Living Democracy, Feeding Hope

“We’ve hit the limits of a finite Earth!” Ever heard this environmentalists’ call to action? If you have, it’s probably made intuitive sense. After all, aren’t ecosystems in collapse everywhere? The message warns us that we’ve crossed the line, and the obvious takeaway: Pull back just as fast as we can. Not only is the message common, it is passionately felt. Barely off the podium after delivering the opening address at a conference of campus sustainability leaders, I was hit by a blast of anger. I’d outraged a professor of ecology by questioning the usefulness — even the accuracy — of this oft-heard battle cry. He didn’t buy my critique, and I winced and wriggled as I tried, and failed, to explain. So I’m using this venue to clarify what I wish the professor had heard. “Hit the limits” is a lousy construct of our crisis for a bunch of reasons. First, most people hear “hit the limits” and understandably assume it means that we’ve hit the limits of nature to meet human needs, period. Persistent messages of food and water scarcity and “overpopulation” seem to tell us just that. “Scarcity is the new norm,” wrote Lester Brown a few years ago. And from there, a lot of us might well conclude that, having hit the limits of nature’s capacity to provide for us, we must do one better than nature. Yes! We must quickly go beyond nature with genetically engineered seeds and geo-engineering of the climate. We must make whatever intervention is necessary to extend Earth’s limits. Is that the response sought by those using the slogan? I don’t think so. Second, “hitting the limits” is bound to heighten fear. It’s hard to imagine solutions to absolute scarcities, and all of them seem to involve painful cutbacks reducing the quality of our lives. Yet, psychologists tell us that fear, especially of our own mortality, typically makes people more materialistic and self-centered. Not exactly the desired response, either. But there’s a deeper drawback to the message of quantitative overreach: It doesn’t accurately define the problem, and thus leads us away from real answers. Take hunger, for example. Is it the result of hitting nature’s quantitative limits? Not when a third of all food is literally wasted and we waste vast food potential by devoting three-fourths of all agricultural land to animal food production that supplies only 16 percent of our calories. In fact, of all the calories livestock consume, humans get only 3 percent in the animal flesh we eat. Or consider energy: In the U.S., it’s estimated that from 55 to 87 percent is wasted. And nature’s potential supply? The sun brings us 15,000 times the daily dose of energy — mostly untapped — relative to what we currently consume in fossil fuels. And beyond waste, just one example of destruction: Every year unsustainable farming practices result in a loss of topsoil equal to seven pick-up trucks’ full of topsoil for each person on earth each year; yet it takes 200 years, at least, to generate one inch of this resource essential to our survival. Diagnosing the problem as quantitative overreach doesn’t lead us to think systemically, which is the only way we’ll get to the root of our crises. We’re not encouraged to see that, for example, we could cut the plastic garbage in the oceans by half and we’d still have a plastic soup the size of Texas . We could cut by half the rate of depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer and still be running out of groundwater in major areas of the farm belt in a few decades. Cutbacks alone can’t succeed. As a slogan, “Hitting the limits of the Earth” can be heard as blaming the skimpiness of nature, or blaming greedy, over-consuming humans, when most of us are experiencing real lack: One in four children is stunted by malnutrition. Instead, we can learn to think systemically. Doing so, we see that, yes indeed, we have crossed a limit. It is this: We’ve exceeded the destruction of nature that humanity can wreak without causing horrific, irreparable loss and suffering. We’ve disrupted nature’s regenerative powers. We need new metaphors that ignite our curiosity about the underlying human-made economic and political systems that cause this waste and destruction of nature; as well as make what we do produce unavailable to those who most need it. We need messages that point to underlying, failing systems, not mere quantities. We need messages suggesting that life will be much better — not bleaker — as we learn to align with nature’s laws and our own commonsense. How about? “We’ve broken the laws of nature,” so “let’s learn from nature.” How about? “We’re actively creating scarcity out of plenty, so let’s align with the laws of nature, and there is more than enough for all.” We can break free of the fear-inducing message of scarcity. We can take a deep breath, use our common sense, and find the courage to recreate democratic, fair economies in which we produce food and energy for all in ways that regenerate nature’s richness. I sure hope my antagonist reads this. Photo courtesy of Creative Commons Article originally published by the Huffington Post on March 12, 2014

Originally published by Al Jazeera on 08/01/2014 This past weekend, biotech giant Monsanto paid bloggers $150 each to attend “an intimate and interactive panel” with “two female farmers and a team from Monsanto.” The strictly invitation-only three-hour brunch, which took place on the heels of the BlogHer Conference, promised bloggers a chance to learn about “where your food comes from” and to hear about the “impact growing food has on the environment, and how farmers are using fewer resources to feed a growing population.” Though the invitation from BlogHer explicitly stated, “No blog posts or social media posts expected,” the event was clearly designed to influence the opinions — and the writing — of a key influencer: the mommy blogger. Another invite-only event in August will bring bloggers to a Monsanto facility in Northern California for a tour of its fields and research labs. Again, while no media coverage is expected, the unspoken goal is clear. Stealth marketing techniques, such as these by Monsanto, reveal how the food industry — from biotech behemoths to fast-food peddlers — is working surreptitiously to shape public opinion about biotechnology, industrialized farming and junk food. We’ve come a long way from Don Draper’s whisky-infused ad concepts meant for old-style print publications. As our media landscape has changed, Big Ag has changed along with it, devising marketing to take advantage of this new terrain and influence the people and platforms — not just journalists and newspapers — that shape our understanding of farming and the health impacts of biotechnology and junk food. Sean Timberlake, who has been blogging for nearly a decade, characterized industry’s move into the social media space as “sweeping and vast.” He explained that back when he started out, “I don’t think the Monsantos of the world understood what blogs were — or cared,” but now, “companies develop entire budget lines for social media programs. They build it into their whole ad budget.” Ad networks such as BlogHer and Federated — two of the biggest — facilitate companies’ advertising and outreach on blogs by aggregating blogs to sell as a bigger package. These networks, Timberlake explained, “can be leveraged and used as a bullhorn for their marketing.” Sure, PR is an old game, but Big Ag is giving the age-old techniques of shaping public opinion a new, sneakier spin. Much of today’s marketing happens behind the scenes and off the printed page — on the Web pages of blogs, on Twitter feeds and Facebook pages, through sponsored content and industry-funded webisodes and on the stages of big-ideas festivals. Monsanto is not the only food company engaging with the blogosphere. Mommy bloggers are the food industry’s newest nontraditional ally. McDonald’s has been wooing them aggressively too, offering sweepstakes in partnership with BlogHer for the company’s Listening Tour Luncheon , an exclusive event with the head of McDonald’s USA — framed as a two-way conversation about nutrition, but more likely a gambit to garner the support of a powerful group of influencers. And in Canada, McDonald’s offers All-Access Mom, behind-the-scenes tours of the company’s inner workings. It’s not just through blogger meet-and-greets that industry is attempting to sway opinion. Video is an increasingly popular (and shareable) medium for PR disguised as content. This summer, for example, Monsanto is funding a Condé Nast Media Group film series called “A Seat at the Table.” According to a casting call, each three- to five-minute episode will cover questions such as “Are food labels too complicated?” and “GMOs: good or bad?” and will feature “an eclectic mix of industry and nonindustry notables with diverse viewpoints.” It’s hard to imagine truly free-flowing discussions resulting, paid for as they are by a company with a definitive take on — and stake in — the food-labeling wars. The U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance, meanwhile, funded the documentary “ Farmland ,” described as a “look at the lives of farmers and ranchers,” but whose narrative — as critics have been quick to point out — “glorif[ies] the trend toward larger, more industrialized farms.” No surprise, given that the film’s financing comes from an agribusiness front group . Big Ag is putting its communications dollars toward big-ideas events too, such as the Aspen Ideas Festival, where underwriters such as Monsanto are celebrated — and get a voice. Monsanto executives got to share their opinions onstage about GMO labeling (surprise: they’re not in favor of state-based labeling initiatives) and how best to feed the world (again: their chemicals and genetically engineered seeds are key to combating hunger). And past years have seen Coca-Cola , DuPont and Syngenta executives all touting their companies’ sustainability onstage. The uptick in these stealth-marketing strategies coincides with growing popular outcry about agricultural chemicals, soda and junk food and genetically modified ingredients. Consider that despite millions spent on marketing over the two decades since genetically engineered seeds were first commercialized, 93 percent of Americans still think GMOs should be labeled and 65 percent are either unsure about the technology or believe it to be unsafe. Last year, when Monsanto retained the PR firm FleishmanHillard , known for its work with social media and agribusiness, to develop its new marketing initiatives, it did so “amid fierce opposition to the seed giant’s genetically modified products,” noted the Holmes Report , a PR industry publication. The father of public relations, Edward Bernays, might never have dreamed up the age of Twitter and Facebook, but he likely wouldn’t be surprised to see food-industry tweets and Facebook ads dressed up as news. Bernays knew the importance of constant PR innovation. If the public “becomes weary of the old methods used to persuade it,” he wrote in his 1928 book “Propaganda,” then we must simply present our “appeals more intelligently.” Or, as we’re seeing with Monsanto and its food industry counterparts, if not exactly intelligently, then at least more surreptitiously: on the podium, the Twitter feeds and the mommy blogs.

