Tag Archives: food and ag

5 Ways Monsanto Wants to Profit Off of Climate Change

by Jay Walker Posted on October 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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Global warming could mean big business for controversial agriculture giant Monsanto, which announced last week it was purchasing the climate change-oriented startup Climate Corporation for $930 million.

Agriculture, which uses roughly 40 percent of the world’s land, will be deeply affected by climate change in the coming years. In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that warming will lead to pest outbreaks, that climate-related severe weather will impact food security, and that rising temperatures will hurt production for farms in equatorial areas. (In areas further from the equator, temperature rise is actually estimated to increase production in the short term, then harm production if temperatures continue to rise over 3 degrees Celsius in the long term.) Meanwhile, increases in the global population will make it crucial for farmers to be efficient with their land, says UC Davis professor Tu Jarvis. “The increase in food production, essentially, in the future needs to be in yields—output per acre,” Jarvis says, even while weather patterns make farming less predictable or more difficult in some places.

Monsanto, meanwhile, has been gearing up to sell its wares to farmers adapting to climate change. Here are five climate change-related products the company either sells already, or plans to:

1. Data to help farmers grow crops in a changing climate. Climate Corporation, which Monsanto is acquiring, sells detailed weather and soil information to farmers with the stated mission of helping “all the world’s people and businesses manage and adapt to climate change.” This data is meant to help farmers better plan, track, and harvest their crops, ultimately making farms more productive. According to its press release, Monsanto thinks the ag data business will be a $20-billion market, and that farmers using these tools could increase their yield BY 30 to 50 bushels (that’s between 1,700 and 2,800 shelled pounds).

In a video interview about the acquisition, Monsanto vice president of global strategy Kerry Preete told TechCrunch: “We think weather patterns are becoming more erratic, it places a huge challenge on farmers with their production. We think a lot of the risk can be mitigated out of weather impact through information,” Preete said. “If you know what’s going on every day in the field, based on climate changes, soil variations that exist, we can really help farmers mitigate some of the challenges that impact their yield.”

2. Insurance for when it’s too hot, cold, dry, wet, or otherwise extreme outside. Climate Corporation currently sells both federally subsidized crop insurance and supplemental plans that pay out additional benefits when crops go awry. While federal insurance repays farmers up to the break-even point for a failed crop, Climate Corporation insures the lost profits as well. Monsanto says it will maintain this insurance business.

Though the broader insurance industry is concerned about losses due to major natural disasters occurring more often as the result of climate change, insuring crops is less risky because payouts for a damaged crop season a generally smaller than those for dense, damaged urban areas, according to Gerald Nelson, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois.

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5 Ways Monsanto Wants to Profit Off of Climate Change

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40 Percent of Your Chicken Nugget Is Meat. The Rest Is…

by 4q4cv8v Posted on October 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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Marketing isn’t about giving people what they want; it’s about convincing people to want what you’ve got—that is, what you can buy cheap, spiff up, and sell at a profit. Take the chicken nugget, that staple of fast-food outlets and school lunches.

The implicit marketing pitch goes something like this: “You like fried chicken, right? How about some bite-sized fried chicken chunks, without the messy bones?” When most people think of eating chicken, they think of, say, biting into a drumstick. What they get when they do so is a mouthful of muscle—popularly known as meat.

What people are actually getting from chicken nuggets is a bit different, according to a new study by University of Mississippi medical researchers. (Abstract here; I have access to the full paper but can’t upload it for copyright reasons.) They bought an order of chicken nuggets from two (unnamed) fast-food chains, plucked a nugget from each, broke them down, and analyzed them in a lab.

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40 Percent of Your Chicken Nugget Is Meat. The Rest Is…

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Car Exhaust Is Confusing Honeybees to Death

by VernaCand Posted on October 3, 2013

Mother Jones

This story first appeared on the Atlantic Cities website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Science has linked breathing car exhaust to all manner of afflictions, from brain damage to heart attacks to chronic asthma in children. But the damaging effects of auto fumes stretch beyond the human realm and into the wild, with honeybees in particular getting so addled by the stuff they no longer can find life-sustaining flowers.

