Tag Archives: food and ag

Americans Are Gorging Themselves on Cheap Meat

by DeannaColleano Posted on March 30, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

While the Dutch and other nations are advising consumers to cut down on red meat, it’s estimated that Americans will eat more beef this year than we have in the last decade.

The Netherlands Nutrition Centre’s new dietary guidelines suggest eating no more than 500 grams (just over one pound) of meat per week, including no more than 300 grams (0.7 pounds) of red meat, which it describes as “high carbon.” The agency wants the Dutch to scale back red meat for health reasons and sustainability. After all, the meat industry produces 14.5 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and land for grazing takes up a quarter of the Earth’s non-ice surface. The Dutch agency’s new guidelines also decrease the recommended fish consumption from twice to once per week, and they encourage protein from sources such as unsalted nuts and legumes.

In the United States, on the other hand, diners are piling more meat onto their plates. The USDA has predicted that 2016 will be the biggest year in a decade in Americans’ consumption of beef. We’ll eat an estimated 53.4 pounds, nearly half a pound more per person than last year.

Bloomberg Business compares US chicken and beef consumption since the 1970’s. Source: Bloomberg

According to Bloomberg, the increase could be due to cheaper prices on red meat and the popularity of protein-heavy diets like the paleo diet. Also, there are more cows. Droughts that plagued the Southwest in 2014 meant fewer cows and higher beef prices. However, cattle counts from earlier this year show there are nearly 3.5 million more cows than two years ago.

The Dutch aren’t the only sustainability conscious eaters. Sweden altered its dietary guidelines in 2009, and in 2012 Brazil called for cultivating and eating foods that had “environmental integrity.” Last week, the United Kingdom released its EatWell Guide, which advised Brits to eat less red meat.

It’s unclear whether the USDA will change its guidelines to reflect sustainability any time soon. When “My Plate,” the Obama administration’s food group

The USDA’s “My Plate” guidelines were released in January. The guidelines advised more vegetables, fruits and lean meats, and less sugar. Source: ChooseMyPlate.gov

recommendations, came out earlier this year the government played it safe and only mentioned eating leaner meats. The guidelines instead came down hard on limiting sugar intake.

See the original post – 

Americans Are Gorging Themselves on Cheap Meat

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, solar power, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Americans Are Gorging Themselves on Cheap Meat

WTF Happened to Golden Rice?

by MikaylaU07 Posted on February 3, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Like the hover boards of the Back to the Future franchise, golden rice is an old idea that looms just beyond the grasp of reality.

5 Surprising GM Foods

“This Rice Could Save a Million Kids a Year,” announced a Time Magazine cover back in 2000. Orange in color, the rice is genetically modified to contain a jolt of beta-carotene, the stuff that gives carrots their hue and that our bodies transform into vitamin A. Diets deficient in that key micronutrient are the leading cause of blindness of children in the global south, where rice tends to be a staple grain. A decade and a half since the Time article, golden rice has yet to be planted commercially—but it continues generating bumper crops of hype. “Is Golden Rice the Future of Food?” the great hipster-foodie journal Lucky Peach wondered last fall, adding that “it might save millions from malnutrition.”

If golden rice is such a panacea, why does it flourish only in headlines, far from the farm fields where it’s intended to grow? The short answer is that the plant breeders have yet to concoct varieties of it that work as well in the field as existing rice strains. This is made all the more challenging in the face of debates over genetically modified crops and eternal disputes about how they should be regulated.

After seed developers first create a genetically modified strain with the desired trait—in this case, rice with beta carotene—they then start crossing it into varieties that have been shown to perform well in the field. The task is tricky: When you tweak one thing in a genome, such as giving rice the ability to generate beta-carotene, you risk changing other things, like its speed of growth. The University of Washington anthropologist and long-time golden rice observer Glenn Stone describes this process as “bringing a superfood down to earth,” and it gets little attention in most media accounts.

The most serious effort to commercialize golden rice is centered at the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the globe’s most prestigious incubator of high-yielding rice varieties. Launched with grants from the Rockefeller and Ford foundations in 1960, IRRI spearheaded the Asian part of what became known as the Green Revolution—the effort to bring US-style industrial agriculture to the developing world. (My review of Nick Cullather’s excellent Green Revolution history The Hungry World is here.)

Today, IRRI coordinates the Golden Rice Network and has been working to develop a viable strain since 2006. And so far, it’s having trouble. On its website, IRRI reports that in the field latest trials, golden rice varieties “showed that beta carotene was produced at consistently high levels in the grain, and that grain quality was comparable to the conventional variety.” However, the website continues, “yields of candidate lines were not consistent across locations and seasons.” Translation: The golden rice varieties exhibited what’s known in agronomy circles as a “yield drag”—they didn’t produce as much rice as the non-GM varieties they’d need to compete with in farm fields. So the IRRI researchers are going back to the drawing board.

Via email, I asked IRRI how that effort is going. “So far, both agronomic and laboratory data look very promising,” a spokeswoman replied. But she declined to give a time frame for when IRRI thinks it will have a variety that’s ready for prime time. Washington University’s Stone says he visited IRRI’s campus in the Philippines in the summer of 2015 and heard from researchers that such a breakthrough is “at least several more years” off. The IRRI spokeswoman also declined to comment on Stone’s time-frame report.