Originally published by Al Jazeera on 07/24/2014 McDonald’s isn’t having a very good week. On Monday it made the news for expired meat turning up in as many as a quarter of its restaurants in China. And on Tuesday it released its second-quarter earnings report, which revealed stagnating profits and falling same-store sales, continuing an eight-quarter losing streak. Is the fast-food behemoth in trouble? This news is only the latest in a string of bad publicity this year. Back in April, when McDonald’s announced its iconic clown mascot’s new presence on social media and unveiled its makeover , the blogosphere flooded with mockery of the missteps. A “whimsical” red blazer? Yellow cargo pants? One blogger said the unfortunate look came “ straight out of 1998 .” The hashtag #NotLovinIt trended on Twitter. Then in May, when McDonald’s launched its next big makeover — this time of its Happy Meal mascot — the Twittersphere erupted again. “Congrats #McDonalds, first you fatten our kids, then you haunt their nightmares” was one of the many taunting tweets. The company defended its bizarre redesign — a smiling red box with big, creepy teeth and spindly arms, named “Happy.” “We are not unhappy about [the response],” McDonald’s senior marketing director told CNN at the time. “Happy is not for everyone. He’s about having fun. Really for kids and families.” The makeovers seemed to be part of the company’s broader strategy to regain footing in the face of eight quarters of stagnating returns and the rise of competitors like Starbucks and Chipotle. It’s a move all the more salient given McDonald’s announcement of its returns this week: Profits fell again, by 1 percent, and same-store sales continued their slump, dropping 1.5 percent. In its Tuesday call with reporters , the company’s CEO, Don Thompson, said this poor performance was expected: McDonald’s is focusing on “strengthening the foundational elements of our business,” he said. The company also blamed “ongoing broad challenges” (i.e., the problem isn’t McDonald’s, it’s the economy). Meanwhile, though, one of its biggest competitors, the burrito giant Chipotle, saw a whopping 17 percent jump in same-store sales — and is being dubbed a “ market star ” for its ability to woo customers with fresh, good-quality ingredients. While McDonald’s is still the world’s largest fast-food chain, its profit struggles are just another indication of its bigger identity problem. (The only reason stock prices didn’t dive further in the face of these results is that they were basically in line with expectation.) As the fast-food sector’s leader in sales, McDonald’s has repeatedly come under fire for being a key driver of the epidemic of diet-related illnesses sweeping the planet, especially among children. It’s time the company took a hard look at what it could do to turn this around. Groups such as Corporate Accountability International, with which I work, have called on the industry giant to take the lead in curbing its predatory marketing of kids, asking the company to, for instance, shut down HappyMeal.com, its flagship Web portal that targets preschoolers. In the face of mounting public pressure, McDonald’s needs to implement much more than mascot redesigns. The new looks for Ronald and “Happy” were supposed to give the company a boost with a rebrand of its signature target-the-children features, but what’s on the menu and in the box remains just as concerning to parents. A typical Happy Meal configuration I tried out on its online MealBuilder interface would serve half the calories my 5-year-old daughter should eat in a day and deliver more than half the recommended sodium and as much as four times the recommended sugar — a whopping 42 grams. As McDonald’s comes under fire by parents and educators around the world for targeting kids — and serving poor-quality food — its rebranding efforts seem even more out of step. This quarter’s poor returns might be further evidence of it. Seeking to explain its poor performance, the company presented a host of reasons, mostly factors outside its control, and its focus on long-term growth. But based on the success of Chipotle, a competitor focused on higher quality, it’s clear something more is going on here. On the heels of another poor quarter, I would hope the company would finally listen to the concerns of its customers who want better food and less marketing to kids. Doing so might just help it see that targeting children, whether with creepy, toothy boxes or creepy, dopey clowns, is out of step with popular opinion — and that serving up high-calorie, high-salt and high-sugar foods (not to mention questionable meat) is too. It might just realize the tide is turning against companies that ignore the impact of their junk food offerings. It might just realize it must change or continue to face returns like the ones we saw this week, or, worse, see its market share slip into the hands of companies delivering better food with less of the ick factor.

