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

Mother Jones

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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.

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

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Science Says: Drink Your Coffee

Mother Jones

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Coffee is one of the pleasures of existence. It’s also really good for us, an ever-expanding body of research suggests. The latest: an analysis of three large population studies by a team of researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. They concluded that regular consumption of between one and five cups a day is associated with significantly lower risk of dying from from cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and brain disorders like Parkinson’s. (For those who drink more than five cups per day, the association unravels.)

Interestingly, the benefits are roughly the same for regular and decaf coffee—suggesting that something in the beloved beverage besides caffeine is the trigger. “Bioactive compounds in coffee reduce insulin resistance and systematic inflammation,” the study’s lead author, Ming Ding, said in a press release. The authors make clear that their results are consistent with “numerous” previous studies.

Now that coffee’s health-giving value is well-established, we should probably think harder about an alwaysvexing problem: how to ensure that the people who tend and harvest this tropical crop get their fair share of the profits generated from it.

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Science Says: Drink Your Coffee

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The Meat Industry Is Killing Kids, Say Pediatricians

Mother Jones

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According to the National Pork Producers Coalition, the way the meat industry currently uses antibiotics is no problem. “Existing FDA regulations are increasingly strict and provide adequate safeguards against antibiotic resistance,” the group insists on its website.

But Jerome Paulson and Theoklis Zaoutis disagree. Pediatricians who serve on the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Environmental Health, they have published a blunt report in the journal Pediatrics, arguing that systemic overuse of antibiotics in livestock production is a key driver of the resistance crisis, which, they show, sickens 2 million Americans every year, kills 23,000, and runs up an annual healthcare bill of $21 billion annually.

With their developing immune systems, children are particularly vulnerable—salmonella alone causes more then 120,000 illnesses, 44,000 physician visits, 4600 hospitalizations, and 38 deaths annually among kids younger than five, the authors report.

They point out that US livestock producers uses a staggering 32.2 million pounds of antibiotics in 2012 (the last year for which data exist), more than four times the amount used to treat people. Fully 60 percent of the those farm-dispensed drugs “are considered to be important in human medicine,” they add. This annual bombardment of farm antibiotics, they show, kills susceptible bacteria and allows resistant ones to proliferate. Of the Salmonella that commonly show up in the US meat supply, 5 percent are are resistant to 5 or more classes of antibiotic drugs—and 3 percent can withstand ceftriaxone, the “first-line therapy for salmonellosis in pediatrics,” the authors note.

Paulson and Zaoutis then run through the various ways these superbugs move off of farms and threaten people. “Increasingly, food animals are raised in large numbers under close confinement, transported in large groups to slaughter, and processed very rapidly,” they write. “These conditions can cause increased bacterial shedding and contamination of hide, carcass, and meat with fecal bacteria.” Resistant bacteria can also escape the farm through farmers, farm workers, and farm families, and casual visitors, who then can spread the germs throughout the communities. Then there’s the vast concentrations of manure from these facilities, which “can contaminate foods when manure containing resistant organisms is applied to agricultural soils and the organisms are then present in farm runoff.”

They end with a critique of what those pork producers claim are “increasingly strict” FDA rules on farm antibiotic use. Currently, the rules allow farmers to use antibiotics not only to treat to disease but also “prevent” it—a loophole that, as I and others have shown, allows meat producers to maintain current practices. That practice “can harm public health, including child health, through the promotion of resistance,” the authors warm. Who are you going to believe—the folks charged with keeping your kids healthy, or the ones charged with profitably churning out billions of meat animals each year?

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The Meat Industry Is Killing Kids, Say Pediatricians

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California Could Be the Next Saudi Arabia

Mother Jones

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In the early 1980s, Saudi Arabia embarked upon a bold project: It began to transform large swaths of desert landscape into wheat farms.