That’s according to researchers at the UK’s University of Southampton who are investigating how diesel exhaust interacts with floral aromas. Bees rely on these zesty odors to locate blossoms, which they mine for nectar and pollen to use as a food source back at the hive. In an ideal environment of green fields and pristine air, bees have little problem tracing the scents to their blooming wellsprings. But in a smoggy urban zone or along highways, car exhaust violently zaps the aromas, changing their chemical composition or even eliminating them completely.

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Car Exhaust Is Confusing Honeybees to Death

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If You Distrust Vaccines, You’re More Likely to Think NASA Faked the Moon Landings

by Merv Carlson Posted on October 2, 2013

Mother Jones

Do you believe that a covert group called the New World Order is planning to take over the planet and impose a single world government?

Do you think the moon landings were staged in a Hollywood studio?

What about 9/11—do you suspect the US government deliberately allowed the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks to happen in order to concoct an excuse for war?

If you believe these sorts of things, you’re a conspiracy theorist. That much goes without saying. But according to new research, if you believe these sorts of things, you are also more likely to be skeptical of what scientists have to say on three separate issues: vaccinations, genetically modified foods, and climate change.

Psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky, who studies conspiracy theories and how they motivate the denial of science.

The new study, by University of Bristol psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky and his colleagues in the journal PLOS ONE, finds links between conspiratorial thinking and all three of these science-skeptic stances. Notably, the relationship was by far the strongest on the vaccine issue. For geeks: the correlation was .52, an impressive relationship for social science. Another way of translating the finding? “People who tend toward conspiratorial thinking are three times more likely to reject vaccinations,” says Lewandowsky. (By contrast, for climate change denial and GMO resistance, the correlation with conspiratorial beliefs was real but much smaller, .09 and .13, respectively.)

The finding may cast a great deal of light on the strange persistence of anti-vaccine views, which have centered on the claim that childhood vaccines are behind an alleged “epidemic” of autism. This assertion has been rejected by scientists. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Institute of Medicine have both weighed in strongly on the matter; and one chief proponent of the vaccine concerns, Andrew Wakefield, has even seen his original 1998 paper raising concerns about the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine retracted by the journal that published it, The Lancet.

Yet vaccine fears have persisted in the face of all scientific refutation (not to mention medical and public health experts saying that the failure to vaccinate is downright dangerous). And if these beliefs are often conspiratorial, that might help explain why. Almost by definition, conspiracy theories are irrefutable; rejections by scientific authorities just become part of the conspiracy. Indeed, several prior analyses of anti-vaccine views, undertaken by analyzing their expression on the web or on YouTube in particular, have found them to be highly conspiratorial in nature.

Lewandowsky’s team conducted the research through an online survey of 1,001 Americans, which asked them a variety of questions about conspiracy theories, and also separate batteries of questions on vaccines, climate change, and genetically modified foods. On vaccines, for instance, survey respondents were asked how much they agree with statements like “The risk of vaccinations to maim and kill children outweighs their health benefits” and “I believe vaccines are a safe and reliable way to help avert the spread of preventable diseases.”

As if the new study won’t provoke enough ire by linking anti-vaccine views to conspiracy theories, Lewandowsky also finds links—albeit much weaker ones—between conspiracy theories and both anti-GMO beliefs and climate change denial. On GMOs, the board of directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science has stated that “crop improvement by the modern molecular techniques of biotechnology is safe.” Accordingly, Lewandowsky’s survey respondents were asked to react to items like “I believe that because there are so many unknowns, that it is dangerous to manipulate the natural genetic material of plants” and “Genetic modification of food is a safe and reliable technology.”

On climate change, the scientific consensus is strong and enduring—it was just reaffirmed by the leading scientific authority on the matter, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. To think that the world’s scientists are collectively conning us about this is indeed a conspiracy theory, and Lewandowsky has previously published research drawing this connection. Ironically, that in turn led some climate skeptics to see a conspiracy behind Lewandowsky’s studies, charging that the research had been faked or was a “scam,” that its conclusions were “pre-ordained,” and (most elaborately) that the University of Western Australia (where Lewandowsky used to work), the Australian Research Council, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and “possibly even the government” were ultimately pulling the strings. (The new research reaffirms that prior study, meaning that critics will now need a still more elaborate conspiracy theory.)

