Tuesday, 31 January 2012
Tent Embassy protest speaks for itself - The Drum Opinion - Most of the media coverage of the Tent Embassy protest outside The Lodge restaurant has overwhelmingly been sensationalistic, shallow, and devoid of understanding. (Australian Broadcasting Corpor
Just hang on a minute. Either the Prime Minister's Office or Government House with the knowledge of the PM's Office chose to organise a function on 'invasion day' within metres of the Tent Embassy on its 40th anniversary when they would have been advised that a major rent a crowd would attend; then revved up the crowd to go get Abbott.
Tent Embassy protest speaks for itself - The Drum Opinion - Most of the media coverage of the Tent Embassy protest outside The Lodge restaurant has overwhelmingly been sensationalistic, shallow, and devoid of understanding. (Australian Broadcasting Corpor
31 January 2012
Tent Embassy protest speaks for itself
The enormous hysteria over an alleged riot that caused no more damage than a "few smudged fingerprints on the glass of the restaurant" is beginning to subside.
Considering there were no arrests, no damage, and no real threat to anyone except protesters aggressively handled by police, it is worth trying to understand why the protest has caused such a reaction.
Despite enormous media coverage, it has overwhelmingly been sensationalistic, shallow, and devoid of understanding. There is a genuine bewilderment at the discovery of Indigenous anger. A common theme, often implicit, is something like: after all we do for them, they just seem so damn ungrateful.
Andrew Bolt wrote of a "disgraceful riot", where Gillard had been "monstered", Abbott and Gillard had been "terrified", and they had been "vilely abused" - after all "we've" done for them. After all, "we" "formally apologised" for the Stolen Generations (which Bolt thinks never happened). "We" have also "marched over bridges", "spent billions to try to lift Aborigines out of poverty", and "granted Aborigines land rights".
He concluded that "the reconciliation movement must end. It's just too dangerous."
In its own way, this is rather comical. After all, the agenda of the Tent Embassy and its supporters is not about reconciliation at all, which is an entirely different agenda. They call for things like recognising Aboriginal sovereignty. They regard native title as grossly inferior to the land rights they believe Indigenous Australians are entitled to. In the words of Gary Foley, "Native Title is Not Land Rights, and Reconciliation is Not Justice!" As Amy McQuire noted, the protest from 40 years ago "was about Aboriginal sovereignty, about the ability for Aboriginal people to control their own affairs. Aboriginal Australia wanted an acknowledgement for a sovereignty that was never ceded."
Tony Abbott's remarks were:
I can understand why the Tent Embassy was established all those years ago. I think a lot has changed for the better since then. We had the historic apology just a few years ago, one of the genuine achievements of Kevin Rudd as prime minister. We had the proposal which is currently for national consideration to recognise Indigenous people in the constitution. I think the Indigenous people of Australia can be very proud of the respect in which they are held by every Australian and yes, I think a lot has changed since then and I think it probably is time to move on from that.
This reflects a surprising amount of ignorance. It is one thing to reject a protest's concerns. It is another thing entirely to claim that a protest is no longer necessary because completely irrelevant things have changed. It is rather as though one were to say to a group of women protesting for paid parental leave, that their protest was redundant because, after all, women got the vote so long ago, and even abortion was legal. This kind of patronising dismissal would presumably get some kind of analysis, if it were directed at people who matter. However, Abbott's condescending words were only targeted at Indigenous Australians, so there's no need to try to understand why anyone would feel angry at him.
Astonishingly, Abbott called the protesters un-Australian. That is, Abbott called Indigenous protesters un-Australian. I think it is hard to exaggerate how audacious and offensive such a comment is.
David Penberthy, editor in chief of The Punch, wrote that "The Aboriginal Tent Embassy has never engendered any public respect". He just found the protest mystifying.
He claims Michael Anderson said, "To hell with the Government and the courts", and Penberthy just doesn't get why. This government "apologised to the Stolen Generations". The court overturned terra nullius. Now that the courts recognise Aboriginal people exist, what more can they want? Obviously, any anger that remains is obviously "irrational", given how well the Australian Government and courts treat Indigenous Australians.
Why might an Indigenous Australian be angry at this government and the courts? Well, the courts are part of the reason why we jail black males at a right five times higher than Apartheid South Africa did. The courts which acquitted Chris Hurley of killing Mulrunji Doomadgee, which locked up Marlon Noble for 10 years without ever trying him for the crimes there's no evidence he committed. Or the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory, who was impressed by the "good character" of the men who beat Kwementyaye Ryder to death.