Now, “desert agriculture” isn’t quite the oxymoron it might sound like. These arid zones offer ample sunlight and cool nights, and harbor few crop-chomping insects, fungal diseases, or weed species. As long as you can strategically add water and fertilizer, you’ll generate bin-busting crops. And that’s exactly what Saudi Arabia did. As this Bloomberg News piece shows, the oil-producing behemoth grew so much wheat for about two decades that “its exports could feed Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, and Yemen.”

But starting in the mid-2000s, Saudi wheat production began to taper off. Soon after, it plunged. This year and from now on, the country will produce virtually no wheat, and instead rely on global markets for the staple grain. What happened?

In short, to irrigate its wheat-growing binge, the nation tapped aquifers that “haven’t been filled since the last Ice Age,” Bloomberg reports. And in doing so, it essentially drained them dry in the span of two decades.

In an April 2015 piece, the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Nathan Halverson brought more details. He writes that the first sign of Saudi agriculture’s water crisis began in the early 2000s,when long-established desert springs—ones that had “bubbled up for thousands of years from a massive aquifer system that lay underneath Saudi Arabia”—began to dry up. It had been “one of the world’s largest underground systems, holding as much groundwater as Lake Erie.” Here’s Halverson:

In the historic town of Tayma, which was built atop a desert oasis mentioned several times in the Old Testament, researchers in 2011 found “most wells exsiccated.” That’s academic speak for “bone dry.” The once-verdant Tayma oasis that had sustained human life for millennia—archaeologists have found stone tablets there dating back 2,500 years—was drained in one generation.

In the meantime, farmers’ wells, too, began to go dry, and they had to drill them ever-deeper to keep the water flowing. By 2012, fully four-fifths of the ancient aquifer had vanished; and the Saudi government had begun to reconsider its make-the-desert-bloom ambitions, which have now turned to dust.

Here in the United States, we’ve followed a similar strategy for fruit, vegetable, and nut production, concentrating it in arid regions of California, irrigated by diverting river water over great distances, and, like the Saudis, tapping massive ancient aquifers. But climate change means less snow to feed rivers and thus to water farms—and more reliance on those underwater reserves. In California’s vast Central Valley, a major site of US food production, fully half of wells are at or below historic lows, according to the US Geological Survey. It’s impossible to know when the region’s aquifers will go dry, because no one has invested in the research required to gauge just how much water is left. But the trend is clear. In large swaths of the region, the land is sinking at rates up to 11 inches per year as underground water vanishes, USGS reports. The raiding of the region’s water reserve is part of a decades-long trend, USGS makes clear, made worse, but not caused, by the current drought.

Two other California regions are significant suppliers to the national food market: the Salinas Valley, known as the “salad bowl of the world”; and the Imperial Valley, which specializes in fresh winter produce. They, too, face severe long-term water trouble.

Unlike their Saudi peers, US policymakers don’t have the luxury of waiting until the water runs out and then simply shifting to a reliance on imports—our population is more than ten times larger. One idea for what to do instead: Enact policies that boost vegetable production in other, more water-rich regions, including the Midwest and South—a process I have dubbed de-Californiacation. To bolster themselves, they may want to ponder what’s scribbled on the ruins of a vanished desert kingdom, as imagined by the Romantic poet Shelley: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings/Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

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California Could Be the Next Saudi Arabia

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Here’s A Diet That Actually Works, and Has the Science to Prove It

Mother Jones

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Low-fat dietary dogma—and, by extension, the plethora of processed junk the food industry conjured up to indulge it—has passed its sell-by date. But cutting down on sugary foods can trigger rapid health improvements.

Those are the messages of two studies released last week. For the fat one, a team of Harvard researchers scoured databases looking for randomized, controlled trials—the gold standard of dietary research—comparing the weight-loss effects of low-fat diets to other regimens like low-carb. They found 53 studies that met their criteria for rigor.