The new study also has some fascinating implications for the longstanding battle over who’s worse when it comes to distorting science: The left, or the right. Addressing this issue was a key motivation behind the research, and the basic upshot is that left-wing science denial was nowhere to be found—at least not in the sense that left-wingers reject established science more frequently than right-wingers on issues like GMOs or vaccines. “I chose GM foods and vaccinations based on the intuition in the media that this is a left wing thing,” Lewandowsky explains. “And as it turns out, I didn’t find a lot of evidence for that.”

When it comes to GM foods, Lewandowsky found no association between left-right political orientation and distrust of these foods’ safety in his American sample. When it comes to vaccines, meanwhile, the study found that two separate political factors seemed to be involved in vaccine resistance, leading to a complex stew. “There’s some evidence that progressives are rejecting vaccinations, but equally there is an association between libertarianism and the rejection of vaccinations,” Lewandowsky explains. Lefties presumably do it because they’re anti-corporate, and Big Pharma is involved in the vaccine business; libertarians presumably do it because they’re anti-government, and the anti-vaccine movement has long levied dubious charges that the government (the CDC in particular) has been hiding the truth on this matter.

Politically speaking, the result is kind of a wash. “Overall, there’s very weak evidence for a liberal war on science,” concludes Lewandowsky. By contrast, the rejection of climate science was associated in the study, as it has been constantly in past research, with political conservatism and free-market beliefs. Conservatives today also have less trust in science in general than liberals do. And then, there’s that whole evolution thing.

What are the implications of these results? First, the study suggests that we need to think about science denial in a new way: It isn’t simply driven by ideology. There appears to be an independent factor, conspiratorial thinking, that is neither left-wing nor right-wing, but that does motivate rejection of what scientists say on a diversity of issues. And that makes sense: “Science is based on looking at all the evidence, rather than focusing in on some abnormality, which is what conspiracy theorists do,” says Lewandowsky.

What does this mean for communicating the importance of vaccinations (or anything else, for that matter)? First of all, Lewandowsky advises against trying to debate conspiracy theorists at all—rather, you should try to communicate to the persuadable. Or if you are going to try to persuade a conspiracy theorist, Lewandowsky advises a multi-pronged approach: Refute multiple separate conspiracy beliefs at once. “It becomes much much harder for a conspiracy theorist to maintain four different crazy conspiracies, when four of them have been debunked,” he says.

The paper is Lewandowsky et al, “The Role of Conspiracist Ideation and Worldviews in Predicting Rejection of Science,” PLOS ONE, October 2, 2013.

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If You Distrust Vaccines, You’re More Likely to Think NASA Faked the Moon Landings

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Tom’s Kitchen: Spaghetti with Butternut Squash, Bacon, and Chickpeas

by munrhexaa Posted on September 28, 2013

Mother Jones

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September in Austin is a bit like February in northern climes: months of harsh weather have turned the farmers market into a study in austerity. Here in Texas, tomatoes are mostly gone, done in by the unrelenting heat. Greens are as rare as rain. Eggplant, zucchini, and melons soldier on. And on.

A few weeks ago, one of my favorite vegetables began to appear at farm stands: butternut squash. The trouble was, the idea of whipping up—much less eating—a butternut squash soup on a 100+ degree day had all the appeal of sporting a down parka at a swimming hole.

At a recent Sunday farmers market, I broke down and bought one of the squashes anyway, desperate for new flavors. I figured I’d find something appealing to do with it. And then, fall—or at least a preview of it—arrived in the form of a day-long rainstorm. The temperature barely cracked 80 degrees: a veritable cold front! So I decided to combine that one butternut squash with a little slab of bacon I bought from the excellent Austin butcher Dai Due into an autumnal pasta.

To bring the sweet smokiness of the squash/bacon combination to the fore, I deployed an old Mark Bittman trick: I used half the amount of spaghetti that a typical recipe would call for. If you want to feed more people, you could get away with using a full pound of pasta. Just add additional lashings of olive oil and cheese to ramp up flavor. Substitution note: Try swapping the pasta for farro—see here for more on that excellent grain.

Spaghetti with Butternut Squash, Bacon, and Chickpeas
(Yields three generous portions.)

