Tag Archives: fao

Is Organic Food Worse for the Environment?

by DanLoftin065 Posted on January 10, 2019

Most of us know there are many health benefits to eating organic food. But is the farming practice all that healthy for the environment? A new study suggests organic food might have some serious consequences for the environment when compared to conventionally produced food. Here?s what it found.

Study: Organic farming comes with a ?carbon opportunity cost?

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Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have found organic food has a greater impact than conventionally farmed food on the environment because it requires more land use. And this results in higher carbon dioxide emissions. In organic farming, yields are typically lower for the same area of land, primarily because the farmers don?t use potent synthetic chemicals to promote growth, according to a news release on the study.

?The greater land-use in organic farming leads indirectly to higher carbon dioxide emissions, thanks to deforestation,? researcher Stefan Wirsenius says in the news release. “The world’s food production is governed by international trade, so how we farm in Sweden influences deforestation in the tropics. If we use more land for the same amount of food, we contribute indirectly to bigger deforestation elsewhere in the world.?

For instance, the researchers cite organic peas farmed in Sweden as having a 50 percent higher impact on the climate than conventionally farmed peas because of lower yields per hectare. Organic meat and dairy products also contribute to higher emissions, as they use organic feed.

The study applied a new metric ? the ?carbon opportunity cost? ? to evaluate the impact of land use on carbon dioxide emissions. ?This metric takes into account the amount of carbon that is stored in forests, and thus released as carbon dioxide as an effect of deforestation,? according to the news release. The researchers note that previous comparisons between organic and conventionally farmed food didn?t often take this impact into account, likely because scientists didn?t have an appropriate measurement like the carbon opportunity cost.

But what about the environmental benefits?

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While organic farming does typically take more land to produce the same yields as conventional farming, there?s much more to the story of how it influences the environment. And it?s certainly not all bad news.

Organic farming practices have the potential to improve the environment over the long term. ?It aims to produce food while establishing an ecological balance to prevent soil fertility or pest problems,? according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. ?Organic agriculture takes a proactive approach as opposed to treating problems after they emerge.?

For example, organic farming involves practices ? ?such as crop rotations, inter-cropping, symbiotic associations, cover crops, organic fertilizers and minimum tillage? ? that help to improve soil and support flora and fauna, the FAO says. These practices enhance nutrients in the soil, subsequently boosting crop yields, as well as improving biodiversity in the environment. Plus, organic agriculture works to decrease water pollution by avoiding synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. And, of course, this leads to many beneficial health effects for humans, as well.

Furthermore, many organic agricultural practices actually work to return carbon to the soil, which helps to combat climate change, according to the FAO. Plus, it reduces nonrenewable energy use by avoiding chemicals produced with high levels of fossil fuels. Still, even with its environmental benefits, more research and innovations must occur before organic farming can efficiently feed the global population without causing substantial damage through deforestation.

So what?s a consumer to do?

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The question becomes: Which type of agriculture should we support as consumers? And the answer might have more to do with which foods you eat.

One study created 500 hypothetical scenarios for feeding the world population in 2050 with the farmland we already have now (i.e., no further deforestation). It found that lower-yield organic farming could work for the world if more people adopted plant-based diets. If everyone went vegan, the study found our existing farmland would be adequate 100 percent of the time. And 94 percent of the vegetarian scenarios were a success, as well. But only 39 percent of the scenarios were successful when everyone adopted a completely organic diet (including people who consumed meat and dairy), and just 15 percent worked when everyone ate a Western-style, meat-based diet.

The researchers from the carbon opportunity cost study also alluded to food choices as being more important than weighing the climate impact of organic versus conventional. ?Replacing beef and lamb, as well as hard cheeses, with vegetable proteins such as beans, has the biggest effect,? according to the news release. Moreover, if you?re a meat- or dairy-eater, organic farming often has higher animal welfare standards (though not always), which is a concern for many people.

Still, it?s not realistic to expect the entire world to go vegan. But what we can do now is aim to purchase our food from producers that are working to better the environment. And for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, that still means buying organic. ?By opting for organic products, the consumer through his/her purchasing power promotes a less polluting agricultural system,? the FAO says. Organic farming might need to adapt some of its practices to improve yields, but its benefits for the environment are too great to ignore.

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Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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Is Organic Food Worse for the Environment?

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The Government Says This Popular Pesticide Doesn’t Cause Cancer. Here’s the Problem With That.

by EstelaDuckworth Posted on September 20, 2016

Mother Jones

Back in 1996, seed and chemical giant Monsanto introduced crops engineered to withstand a weed killer called glyphosate (brand name: Roundup). Soon after, glyphosate emerged as by far the globe’s most prolific pesticide, its use spiking ninefold in the United States and nearly fifteenfold globally. All the while, it enjoyed a reputation as a relatively benign agrichemical compared with older, harsher herbicides like 2,4-D and dicamba.

Last year, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which evaluates potential carcinogens for the World Health Organization, detonated a stink bomb in global agriculture and public-health circles by declaring glyphosate “probably carcinogenic to humans,” after completing a lengthy assessment of the existing science.