The result, published in the British journal The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology: low-carbohydrate diets “led to significantly greater weight loss” than did low-fat ones. People assigned low-fat diets tended to lose a small amount of weight compared to no-change-in-diet control groups, but cutting carbs delivered better results than reducing dietary fat. “The science does not support low-fat diets as the optimal long-term weight loss strategy,” lead author Deirdre Tobias of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School said in a press release.

The study marks the latest indication that your fat-free fro-yo habit is not likely doing you any favors by cutting your fat intake. But its sugary jolt may be doing more harm than you already thought. That’s the suggestion of another new study, published in the journal Obesity, by a team led by longtime sugar critic Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist in at the University of California at San Francisco.

Lustig is a proponent of the idea that all calories aren’t created equal—specifically, that added sugars (in sodas, processed foods, etc.) do more harm than calorie-equivalent amounts of fats, starches, and complex carbohydrates. To test this theory, Lustig and his colleagues identified 43 kids diagnosed with obesity and metabolic syndrome—defined as a cluster of conditions associated with the risk cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes—and tweaked their diets.

For 10 days, the kids ate catered meals with caloric amounts equivalent to their previous diets but with all foods with added sugars removed, replaced with starches. Their overall sugar intake went from 28 percent to 10 percent (representing naturally sweet foods like fruit). Lustig summarized the results in an op-ed:

Diastolic blood pressure decreased by five points. Blood fat levels dropped precipitously. Fasting glucose decreased by five points, glucose tolerance improved markedly, insulin levels fell by 50%. In other words we reversed their metabolic disease in just 10 days, even while eating processed food, by just removing the added sugar and substituting starch, and without changing calories or weight. Can you imagine how much healthier they would have been if we hadn’t given them the starch?

It’s important to note that the results are suggestive, not conclusive. Unlike the studies conglomerated in the low-fat paper, Lustig’s project did not include a control group.

But both the Harvard study and Lustig’s reinforce an emerging consensus that fat is not necessarily a dietary devil, while quaffing sugar at typical US levels might just be.

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Here’s A Diet That Actually Works, and Has the Science to Prove It

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This Devastating Chart Shows Why Even a Powerful El Niño Won’t Fix the Drought

Mother Jones

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In California, news of a historically powerful El Niño oceanic warming event is stoking hopes that winter rains will ease the state’s brutal drought. But for farmers in the Central Valley, one of the globe’s most productive agricultural regions, water troubles go much deeper—literally—than the current lack of precipitation.

That’s the message of an eye-popping report from researchers at the US Geological Survey. This chart tells the story:

USGS

To understand it, note that in the arid Central Valley, farmers get water to irrigate their crops in two ways. The first is through massive, government-built projects that deliver melted snow from the Sierra Nevada mountains. The second is by digging wells into the ground and pumping water from the region’s ancient aquifers. In theory, the aquifer water serves as a buffer—it keeps farming humming when (as has happened the last three years) the winter snows don’t come. When the snows return, the theory goes, irrigation water flows anew through canals, and the aquifers are allowed to refill.

But as the chart shows, the Central Valley’s underground water reserves are in a state of decline that predates the current drought by decades. The red line shows the change in underground water storage since the early 1960s; the green bars show how much water entered the Central Valley each year through the irrigation projects. Note how both vary during “wet” and “dry” times.

As you’d expect, underground water storage drops during dry years, as farmers resort to the pump to make up for lost irrigation allotments, and it rises during wet years, when the irrigation projects up their contribution. The problem is, aquifer recharge during wet years never fully replaces all that was taken away during dry times—meaning that the the Central Valley has surrendered a total of 100 cubic kilometers, or 811 million acre-feet, of underground water since 1962. That’s an average of about 1.5 million acre-feet of water annually extracted from finite underground reserves and not replaced by the Central Valley’s farms. By comparison, all of Los Angeles uses about 600,000 acre-feet of water per year. (An acre-foot is the amount needed to cover an acre of land with a foot of water).

