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Featured stories in this issue...
Early Warning Signs at the Global Warming Cafe
Most of environmentalists' time and creative energy is bent toward
policy. Books on climate, organizational manifestos, and blog posts
argue the finer points of carbon taxes versus cap-and-trade and other,
often arcane, details. Little of our thinking or resources goes into
social change theory, political strategy (aside from elections),
organizing and campaigning, applying lessons from U.S. history....
New Research Finds Human Activities Definitely Cause Global Warming
Scientists have been able to say with virtual certainty for the
first time that the climate change observed over the past four decades
is not the result of natural phenomena but is caused by human
activities.
Shouldn't Chemicals Be Proven Safe for Kids Before Marketing?
Currently, U.S. chemicals law is so toothless that the U.S. EPA was
unable to ban asbestos under its provisions, even though asbestos is
perhaps the most potent cancer-causing substance ever introduced into
commerce and kills about 10,000 people per year. Time for a new law.
Mazzocchi, Speth and Capitalism's Future
Gus Speth -- the current Dean of Yale University School of Forestry
and Environmental Studies -- and Tony Mazzocchi, an important labor
leader who died in 2002, traveled very diffferent paths to arrive at
the same conclusion: capitalism as we know it is incompatible with the
natural environment and therefore will change, one way or another.
Chronic Diseases Top Causes of Deaths Globally
The World health Organization reports that chronic diseases --
mainly heart disease and stroke -- have now displaced infectious
diseases as the major killers worldwide.
Manufacturing a Food Crisis
The global food crisis was created by public policies imposed on
third-world countries by industrialized nations eager to sell surplus
food.
One Country's Table Scraps, Another Country's Meal
Food shortages are causing sporadic riots in poor countries
throughout the world, while Americans are wasting "an astounding
amount of food -- an estimated 27 percent of the food available for
consumption." It works out to about a pound of food wasted every day
for every American. It doesn't have to be this way.
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From: Gristmill, May 20, 2008
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EARLY WARNING SIGNS AT THE GLOBAL WARMING CAFE
The Climate Policy Paradigm has reached its endgame
By Ken Ward
It takes effort to suit up in the quasi-business/academic garb of the
professional environmentalist and enter the lion's den of DC politics
or the state houses. Our beliefs are so fundamentally at odds with the
very fabric of civic life that it requires an effort of will,
particularly in the early years, not to scream bloody murder and run
for the door.
Over decades, layers of accommodation and polite behavior have built
up by accretion, while our rough edges have been worn down. The net
result is a worldview -- we may call it the "Climate Policy Paradigm"
-- that is so universally accepted that it goes unnoticed, yet its
power is so great that we have abandoned the precautionary principle,
environmentalism's central guide for action, with barely a murmur when
the two came in conflict.
Two hundred people turned out to hear Ross Gelbspan speak at the
Jamaica Plain Forum a couple months ago. He gave us an hour of
unvarnished truth, summarized recent climate science, and drove home
the reality that nothing short of immediate, transformative, global
action is sufficient.
Climate campaign staff followed up at a "Global Warming Cafe,"
presenting our standard three-part story:
First, we can turn things around, indeed we are already starting to do
so;
Second, sound energy policy is good for America, because it will
reduce dependence on foreign oil and create green jobs; and
Third, there are two things individuals can do: urge members of
Congress to support emissions reduction bills and reduce our own
carbon footprints.
The audience joined in small group discussions, contributing their own
tips on mulching and insulating hot water pipes, but the disparity
between the terrible picture Ross painted and the flimsy action
activists were invited to take left a palpable pall in the auditorium.
If the purpose of campaigning is to raise hope, spirits, and courage
in the face of long odds, and channel that energy into productive
political change, then we are failing. Participants in the reduce-
your-carbon-footprint workshops were not joined to some larger purpose
and few appeared to leave more energized then they arrived.
To the growing and increasingly sophisticated climate core -- anxious
individuals responding directly to climate scientists, who now address
them directly via op-eds in The New York Times -- our invitation to
lobby Congress for tepid legislation is un-galvanizing, to put it
mildly. Gifted with 200 potential activists in a national election
year, our best idea is to engage them in private carbon-emissions
navel gazing.
Common sense and organizing experience ought to tell us that we are
beginning to lose touch with our base, but we no longer think much in
terms of building the environmental core. In the long, strange trip
between Earth Day 1970 and the Global Warming Cafe, the transformative
vision of environmentalism -- which spoke to people's fears (as well
as their hopes), sketched a vision in broad strokes of society rebuilt
(in addition to lobbying for reforms), thought in terms of movement
and belief (not just organization and policy), and saw
environmentalism as outside the left/right spectrum, equally appealing
and equally challenging to all traditional politics (and not just one
of the progressive herd) -- has morphed into something cramped,
Balkanized, and self-conscious.
Our eco-fundamentalist vision is still there, but it is buried. The
way we see the world, on a day-to-day basis, is through the lens of
our Climate Policy Paradigm, an internally consistent body of beliefs
which guides and structures our actions. U.S. environmentalists, from
self-avowed critics to the most mainstream, agree on three things, the
cornerstones of the Paradigm:
1. our most important work is to advance climate policy;
2. we must be optimistic, and;
3. climate must be put in terms other than environmental interests.
Policy is our business
Most of our time and creative energy is bent toward policy. Books on
climate, organizational manifestos, and Gristmill posts argue the
finer points of carbon taxes versus cap-and-trade and other, often
arcane, details. Little of our thinking or resources goes into social
change theory, political strategy (aside from elections), organizing
and campaigning, applying lessons from U.S. history, public
communications, or insights from cognitive psychology, sociology,
theology, economics, or any number of other arts and sciences.
We elevate climate policy above other avenues because we believe that
it is the primary responsibility of environmentalists to craft the
climate change solution.
Why so? Because we think that if we hit upon just the right formula --
the perfect blend of incentives, quasi-free market trappings, tax
breaks, and so on -- we can accomplish the political equivalent of
changing lead into gold, and pass effective climate legislation
without major opposition.
But political power is immutable and we are not alchemists.
Policy -- a plan of governmental action -- is an outcome of power, not
a means of achieving it. We do not have enough power to win functional
climate policy in the U.S., and until we do so, there will be no
global climate solution.
For twenty years we have approached the problem by pre-negotiating
with ourselves on behalf of our opposition. We don't think about it in
those terms, but that is what climate policy is all about. We
calculate what concessions are necessary to placate whichever
interest, power, or nation it is thought must be mollified, and then
devise a scheme to fit within those limits.
There are powerful arguments against the anything-is-better-than-
nothing philosophy, but there is an even more basic problem with our
"policy-first" approach. The world can only draw back from the climate
tipping point by transformative political action. The details (i.e.
policy) of that action are unknowable to us because we are unaware of,
and cannot predict, the conditions, resources, and timetable that will
dictate the terms of action when America does accept responsibility
for global leadership.
It is possible for us to talk about what America can do when we
mobilize to face a global threat, by drawing on U.S. history. The
Marshall Plan and post-WWII reconstruction are often used as analogies
for a climate solution, but the U.S. gear-up for war after the bombing
of Pearl Harbor is more useful example of the potential speed and
scale of American mobilization.
After Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government told Detroit to stop
manufacturing automobiles for private use and start building tanks and
other war materiel. Automobile production was 162,000 in 1941, and
zero in 1942. Tank production was less than 300 in 1940, and 25,000 by
1942.
When the U.S. does act decisively on climate, our government will tell
the private sector to stop burning coal and start getting power from
renewables within one year, and they will do it, because it feasible.
The U.S. can't solve the climate crisis unilaterally, so we will pay
for China to go solar in exchange for shutting down its coal mines
(the two nations control 40% of the worlds coal reserves), just as we
couldn't win the war alone, and paid the Soviet Union to keep the
second front open.
Our agenda must aim for that level of action. Nothing short of it is
sufficient, and the details will not be worked out beforehand. Our
present agenda, focused on U.S. domestic emissions and anything-is-
better-than-nothing, has more in common with the pre-war policies of
isolationism and appeasement.
The people sitting on folding chairs in low-carbon-footprint workshops
are much more sophisticated than they were a few years back, and
they're not easily snowed by charts and graphs peppered with labels --
"wedges" this and RPS that -- purporting to show how emissions can go
down without our power first going up.
What we have going for us is truth and righteousness. What we need is
a disciplined, committed climate core. Both are compromised if we keep
flogging flimsy policy that cannot solve the problem.
We must be upbeat
Every day we we receive communications from our organizations
enthusing about this or that victory. Here's one:
Great news. Yesterday, the House of Representatives passed a strong
renewable energy standard requiring utilities to provide 12.5% of the
state's electricity from clean, renewable energy sources like wind and
solar by 2025.
If the world must immediately shut down coal plants to get below 350
ppm, as Hansen advises, then the utilities mentioned in the blurb
above have just won themselves a great victory.
We can't have it both ways. If we are on the fast road to cataclysm
and nothing short of massive, global transformation is meaningful,
then we must stop seeking and celebrating dinky achievements. At the
very least, we must rephrase how they are trumpeted:
Yesterday, the House of Representatives passed a renewable energy
standard requiring utilities to provide 12.5% of the state's
electricity from renewable energy sources like wind and solar by 2025.
That is 1/6 of total cuts utilities must make in coal emissions to
pull back from the climate "point of no return." We believe it is
crucial to get the renewable standard language onto the books, and
have accepted the low percentage. [Our campaign] is pledged to
immediately return to the legislature to speed up the transfer from
coal to solar and wind.
Climate must be pitched to other interests
Climate programs spanning the gamut from Rising Tide to Apollo and
NWF assume that people won't respond to direct calls for climate
action.
Whether this mass communications approach is advisable is neither here
nor there, because it is certainly a disaster for the climate core --
and it is a terrible bargain to trade a small but deeply committed
base for a supposed majority that is paper thin.
The folks at the Global Warming Cafe heard two different stories. Ross
talked about the end of the world, yet managed to encourage hope in
the face of darkness. The gist of our story is that we don't believe
climate change is nearly the problem Ross and the scientists say it
is.
We convey our skepticism in two ways. First, we blur our descriptions
of the problem so as not to be too alarmist, and second, we put the
primary case for climate action in terms other than avoiding disaster.
To cry catastrophe! and then list benefits like green jobs and reduced
oil imports to be gained if we take preventative measures is odd and
confusing behavior, like running into a crowded movie theater and
shouting "Fire!... and don't forget to buy popcorn on the way out;
with all the unexpected traffic, it's on sale!"
Unmoored from principle
We are in crisis because the Climate Policy Paradigm has demonstrably
failed to solve the problem. It also prevents us from perceiving that
we are in crisis. One unambiguous signal that we have sailed into
murky waters is our abandonment of the precautionary principle --
environmentalism's central assumption -- without debate.
Environmentalists won inclusion of precautionary language in the Rio
Declaration on the Environment and the Kyoto Protocol. Climate
scientists consistently refer to this language as the benchmark for
deciding are necessary and appropriate responses to climate change.
In 2005, Jim Hansen published "On A Slippery Slope" (PDF), laying
out the case for a 450 ppm "bright line" and outlining a scenario of
glacier surface ice melt leading to ice shelf break-up and rapid sea
level rise. Hansen's position was significantly more conservative --
that is, precautionary -- than the 550 ppm Kyoto target, and was not
endorsed by any major U.S. environmental organization for several
years (even, ironically, as U.S. environmentalists rushed to support
Hansen when the Bush administration sought to gag him).
Three years later, Hansen has circulated a paper making the
precautionary case for a swift return below 350 ppm atmospheric
carbon. Once again, nothing is heard from U.S. environmentalists but a
deafening silence. As a matter of intellectual honesty, we have two
options: endorse or refute. As a matter of environmental principle,
there is no option, and the longer we remain silent, the greater the
moral burden, the tighter our grip on the familiar, and more
impossible the task that can commence only when the way is cleared.
A second unambiguous example that our thinking is out of whack is that
we have yet to take even the simplest of steps to join forces. The
Paradigm evolved from decisions of energy advocates and program
officers, whose calculus of environmental power was organizational,
rarely coalitional, not institutional, and never movement-based.
Ten years ago, that kind of thinking might be excused, but today?
Where is the gathering of Green Group leadership to plan strategy?
Where is the national training conference for our core? Where is the
proposal to create infrastructure (communications center, training
academy, fundraising, technology, etc.)?
An organization or foundation that represents itself as addressing
climate change based on its own resources and program alone has not
accepted reality.
Easing out from under the paradigm
We can keep plodding down the dark road of deepening despair, rigid
defense of inadequate policy, and preservation of organizational power
at the expense of common purpose until our base disintegrates and/or
an internal flash point is reached.
Or, we can acknowledge that our Climate Policy Paradigm has failed,
experiment with new program and campaigning, and craft a more robust
approach. (I have argued that we might bridge the gap by creating an
in-house, experimenting campaigns center to germinate and test new
ideas.) Even small steps in this direction will be instantly rewarded,
as a new atmosphere of creative ferment supplants sterile labor. When
reality -- however terrible -- is accepted in place of false optimism,
we will tap a wellspring of courage, joy, and hope.
How we choose to act at this critical juncture determines whether
environmental principles and our institution will survive; whether a
just and sustainable climate solution will be put before the world;
and whether America will be mobilized to lead a last-minute global
drive to avert collapse of civilization and eco-cataclysm. To achieve
these things -- to save the world -- we must do what may be the
hardest thing humans are ever called upon to do: give up deeply held
beliefs of which we are barely even aware. In our case, the challenge
is made easy because we have merely to unearth the values and
principles we already hold but have held too long in secrecy.
Which vision will go over best at the next Global Warming Cafe? Two
years back it would have been a tough call whether the climate core
preferred terrible truth + long odds but functional global solution,
or buffered truth + personal action and comfortable but ineffective
politics. Now, if offered an alternative to civics by pre-packaged
constituent email and activism defined as refusing junk mail, there is
little doubt they would seize it, because they have accepted reality,
and it terrifies them.
