Cod fishery in crisis

The federal government this week enacted what amounts essentially to a 6-month pause in commercial cod fishing in the Gulf of Maine, according to a report by David Abel in the Boston Globe yesterday. This is a sad day for New England's most famous fishery.

Cod fishing is a classic example of a situation where free markets would be devastating for everybody, including fishermen and their families. Because overfishing in the past has pushed stocks far below maximum sustainable levels, each fishing boat harms the economic interests of the next. Economists believe that liberated markets serve environmental goals wonderfully in many situations, where property rights to natural resources are well defined, but free markets are a disaster when each producer is chasing a common resource.

Nobody thinks the New England cod fishery should be unregulated. Yet, cod fishermen complain about the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) regulators who took action this week. Many fishermen believe the scientific estimates are overly pessimistic, leading regulators to be overly cautious.

Here you can inspect the evidence for yourself, in NOAA's report this past August. Using two different models of cod mortality (on the left and right), the figure reproduced here shows the downward trend over time in estimated spawning stocks biomass (top row) and the upward trend in estimated recent fish mortality (bottom row).

Of course, these estimates could be mistaken. Yet, as a non-expert reading them closely, I found them persuasive. If I were a cod fisherman, I would cry, plan, and organize politically, but I would resist the temptation to blame the messenger.

For the other side of the story, here is a link to the Northeast Seafood Coalition, but I haven't yet found a real scientific rebuttal to the NOAA estimates.

In the tragic political division in this country, so apparent in the recent election, the conservative party is (rightly!) devoted to the great prosperity economic markets can achieve, yet sadly unable to comprehend that vigorous and effective government sometimes is needed to let markets work well.

New composting rules in Massachusetts

Beginning next week, on October 1, about 1,700 Massachusetts businesses that produce substantial food waste must sort and divert that waste to composting or another destination other than landfill. The new program is one of the most ambitious in the country.

As the Boston Globe explains today:

As of Oct. 1, Massachusetts has banned any establishment that creates a ton or more of food waste per week from sending as much as a carrot peel to the state’s rapidly dwindling available landfills. Despite a recycling rate topping 40 percent, Massachusetts businesses and households still toss about 6.5 million tons of garbage every year — enough to fill up Fenway Park 74 times. Most of it is piled into a couple dozen landfills where it slowly decomposes, the organic stuff from kitchens and yards spewing the greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere, or hauled to a handful of waste-to-energy incinerators where it is burned to create electricity.

So-called compostable organics make up more than 25 percent of the state’s commercial and household waste, and the goal of the new regulation is to divert much of that away from landfills. Where will it go? To composting facilities and energy plants that run on biogas (made primarily of methane) — places where it can actually be put to use.

Clare Leschin-Hoar covered the Massachusetts news for the Guardian this week. Elsewhere in the country, Seattle is pursuing a similar policy just this week -- but without limiting it just to large waste producers as the Massachusetts policy does. For further background, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has a longer 2012 report with estimates on the scale of food waste going to landfills.

Most of these links were brought to my attention this week by Jennifer Otten, a faculty member in health services at the University of Washington. Professor Otten's food policy class uses my textbook, Food Policy in the United States: An Introduction. She reports that food waste issues make a great concrete local issue for use in food policy teaching: "Students get really into this topic, because it’s something they can do something about."

On the way to the People's Climate March: Action and persuasion to address global climate change

In an astonishing turn of events this week, prosecutors dropped criminal charges against two climate change activists who in 2013 used their boat -- the Henry David T. -- to block a large coal shipment to New England.

Instead of proceeding to trial on September 8, Bristol District Attorney C. Samuel Sutter announced that he agreed with the activists that addressing climate change is a critical public concern. Taking the microphones afterwards, the prosecutor said he now planned to attend the People's Climate March in New York City next week, September 21.

What persuaded Mr. Sutter? What makes a person in authority decide to support strong action to address an environmental challenge?

I met one of the activists, Jay O'Hara, last year at a local meeting of church environmentalists. O'Hara is a Quaker, who speaks with calm conviction and common sense about the logic of his direct action. As you can hear in this morning's terrific Living On Earth interview, he is polite and respectful to people in authority, including police, even while quietly explaining the seemingly illegal action he has just taken. If it were not for the prosecutor's change of heart, the activists would have mounted a "necessity defense," saying their action was needed to prevent a greater public harm (as when somebody jaywalks in order to help an injured person out of a roadway).