That’s not a very inspiring assessment, given that researchers first successfully inserted the beta-carotene trait in the rice genome in 2000, and that the technology has been lavished with research support ever since—including from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative), USAID, the Syngenta Foundation, and others, according to the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board.

Of course, among people who think biotechnology has a crucial role to play in solving developing-world malnutrition, IRRI’s agronomic struggles are compounded by anti-GMO zealotry as well as what it sees as over-regulation of GMOs in the global south. David Zilberman, an agricultural economist at the University of California at Berkeley, points out that most developing-world nations, including the Philippines, have adopted the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, which stipulates a precautionary approach to introducing new GMO products, including restrictions on how trials are conducted. The Cartagena regime stands in sharp contrast to the much more laissez-faire one that holds sway in the United States, Zilberman says.

If the developing world embraced US-style regulation and treated vitamin A deficiency as a medical emergency solvable by golden rice, “it would have become available in 2000” Zilberman says. Based on that premise, he and German agricultural economist Justus Wesseler co-authored a 2014 paper claiming that golden rice has “been available since early 2000” and opposition to it has resulted in “about 1.4 million life years lost over the past decade in India” alone. Such claims abound in pro-GM circles. At a speech at the University of Texas last year, the Nobel laureate British biochemist Sir Richard Roberts accused gold rice opponents of have having committed a “crime against humanity.”

To be sure, opposition to golden rice has occasionally gone overboard. In 2013, activists destroyed one of of IRRI’s golden rice field trials in the Philippines, for example. “Anti-GMO activism has set back our work, in that we not only concentrate with our research, but we have to also spend time and resources to counter their propaganda,” the IRRI spokesperson told me. But the group makes clear that regulation and activism are only two of the challenges facing golden rice—getting it to perform well remains a major task.

Even if and when IRRI does come up with a high-yielding golden rice variety that passes regulatory muster, it remains unclear whether it can actually make a dent in vitamin A deficiency. As the Washington University’s Stone notes, vitamin A deficiency often affects people whose diets are also deficient in other vital nutrients. Vitamin A is fat soluble, meaning that it can’t be taken up by the body unless it’s accompanied by sufficient dietary fat, which isn’t delivered in significant quantities by rice, golden or otherwise.

According to Stone, only one feeding study (PDF) has ever showed a powerful uptake of vitamin A by subjects eating golden rice. The paper was much-cited by golden rice proponents, but Stone says it had a major flaw: The subjects were “well-nourished individuals” who already took in sufficient fat in their diets. The study “demonstrated only that Golden Rice worked in children who did not need it,” he writes. (The study has since been retracted on claims that the author failed to obtain proper consent from the parents of the participants).

Meanwhile, as IRRI scrambles to perfect golden rice, the prevalence of vitamin A deficiency is declining in the Philippines—according to IRRI itself— from 40 percent of children aged 6 months to 5 years in 2003, to 15.2 percent in 2008. “The exact reasons for these improvements have not been determined, but they may be the results of proven approaches to preventing vitamin A deficiency, such as vitamin A supplementation, dietary diversification, food fortification and promotion of optimal breastfeeding,” the group noted. That drop is part of a long-term trend that involves all of Southeast Asia. According to a 2015 Lancet study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, vitamin A deficiency plagued 39 percent of children in the region in 1991, but only 6 percent in 2013—without the help of golden rice.

But VAD, as the deficiency’s known, remains a huge scourge on the Indian sub-continent and in Africa, the study found, affecting more than 40 percent of children in both regions. Whether golden rice will ever help mitigate that ongoing tragedy won’t likely be known for some time. But the technology’s hardly the slam-dunk panacea its advocates insist it is.

Visit source – 

WTF Happened to Golden Rice?

Posted in alo, Anchor, Casio, Down To Earth, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, organic, oven, Pines, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on WTF Happened to Golden Rice?

The Oregon Militia Is Picking the Wrong Beef With the Feds

by GeorginStreetma Posted on January 13, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On January 2, a band of armed militants—led by Cliven Bundy‘s son Ammon—stormed Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, seizing the visitor center both to protest the tangled legal plight of two local ranchers convicted of arson on public land, and to defy the federal government’s oversight of vast landholdings in the West. (You might remember that Cliven launched his own successful revolt against federal authorities in 2014 to avoid paying grazing fees on public land in Nevada.)

For all the slapstick comedy on display at the still-occupied government complex—rival militias arriving to “deescalate” the situation, public pleas for donated supplies including “French Vanilla Creamer”—the armed-and-angry men behind the fiasco are pointing their rifles at a real problem. In short, the ranchers who supply the United States with beef operate under razor-thin, often negative, profit margins.

It’s not hard to see why grazing rights are an issue. Ranchers’ struggle for profitability gives them strong incentive to expand their operations to increase overall volume and gain economies of scale. A 2011 USDA paper found that the average cost per cow for small (20-49 head) operations exceeded $1,600, while for large ranches (500 or more head), the average cost stood at less than $400. Large operations are more efficient at deploying investments in labor and infrastructure (think fencing), the USDA reported.