Extra-virgin olive oil

6 oz. bacon, preferably from pastured hogs, diced into quarter-inch bits

1 large butternut squash, cut into half-inch chunks
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

8 oz. spaghetti
4 cloves garlic, mashed flat, peeled, and finely chopped
A pinch or two, to taste, of crushed chili flakes
1 15 oz. can of chickpeas, drained (cannellini beans would also work well)
A wedge of Parmesan, grano padano, or other hard cheese
1 bunch parsley, chopped

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Place a large, oven-proof skillet—one big enough to hold the squash in one layer—over a medium flame. Add barely enough olive oil to cover the bottom of the skillet. When it’s hot, add the bacon and cook, stirring often, until brown and crisp. Remove with a slotted spoon and set aside, leaving the heat on.

Add the squash to the hot pan and gently toss until it’s sizzling and coated in fat. (If there isn’t enough fat left in the pan from cooking the bacon, add a bit of olive oil.) Add a small pinch of salt—go easy, because bacon is salty—and a generous grinding of pepper. Toss the squash one more time to make sure the pieces are laid out more or less in one layer.

Place the pan in the heated oven. Cook, tossing occasionally, until the squash is tender and lightly browned, 15 to 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, get the pasta going. (I use Harold McGhee’s low-water, high-speed method.)

When the squash is done, take the pan out of the oven and mix in the chopped garlic and crushed chili flakes. Let it sizzle for a minute or two, as the pan’s residual heat cooks the garlic. Now add the drained beans, a ladle of pasta water, the cooked bacon, a good grating of cheese, and toss it all together.

When the pasta is done, drain it and combine with the squash mixture. Add the chopped parsley, and toss until well combined. Taste for seasoning, adding salt, pepper, and chili flakes as needed. If the dish seems a little dry, add a glug of olive oil.

Pass around the block of cheese and the grater as you serve. This dish goes well with a sturdy red wine—maybe one from France’s Rhône region.

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Tom’s Kitchen: Spaghetti with Butternut Squash, Bacon, and Chickpeas

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Can We Finally Have a Serious Talk About Population?

by adndseu13da Posted on September 27, 2013

Mother Jones

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Climate Desk has launched a new science podcast, Inquiring Minds, cohosted by contributing writer Chris Mooney and neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas. To subscribe via iTunes, click here. You can also follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow, and like us on Facebook.

Today, as the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change releases its latest megareport, averring a 95 percent certainty that humans are heating up the planet, there’s an unavoidable subtext: The growing number of humans on the planet in the first place.

The figures, after all, are staggering: In 1900, there were just 1.65 billion of us; now, there are 7.2 billion. That’s more than two doublings, and the next billion-human increase is expected to occur over the short space of just 12 years. According to projections, meanwhile, by 2050 the Earth will be home to some 9.6 billion people, all living on the same rock, all at once.

So why not talk more about population, and treat it as a serious issue? It’s a topic that Mother Jones has tackled directly in the past, because taboos notwithstanding, it’s a topic that just won’t go away.

The bestselling environmental journalist Alan Weisman agrees. In this episode of Inquiring Minds (click above to stream audio), he explains why, following on his 2007 smash hit The World Without Us, he too decided to centrally take on the issue of human population in his just-published new book book Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

The new release by Alan Weisman, bestselling author of The World Without Us. Little, Brown & Co.

“Population is a loaded topic, and people who otherwise know better, great environmentalists, often times are very, very timid about going there,” Weisman explains on the podcast. “And I decided as a journalist, I should go there, and find out, is it really a problem, and if so, is there anything acceptable that we can do about it?”

The World Without Us imagined a planet rapidly returning to a natural state in the absence of humans. Where that book represented an ambitious thought experiment, Weisman’s new book is an experience. He traveled to 21 countries—from Israel to Mexico, Pakistan to Niger—to report on how different cultures are responding to booming populations and the strain this is putting on their governments and resources.

Strikingly, he found that countries are coping (or not coping) with this problem in vastly different ways. For instance:

• Pakistan: Current population: 193 million. “By the year 2030, they’re going to have about 395 million people,” Weisman says. “And they’re the size of Texas.” (Texas’ population? Twenty-six million.)