Reflecting on this week's events, which still amaze me days later, I see two key ingredients: (a) direct action, not just talk, without waiting for permission and (b) speaking calmly and reasonably, always believing that your opponents are capable of thinking clearly and being persuaded.

For years, my family has been focusing on personal lifestyle changes to reduce our environmental impact. One of our key goals is to practice ways of living richly, while using fewer resources.

Inspired by the news this week, my wife and I (and perhaps one or both kids) are now arranging our complex schedules for next weekend so that we, too, may be able to attend the People's Climate March in New York City, September 21.

Source: Living On Earth website. (Photo: Kate Toomey; CC BY 2.0)

AGree agricultural policy initiative releases five point-of-view papers on conservation policy

The AGree agricultural policy initiative today released five point-of-view papers related to productivity, profitability, and environmental outcomes.

The papers represent the diverse views of the authors, but one general theme is to encourage decentralized decision-making through which farmers and ranchers can address key environmental constraints, such as stewarding limited water quantity and protecting water quality.

For example, Kristin Weeks Duncanson, Jim Moseley, and Fred Yoder (.pdf) propose using local boards "to cooperatively establish and advance long-term productivity and conservation goals for their watersheds through engagement and support of producers and landowners and guided by sound science."

At their best, decentralized responses to environmental problems can have major advantages. Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel prize in economics for analyzing the ways that community-based decisions can in some cases address problems of the commons. At their weakest, decentralized responses may be insufficiently bold and comprehensive.

In AGree's press release this morning, Gary Hirshberg, an AGree Co-Chair and Chairman of Stonyfield Farm, describes the papers as a product of long discussion and a foundation perhaps for greater accomplishments in the future: “These papers reflect the intense deliberation that has gone into developing consensus recommendations and strategies,” he said. “To keep up with a changing climate, shrinking water supplies, shifting dietary preferences, and growing populations it is clear that we need system-wide change. AGree has focused on how new partnerships, innovative ways of working together, and targeted policy change can build trust and lay the foundation for a more sustainable future.”

Because the emphasis on decentralized approaches may not be matched yet with broader regulatory or tax-based responses to problems such as pollution, or property rights reforms to address water quantity, environmentalist readers of the five new papers may ask whether AGree fully acknowledges the determined national-level response that leading environmental challenges may require. I will be interested to hear which aspects of these five papers environmentalist readers find most daring, and which ones seem likely just to forestall or delay more vigorous initiatives.

In the paper by Duncanson, Mosely, and Yoder, I didn't yet get a strong sense of whether the local committees' work would add up in the end to quantifiable aggregate improvements, such as reduced total nutrient flow to the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Erie, and the Chesapeake. Perhaps one thing that could be added to their admirable decentralized vision is some mechanism for setting ambitious higher-level targets and getting buy-in from each local and regional board to do its part.

[I have been serving on AGree's research committee, where I've volunteered principally not on conservation but on a parallel discussion about nutrition policy. Of course, AGree is not responsible for my views here, nor vice versa.]

Kellogg announces new climate change commitments

The Kellogg Company today unveiled new commitments to address actions by itself and its suppliers that affect climate change. General Mills on July 28 had announced similar initiatives.

From Kellogg's statement (.pdf) today:

As stated in our Kellogg Global Supplier Code of Conduct, we expect suppliers to support our corporate responsibility commitments by implementing sustainable operating and farming practices, and agricultural production systems. Suppliers must strive to reduce or optimize agricultural inputs; reduce greenhouse gas emissions, energy and water use; and minimize water pollution and waste, including food waste and landfill usage.

The anti-hunger organization Oxfam International had been encouraging leading food manufacturers to make such commitments. Oxfam's recent report, Standing on the Sidelines, had argued that food and beverage companies need to do more. Today, Oxfam praised Kellogg's announcement:

“We welcome Kellogg’s efforts to become an industry leader in the fight against climate change and the damage it is causing to people everywhere,” said Monique van Zijl, campaign manager for Oxfam’s Behind the Brands campaign. “Kellogg’s new commitments add momentum to calls on governments and the wider food and agriculture industry to recognize that climate change is real, it’s happening now, and we need to tackle it.”