To scale up, ranchers need access to sufficient land. And in the West, land access often means obtaining grazing rights to public land through the Bureau of Land Management. Hence the bitter dispute playing out in Burns, Oregon: The ranchers accuse the federal government of ruining their businesses through overzealous environmental regulation of that public land.

Now, t’s clear that what the Malheur militiamen appear to be demanding—essentially laissez-faire land management based on private ownership, overseen by local politicians—is a recipe for ecological ruin. In a recent New York Times op-ed, the environmental historian Nancy Langston described what happened last time such a policy regime prevailed in the area: “By the 1930s, after four decades of overgrazing, irrigation withdrawals, grain agriculture, dredging and channelization, followed by several years of drought, Malheur had become a dust bowl.”

But the real beef struggling ranchers should take up with the federal government involves not zealous federal regulation, but rather its opposite: the way the feds have watched idly as giant meat-packing companies came to dominate the US beef production chain. Ranchers run what are known as cow-calf operations—they raise cows up to a certain weight on pasture, sell them to a feedlots to be fattened on corn and soybeans (and other stuff), which then sell them to companies known as beef packers that slaughter and prep the meat for consumers. As the University of Missouri rural sociologist Mary Hendrickson points out, after a decade of mergers and acquisitions, just four companies slaughtered and packed 69 percent of US-grown cows in 1990. By 2011—after another spasm of mergers—the four-company market share had risen to 82 percent, Hendrickson reports.

Such consolidation at the top of the value chain gives farmers less leverage to get a decent price for their cows. A market dominated by a few buyers is a buyer’s market. The Kansas rancher and rural advocate Mike Callicrate has been making this point tirelessly for years. Callicrate thinks the BLM has been overly burdensome for ranchers in the West, he tells me, but there’s a bigger problem that is “rarely mentioned” either by the gun-toting ranchers or the media covering them: “the historically low, below break-even, market prices for livestock.”

As the big beef packers scaled up and consolidated their market share in the 1980s and ’90s, giant retailers led by Walmart did the same. The result has been steady downward pressure on the beef supply chain: The retail giants pressured the beef packers to deliver lower prices, and the beef packers in turn pressured ranchers. The result has been a big squeeze.

In the chart below that Callicrate created for a 2013 blog post, drawn from USDA data, the trend is clear: Compared to 40 years ago, nearly a third less of every dollar you spend on beef goes into the pocket of the rancher who raised the cow.

Chart by Mike Callicrate

Under pressure from this squeeze, ranchers have had little choice but to scale up, or exit the business altogether—as tens of thousands have done:

Chart: USDA

Rather than demanding unfettered access to public land, the Malheur rebels could be agitating for federal antitrust authorities to take on the beef giants. As the New America Foundation’s Barry C. Lynn has shown repeatedly, since the age of Reagan, US antitrust regulators have focused almost exclusively on whether large companies use their market power to harm consumers by unfairly raising retail prices. Those regulators have looked the other way when companies deploy their girth to harm their suppliers by squeezing them on price. So antitrust authorities okayed merger after merger, even when deals left just a few giant companies towering over particular markets. As a result, writes Lynn, “In sector after sector, control is now more tightly concentrated than at any time in a century.” The meat industry is a classic example.

During the 2008 election, Barack Obama vowed to challenge the big meat packers and defend independent farmers and ranchers from their heft. As Lina Khan showed in a 2012 Washington Monthly piece, President Obama actually made a valiant effort to do just that—before surrendering to a harsh counterattack from the industry’s friends in Congress.

The current presidential election would be an ideal time for beleaguered ranchers to bring corporate domination of meat markets back into the public conversation. Armed occupations of bird-refuge visitor centers won’t help with that struggle.

Source: 

The Oregon Militia Is Picking the Wrong Beef With the Feds

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Oregon Militia Is Picking the Wrong Beef With the Feds

The Feds Are Now Investigating Chipotle Over That Nasty Norovirus Outbreak

by eG8kJ4fQ7z Posted on January 6, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Its plummeting stock price wasn’t the only dismal year-end news for Chipotle in 2015.

The once hugely popular burrito chain revealed on Wednesday that the company was also served with a grand jury subpoena last month to investigate the nasty norovirus outbreak that started at a Simi Valley, California, restaurant in August.

That outbreak caused about 100 people to suffer gastrointestinal distress—with everything from diarrhea to vomiting.

According to a company memo released on Wednesday, Chipotle said the US Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, along with the Federal Drug Administration’s criminal investigation’s office, has requested the company “produce a broad range of documents” related to the California incident. Chipotle said it intended to fully cooperate in the probe.

News of the subpoena comes on the heels of multiple similar outbreaks all linked to restaurants in the chain around the country, including an E. coli outbreak that affected more than 50 people in the Midwest and another norovirus outbreak that sickened 80 people in Boston.

In the same company memo, Chipotle said the company’s stocks were down a staggering 30 percent in December.

“Future sales trends may be significantly influenced by further developments,” the company added.