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From: Financial Times (London, U.K.), May 15, 2008
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CLIMATE CHANGE STUDY POINTS FINGER
Scientists confident on human cause
Research backs up IPCC assertions
By Fiona Harvey
Scientists have been able to say with virtual certainty for the first
time that the climate change observed over the past four decades is
not the result of natural phenomena but is man made.
The research compounds the conclusion of the biggest scientific report
on global warming to date, the fourth assessment report of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last year, which
asserted a strong likelihood that human action was changing the
climate.
The new study raises the likelihood of "unnatural" causes of global
warming to near certainty.
Authors of the study, published today 6 Mbyte PDF in the peer
reviewed journal Nature, examined a greater range of data than any
other study so far. "Changes in natural systems since at least 1970
are occurring in regions of observed temperature increases, and these
temperature increases at continental scales cannot be explained by
natural climate variations alone," they say.
They give warning that man-made climate change is having "a
significant impact on physical and biological systems globally". The
authors of the Nature study, including scientists from the Australia,
China, the US and several other countries, found that more than 90 per
cent of the data sets they examined showed evidence that natural
systems were responding to warming.
Spring is coming earlier, permafrost is melting and coastal erosion is
increasing under the influence of rising sea levels, while animals and
birds are changing their migration and reproductive patterns.
Barry Brook, director of climate change research at the University of
Adelaide, said: "[We should] consider that there has been only 0.75ºC
of temperature change so far, yet the expectation for this century is
four to nine times that amount.
"So these changes are only a minor portent of what is likely to come,
especially if we continue on our carbon-profligate pathway."
Climate scientists know they may be facing difficult times ahead in
persuading the public and politicians of the urgency of global
warming, as research published recently in Nature suggested that
global temperatures were not likely to increase in the next decade,
and could even decline.
Scientists from Germany's Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences and the
UK Met Office's Hadley Centre say natural variations in the climate
linked to the Pacific cooling system known as La Nina, and a cooling
phase of a system of Atlantic currents called the meridional
overturning circulation, may push down temperatures despite the
effects of greenhouse gases.
After those effects wear off, within about a decade, temperatures are
likely to rise much more strongly as the warming effect of carbon
emissions regains the upper hand in altering the climate.
Scientists fear that the expected lull in temperature rises might
dispel any sense of urgency in tackling global warming and provide
ammunition for climate change sceptics.
Copyright 2008 The Financial Times Limited
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From: Ascribe Newswire, May 21, 2008
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SHOULDN'T CHEMICALS BE PROVEN SAFE FOR KIDS BEFORE MARKETING?
Amid rising concern over toxic chemicals in consumer products and in
the bodies of Americans, landmark legislation has been introduced in
Congress to make sure chemicals are safe before they are allowed on
the market.
Under current law known as the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA),
unchanged since 1976, most new chemicals are approved with little or
no safety testing, and more than 62,000 existing chemicals have
remained on the market for three decades despite evidence that some
pose serious health risks. The Kid Safe Chemicals Act (KSCA), by Sen.
Frank R. Lautenberg (D-NJ) and Reps. Hilda Solis (D-CA) and Henry
Waxman (D-CA), would place the burden of proof on the chemical
industry to show that chemicals are safe for children before they are
added to consumer products.
"Every day, consumers rely on household products that contain hundreds
of chemicals. The American public expects the federal government to
keep families safe by testing chemicals, but the government is letting
them down," Lautenberg said in a press release. "We already have
strong regulations for pesticides and pharmaceuticals. It's common
sense that we do the same for chemicals that end up in household items
such as bottles and toys."
The current law is so toothless that the U.S. EPA was unable to ban
asbestos under its provisions, even though asbestos is perhaps the
most potent cancer-causing substance ever introduced into commerce and
kills about 10,000 people per year. In the 32 years since TSCA was
passed, EPA has evaluated the safety of just 200 out of 80,000
chemicals, and banned only 5.
The Kid Safe Chemicals Act would give EPA the mandate to protect
public health from chemical exposures and the authority to get the job
done. The bill puts the burden of proving chemical safety where it
belongs -- with the manufacturers -- and makes available to the public
a wealth of health and safety information used to make safety
determinations. KSCA recognizes the magnitude of the task and sets
priorities for action based on whether chemicals are found in people,
with special priority for chemicals found in human umbilical cord
blood.
Ken Cook, president of Environmental Working Group (EWG), whose tests
found 287 industrial chemicals in 10 samples of umbilical cord blood,
called KSCA a long-overdue move to put public health ahead of chemical
industry profits.
"When babies come into this world pre-polluted with hundreds of
dangerous industrial chemicals already in their blood, it's clear that
the regulatory system is broken," said Ken Cook, president of
Environmental Working Group (EWG). "The Kid Safe Chemicals Act will
change a lax, outdated system that presumes chemicals are safe into
one that requires makers of toxic chemicals to prove their safety
before they're allowed on the market."
KSCA does not propose to invent new public health criteria, but
instead adopts tough health standards that chemical manufacturers
already comply with for other products like pesticides and food
additives, and applies these same standards to industrial chemicals
that also end up in people.
A coalition of grassroots, state and national organizations led by EWG
sent a letter to the lawmakers today applauding their action and
pledging support as the work begins to make this legislation law. The
letter and list of organizations is available at http://www.ewg.org.
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From: Future Hope, May 19, 2008
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MAZZOCCHI, SPETH AND CAPITALISM'S FUTURE
By Ted Glick
==============
"Capitalism as we know it today is incapable of sustaining the
environment." -- James Gustave (Gus) Speth, in "The Bridge at the End
of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to
Sustainability"
"In the late 1980s, Tony was arguing that global warming might force
us to fundamentally alter capitalism. He believed that the struggle
against nature was the irreconcilable contradiction that would force
systemic change." -- Les Leopold, in "The Man Who Hated Work and Loved
Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi"
==============
I don't know if Gus Speth and Tony Mazzocchi knew each other
personally. Speth's work career has been as a co-founder and senior
attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, with President
Jimmy Carter's Council on Environmental Quality, as founder and
president of the World Resources Institute, as Administrator of the
United Nations Development Programme and, since 1999, as Dean of the
Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
The late Tony Mazzocchi, on the other hand, following service in the
army during World War II, was completely immersed in the world of the
U.S. labor movement. He rose from the ranks to become a national
leader of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union,
and he was the founder and leader of the Labor Party.
But as these two fascinating books make clear, their distinct life
experiences led them both to believe that the capitalist system which
now dominates most of the world is the ultimate problem which humanity
must face up to and deal with if we are to survive and if, in Tony
Mazzocchi's words, "people are [to be] able to enjoy the arts,
relaxation, interaction with other people, free time... You know,
there's an awful lot of wealth out there. If it was distributed
appropriately, everyone could have a fairly decent life -- I think
globally. And people could be happy transforming the way we live. Not
everyone has to live in a mansion, but everyone can live in a decent
environment. It's all possible." (pps. 480-481)
Tony Mazzocchi died in 2002. As Les Leopold's well-researched book
makes clear, Mazzocchi was not your typical U.S. labor leader. He was
a visionary, while being very practical and very "close to the ground"
in his political sensibilities. He was a radical in his political
beliefs, for sure, in the best sense of radicalism as getting at the
root of things.