The Labor Governments of Rudd and Gillard have continued and expanded the racially discriminatory intervention. It has pursued an assimilationist agenda in the Northern Territory, dismantling bilingual education, cutting funding to homelands so that Aboriginal people are forced to move to hub towns, seeking to destroy their connections to land that is culturally valuable to them. The Labor Governments have continued the Howard process of taking away Aboriginal rights. Meanwhile, there has been no evidence of improvement in socio-economic conditions in Indigenous communities. Jenny Macklin's own handpicked board to review the intervention explained that "dysfunctional government service delivery" and "the chronic failure by all levels of government to provide basic civic services" to Indigenous communities were the "key determinants" of all their problems. When "the most recent statistics on child removals show Aboriginal children are being taken from their parents in numbers much greater than the Stolen Generations."
One could go on and on at great length. Yet many conservatives are undoubtedly genuinely puzzled. Why on earth are Indigenous Australians so angry?
Part of the reason for the surprise at the anger of Indigenous protesters is because we usually never hear such voices.
A couple of weeks ago, I attended summer school classes on defamation. One of my fellow students was an Indigenous man. When the subject of News Limited came up, he described his anger - and that of many Indigenous Australians - at how it consistently ignored the views of most of Aboriginal Australia, instead just promoting the highly unrepresentative views of alleged leaders like Warren Mundine and Noel Pearson.
Nicole Watson wrote of the:
Shallowness of engagement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia. For a great number of the population, their interaction with Indigenous people is confined to an appreciation of dot paintings, cheering on black athletes from afar and reading Noel Pearson lambast Indigenous people for their own poverty on the pages of The Australian.
However, media commentators across the spectrum remain impressed by the Australian's coverage of Indigenous issues, and the narrow range of voices it chooses to give a platform. Margaret Simons, for example, gave an "honourable mention" to The Australian for "for never dropping the ball" on Indigenous affairs (she wrote Indigenous with a small "i"). Similarly, according to Nicole Watson, Mungo MacCallum explained that Tony Abbott "has an excellent relationship with Aboriginal Australians". Why? He has "credibility on Indigenous issues" because he's friends with Noel Pearson.
Likewise, Paul Sheehan commented on the alleged "irony" that Indigenous protesters would target Tony Abbott. After all, "Abbott has spent weeks with Indigenous communities searching for ways to end the cycle of failed government policies. He is particularly close to Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson."
What more could you want? On the progressive end of the spectrum, Mike Carlton wrote that "Abbott deserves credit for his tireless drive to understand the plight of Aboriginal people. He has worked in their communities and listened to them as few politicians have done." Perhaps the word "them" means Noel Pearson. Gerard Henderson also explained that "as is well known, Abbott has a history of supporting Indigenous endeavours and has Aboriginal friends and associates."
The Australian headline declared that "Mob doesn't speak for us, say Indigenous leaders". Readers will be amazed to discovered these "leaders" include Warren Mundine, and the former chairwoman of the Northern Territory intervention, Sue Gordon.
A headline could as easily have been "Indigenous leaders don't speak for us, protest shows". The "unrepentant" activists said so. Michael Anderson said that "They were not elected by us, they were just appointed by the Government not Aboriginal people. They're just interested in representing the middle to upper-class Indigenous Australians and paying off their mortgage". Similarly, Fred Hooper said "what is being said in board rooms by black fellas appointed by government is not how we all really feel". Similarly, Amy McQuire complained that the media "prefer to listen to the self-appointed Aboriginal leaders such as Warren Mundine, who represent the smallest percentage of Aboriginal opinion."
The protest has seen a remarkable level of media criticism of Indigenous Australians. Some may think that the protest was therefore a failure. I think that view is incorrect. For a long time, Australia's media has refused to provide a platform to Indigenous Australians, except those who, in the words of Chris Graham, tell "white Australia what they want to hear: ...that we're doing our best to save the unsaveables, and that the demise of Aboriginal people is really their own fault." This protest has shown white Australia that many Indigenous Australians are angry.
It would be nice if we took the time to find out why.
Michael Brull is studying a Juris Doctor at UNSW. He tweets at @mikeb476. View his full profile here.
Renationalise English water | Neil Clark | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Renationalise English water
The obscene commodification of a natural resource has gone on long enough, ripping off ordinary people
- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 31 January 2012 16.59 GMT
- Article history
Ofwat has announced that average household water bills in England and Wales are to increase by an average of 5.7% in 2012-13. Photograph: Rui Vieira/PAHere we go again. In the past 12 months, we've had significant hikes in our gas and electricity bills (not reversed by recent cuts due to a fall in wholesale prices) and above-inflation increases in train fares – which are already the highest in Europe. Now it's time for the water companies to put the boot in.