In the announcement today, Kellogg says it will set targets for greenhouse gas reductions, produce a climate change adaptation strategy, take steps to limit deforestation impacts in its supply chains, and commit to disclosure of key climate change information. Oxfam said Kellogg plans to participate in the Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy (BICEP) group and sign the Climate Declaration.

Summarizing the Agricultural Act of 2014

Choices Magazine -- the outreach magazine of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA) -- this spring and early summer published a special series summarizing the Agricultural Act of 2014 (also known as the Farm Bill).

Jody Campiche organized the series and presented the theme overview:

After more than three years of debate on the next farm bill, the Agricultural Act of 2014 was signed into law on February 7, 2014. Overall, total spending under the new bill will be reduced by $23 billion as compared to the baseline over the next 10 years. The Agricultural Act of 2014 reforms the dairy program, includes major changes to commodity programs, adds new supplemental crop insurance programs, consolidates conservation programs, expands programs for specialty crops, reauthorizes important livestock disaster assistance programs, and reduces spending under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). However, despite large cuts in total program spending, the Act continues to provide important programs to ensure a safe and adequate food supply and to protect our natural resources. The articles in this theme discuss new or revised provisions relating to commodities, crop insurance, dairy, conservation, nutrition, and specialty crops as included in the Agricultural Act of 2014.

The series includes articles on commodity payments, conservation programs, dairy programs, crop insurance, specialty crops, and my contribution on nutrition assistance programs.

Menus of Change

The Menus of Change -- a project of the Harvard School of Public Health and the Culinary Institute of America -- brings together industry folks, chefs, academics, and advocates to discuss private-sector and public-sector action regarding both nutrition and the environment.

The new annual report summarizes recent trends, progress, and lack of progress, topic by topic.

At the end of the day, what we as chefs and operators choose to offer as a plate of food has enormous consequences, for the health of our customers and our planet. And yet just as we embrace evidence-based guidance from the scientific community as a key reference point in decision-making, we also know that we need—nationally—something akin to a new “moonshot” program to better and more fully realize the possibilities of bringing together deliciousness with healthy, sustainable food choices. This is an issue for all of us: our families, our schools, our employees, our troops. And it needs to start with a renewed commitment to the fundamentals: what we might call “farming for flavor.”

Restaurant News published a good summary of the project's lively and engaging second annual summit, which was held this week in Boston. The article noted that three leading themes from the summit were coping with climate change, finding better ways to source protein, and increasing fruit and vegetables on menus.

The conference’s presenters tied the three topics together, presenting evidence that excessive consumption of red meat is a leading cause of heart disease and a contributor to diabetes, and that red meat — particularly beef — is a key contributor to global warming. They said foodservice operators should try to introduce other sources of protein and also replace much of that protein with vegetables and fruit, particularly since most Americans eat more protein than they need.

Menus of Change is just one of several initiatives that seem to combine sustainability and nutrition issues in higher profile ways. I am on the Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee for this project. Other such efforts include the AGree agricultural policy initiative, some of the work last year of the Food Forum at the Institute of Medicine, and the current round of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (for example, see the recent presentation by Kate Clancy).

Greenhouse gas emissions flows

I recently had cause to remember and appreciate this 2008 graphic from the World Resources Institute (WRI).  Ordinarily, there is confusion between various statistics one reads about economic sectors (such as transportation, energy, agriculture), about economic activities and end uses (such as heating residential buildings, heating commercial buildings), and about gasses (such as carbon dioxide and methane).  The graphic still doesn't answer one of my questions -- I am trying to reconcile environmental accounts that (a) place food distribution with the corresponding manufacturing and distribution sectors or (b) attribute all of these costs to food itself.  Nonetheless, it is a good data visualization.

Living richly

Following an occasional thread on this blog, it is time for a more personal update on my family's decade-long experimentation in sustainable living. We are informed by the active online conversation about this topic, but we draw some different lessons as well.

First, my family begins with the awareness that we are rich.  It would be good for all but the very poorest Americans to begin from this proposition.  Many of us make unwise environmental decisions because we feel economically beleaguered -- constrained by jobs, family, and social expectations to commute by car, fly in airplanes, and eat environmentally expensive food.  Acknowledging that we are rich can liberate us to make the decisions that satisfy our consciences and truly bring us joy.  I rarely talk about faith on this semi-professional blog, but, among the four of us, including my wife and two children, we use religious language to describe this fact.  We know we have been blessed.