The USGS authors note that the region’s farmers have gotten more efficient in their irrigation techniques over the past 20 years—using precisely placed drip tape, for example, instead of old techniques like flooding fields. But that positive step has been more than offset with a factor I’ve discussed many times: “the planting of permanent crops (vineyards and orchards), replacing non-permanent land uses such as rangeland, field crops, or row crops.” This is a reference to the ongoing expansion in acres devoted to almonds and pistachios, highly profitable crops that can’t be fallowed during dry times. To keep them churning out product during drought, orchard farmers revert to the pump.

The major takeaway is that the Valley’s farms can’t maintain business as usual—eventually, the water will run out. No one knows exactly when that point will be, because, as Jay Famiglietti, senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at California Institute of Technology, never tires of pointing out, no one has invested in the research required to measure just how much water is left beneath the Central Valley’s farms. Of course, averting this race to the bottom of the well is exactly why the California legislature voted last year to end the state’s wild-west water-drilling free-for-all and enact legislation requiring stressed watersheds like the Central Valley’s to reach “sustainable yield” by 2040. The downward meandering red line in the above graph, in other words, will have to flatten out pretty soon, and to get there, “dramatic changes will need to be made,” the USGS report states.

Meanwhile, one wet El Niño winter won’t do much to end the the decades-in-the-making drawdown of the Central Valley’s water horde. And people pining for heavy rains should be careful what they wish for—parts of the Central Valley, especially its almond-heavy southern regions, are notoriously vulnerable to disastrous flooding. Then there’s the unhappy fact that El Niño periods are often followed by La Niña events—which are associated with dry winters in California. The region could be “whiplashed from deluge back to drought again” in just one year’s time, Bill Patzert, a climatologist for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, recently told the Los Angeles Times. “Because remember, La Niña is the diva of drought,” he said. The last big El Niño ended in 1998, and as the above chart shows, what followed wasn’t pretty.

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This Devastating Chart Shows Why Even a Powerful El Niño Won’t Fix the Drought

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McDonald’s Spams Schools With Infomerical on the Virtues of Fast Food

Mother Jones

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Robust health requires nothing more than a little exercise and a daily dose or three of fast food. That’s the message of the new 20-minute video 540 Meals: Choices Make the Difference (viewable here, short teaser above), being promoted in high schools and middle schools by McDonald’s and uncovered by the superb school-food blogger Bettina Elias Siegel.

The video focuses on the dietary and exercise regimen of John Cisna, who identifies himself as an “Iowa HS high school Science Teacher who lost over 50 lbs eating only McDonald’s,” who “now travels across the country sharing my message about food choice.” Cisna gained notoriety when he mimicked the self-experiment of documentarian Morgan Spurlock, director/subject of the famed Super-Size Me (2004), and took his meals exclusively at McDonald’s for six months straight. Unlike Spurlock, who saw his weight rise and his health falter, Cisna claims his weight plunged and health improved. One key difference: whereas Spurlock famously assented to any plea by a McDonald’s employee to “super-size” his orders, Cisna stuck rigorously to a limit of 2,000 calories per day.

Apparently still haunted by the specter of Super-Size Me a decade since its release, McDonald’s embraced Cisna, taking him on as a paid “brand ambassador” and now pushing his message to school kids, both through the 540 Meals film and through appearances at schools, documented on Cisna’s Twitter feed. Siegel uncovered this McDonald’s-produced “teachers discussion guide” to 540 Meals. It recommends using the film “as a supplemental video to current food and nutritional curriculum,” particularly in “plans that incorporate Morgan Spurlock’s Super-Size Me.” She also points to this August press release from McDonald’s franchisees in the New York Tri-State Area, flogging 540 Meals to “high school educators looking for information to demonstrate the importance of balanced food choices.”

As Siegel shows in this handy list of quotes from the film, it brims with agit-prop for the famous burger-and-fries purveyor, including such wisdom as “through careful planning and mindful choices, you can still enjoy your favorite McDonald’s items.”