For more on burrito safety and how to avoid potential outbreaks, check out our helpful charts here.

Link:  

The Feds Are Now Investigating Chipotle Over That Nasty Norovirus Outbreak

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, organic, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Feds Are Now Investigating Chipotle Over That Nasty Norovirus Outbreak

Move Over, Monsanto: The Pesticide and GMO Seed Industry Just Spawned a New Behemoth

by MaricelGbr Posted on December 14, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

US chemical titans Dow and DuPont have agreed to a $130 billion merger. Once combined, DowDuPont (as it will be known) intends to split into three parts, including one devoted solely to agriculture. The announcement likely triggered corner office gasps in Basel, Switzerland, and in St. Louis, Missouri—hometowns of the globe’s two-largest pesticide and seed companies, Syngenta and Monsanto. That’s because Dow and DuPont are both sprawling conglomerates that contain massive ag divisions. Combining them into a “leading global pure-play Agriculture company” (as the companies’ press release puts it) will create a gargantuan new rival for those market-leading agribusiness titans.

To highlight the gravity of the deal, here’s a snapshot of the industry’s pre-merger position. After waves of mergers and buyouts in the ’90s and early ’00s—coinciding with the emergence of genetically modified seeds—the global seed landscape shook out like this:

The companies that rose to dominate the space—Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont—also sold pesticides, and lots of them. While these giant chemical companies’ rationale for moving into GM seeds was to diversify away from reliance on peddling bug- and weed-killing chemicals, the two business lines always had a certain synergy. That’s because the era’s blockbuster GM trait was herbicide resistance—the companies engineered corn, soybean, and cotton varieties that could thrive even when they’re doused with these companies’ own branded herbicides. The rapid adoption of these crops gave rise to a plague of herbicide-resistant weeds, a boom in herbicide use, and a new iteration of crops, including ones from Monsanto and Dow, engineered to resist multiple herbicides.

Earlier this year, Monsanto made a bold, sustained push to buy out its rival Syngenta. The combined company would have been truly enormous, controlling something approaching a third of both the seed and pesticide markets (see charts here). Syngenta’s management ultimately fought off the bid in August, but rumors of coming mergers and buyouts in the agribiz sector have swirled ever since. With the Dow-DuPont deal, those prophecies have proven thunderously true. The new firm will mash up DuPont’s seed heft with Dow’s fat share of the pesticide market. Let’s call it DowDuPont Agri. Here’s a sketch of its girth, made by crunching numbers in the above charts. Antitrust regulators may shave the final company a bit—DuPont and Dow both sell corn seeds, for example, and there is speculation that Dow’s relatively small corn seed business might have to be sold off.

Note that in this scenario, the same three mega firms—Monsanto, Syngenta, and DowDuPont Agri—will control more than half the global seed market and nearly half the pesticide market. The GMO seed industry once vowed to wean industrial agriculture off its reliance on pesticides. But as I wrote in May, when the globe’s biggest seed company (Monsanto) was hotly pursuing marriage with the globe’s biggest pesticide maker (Syngenta), the industry now appears to be betting big on a pesticide-soaked future.

And the new company will likely—unless antitrust authorities make it sell off overlapping business segments—emerge as a bigger seed and agrichemical player than the two that currently stand atop the market.

But I may soon have to rev up Datawrapper again and redo those charts. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the DuPont-Dow tie-up could “spur agricultural rivals to forge their own partnerships, further shrinking the handful of companies that dominate the global seed and pesticide business.” As recently as mid-November, Monsanto execs were publicly contemplating another bid for Syngenta, and some prominent Syngenta shareholders are pushing the company to reconsider its refusal to merge with Monsanto in the wake of the new merger, the Journal reported last week. “The synergies in terms of costs, distribution, and R&D would create huge value for shareholders and establish a dominance that would be difficult for any competitor, including a Dow/DuPont, to rival,” one fund manager whose firm owns Syngenta stock told the Journal. But the hottest takeover rumor involving Syngenta involves not its US rival, but rather China National Chemical Corp., or ChemChina, a vast state-owned enterprise.

There’s also talk of Monsanto making a play for the agrichemicials division of German chemical giant BASF, which owns a juicy 12 percent of the global pesticide market (see chart above). In the wake of the Dow-DuPont merger, I am left to wonder: What new, yet even more massive beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward our corn fields to be born?

See more here – 

Move Over, Monsanto: The Pesticide and GMO Seed Industry Just Spawned a New Behemoth

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, oven, PUR, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Move Over, Monsanto: The Pesticide and GMO Seed Industry Just Spawned a New Behemoth

The King of Beers Wants to Push Craft Brews out of Your Supermarket

by DanelleDHTV Posted on December 9, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Pity Anheuser-Busch InBev, the Belgian-owned behemoth responsible for such beloved US beers as Budweiser, Bud Light, and Michelob Ultra. When InBev bought US beer giant Anheuser-Busch back in 2008, the company accounted for 49 percent of the US beer market, the Wall Street Journal reported. Since then, its US market share has dipped to 45 percent. Since 2005, sales of its big domestic brands like Bud have dropped 5.7 percent, even as craft-beer sales have rocketed up 173.6 percent. What’s a transnational, industrial-scale maker of flavor-light, marketing-heavy brews to do?