Ofwat has announced that average household water and sewerage bills in England and Wales are to increase by an average of 5.7% from April. As in the case with the rail fares, we're told that the reason that prices are rising is to enable more "investment" by the water companies. But a closer inspection is highly revealing. While English water companies are hiking charges by as much as 8.2%, Glas Cymru, the owner of Welsh Water is only raising prices by 3.8%. In Scotland, there's going to be no price rise at all.
The discrepancies can be explained by the different ownership structure of the water companies in England, Wales and Scotland. While England's water industry was sold off to the private sector by the Conservative government in 1989, Scotland's stayed in full public ownership. Scottish Water, with no pressure to provide dividends to shareholders or reward wealthy investors, not only charges lower prices to its users than English companies, it has also recently announced that its price freeze, introduced in 2009, will continue for a fourth successive year. In Wales, Glas Cymru is a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee, set up after the collapse of the privately owned Hyder in 2001. Average household water bills in Wales in the six months to September 2010 were £4 lower than a year before.
Despite the obvious benefits to consumers in Scotland and Wales from these ownership models, pro-privatisation zealots are keen to see the whole of the UK's water industry in private hands. While acknowledging that "undoubtedly, efficiency has improved at Scottish Water"; and that "Glas Cymru has performed well", the Adam Smith Institute, in its paper "Privatisation – Reviving the Momentum", has called for both the Scottish and Welsh water industries to be privatised. On Glas Cymru, the ASI states: "There remains scope for further improvements, which the discipline of private-sector ownership are best placed to deliver".
Today's news surely shows that it's England which should be copying the Scottish and Welsh models and not the other way round. Water privatisation was arguably the most ideologically extreme of all the Conservative sell-offs of the 80s and 90s. Selling off water would have been regarded as completely barmy idea by the One Nation, middle-of-the-road postwar Tories like Harold Macmillan, but it became Conservative party policy under Margaret Thatcher. So thanks to the Conservatives, we in England now have our water provided by companies such as Thames Water, whose parent company Kemble Water is a subsidiary of Kemble Water Holdings Limited, which is owned by the Macquarie Group, an Australian global investment banking conglomerate. Thames Water is raising its prices by 6.7%.
Southern Water meanwhile, which is increasing charges by 8.2%, is owned by Southern Water Capital Ltd, which in 2007 was bought by a consortium led by JP Morgan Chase. JP Morgan's Chase announced profits of $4.26bn last October – something for those about to fill their kettles in Brighton or Eastbourne, to reflect on.
Bringing water back into public ownership in England – which could be done by the government simply nationalising the existing companies and establishing a new publicly owned body named "English Water", would not only lead to lower prices, but would be a move of great significance. For a key hallmark of the neoliberal era, which kicked off in Britain on 3 May 1979, has been "commodification" – ie the turning of things never before seen as goods into commodities, to be bought and sold.
Water, which falls out of the sky for free and which everyone needs, was obscenely commodified by the Thatcherites. You don't even have to be a Marxist to agree that there is something fundamentally wrong about water being sold off in order for global conglomerates to make even more profits from hard-pressed ordinary people. Action to end England's great water rip-off urgently needs to be taken.
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When did vegetarianism become passe? | Grist
When did vegetarianism become passe? 46
Out of fashion and proud of it. (Photo by KayVee.INC)
It used to be that when I told a fellow progressive I’m a vegetarian, I would get one of three reactions: (1) an enthusiastic “me too!,” (2) a slightly guilty admission of falling off the veg wagon, or (3) a voracious defense of the glories of steak.
These days, there’s another increasingly common reaction: People look at me with a mix of pity and confusion, like I’m some holdover from the ’90s wearing a baby-doll dress with chunky shoes and babbling on about No Doubt. I can see what they’re thinking: “You’re still a vegetarian?”
At some point over the past few years, vegetarianism went wholly out of style.
Now sustainable meat is all the rage. “Rock star” butchers proffer grass-fed beef, artisanal sausage, and heritage-breed chickens whose provenance can be traced back to conception on an idyllic rolling hillside. “Meat hipsters” eat it all up. The hard-core meaties flock to trendy butchery classes. Bacon has become a fetish even for eco-foodies, applied liberally to everything from salad to dessert, including “green” chocolate bars and “sustainable” ice cream.
All of which has led some vegetarians to give up their plant-based ways. But food fads aside, vegetarianism still has its place and deserves its due respect.