So what’s wrong with pushing Cisna’s message to school kids? Plenty, writes Siegel in her post, which is well worth reading in its entirety. Here’s a sample:

First, neither 540 Meals nor the discussion guide ever offer young viewers the critically important disclaimer that “Your calorie needs may be significantly lower than John Cisna’s,” nor do they even discuss how one might go about calculating one’s daily caloric requirements. Instead, students are left with the vague but reassuring message that “choice and balance,” along with a 45-minute walk (which might burn off about 1/5 of a Big Mac) will allow them to eat whatever they want at McDonald’s on a regular basis.

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McDonald’s Spams Schools With Infomerical on the Virtues of Fast Food

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California Is About to Stop People From Pumping So Many Drugs Into Meat

Mother Jones

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After decades of ignoring a deadly problem, the Food and Drug Administration finally came out with rules restricting the meat industry’s heavy reliance on antibiotics back in 2012. But the new regime had two major flaws: (1) It was voluntary, relying on the benevolence of two industries (pharmaceuticals and meat) with long records of lobbying hard for their own interests, and (2) it contained a loophole that allowed meat producers to maintain their old antibiotic habit if they so desired.

Enter California, with new legislation—expected to be signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown any day now—that would retract those regulatory gifts from the state’s teeming livestock farms.

The bill would make California’s regulation of animal antibiotic use more stringent than the federal government’s simply because it’s compulsory and not voluntary, according to Natural Resources Defense Council senior attorney Avinash Kar. But it also snaps shut the infamous “prevention” loophole in the FDA’s policy, he adds.

Antibiotics are used in three ways on factory livestock farms: (1) growth promotion—when animals get small daily doses of the the stuff, they grow faster; (2) disease prevention—animals stuffed together in stressful conditions are prone to infection, they pass diseases among themselves rapidly, and antibiotics provide a kind of pharmaceutical substitute for a natural robust immune system; and (3) disease treatment—an animal comes down with a bug and gets treated with antibiotics.

The FDA’s policy phases out growth promotion but leaves prevention intact—even though giving animals small daily doses of antibiotics to “prevent” disease is virtually indistinguishable from giving them small daily doses to promote growth. A 2014 Pew analysis found no fewer than 66 antibiotic products that the FDA allows to be used for “disease prevention” at levels that are “fully within the range of growth promotion dosages and with no limit on the duration of treatment.” In other words, you change the language you use to describe the practice and continue giving your herd of 4,000 confined pigs the same old daily dose of antibiotics.

The California bill, too, allows antibiotic use as “prophylaxis to address an elevated risk of contraction of a particular disease or infection,” but it adds an important qualification, Kar points out: The drugs can’t be used “in a regular pattern.” In other words, no more daily, indiscriminate dosing based on some vague notion of “prevention.” “We think this the “regular pattern” language puts serious restraint on the routine use of antibiotics,” Kar said.

The California law won’t have an immediate impact on national policy, Kar said, but he pointed out that the bill’s passage might embolden several other states with significant livestock production, including Oregon and Maryland, that are considering similar legislation. And California itself is a massive producer of dairy, beef, and chicken.

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California Is About to Stop People From Pumping So Many Drugs Into Meat

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Monsanto Halts Its Bid to Buy Rival Syngenta—For Now

Mother Jones

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After four months of hot pursuit, genetically modified seed/pesticide giant Monsanto formally ended its bid to buy rival Syngenta Wednesday—at least for now. Earlier in the week, Monsanto had sweetened its offer for the Swiss agrochemical behemoth—most famous for its controversial atrazine herbicide and neonicotinoid pesticides—to $47 billion, in an effort to convince Syngenta’s management and shareholders to accept the merger. They balked, and Monsanto management opted to halt the effort, declaring in a press release that it would instead “focus on its growth opportunities built on its existing core business to deliver the next wave of transformational solutions for agriculture.”