• The Philippines: Current population: nearly 105 million. “As the rest of the planet’s population quadrupled in a century, the head count here quintupled in half that time,” Weisman writes in Countdown.

• Iran: Current population: nearly 80 million. Yet unlike Pakistan and the Philippines, Weisman says, Iran managed its population growth with “probably the most humane program ever in the history of the planet. They got down to replacement rate a year faster than China, and it was a totally voluntary program. No coercion at all.” (Note, though, that as Weisman explains in his book, there was one Iranian government “disincentive” to having a large number of children: “elimination of the individual subsidy for food, electricity, telephone, and appliances for any child after the first three.”)

Alan Weisman in Golestan National Park, Iran Beckie Kravetz

Weisman is well aware of the controversy his book invites. In particular, political libertarians are very fond of refuting the concerns of population crusaders, from the Reverend Thomas Malthus to the ecologist and Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich, with the claim that human ingenuity has a history of proving them wrong. The key episode: the Green Revolution of the late 1960s, led by plant geneticist Norman Borlaug, in which dramatic new agricultural technologies and crop strains were credited with averting what might otherwise have been mass famines.

But Weisman has his response ready (he chronicles Borlaug’s life and triumphs in the book). “Everybody says that Norman Borlaug, the great plant geneticist, he disproved Malthus and Ehrlich forever,” he explains. “It’s kind of cherry-picked, because the part that they neglect to add, Norman Borlaug’s Nobel acceptance speech, he didn’t sit there congratulating himself—as he was congratulated by others—for saving more lives than any other human in history. He said, ‘We have bought the world some time, but unless population control and increased food production go hand in hand, we are going to lose this.'”

So what’s Weisman’s solution? Importantly, he is no supporter of coercive population control measures such as China’s infamous one-child policy. Rather, Weisman makes a powerful case that the best way to manage the global population is by empowering women, through both education and access to contraception—so that they can make more informed choices about family size and the kind of lives they want for themselves and their children.

“The libertarians are going to like the solution that ultimately comes up,” Weisman says. “And that is, letting everybody decide how many children they want, which means giving every woman on Earth—and then every man, because male contraceptives are coming—giving them universal access to contraception, and letting them decide for themselves.”

You can listen to the full show here:

This episode of Inquiring Minds also features a discussion of the latest myths circulating on global warming, and the brave new world of gene therapy that we’re entering—where being rich might be your key ticket to the finest health care.

To catch future shows right when they release, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes. You can also follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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Can We Finally Have a Serious Talk About Population?

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Is $7 Billion in Anti-Hunger Support Falling Through the Cracks?

by DorothyUn Posted on September 23, 2013

Mother Jones

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Ending hunger for millions of people by boosting food production worldwide has long been a priority of the Obama administration, advanced through its $7 billion Feed the Future initiative. Yet according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), it’s not clear if Feed the Future is working as intended, or if its funds are falling through the cracks.

The idea behind Feed the Future, a multi-agency initiative led by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), is to link agribusiness with governments in poor countries to grow more food for local consumption and export. Currently, are 19 Feed the Future “focus countries,” selected both for their high rates of starvation and for their potential for attracting agribusiness investment. These include Senegal and Tanzania (two stops on Obama’s African tour this summer), Ethiopia (where USAID recently partnered with PepsiCo to train farmers to grow chickpeas for Sabra Hummus), Cambodia, Haiti, and Guatemala.

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Is $7 Billion in Anti-Hunger Support Falling Through the Cracks?

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Watch: Rep. Jim Mc Govern Calls GOP Food Stamp Bill "Heartless"

by JohnsieaJensen Posted on September 20, 2013

Mother Jones

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Earlier today the House of Representatives approved a bill 217-210 that would cut funding for food stamps by nearly $40 billion over ten years. No Democrats voted for it and only 15 Republicans voted against it. If the measure were to become law, the Congressional Budget Office estimates, nearly 4 million Americans would lose their benefits in 2014. Massachusetts Democrat Jim McGovern voiced concern prior to the vote, calling out Republicans not only for the “heartless” bill itself, but the lack of hearings prior to the vote. Watch:

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Watch: Rep. Jim Mc Govern Calls GOP Food Stamp Bill "Heartless"

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You Just Threw Out a Perfectly Good Gallon of Milk Because You Think the "Sell By" Date Means Something

by irj972ys Posted on September 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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Admit it: When you see milk past the “sell by” date in your fridge you’re apt to skip the smell test and throw that stuff out. What you might not know is that the date is actually meant for store stockers to keep track of product rotation. It offers little indication of when the milk may actually sour. You wouldn’t be alone in tossing out perfectly good milk. Nine out of 10 Americans needlessly throw away edible, unspoiled food based on “use by,” “sell by,” and “best before” labels, according to a report released today by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Harvard Law School.

