmentalist Dr. Bina Agarwal. The forest-management groups, working in collaboration with the Indian government, cover a fifth of India’s forests, and they’re likely a reason that India is one of the few countries in the world to enjoy an increase in forest cover since 2005. On the other side of the globe, Costa Rica fosters commons care with another strategy: rules rewarding landowners who maintain forests, which both absorb carbon and protect the watershed for the benefit of fisherpeople and farmers. In 1997, the country created another rule, a carbon tax of 3.5 percent on fossil fuels, and began using the income to pay these forest protectors — now numbering about 7,000. Another rule, a water tax on big users, like hydroelectric dams, farms, and suppliers of drinking water, goes to pay villagers for keeping rivers clean. Besides being a major source of income for poor people, the approach has also enabled Costa Rica to reverse deforestation, says Carlos M. Rodríguez , the country’s former environment minister. In the mid-twentieth century, Costa Rica’s rate of deforestation was among the worst in Latin America. But just since the 1990s, its forests have spread at an amazing speed, from only covering a fifth to now covering half the country. Commons care also occurs, of course, without government support. In Honduras’ Pico Bonito National Park, for example, the conservation NGO EcoLogic has helped rural communities develop sustainable, participatory watershed management. A self-organized network of Associations of Water Committees involving twenty-seven communities now protect 18,000 acres of forest and 14 micro-watersheds. These self-governing bodies engage villagers in the construction of plant nurseries and in re-forestation to protect their potable water supplies. What’s more, these democratic committees are self-sustaining: maintained through voluntary (yes, voluntary!) payments that cover potable water and maintenance of water infrastructure. In fact, EcoLogic reports, a nearby mayor was so inspired by the Associations’ success that he took the lead on a similar initiative in his village. In this shift to effective commons care, we come to value what we share as much as what we own, what keeps us alive as much as what we exchange. Adapted from EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think to Create the World We Want , new April 23, 2013 in paperback from Nation Books. Second photo: Children in Honduras, Photo by EcoLogicImages used with permission from NGO Ecologic. Originally published by Huffington Post on 04/09/2013

We see fear’s face everywhere, whether in a Congress debating assault weapons or in schools introducing lock-down drills. And for most species fear is, of course, key to survival. Sensing danger, a healthy animal experiences instantaneous physical changes that enable it to escape; then, once the threat has passed, the impala literally shakes off its fear and runs back to join its group. But could it be that for human animals fear itself has become a danger? To explore the possibility, a place to start is asking what humans most fear. It is the loss of standing with others, the fear of being cast out by the tribe. Rather than being hyper-individualists, as one often hears, Homo sapiens are profoundly social creatures — actually, the most social of species. This sense of standing is inseparable from trust. To thrive, we need to trust that we count in the eyes of others and will, therefore, be treated with respect. In a word, our fear is loss of dignity. Almost equal is our fear of powerlessness. Human beings need to feel that we make a difference. Social psychologist Erich Fromm argued in The Heart of Man that what characterizes man is that “he is driven to make his imprint on the world.” And later he dismissed Descartes’ axiom about a human essence centered in thought, declaring instead: “I am, because I effect.” So, when these essential two needs — for connection and agency — are unmet, we go nuts. We try to get respect by whatever means possible. If peaceful means seem closed off, violence it is. In his book Violence, psychologist James Gilligan asked a Massachusetts prison inmate, “What do you want so badly that you would sacrifice everything in order to get it?” The inmate declared: “Pride. Dignity. Self-esteem... and I’ll kill every mother-fucker in that cell block if I have to in order to get it,” Or, as another inmate said, “I’ve got to have my self-respect, and I’ve declared war on the whole world till I get it.” Pride, dignity, respect, agency — a sense that we matter — these are feelings largely shaped interpersonally. We depend upon the social fabric to get them. But, ours is in tatters, with fewer and fewer of us feeling a sense of belonging and more and more preoccupied with a desperate scramble for belongings. Inequality has soared to historic levels. In 2010, the top 1 percent garnered 93 percent of all income gains. And, in countries as well as the U.S., high income inequality is linked to low levels of trust, report British scholars Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in The Spirit Level . Trapped in a giant game of musical chairs, we run faster and faster to edge out the guy ahead. For, with economic rules that increasingly concentrate wealth, we know we could be the next one kicked out, no matter how quick our pace. So we take on debt, juggle three jobs, cheat in school — whatever it takes to stay “in.”And our children are most sensitive to this fear of exclusion. Those who’ve felt bullied, unable to fit in, misunderstood, without a voice in those most social of places — schools — are more likely to become psychotic and violent , including against themselves. In a culture of fear of disconnection, those at the bottom feel most dismissed and discounted. Adam Smith — the supposed, but misunderstood — Champion of the market, more than two centuries ago grasped the devastating power of exclusion: Poverty, he wrote in the Theory of Moral Sentiments “places... [a person] out of the sight of mankind ... [T]o feel that we are taken no notice of, necessarily damps the most agreeable hope... of human nature.” In this vein, joblessness isn’t just about money. It’s about loss of “membership.” Martin Luther King once said that “[i]n our society it is murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an income. You are in substance saying to that man he has no right to exist .” And that is exactly how many feel: A rise of 1 percent in joblessness in the U.S. is accompanied by an increase of roughly 1 percent in the suicide rate. Overall, in our world of increasing inequalities suicide now claims more lives than homicide and war combined . Americans own more than four in 10 of the world’s privately held guns, and nearly two-thirds of U.S. gun deaths in 2010 were suicides. And when people feel “dissed,” violence toward the powerless increases, too: For “each 1 percent increase in unemployment was associated with at least a 0.50 per 1,000 increase in confirmed child maltreatment reports one year later.” Since the recession began in 2007, the number U.S. children killed by maltreatment has risen by about 20 percent to more than five children each day. Thus, our culture of fear gets passed down from one generation to another. So, what can we do to break free from the spiral of fear and worsening violence? Maybe we begin here: recognizing that our crisis is not that we humans are too individualistic, or too selfish. It’s that we’ve lost touch with how deeply social we really are. Easing the fear at the root of so much pain and violence that generates more fear — from suicide to child abuse to school massacres — comes as we embrace the obvious: We are creatures who, in order to thrive individually, depend on inclusive communities in which all can thrive. Freedom starts there. We build it by standing up for rules on which inclusive, trusting community depends: fair rules, for example, that keep wealth circulating and strictly out of public decision making; and rules that ensure decent jobs for all. This pathway out of a violence-soaked culture is no foreign “ism.” It is what’s proven essential to our species’ thriving — communities of trust without which we destroy, not just others but ourselves as well. Adapted from EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think to Create the World We Want (new in paperback from Nation Books) Image: Creative Commons Originally published by the Huffington Post on March 27, 2013

This is the first of a five-part, weekly series celebrating Earth Day. David Pogue in the New York Times not long ago extolled the wonders of LED lights , but lamented that the all-too-human weakness for “instant gratification” — killed by LEDs’ higher price tag — will prevent them taking off. Pogue’s piece got me thinking. What is instant gratification, and has it changed for me? One way of conceiving environmental awareness is that it’s all about fighting our desire for instant gratification. It’s about sacrificing now — whether convenience or money or both — so that in a future, which we might not live to see, this beautiful earth won’t be destroyed. But there is another way to think about instant gratification that an ecological worldview opens to us. If we “think like an ecosystem” — with what I like to call our “eco-mind,” the first thing we’re aware of is connectedness. Maybe this changes everything. Growing up, a light bulb was a light bulb. A car was a car. A new dress was a new dress. Their “meaning” to me, the reward I got — instant or not — boiled down to their usefulness, their aesthetics (were they cool?) and, yes, also their capacity to “up” my standing in my crowd. But something about the LED article triggered a realization that something big has changed. My instant gratification is everywhere and happening often. Here’s what I mean: To use less electricity — from fossil fuels and nuclear — a couple of years ago, I stopped using our clothes dryer. In summer, I use a clothesline on a pulley between a big tree and my deck. In the winter, I use a wooden clothes rack set up next to the washing machine. Now, by my prior way of thinking and being, I might have thought: I’ve forced myself to give up the instant gratification of having quickly dried clothes because I am worried about our earth. But I’d be kidding myself! A moment’s reflection and I realize that I get immediate gratification in many instants every time I use my system. My gratification comes in feeling a bit smug (maybe not anything to boast about), smart for saving money, clever for rigging up a convenient system, and pride, if it comes up in conversation (God forbid I should brag about my laundry). Oh, and then there’s the gentle roughness of a line-dried towel that feels a bit like an invigorating loofah against my skin, and seems more absorbent, too. Yes, I do think about the long-term, but the gratification feels pretty immediate. Or, that new dress I mentioned. When I was younger, the meaning of a new dress was only about how it made me look and feel. But I recently shifted almost all my clothes shopping to a consignment shop a few blocks from home. Talk about gratifications! My purchases cost a fraction of what I used to spend. So I feel prudently frugal. I also feel great about not having to use fossil fuel to travel to distant stores. I’ve gotten friendly with the owners, so I feel more connected to my town. And all this is happening before I also register that, in buying a used item, I’ve triggered less resource use. And those LED lights? A problem solved! Pogue led me to a perfect birthday gift for my son Anthony, whose super-high ceiling in Manhattan means that changing a light bulb requires waiting for a building maintenance guy with an extension ladder. Since LEDs last 25 times longer than incandescents, I was able to make that hassle history. And, I got a big kick out of realizing that over 25 years, according to Pogue, my gift could save his family $200 in replacement bulbs and electricity. And, for me? Hey, I’ve saved myself ever worrying about my son or daughter-in-law atop a wobbly ladder. You see? Gratifications everywhere. My point is really simple. If we environmentalists stay locked in the frame that environmentalism has to fight human nature to win, we’ll lose. Instead, we can celebrate human nature — our desire for more meaning, power, and connection. With an eco-mind, we increasingly see the connectedness of all life, and thus endless opportunities for gratifying those needs and more. Lappé explores these ideas further in EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think to Create the World We Want , new April 23, 2013 in paperback from Nation Books. Originally published by Huffington Post on 04/04/2013