However, Monsanto may just be pausing, not fully halting, its buyout push. The company’s press release states that it’s “no longer pursuing the current proposal” (emphasis added) to buy its rival, and quickly added that the combination “would have created tremendous value for shareowners of both companies and farmers.” And as Dow Jones’ Jacob Bunge notes, Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant “has coveted Syngenta since at least 2011, and said in a June interview that he viewed the effort as ‘a long game.'”

The logic that has driven Monsanto’s zeal for a deal remains in place: It wants to diversify away from its reliance on seeds by buying Syngenta, the world’s biggest purveyor of pesticides (more on that here).

Meanwhile, Monsanto has been actively hyping up a new generation of pesticides, still in the development stage, which work by killing crop-chomping pests by silencing certain genes. But the company doesn’t expect the novel sprays to hit the market until 2020—a timeline that may be overly optimistic, as I show here.

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Monsanto Halts Its Bid to Buy Rival Syngenta—For Now

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New Monsanto Spray Kills Bugs by Messing With Their Genes

Mother Jones

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In a fascinating long piece in MIT Technology Review, Antonio Regalado examines the genetically modified seed industry’s latest blockbuster app in development—one that has nothing to do with seeds. Instead, it involves the industry’s other bread-and-butter product: pesticide sprays. But we’re not talking about the poisonous chemicals you convinced your dad to stop dousing the lawn with. The novel sprays in question are powered by a genetic technology called RNA interference, which promises to kill specific insects and weeds by silencing genes crucial to their survival, while leaving nontarget species unscathed.

RNAi, as it’s known, is an emerging science; the two US researchers who discovered it brought home a Nobel Prize in 2006. Regalado describes the process like this:

The cells of plants and animals carry their instructions in the form of DNA. To make a protein, the sequence of genetic letters in each gene gets copied into matching strands of RNA, which then float out of the nucleus to guide the protein-making machinery of the cell. RNA interference, or gene silencing, is a way to destroy specific RNA messages so that a particular protein is not made.

If you can nix RNA messages that exist to generate crucial genes, you’ve got yourself an effective bug or weed killer. And GMO seed and pesticide behemoth Monsanto thinks it has just that. Robb Fraley, the company’s chief technology officer and a pioneer in creating GM seeds, told Regalado that within a few years, RNA sprays would “open up a whole new way to use biotechnology” that “doesn’t have the same stigma, the same intensive regulatory studies and cost that we would normally associate with GMOs.” Fraley described the novel technology as “incredible” and “breathtaking.”

It’s not hard to see why the veteran agrichemical and biotech exec is so amped for something new to load into a crop duster. Monsanto’s GM herbicide-resistant and insecticidal traits still dominate the highly lucrative US corn, soybean, and cotton seed markets, but these cash-cow products are victims of their own success, so widely used that weeds and pests are rapidly developing resistance to them. The company’s flagship herbicide, Roundup, still generates about $5 billion in sales annually, but it went off-patent years ago, and it was recently declared a “probable carcinogen” by the World Health Organization—a finding Monsanto disputes.

Such concerns are widely seen as the reason Monsanto is so hotly pursuing a takeover of its rival, Syngenta, which focuses much more on pesticides than novel seeds. Syngenta, too, is developing RNAi technology, reports Regalado—back in 2012, it spent $523 million to buy Devgen, a company that had been developing the novel sprays.

However, there’s no reason to assume crop dusters will be strafing farm fields with gene-silencing sprays anytime soon. As Regalado notes, they’re very little studied outside of corporate labs. “So far, only a few scientific publications even mention the idea of RNA sprays,” he writes. “That makes it hard to judge companies’ claims.”

The first obstacle is technological—the problem of “how to get a large, electrically charged molecule like RNA to move through a plant’s waxy cuticle and into its cells,” Regalado writes. That’s crucial, because the technology works like this: A targeted bug—the one drawing attention now from Monsanto is the Colorado potato beetle—chomps on a leaf that’s been sprayed by RNA solution and then, fatally, gets critical genes turned off. To make that happen, you have to get the RNA material into the leaf.