"His brush with heavy manual labor convinced him that the good life
required something beyond traditional work. Slowly, that sense would
crystallize into a stinging critique of the left's obsession with
'jobs, jobs, jobs.' Mazzocchi would later apply his version of
radicalism to anticipate a different kind of contradiction of
capitalism: He believed the clash of capital against nature (as in
global warming or environmental health) -- not just a clash over
economic resources -- would force systemic change." (pps. 76-77)
Mazzocchi was likely the first labor leader, if not one of the first
labor activists, to get it on global warming. 20 years ago, in 1988,
he organized the first U.S. union conference on global warming, and he
was responsible for the publication and circulation of Global Warming
Watch, by the Labor Institute's Mike Merrill, "certainly the first
publication on the implications of climate change for American
workers." (p. 433)
Mazzocchi's commitment to linking worker's rights and environmental
issues was deeply-grounded. As the legislative director of OCAW he
played a major role in 1973 when 4,000 OCAW members who worked for
Shell Oil Company went on strike at eight plants and refineries around
the country. In part because of Mazzocchi, the health and safety of
the workers, at risk because of high amounts of asbestos in their
workplaces, was the primary issue of the strike.
Due to Mazzocchi's leadership, a blue-green alliance developed around
this struggle. Major environmental groups supported the strike and
built support for a nationwide boycott of Shell products. Four months
after it began, the strike was settled. Historian Robert Gordon,
writing 25 years later, wrote of OCAW's "remarkable progress. Almost
all of the union's contracts with other oil companies were renewed
with the strict health and safety clause... In addition, OCAW's
efforts heightened public awareness of health hazards confronting
millions of American workers... Perhaps most importantly, the Shell
strike solidified the tentative labor-environmental alliance." (p.
308)
Gus Speth appreciates the importance of such alliances if we are to
create a just and sustainable society. In the concluding pages of his
book, he says that "perhaps above all, the new environmental politics
must be broadly inclusive, reaching to embrace union members and
working families, minorities and people of color, religious
organizations, the women's movement, and other communities of
complementary interest and shared fate." (p. 228)
Coming from someone who Time magazine called the "ultimate insider,"
Speth's well-reasoned call for a new environmental movement, for a new
movement in which environmental issues are central, is a welcome and
much-needed contribution, particularly for the climate and
environmental movements.
It is no small thing when someone with Speth's background and
connections writes, "my conclusion, after much searching and
considerable reluctance, is that most environmental deterioration is a
result of systemic failures of the capitalism that we have today and
that long-term solutions must seek transformative change in the key
features of this contemporary capitalism." (p. 9) Or this more stark
formulation: "Capitalism as we know it today is incapable of
sustaining the environment." (p. 63)
On the other hand, Speth makes clear that he's no socialist, a
difference with Mazzocchi, who liked the basic idea even though he was
critical of much of "actually existing socialism" and much of the
organized socialist and communist Left in the U.S.
Speth writes approvingly of a government-regulated market economy, one
in which environmental impacts and the "polluter pays" principle would
be paramount, essentially a form of environmental social democracy.
Included would be "policies that promote an environmental revolution
in technology... a wholesale transformation in the technologies that
today dominate manufacturing, energy, construction, transportation and
agriculture. The twentieth-century technologies that have contributed
so abundantly to today's problems should be phased out and replaced
with twenty-first-century technologies designed with environmental
sustainability and restoration in mind." (p. 113)
Speth calls for a rejection of the necessity of constant economic
growth -- a central tenet of capitalism. He calls, instead, for
policies that "strengthen families and communities," "measures that
guarantee good, well-paying jobs," "measures that give us more time
for leisure, informal education, the arts, music, drama, sports,
hobbies, volunteering, community work, outdoor work...," "measures
that give everyone a good education," and more. (p. 145)
He rejects "consumerism and commercialism." Instead, "Confront
consumerism. Practice sufficiency. Work less. Reclaim your time --
it's all you have. Turn off technology. Join No Shopping Day. Buy
nothing... Simplify your life. Shed possessions. Downshift." (p. 163)
He is critical of corporations and wants to see the public good come
before private profit, with the implications of that for actually
existing corporations, especially the huge and powerful ones, left
unclear. He supports "ownership by workers, public ownership, and
public and private enterprises that do not seek traditional profits.
They offer opportunities for greater local control, more sensitivity
to employee, public, and consumer interests, and heightened
environmental performance. Collectively, they signal the emergence of
a new sector -- a public or independent sector -- that has the
potential to be a countervailing center of power to today's
capitalism." (p. 194) Left unaddressed -- a weakness -- is how this
"countervailing center of power" would relate to the
military/industrial/fossil fuel complex that dominates our economy and
government.
Speth sees the importance of "a new consciousness" and "a new
politics" if the change needed is to take place. He appreciates that
"government is the principal means available to citizens to
collectively exercise their stewardship responsibility to leave the
world a better place." (p. 217)
He is particularly supportive of the movement-building that is going
on among young people and within the World Social Forum process. He
concludes by writing, "Our goal should be to find the spark that can
set off a period of rapid change, like the flowering of the domestic
environmental agenda in the early 1970s. In the end, we need to
trigger a response that in historical terms will come to be seen as
revolutionary -- the Environmental Revolution of the twenty-first
century. Only such a response is likely to avert huge and even
catastrophic environmental losses."
One weakness of Speth's book, highlighted by comparison to the one on
Mazzocchi, is that, while he supports alliance-building and grassroots
movement-building, he says nothing about our corporate-dominated, two
party political system. He doesn't address whether he thinks it will
be possible to make the changes necessary through the Democratic Party
alone and how he sees that political animal. Does he believe that we
do -- or don't -- need to transform a political system that pretty
much restricts voters' choices to Republicans and Democrats, that
makes it extremely difficult for third parties to gain a foothold and
grow? What about the role of our propagandistic, corporate-dominated
mass media and our 19th-century, winner-take-all, non-proportional
electoral system in suppressing popular resistance to capitalism's
negative and destructive impacts?
Tony Mazzocchi, experiencing the relative powerlessness of the working
class, understood this in his bones, which is why he devoted the last
years of his life to efforts to form a U.S. labor party.
A related weakness is a lack of specificity when it comes to the
tactics of struggle in the process of making the urgently-needed
"Environmental Revolution." The role of direct action and nonviolent
civil disobedience -- the centrality of leadership in this new
movement from historically disenfranchised constituencies like people
of color, working-class people and women -- the building of thoroughly
democratic and transparent organizations and alliances that empower
grassroots people and new members -- how to counter the inevitable
efforts to divide and repress a growing movement that threatens the
obscene wealth and power of those who currently have it: these are
very real issues.
Albert Einstein once said, "In everyone's life, at some time, our
inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with
another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who
rekindle the inner spirit." Thanks to Les Leopold, many people who did
not know Tony Mazzocchi will have their spirit rekindled when they
read about this 20th century hero of our history.
And we are fortunate that "ultimate insider" Gus Speth will continue
to help lead us as we build towards the Environmental Revolution which
must occur. May "the spark that can set off a period of rapid change"
come soon.
==============
Ted Glick has been active in the climate movement since 2003 and in
the progressive social change movement since 1968. He can be contacted
at indpol@igc.org or P.O. Box 1132, Bloomfield, N.J. 07003.