Let me state, for the record, that I wholeheartedly support the shift from factory farming to more sustainable meat production. Treating animals humanely, letting them eat what they’re naturally inclined to eat, raising them without antibiotics and hormones, incorporating them into holistic farms Joel Salatin-style, and, once they’re slaughtered, eating every last bit of them, nose to tail — that’s all good stuff.
But let’s get real. Only a teeny-tiny fraction of meat in the U.S. is actually produced in any way that could conceivably be described as “sustainable” — less than 1 percent, according to the group Farm Forward — and only a teeny-tiny fraction of that is raised in the super-duper-über-conscientious Salatin style. Most of the meat raised even by those trying to do it right comes with serious environmental impacts, from high water consumption to large land footprints to excessive methane emissions.
So it really gets my goat (ahem) when people claim it’s more responsible to eat supposedly sustainable meat than to abstain from it — like the author of this facile article from Food & Wine, who pats herself on the back for convincing her husband to give up his vegetarianism:
For Andrew and about a dozen people in our circle who have recently converted from vegetarianism, eating sustainable meat purchased from small farmers is a new form of activism — a way of striking a blow against the factory farming of livestock that books like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma describe so damningly.
Oh come on. You’re not striking any more of a blow against Big Meat by buying your sustainable sausage at the farmers market than I am by buying my dried beans at the farmers market.
To nudge our horrific food system toward sustainability, we don’t need vegetarians to shift to occasional consumption of ethically produced meat. We need the American masses who eat an average of half a pound of factory-farmed meat a day to shift to the occasional consumption of ethically produced meat. (Americans are actually eating a little less meat overall these days, no thanks to the meat hipsters.)
Eating truly sustainable meat, in modest quantities, is a fine thing. But it’s not better than eating no meat — certainly not when we’ve got more than 7 billion people on a fast-heating planet competing to feed themselves via shrinking, oversubscribed cropland and increasingly limited, degraded freshwater supplies.
Yes, vegetarians can do better too. Just as most meat-eaters, even green-leaning ones, consume at least some less-than-exemplary meat, most vegetarians eat some highly processed, GMO-tainted, decidedly non-local soy products that wouldn’t win any sustainability awards. And just as omnivores can focus on eating better meat, vegetarians can focus on eating better sources of protein. When vegetarians do aim higher, it’s hard to beat them on the sustainability front — a non-soy-based, non-heavily-processed, local-focused veg diet is the definition of low impact.
In the end, vegetarianism — eating lower on the food chain, gobbling up fewer resources and less water — is still an ethical, environmentally friendly choice, just like it was in the ’90s. Maybe even more so now, if you consider how our environmental, energy, and food challenges have compounded in the last two decades.
So, meat hipsters, drop that smug sanctimony. Sometime soon, bacon-spiked dessert will look just as outmoded as lentil loaf and baby-doll dresses — and vegetarianism will still be a good choice for my health, society at large, and our global environment.
Monsanto’s new seeds could be a tech dead end | Grist
Monsanto’s new seeds could be a tech dead end 20
This is how corn is planted on industrial-sized farms. (Photo by Minnemom.)
When I wrote recently about the next generation of genetically engineered seeds, I was in truth referring to the next next generation. The fact is that the next actual generation of seeds is already out of the lab and poised for approval by the USDA.
And I’m not talking about Monsanto’s recently approved “drought-tolerant” seeds, which the USDA itself has observed are no more drought-tolerant than existing conventional hybrids.
No, the “exciting” new seeds are simply resistant to more than one kind of pesticide. Rather than resisting Monsanto’s glyphosate-based Roundup alone, they will now also be resistant to Dow AgroScience’s pesticide 2,4-D .
“A new pesticide,“ you say. “How exciting!” Except 2,4-D, despite its catchy name, has been around since World War II. Not only is it one of the most commonly used pesticides in the world, but it came to further prominence in certain circles when it was incorporated as a main ingredient in Agent Orange.
Indeed, as with research into new antibiotics, research into new — potentially safer — pesticides has come to a virtual standstill. Like the drug pipeline, the pesticide pipeline has run dry. Instead, biotech companies are going back to the older, more toxic chemicals, like 2,4-D, for inspiration.
And while you’d expect opposition to these new products from the likes of Tom Philpott of Mother Jones or Doug Gurian-Sherman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, one place you might not expect to see it is the pages of the influential, peer-reviewed journal BioScience.
And yet there it is! Led by David Mortensen, a team of scientists from Penn State, Montana State, and the University of New Hampshire published a paper that describes the effects on agriculture from an over-reliance on glyphosate and an overuse of Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds. It also discusses at length the risks of using new seeds that “stack” resistance to various pesticides into one genetically engineered package.