Originally published by Triple Crisis Blog on 05/12/2014 On April 21, a Mexican judge dealt a blow to the efforts of agricultural behemoth Monsanto and other biotech companies to open the country to the commercial cultivation of genetically modified (GM) maize. The ruling upheld the injunction issued last October that put a halt to further testing or commercial planting of the crop, citing “the risk of imminent harm to the environment.” In a fitting tribute to Mexican surrealism, Monsanto had accused the judge who upheld the injunction of failing to be “impartial.” I don’t know if the presiding judge smiled when he denied Monsanto’s complaint, but I did. I had just arrived in Mexico to look at the GM controversy, and I could tell it was going to be quite a visit. The original injunction came last October as the result of a class action suit filed by 53 citizen plaintiffs, including farmers, environmentalists, and consumers. They claimed the Mexican government’s approval of permits for planting genetically modified maize violated the country’s laws guaranteeing the protection of native varieties. The legal case is complex, but the core issue couldn’t be simpler. Mexico is recognized as the “center of origin” for maize, and is home to many diverse strains of the crop’s seeds. Each of these core strains—known as landraces—evolved over thousands of years in Mexico to adapt to both local environmental conditions and human tastes and desires. Each landrace has evolved further into a rich array of local varieties. Southern and central Mexico have long been known as the homes of maize biodiversity. Every year, indigenous communities there select their best seeds for planting the next crop cycle. That simple process, and the free exchange of seeds with other farmers, has produced the complex diversity that we find today. A recent study by Mexico’s National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (known by its Spanish acronym CONABIO) identified 65 distinct landraces of maize in the country, including several that had never before been catalogued. From those 65 confirmed landraces, the CONABIO study identified more than 22,000 different varieties of maize in Mexico. Experts fear that if genetically modified maize comes into the mix it could alter these landraces by pollinating native varieties and undermining the genetic integrity of the crops. This isn’t just a question of conservation. These maize varieties are the living, evolving base for modern plant-breeding, a resource drawn on by conventional maize breeders (and GM breeders like Monsanto) when they look to create hybrid varieties that can increase yields, resist drought, or provide other useful adaptations to changing climates and cropping environments. The native varieties are of such high value that samples of them are stored in ultra-secure locations around the world in the event of a catastrophe. For people from the United States—who tend to be familiar only with sweet corn on the cob and the yellow dent corn (unfit for human consumption) that feeds our animals and, through ethanol, our cars—this diversity is striking. One Mexican variety, for instance, is used almost exclusively for pozole, a subtly spiced soup with large whole kernels of white maize. Others are used for local tamales, which can be found in different forms throughout the country. Many are used for a rainbow of tortillas—white, blue, green, red. Mexican law recognizes this diversity. Its biosecurity law, approved in 2005, includes special protection for maize. GM maize, the law stipulates, is not to be sown in proximity to any area known to be a “center of origin” for maize. With no legal definition of this term, the Mexican government in 2009 approved biotech company requests to begin experimental trials in six northern states where maize diversity was considered negligible. The government was set to approve large-scale commercial planting of GM maize there when the injunction put a stop to all GM permits. To the naked eye, northern Mexico does not look like a center of diversity. It is dominated by huge irrigated farms that look like they could be in Iowa. These farms use hybrid white maize seeds developed either by national maize breeders or foreign multinationals. Their high yields provide a significant share of Mexico’s production of maize for direct human consumption, which totals more than 20 million tons a year. About 10 million additional tons a year come from the United States, but nearly all of it is yellow maize, and nearly all of that is genetically modified. Mexico’s industrialized white maize is the market Monsanto wants, even though field trials have been limited to yellow varieties. Mexico is one of the world’s largest producers and consumers of white maize. In an interview at the company’s high-rise headquarters in Mexico City, Jaime Mijares Noriega, Monsanto’s Latin America Director for Corporate Affairs, was surprisingly frank. “In order for the penetration of biotechnology crops to be successful, it will have to be for both white and yellow corn,” he said. “If it was only yellow, we would not be investing.” I was surprised. Wouldn’t Mexicans rebel en masse at the prospect that biotech companies were planning to put GM maize into their beloved tortillas and tamales? I asked him if he didn’t think it might be a harder sell, since consumers even in the United States are skeptical of directly consuming GM maize. He acknowledged that it “would take some time.” He dismissed concerns about gene flow, saying that their field trials had shown minimal pollination beyond 25 meters from the field. That’s not good enough for José Sarukhan, director of CONABIO. Gene flow is gene flow, and once a plant is contaminated with GM maize pollen it will then pollinate other plants. Sarukhan said that CONABIO researchers found a surprising number of native varieties in northern Mexico, precisely the regions where experimental GM plots were authorized. Sarukhan told me the strong presence of native seeds in the north made him rethink his previous support for limited GM maize trials in those states. According to Antonio Serratos, a researcher involved in CONABIO’s recent maize study, the entire country should be considered a center of origin. “You can’t just isolate the communities where you find native maize,” he said. Serratos also reminded me that the most pervasive form of gene flow isn’t pollen on the wind, it’s kernels of maize in people’s pockets. Peasant farmers are relentless experimenters, trying every type of maize they get their hands on to see if it produces something useful. They can’t know from looking at a kernel of maize whether it’s genetically modified or not. They assume it isn’t. If they plant it, its pollen will flow to neighboring plants. This is precisely what happened in the southern state of Oaxaca in 2002, when a farmer presumably took grains of maize from a food distribution, which contained imported GM maize, and planted them in his fields. Serratos says this kind of contamination was already prevalent in Mexico, even before the recent GM field trials. His own study found a surprisingly rich diversity of maize even within the borders of Mexico City itself. But he also found transgenic contamination. “We’re creating something new: transgenic native maize,” he warns. I asked Monsanto officials how they expected to control this more pervasive form of gene flow. “We can’t really ensure how grains are transported and where they end up,” said Oscar Heredia, the company’s Agronomic Regulatory Affairs officer. For CONABIO’s Sarukhan, that is the final straw. “I don’t believe this country has the capacity—nor the will—to regulate transgenic maize,” he said. The injunction put a stop to the expansion of transgenic maize, for now. Monsanto and other biotech companies have joined with Mexico’s agriculture and environment departments to file a blizzard of legal challenges, 62 different appeals and legal complaints so far. Up to now, Mexico’s notoriously corrupt judicial system has refused to overturn the injunction. Observers expect the legal proceedings to take a year or two to resolve. When the class action suit on the danger of genetic contamination is finally heard, the plaintiffs will have the opportunity to present a raft of evidence, from governmental, non-governmental, and university sources, on the history and the presence of GM contamination of Mexico’s native maize. “We look forward to that opportunity,” says Adelita San Vicente, one of the spokespeople for the plaintiffs.

Originally published by Triple Crisis on 08/04/2014 Can land grabs by foreign investors in developing countries feed the hungry? So says the press release for a recent, and unfortunate, economic study . It comes just as civil society and government delegates gather in Rome this week to negotiate guidelines for “responsible agricultural investment” (RAI), and as President Obama welcomes African leaders to Washington for a summit on economic development in the region. At stake in both capitals is whether the recent surge in large-scale acquisition of land in Africa and other developing regions needs to be better regulated to ensure that agricultural investment contributes to food security rather than eroding it by displacing small-scale farmers. The recent study paper will not advance those discussions. It is the kind of study that gives economists a bad name. Economists like the one in the oft-told joke who, shipwrecked on a deserted island, offers his expertise to his stranded shipmates: “Assume we have a boat.” In this case, these seemingly well-intentioned Italian economists came up with the dramatic but useless estimate that global land grabs could feed 190-550 million people in developing countries. The heroic assumptions they needed to get there should have stranded them on a deserted island, because they make no sense in the real world. • Assume land grabs produce staple food. (Mostly, they don’t.) • Assume such assumed food is consumed domestically. (Overwhelmingly it’s exported.) • Assume the calories they might produce go to hungry people. (They don’t, they go to people who can afford them.) • Assume calories are all that’s needed to nourish someone. (They aren’t.) • Assume productivity-enhancing investments on such land would be made for an assumed market of hungry consumers. (They wouldn’t, the hungry are no real market at all because they have no effective buying power.) • Assume the grabbed land didn’t displace anyone from producing food. ( According to the same data relied on by these economists , most projects have displaced farmers.) Perhaps the most absurd assumption, though, is that the governance mechanisms exist, at the national, international, or corporate levels, to manage the surge of investment we’ve seen since the food price spikes of 2007-8. Trust me, they don’t, which is why the UN’s Committee on World Food Security is meeting in Rome this week to negotiate the RAI guidelines . Those negotiations have proven contentious, with developing countries and civil society groups demanding that land rights be included in the guidelines. Some rich country governments, such as that of the United States, resist such measures saying they interfere with the development of markets, which they see as the ultimate solution to … well … everything. In Tanzania, those land markets are going fast and furious, fueled by government programs to make large tracts of land available to foreign investors. Many have gone for biofuel crops like sugar and jatropha, the oilseed tree that has proven to be a spectacular failure all over Africa. The governance failures include not just the taking of 20,000-acre tracts of good land, based on false promises to local villagers, but then the failure to return the land to those villagers when the project collapses. In Kisarawe, Tanzania, that land instead was simply subleased by the bankrupt Sun Biofuels to Mtanga Farms, a Tanzanian company that has disavowed any responsibility to fulfill the promises made by Sun Biofuels when it secured the land in the first place. (See my previous article .) This is the kind of irresponsible investment that has negotiators in Rome trying desperately to plug the yawning land-governance gap in order to protect the rights of small-scale farmers, most of whom lack formal titles to their land. In Zambia, the government has taken the same proactive approach to attracting foreign land investors, securing good land and promising infrastructure development as part of the new wave of “public-private partnerships” that are supposed to stimulate agricultural development. Mostly, investors don’t wait for the national government. They go straight to local leaders, who have traditional authority over “customary lands” farmed by small-scale producers. They cut deals that displace local farmers for the large-scale production of sugar cane or some other cash crop, often for export. At best, you get a managed process to attract investors to one of the Zambian government’s “farm blocks” – 250,000-acre tracts intended to bring in a foreign investor to establish a “nucleus farm” of 25,000 acres around which other large, medium, and small farmers can get land to grow crops for the investor’s processing facility. Such schemes have had some economic success in rice farming in some countries, but the issue of displacement of small-scale food producers, generally for export agriculture, remains. So does the limited involvement of small-scale farmers and the overwhelming export orientation of most projects. Zambia has one such farm block project going in Nansanga , but this land is neither idle nor unoccupied, as proponents of such schemes often suggest. Some 2,500 farmers live on the Nansanga land and they do not want to be moved or swallowed up by the larger project. It is certainly difficult to see how such projects address the desperate needs of the 80% of rural Zambians who are poor and food-insecure. They are food-insecure in part because they are land-poor ; they do not have enough decent land to support their households. While the government auctions off the country’s best land, these villagers are dividing their small landholdings among their children, resulting in smaller plots and greater poverty. Which begs the question: If the goal is to address the urgent issue of food security, why not give some of those good agricultural lands to land-poor smallholders? In Zambia, I saw one very small project that did just that. The Chanyanya Smallholders Cooperative Society of 126 households in Kafue, south of Lusaka, got secure title to about 1,250 acres of land, irrigated it with European donor support, set up small garden plots for themselves on some of it, and sublet the majority to a commercial soybean and wheat farming business in which they retain significant equity shares. They get more food, with year-round production of cash and subsistence crops from their garden plots, thanks to the irrigation. The land gets developed through capital-intensive investment, with cooperative members sharing in those profits and retaining title to the land. They seemed enormously better off, though they might do even better if they each had 10 irrigated acres and they were shown how to become mid-size commercial farmers. Instead of touting the imagined food-security benefits of land grabs, why not look at the real-life food security benefits of giving good land to the hungry? And irrigating it? Interpreting the data from that flawed land grab study a little differently, the researchers show, in effect, that in Tanzania 3.1 million people additional people could be fed by just giving the land to small-scale farmers. Or, more realistically, one could increase by 25% the caloric intake of 12.4 million people who don’t get enough to eat now. Invest in the land and, according to these researchers, one could do the same for 20.4 million people. That would go a long way toward wiping out rural poverty in Tanzania. It doesn’t look anything like a “land grab.” But it sure looks like “responsible agricultural investment” to me.