Originally published by Common Dreams on 04/01/2013 In the summer of 2010, Robert DuBois and Aaron Zueck headed out on a 100 day bike trip across the country to document the thriving local foods movement. In the YouTube video of this “potluck across America,” the two seem genuinely passionate about farmers and healthy food—and the movement they’re documenting. As the screen goes black, a voiceover says: “Every time you drink Pepsi you support the Pepsi Refresh project. Every Pepsi refreshes the world.” What’s one of the world’s biggest soda companies got to do with a local foods bike trek? Turns out Aaron and Robert had gotten enough votes on Pepsi’s website to earn $5,000 from the company’s Pepsi Refresh campaign. In return, the two gave the multinational corporation the right to use their story to burnish their brand. Launched in 2010, Pepsi Refresh was a brilliant new marketing strategy that drew millions to the company’s Web site to “vote” on community-based projects to win grants between $5,000 and $50,000. It’s one of the best examples of a new corporate PR strategy that hides marketing beneath the cover of philanthropy. In a fabulous new report “ Selfish Giving: How the Soda Industry Uses Philanthropy to Sweeten Its Profits ,” researchers at the Center for Science in the Public Interest call it “philanthro-marketing.” I remember that summer of 2010 being bombarded with pleas from friends and colleagues to vote for worthy projects in the running for Pepsi Refresh, projects like Aaron and Robert’s. At the time, I heard few people being publicly critical of Pepsi Refresh. In fact, one community activist from the Bronx even described Pepsi Refresh as “democracy in action.” But what was Pepsi Refresh really? It was a cleverly structured marketing campaign that drew people close to the brand while bringing heavy traffic to the company’s Web site—you could vote once a day, but as many times as you wanted. Thousands of projects jockeyed for grants; only 32 were given every month. And while $50,000, even $5,000, is a significant contribution to a community project, it’s a tiny fraction of the company’s marketing budget. (Each month about $1 million was given away; consider that the CEO of Pepsi herself brought home $1.3 million a month ). As the CSPI report makes clear, this isn’t charity. “PepsiCo’s annual contributions to human sustainability programs, $2.3 million in 2011,” the authors write, “were… dwarfed by the company’s $60 million sponsorship of just one television show—The X Factor.” My Coke Rewards is Coca-Cola’s equivalent. Through purchases of Coke products, consumers earn points to redeem for prizes. The program has developed an interface specifically for schools and Parent-Teacher Associations across the country bill My Coke Rewards as a great fundraising tool for schools. Like this Chicago-area PTA that encouraged participation in My Coke Rewards: Our school has “joined the My Coke Rewards program,” said the PTA’s Web site. “That means by drinking Coca-Cola products your family can get My Coke Rewards points and donate them to help our school.” Nevermind the questionable practice of aligning with a company whose products are linked to the obesity crisis. Or, that as far as fundraising goes, it’s not such a great bang for your buck. We did the math: To earn just one physical activity pack for your school, you’d need to buy 55,440 cans of Coke, which would cost $11,550. Seems like there’s a more effective way to get your school 350 bucks worth of jump ropes, balls, cones, and basic gym supplies. In tough economic times, communities are particularly vulnerable to getting co-opted by programs like My Coke Rewards or Pepsi Refresh where they become de facto marketers for the companies. But as the CSPI report makes clear: Public policy solutions could garner as much or more revenue without sacrificing our power, and handing over goodwill, to the companies whose products—like Coke and Pepsi—are at the center of our healthcare crisis. Soda taxes, for instance, could be a powerful mechanism for raising much-needed public funds, especially for health promotion and physical activity programs for youth, CSPI notes. In fact, the report claims that one proposed soda tax in Philadelphia could have raised $77 million a year for the city, with $20 million specifically earmarked for obesity prevention programs. But the food industry fought hard against Philadelphia’s proposed tax, as they have everywhere such taxes have been proposed. And in 2011, after the city’s Mayor proposed the two-cent-per-ounce excise tax on sugary drinks, Philadelphia’s City Council rejected it. “Perhaps to celebrate the demise of the tax bill or to inoculate against a future tax proposal,” said CSPI . “In 2011 the beverage industry funneled a $10 million donation to CHOP by creating a new non-profit organization, the Foundation for a Healthy America.” Back in 2010 at the height of the Pepsi Refresh campaign, the executive director of a girls club in New York City publicly drew her line in the sand, in a blog called “ Pimping for Pepsi? I’d Rather Sell Cupcakes! ” “It feels so schizophrenic,” she wrote, “to promote products and ideas we spend our working days challenging.” She’s right: I urge you to read CSPI’s whole report here and then let’s get back to the work of challenging companies that are making our communities sick.