The most promising solution so far is to “encapsulate the RNA in synthetic nanoparticles called lipidoids—greasy blobs with specialized chemical tails,” Regalado reports. “The idea is to slip them into a plant, where the coating will dissolve, releasing the RNA.”

This nanotech booster to Monsanto’s new bug killer won’t likely raise red flags from government overseers. As I’ve shown before, both nanotechnology and adjuvants—the compounds mixed with pesticides to help them break into plants—are lightly regulated.

However, the RNAi compound itself will have to be reviewed by the Environmental Protection Agency, which vets new pesticides before they reach farm fields. Early indications suggest the going will be bumpy. Last year, the EPA convened a scientific advisory panel to assess the human health and ecological risks posed by emerging RNAi crop technologies.

The panel concluded there’s “no convincing evidence” that RNAi material poses a threat to humans or other animals—the digestive process likely destroys it before it can do harm. But for nontarget insects in the field, they concluded, it’s a different story. The technology’s boosters claim the technology can target particular pests and leave everything else in the ecosystem alone. The independent scientists on the EPA panel were not convinced. They noted “uncertainties in the potential modes of action in non-target species, potential for chronic and sublethal effects, and potential unintended consequences in the various life stages of non-target organisms.” As a result, they found “sufficient justification to question” whether the EPA’s current methods of evaluating new pesticides, which were designed to vet chemicals, apply to these gene-altering treatments.

And the technology is so novel that figuring out what those tests should be will be hard— it “cannot be done without a better understanding” of exactly how the technology works, the panel concluded. US Department of Agriculture entomologists Jonathan Lundgren and Jian Duan raised similar concerns in a 2013 paper.

One particular concern for the EPA panel was the amount of time RNAi material stays intact after it’s sprayed. Monsanto says not to worry, because “when the company doused dirt with RNA, it degraded and was undetectable after 48 hours,” Regalado reports. But he adds that Monsanto “wants to develop longer-lasting formulations,” noting that another RNAi spray it’s developing for trees was shown to persist for months. “What’s more,” Regalado notes, “Monsanto’s own discoveries have underscored the surprising ways in which double-stranded RNA can move between species”—not exactly a comforting aspect of a technology Monsanto hopes to see widely used on farm fields.

A Monsanto exec told Regalado that the company hopes to get its first RNAi spray, one targeting potato beetles, into the market by 2020. The company is also working on an RNAi product to add to its failing Roundup herbicide—one it hopes can turn off the resistant genes in the superweeds now rampant on US farm fields. But that’s well behind the potato beetle product in Monsanto’s development timeline, a company spokeswoman told me.

In addition to its sprays, Monsanto has an RNAi-enhanced corn crop in the pipeline: a corn type engineered to contain RNA that was designed to kill a common pest called the rootworm. It’s “currently pending approval from the EPA,” the Monsanto spokeswoman said. “We are planning for a full commercial launch by the end of the decade, pending key regulatory approvals.”

Doug Gurian-Sherman, a plant pathologist by training who covers biotechnology for the Center for Food Safety, echoed the EPA panel’s concerns.”These are very complex biological systems, and their interactions evolve, and are not static,” he said. “So it is really impossible to predict all the things that could go wrong. That does not mean we should be paranoid about them, but we should be at least reasonably cautious and skeptical about claims of both safety and efficacy, since there is little experience or research to rely on.”

He also questioned Monsanto’s claim, reported by Regalado, that insects won’t likely develop resistance to the RNAi treatments, as they have to most chemical treatments in the past. “This is surprisingly reminiscent of Monsanto’s assurances in the ’90s that weeds would be very unlikely to develop resistance to the glyphosate Roundup herbicide…and now we have an epidemic of glyphosate resistant weeds,” Gurian-Sherman said.

Excerpt from:

New Monsanto Spray Kills Bugs by Messing With Their Genes

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