In short, they say that you can’t believe Monsanto and Dow when they hype gyphosate resistance plus 2,4-D resistance as two great tastes that taste great together. The two companies are promising to eliminate the growing superweed menace — the one that has caused farmers to abandon thousands of acres of prime farmland and to return to older, more toxic pesticides to protect their crops.
What these scientists conclude is that with so many weeds resistant to glyphosate already, it won’t take long for them to develop resistance to 2,4-D as well. According to the study’s authors, almost half of the nearly 40 species of weeds that are already resistant to two pesticides have arisen since 2005 (i.e. since the Roundup Ready era began). In short, the crisis Monsanto and Dow are promising to head off is already here.
There are other problems with 2,4-D, such as a strong link to cancer and a much greater tendency to drift on the wind (and thus contaminate nearby fields and waterways) — problems that the development of the less toxic, less volatile glyphosate was supposed to have “solved.” Yet now, thanks to Big Ag’s over-reliance on these genetically engineered one-hit wonders, which encouraged farmers to use too much glyphosate too often, we’re back to square one — or rather to square toxic.
There is, however, an alternative — and one that doesn’t require a total transition to organic agriculture (not that there’s anything wrong with that!). Mortensen and his team describe in detail a practice called Integrated Weed Management (IWM). Like its sibling, Integrated Pest Management (IPM), IWM does involve the use of chemical pesticides. But it’s a judicious use that can act as a last resort rather than a first line of defense. As the paper states:
IWM integrates tactics, such as crop rotation, cover crops, competitive crop cultivars, the judicious use of tillage, and targeted herbicide application, to reduce weed populations and selection pressures that drive the evolution of resistant weeds.
It’s designed for production agriculture and would most likely increase farmer profits, since farmers would get the benefit of reduced seed and pesticide costs and no real loss of productivity. But, as with the climate-friendly agriculture I discussed the other day, you’re unlikely to see IWM embraced by Big Ag any time soon.
The USDA, along with the entire large-scale agriculture economy, is built around the profits of pesticide and biotech companies. You need only watch the USDA approve new genetically engineered products — which the agency admits represents a threat to other forms of agriculture — to see how deep in the tank to these companies our government is.
Tom Philpott observed that with this latest development, agriculture is at “a crossroads.” I disagree. I would say that if the USDA approves this new multiple pesticide-resistant GMO seed as it’s expected to, large-scale agriculture in the country will have reached a true dead end.
A 17-year veteran of both traditional and online media, Tom is a founder and Executive Director of the Food & Environment Reporting Network and a Contributing Writer at Grist covering food and agricultural policy. Tom’s long and winding road to food politics writing passed through New York, Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, Florence, Italy and Philadelphia (which has a vibrant progressive food politics and sustainable agriculture scene, thank you very much). In addition to Grist, his writing has appeared online in the American Prospect, Slate, the New York Times and The New Republic. He is on record as believing that wrecking the planet is a bad idea. Follow him on Twitter.
Honeybee problem nearing a ‘critical point’ | Grist
Honeybee problem nearing a ‘critical point’ 110
Photo: Pesticide Action Network North AmericaAnyone who’s been stung by a bee knows they can inflict an outsized pain for such tiny insects. It makes a strange kind of sense, then, that their demise would create an outsized problem for the food system by placing the more than 70 crops they pollinate — from almonds to apples to blueberries — in peril.
Although news about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) has died down, commercial beekeepers have seen average population losses of about 30 percent each year since 2006, said Paul Towers, of the Pesticide Action Network. Towers was one of the organizers of a conference that brought together beekeepers and environmental groups this week to tackle the challenges facing the beekeeping industry and the agricultural economy by proxy.
“We are inching our way toward a critical tipping point,” said Steve Ellis, secretary of the National Honey Bee Advisory Board (NHBAB) and a beekeeper for 35 years. Last year he had so many abnormal bee die-offs that he’ll qualify for disaster relief from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
In addition to continued reports of CCD — a still somewhat mysterious phenomenon in which entire bee colonies literally disappear, alien-abduction style, leaving not even their dead bodies behind — bee populations are suffering poor health in general, and experiencing shorter life spans and diminished vitality. And while parasites, pathogens, and habitat loss can deal blows to bee health, research increasingly points to pesticides as the primary culprit.
“In the industry we believe pesticides play an important role in what’s going on,” said Dave Hackenberg, co-chair of the NHBAB and a beekeeper in Pennsylvania.