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From: Reuters Alertnet, May 20, 2008
[Printer-friendly version]
CHRONIC DISEASES TOP CAUSES OF DEATHS GLOBALLY
By Stephanie Nebehay
GENEVA -- Chronic conditions such as heart disease and stroke, often
associated with a Western lifestyle, have become the chief causes of
death globally, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Tuesday.
The shift from infectious diseases including tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS
and malaria -- traditionally the biggest killers -- to noncommunicable
diseases is set to continue to 2030, the U.N. agency said in a report.
"In more and more countries, the chief causes of deaths are
noncommunicable diseases such as heart disease and stroke," Ties
Boerma, director of the WHO department of health statistics and
informatics, said in a statement.
The annual report, World Health Statistics 2008, is based on data
collected from the WHO's 193 member states.
It documents levels of mortality in children and adults, patterns of
disease, and the prevalence of risk factors such as smoking and
alcohol consumption.
"As populations age in middle- and low-income countries over the next
25 years, the proportion of deaths due to noncommunicable diseases
will rise significantly," it said.
By 2030, deaths due to cancer, cardiovascular diseases and traffic
accidents will together account for about 30 percent of all deaths, it
said.
WHO Director-General Margaret Chan, in a speech to the WHO's annual
assembly on Monday, voiced concern at the growing toll of chronic
noncommunicable diseases.
"Diabetes and asthma are on the rise everywhere. Even low-income
countries are seeing shocking increases in obesity, especially in
urban areas and often starting in childhood," Chan said.
Tobacco use is the single largest cause of preventable death
worldwide, killing "a third to a half of all those who use it",
according to the WHO. It contributes to deaths from ischaemic heart
disease, stroke and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease which
numbered 5.4 million in 2004.
More than 80 percent of the 8.3 million tobacco-attributable deaths
projected to occur in 2030 will be in developing countries, it says.
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From: The Nation, May 16, 2008
[Printer-friendly version]
MANUFACTURING A FOOD CRISIS
By Walden Bello
When tens of thousands of people staged demonstrations in Mexico last
year to protest a 60 percent increase in the price of tortillas, many
analysts pointed to biofuel as the culprit. Because of US government
subsidies, American farmers were devoting more and more acreage to
corn for ethanol than for food, which sparked a steep rise in corn
prices. The diversion of corn from tortillas to biofuel was certainly
one cause of skyrocketing prices, though speculation on biofuel demand
by transnational middlemen may have played a bigger role. However, an
intriguing question escaped many observers: how on earth did Mexicans,
who live in the land where corn was domesticated, become dependent on
US imports in the first place?
The Mexican food crisis cannot be fully understood without taking into
account the fact that in the years preceding the tortilla crisis, the
homeland of corn had been converted to a corn-importing economy by
"free market" policies promoted by the International Monetary Fund
(IMF), the World Bank and Washington. The process began with the early
1980s debt crisis. One of the two largest developing-country debtors,
Mexico was forced to beg for money from the Bank and IMF to service
its debt to international commercial banks. The quid pro quo for a
multibillion-dollar bailout was what a member of the World Bank
executive board described as "unprecedented thoroughgoing
interventionism" designed to eliminate high tariffs, state regulations
and government support institutions, which neoliberal doctrine
identified as barriers to economic efficiency.
Interest payments rose from 19 percent of total government
expenditures in 1982 to 57 percent in 1988, while capital expenditures
dropped from an already low 19.3 percent to 4.4 percent. The
contraction of government spending translated into the dismantling of
state credit, government-subsidized agricultural inputs, price
supports, state marketing boards and extension services. Unilateral
liberalization of agricultural trade pushed by the IMF and World Bank
also contributed to the destabilization of peasant producers.
This blow to peasant agriculture was followed by an even larger one in
1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect.
Although NAFTA had a fifteen-year phaseout of tariff protection for
agricultural products, including corn, highly subsidized US corn
quickly flooded in, reducing prices by half and plunging the corn
sector into chronic crisis. Largely as a result of this agreement,
Mexico's status as a net food importer has now been firmly
established.
With the shutting down of the state marketing agency for corn,
distribution of US corn imports and Mexican grain has come to be
monopolized by a few transnational traders, like US-owned Cargill and
partly US-owned Maseca, operating on both sides of the border. This
has given them tremendous power to speculate on trade trends, so that
movements in biofuel demand can be manipulated and magnified many
times over. At the same time, monopoly control of domestic trade has
ensured that a rise in international corn prices does not translate
into significantly higher prices paid to small producers.
It has become increasingly difficult for Mexican corn farmers to avoid
the fate of many of their fellow corn cultivators and other
smallholders in sectors such as rice, beef, poultry and pork, who have
gone under because of the advantages conferred by NAFTA on subsidized
US producers. According to a 2003 Carnegie Endowment report, imports
of US agricultural products threw at least 1.3 million farmers out of
work -- many of whom have since found their way to the United States.
Prospects are not good, since the Mexican government continues to be
controlled by neoliberals who are systematically dismantling the
peasant support system, a key legacy of the Mexican Revolution. As
Food First executive director Eric Holt-Gimenez sees it, "It will take
time and effort to recover smallholder capacity, and there does not
appear to be any political will for this -- to say nothing of the fact
that NAFTA would have to be renegotiated."
Creating a Rice Crisis in the Philippines
That the global food crisis stems mainly from free-market
restructuring of agriculture is clearer in the case of rice. Unlike
corn, less than 10 percent of world rice production is traded.
Moreover, there has been no diversion of rice from food consumption to
biofuels. Yet this year alone, prices nearly tripled, from $380 a ton
in January to more than $1,000 in April. Undoubtedly the inflation
stems partly from speculation by wholesaler cartels at a time of
tightening supplies. However, as with Mexico and corn, the big puzzle
is why a number of formerly self-sufficient rice-consuming countries
have become severely dependent on imports.
The Philippines provides a grim example of how neoliberal economic
restructuring transforms a country from a net food exporter to a net
food importer. The Philippines is the world's largest importer of
rice. Manila's desperate effort to secure supplies at any price has
become front-page news, and pictures of soldiers providing security
for rice distribution in poor communities have become emblematic of
the global crisis.
The broad contours of the Philippines story are similar to those of
Mexico. Dictator Ferdinand Marcos was guilty of many crimes and
misdeeds, including failure to follow through on land reform, but one
thing he cannot be accused of is starving the agricultural sector. To
head off peasant discontent, the regime provided farmers with
subsidized fertilizer and seeds, launched credit plans and built rural
infrastructure. When Marcos fled the country in 1986, there were
900,000 metric tons of rice in government warehouses.
Paradoxically, the next few years under the new democratic
dispensation saw the gutting of government investment capacity. As in
Mexico the World Bank and IMF, working on behalf of international
creditors, pressured the Corazon Aquino administration to make
repayment of the $26 billion foreign debt a priority. Aquino
acquiesced, though she was warned by the country's top economists that
the "search for a recovery program that is consistent with a debt
repayment schedule determined by our creditors is a futile one."