Second, our personal goal is not to experience hardship.  Over the centuries, many people have found great insight in taking a vow of poverty, but that is not for us.  We want to experiment with using fewer and fewer environmental resources in order to uncover the point at which we begin to feel materially poor.  Then we'll stop and think before proceeding further.

So, here is some of what we have learned so far about what resources are necessary to live well.

Shelter.  We have a 3-bedroom 2-bathroom free-standing house in a dense inner suburban neighborhood.  Clearly, this already makes us more prosperous than most people in the world, but it is a simpler home than most people in my professional circles have, and we have not yet taken steps toward selling our home and buying a smaller place.  In summer, we use no air conditioning, although air conditioning is common in Boston.  We have learned to open and shut our windows in summer on a schedule that keeps the house a pleasant temperature on all but about 7 days per year.  In winter, we keep the house at 50 degrees at night, and when we are away at school and work, and 61 degrees when we are at home.  The energy company tells us that we use 34% less gas than average homes in our neighborhood and save many hundreds of dollars each year.  We enjoy our slippers and sweaters and feel cozy. 

Food.  We eat nearly a vegetarian diet at home, but frequently have dairy products and occasionally fish.  Counting food from elsewhere, I eat some meat about 4 days per week.  My son eats meat with school lunch, and my daughter eats vegetarian at school.  We use some local food, and cook at home, but perhaps 90 percent of our food comes by way of the industrial food system.  We enjoy our food and feel richly fed all the time.

Transportation by car.  We own one 2000 Honda Civic, which we drive for short trips most days.  My wife bicycles to work, and I bike to a "T" station and then take the subway.  The children are old enough to go to school by bicycle or city bus.  Our car seldom has repair expenses, and the insurance company gives us a discount for low mileage.  Walking, cycling, and on the subway, we feel healthier, happier, and more connected with friends and strangers around us.

Transportation by air.  We realized that frequent travel by air for fun and work threatened to offset all of the gains our family made in shelter and food, leaving us with a carbon impact that exceeded national averages.  So, we gave up flying entirely for a time.  Despite being an active academic researcher, and despite having a new textbook to market, I haven't flown since the first week of May, 2013.  My university's website encourages faculty to reduce flying when possible, but in practice most researchers in my field spend immense resources on air travel to meetings and conferences.  This is strange if the meeting or conference addresses the problems of world poverty or sustainable food systems.  I had hoped to keep up my no-flying discipline for a year, but this week I could not resist adding a trip by air to my calendar for April, 2014, so my freedom from flying will last 11 months in total.  Since May, I've given presentations and attended meetings in DC, Woods Hole, Boston, Cornell University, and even by Amtrak to Ohio for presentations in Cleveland and Columbus, and I have forthcoming presentations in Albany and Philadelphia.  I've learned to work as effectively on the train as I do in my office, so train travel is both more pleasant and less time-consuming for me than air travel.  The rest of my family stopped flying even earlier, in April, 2012.  Our summer vacation in 2013 was a bicycle trip on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal.  My family will go without flying for 25 months, after which we will take a vacation in summer 2014 that can only be done by air, a 6-week walking pilgrimage together that we have wished for many years. If that trip comes to pass as we hope, we know it is a blessing.  Our vacations still leave us in the ranks of the world's most privileged people, but it is both good environmentalism and good wisdom to take longer and more peaceful breaks rather than shorter and more resource-intensive vacations wedged between periods of excessive work for high pay.

What is the lesson from this self-experimentation?  We found we can reduce resource use by a large margin without any symptoms of deprivation.  As the community of friends around us grows stronger, working on the same simple living project, we may find it psychologically easier to take more radical steps in this direction.

For me, this experience provides crucial information about the possibility that our global family can thrive even during the forthcoming time of scarcity.  Far more than any technological development (such as GMOs or biofuels), what matters most for the future of the world is the capacity of those who are rich to use fewer material resources.  Because the rich of the world also are politically powerful, and unlikely to will themselves into poverty voluntarily, my hope for this capacity depends in part on whether higher-income people can use fewer resources and still recognize themselves as prosperous.  Quite possibly, the stresses the world faces will cause disruptions, crisis, famine, or war, but I think those events arise from our foolishness as social animals rather than from any material economic requirement we have for an adequate standard of living.  On a material basis, I have seen with my own eyes and felt in my own skin that people in rich countries can undertake drastically lower resource use in shelter, food, and transportation, and still live richly.