Of particular concern is a group of pesticides, chemically similar to nicotine, called neonicotinoids (neonics for short), and one in particular called clothianidin. Instead of being sprayed, neonics are used to treat seeds, so that they’re absorbed by the plant’s vascular system, and then end up attacking the central nervous systems of bees that come to collect pollen. Virtually all of today’s genetically engineered Bt corn is treated with neonics. The chemical industry alleges that bees don’t like to collect corn pollen, but new research shows that not only do bees indeed forage in corn, but they also have multiple other routes of exposure to neonics.
The Purdue University study, published in the journal PLoS ONE, found high levels of clothianidin in planter exhaust spewed during the spring sowing of treated maize seed. It also found neonics in the soil of unplanted fields nearby those planted with Bt corn, on dandelions growing near those fields, in dead bees found near hive entrances, and in pollen stored in the hives.
Evidence already pointed to the presence of neonic-contaminated pollen as a factor in CCD. As Hackenberg explained, “The insects start taking [the pesticide] home, and it contaminates everywhere the insect came from.” These new revelations about the pervasiveness of neonics in bees’ habitats only strengthen the case against using the insecticides.
The irony, of course, is that farmers use these chemicals to protect their crops from destructive insects, but in so doing, they harm other insects essential to their crops’ production — a catch-22 that Hackenberg said speaks to the fact that “we have become a nation driven by the chemical industry.” In addition to beekeeping, he owns two farms, and even when crop analysts recommend spraying pesticides on his crops to kill an aphid population, for example, he knows that “if I spray, I’m going to kill all the beneficial insects.” But most farmers, lacking Hackenberg’s awareness of bee populations, follow the advice of the crop adviser — who, these days, is likely to be paid by the chemical industry, rather than by a state university or another independent entity.
Beekeepers have already teamed up with groups representing the almond and blueberry industries — both of which depend on honey bee pollination — to tackle the need for education among farmers. “A lot of [farm groups] are recognizing that we need more resources devoted to pollinator protection,” Ellis said. “We need that same level of commitment on a national basis, from our USDA and EPA and the agricultural chemical industry.”
Unfortunately, it was the EPA itself that green-lit clothianidin and other neonics for commercial use, despite its own scientists’ clear warnings about the chemicals’ effects on bees and other pollinators. That doesn’t bode well for the chances of getting neonics off the market now, even in light of the Purdue study’s findings.
“The agency has, in most cases, sided with pesticide manufacturers and worked to fast-track the approval of new products, and failed in cases when there’s clear evidence of harm to take those products off the market,” Towers said.
Since this is an election year — a time when no one wants to make Big Ag (and its money) mad — beekeepers may have to suffer another season of losses before there’s any hope of action on the EPA’s part. But when one out of every three bites of food on Americans’ plates results directly from honey bee pollination, there’s no question that the fate of these insects will determine our own as eaters.
Ellis, for his part, thinks that figuring out a way to solve the bee crisis could be a catalyst for larger reform within our agriculture system. “If we can protect that pollinator base, it’s going to have ripple effects … for wildlife, for human health,” he said. “It will bring up subjects that need to be looked at, of groundwater and surface water — all the connected subjects associated [with] chemical use and agriculture.”
Related action: Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA) has a petition asking the EPA to ban Bayer’s toxic pesticide clothianidin.
Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist
Monsanto’s man Taylor returns to FDA in food-czar role | Grist
Monsanto’s man Taylor returns to FDA in food-czar role 13
Michael TaylorIn a Tuesday afternoon press release, the FDA announced that Michael Taylor, a former Monsanto executive, had joined the agency as “senior advisor to the commissioner.” If the title is vague, the portfolio (pasted from the press release) is substantial–a kind of food czar of the Food and Drug Administration:
• Assess current food program challenges and opportunities
• Identify capacity needs and regulatory priorities
• Develop plans for allocating fiscal year 2010 resources
• Develop the FDA’s budget request for fiscal year 2011
• Plan implementation of new food safety legislationTaylor’s new position isn’t his first in government. He’s a veteran apparatchik who has made an art of the role-swapping dance between the food industry and the agencies that regulate it. (The FDA’s press release highlights his government service while delicately omitting his Monsanto daliances.) In her 2002 book Food Politics, the nutritionist and food-industry critic Marion Nestle describes him like this (quote courtesy of La Vida Locavore):
Mr. Taylor is a lawyer who began his revolving door adventures as counsel to FDA. He then moved to King & Spalding, a private-sector law firm representing Monsanto, a leading agricultural biotechnology company. In 1991 he returned to the FDA as Deputy Commissioner for Policy, where he was part of the team that issued the agency’s decidedly industry-friendly policy on food biotechnology and that approved the use of Monsanto’s genetically engineered growth hormone in dairy cows. His questionable role in these decisions led to an investigation by the federal General Accounting Office, which eventually exonerated him of all conflict-of-interest charges. In 1994, Mr. Taylor moved to USDA to become administrator of its Food Safety and Inspection Service … After another stint in private legal practice with King & Spalding, Mr. Taylor again joined Monsanto as Vice President for Public Policy in 1998.
