Subject: Industrial ag once again demanding free pass to crap in your backyard
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Grist Magazine January 11, 2011
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>http://www.grist.org/article/food-2011-01-11-industrial-agriculture-crap-in-your-backyard
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>Industrial ag once again demanding free pass to crap in your backyard
>
>by Tom Philpott
>
>I've long argued that chemical-intensive commodity agriculture could never
>flourish without the right to pollute freely and stomp on surrounding
>communities and landscapes. Evidently, Big Ag's greatest champions agree with
>me.
>
>Take the Chesapeake Bay. Once one of the nation's most productive sources of
>wild food, the area has become a virtual wasteland after decades of serving as a
>"toilet" (as the environmental NGO Waterkeepers puts it) for the poultry
>industry, which has unconscionably concentrated itself right in the Chesapeake
>watershed.
>
>Finally, after years of bumbling inaction, the EPA has belatedly come up with a
>set of rules that would force vast chicken factories to monitor and -- gasp! --
>limit the amount of algae-friendly, heavy metal-laden chicken "litter" (that is,
>shit, feathers, and bedding) that ends up in the Bay.
>
>According to the industry, cramming hundreds of millions of chickens into houses
>right along the Bay is an environmentally benign activity; so presumably, the
>new rules won't have much impact. Right? Except, the industry is shrieking like
>an abused hen over the new rules. Bob Stallman, president of the American Farm
>Bureau and a bare-knuckled warrior on behalf of the few companies who dominate
>the U.S. food industry, issued this statement in response to the EPA's
>Chesapeake move:
>
>"EPA likes to call the new regulations a pollution diet, but this diet threatens
>to starve agriculture out of the entire 64,000 square-mile Chesapeake Bay
>watershed, and this new approach will not end with the bay. EPA has already
>revealed its plan to take similar action in other watersheds across the nation,
>including the Mississippi River watershed."
>
>Never one to just bark and not bite, Stallman soon after announced that the Farm
>Bureau was suing the EPA to block the new rules. (The Farm Bureau proclaims
>itself the "Voice of Agriculture," but it really only speaks for
>corporate-dominated industrial agriculture, as this recent Food & Water Watch
>paper shows.)
>
>To me, this is a bald admission that the Chesapeake Bay must be sacrificed in
>order to keep Americans on cheap and limitless chicken nuggets. And the bit
>about the Mississippi River watershed is clearly a reference to the annual "dead
>zone" that blooms in the Gulf of Mexico, fed by Corn Belt agricultural runoff.
>The Gulf's glorious fishery, one of the globe's prime wild-food assets, too must
>pay the price so that Big Ag can do its thing unimpeded.
>
>The "get out of our way, world" message is also being sounded loud and clear by
>the genetically modified (GM) seed industry, particularly in the case of
>Monsanto's Roundup Ready alfalfa. The industry is demanding that the USDA allow
>unrestricted planting of the alfalfa, which mainly serves as feed for cows.
>Alfalfa represents a lucrative opportunity for Monsanto, because it's a massive
>crop, covering about 20 million acres, about 7 percent of U.S. cropland.
>
>Yet there are a couple of glaring problems. Alfalfa is a prolific pollinator,
>meaning that GM alfalfa can easily cross-breed with non-GM alfalfa. If organic
>producers find their crop contaminated with GM material, they risk losing their
>organic certification and, likely, their livelihoods. The organic dairy
>industry, which relies on a steady supply of organic alfalfa, would also be
>imperiled.
>
>The second problem is so-called "superweeds" -- weeds that develop resistance to
>Roundup, Monsanto's flagship herbicide. Such weeds are already rampant in the
>South, where Monsanto's Roundup Ready cotton holds sway, and are moving into the
>Corn Belt, which is blanketed by the tens of millions of acres with the
>agrichemical giant's corn and soy seeds. The rise of superweeds is unleashing a
>virtual monsoon of dodgy poison cocktails onto affected farmland.
>
>Do we really want to subject organic growers and dairies to possible
>contamination and loss of their livelihoods, plus risk unleashing superweeds on
>another 20 million acres? Oh but we simply must, according the the agrichemical
>industry and its allies, including the above-mentioned Farm Bureau. The USDA is
>considering breaking its long-term tradition of minimally regulating GM crop
>plantings by placing restrictions on GM alfalfa -- and the industry is furious
>at the insolence.
>
>Here's Des Moines Register Washington correspondent Philip Brasher:
>
>"The implications of moving forward in that direction are huge," said Sharon
>Bomer Lauritsen, executive vice president of food and agriculture for the
>Biotechnology Industry Organization. "Long term we are looking at upending the
>U.S. regulatory process, which has implications for investment and research."
>
>"[U]pending the U.S. regulatory process," huh? Interesting phrase, given that
>when it comes to transgenic crops, there essentially isn't a regulatory process.
>What this industry rep is saying, in essence, is that industry needs a permanent
>green light to thrive -- the health of the environment and the right of organic
>growers be damned.
>
>Never one to remain silent when the interests of industrial agriculture are in
>question, the Farm Bureau has weighed in on alfalfa, too. Joining forces with a
>few other Big Ag groups, the Farm Bureau issued a letter to USDA chief Tom
>Vilsack bitterly deploring the idea of even considering curbs on GM alfalfa.
>
>Of course, back here on Planet Earth, I can think of no compelling reason to
>allow the planting of Roundup Ready alfalfa at all. If it's anything like
>Roundup Ready corn, soy, and cotton, Monsanto's alfalfa seed won't increase
>yields but will vastly up the application of pesticides (contrary to what its
>billion-dollar marketing campaigns say). The USDA should go beyond restrictions
>and ban it outright.
>
>In both the case of the Chesapeake Bay watershed's vast chicken factories and
>that of GM alfalfa, industrial agriculture is admitting that it needs to trash
>its neighbors and the surrounding landscape to thrive. It wants us to believe
>that there are no alternatives if we want to feed ourselves plentifully. That's
>a hollow claim.
>
--
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