Don’t laugh. It’s true, and it’s serious business. Today is the world’s first International Happiness Day, declared by the UN to signal the importance of going beyond Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a measure of progress. We need, says the UN, better measures of society’s real wellbeing — including happiness. GDP was never meant for the job. In 1934, Harvard economist and Nobel Laureate Simon Kuznets devised the measure to help the U.S. climb out of the Great Depression, but he was clear about GDP’s limits, warning congress that “the welfare of a nation can...scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income...” How right he was. Since the 1960s, U.S. GDP per capita has doubled , but average happiness? It hasn’t budged . Finally, people are starting to pay attention. Noting what a poor guide GDP has been, an international movement is underway to create metrics of progress that incorporate multi-faceted wellbeing. And, it could be game changer, if you consider this finding of the Gallup Millennium World Survey: Polling almost 60,000 people in 60 countries, Gallup ranked ten things that matter most to people. At the top were health, a happy family life, and a job, while “Standard of Living” — what the GDP supposedly captures — was one of the least important. Leading the movement to remake what we measure has been the tiny, mountainous Asian nation of Bhutan, population of 740,000. Its goal is “Gross National Happiness.” Six weeks ago, as a member of a UN-promoted International Expert Group for a New Development Paradigm, I traveled to Bhutan where, with a couple dozen others invited from around the world, I deliberated on how to measure wellbeing. Why Bhutan? In 2005, after the Fourth King relinquished the throne to his son and instituted a British-style parliamentary democracy, Bhutan began in earnest to build the world’s first Gross National Happiness Index — a comprehensive approach to measuring well-being that includes not only psychological well-being (life satisfaction, emotions, and spirituality) but also subjective assessments in eight other “domains” that include health, education, good governance, and ecological diversity and resilience. Five years later a Bhutan survey found 41 percent of its people happy, meaning they’d attained “sufficiency” in two-thirds of (weighted) indicators, such as work, literacy and housing. Only 10 percent were “unhappy.” Then, in 2011, Bhutan took leadership on the world stage. In July it sponsored, with 68 co-sponsors, UN resolution 65/309, “Happiness: Towards a Holistic Approach to Development,” which flatly stated that GDP doesn’t reflect the goal of “happiness” and declares that a “more inclusive, equitable and balanced approach is needed...” UN General Assembly adopted the resolution by consensus and invited member states to take action. So in New York City last spring Bhutan hosted a meeting on new wellbeing indicators, attracting 800 enthusiastic attendees and exceeding all expectations. Already, a number of countries , including Canada, France and Britain “have added measures of citizen happiness to their official national statistics.” Just one year ago, Japan launched its first Quality of Life Survey that leads off with “a sense of happiness.” Italy is also a leader, in part using online consultations with citizens to develop twelve domains for measuring well-being, including health and the environment, along with specific indicators like “quality of urban air.” Here in the U.S., two state governments, Maryland and Minnesota, have gotten serious about happiness — generating more realistic, comprehensive measures of progress. Maryland’s Genuine Progress Indicator both subtracts and adds about two dozen things that GDP doesn’t capture: from, on the negative side, the costs of lost leisure time (as much as $12.5 billion a year), pollution clean-up and crime to, on the positive side, the value of volunteer work. And in 2011 the city of Somerville in Greater Boston became the first U.S. metropolitan to survey its residents on their happiness and wellbeing — finding, among many discoveries, that the city’s “beauty and physical setting” are “relatively important” in how residents value Somerville. On the first International Day of Happiness, just knowing these initiatives are getting underway and taken seriously by the United Nations, makes me happy. Originally published by the Huffington Post on March 9, 2013

Here it is: Power . Now, quick, before reading further, close your eyes. What associations come to mind? If your list is full words like coercion, force, guns, oppression, domination, money , you could be in big trouble. Turns out, our very idea of power can rob us of it. In its Latin root, posse , means simply the capacity to act. If to turn our planet toward life we need more and more of us to exert power, even more energetically and thoughtfully, but our associations with the very concept of power are all negative...then that’s a problem. A big one. So let’s rethink. What is power? Power is creating. It is making things happen. And it is perhaps the most under-appreciated human need. Most experts on what we need to be happy, beyond physical needs, stress the importance of satisfying personal relationships, security, and meaning. But Erich Fromm gets it right in my view. Of humanity he writes, “[Man] is driven to make his imprint on the world, to transform and to change, and not only to be transformed and changed...” And if we can’t make our imprint positively, says Fromm, we try something else: “If... man is not able to act [he attempts] to restore his capacity. . . . One way is to submit to and identify with a person or group having power. . . . The other way... [is] to destroy.” And in today’s world, proof of his wisdom feels ever more evident. So the pressing question for our species: Can we consciously reframe this deep need for agency in ways that align with life? Can we shift from control as the primary expression of power to experience power as co-creating with nature? Co-creating power takes discipline. And I don’t mean just getting oneself to the voting booth or installing a solar panel. I mean mental discipline—continually examining our own assumptions and refusing to go on repeating messages that aren’t working: Messages that simply blame corporations, for example, without also offering practical pathways to remove them from their controlling political role. “Anti-bad-guys-messages” can help us feel virtuous and release justifiable anger, but alone they can’t work. Co-creating power means staying open and keeping in touch with our inner two-year-old’s “Why, why, why?” Such co-creating power is expanding in part through largely