The answer, according to the Journal: use its still-formidable US market heft to squeeze out those fast-growing craft-beer makers. Understanding AB InBev’s maneuver requires a bit of background. After Prohibition, the US government sought to limit the market power of brewers by imposing a three-tiered system on the industry. One set of firms would brew beer; another set would distribute it; and a third would retail it, either in bars or carryout stores. Much of that old regime has broken down—in many states, for example, small brewers can sell directly to the public through brewpubs. But in most states, distributors—the companies that move beer from breweries and stock retail outlets’ shelves and bars’ taps and bottle offerings—can’t be owned directly by brewers. â&#128;¨

To get around that restriction, megabrewers have for decades sought more or less exclusive agreements with nominally independent distributors. Today, the US beer market is dominated by AB InBev and rival MillerCoors, which together own about 80 percent of the market. Independent craft brewers account for 11 percent of the US market—and that’s growing rapidly, even though crafts tend to retail for $8 to $10 per six-pack, versus about $6 for conventional beers. Most distributors sell either InBev or MillerCoors brands as their bread and butter, the Journal reports, plus a smattering of independent craft brews. That’s why in supermarket beer coolers these days you’ll typically find a few national craft brews like Sierra Nevada, along with maybe a few local favorites, after you walk past towering stacks of Bud and Miller six-packs.

So AB InBev has launched a “new plan to reverse declining volumes” in the United States by offering sweet incentives for company-aligned distributors to restrict sales of craft beers and push more Bud Light and whatnot. Get this, from the Journal:â&#128;¨

The world’s largest brewer last month introduced a new incentive program that could offer some independent distributors in the U.S. annual reimbursements of as much as $1.5 million if 98% of the beers they sell are AB InBev brands, according to two distributors who requested confidentiality because they were asked not to discuss the plan. Distributors whose sales volumes are 95% made up of AB InBev brands would be eligible to have the brewer cover as much as half of their contractual marketing support for those brands, which includes retail promotion and display costs. AB InBev, which introduced the plan at a meeting of distributors in St. Louis, estimates participating distributors would receive an average annual benefit of $200,000 each.â&#128;¨

The beer giant plans to devote big bucks to the scheme—about $150 million next year, as part of a “three-year plan to restore growth in AB InBev’s most profitable market,” the United States, the Journal reports. â&#128;¨

And beyond pushing up the percentage of AB InBev products in the mix, the incentive plans place another restriction on the distributors who choose to take advantage of the offers: They can only carry craft brewers that produce less than 15,000 barrels or sell beer only in one state.â&#128;¨ Such a provision would put a hard squeeze on excellent, relatively large craft brewers like San Diego’s Stone, Northern California’s Sierra Nevada, and Colorado’s Oskar Blues. InBev’s new program is already having an impact, the Journal reports.

At least one distributor has dropped a craft brewer as a result of the incentive program. Deschutes Brewery President Michael Lalonde said Grey Eagle Distributing of St. Louis last week decided it will drop the Oregon brewery behind Mirror Pond Pale Ale because it “had to make a choice to go with the incentive program or stay with craft.”

All of this raises the question: Under US antitrust law, can a giant company legally throw around its weight like that? The answer may well be yes. Ricardo Melo, Anheuser-Busch’s vice president of sales strategy and wholesaler development, stressed to the Journal that the incentive program is voluntary—that is, distributors are free to decline the extra support and continue stocking as many craft brands as they want. But apparently, the company doesn’t think many distributors will turn down such a sweet deal. Currently, the Journal reports, just 38 percent of AB InBev-aligned distributors participate in the company’s incentive programs. The company “aims to double participation in three years behind the new rewards plan,” the article adds.

See original article – 

The King of Beers Wants to Push Craft Brews out of Your Supermarket

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The King of Beers Wants to Push Craft Brews out of Your Supermarket

Diabetes Rates Are Finally Starting to Fall

by Tatiana95B Posted on December 1, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Americans have been slowly improving their diets, moving away from sugary drinks and highly processed food. And they’re starting to reap the fruits, so to speak, of this shift.

The latest evidence: After a quarter century of steady rise, new cases of diabetes declined by a fifth between 2008 and 2014, reports The New York Times’ Sabrina Tavernise, pointing to a new release from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Tavernise puts the trend into context:

There is growing evidence that eating habits, after decades of deterioration, have finally begun to improve. The amount of soda Americans drink has declined by about a quarter since the late 1990s, and the average number of daily calories children and adults consume also has fallen. Physical activity has started to rise, and once-surging rates of obesity, a major driver of Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease, have flattened.

The situation is hardly rosy, she makes clear: New diabetes cases still accumulate at double the rate they did in the ’90s, and most of the declines have accrued to college graduates, while the “rates for the less educated have flattened but not declined.” And large racial disparities remain:

CDC

But the trends point downward. That’s something to celebrate.