Between 1986 and 1993 8 percent to 10 percent of GDP left the
Philippines yearly in debt-service payments -- roughly the same
proportion as in Mexico. Interest payments as a percentage of
expenditures rose from 7 percent in 1980 to 28 percent in 1994;
capital expenditures plunged from 26 percent to 16 percent. In short,
debt servicing became the national budgetary priority.
Spending on agriculture fell by more than half. The World Bank and its
local acolytes were not worried, however, since one purpose of the
belt-tightening was to get the private sector to energize the
countryside. But agricultural capacity quickly eroded. Irrigation
stagnated, and by the end of the 1990s only 17 percent of the
Philippines' road network was paved, compared with 82 percent in
Thailand and 75 percent in Malaysia. Crop yields were generally
anemic, with the average rice yield way below those in China, Vietnam
and Thailand, where governments actively promoted rural production.
The post-Marcos agrarian reform program shriveled, deprived of funding
for support services, which had been the key to successful reforms in
Taiwan and South Korea. As in Mexico Filipino peasants were confronted
with full-scale retreat of the state as provider of comprehensive
support -- a role they had come to depend on.
And the cutback in agricultural programs was followed by trade
liberalization, with the Philippines' 1995 entry into the World Trade
Organization having the same effect as Mexico's joining NAFTA. WTO
membership required the Philippines to eliminate quotas on all
agricultural imports except rice and allow a certain amount of each
commodity to enter at low tariff rates. While the country was allowed
to maintain a quota on rice imports, it nevertheless had to admit the
equivalent of 1 to 4 percent of domestic consumption over the next ten
years. In fact, because of gravely weakened production resulting from
lack of state support, the government imported much more than that to
make up for shortfalls. The massive imports depressed the price of
rice, discouraging farmers and keeping growth in production at a rate
far below that of the country's two top suppliers, Thailand and
Vietnam.
The consequences of the Philippines' joining the WTO barreled through
the rest of its agriculture like a super-typhoon. Swamped by cheap
corn imports -- much of it subsidized US grain -- farmers reduced land
devoted to corn from 3.1 million hectares in 1993 to 2.5 million in
2000. Massive importation of chicken parts nearly killed that
industry, while surges in imports destabilized the poultry, hog and
vegetable industries.
During the 1994 campaign to ratify WTO membership, government
economists, coached by their World Bank handlers, promised that losses
in corn and other traditional crops would be more than compensated for
by the new export industry of "high-value-added" crops like cut
flowers, asparagus and broccoli. Little of this materialized. Nor did
many of the 500,000 agricultural jobs that were supposed to be created
yearly by the magic of the market; instead, agricultural employment
dropped from 11.2 million in 1994 to 10.8 million in 2001.
The one-two punch of IMF-imposed adjustment and WTO-imposed trade
liberalization swiftly transformed a largely self-sufficient
agricultural economy into an import-dependent one as it steadily
marginalized farmers. It was a wrenching process, the pain of which
was captured by a Filipino government negotiator during a WTO session
in Geneva. "Our small producers," he said, "are being slaughtered by
the gross unfairness of the international trading environment."
The Great Transformation
The experience of Mexico and the Philippines was paralleled in one
country after another subjected to the ministrations of the IMF and
the WTO. A study of fourteen countries by the UN's Food and
Agricultural Organization found that the levels of food imports in
1995-98 exceeded those in 1990-94. This was not surprising, since one
of the main goals of the WTO's Agreement on Agriculture was to open up
markets in developing countries so they could absorb surplus
production in the North. As then-US Agriculture Secretary John Block
put it in 1986, "The idea that developing countries should feed
themselves is an anachronism from a bygone era. They could better
ensure their food security by relying on US agricultural products,
which are available in most cases at lower cost."
What Block did not say was that the lower cost of US products stemmed
from subsidies, which became more massive with each passing year
despite the fact that the WTO was supposed to phase them out. From
$367 billion in 1995, the total amount of agricultural subsidies
provided by developed-country governments rose to $388 billion in
2004. Since the late 1990s subsidies have accounted for 40 percent of
the value of agricultural production in the European Union and 25
percent in the United States.
The apostles of the free market and the defenders of dumping may seem
to be at different ends of the spectrum, but the policies they
advocate are bringing about the same result: a globalized capitalist
industrial agriculture. Developing countries are being integrated into
a system where export-oriented production of meat and grain is
dominated by large industrial farms like those run by the Thai
multinational CP and where technology is continually upgraded by
advances in genetic engineering from firms like Monsanto. And the
elimination of tariff and nontariff barriers is facilitating a global
agricultural supermarket of elite and middle-class consumers serviced
by grain-trading corporations like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland
and transnational food retailers like the British-owned Tesco and the
French-owned Carrefour.
There is little room for the hundreds of millions of rural and urban
poor in this integrated global market. They are confined to giant
suburban favelas, where they contend with food prices that are often
much higher than the supermarket prices, or to rural reservations,
where they are trapped in marginal agricultural activities and
increasingly vulnerable to hunger. Indeed, within the same country,
famine in the marginalized sector sometimes coexists with prosperity
in the globalized sector.
This is not simply the erosion of national food self-sufficiency or
food security but what Africanist Deborah Bryceson of Oxford calls
"de-peasantization" -- the phasing out of a mode of production to make
the countryside a more congenial site for intensive capital
accumulation. This transformation is a traumatic one for hundreds of
millions of people, since peasant production is not simply an economic
activity. It is an ancient way of life, a culture, which is one reason
displaced or marginalized peasants in India have taken to committing
suicide. In the state of Andhra Pradesh, farmer suicides rose from 233
in 1998 to 2,600 in 2002; in Maharashtra, suicides more than tripled,
from 1,083 in 1995 to 3,926 in 2005. One estimate is that some 150,000
Indian farmers have taken their lives. Collapse of prices from trade
liberalization and loss of control over seeds to biotech firms is part
of a comprehensive problem, says global justice activist Vandana
Shiva: "Under globalization, the farmer is losing her/his social,
cultural, economic identity as a producer. A farmer is now a
'consumer' of costly seeds and costly chemicals sold by powerful
global corporations through powerful landlords and money lenders
locally."
African Agriculture: From Compliance to Defiance
De-peasantization is at an advanced state in Latin America and Asia.
And if the World Bank has its way, Africa will travel in the same
direction. As Bryceson and her colleagues correctly point out in a
recent article, the World Development Report for 2008, which touches
extensively on agriculture in Africa, is practically a blueprint for
the transformation of the continent's peasant-based agriculture into
large-scale commercial farming. However, as in many other places
today, the Bank's wards are moving from sullen resentment to outright
defiance.
At the time of decolonization, in the 1960s, Africa was actually a net
food exporter. Today the continent imports 25 percent of its food;
almost every country is a net importer. Hunger and famine have become
recurrent phenomena, with the past three years alone seeing food
emergencies break out in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, and Southern
and Central Africa.
Agriculture in Africa is in deep crisis, and the causes range from
wars to bad governance, lack of agricultural technology and the spread
of HIV/AIDS. However, as in Mexico and the Philippines, an important
part of the explanation is the phasing out of government controls and
support mechanisms under the IMF and World Bank structural adjustment
programs imposed as the price for assistance in servicing external
debt.