unseen but growing citizen organizations, including Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC) , whose 5,000 plus members take on challenges from toxic dumping to making government more open; in 2010, they were key to halting a new coal plant in their state. Jean True, a KFTC leader in the 1990s, told me, “I was home raising kids for ten years. I didn’t know anything about politics. I thought my only job was to vote.” When I asked Jean to tell me why she joined KFTC, she responded, “It’s just the fun! That you can get together some regular people, go to the capitol, and make changes in state policy...We have a great time going toe to toe and head to head with state legislators. We sometimes know more than they do! It’s the fun of power — the ant knocking over the buffalo.” On the other side of the world in the year 2000, I danced with women in a Kenyan village, feeling the exuberant happiness in their new found power as village tree planters — part of the Greenbelt Movement that has planted over 50 million trees. So, accomplishing humanity’s biggest-ever feat — tackling both poverty and climate chaos via real democracy — may just depend on our shedding the myths now stripping us of power and, with the exuberance of dancing Kenyan tree planters, joining in Jean True’s kind of power. We can do it. We can do it if we do the work — the good work of checking our failing frames at the door and walking into a new space: There, in our ecological home, we’re all connected. So, guess what? We’re all implicated. That might not sound good, but it is. For the notion of power as a divisible pie — “If he has it, I don’t” — dissolves and we see that no one is every utterly powerless. Even entities as vast as the U.S. Pentagon or as wealthy as Exxon, with its $30,000-a-minute profit, are being shaped moment to moment through our own assumptions about what’s possible and by our daily roles in this magnificent life-and-death drama. “Thinking like an ecosystem,” what I love to call “eco-mind“ —and realizing our interconnectedness, suddenly, we see the sources of power available to almost all of us at any moment. Here are ten to mull: The power of curiosity: What most piques my curiosity and inspires me to learn more? How can I best pursue my curiosity? The power of connection: Whom can I reach out to right now — friends, strangers, groups—to help keep me going? The power of frame and language: What is one piece of my current mental map—my core assumptions about life—I can reframe to free myself? What words do I use that keep my thinking mired in the world of separateness, lack, and loss? And what new words will allow me to see connection, strength and possibility? The power of action: What is one act I can take right now to align my life with the world I want and make me more powerful? The power of agitation: What disturbs me? How can I transform that disturbance into energy for action? The power of self-awareness: What is an important strength I already have — knowledge, contacts, moral courage — that I can share? How do I grow my strengths? How do I use my strengths to empower others? The power of daily attention: What is one change I can adopt right now that enriches my life because it reminds me every day of my embeddedness in nature? The power of inspiration: Who are my heroes — my everyday heroes — and how can I bring them more fully into my life? How can I myself act in a way that I can become a hero to myself and inspire others? The power of embracing fear: What is one risk I could take now to enhance my creative power? The power of organization: How can I join and strengthen groups that aligned with a frame of possibility? In other words, with an eco-mind, the only choice we don’t have is whether to change the world. We are changing it every day. Recognizing our power, we can be tough. We can challenge any message telling us we can’t have real democracy so just give up on government, or scolding us for being greedy or apathetic, when most of us want to be part of the solution. Claiming our power as co-creators, we can together speed an evolving and immensely liberating ecology of hope. Adapted from EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think to Create the World We Want (New in paperback from Nation Books) Photo: Small Planet Institute Originally published by Huffington Post on 08/06/2013

Who doesn’t feel like throwing in the towel... with congressional approval ratings at a pitiful 10 percent ? For pete’s sake, even the much-reviled “socialism“ has more than double the fans. Yet a moment’s reflection tells us we can’t solve any of our giant challenges without public decision-making bodies that work. So settling for the best democracy money can buy is not an option. And just as clear? That we can’t we fix our broken democracy without a vision of one that could work. Human beings have a hard time creating what we can’t imagine or even name. Of course, our “vision” can’t be some pie-in-the sky, fairy-tale democracy. To be motivating, it has to be hard-nosed: grounded in all we now know — the good, bad, and the ugly — about nature, including our own. Here’s where we might begin: First, we stop assuming that the prevailing version of liberal democracy — elections plus markets — is the best we humans can do. Then, we appreciate what ecology has to teach us about democracy. It’s a lot. Simply put, ecology holds these main lessons: that everything’s connected and everything’s changing — with all elements shaping all others moment to moment. We, like all organisms, respond to context. “Thinking like an ecosystem,” we can see therefore that our inherited notion of democracy as an unchanging, political structure — fixed and finished — is bound to fail. With an “eco-mind,” we realize that democracy’s first questions must be: What are our species’ essential needs? And, then, what specific contexts have proven to elicit our species’ capacities to build societies meeting those needs? Anthropologists, psychologists, and our everyday experience suggest at least three virtually universal human needs: for connection, meaning, and power (understood as the need to “make our mark.”) And to meet these needs, three conditions — increasingly violated in today’s many so-called democracies — appear essential: • The fluid, continuous dispersion of power. • Transparency in human relations. • Cultures of mutual accountability, instead of one-way blame. If you doubt this short-list, just think where the opposites have taken us! These three conditions could become our “lodestar,” as we embrace democracy understood as a way of life — not something we build once and for all, but a culture we continuously create together. I call