Originally published by Food Tank on 12/20/2014 What if you threw a lavish party for foreign investors, and no one came? By all accounts, that is what’s happening in Mozambique’s Nacala Corridor, the intended site for Africa’s largest agricultural development scheme – or land grab, depending on your perspective. The ProSavana project , a Brazilian-and-Japanese-led development project, was supposed to be turning Mozambique’s fertile savannah lands in the north into an export zone, replicating Brazil’s success taming its own savannah – the cerrado – and transforming it into industrial mega-farms of soybeans. The vision, hatched in 2009, but only revealed to Mozambicans in 2013, called for 35 million hectares (nearly 100 million acres) of “underutilized” land to be converted by Brazilian agribusiness into soybean plantations for cheaper export to China and Japan. In my two weeks in Mozambique, including one week in the Nacala Corridor, I had a hard time finding evidence of any such transformation. It was easy, though, to find outrage at a plan seen by many in the region as a secret land grab. That resistance, which has evolved into a tri-national campaign in Japan, Brazil, and Mozambique to stop ProSavana, is one of the reasons the project is a currently a dud. The new face of South-South investment? I came to look at ProSavana because, out of all the large-scale projects I studied over the course of the last year, this one sounded almost plausible. It wasn’t started by some fly-by-night venture capitalist, growing a biofuel crop he’d never produced commercially for a market that barely existed. That’s what I saw in Tanzania , and such failed land grabs litter the African landscape. ProSavana at least knew its investors: Brazil’s agribusiness giants. The planners also knew their technology: Brazil’s soybeans, which had adapted to the harsh tropical conditions of Brazil’s cerrado. And they knew their market: Japan’s and China’s hog farms and their insatiable appetite for feed, generally made with soybeans. That was already more than a lot of these grand schemes had going for them. I was also compelled by the sheer scale of the project. When first announced, ProSavana was to encompass 35 million hectares of land, an area the size of North Carolina. That would have made it the largest land acquisition in Africa. ProSavana also interested me because it was not the usual neo-colonial megaproject promoted by the Global North. It was a projection of Brazil’s agro-export prowess. This was South-South investment, the new wave of development in a multipolar world. Wouldn’t Brazil do this differently, I wondered, with the kind of strong developmental focus that had characterized the country’s ascendance under the leadership of the left-leaning Workers’ Party? ProSavana’s premise was that the soil and climate in the Nacala Corridor of Mozambique were similar to those found in the cerrado, so technology could be easily adapted to tame a region inhospitable to agriculture. Someone should have gone there before they issued the press releases. It turns out that the two regions differ dramatically. The cerrado had poor soils, which technology was able to address. That’s also why it had few farmers, and those that were there could be moved by Brazil’s then-military dictatorship. The Nacala Corridor, by contrast, has good soils, which is precisely why it is the most densely-populated part of rural Mozambique. (If there are good lands, you can bet civilization has discovered them and is farming them.) Mozambique also has a democratic government, forged in an independence movement rooted in peasant farmers’ struggle for land rights. So the country has one of the stronger land laws in Africa, which grants use rights to farmers who have been farming land for ten years or more. The disconnect between the claims ProSavana was making to its investors and the reality of the situation reached almost laughable proportions. Agriculture Minister Jose Pacheco led sales visits to Mozambique, organized by Brazil’s Getulio Vargas Foundation, which had put together the agribusiness-friendly draft “ Master Plan ” that was leaked to Mozambican civil society organizations in March 2013. Brazil’s biggest farmers came looking for thousands of hectares of land, only to find three disappointments: they couldn’t own land in Mozambique; what land they could lease was by no means empty; and it was far from the ports, with no decent roads to transport their soybeans. Brazil’s soybean mega-farmers packed up their giant combines and went back to the cerrado, where there are still millions of hectares of undeveloped land. A kinder, gentler ProSavana There are a few large soybean farms in Gurue, producing for the domestic poultry industry; but nothing like the export boom promised by ProSavana. According to Americo Uaciquete of ProSavana’s Nampula office, Brazilian farmers came expecting 40,000 hectares free and clear. He told me no investor could expect that in the Nacala Corridor. The only foreign investors who will farm there, he said, are those willing to take 2,000 hectares and involve local farmers. To me, that sounded like a very quick surrender on the ProSavana battlefield. Couldn’t the Mozambican government open larger swaths of land? “Not without a gun,” Uaciquete said, clearly rejecting that path. “We are not going to impose the Brazilian model here.” He went on to describe ProSavana as a support program for small-scale farmers, based on its two non-investment components: research into improved locally adapted seeds, and extension services to improve productivity. In Maputo, the ProSavana Directorate did its best to polish up the new, development-friendly ProSavana. Jusimere Mourao, of Japan’s cooperation agency, had it down best. She lamented that ProSavana was “poorly timed” because its “announcement” (a leak) “coincided” with international concerns about land grabbing. Hmmm…. After taking civil society concerns into account, she said, the program had issued a new “ concept note ” and the Master Plan is under revision. “Small and medium producers are the main beneficiaries of ProSavana,” she said. “We have no intention of promoting the taking of their land. It would be a crime.” It’s not about promoting foreign investment, she assured me; that is up to the Mozambican government. The turnaround was stunning, and welcome, if not quite believable. It certainly had not quieted the coalition calling for an end to ProSavana until farmers and civil society groups are consulted on the agricultural development plan for the Nacala Corridor. Luis Sitoe, Economic Adviser to the Minister of Agriculture, smirked when I told him I’d been in the region researching ProSavana. “Did you find anything?” For him, ProSavana had failed. But lest I think anything profound had been learned from that experience, he reassured me that the Mozambican government remains firmly committed to relying on large-scale foreign investment to address its agricultural underdevelopment. He pulled out a two-inch-thick binder to show me he was serious. It was the project proposal for the Lurio River Valley Development Project, a 200,000-hectare irrigation scheme right there in the northern Nacala Corridor. Was it part of ProSavana? Absolutely not. Had the communities been consulted on this ambitious project along the heavily populated river valley? “Absolutely not,” said Vicente Adriano, research director at UNAC , Mozambique’s national farmers’ union, which had just presented its own agricultural development plan, based on the country’s three million family farmers. The ProSavana directorate is still promising a new Master Plan for the project in early 2015. So it would be a mistake to think that ProSavana is dead. Large-scale land deals certainly aren’t, however they are branded. Investors may just be waiting for the Mozambican government to bring more to the table than just promotional brochures. Things like land, which turns out to be rather important for a successful land grab. In the Nacala Corridor, that land is anything but unoccupied.