Read the article:  

Diabetes Rates Are Finally Starting to Fall

Posted in alo, Anchor, eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Diabetes Rates Are Finally Starting to Fall

The Government Buried Some Really Important Herbicide News Right Before Thanksgiving

by JohnBorowski Posted on November 30, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Just before the Thanksgiving holiday, the Environmental Protection Agency revoked its controversial approval of a novel herbicide mix, sending shares of its maker, chemical giant Dow, down nearly 3 percent in Wednesday trading.

The product, Enlist Duo, is the signature weed-killing cocktail of Dow AgroScience, Dow’s ag subsidiary. It’s composed of two endocrine-disrupting chemicals, 2-4-D and glypohosate, that have landed on the World Health Organization’s lists of “possible” and “probable” carcinogens, respectively. Dow markets it for use alongside corn and soybean varieties that have been genetically engineered to withstand the combined herbicides, to counter the rapid rise of weeds that have evolved to resist glyphosate alone. Approved by the EPA last year, Enlist Duo is the company’s “crown jewel,” a Wall Street analyst recently told The Wall Street Journal. The US Department of Agriculture thinks farmers will embrace it rapidly—it will boost 2,4-D use by as much as 600 percent by 2020, the agency projects.

How inconvenient for Dow’s shareholders, then, that the EPA has changed its mind. Last Tuesday, the agency petitioned the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals to revoke its approval of Enlist Duo, temporarily barring farmers from using it.

The reason for the reversal is fascinating. The decision hinges on the so-called “synergistic” effects of combined pesticides. When you combine two or more herbicides, do you merely get the weed-slaying properties of each—or do you also get something new and greater than the sum of the parts? There’s not a lot of data on that. Generally, pesticides are tested for safety in isolation, even though farmers tend to use several at once in the field. Yet studies have repeatedly shown—see here and here—that chemical combinations can be much more toxic than you’d expect from analyzing each of their components.

When the EPA reviewed safety data supplied by Dow, it found “no indication of synergism between the two Enlist Duo ingredients for mammals, freshwater fish, and freshwater invertebrates,” its court petition states, and thus it concluded that the “mixture of the two ingredients does not show a greater toxicity compared to either parent compound alone.”

But later, agency officials looked at Dow’s application to the US Patent Office for Enlist Duo, originally filed in 2013, and found something quite different: “claims of ‘synergistic herbicidal weed control.'” The EPA was not amused. “Specifically, Dow did not submit to EPA during the registration process the extensive information relating to potential synergism it cited to the Patent Office,” the agency complained to the court. “EPA only learned of the existence of that information after the registrations were issued and only recently obtained the information.”

In others words, Dow was assuring the EPA that its proposed cocktail was really nothing new—just the combination of two already-approved agrichemicals—while simultaneously telling the patent office that Enlist did indeed bring new and different weed-leveling properties to the farm field. In short, two different messages for two different audiences—the EPA sees potentially heightened toxicity from synergistic effects, while the investors who pore over patents might see a potential blockbuster in an herbicide mix that’s more than just the sum of its two components.

Dow has now handed that “extensive information” on Enlist Duo’s synergistic effects to the EPA. In a press release, Dow AgroSciences President and CEO Tim Hassinger vowed to resolve the EPA’s issues “in the next few months, in time for the 2016 crop use season.” Given that the EPA relies on company-supplied data to make these decisions, he’s probably right—the EPA’s action last week will amount to a speed bump on the road to Enlist Duo’s conquering of the nation’s vast corn/soybean belt. But considering the confusion so far, now might be the time for the EPA to demand independent testing of this powerful and potentially soon-to-be ubiquitous mix.

Meanwhile, last Wednesday’s action marks the second time in November the EPA has seen fit to revoke registration of a would-be blockbuster Dow pesticide. Just a week before, the agency nixed its approval of the insecticide sulfoxaflor, months after a federal appeals court found that Dow had delivered the agency “flawed and limited data” about the chemical’s impact on honeybees.

More:  

The Government Buried Some Really Important Herbicide News Right Before Thanksgiving

Posted in alo, Anchor, Crown, eco-friendly, Everyone, FF, GE, Green Light, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Government Buried Some Really Important Herbicide News Right Before Thanksgiving

These 18 Photos of Grizzly Bears Will Make You Want to Get in Your Car and Drive to Yellowstone Right Now

by JustineBallou Posted on November 21, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

By the end of the year, the federal government will likely propose taking the grizzly bear off of the endangered species list. To some, this would mark an unprecedented victory: the resuscitation of perhaps the most iconic large mammal on the continent. In 1975, when it first gained endangered species protection, the grizzly bear population in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, one of the few areas grizzly bears still exist in the continental United States, dwindled to 130. Today, the population stands at around 750. But despite this resurgence, many scientists, conservationists, and indigenous people say taking away its protection could spell disaster for the species.

This latter camp includes award-winning wildlife photographer Thomas D. Mangelsen, who has lived in Jackson Hole, Wyo., on the edge of Great Teton National Park, since the 1970s. He has captured the return of the grizzlies to Greater Yellowstone with his lens for nearly a decade, since his most famous subject, the mother grizzly bear known as 399, first appeared in Teton Park. The bear quickly became a wildlife star, raising several sets of cubs in close proximity to popular tourist spots within Grand Teton National Park while almost never threatening humans.