it Living Democracy. It’s not a set system but a set of system values and conditions — the dispersion of power, transparency, and mutual accountability — that bring forth the best and keep the worst in check across all dimensions of public life, from our workplaces to our schools. Living Democracy builds from the insight that today’s problems are too complex, interwoven, and pervasive to be solved from the top down. People rarely change by fiat. So solutions require the ingenuity, insights, experience, and “buy-in” of those most directly affected by the problems we face. The term “living democracy” suggests democracy as both a lived experience and an evolving, organic reality — “easily lost but never finally won,” in the words of the first African-American federal judge William Hastie. But... are we capable, many might ask? Didn’t human beings evolve within strict hierarchies, vestiges of which linger today in gender, class, and caste power structures? Actually, no. During 95 percent of our evolution, humans lived in highly egalitarian tribes, anthropologists tell us. We kept them that way through “counter dominance” strategies because we humans thrive best when we work together, not under the thumb of one strong man. And what does an emergent Living Democracy look and feel like? In learning... we afford “arts of democracy” — i.e., listening, mediation, negotiation, and more — priority equal to reading, writing and “rithmetic.” Students engage in practical community problem-solving through, for example, what the Maine-based KIDS Consortium calls “apprentice citizenship.” From environmental restoration to teaching younger kids bike safety, children in hundreds of schools are getting a taste for how good it feels to make a difference. Now, in dozens of countries, children are also learning the art of mediating disputes among themselves instead of simply running to an authority or fighting. In economic life... Seeing through the fiction of a mechanical, autonomous “free market,” an “eco-mind” sees the possibility of democratic system-rules creating values boundaries that keep power widely dispersed and markets fair, open, and aligned with nature’s laws. (Perhaps the “free market” could then be redefined as one in which all are free to participate because it is kept accessible by fair rules.). And we go beyond “fair distribution” to also embrace “ fair production “; for it fulfills the core human need for agency. Fair production suggests opportunities for people to participate in co-production via cooperatives and other forms of co-ownership. And, even now, they’re hardly marginal: Coops of all types worldwide enjoy many more members — a billion! —than there are people with shares in publicly traded companies. Cooperatives produce 20 percent more jobs than do multinational corporations. In rural India, for example, they meet 67 percent of consumer needs. In political life and civic life... Living Democracy means rules that prevent the influence of concentrated private wealth and corporation in campaigns and lawmaking, along with election rules barring advertising and ensuring candidates’ fair access to media. But fair elections and formal political decision-making accountable to citizens — not private interests — are but the beginning. Living Democracy means multiple avenues for rewarding engagement. One is the “Citizen Jury“ that in the Global South has, for example, brought diverse interests together to come to judgment on the direction of agricultural development, leading to strengthening ecological farming. Another, the “Deliberative Poll”: In Japan in 2012 this practice helped move the government to adopt the goal of ending all reliance on nuclear power before 2040; and in Texas , a Deliberative Poll used by utility companies helped the state become a leader in wind power. A great source for exemplars of Living Democracy is Participedia.net. In Living Democracy, citizens also become active co-creators of knowledge, as, for example, citizen water monitors responsible for gathering water quality data now in 77 countries. Citizens also contribute to community well-being by sharing their knowledge and monitoring well-being, such as Nepal’s community health volunteers. In these arenas and more, Living Democracy is showing up worldwide. But it can’t spread quickly as long it’s invisible. So, let’s remember that we humans, too, are shaped by our ecological niche — especially our social ecology. To further the world we want, we can start consciously creating forms of democracy creating the conditions proven to enhance species’ thriving — and thus to the well-being of all species. Adapted from Ecomind: Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want and from the Solutions Journal article “ EcoMind or ScarcityMind: Where Do They Lead? “ Photo: American Flag of Faces. Image from Creative Commons. Originally published by Huffington Post on 09/18/2013

Originally published by Food Tank on 12/18/2015 Trade ministers from around the world are concluding a contentious week of negotiations in Nairobi, Kenya under the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Doha Development Round. Thus far, there is no indication that Pope Francis, when he was in Nairobi three weeks earlier, blessed the Kenyatta International Convention Center where the summit will take place. Given the intransigent tone of the U.S. and other developed country representatives, a papal blessing may be the only thing that can produce an outcome worthy of the WTO’s current mandate to promote development. The United States is demanding nothing less than the ending of the Doha Round. A welcome shot in the arm came earlier this week from Dr. Hilal Elver, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, who issued a statement urging negotiators to deepen their commitment to achieving the development objectives of the Doha Round. She called it “profoundly troubling” that a “handful of countries” are calling for an end to Doha. Trade rules and the right to food The Special Rapporteur’s sharply worded statement highlights the importance of fair trade in achieving the U.N. mandate for governments to promote “the progressive realization of the right to food.” Trade rules can – and do – undermine food security in developing countries in a number of ways, and many of those issues are at the center of the WTO’s agriculture negotiations. Trade rules allow excessive levels of “domestic support” for their farmers by rich countries, which results in the “dumping” of cheap, subsidized commodities on developing country markets. WTO rules, strictly applied, can threaten legitimate food security programs, such as the public procurement of staple food crops at