At the 92nd Street Y , I got to interview Jane Goodall on stage about her new book Seeds of Hope . Honored to be asked, a bit anxious about my role, I started cramming well beforehand. I expected Seeds of Hope to be “interesting.” I didn’t expect it to create a powerful shift inside me. But it did. I began by jumping around in the book, mining for nuggets that I might incorporate into my questions for Jane. But I kept getting slowed down, caught by a thread that intrigued me, and then slowed down even more to scribble in margins and memorize what I wanted — oh so badly — to share. Here is just a taste... That plants communicate with each other through their root systems. Why didn’t I know this? They can share information. When pea plants experience water shortage, they send a chemical message through their roots warning surrounding plants to begin preparing themselves to better withstand the drought. And they do. They help each other out. Established trees serve as “mother trees” for surrounding youngsters; sending nutrients out through their roots — and through thread-like fungi that cling to them — to help the little ones get going. (So I guess I’d gotten it backwards. I’d assumed big trees would hog nutrients young-uns need.) I found myself deep under the earth’s surface imagining trees’ intricately patterned messaging. Then I got stuck on what tells a seed it’s time to jump. Lodgepole pine seeds only germinate when their cones go through fire. Turns out the intense heat is required to melt the cone’s hard resin. Why didn’t I know this? Almost half of the entire world’s biodiversity exists in the canopies of trees. What? And only recently have we begun to explore them. (Could this be one reason that we’ve not yet named 86 percent of species? Imagine now so many species disappearing before we’ve even met them.) Trees started appearing about 385 million years ago, playing an increasing role in absorbing C02 and cooling temperatures of the Devonian period enough to enable animals like us to proliferate. Really? Today it’s common to thank trees for helping mitigate climate heating, but how many have a clue that we might never have appeared without them? Plants can clean up toxins. Well, I’d visited “living machines” where organic waste is purified as it passes through selected plants, in all-natural sewage treatment. And I’d heard about plants remediating oil spills. But a species of fern that can remove arsenic? Yes, turns out there are twenty other plants native to America that can clean up lead, copper, nickel, and more. Orchids north of the Arctic Circle? Yes, thirteen species, while Hawaii is home to only three. And a forever-tree? The root system of a single tree on a cold, harsh mountainside in Sweden has survived almost 10,000 years. Yes, dear “Old Tjikko” goes on. Here’s my point. It’s commonly recognized that beauty touches our hearts; and that interacting directly with plants and animals can stir our emotions. In fact, my evening with Jane closed with a video of one of the most heart-rending scenes I’ve encountered: A chimp — who’d been orphaned by violence, found near death, and then revived — holds Jane in a long, most-tender embrace before sauntering off into the forest leaving humans behind. But what I’d never fully gotten before this book is how knowledge could awaken feelings of intimacy. As I read Seeds of Hope , again and again I felt appreciation, gratitude and awe. And are these not feelings we associate with intimacy and even love? Reading Jane’s new book, I actually found myself loving our earth more. It became even more precious to me. And why should I be surprised? After all, we’re aware, of course, that the deeper we get to know a friend or spouse, the more love arises. Knowledge changes how we experience life. Knowledge — not only direct experience or awesome beauty — opens the heart to intimacy, I am convinced. So, thank you, Jane Goodall, for bringing to my consciousness the truth that knowledge itself is a seed of intimacy. P.S. And, why would anyone be surprised that Jane could awaken feelings of intimacy via plants? After all, you’ll learn in this book that she once received a single rose tossed from a low-flying plane as a prelude to a proposal of marriage — which she accepted. Originally published by the Huffington Post on April 11, 2014

Originally published by Civil Eats on 09/21/2014 Today, hundreds of thousands of people around the world will take to the streets to fight for our lives. People’s Climate Marches are being organized in dozens of U.S. cities and a whopping 158 countries , from Burundi to Brazil to Nepal. Marchers are demanding international leaders to commit to serious emissions reductions and polluting industries to clean up their practices. Climate-impacted communities–from Hurricane Sandy survivors in New York City to indigenous peoples displaced by rainforest destruction in South America–will put a face on the urgency of this call to action. We all know the bad news—melting ice caps, rising seas, mass extinctions—but here is the good: We actually have solutions at our fingertips; we just need the political will to embrace them. New data from Cornell, Univeristy of California at Davis, and Stanford University shows that we have enough clean energy sources to power our country. The Solutions Project is using that data to help all Americas access to clean energy, across all economic, demographic, and political divides. We also have a blueprint for how to reshape the global food system so that instead of being one of the key drivers of the climate crisis, food becomes a central solution. Embracing a “low carbon diet” can help us both reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and survive on a hotter, less predictable planet. Consider the worst culprits of global warming and you might think of dirty coal-fired power plants or gas-guzzling SUVs. While its true that the majority of current human-produced GHGs come from the fossil fuel industry, the global food system—from agricultural land use to processing plants and food waste in landfills—contributes to as much as one third of these emissions. Finish Your Peas, the Ice Caps are Melting While nearly one billion go hungry every year globally, we waste as much as half of all food we produce. That’s a tragedy for the hungry; it’s also tragic for the climate. Not only are GHGs produced in the process of growing and making that food, but the landfills where much of it ends up belch methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that if food waste were a country, it would represent the world’s third largest GHG emitter, after China and the United States. Around the world, folks are tackling the food waste problem with creative solutions. Urban Gleaners in Portland, Oregon is taking extra food going from restaurants and grocery stores and connecting it with food banks and other institutions in need. Love Food Hate Waste out of the UK has been pioneering education for reducing home and institutional food waste for years. And the Food Waste Recovery Network on U.S. college campuses has already saved more than 350,00 pounds of food since it was founded just two-and-a-half years ago. Don’t Panic, Go Organic Even when feeding billions, agriculture need not contribute to the climate catastrophe. One solution is to promote sustainable farming like organic agriculture that uses ecological strategies to manage weeds and pests and promote soil fertility. Organic farms use far less energy than those that rely on petroleum-based chemicals and synthetic fertilizer, which requires enormous amounts of energy to produce. In one long-term study comparing organic and non-organic corn production, the Rodale Institute found that the organic fields used 30 percent less energy. A Canadian life-cycle analysis found that organic farmers use less than half of the energy conventional ones do. Healthy soil also retains water and withstands extreme weather events, like flooding and droughts, more effectively than soil from conventional operations. A University of Minnesota study also found that organic farms lost 41 percent less water. Rodale Institute’s long-term field trials research shows that organic farms produce much better than conventional ones in drought years, delivering yields up to one third higher. Moreover, healthy soil stores more carbon, meaning it stays out of the atmosphere. Andre Leu, from the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements , has estimated that organic agriculture practices could enable the earth’s soils to capture as much as 20 percent of current total emissions; add in agroforestry practices and that number could jump to as high as 36 percent. Stir Your Peanut Butter Multi-syllabic ingredients are red flags for your health, for sure, but one of them—palm oil—is a big red flag for the planet. In Indonesia and Malaysia, carbon-rich peatlands are being drained and destroyed to make way for giant palm oil plantations. Food processors’ are increasingly buying up this oil, no matter the ecological cost. And the cost is huge. One study by Rainforest Action Network (on whose board of directors I sit) found that deforestation for palm plantations in Indonesia causes 80 percent of that nation’s carbon dioxide emissions, making the country one of the world’s leading contributors to global warming. You can now find palm oil in most processed foods, from cookies and crackers to granola bars and peanut butter. It’s cheaper than other vegetable oils and it’s often used to increase shelf life or create the right consistency. You can thank palm oil for peanut butter than doesn’t need mixing. I would guess many of us might be willing to stir our own peanut butter if we knew it meant keeping Indonesian rainforests intact. The Meat of the Matter The United Nations estimates that livestock production is responsible for 14.5 percent of all GHG emissions, in large part because of the deforestation driven by global demand for feed as well as the emissions from intensive animal operations. But not all livestock is equally to blame: Think of beef as the Hummer on your plate. One study looking at emissions by animal type found that sheep accounted for nine percent of global livestock-related emissions, pigs five percent, and goats only four percent; whereas beef and dairy cattle account for a combined 71 percent. One reason is that beef is a major user of farmland: It requires about three-fifths of the world’s agricultural land for either pasture or feed, yet the production delivers less than 5 percent of the planet’s protein and less than 2 percent of global calories, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists . And there’s water to consider, too. You don’t have to live in drought-stricken California to know that water will become even more precious as weather becomes weirder. And beef production is water-intensive, extremely so. Producing a pound of beef uses almost 50 times more water than a pound of vegetables; about 40 times more than potatoes and other root crops; and about nine times more than grain. As participants in today’s climate march in New York City head home, spreading back out to Queens and Brooklyn and across the country, they’ll take with them the knowledge that these moments of popular expression are key to sparking real change in the halls of Congress and the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies. But whether we take to the streets or not, we can all take action in our own communities—and our own kitchens.

