by: Jill Richardson
Fri Jun 18, 2010 at 21:01:35 PM PDT
The USDA has come out with a new proposed rule and - based on the reaction it has gotten thus far - it's a big fucking deal. In a good way. Here's how the AP described the new rule:
The rules would place the sharpest limits on meat companies since the Great Depression, drastically lowering the bar that farmers and ranchers must meet to sue companies whom they accuse of demanding unfairly low prices.
The rules would dictate how meatpackers buy cattle on the open market, and prohibit them from showing preference to big feedlots rather than buying from small producers.
They would also limit the control chicken companies have over the farmers who raise birds for them. The companies couldn't require farmers to take on debt to invest in chicken houses, for example, unless farmers were guaranteed to recoup 80 percent of the cost.
The law would also make it easier to file suits under the Depression-era Packers and Stockyards Act by stating that farmers don't need to prove industrywide anticompetitive behavior to file a lawsuit under the act.
Sen. Feingold, a longtime champion for fair competition in agriculture, has already come out praising this rule in a statement I've included below. South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson praised the rule as well, as did R-CALF USA. You can see the USDA's press release about this here and the actual rule itself here.
While Goldman Sachs agreed to pay $550 million to resolve a civil fraud lawsuit filed by the SEC, Goldman has not been held accountable for many of its other questionable investment practices. A new article in Harper’s Magazine examines the role Goldman played in the food crisis of 2008 when the ranks of the world’s hungry increased by 250 million. We speak to Harper’s contributing editor Frederick Kaufman.
Guest:
Frederick Kaufman, contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine. Author of the piece The Food Bubble: How Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away With It from the July issue of the magazine.
AMY GOODMAN: We continue with Goldman Sachs.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, while Goldman Sachs agreed Thursday to pay $550 million to resolve a civil fraud lawsuit filed by the SEC, Goldman has not been held accountable for many of its other questionable investment practices. A new article in Harper’s Magazine examines the role Goldman played in the food crisis of 2008, when the ranks of the world’s hungry increased by 250 million. The article is titled "The Food Bubble: How Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away With It."
AMY GOODMAN: The author of the article, Frederick Kaufman, joins us now. He’s a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine.
Well, explain. We’re talking about Goldman Sachs today, this—they call it a landmark settlement, but they made more after-hours in trading last night than they will have to pay. So let’s look at Goldman Sachs and its record overall.
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Yeah, this is really—it’s really outrageous. And on a certain level, this reform bill is really a sham, because it does not cover, in any way, shape or form, what Goldman Sachs—and really, let’s be honest here, it wasn’t just Goldman; it was Goldman, and it was Bear, and it was AIG, and it was Lehman, it was Deutsche, it was all across the board, JPMorgan Chase—what these banks were able to do in commodity markets, really which reached its peak from 2005 to 2008, in what is now known as the food bubble. And as Juan points out, this is unconscionable what happened, in the sense that their speculation and their restructuring of these commodity markets pushed 250 million new people into food insecurity and starving, and brought the world total up to over a billion people. This is the most abysmal total in the history of the world.
As oil continued to pour into the Gulf of Mexico on a recent Saturday, Jennifer Wilkerson spent three hours on the phone talking about life after petroleum.
Be not troubled by Robert Paarlberg's scaremongering. Organic practices can feed the world -- better, in fact, than wasteful industrial farming.
BY ANNA LAPPÉ | APRIL 29, 2010
In May 2004, Catherine Badgley, an evolutionary biology professor at the University of Michigan, took her students on a research trip to an organic farm near their campus. Standing on the acre-and-a-half farm, Badgley asked the farmer, Rob MacKercher, how much food he produces annually. "Twenty-seven tons," he said. Badgley did the quick math: That's enough to provide 150 families one pound of produce every single day of the year.
"If he can grow that quantity on this tiny parcel," Badgley wondered, "why can't organic agriculture feed the world?" That question was the genesis of a multi-year, multidisciplinary study to explore whether we could, indeed, feed the world with organic, sustainable methods of farming. The results? A resounding yes.
“The real danger is the skewed public perception of the danger of honeybees,” said Andrew Coté, of the New York City Beekeepers Association.
By MIREYA NAVARRO
Published: March 14, 2010
Kathleen Boyer suspects the mailman.
She said she could not think of anyone else in her neighborhood who would have complained about the two beehives she kept under a pine tree in her front yard in Flatbush, Brooklyn, leading the city’s health department to fine her $2,000 last fall.
“I was kind of surprised,” said Mrs. Boyer, an art director with a media company. “People see us in our bee suit and they’d bring their kids to watch us and ask us questions.”
New York City is among the few jurisdictions in the country that deem beekeeping illegal, lumping the honeybee together with hyenas, tarantulas, cobras, dingoes and other animals considered too dangerous or venomous for city life. But the honeybee’s bad rap — and the days of urban beekeepers being outlaws — may soon be over.