The problem of wasted food is serious and multifaceted. As Kiera Butler reported earlier this week, a whopping one-third of the global food supply is wasted. Not only that, but this discarded food is responsible for 3.3 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions. If food waste were a country, it would be the third worst carbon-emitting country on the planet after China and the United States, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

Here in America, we’re even worse: Roughly 40 percent of our food goes uneaten, amounting to an economic loss of $165 billion a year, the NRDC reported in 2012. The authors of this week’s analysis found that much of that waste is due to “misinterpretation” of the date labels.

“The average household is losing up to $450 on food each year because they don’t understand the labels,” said co-author Dana Gunders, an NRDC food & agriculture staff scientist, during a press call Wednesday morning. It’s a travesty, she added, especially when one in six Americans are “food insecure.” It’s also a terrific waste of human resources—think about all the time and energy that goes into harvesting, transporting, and processing those trashed foods. Eighty percent of our water, more than half of our land area, and 10 percent of our energy are consumed by agriculture.

The authors of the NRDC study, titled “The Dating Game,” place the blame on inconsistent and irrational labeling laws, which tend to be nonbinding: “This convoluted system is not achieving what date labeling was historically designed to do—provide indicators of freshness. Rather, this creates confusion and leads many consumers to believe, mistakenly, that date labels are signals of a food’s microbial safety. This unduly downplays the importance of more pertinent food safety indicators.”

The solution? A system of clear and consistent federally mandated labels for foods. Here are the authors’ three major recommendations:

1. Sell by dates, only meant as business-to-business information, should be made invisible to consumers; only useful labels that indicate when the food will likely spoil should be stamped on packaging.

Click here to view the NRDC infographic.

2. Government should mandate a clear set of labels for consumers, with unambiguous language that clearly distinguishes between dates for safety and dates for quality. For instance a ready-to-eat sandwich should indicate the date by which it should be eaten, with a label saying something like “unsafe to eat after.” Date labels should be removed from non-perishable goods and replaced with quality-based dates with more general information about when the product peaks in taste.

3. Date labels should be come with more information about safe food handling, including time and temperature exposure indicators. Ted Labuza, a co-author and food safety expert at the University of Minnesota, has argued for labels that indicate temperature changes of the product during shipping and handling.

But the authors say consumers also have a responsibility to reduce the amount of wasted food. They offer a handy infographic for demystifying your fridge with tips such as never letting ice build up in the freezer, and keeping the fridge temperature below 40 degrees F. Labuza said he has kept milk fresh at that temperature for up to six weeks.

Learning some of the tips that our grandparents used could be helpful too. For instance, this rule of thumb for eggs: If it sinks in a bowl of water, it’s good; if it floats, toss it out.*

Obviously, you want to toss anything that looks or smells rotten. In short, trust your senses, not the labels.

*Correction: An eagle-eyed reader noted that this adage was initially in the reverse order.

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You Just Threw Out a Perfectly Good Gallon of Milk Because You Think the "Sell By" Date Means Something

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CDC Reveals Scary Truth About Factory Farms and Superbugs

by Cynthia Perez Posted on September 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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Nearly 80 percent of antibiotics consumed in the United States go to livestock farms. Meanwhile, antibiotic-resistant pathogens affecting people are on the rise. Is there a connection here? No need for alarm, insists the National Pork Producers Council. Existing regulations “provide adequate safeguards against antibiotic resistance,” the group insists on its site. It even enlists the Centers for Disease Control in its effort to show that “animal antibiotic use is safe for everyone,” claiming that the CDC has found “no proven link to antibiotic treatment failure in humans due to antibiotic use in animals.”