Originally published by Food Tank on 05/21/2014 To listen to the current debates over the controversial requests by Monsanto and other biotech giants to grow genetically modified (GM) maize in Mexico, you’d think the danger to the country’s rich biodiversity in maize was hypothetical. It is anything but. Studies have found the presence of transgenes in native maize in nearly half of Mexico’s states. A study of maize diversity within the confines of Mexico’s sprawling capital city revealed transgenic maize in 70 percent of the samples from the area of Xochimilco and 49 percent of those from Tlalpan. Mexico is the “center of origin” where maize was first domesticated from its wild ancestor, teocinte. The country is arguably the last place you’d want to risk the possibility that its wide array of native seeds might be undermined by what indigenous people have called “genetic pollution” from GM maize. Last October, a judge issued an injunction putting a halt to all experimental and commercial planting until it can be proven that native maize varieties are not threatened by “gene flow” from GM maize. The precautionary measure comes more than a decade too late. In 2001, US-based researchers discovered the presence of transgenic traits in native maize varieties in the southern state of Oaxaca. A formal citizen complaint brought an exhaustive study by the environmental commission set up by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The researchers acknowledged that “gene flow” had occurred, warned, as other studies did, of more widespread contamination, and called for precautionary policies, including restrictions on imports from the United States. The Mexican government buried the study and promptly passed a biosafety law that opened the door to GM maize. “It is Orwellian that this history is unknown,” said Antonio Serratos, one of the researchers on the NAFTA-commissioned study, as well as the studies on Mexico City native maize. He said he was surprised by two things in Mexico City. “First, that we found so much diversity. In an area so small, so urban, it was so unlikely,” he said. “The other surprise was finding transgenics.” “In Mexican fields,” Serratos warned, “transgenic native maize is being created.” That possibility did not seem to concern representatives of Monsanto Mexico, beyond a passing mention. “We are very sensitive to Mexico being a center of origin, to the cultural significance of maize,” Jaime Mijares Noriega, Monsanto’s Latin America Director for Corporate Affairs, said in the company’s Mexico City office. “But if there is pollen flow to native maize, what happens? There are very few pure landraces in Mexico today. Many have already gotten genes from hybrids, and the native seeds are preserved in gene banks.” According to Oscar Heredia, the company’s Agronomic Regulatory Affairs officer, the company-funded field trials in northern Mexico showed minimal gene flow from GM maize to non-GM maize in bordering plots, dropping to less than 0.5 percent of plants. I asked if the company’s goal was to achieve zero percent gene flow. He said that would be unrealistic. Indeed it would, which is why people are concerned. Serratos told me that maize pollen has been known to travel more than one kilometer. He explained the danger: A hectare will have about 40,000 plants. One-half a percent of that is 200 plants. Each plant has about 400 grains on a few ears of maize, with each grain pollinated separately through the plant’s silk threads. If 200 plants get some level of contamination, that can mean up to 80,000 grains. And, if any of those grains are planted as seed, they will produce pollen, even if they don’t produce usable ears of maize. That pollen travels the winds, further spreading the transgenes. Serratos pointed out that wind-borne gene flow isn’t even the most pervasive source of contamination. Seeds travel far and wide, in farmers’ pockets. Small-scale farmers are relentless experimenters, trying every seed they get their hands on to see if it produces something useful. That’s how maize has evolved into the wide and useful range of varieties we see today. That is also how imported GM maize traveled to Oaxaca, got planted by an unwitting farmer, and spread transgenes to native plants. I asked Monsanto officials how they expected to control this more pervasive form of gene flow. “We can’t really ensure how grains are transported and where they end up,” Heredia said. Serratos stressed that this is precisely why precaution is warranted, why the entire country should be declared a “center of origin” for maize, with no permitted GM cultivation. Well-intentioned farmers could already be storing contaminated native seeds in their own community seed banks. ”If the seeds of maize are sold or exchanged, the contamination will grow exponentially,” he warned. “That is the point of no return.”