Problems in industrial food animal production are only getting worse

The Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins in October released an update on problems in industrial food animal production, five years after a landmark Pew Commission report in 2008.  Ralph Loglisci has a good overview at Civil Eats. 

Sadly, in most areas of concern, there has been no progress.  On many issues there has been backwards motion.

I found the new update report generally fair and sober.  (I took the closing appeal from Fred Kirschenmann for an "agriculture that mimics nature" to be an inspirational homily rather than a concrete scientific or food policy proposition).  I know that people in the animal production industries, and even many of my colleagues in the mainstream of the agricultural economics profession, will be tempted to classify the Pew Commission and its descendents along with radical environmentalist critics of the modern food system, but I see this report far more favorably.  At every turn, it offers informative explanations of the serious potential problems with unrestrained antibiotic use, disease monitoring, water and air pollution, animal confinement, and economic competition.

Because most of these topics are intensely contested and debated, perhaps the most interesting passages of the report explain how meat producers have been able to evade increased information collection.  On topics from antibiotic use to water pollution by CAFOs to contracts in poultry marketing, the industry resists efforts to share the information we need in order to judge these debates in a sensible manner.  For example:

Delivering Antibiotic Transparency in Animals Act (2013 to present)

The Delivering Antibiotic Transparency in Animals (DATA) Act, sponsored by Rep. Henry Waxman (D–CA), would amend the reporting requirements contained in ADUFA Section 105 to require drug companies to report additional sales data, and to require integrators to report data on antimicrobial use.

The bill would also direct the FDA to include additional information on reported data in the annual summaries, including breakdowns by route of administration and approved indication, animal species, and production class. The legislation, which was introduced in February 2013 prior to reauthorization of ADUFA, has not been enacted.

Antimicrobial Data Collection Act (2013 to present)

The Antimicrobial Data Collection Act, sponsored by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D–NY), would, like the DATA Act, require the FDA to include additional information on antimicrobial sales data in the annual summaries required under ADUFA. It would not, however, require any additional reporting of sales by drug companies or require reporting of antimicrobial use by integrators. It has not been enacted.

If private sector and government initiatives did a better job of addressing these environmental and health issues, our meat and dairy products might be somewhat more expensive, but we would be able to bear this price increase just fine.  Americans have room to reduce meat and dairy intake by a certain amount while still maintaining a very high nutritional standard of living.  Many of the foods that provide similar nutrients, such as alternative sources of protein and fats, are less expensive than meat.  It is therefore false that addressing important environmental and health concerns would be an unbearable hardship for any stratum of Americans, whether low-income or middle-income.  This is not about government overreach, nor is it about taxation to influence consumer food choices, it is simply about designing production systems that correctly account for environmental and health constraints, and then letting the free market set appropriate corresponding prices.

I'd be glad for any rebuttal, or tough questions about the main points of this report, but I found it highly persuasive. 

Beyond the Farm Bill

I was interviewed recently by Beyond the Farm Bill, a project of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP). As the name suggests, the project wisely focuses on initiatives and progress other than the traditional policy-making process in the U.S. Congress, which now has broken down so badly.

What specific issues that fall outside the current Farm Bill should be considered part of food and farm policy? 

You are right to ask about policies outside of the Farm Bill. A whole world of food and farm policy happens outside of the Farm Bill. It is true that the Farm Bill is the largest single piece of authorizing legislation in U.S. food policy. The Farm Bill is an "omnibus bill" -- a term that for me generates an amusing image of an overburdened and rickety old city bus belching diesel and puffing with great effort up a long hill. The major titles address nutrition assistance programs, conservation programs, crop insurance, and (to a smaller extent than ever before) more traditional farm programs.

Within the federal legislative arena, other authorizing vehicles also are important. If the House of Representatives has its way, even the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) may need a new home. Separately, school meals programs are authorized as part of Child Nutrition Reauthorization. The nation's most important environmental, food safety, and tax bills that influence food policy are separate from the Farm Bill.