Using 399 and her offspring as an entry point, Mangelsen and his longtime friend and journalist Todd Wilkinson explore the controversy surrounding grizzly bears and how humans should treat them in a gorgeous coffee table book, Grizzlies of Pilgrim Creek: An Intimate Portrait of 399, that comprises Mangelsen’s photos of 399 and her family (some of which are included here), along with a narrative by Wilkinson.

Mengelsen and Wilkinson recently sat down with Mother Jones to talk about their experiences with 399, the threats she and other grizzlies face, and why we should care about what could happen if the US Fish and Wildlife Service takes away their Endangered Species Act protection.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Mother Jones: Tom, tell me about what it was like when 399 showed up in Grand Teton National Park near to where you live.

Thomas D. Mangelsen: : 399’s arrival was big news in 2006 because up until then grizzly bears hadn’t been seen in Teton Park. I had been there 27 years when she showed up, and I had never seen a grizzly bear in Teton Park, and I had seen very few grizzlies in Yellowstone.

I live on the edge of Teton Park, next to the Snake River, and in 2005 I awoke in the middle of the night because my dog was going crazy. I bolted up, adrenaline rushing, and I look up and I see this bear standing face-to-face thorough the glass, looking at Loup (my dog). I looked and I saw this big hump on his back or her back, and I said hmm, that’s not a black bear, that’s a grizzly bear. But because I had never seen one there (this was before 399 showed up) I still thought it had to be a black bear.

The following year, in 2006, I started hearing stories that a mother with three cubs had been seen a couple of times in Teton Park in Oxbow Bend, which is a famous overlook, and a great place in Teton Park for wildlife. I went up there later in the summer and I saw her and her three cubs feeding on a moose carcass. I didn’t think too much about it, I thought they will be gone soon because it’s turning into fall.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

She grew on me. I watched her a little later in the season chase elk calves in early June in the Willow Flats, which is near Oxbow Bend. She started drawing these crowds of people because she would come there every afternoon and she would play rope a dope with these herds of elk and their calves. She would be out there playing and nursing the calves, not paying attention to the elk, it looked like. Then these elk would come up closer to her to keep an eye on the predator, and all of a sudden she would bolt and run and chase them and split the herd. The elk would run into the willows and then 399 would just turn around and go back like a herd dog and pick off these elk calves.

I was excited because I knew immediately that it was a great opportunity for people to learn about bears and see them in a natural state. I’ve spent a lot of time in Africa over the years, and it was very similar to the Serengeti, seeing a lion or a cheetah chasing wildebeest.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

MJ: Grizzlies have been protected under the Endangered Species Act since the ’70s, but many are still shot every year. Why?

Todd Wilkinson: There is an elk hunt that’s been in Great Teton National Park, the only sanctioned big game hunt of its kind in the lower 48 in a national park, and that perennially puts bears at risk because elk are getting killed in the park, the grizzlies are feeding on the remains—the gut piles—and then hunters are bumbling into them. So every season that goes by with 399 and her 15 descendants, it’s a miracle in some ways that they remain alive, because she and her offspring are walking through these land mines.

TDM: In the national parks, you can’t leave a coke can on a picnic table—you would get a ticket—but you can leave these gut piles, and you cut the legs, limbs, heads, off and leave them in the field.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

MJ: Why would it be a bad idea to take away grizzly bears’ Endangered Species Act protection?

TW: The federal government is saying that bears have surpassed their carrying capacity and basically the ecosystem is bursting at the seams in terms of bear numbers, so they are pushing out.

In the book, we talk about a scientist named David Mattson, who is a veteran of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, the premier large mammal research unit in the world. He has advanced a counter narrative, which is that, as a result of declines in their four main food groups, grizzly bears are having to range wider to find their food.

One of those key foods is whitebark pine seeds. Within the last decade, the 18-million-acre whitebark pine forest ecosystem has collapsed—it’s functionally extinct as a reliable food source. Climate change has exacerbated insect infestation so we’re now getting two beetle reproductive cycles in the course of a single year when in the past we might get one.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

The second thing that’s happened is 25 or 30 years ago, someone introduced lake trout into Yellowstone Lake, and that has beaten back native cutthroat trout that spawn in the streams that come out of Yellowstone Lake. The bears seize upon the fish, it’s a great source of protein. Because cutthroat has been decimated that has impacted a huge number of bears, 60 to 80 bears.

And then on top of that, there is a third food source called the army cutworm moth (also known as the miller moth). They are treated as an agricultural pest, and so you have lots of pesticides thrown at the moths in farm country. Those moths migrate hundreds of miles to the high mountain talus slopes to drink the nectar of high mountain flowers. We know from climate change that those high alpine and subalpine areas are in danger, so if the flowers go away, what’s going to happen to the moths? Or if the moths get hammered by pesticides, they disappear. They are high fat sources, grizzlies eat tens of thousands of them in a sitting.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

As a result of bears losing those key foods and having to forage further, not only are females being forced to feed on carcasses, but they are also having negative encounters with cattle in the area—we have seen a spike in the number of encounters with livestock.