Originally published by Triple Crisis Blog on 10/07/2014 Since the food price spikes of 2007-8, global hands have been wringing over the question, how will we feed the world? Population keeps growing, food-producing resources like land and water become more scarce, climate change introduces a dramatic uncertainty. The images are downright Malthusian. The urgent recommendation is to produce more food, quickly. It is the theme of this year’s World Food Prize . The question is fundamentally flawed, as is the Malthusian panic. There is no “we” who feed the world. There are, mostly, hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers. And there is no abstract “world” out there needing to be fed. There are about one billion hungry people, nearly all in developing countries. The majority are some of those same small-scale farmers. The rest are poor because they are unemployed or underemployed. Increasing the industrial production of agricultural commodities does almost nothing for these people. Oddly enough, it can even make them hungrier. Who feeds whom? In practice, “we” all know whom “we” mean when we ask how “we” will feed the world. We mean industrialized societies, with their high-yield industrialized agriculture. But industrialized farms produce only 30% of the food consumed in the world today. Seventy percent is produced by small-scale farmers . And it’s mostly not traded across borders; only 15% of food is traded internationally. Eighty-five percent is consumed by the farming household, traded locally, or sold in domestic markets. The conceit that first-world farmers feed the hungry is just that: conceited. What industrialized agriculture produces are agricultural commodities that serve as raw materials—occasionally as food, often as animal feed. It produces a lot of those raw materials, and the output has a lot to do with international prices for food commodities. But the volume of that production has very little to do with whether the hungry are fed. By some estimates, we currently grow enough food today to feed ten billion people, more than the projected global population in 2050. The hungry are hungry not because there isn’t enough food but because they don’t have the incomes to buy it. Or to grow it. An estimated 70% of the hungry in the world today live in rural areas. They can end up hungrier because of higher production of agricultural commodities. Cheap, industrialized rice or corn comes as a double-edged sword. If the farmers have any cash, lower prices mean they can afford more food. But if they grow these same crops, the prices they can get for their own rice or corn are lower thanks to the international competition. So they have less cash. Studies have shown that high crop prices are better for the rural poor, even if they drive up the cost of food. Why? Money flows to the domestic agricultural economy, spurring investment, creating jobs, and raising wages. Two ways to feed the hungry There are two ways to better feed the hungry: increase the amount of food they can produce or create decent work for them. Industrialized agriculture does neither of these things well. Its technologies are poorly suited to the needs and environments of small-scale developing-country farmers. Hybrid seeds and chemical inputs all cost money; few small-scale producers can afford them without government subsidies, and even then they often lack the credit they need to sustain the cash demands of industrial production. In Malawi, few farmers could afford the recommended second application of fertilizer, leaving their hybrid maize yields little better than if they had used traditional seeds. What about creating jobs? Industrialized agriculture is capital-intensive, not labor-intensive. By definition, it increases productivity by substituting technology—tractors, irrigation, chemical inputs, seeds—for labor. Each kilo of rice might be a little cheaper as a result, but the number of people who get an income from that production is often dramatically reduced. If the high-yield rice displaces small-scale rice producers, the net impact on jobs and livelihoods can be negative. But can’t societies just jump-start development by bringing in foreign capital and expertise? That is the premise of the Obama Administration’s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition , which seeks to infuse private capital into African agriculture through the magic of “public-private partnerships.” At best, such investments will develop only land, not societies. They will produce primarily for export, not the domestic market. They will employ few people and train few farmers in more productive farming practices. They certainly won’t feed the hungry. If we want to see that the world is well fed, we should stop looking to industrialized agriculture to solve the problem. We should address the problem where it lies: by increasing small-scale food production, particularly among women, and by pursuing economic policies that increase, rather than decrease, employment and livelihoods. Direct investments in improving smallholders’ farm production, using sustainable and appropriate technologies, are precisely what are needed if “we” want to feed “the world.” This has always been the first and most important step toward economic development for agricultural societies . It worked for China. It worked for South Korea. It’s working for Vietnam, which has become a global rice exporter thanks to public investments in smallholder rice production. The recent price spikes were real, and so are the looming resource constraints. But the answer is not simply to increase the production of industrialized agricultural commodities. “We” have to remember who the hungry are. And “we” have to stop assuming that bigger harvests in Iowa, or Brazil, will give them more food. At best, this can reduce food prices. That can make a small difference to a poor consumer, but not as big a difference as helping them grow more food or giving them a job that pays them enough to feed their families. So let’s invest in small-scale farmers and get them more land and resources. And let’s favor policies that create decent jobs. And while we’re at it, we in the United States should put our own house in order. We should stop wasting 40% of our own food and feeding 35% of our corn to our cars. “We” have a lot to say about the amount of food that is available in the world.

Originally published by Civil Eats on 11/13/2014 Andre Leu has been an organic farmer in Australia for 40 years. He is also the newly re-elected President of the International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements (IFOAM), a worldwide network of more than 800 groups in 120 countries. In addition to traveling the world advocating for organic farming, Leu has spent the last few years thinking and writing about pesticides for his new book, The Myth of Safe Pesticides . I met Leu in October at the IFOAM’s Organic World Congress , held this year in Istanbul, Turkey. The tri-annual event brought together nearly 1,000 farmers, scientists, processors, and other experts for an impressive, inspiring meeting of the minds. When I asked Leu who takes care of his farm while he’s on the road—about 300 days of the year—he said, “It takes care of itself, all I have to do is manage the biodiversity.” When Leu bought his 150-acre farm 20 years ago in the Daintree region of northern Australia, the land had been degraded, the native tropical rainforest destroyed. He knew most of the property would be worth far more by returning it back to the natural primary forest, so that’s just what he did. Today, 100 acres have been returned to rainforest and he grows more than 100 different species of tropical fruit on the other 50 acres. “Instead of a reductionist approach,” Leu told me, “we’re looking at how we can use biodiversity to help foster a productive farm.” As the forest has returned, so have keystone species like the duckbilled platypus that now calls his creeks home, the rare Victoria’s Riflebirds, Buff-breasted Paradise Kingfishers and the six foot tall, flightless Cassowary, which nest in his restored tropical rainforest and wetlands. “They were all rare and threatened species, now they’re back and breeding,” said Leu. “I am showing we can build productive agricultural systems alongside strong, local ecosystems.” I interview Leu recently over Skype on his way to Kazakhstan. We’ve come a long way since advertisements in the 1950s were telling us “DDT is good for me!” Thanks in large part to Rachel Carson’s 1962 wakeup call, Silent Spring, we banned DDT in the U.S. in 1972. Are there other toxic chemicals we should be worrying about? Most people don’t realize that the number of pesticides and the total tons used in farming have actually increased exponentially since Carson wrote Silent Spring . Bird, bee, and butterfly species continue to decline. At the same time there have been increases in huge impacts on pollinators and cancers, degenerative diseases, reproductive problems, behavioral disorders, and numerous other diseases in humans. Hundreds of scientific studies show that these are linked to pesticide and other chemical residues . Many of the new pesticides are just as pervasive as the few pesticides that have been banned; hundreds of chemical and pesticide residues can be found in the tissues of all living species, including humans. The Environmental Working Group has found as many as 232 chemicals, including pesticides, in the placental cord blood of newborn babies in the U.S. Sadly, the problem is far worse now than at any time in history. In the U.S., many articles have come out recently reporting that studies show organic food isn’t any healthier than food grown using chemical pesticides. You have an international perspective and have your finger on the scientific pulse. What’s your response? Consider the latest study by Newcastle University , based on a systemic review and analysis of 343 scientific papers, which found that organic foods do have significantly higher levels of beneficial antioxidants as well and lower levels of heavy metals—especially cadmium—and significantly lower residue levels of synthetic toxic pesticides. The problem is the mainstream media doesn’t question the mantra that the current residue levels of the cocktails of chemicals and pesticides in our food are safe. They’re ignoring hundreds of published scientific studies that show that they are linked to many of the diseases and behavioral problems that are increasing today. By 2050, we’re told we will need to feed 9 billion people and some say we’ll need high-yielding, industrial techniques to meet that global demand. Do you think organic agriculture has the potential to feed the world? A critical area where research is showing higher yields for organic systems is in traditional smallholder farming systems. The majority of the world’s undernourished people are farmers or landless laborers who do not produce enough food or income to feed their families. Given that, the only logical way to feed the world is by increasing the production of the smallholders who produce vast majority of the world’s food. Significant yield increases can be achieved by teaching smallholder to do things like recycling organic matter, using water efficiently, and promoting biodiversity as a way to improve pest and disease control without chemicals. All this works. In one study of 114 agricultural projects in 24 African countries covering 2 million hectares and 1.9 million farmers, organic practices increased yields from 54 to 176 percent. Meanwhile, despite the introduction of chemical agriculture in Africa, food production per person is 10 percent lower now than it was in the 1960s. This all sounds so exciting, so possible, and yet certified organic agriculture was only practiced on 0.87 percent of the world’s farmland in 2012. Why don’t we see organic practices embraced by more farmers? Organic is the fastest growing agricultural production system in the world, despite the fact that most governments, research universities, and institutions ignore it. One of the main reasons for the slow uptake is that research in organic systems has been largely ignored. Fifty-two billion dollars is spent annually on agriculture research worldwide, but less than 0.4 percent is spent on organic farming systems. Compare the small yield difference achieved with trillions of dollars and thousands of researchers to what organic farmers have achieved when left largely to their own devices and I’d argue that conventional agriculture has been a very poor use of valuable funds. Also given that the new research into organic systems is starting to show very impressive increases in yields, organic agriculture is a far better use of research dollars. Is there one place in the world that you think they’re getting organic farming right? What can the rest of us can learn from them? In Tigray, Ethiopia, the Institute of Sustainable Development has been working with farmers to restore local ecology and learn practices like composting and using biogas digesters. Farmers in this network are re-vegetating marginal areas—like gullies, slopes, and field borders—and sustainably harvesting the biomass. This has provided a steady source of nutrients helping build soil fertility and replacing nutrients lost when crops are taken off the farm. Farmers are also learning how to plant deep-rooted legumes for nitrogen production, taller species for windbreaks, and a variety of crops to attract beneficial pests. The farmers have also been encouraged to use seeds of their own landraces, developed over millennia to be adapted to the local climate, soils, and pests. These farmer-bred varieties produced high yields under organic conditions. The major advantage of this system is that the seeds and the compost are sourced locally at no or little cost to the farmers, whereas the seeds and synthetic chemical inputs in the conventional system have to be purchased. In just a few years, they’ve seen more than 100 percent increases in yields and higher income for farmers.