Moreover, much of food policy happens outside of federal legislation altogether. In these times of dysfunction and stagnation in federal lawmaking, many important innovations in the food system are led by the private and non-profit sectors, rather than the government sector. The local and organic food movements each do have a policy agenda, but they are fundamentally driven by consumer and producer initiative.

What local/regional or other model(s) should we be scaling up? 

Many innovations in environmentally sound food production and distribution begin their lives on a scale that is too small to make the best use of limited resources. I enjoy seeing these initiatives grow. I have special interest in mid-scale businesses and non-profit initiatives, larger than a small farm but smaller than Cargill or Monsanto. Energy use in food production depends on miles traveled, of course, but also on other qualities such as packaging, degree of processing, and type of transportation. In bringing food to a retailer (near to the consumer), a cargo ship, train container, or tractor trailer truck can carry comparatively more food per gallon of fuel. A smaller box truck or pickup truck can carry less food per gallon of fuel. Good stewardship of environmental resources requires achieving a substantial scale of operation, and yet it may be very different from our current industrial approach.

Where do you see the best opportunities for collective action in the food movement?

For any food policy initiative, it is valuable to consider its degree of promise in a society that seeks to operate on democratic principles, recognizing that food producers have an important place at the table when policies are determined. Let us ask not only, "What policies do I favor?" Instead, let us also ask, "What policies can win support from a broad swath of food producers and consumers, given that we share a sense of common purpose on some principles and not on others?" In the United States, this likely means proposing measures that do address the leading environmental concerns of the day -- greenhouse gases, hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico, water scarcity, water quality -- but without necessarily envisioning some type of revolutionary political victory over the market-oriented capital-intensive and technologically optimistic commercial agriculture that holds sway over the American heartland.

Monsanto invests in decision-making data tools

At Modern Farmer yesterday, Dan Mitchell explains the new Monsanto purchase of the Climate Corporation:

Monsanto is hot to expand further into data services for farmers. Toward that end, the company on Tuesday morning announced that it will acquire The Climate Corporation for $930 million. Climate Corporation underwrites weather insurance for farmers, basically in real time, using some of the most sophisticated data tools available to determine the risks posed by future weather conditions and events.

Should federal dietary guidelines address environmental sustainability issues?

The federal government revises the Dietary Guidelines for Americans every five years and currently is working on the next revision, scheduled for completion in 2015.

Traditionally, the guidelines have focused quite narrowly on nutrition issues, although Kate Clancy, Joan Dye Gussow, and a few others have been encouraging greater attention to sustainability issues in connection with dietary guidelines for many years.  During recent times of population growth, changing consumption patterns, and increasingly severe environmental constraints on global food production, it is interesting to ask whether the 2015 guidelines should also address environmental sustainability issues.

In May, 2013, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) at the National Academy of Sciences convened The Food Forum Workshop on Sustainable Diets: Food for Healthy People and a Healthy Planet.  Former USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan was the keynote speaker.

In one session of the workshop, I compared and contrasted the economics of market signals for healthy eating and environmental sustainability.  Here is a slightly shortened video of the talk.  (As always, neither the IOM nor the Food Forum nor anybody else but me is responsible for any errors I make or opinions I offer).  Extensive background material is available in my book, published this year, Food Policy in the United States: An Introduction (Routledge/Earthscan).

In some ways, it is easy to imagine the government offering guidance on environmental aspects of food production just as it offers suggestions on nutrition.  In another sense, the two issue areas are very different.

Here is one difference.  Given the trends of recent decades, it is entirely conceivable that Americans will continue to eat badly for ever more.  There is no automatic nutritional feedback loop that ensures our eating patterns will some day converge in the direction of greater healthfulness.  In the future, we will have healthier nutrition only if we choose to make some change in our current trajectory.

By contrast, it is not physically possible for the world's consumers to eat more than the planet can provide.  If we continue to seek to exceed the planet's productive resources, there will be a reconciliation one way or another.  If we are unfortunate, the reconciliation will involve some manner of crisis, widespread death, and reduced population, until food needs are back in line with productive capacity.  If we are fortunate, the reconciliation will involve moderately higher food prices, especially for animal foods and other foods with comparatively high environmental impact.  These price increases will lead consumers to temper their excesses while simultaneously sending signals to producers to innovate and invest even more fruitfully in new productive capacity.  Whether unfortunate or fortunate, we can no more evade the environmental reconciliation than we can stop the sun from rising.

