Editorial 12.6, June 2010, by Deirdre Helfferich Poisoning the Well—and Purifying It Again Item: BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, originally estimated by the company to be about 1,000 barrels of oil a day, is now at 100,000 barrels a day—but not because the gusher has gotten any larger, merely because the estimate is now more accurate. The spill is not expected to be under control before September—and hurricane season began this month. Mexico, Cuba, the Bahamas, and Turks and Caicos are bracing for an oily disaster on their shores. Item: Roundup-resistant weeds are now widespread, with approximately nineteen resistant species identified world wide. Yet, Monsanto is continuing to develop and release glyphosate-tolerant crops, the latest being alfalfa. Fifty US representatives and six senators (to date) have called on the USDA to block planting of “Roundup-ready alfalfa,” citing the danger to the $1.4 billion per year organic dairy industry from contamination of alfalfa fields through cross-pollination. Item: Amphibians the world over are dying from a fungal disease called chytridiomycosis. Snake populations have declined drastically and are not rebounding. Honeybees are experiencing colony collapse disorder, with the likely culprit a combination of pesticide poisoning and parasite attack. According to the United Nations’ Global Biodiversity Outlook 3, world biodiversity is shrinking alarmingly and ecosystems are approaching three major tipping points: dieback of large areas of the Amazonian forest; freshwater lakes and inland water bodies shifting to a eutrophic or algae-dominated state; and the collapse of coral reef ecosystems. Item: Jiggering with commodities futures in wheat resulted in an artificial world-wide food shortage—due solely to high prices, not lack of food. Between 2005 and 2008 food prices jumped 80 percent. There is nothing to prevent this kind of speculation from happening again, and even more drastically. Item: The world’s human population is approximately 6,829,200,000, and is expected to reach 9 billion between 2040 and 2050. In the year that I was born, 1961, the world population was 3.08 billion. The depressing facts of world degradation make me want to flee into the escape provided by mind fluff fiction. Still, there’s a lot of room for good news—and most of it has to do with local movements and organizations. It turns out that the small scale is making a big difference. One place that this is clearly evident is in the food movements: local food, organic food, the farm-to-school movement, heirloom foods, the slow food movement, food sovereignty, food justice. Restorative agriculture and food systems counter the loss of biodiversity, reduce or even eliminate use of fossil fuels, eschew harmful chemicals and practices that deplete the soil and put health at risk, tend to bring control over food to the people of the local area, and so forth. One surprising fact is that small-scale farming (or large-scale gardening) such as this is actually more productive per acre than the large-scale, “Green Revolution”-style farming of industrial agriculture. This is because there is, typically, far greater diversity of crops and the soil is improved rather than depleted over time. A study by Jules Pretty released in November 2006 describes how agroecological farming practices have positive side effects, improving natural, social, and human capital. According to Beginning Farmers, “[m]ost farms in the United States are now small, with almost 40% of U.S. farms now less than 50 Acres, and 60 percent of all farms reporting less than $10,000 in total sales of agricultural products.” In Alaska, all farming is small, or at most mid-sized. In May, I participated in the first meeting of the Alaska Food Policy Council. Interestingly, out of the eighty or so people who attended, four of us were from the Ester area: me, Mike Emers, Bret Luick, and Tom Zimmer. A food policy council, briefly, is a group of stakeholders in food-related sectors of society that examine how a region’s food system operates and come up with recommendations to improve it. According to the Community Food Security Coalition, food policy councils
Like farmers’ markets and small farms, food policy councils are also increasing in number. Regional control and production of food brings economic benefits, but also social and cultural ones. Alaska has long had struggles over food: subsistence and traditional use versus commercial and sporting interests; fresh local food versus imported; urban versus rural supply chains; and so on. The increased interest in things food, both nationally and in Alaska, is inspiring people and making a dent in the grim state of the world by reducing our carbon footprint and improving our health with fresher food. In 1955, according to Danny Consenstein of the Alaska Farm Service Agency, 55 percent of Alaska’s food was produced in-state. We should be able to do that again—or at least try. With plenty of local gardens, farms, and a farmers’ market, Ester’s got a good start. Sources: “Agroecological Approaches to Agricultural Development,” by Jules Pretty, November 2006, on line at http://www.rimisp.org/getdoc.php?docid=6440. See also www.julespretty.com. “Agroecology, Small Farms, and Food Sovereignty,” by Miguel A. Altieiri, Monthly Review, July-August 2009, on line at www.monthlyreview.org/090810altieri.php www.cnr.berkeley.edu/~christos/articles/cv_organic_farming.html (older articles, but an interesting collection) “The Food Bubble: How Wall Street starved millions and got away with it,” by Frederick Kaufman, Harper’s Magazine, July 2010. Also on line at http://frederickkaufman.typepad.com/files/the-food-bubble-pdf.pdf. http://sitkalocalfoodsnetwork.org/2010/06/09/ http://snras.blogspot.com/2010/05/alaska-food-policy-council-meeting.html
| ||
 | | |