So move along, nothing to see here, right? Not so fast. On Monday, the CDC came out with a new report called “Antibiotic resistance threats in the United States, 2013,” available here. And far from exonerating the meat industry and its voracious appetite for drugs, the report spotlights it as a driver of resistance. Check out the left side of this infographic drawn from the report:

CDC

Note the text on the bottom: “These drugs should be only used to treat infections.” Compare that to the National Pork Producers Council’s much more expansive conception of proper uses of antibiotics in livestock facilities: “treatment of illness, prevention of disease, control of disease, and nutritional efficiency of animals.” Dosing animals with daily hits of antibiotics to prevent disease only makes sense, of course, if you’re keeping animals on an industrial scale.

The CDC report lays out a couple of specific pathogens whose spread among people is driven by farm practices. Drug-resistant campylobacter causes 310,000 infections per year, resulting in 28 deaths, the report states. The agency’s recommendations for reducing those numbers is blunt:

• Avoiding inappropriate antibiotic use in food animals.

• Tracking antibiotic use in different types of food animals.

• Stopping spread of Campylobacter among animals on farms.

• Improving food production and processing to reduce contamination.

• Educating consumers and food workers about safe food handling

practices.

Then there’s drug-resistant salmonella, which infects 100,000 people each year and kills 38, CDC reports. The agency lists a similar set of regulations—including “Avoiding inappropriate antibiotic use in food animals”—for reversing the rising trend of resistance in salmonella.

Finally, there’s Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, which racks up 80,461 “severe” cases per year and kills a mind-numbing 11,285 people annually. The CDC report doesn’t link MRSA to livestock production, but it does note that the number of cases of MRSA caught during hospital stays has plunged in recent years, while “rates of MRSA infections have increased rapidly among the general population (people who have not recently received care in a healthcare setting).”

Why are so many people coming down with MRSA who have not had recent contact with hospitals? Increasing evidence points to factory-scale hog facilities as a source. In a recent study, a team of researchers led by University of Iowa’s Tara Smith found MRSA in 8.5 percent of pigs on conventional farms and no pigs on antibiotic-free farms. Meanwhile, a study just released by the journal JAMA Internal Medicine found that people who live near hog farms or places where hog manure is applied as fertilizer have a much greater risk of contracting MRSA. Former Mother Jones writer Sarah Zhang summed up the study like this for Nature:

The team analyzed cases of two different types of MRSA — community-associated MRSA (CA-MRSA), which affected 1,539 patients, and health-care-associated MRSA (HA-MRSA), which affected 1,335 patients. (The two categories refer to where patients acquire the infection as well as the bacteria’s genetic lineages, but the distinction has grown fuzzier as more patients bring MRSA in and out of the hospital.) Then the researchers examined whether infected people lived near pig farms or agricultural land where pig manure was spread. They found that people who had the highest exposure to manure—calculated on the basis of how close they lived to farms, how large the farms were and how much manure was used—were 38% more likely to get CA-MRSA and 30% more likely to get HA-MRSA.

In short, the meat industry’s protestations aside, livestock production is emerging as a vital engine for the rising threat of antibiotic resistance. Perhaps the scariest chart in the whole report is this one—showing that once we generate pathogens that can withstand all the antibiotics currently on the market, there are very few new antibiotics on the horizon that can fill the breach—the pharma industry just isn’t investing in R&D for new ones.

CDC

Last year, the Food and Drug Administration rolled out proposed new rules for antibiotic uses on farms. At the time I found them wanting, because they include a massive loophole: They would phase out growth promotion as a legitimate use for antibiotics, but still accept disease prevention as a worthy reason for feeding them to animals. As I wrote at the time, “The industry can simply claim it’s using antibiotics preventively and go on about its business—continuing to reap the benefits of growth promotion and continuing to menace public health by breeding resistance.” To repeat the CDC’s phrase from its new report, “These drugs should be only used to treat infections.” Worse, the FDA’s new rules would be purely voluntary, relying on the pharma and meat industries to self-regulate.

Nearly a year and a half later, the FDA still hasn’t moved to initiate even that timid step in the right direction. Perhaps the CDC’s blunt reckoning will provide sufficient motivation.

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CDC Reveals Scary Truth About Factory Farms and Superbugs

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