The one thing we know about climate change is that it is making the wild apron of ecosystems shrink. You have climate change that is asserting its impact on Greater Yellowstone at the same time you have record visitation to the national parks and a record inundation of lifestyle pilgrims moving to the ecosystem, pressing in on the outside edges. So you got this constricting ecosystem, and on top of it you have climate change. The future of grizzly bears is really uncertain.

TDM: People in the scientific community, private citizens, and conservationists are saying what’s the rush (to take away Endangered Species Act protection from the grizzly bears), let’s see how this plays out.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

MJ: What’s in store for 399 while we wait to see if grizzly bears’ protection is taken away?

TW: 399 is 19 years old. She’s been seen with male bears this summer, and so very likely when she comes out of the den late winter next year, she’ll have a new set of cubs as a 20-year-old mother.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

View original:

These 18 Photos of Grizzly Bears Will Make You Want to Get in Your Car and Drive to Yellowstone Right Now

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, Free Press, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Pines, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on These 18 Photos of Grizzly Bears Will Make You Want to Get in Your Car and Drive to Yellowstone Right Now

Ben Carson Just Dropped This Pretty Insane Immigration Policy on the Nation

by LouzConstant Posted on November 12, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In a Wednesday press conference at Liberty University, a day after the GOP presidential candidates’ most recent debate, co-frontrunner Ben Carson aired his views on one of the race’s most contested topics: immigration. The former surgeon echoed Donald Trump on the magical powers of a heavily policed border fence and pushed back against his rival on the desirability of purging 11 million undocumented people, expressing concern for the plight of “farmers with multi-thousand acre farms” and hotel owners, who, he fretted, would have trouble finding workers to harvest crops and clean rooms.

Then he dropped a whopper. The answer to stemming the (alleged) tide of undocumented workers coming from the south is easy, he suggested: US companies simply need to set up shop in Central and South America and teach them how to farm. His model, he said, is Cameroon, where US agribusiness firms are “helping to develop millions of acres and incredibly fertile land, growing record crops, and getting big profits,” which, he added, “is great for them; I like business.”

These companies are doing well by doing good, he argued, “building the infrastructure of a nation, creating jobs there, and teaching them the ag business so they carry on themselves, while at the same time creating friends for the United States.” And if US firms repeat this feat south of the US border, “people won’t feel the necessity to come here.”

Whoa. First, Cameroon makes an odd model for foreign-led agriculture development. The nation has seen overall food production rise and malnutrition rates drop, but that’s the work of domestic smallholder farmers growing for the local market, not multinationals. Foreign firms have played a large role in converting forest into large palm oil plantations, but those efforts have generated at least as much controversy as “friends for the United States.” The Belgian-owned company Socapalm is locked in a “bitter land rights struggle” with villagers over expansion plans, The Guardian reports. And earlier this month, the government sentenced Cameroon environmental activist and NGO leader Nasako Besing to three years in prison for his role in opposing a hotly contested palm expansion/deforestation project by US firm Herakles Farm.

Then there’s the vexed history of US interventions in Mexican agriculture. The Green Revolution—the effort, funded by US foundations, to bring industrial-style agriculture to the global south—started in Mexico in the 1940s. As the historian Nick Cullather shows in his fantastic 2010 book The Hungry World (which I reviewed here), the Green Revolution did transform agriculture in Mexico’s north. The result: “narrowing of domestic agriculture’s genetic base, supplanting indigenous, sustainable practices; displacing small and communal farming with commercial agribusiness; and pushing millions of peasants into urban slums or across the border.”

Thus Mexico’s Green Revolution experience triggered what 1950s US policymakers would call the “wetback problem”—1.5 million migrants crossing the border each year in search of gainful work, Cullather shows. And that led directly to President Eisenhower’s infamous Operation Wetback, the very round-’em-up-and-purge-them scheme that Carson’s opponent Trump repeatedly trumpeted (though not by name) in Tuesday’s debate.

Of course, the last big wave of Mexican migration was also directly linked to US agribusiness. Implemented in 1994, NAFTA removed trade barriers and inspired Mexican policymakers to withdraw support for Mexican farmers. The result was a flood of subsidized US corn going south, a plunge in corn prices, and a tide of displaced Mexican smallholders heading north, as the Mexican analyst Ana de Ita and others have shown. US firms like Archer Daniels Midland profited handsomely.

In more recent years, though, immigration from Mexico has slowed dramatically, brought down by a variety of factors, from better corn prices in Mexico to less pull from the sluggish US economy. There’s strong evidence that net Mexico-to-US migration (the number of new arrivals minus the number who leave) is at or near zero. You won’t hear Carson or Trump talk about that, or the fact that current undocumented immigrants pay billions in annual taxes, both federal and state/local, in exchange for low-wage labor on farms, in restaurants, etc. On the immigration issue, Carson and his main rival to the GOP presidential throne are spewing noxious fumes about nothing in particular.

Continued here:  

Ben Carson Just Dropped This Pretty Insane Immigration Policy on the Nation

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Ben Carson Just Dropped This Pretty Insane Immigration Policy on the Nation