“Vice president for public policy” means, of course, chief lobbyist. Monsanto had hired him to keep his former colleagues at USDA and FDA, as well as Congress folk, up to date on the wonders of patent-protected seed biotechnology.
“Since 2000,” the FDA press release informs us, “Taylor has worked in academic and research settings on the challenges facing the nation’s food safety system and ways to address them.”
Watchdog in flack’s clothing?
And somewhere along the away, according to his erstwhile critic Nestle, Taylor had a moment like Saul’s on the road to Damascus: the one-time company man suddenly became a valorous industry watchdog. In a surprising blog post Tuesday, Nestle declared Taylor “a good pick” for the FDA. “I say this in full knowledge of his history,” Nestle wrote. Here’s her rationale:
Watch what happened when he moved to USDA in 1994 as head of its Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS). Just six weeks after taking the job, Mr. Taylor gave his first public speech to an annual convention of the American Meat Institute. There, he announced that USDA would now be driven by public health goals as much or more than by productivity concerns. The USDA would soon require science-based HACCP systems in every meat and poultry plant, would be testing raw ground beef, and would require contaminated meat to be destroyed or reprocessed. And because E. coli O157.H7 is infectious at very low doses, the USDA would consider any level of contamination of ground beef with these bacteria to be unsafe, adulterated, and subject to enforcement action. Whew. This took real courage.
Nestle goes on to report that Taylor, after serving a stint as Monsanto’s chief lobbyist, became a kind of food-safety intellectual, issuing wise papers on how the regulators should oversee food companies. She points us to an “excellent report” [PDF] co-written by Taylor, released this year.
That paper must be read carefully: Given Taylor’s new status, it–along with new guidelines released by the White House Food Safety Working on Tuesday–will likely serve as a kind of blueprint for the Obama FDA food oversight.
Two things jump out immediately from Taylor’s paper. First, it amounts to a forceful push to shift much more of the burden for funding food-safety operations to the state and local level. Its very title is “An Agenda for Strengthening State and Local Roles in the Nation’s Food Safety System.” The paper promotes a “Joint Funding Responsibility” between federal and local/state agencies.
Why is this a problem? For one, state and local budgets are parched dry, drained by the most severe economic downturn since the Depression. Is, say, California now going to fund a robust food-safety platform–with IOUs, perhaps?
Moreover, we’ve seen the sort of federal-state partnership Taylor promotes in action–and there have been spectacular failures. Remember the great peanut-butter calamity of 2008-’09, the one that killed at least seven people and sickened hundreds? In that case, the FDA had farmed out inspections of the ofending factory to Georgia authorities, who dutifully documented atrocious sanitary lapses even as tainted product got distributed nationwide.
The other immediate problem with Taylor’s blueprint relates to scale. A sane food-safety policy would do two things: 1) rein in the gigantic companies that routinely endanger millions with a single lapse at a single plant–say, a gigantic beef company that can send out 420,000 pounds of E. coli-tainted beef from a day’s processing; and 2) do so in a way that doesn’t harm the thousands of small-scale, community-oriented operations rising up in new alternative food systems.
Again and again, we’ve seen regulations designed to rein in big players actually consolidate their market power by wiping out small players. As a recent Food & Water Watch report showed, regulations that make sense for industrial slaughterhouses can spell the end for community- and regional-scale ones. The Taylor report only addresses this critical point once in its 80 pages: “Due regard should be given to making the traceback requirement feasible for small businesses.” Clearly, the small-scale producer issue isn’t a priority for Monsanto’s man at FDA.
A technocrat’s tinkering
With the widely respected Marion Nestle throwing her support behind the Taylor pick, I went looking for other perspectives. I asked Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food & Water Watch, for her take. FWW has been actively working to promote a scale-appropriate food-safety regime that checks Big Food without crushing small producers.