administered prices (to benefit poor farmers) for distribution to the poor at subsidized prices. Many countries, including the WTO host government of Kenya, maintain such programs. India’s vastly expanded food security program came under fire from the United States and a few other countries, which used arcane WTO calculations to inflate the estimated subsidy implied by such programs. The conflict almost prevented agreement in Bali, Indonesia two years ago. Such conflicts between trade rules and the right to food prompted a public dust-up in 2011 between then-WTO head Pascal Lamy and then-Special Rapporteur Olivier De Schutter. De Schutter had issued a briefing note identifying the many ways in which WTO rules undermined the right to food. As a human right, De Schutter argued, the right to food should take precedence and trade rules should promote rather than impede its realization. The subsequent attack on India’s National Food Security Act (NFSA) only highlighted De Schutter’s point. India’s National Food Security Act (NFSA), approved in 2013, seeks to reach hundreds of millions of poor farmers with better prices while providing basic foods to fully two-thirds of the nation’s people. It represents a huge step toward achieving the right to food, which had been formally upheld by the Indian Supreme Court. United States farm policies under fire The United States led the calls in Bali to question India’s food security measures, calling them – apparently with a straight face – an unfair subsidy to India’s farmers. The hypocrisy of that charge was only made more stark by the passage the following year of the new U.S. farm bill. Though claiming to reduce “trade-distorting” subsidies, the bill may well end up increasing them. Early projections suggest that commodity payments to farmers will be around US$12 billion, higher than in recent years. There is little doubt that U.S. cotton subsidies will have such a “price-suppressing” effect. A recent study estimated that removing the new subsidies to cotton, which were supposed to be WTO-compliant, would reduce U.S. exports by 29 percent while raising prices 7 percent. The costs of lowered prices and lost markets to other cotton producers were estimated at US$3.3 billion per year, US$16 billion over the five-year life of the farm bill. India, the country the United States accuses of unfairly subsidizing its farmers, would be one of the hardest hit, with lost cotton revenues of US$800 million per year. The so-called Cotton 4 West African countries – Mali, Chad, Benin, and Burkina Faso – which had been promised “expeditious” action on U.S. cotton subsidies fully ten years ago, now face losses collectively of US$80 million per year. Will the WTO abandon development? U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman, in a bold stroke of hypocrisy, opened his speech to the WTO plenary calling on trade representatives “to move beyond the cynical repetition of positions designed to produce deadlock.” Deadlock, of course, is exactly what Froman wants so he can start shaping the WTO in the image of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an agreement far more to the liking of the U.S. negotiators. This is no time to abandon the development mandate embodied in the WTO’s Doha Round. More than one hundred WTO member countries issued a statement challenging the call to end the negotiations, citing Doha’s many unmet promises. The African group issued a statement with India and other developing country allies demanding the reaffirmation of the Doha mandate. Special Rapporteur Hilal Elver agrees. She particularly urged the removal of rich country policies that “hamper efforts by developing country governments to increase domestic food production, particularly by smallholder farmers whose families are among the world’s hungry.” If rich countries are permitted to jettison the Doha Round and put their own priority issues on the table instead, we’ll be looking at what the late great U.S. baseball legend Yogi Berra called “déjà vu all over again” – a few developed countries setting the agenda and writing the rules in their own interests. That history is what prompted the present effort to seek greater equity in the WTO. It should not be abandoned.

Originally published by TIME on 11/26/2015 Just five years ago, many would have considered it impossible to pass a $15 minimum wage in this country. Today, nine cities, counties or states have passed policies for $15 an hour or more. Many others are contemplating similar measures. Several years ago even the most diehard labor activist would have considered it pie-in-the-sky to imagine mass action by the low wage workers of Walmart, the largest corporation in the world. This Black Friday, thousands of Walmart workers and their supporters will take to the streets again to demand $15 an hour and full-time hours. As we gather around the table today, we are connected to this movement whether we realize it or not. Paleo or vegan, gluten-free or omnivorous, your dinner has been brought to you by likely hundreds of the 20 million people who work along the food chain: from meat packers to truckers, grocery clerks and farmworkers. Perhaps no other day is so clearly a reminder of how out of whack are the values of our food chain. While healthy, safe, affordable food is likely high on all of our lists of important things, those making sure such food is on our tables are among the most exploited, overworked and underpaid. According to research from the Food Chain Workers Alliance , a national network of 25 food worker organizations representing over 300,000 workers, 86 percent of all food workers are either paid below the minimum wage or below a living wage. A full 23 percent of food workers are paid less than the minimum wage with tipped employees receiving a trifling $2.13 an hour under federal law. It’s not just poor wages; it’s also dangerous working conditions. Workers on conventional farms are exposed to a barrage of toxic chemicals, many of which have been associated with a variety of cancers and hormonal and neurological problems. Studies published by the California Cancer Registry have found that farmworkers have higher risks of lymphomas and leukemia , as well as brain, stomach, prostate and cervical cancers. Workers across the food chain are at risk. Meat processors, for example, are injured on the job at two and a half times the rate of the national average—a reality that has gotten worse as the industry has pushed out organized labor and workers have lost protections. In his devastating book The Chain , journalist Ted Genoways details the dangerous conditions on pork processing floors in the Midwest where line speeds force workers to work