Structural adjustment brought about declining investment, increased
unemployment, reduced social spending, reduced consumption and low
output. Lifting price controls on fertilizers while simultaneously
cutting back on agricultural credit systems simply led to reduced
fertilizer use, lower yields and lower investment. Moreover, reality
refused to conform to the doctrinal expectation that withdrawal of the
state would pave the way for the market to dynamize agriculture.
Instead, the private sector, which correctly saw reduced state
expenditures as creating more risk, failed to step into the breach. In
country after country, the departure of the state "crowded out" rather
than "crowded in" private investment. Where private traders did
replace the state, noted an Oxfam report, "they have sometimes done so
on highly unfavorable terms for poor farmers," leaving "farmers more
food insecure, and governments reliant on unpredictable international
aid flows." The usually pro-private sector Economist agreed, admitting
that "many of the private firms brought in to replace state
researchers turned out to be rent-seeking monopolists."
The support that African governments were allowed to muster was
channeled by the World Bank toward export agriculture to generate
foreign exchange, which states needed to service debt. But, as in
Ethiopia during the 1980s famine, this led to the dedication of good
land to export crops, with food crops forced into less suitable soil,
thus exacerbating food insecurity. Moreover, the World Bank's
encouragement of several economies to focus on the same export crops
often led to overproduction, triggering price collapses in
international markets. For instance, the very success of Ghana's
expansion of cocoa production triggered a 48 percent drop in the
international price between 1986 and 1989. In 2002-03 a collapse in
coffee prices contributed to another food emergency in Ethiopia.
As in Mexico and the Philippines, structural adjustment in Africa was
not simply about underinvestment but state divestment. But there was
one major difference. In Africa the World Bank and IMF micromanaged,
making decisions on how fast subsidies should be phased out, how many
civil servants had to be fired and even, as in the case of Malawi, how
much of the country's grain reserve should be sold and to whom.
Compounding the negative impact of adjustment were unfair EU and US
trade practices. Liberalization allowed subsidized EU beef to drive
many West African and South African cattle raisers to ruin. With their
subsidies legitimized by the WTO, US growers offloaded cotton on world
markets at 20 percent to 55 percent of production cost, thereby
bankrupting West and Central African farmers.
According to Oxfam, the number of sub-Saharan Africans living on less
than a dollar a day almost doubled, to 313 million, between 1981 and
2001 -- 46 percent of the whole continent. The role of structural
adjustment in creating poverty was hard to deny. As the World Bank's
chief economist for Africa admitted, "We did not think that the human
costs of these programs could be so great, and the economic gains
would be so slow in coming."
In 1999 the government of Malawi initiated a program to give each
smallholder family a starter pack of free fertilizers and seeds. The
result was a national surplus of corn. What came after is a story that
should be enshrined as a classic case study of one of the greatest
blunders of neoliberal economics. The World Bank and other aid donors
forced the scaling down and eventual scrapping of the program, arguing
that the subsidy distorted trade. Without the free packs, output
plummeted. In the meantime, the IMF insisted that the government sell
off a large portion of its grain reserves to enable the food reserve
agency to settle its commercial debts. The government complied. When
the food crisis turned into a famine in 2001-02, there were hardly any
reserves left. About 1,500 people perished. The IMF was unrepentant;
in fact, it suspended its disbursements on an adjustment program on
the grounds that "the parastatal sector will continue to pose risks to
the successful implementation of the 2002/03 budget. Government
interventions in the food and other agricultural markets [are]
crowding out more productive spending."
By the time an even worse food crisis developed in 2005, the
government had had enough of World Bank/IMF stupidity. A new president
reintroduced the fertilizer subsidy, enabling 2 million households to
buy it at a third of the retail price and seeds at a discount. The
result: bumper harvests for two years, a million-ton maize surplus and
the country transformed into a supplier of corn to Southern Africa.
Malawi's defiance of the World Bank would probably have been an act of
heroic but futile resistance a decade ago. The environment is
different today, since structural adjustment has been discredited
throughout Africa. Even some donor governments and NGOs that used to
subscribe to it have distanced themselves from the Bank. Perhaps the
motivation is to prevent their influence in the continent from being
further eroded by association with a failed approach and unpopular
institutions when Chinese aid is emerging as an alternative to World
Bank, IMF and Western government aid programs.
Food Sovereignty: An Alternative Paradigm?
It is not only defiance from governments like Malawi and dissent from
their erstwhile allies that are undermining the IMF and the World
Bank. Peasant organizations around the world have become increasingly
militant in their resistance to the globalization of industrial
agriculture. Indeed, it is because of pressure from farmers' groups
that the governments of the South have refused to grant wider access
to their agricultural markets and demanded a massive slashing of US
and EU agricultural subsidies, which brought the WTO's Doha Round of
negotiations to a standstill.
Farmers' groups have networked internationally; one of the most
dynamic to emerge is Via Campesina (Peasant's Path). Via not only
seeks to get "WTO out of agriculture" and opposes the paradigm of a
globalized capitalist industrial agriculture; it also proposes an
alternative -- food sovereignty. Food sovereignty means, first of all,
the right of a country to determine its production and consumption of
food and the exemption of agriculture from global trade regimes like
that of the WTO. It also means consolidation of a smallholder-centered
agriculture via protection of the domestic market from low-priced
imports; remunerative prices for farmers and fisherfolk; abolition of
all direct and indirect export subsidies; and the phasing out of
domestic subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture. Via's
platform also calls for an end to the Trade Related Intellectual
Property Rights regime, or TRIPs, which allows corporations to patent
plant seeds; opposes agro-technology based on genetic engineering; and
demands land reform. In contrast to an integrated global monoculture,
Via offers the vision of an international agricultural economy
composed of diverse national agricultural economies trading with one
another but focused primarily on domestic production.
Once regarded as relics of the pre-industrial era, peasants are now
leading the opposition to a capitalist industrial agriculture that
would consign them to the dustbin of history. They have become what
Karl Marx described as a politically conscious "class for itself,"
contradicting his predictions about their demise. With the global food
crisis, they are moving to center stage -- and they have allies and
supporters. For as peasants refuse to go gently into that good night
and fight de-peasantization, developments in the twenty-first century
are revealing the panacea of globalized capitalist industrial
agriculture to be a nightmare. With environmental crises multiplying,
the social dysfunctions of urban-industrial life piling up and
industrialized agriculture creating greater food insecurity, the
farmers' movement increasingly has relevance not only to peasants but
to everyone threatened by the catastrophic consequences of global
capital's vision for organizing production, community and life itself.
==============
Walden Bello is senior analyst at and former executive director of
Focus on the Global South, a research and advocacy institute based at
Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. He is the author or co-author of
many books on politics and economic issues in the Philippines and
Asia, including, most recently, Deglobalization (Zed), and recipient
of the 2003 Right Livelihood Award, also known as the "Alternative
Nobel Prize." In March he was named Outstanding Public Scholar for
2008 by the International Studies Association.
Copyright 2008 The Nation
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From: The New York Times (pg. WK3), May 18, 2008
[Printer-friendly version]
ONE COUNTRY'S TABLE SCRAPS, ANOTHER COUNTRY'S MEAL
By Andrew Martin
Grocery bills are rising through the roof. Food banks are running
short of donations. And food shortages are causing sporadic riots in
poor countries through the world.