Originally published by Al Jazeera on 09/21/2014 Today hundreds of thousands of people around the world — from Burundi to Berlin to Brooklyn — will take to the streets in what organizers are calling the biggest climate march in history. This outpouring of action in the lead-up to this year’s global climate summit in Lima, Peru, is a reflection of the growing frustration with lack of progress in the fight against global warming, from stalemate on emission reductions to an impasse on commitments of support for affected communities. Progress has been stalled in part because the biggest polluters in the world — those oil and gas companies responsible for the lion’s share of emissions, for example — have been given a seat at the negotiating table, treated as partners and stakeholders at the annual global meetings called the Conference of Parties, or COP. Over the years, these COPs have featured industry-sponsored pavilions , dinners and breakaway meetings . And companies have been granted official observer status through their industry trade associations, which are considered nongovernmental organizations under current climate meeting rules. Some have even attended as official members of country delegations . (For instance, a representative from Shell joined the Nigerian delegation to COP16 in 2010 and Brazil’s to COP14 in 2008.) As climate activists call for governments to take real action on climate, the decades-long fight against Big Tobacco — specifically, how public health advocates successfully kept companies away from the negotiating table — holds powerful lessons for the role industries should have in these key talks. Keeping Big Tobacco at bay It’s almost impossible to fathom it now, but the first state ban on smoking in hospitals passed only in 1989. By then, decades of research had long proved the connection between nicotine and addiction and shown that smoking causes harm to nearly every organ in the body. The science finally managed to break through industry-funded misinformation campaigns, and in 1998 the United States reached a master settlement with the tobacco industry, which included annual payouts to 46 states of $10 billion for education and public health programs and strict regulations on marketing and advertising cigarettes. Several years later, after still more campaigning, the World Health Assembly unanimously adopted the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control . Since then, more than 179 countries have ratified it, including Iran and China, although notably not the United States. Civil society organizations such as Corporate Accountability International (CAI), for which I am an adviser, understood that in order for the convention to have teeth, Big Tobacco could not be allowed to interfere. To that end, CAI and other civil society groups and governments — especially those of Panama, Thailand and South Africa — fought for and secured the inclusion of 30 words that were the jumping-off point for an extensive set of guidelines (PDF) that spurred serious government action. They state, in Article 5.3 , “In setting and implementing their public health policies with respect to tobacco control, parties shall act to protect these polices from commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry.” These guidelines were adopted unanimously at the 2008 COP (PDF) in Durban, South Africa. Building on these guidelines (PDF), many governments around the world have gone further to keep the tobacco industry away from policymaking. Colombia passed laws barring tobacco industry representatives from policy negotiations. Australia strengthened transparency laws regarding government interactions with the industry. And in 2009, Norway was the first nation to divest government pension funds from tobacco stock in response to the World Health Organization guidelines that specified governments “should divest all holdings in tobacco companies in order to keep public health interests apart from economic influence.” Big Tobacco is not granted official observer status at tobacco treaty meetings. In fact, tobacco companies and their trade groups are not allowed to attend or observe the meetings at all. This is made clear in the WHO’s memo (PDF) on attendance policies, which reads, “Persons affiliated or having any relations with the tobacco industry or entities working to further its interests would not be permitted to attend any session or meeting of the COP and its subsidiary bodies.” When industry representatives have attempted to use public badges to gain entry, they have been removed by the Secretariat. The WHO is working on screening public badges to prevent such breaches in the future. This stark line between negotiators, governments and industry helped create a tobacco treaty with real impact. One of the most widely embraced treaties in U.N. history, it covers almost 90 percent of the world’s population and is projected to save as many as 200 million lives by 2050 — and many millions more thereafter. As people take to the streets to demand substantial action on climate change, it’s time to take this lesson from the fight against Big Tobacco. Bold action on climate policy is possible only if a stark line is drawn between climate negotiators and the industries driving the crisis: no revolving doors between regulatory positions and corporations, no so-called partnerships with industry that constitute a conflict of interest, no seat at the table in writing the rules of regulation and transparency in all industry engagements with public officials. Untangle industry involvement Instead, the fossil fuel industry is deeply involved in and actively influencing climate negotiations. For example, the International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association (whose members include BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell, among other major oil and gas companies) has hosted official side events to the COPs, produced their own reports on strategies for adapting to climate change and advised governments on climate policy. Meanwhile, its members are working in direct opposition to reducing global emissions by expanding oil exploration: BP and Shell, for example, are moving into offshore drilling in the Arctic Ocean. Its members have been at the forefront of undermining climate science, with ExxonMobil alone funneling at least $22 million toward climate denial efforts from 1998 to 2011, according to a Greenpeace investigation (PDF). Last year’s COP19 in Poland saw the participation of the World Coal Association (whose members include General Electric, Rio Tinto and Glencore), including partnering with the Polish Ministry of Economy on an international coal summit to convince U.N. negotiators to embrace coal as a solution to climate change. Out of this partnership came the Warsaw Communiqué, which promotes so-called clean coal, a process that critics point out is no less polluting than standard coal production and is just “a blunt attempt to keep the coal industry in business while governments and taxpayers continue to foot the bill for the damage it causes.” At 2011’s COP17 in Durban, South Africa, the Carbon Capture and Storage Association , made up of fossil fuel and power companies such as Shell, GDF Suez and Siemens, lobbied for and won carbon capture credits for new coal plants, even though carbon offsets for dirty coal are known to be ineffective at reducing emissions. Untangling industry’s involvement in global climate negotiations will require taking on some of the biggest trade groups in the world. Members of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development , for example, have combined annual revenue of more than $7 trillion and include Dow Chemical, Monsanto, Shell, Duke Energy and BP. While the council presents its 200 corporate members “as part of the solution to climate change,” it has consistently lobbied against legally binding standards at every major United Nations environmental summit since the council was founded in 1992. And the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), which has been granted privileged access at the United Nations, has “consistently blocked attempts at regulating emissions,” according to the Corporate Europe Observatory (PDF). Unsurprisingly, the ICC’s members consist of the world’s biggest polluters, including Dow Chemical, ExxonMobil and Duke Energy. The European Parliament, at least, has recognized the need to rein in such industry influence. In a resolution presented on the eve of the 2013 climate talks, it called for vigilance “concerning efforts by economic actors that emit significant amounts of greenhouse gases or benefit from burning fossil fuels to undermine or subvert climate protection efforts.” After last year’s climate talks, 78 organizations from around the world penned an open letter to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres, calling on them to “to protect climate policymaking from the vested interests of the fossil fuel industry.” Ban has announced he will be joining climate marchers in the street. Here’s hoping he also listens to the call to action. As sea levels rise and millions are displaced, as species disappear and extreme weather sweeps the globe, it’s ever more clear we need an Article 5.3 for climate talks — and we need it now.