harder and faster, leading to a range of health concerns. It’s no surprise to us that worker protections are key to food safety. We have seen time and time again that workers who don’t have union protection are afraid to speak up about food safety violations for fear of losing their jobs. And in one survey of Alliance members , 53 percent reported going to work sick because they lacked paid sick days or protection for an illness-related absence. In fact, four out of five workers surveyed reported either not having paid sick days or not knowing whether they did—which generally means they do not. The call for higher wages for food workers is often met with concern about skyrocketing food prices. We understand the worry. After all, 45 million Americans—that’s more than the entire population of Canada—rely on government support to feed their families. But data shows meaningful improvement in worker wages need not translate into significant increases in food prices. In one study from UC Berkeley , if Walmart raised its minimum wage to $12 per hour, the cost to the average shopper would be just 46 cents per trip. In another study, researchers found that a 40 percent increase in restaurant workers’ minimum wage raised prices by less than 3 percent. When the Coalition of Immokalee Workers secured a big win for its Florida tomato pickers, they were able to double members’ income with only one penny more per pound of tomatoes. Even if growers passed on the entire raise to consumers, we believe most would be willing to pay a penny more per pound for fairness. How can we know workers are paid and treated fairly? There are more and more ways to do so. The national network Restaurant Opportunities Centers United and RAISE, an association of industry leaders, are developing a cadre of “high-road” restaurants championing living wages, basic benefits and fair promotion policies. The new label, Food Justice-Certified , will be another tool to assure worker fairness. And while the organic certification is not a labor standard—there are no provisions for wages or working conditions—choosing organic-certified food does guarantee that farmers and farmworkers aren’t exposed to toxic pesticides in the field. As we dig into our meal today, we do so at a moment when there is a sea change afoot in food, from a system built on exploitation to an emergent one built on respect and fairness. One day soon, we hope, all of us will be able to dine with the peace of mind that everyone along the food chain was treated with dignity. To get there will take all of us: food workers and concerned eaters, united together. As workers take to the streets and diners nationwide call for higher wages, we’re more confident than ever that we will.

Drawn from World Hunger: 10 Myths, by Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins. It’s a “protein factory in reverse!” I declared more than forty years ago in Diet for a Small Planet . In my outburst, I was targeting livestock—especially cattle. But little did I imagine in 1971 just how this “factory’s” capacity to shrink our food supply would multiply. Today, worldwide, three-fourths of all agricultural land, including pasture, is used to produce animal products. But from all this, what do we get? Just 17 percent of our calories. That’s what I mean by “shrink.” To understand why humans get so little, consider livestock’s “take”: About half the world’s calories from crops don’t go to people. Instead they go primarily to feed livestock—which consume a third of the world’s grain and 85 percent of soy—as well as into agrofuel production and other industrial purposes. Let this sink in. Then note also that all livestock are not created equal in their capacity to shrink our food-resource potential. Beef wins the inefficiency prize: Of the calories that cattle eat in feed, humans get a measly 3 percent in the beef we eat. The following table reveals the big differences in the capacity of livestock to convert what they eat into calories we eat. Dairy, for example, is about thirteen times more efficient than beef, chicken about four times. Given this extreme inefficiency, it shouldn’t surprise us that livestock-centric U.S. agriculture—viewed by many as the pinnacle of efficiency—actually feeds fewer people per hectare, 5.4, than the less meat-focused Chinese, 8.4, or Indian, 5.9. What a contrast to the presumption of America’s great agricultural superiority! But, of course, livestock were not always shrinking our food supply. Throughout human evolution animals have converted grass and other things we don’t eat into high-grade protein we do eat—a big boon for humans. But over time we have remade livestock into nutrition disposals. This we can change. Worldwide, converting just half of crops fed to livestock into crops for humans could yield enough food for two billion people or be converted to carbon-storing forests. Looking at the impact of what we eat from another angle, what would be the result of shifting modestly from beef to other animal foods? Replacing even a fifth of the beef eaten globally with the more efficient pork or poultry would reduce the total agricultural area needed for all to eat in 2030 by about the same amount—a fifth—find scientists at Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology. “Water Guzzlers” Beyond this loss of potential food energy, there’s another waste built into livestock production that’s taking on ever greater importance: water waste. Just as climate change is making water more precious, livestock production is using ever more of it. First note that nearly 70 percent of freshwater used by humans goes into irrigation, and much of it is used on crops and pasture for livestock—the big water guzzlers. In drought-plagued California, for example, meat and dairy account for almost half of the state’s entire water footprint. Nearly a fifth of its irrigation water goes to just one feed crop, alfalfa. So even as water scarcity worsens, every year 100 billion gallons of California water in the form of alfalfa go to China for meat production there. In all, a pound of beef uses : •almost fifty times more water than growing a pound of vegetables •about forty times more water than potatoes and other root crops •about nine times more water than grain. More than half of water used in the entire Colorado River basin, reaching six states including California, “is dedicated to feeding cattle and horses,” reports the Pacific Institute. Or consider this: One could bathe daily for more than a month with the water used to produce a pound of beef! Why would a smart species actively shrink its food supply and waste ever-more precious fresh water? Originally published by Huffington Post on 11/10/15