Why is conventional agriculture so wound up? Are they afraid of organic
agriculture? What's all the fuss about? After all, a recent study by the Lieberman Research Group showed that organic food sales account for only 3.5% of all food product sales in the US.
A year after America voted for the change-agent they saw in Barack
Obama, advocates hoping for deep improvements in our food system can
point to only a few successes, while other policies that could lead to
food insecurity are brewing in back rooms.
Nearly two years ago, candidate Obama said the following in a speech at the Iowa Farmer's Union:
If and when health care reform finally passes, we will have
successfully ameliorated only half of the crisis. The treatment half.
The next step has to be focused upon doing something about the poisoned
filth we've collectively nicknamed "food." Without any real changes in
how our food is produced, the health care system will continue to bloat
and fall apart. Not unlike the insides of an average American body.
Tomorrow is World Food Day and since I can't invite you all over
for dinner, I thought I'd serve up a smorgasbord of facts and figures about the
way the US
and the world eat or don't eat, as the case may be.
Author Michael Pollan is no stranger to controversy. He has broadened
the discussion of what we eat, where and how it is grown, big vs.
small, organic farming vs. conventional. When he speaks some in the
audience will love him, some will not.
The industrial agriculture complex has been doing back flips for the last few weeks, first because of the ascendance of Blanche Lincoln (ConservaDem-AR) to the high throne of the Senate Agriculture Committee, where she promises to pinch climate legislation
(or at the very least shove it aside until next year) and push a
southern Big Ag agenda in the Senate for rice and cotton in
The Global Harvest Initiative, founded by agribusiness interests DuPont, Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland, and John Deere, will meet today
beginning at 9:00 am for a daylong symposium at which the focus is said
to be on finding “ways to sustainably double agricultural output to
meet rapidly growing global demand as anticipated by the United
Nations.” Are big corporations finally seeking to do what is right by
the nearly billion p
For the past dozen years, I've been writing editorials opposing the
introduction of genetically modified crops. When I began, genetically
modified corn and soybeans were still just getting a foothold in
American fields. Now, of course, hundreds of millions of acres here and
abroad have been planted to these new varieties, which are usually
engineered to withstand the application of pesticides - pesticides
usually made by the same companies that engineer the seeds. Even wheat
and rice producers, latecomers to the genetically modified table, are
feeling the pressure to convert.
President Obama’s plans to reform the healthcare system in U.S. have taken over the headlines in the past several weeks. Doctors, economists, insurance executives, public health experts—all of them are being afforded the chance add their two cents on how to fix our broken healthcare system. The voices that are strikingly absent, though, are those of the agricultural community. What, you may ask, does agriculture have to do with overhauling the healthcare system?