But in a report released last week, staff scientists for the US Environmental Protection Agency—which is in the middle of reevaluating glyphosate and a host of other commonly used chemicals—pushed back, declaring that their own review of the scientific literature found the weed killer “not likely” to be carcinogenic to humans. The EPA will host a panel of outside scientists in October to evaluate the report.

The EPA’s in-house assessment criticized the IARC report, claiming that some of the more damning studies that led to the “probably carcinogenic” conclusion were “low quality” and therefore irrelevant.

The EPA isn’t the first major public authority to contradict the IARC’s finding. The European Food Safety Agency concluded last year that glyphosate is “unlikely” to cause cancer, though it did propose a “new safety measure that will tighten the control of glyphosate residues in food.” In May, another arm of the WHO teamed up with the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to assemble a panel to evaluate glyphosate. The joint WHO/FAO team, too, found it an unlikely carcinogen.

One subtle difference between the IARC’s review and that of the EPA, the EFSA, and the FAO involves the question of whether to evaluate glyphosate as an isolated chemical or the way it’s actually used in farm fields. To make a usable herbicide, agrichemical companies mix an active ingredient like glyphosate with other chemicals, called adjuvants and surfactants, that help ensure the pesticide penetrates beneath a weed’s surface, or coats its leaves, to administer the poison. As I’ve shown before, these chemical additives are lightly (at best) regulated by the EPA, and can have harmful effects.

The IARC indicates that it took data from studies that used both “pure” glyphosate and real-world formulations of glyphosate with other chemicals. The group found “strong” evidence that in both isolated and mixed forms, the famed herbicide can cause cancer.

While the EPA and the EFSA disagree with that conclusion about pure glyphosate, they have so far not taken a position on the stuff as it’s actually used. In its assessment, the EPA states that it evaluated only the “human carcinogenic potential for the active ingredient,” not that of “glyphosate-based pesticide formulations.” As for the EFSA, its conclusion, too, was based on pure glyphosate, and it acknowledged that one common ingredient in glyhpsate-based herbicides, POE-tallowamine, is more toxic than glyphosate itself. The carcinogenic potential of real-world glyphosate formulations “should be further considered and addressed,” EFSA added.

The European Union banned POE-tallowamine in July. In a blog post a few weeks later, Monsanto claimed that it had “already been preparing for a gradual transition away from tallowamine to other types of surfactants for commercial reasons,” adding that “tallowamine-based products do not pose an imminent risk for human health when used according to instructions.” (For more on this, see this excellent piece from the Intercept‘s Sharon Lerner.) The company did not say what it planned to replace POE-tallowamine with.

Here in the United States, more than 3.5 billion pounds of pure glyphosate have been applied since 1974, about two-thirds of that in the last decade alone. It’s great to know that on its own, glyphosate doesn’t likely trigger cancer. It would be better still to know more about its effects as it’s actually used, mixed with other, lightly studied chemicals.

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The Government Says This Popular Pesticide Doesn’t Cause Cancer. Here’s the Problem With That.

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Wasted food is a huge climate problem

by Frederick Cunningham Posted on September 16, 2013

Wasted food is a huge climate problem

By

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Global warmer.

If wasted food became its own pungent country, it would be the world’s third biggest contributor to climate change.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization had previously determined that roughly one-third of food is wasted around the world. Now it has used those figures to calculate the environmental impacts of farming food that is never eaten, along with the climate-changing effects of the methane that escapes from food as it rots.

The results, published in a new report [PDF], were as nauseating as a grub-infested apple:

Without accounting for [greenhouse gas] emissions from land use change, the carbon footprint of food produced and not eaten is estimated to 3.3 Gtonnes of CO2 equivalent: as such, food wastage ranks as the third top emitter after USA and China. Globally, the blue water footprint (i.e. the consumption of surface and groundwater resources) of food wastage is about 250 km3, which is equivalent to the annual water discharge of the Volga River, or three times the volume of Lake Geneva. Finally, produced but uneaten food vainly occupies almost 1.4 billion hectares of land; this represents close to 30 percent of the world’s agricultural land area.

In the West, most of our food waste occurs because we toss out leftovers and unused ingredients — and because stores won’t sell ugly produce. The FAO found that some farmers dump 20 to 40 percent of their harvest because it “doesn’t meet retailer’s cosmetic specifications.” In developing countries, by contrast, most of the wasted food rots somewhere between the field and the market because of insufficient refrigeration and inefficient supply chains.

The FAO estimates that when we throw away more than 1 gigaton of food every year, we are throwing away $750 billion with it — an estimate that doesn’t include wasted seafood and bycatch.

“All of us — farmers and fishers; food processors and supermarkets; local and national governments; individual consumers — must make changes at every link of the human food chain to prevent food wastage from happening in the first place, and re-use or recycle it when we can’t,” FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva said in a statement. “We simply cannot allow one-third of all the food we produce to go to waste or be lost because of inappropriate practices, when 870 million people go hungry every day.”

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

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Wasted food is a huge climate problem

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