Food Tank recommends books for fall 2013

Danielle Nierenberg and Anna Glasser at Food Tank this week listed Food Policy in the United States: An Introduction as a "must read" book for fall 2013.

Food Tank: The Food Think Tank was founded by Nierenberg (a graduate of the Friedman School at Tufts) and Ellen Gustafson. This video lays out the initiative's objectives.
 

What is your general view about the safety of genetically modified organisms (GMOs)?

The public debate over genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is shrill.

GMO opponents are very tough on occasional environmentalists who express a public view that GMOs might be safe or useful.  GMO supporters belittle the serious concerns that critics have about corporate control of the food supply and shortcomings in the U.S. approach to safety testing.

For rhetorical purposes, most writers on this topic spend all their ink criticizing the errors their opponents make, while carefully avoiding committing themselves to the sometimes untenable implications of their own side's position.

I think it would help if people paused the rock-throwing and reflected on what broad general statements they could support and defend under scrutiny.  I suspect that this reflection would make people more aware of the weaknesses on their own side and more willing to listen to multiple points of view on this divisive issue.

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With declines in Ogallala Aquifer, a reflection on the politics of agricultural environmentalism

Here is an excellent, sober, persuasive, and worrisome report at Science 360 about the accelerated decline of the Ogallala Aquifer from 2011 to 2013, because of drought on the Great Plains.

 

In the summer of 2010, I drove across the country visiting farms, markets, agricultural research stations, and other food policy sites.  One of the most interesting stops was a visit with a large-scale corn farmer in southern Nebraska, who showed me the modern irrigation equipment and careful monitoring system he used in an effort to waste as little water as possible from the Ogallala Aquifer.  He argued that aquifer declines were really only a problem further south, in Kansas and Oklahoma, not in his part of Nebraska.  He said farmers have a strong economic incentive to conserve water, because of the electricity costs and other variable costs from pumping water.  I think many farmers in his situation don't want government regulation or too much attention from worried environmentalists.

At the time, I wondered if these internalized costs really provided a strong enough incentive.  The big cost of irrigation is the value of the aquifer water itself.  Without coordination among farmers, each farmer has an incentive to use too much water.  I thought at the time that environmentally aware corn farmers in Kansas and Nebraska should go a little softer in their ferocious criticism of government environmental regulations, because without these regulations their own livelihoods are in jeopardy.

Climate science includes big uncertainties, but it seems likely that global climate change is causing more frequent droughts in the Great Plains.  I hope scientifically savvy and pragmatic corn farmers who rely on the Ogallala Aquifer have the political courage to resist the temptation to ally with anti-government conservatives who flirt with climate denialism.  Even though it takes some work and some compromise, and even some tolerance for cultural differences between heartland folks and city dwellers, I think farmers have a more promising long-term future allied with the pragmatic wing of the environmental movement.

World Resources Institute: The Great Balancing Act

World Resources Institute has a new report series on food and environment issues.  The first installment is on balancing food needs, food production, and environmental constraints.  The second installment is on food waste.

The infographic below accompanies the first report.  Even more than this graphic, I liked the final Table 1 in that report, which contemplates a long list of proposed constructive responses and concisely summarizes how each proposed response might appear to people concerned more specifically with poverty reduction or gender justice, for example, in addition to the basic environmental concerns such as climate change and water pollution.  It is both substantially correct and politically astute to anticipate how proposed environmental measures will be received by people who care about diverse public interest goals.

What business model lets a person represent a neighborhood?

First, consider this 1999 article in the New York Times, which quotes community activist and businessperson Majora Carter on the topic of a garbage transfer station that had been proposed for the South Bronx.  This 1999 argument pitted (on the one side) an African American-owned business and a clean-air environmental group in favor of the transfer station against (on the other side) community advocates concerned about pollution from the transfer station.

The opponents shouted down representatives of the garbage company, saying the area already handles more than its share of garbage. They also accused the South Bronx Clean Air Coalition, which traditionally has opposed such projects, of accepting money from the company in exchange for its support.