See the British documentary film that has not been released in the US, primarily due to legal pressure brought upon the producer (Tracy Worcester) by the film’s main “villain,” Smithfield Foods (the world’s largest pork producer).
Despite four letters threatening litigation, the UK’s Channel 4 played the film last summer. But since no US insurer would back the film’s release here in the States due to concerns over threatened lawsuits from Smithfield, it has become essentially a black market film. Thus as Americans have fought censorship by our government for more than 200 years, corporate censorship continues unabated.
Guest: Michael Pollan, Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written several books about food, including The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. His latest is Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual.
MICHAEL POLLAN: The way we eat has changed more in the last fifty years than in the previous 10,000. The modern supermarket has, on average, 47,000 products. The industry doesn’t want you to know the truth about what you’re eating, because if you knew, you might not want to eat it.
ERIC SCHLOSSER: We’ve never had food companies this powerful in our history.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN 1: Everything we’ve done in modern agriculture is to grow it faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN 2: If you can grow a chicken in forty-nine days, why would you want one you’ve got to grow in three months?
MICHAEL POLLAN: When you go through the supermarket, there is an illusion of diversity. So much of our industrial food turns out to be rearrangements of corn.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Sometimes you look at a vegetable and say, “OK, well, we can get two hamburgers for the same price.”
MICHAEL POLLAN: They have managed to make it against the law to criticize their products. There is an effort to make it illegal to publish a photo of any industrial food operation.
The following is an excerpt from a July 2009 letter sent by the founder of Seed Saver's Exchange to SSE members. In its 2009 Catalog of Heirloom Seeds, Books and Gifts, SSE called itself "a non-profit membership organization dedicated to conserving and promoting heirloom vegetables, fruits, herbs and flowers. These include our members' family heirlooms' and [26,000 endangered] traditional varieties from around the world." This letter demonstrates that its original purpose has been usurped. Those with a different motive have, by slow infiltration and financial contributions, taken over one of humanities greatest collection of treasures' -- seeds.
NEW YORK (December 29, 2009) – A pesticide that could be dangerously toxic to America’s honey bees must be pulled from store shelves as a result of a suit filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Xerces Society. In an order issued last week, a federal court in New York invalidated EPA’s approval of the pesticide spirotetramat (manufactured by Bayer CropScience under the trade names Movento and Ultor) and ordered the agency to reevaluate the chemical in compliance with the law. The court’s order goes into effect on January 15, 2010, and makes future sales of Movento illegal in the United States.
“This sends EPA and Bayer back to the drawing board to reconsider the potential harm to bees caused by this new pesticide,” said NRDC Senior Attorney Aaron Colangelo. “EPA admitted to approving the pesticide illegally, but argued that its violations of the law should have no consequences. The Court disagreed and ordered the pesticide to be taken off the market until it has been properly evaluated. Bayer should not be permitted to run what amounts to an uncontrolled experiment on bees across the country without full consideration of the consequences.”
THE WAY THEY WERE A Tennessee fainting goat at SVF Foundation in Newport, R.I.
By BARRY ESTABROOK
Published: January 5, 2010
NEWPORT, R.I.
IT didn’t take long for Chip, a Tennessee fainting goat sporting a luxuriant Vandyke beard and an impressive pair of curlicue horns, to live up to his breed’s name. When Peter Borden, accompanied by a stranger, entered the immaculate stable that Chip calls home, the goat pressed his velvety nose through the bars of his stall, begging for a scratch. But at the visitor’s approach, Chip apparently had second thoughts. His left foreleg stiffened, his brown eyes went glassy and he began to list to one side.
“There he goes,” said Mr. Borden, the executive director of the SVF Foundation, a heritage livestock preservation facility here. The guest turned away, and Chip quickly recovered, his dignity intact.
Located on a 45-acre estate in Newport, SVF is the only organization in the country dedicated to conserving rare heritage livestock breeds by freezing their semen and embryos, a technique called cryopreservation. Chip, now SVF’s unofficial mascot, was the proof that the foundation had mastered the process. In early 2004, as a six-day-old embryo, he was flushed from his mother’s womb and spent the next several months frozen. Thawed and transplanted into a surrogate Nubian doe, a common breed, he was born on May 7, 2004, a perfectly normal fainting goat.
The building adjacent to the one that houses Chip contains three stainless-steel tanks about the size of commercial washing machines. About 45,000 semen and embryo samples from 20 breeds of rare cattle, sheep and goats are preserved there in liquid nitrogen chilled to minus 312 degrees — essentially a frozen ark. Each time the foundation freezes a batch of embryos from a new breed, it thaws a few and transplants them into surrogate animals, repeating the test that Chip once passed.
October 21, 2009 - The Center for Community Alternatives is now breeding Gulf Coast sheep at its rural facility in Hurdle Mills, North Carolina. The breed, listed as 'critical' by the American Breeds Conservancy, is being brought back from the brink of extinction. The Center occasionally has lambs for sale. Please contact us if interested.