Lovera does not share Nestle’s enthusiasm. “Taylor basically promotes a risk-based approach, and we don’t think that’s adequate,” she told me. Lovera explained that in a risk-based approach, regulators focus limited resources on areas of the food system that pose the most risk. Sounds logical, she said, but it’s proven difficult to predict where risk factors really lie. I asked her if the peanut-butter debacle was a good example. Who would have foreseen multiple deaths from a factory that produces peanut paste for processed food manufacturers? She concurred. She added that the USDA’s FSIS program, which oversees meat safety, has largely failed in a 10-year effort to identify the riskiest parts of the meat-production process.
Then there’s the emphasis on what Nestle praised in her blog post as “science-based HACCP systems.” HACCP stands for “hazard analysis and critical control point.” In an HACCP system, you identify the points in a process that pose the most risk and “fix” the problem.
“That approach is really geared to techno fixes,” Lovera told me–stuff like ammonia washes, irradiation, etc. These procedures don’t seek to, say, keep salmonella-tainted peanut butter out of cookies, but rather to make salmonella-exposed cookies safe to eat. Moreover, the HACCP approach “hasn’t proven friendly to small producers,” she adds. To see the Obama FDA appear to embrace it, she told me, “makes us cringe.” In the end, the food safety system doesn’t just need to tinker with the use of scarce resources, leveraged by increasing the burden on states and localities. It needs to devote more resources to actual inspections.
As for Taylor, here’s my take: Despite massive marketing budgets, the food industry has become widely distrusted over the last several years, with high-profile outbreaks a major reason. “Consumers are increasingly wary of the safety of food purchased at grocery stores,” declares a recent study. “And their confidence in–and trust of–food retailers, manufacturers and grocers is declining.”
The industry knows it needs an improved safety system; technocrats like Taylor can deliver a marginally improved food safety system while preserving profit margins and market share.
Perhaps the FDA’s new food czar can save some lives–I hope he does. It’s abominable when people die from eating pre-fab peanut butter cookie or salad from a bag. Taylor’s tinkerings could well reduce such disasters.
But what we really need is a food safety system that takes the shit out of industrial meat and the salmonella out of peanut butter, without dumping on small producers. And I don’t think Taylor will deliver that–or even try.
Tom Philpott was Grist’s senior food writer until May 2011. He now writes for Mother Jones.
McDonald's Will Stop Using Pink Goop Beef in Its Burgers
McDonald’s Will Stop Using Pink Goop Beef in Its Burgers
Chef Jamie Oliver calls it pink slime. We feel it's more like pink goop. Either way, the ammonium hydroxide soaked pink crap beef is vomit inducing. Thankfully, you won't have to eat it anymore! Kind of. McDonald's has finally caved to the pressure and will ditch the use of the pink goop beef in its burgers.
What's gross about the pink goop beef, made by Beef Products Inc (BPI), is that it's actually made of of "beef trimmings" which are the undesirable, leftover crap of a cow that's better fit for dogs than humans. Taking it one step further, the beef trimmings are then processed and soaked in ammonium hydroxide and churned into ground beef. Agh, it's disgusting to even think about. This pink goop beef actually makes up 70% of America's ground beef too!
It's taken a while but McDonald's has finally decided to step up its standards in the US (it never used pink goop meat in the UK) and will no longer use the pink BPI meat in the US of A. It might taste fine but pink goop meat is so bad that US Department of Agriculture microbiologist Geral Zirnstein doesn't even consider "the stuff to be ground beef" and considers "allowing it in ground beef to be a form of fraudulent labeling." Oof. And we enjoy this madness!
Joining McDonald's in the pink crap ban is Burger King and Taco Bell which means we can breathe a sigh of relief as we won't be eating ammonium hydroxide soaked beef and beef trimmings fit for dogs when we want to eat crappy fast food. Quality you can't taste! [CBS News, Daily Mail Image Credit: VIPDesignUSA/Shutterstock]
2012/01/31 DARPA researchers design eye-enhancing virtual reality contact lenses
DARPA researchers design eye-enhancing virtual reality contact lenses
January 31, 2012
Currently being developed by DARPA researchers at Washington-based Innovega iOptiks are contact lenses that enhance normal vision by allowing a wearer to view virtual and augmented reality images without the need for bulky apparatus. Instead of oversized virtual reality helmets, digital images are projected onto tiny full-color displays that are very near the eye. These novel contact lenses allow users to focus simultaneously on objects that are close up and far away. This could improve ability to use tiny portable displays while sill interacting with the surrounding environment.
Developed as part of DARPA’s Soldier Centric Imaging via Computational Cameras (SCENICC) program, SCENICC’s objective is to eliminate the ISR capability gap that exists at the individual Soldier level. The program seeks to develop novel computational imaging capabilities and explore joint design of hardware and software that give warfighters access to systems that greatly enhance their awareness, security and survivability.