You'd never know it if you saw what was ending up in your landfill. As
it turns out, Americans waste an astounding amount of food -- an
estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption, according
to a government study -- and it happens at the supermarket, in
restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen. It works out
to about a pound of food every day for every American.
Grocery stores discard products because of spoilage or minor cosmetic
blemishes. Restaurants throw away what they don't use. And consumers
toss out everything from bananas that have turned brown to last week's
Chinese leftovers. In 1997, in one of the few studies of food waste,
the Department of Agriculture estimated that two years before, 96.4
billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United
States was never eaten. Fresh produce, milk, grain products and
sweeteners made up two-thirds of the waste. An update is under way.
The study didn't account for the explosion of ready-to-eat foods now
available at supermarkets, from rotisserie chickens to sandwiches and
soups. What do you think happens to that potato salad and meatloaf at
the end of the day?
A more recent study by the Environmental Protection Agency estimated
that Americans generate roughly 30 million tons of food waste each
year, which is about 12 percent of the total waste stream. All but
about 2 percent of that food waste ends up in landfills; by
comparison, 62 percent of yard waste is composted.
The numbers seem all the more staggering now, given the cost of
groceries and the emerging food crisis abroad.
After President Bush said recently that India's burgeoning middle
class was helping to push up food prices by demanding better food,
officials in India complained that not only do Americans eat too much
-- if they slimmed down to the weight of middle-class Indians, said
one, "many people in sub-Saharan Africa would find food on their
plate" -- but they also throw out too much food.
And consider this: the rotting food that ends up in landfills produces
methane, a major source of greenhouse gases.
America's Second Harvest -- The Nation's Food Bank Network, a group of
more than 200 food banks, reports that donations of food are down 9
percent, but the number of people showing up for food has increased 20
percent. The group distributes more than two billion pounds of donated
and recovered food and consumer products each year.
The problem isn't unique to the United States.
In England, a recent study revealed that Britons toss away a third of
the food they purchase, including more than four million whole apples,
1.2 million sausages and 2.8 million tomatoes. In Sweden, families
with small children threw out about a quarter of the food they bought,
a recent study there found.
And most distressing, perhaps, is that in some parts of Africa a
quarter or more of the crops go bad before they can be eaten. A study
presented last week to the United Nations Commission on Sustainable
Development found that the high losses in developing nations "are
mainly due to a lack of technology and infrastructure" as well as
insect infestations, microbial growth, damage and high temperatures
and humidity.
For decades, wasting food has fallen into the category of things that
everyone knows is a bad idea but that few do anything about, sort of
like speeding and reapplying sunscreen. Didn't your mother tell you to
eat all the food on your plate?
Food has long been relatively cheap, and portions were increasingly
huge. With so much news about how fat everyone was getting -- 66
percent of adult Americans are overweight or obese, according to
2003-04 government health survey -- there was a compelling argument to
be made that it was better to toss the leftover deep-dish pizza than
eat it again the next day.
For cafeterias, restaurants and supermarkets, it was just as easy to
toss food that wasn't sold into trash bins than to worry about
somebody getting sick from it. And then filing a lawsuit.
"The path of least resistance is just to chuck it," said Jonathan
Bloom, who started a blog last year called wastedfood.com that tracks
the issue.
Of course, eliminating food waste won't solve the problems of world
hunger and greenhouse-gas pollution. But it could make a dent in this
country and wouldn't require a huge amount of effort or money. The
Department of Agriculture estimated that recovering just 5 percent of
the food that is wasted could feed four million people a day;
recovering 25 percent would feed 20 million people.
The Department of Agriculture said it was updating its figures on food
waste and officials there weren't yet able to say if the problem has
gotten better or worse.
In many major cities, including New York, food rescue organizations do
nearly all the work for cafeterias and restaurants that are willing to
participate. The food generally needs to be covered and in some cases
placed in a freezer. Food rescue groups pick it up. One of them, City
Harvest, collects excess food each day from about 170 establishments
in New York.
"We're not talking about table scraps," said Joel Berg, executive
director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, explaining the
types of wasted food that is edible. "We're talking about a pan of
lasagna that was never served."
For food that isn't edible, a growing number of states and cities are
offering programs to donate it to livestock farmers or to compost it.
In Massachusetts, for instance, the state worked with the grocery
industry to create a program to set aside for composting food that
can't be used by food banks.
"The great part about this is grocers save money on their garbage bill
and they contribute a product to composting," said Kate M. Krebs,
executive director of the National Recycling Coalition, who calls the
wasting of food "the most wrenching issue of our day."
The City of San Francisco is turning food waste from residents and
restaurants into tons of compost a day. The city has structured its
garbage collection system so that it provides incentives for recycling
and composting.
There are also efforts to cut down on the amount of food that people
pile on their plates. A handful of restaurant chains including T.G.I.
Friday's are offering smaller portions. And a growing number of
college cafeterias have eliminated trays, meaning students have to
carry their food to a table rather than loading up a tray.
"It's sort of one of the ideas you read about and think, 'Why didn't I
think of that?' " Mr. Bloom said.
The federal government tried once before, during the Clinton
administration, to get the nation fired up about food waste, but the
effort was discontinued by the Bush administration. The secretary of
agriculture at the time, Dan Glickman, created a program to encourage
food recovery and gleaning, which means collecting leftover crops from
farm fields.
He assigned a member of his staff, Mr. Berg, to oversee the program,
and Mr. Berg spent the next several years encouraging farmers,
schools, hospitals and companies to donate extra crops and food to
feeding charities. A Good Samaritan law was passed by Congress that
protected food donors from liability for donating food and groceries,
spurring more donations.
"We made a dent," said Mr. Berg, now at the New York City hunger
group. "We reduced waste and increased the amount of people being fed.
It wasn't a panacea, but it helped."
With thecurrent food crisis, it seems possible that the issue of food
waste might have more traction this time around.
Mr. Bloom said he was encouraged by the increasing Web chatter about
saving money on food, something that used to be confined to the
"frugal mommy blogs."
"The fundamental thing that I'm fighting against is, 'why should I
care? I paid for it,' " Mr. Bloom said. "The rising prices are really
an answer to that."
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Return to Table of Contents
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Rachel's Democracy & Health News (formerly Rachel's Environment &
Health News) highlights the connections between issues that are
often considered separately or not at all.
The natural world is deteriorating and human health is declining
because those who make the important decisions aren't the ones who
bear the brunt. Our purpose is to connect the dots between human
health, the destruction of nature, the decline of community, the
rise of economic insecurity and inequalities, growing stress among
workers and families, and the crippling legacies of patriarchy,
intolerance, and racial injustice that allow us to be divided and
therefore ruled by the few.
In a democracy, there are no more fundamental questions than, "Who
gets to decide?" And, "How do the few control the many, and what
might be done about it?"
As you come across stories that might help people connect the dots,
please Email them to us at dhn@rachel.org.
Rachel's Democracy & Health News is published as often as
necessary to provide readers with up-to-date coverage of the
subject.
Editors:
Peter Montague - peter@rachel.org
Tim Montague - tim@rachel.org
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