''You are accepting money from them and playing their community partner,'' Majora Carter, an official with the Point Community Development Corporation, shouted at members of the South Bronx Clean Air Coalition. ''This is obscene.'' ...

''I don't care if it's a minority owned business,'' Ms. Carter, of the Point, who is also black, yelled at Mr. Jones at the public meeting. ''I'm a businesswoman too. I would not sell out my brothers and sisters that way.''

Later, but only later, read the harsh article today about Majora Carter in the New York Times.  This article may be unfair to Carter.  Yet, perhaps, Carter may have been too harsh in her criticism of Robert Jones, 3rd, and the South Bronx Clean Air Coalition in 1999.

For me, the lesson is two-fold: (a) we should have very high expectations for the ethical standards of our public interest organizations and entrepreneurs, and yet (b) these expectations should not be so high as to be impossible for any thriving operation to satisfy in the real world. 

Just like for-profit organizations, public interest organizations need a viable business model.  They may aim for small local impacts with cobbled together funding, or they may aim for larger impact with more substantial funding.  In the latter case, they must be vigilant about conflicts of interest and transparent about funding sources, but being a businessperson is not itself a sign of corruption.  Notice that even in the 1999 article, Majora Carter always described herself as a businesswoman.

[I had been thinking about similar issues in this February post.]

IOM's Food Forum announces a workshop on sustainable diets, May 7-8

The Institute of Medicine's Food Forum announces an upcoming workshop on a great topic:

Sustainable Diets:

 Food for Healthy People and a Healthy Planet   

May 7-8, 2013

The National Academies Auditorium 

  2101 Constitution Avenue, NW

Washington, DC   

The Institute of Medicine's Food Forum and Roundtable on Environmental Health Sciences, Research, and Medicine are  holding a 1.5 day workshop on “Sustainable Diets: Food for Healthy People and a Healthy Planet.” We hope you will attend. The workshop will explore current and emerging knowledge on the food and nutrition policy implications of the increasing strain on the natural resources in our food system, and seek to further discussion of how to incorporate environmental sustainability into U.S. dietary guidance policies.   

Visit here for more information and to register for the workshop. 

The agenda (.pdf) includes former USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan as keynote speaker, my Tufts colleague Christian Peters speaking about land use effects of dietary patterns, and myself speaking about consumer responses to economic incentives.

U.S. meat consumption fell after 2004

According to USDA data on food consumption per capita, U.S. meat consumption fell from about 2004 to 2010 (the most recent data available).

Beef consumption peaked in 2002 and has fallen about 12% since then.  Pork consumption peaked in about 1999 and has fallen about 11% since then.  And I had not realized that chicken consumption peaked in about 2006 and has fallen almost 5% since then.

Total combined consumption of beef, pork, and chicken peaked in about 2004 and has fallen more than 6% since then.

I think these trends likely are driven both by economic recession and by increasing health and environmental awareness.

Americans consume substantially more beef, pork, and chicken than is necessary for a balanced and healthy diet.  The federal government's mainstream advice on diet and health, MyPlate, suggests that about a quarter of the dinner plate can come from the protein group (which includes fish, seafood, beans, peas, soy foods, nuts, and eggs, in addition to beef, pork, and chicken).

The unusually high U.S. consumption of beef, pork, and chicken also raises environmental concerns, with implications for water quality (when nutrients in manure reach water sources) and land use (because of the large amounts of animal feed that are converted comparatively inefficiently into meat-based foods).

It is worth mentioning that meat is a good source of protein and several other nutrients, but these nutrients are not currently under-supplied in U.S. diets.  Similarly, animal agriculture is a particularly sensible use of certain grasslands that are environmentally unsuitable for crop production, but this grass-based production system is not where most of our beef, pork, and chicken comes from.

Overall, I don't think the government should be too pushy when it comes to influencing people's diets.  It seems quite wise simply to accept and accomodate the recent market-driven downward trends in meat consumption, without taking government action to oppose them.

These trends are a good thing for our health, environment, and economy.
Source: interactive chart by the author using USDA food availability data.

Update (later the same day): I just saw that Steve Baragona at Voice of America yesterday described this same trend.  I had been thinking about this topic, because my colleague Paul McNamara mentioned related work on trends in vegetarian consumption by a student in his department at the University of Illinois, Daniel Karney.