Soil and empire - a review

 The fertility of the soil in my vegetable garden is constantly renewed and improved using the systems researched and taught by Albert Howard - compost, green manures, animal manures, and organic mulches. 

It is not hard to make soil - it is very easy to lose it.

 I recently read two books, written sixty-three years apart, which cover different aspects of the same two-sided problem – the destruction of soil by export-oriented agriculture, and the destruction of human health as a result of eating the food produced by such agriculture and/or by having insufficient access to nutritious and affordable locally-produced foods. Sir Albert Howard wrote The Soil and Health. A study of organic agriculture at the end of his life as an agricultural scientist, farmer, and farming advisor. Published in 1947, it sums up the principles on which his life's work was based, the great results achieved by following those principles, and the great dangers of flouting them.

Howard's first chapters look at the profligate loss of soil fertility and its relationship to war, starvation and population collapse in ancient times, before moving on to the problem in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Commenting on the contemporary situation he writes:

“ The phrase mining the land is now recognised as a very accurate description of what takes place when the human race flings itself on an area of stored fertility and uses it up without thought for the future. In the mid-nineteenth century this began to take place on an unprecedented scale. For if agriculture was, so to say, the nursemaid of industry, she was persuaded to learn one salient lesson from her nursling. This was the lesson of the profit motive.”

The profit motive and where it leads when applied to food is the underlying theme of the book Empires of Food. Feast, Famine and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations by Evan D.G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas, first published in 2010. Leaping centuries and continents to illustrate this theme, they look at long-distance food trading, its relationship with imperial conquests and the maintenance of armies, and where it has historically ended – in malnourished populations and weakened defence forces in the imperial heartland that are easy prey for invaders, and in soils which take centuries to recover enough fertility to support urban as well as rural populations.

The Roman empire is the best documented example of this process, and is covered by Fraser and Rimas, although to round out their picture I would also recommend reading what David Montgomery (2007) has to say on the subject in Dirt: the erosion of civilisations, and also Thomas Homer-Dixon's (2006) account in The Upside of Down of the food energy required to build and run the Roman empire, and what happened when it ran out. Fraser and Rimas lay bare the historical imperial construction of today's global food trading system, and the social impacts of states no longer producing (and storing and releasing at affordable prices) enough food to weather climatic or political storms. They also look at the heavy environmental burdens that the modern empires of food are imposing on nations in addition to the loss of soil and its fertility. These include toxic chemicals, greenhouse gas emissions and noxious wastes.

Fraser and Rimas pay particular attention to the situation of China today, which has moved from storing rice to exporting it and other profitable foods, while systematically destroying the soils on which export (and locally-consumed) production depends, whether by paving them over with roads and cities, drowning them under the dams formed by huge hydro projects, or poisoning them with agricultural chemicals and heavy metals from industry. (A report released on 7 November 2011 by China's Ministry of Environmental Protection said that one tenth of China's farmland is now so polluted by heavy metals such as lead and zinc that people are regularly suffering from poisoning.)

The upside of the high connectivity of the current global food system is that there probably won't be a repeat of invasions from the outside as there was in the past; the downside is that the collapse will be much more widespread than it was for the Mesopotamians or the Mayans. Fraser and Rimas think that a hybrid system of more local but some global food will still be possible (and desirable) in the foreseeable future. But that will depend on whether there is the political will to protect soil fertility at home rather than mining it abroad, and so far there is little evidence of this occurring in any of the great food producing states. On the contrary, they continue to negotiate and sign neo-liberalised trade and investment agreements that will make the problem worse. Therefore, the electoral advice that Albert Howard gave to 'the man in the street' remains as pertinent now as it was in 1947.

“3. He must use his vote to compel his various representatives – municipal, county and parliamentary – to see to it: (a) that the soil of his country is made fertile and maintained in this condition: (b) that the public health system of the future is based on the fresh produce of land in good heart.”

The Occupy movement: Wall St, Colombo St - and junk food joints

Subway and McD's are next to each other at the southern end of Colombo St, the main street of Christchurch. They survived the earthquakes of the past year. The locally-owned, independent diners and cafes they undercut and shoved aside were gone long before the quakes.



The Occupy Wall St movement does not seem to have had any impact on McDonald's stocks, which were trading on the New York Stock Exchange on October 28 at around US$93. Nor on Starbucks stock, traded on the NASDAQ. Subway is a  private company that opened its first NZ store in 1995 (the same year that it opened its first stores in China and eight other countries). Now all three chains have premises on the main street of Christchurch, although the Starbucks one is temporarily closed due to quake damage.

I can't say that the fish and chip shops and other local cheap food places driven out of business by the transnational junk food joints served haute cuisine, but I can say that they served locally-produced and prepared food, and also that they did not say things like 'We bake our own bread' unless it was actually true. (The truth about the Subway chain's claim to do this is that they 'bake' frozen dough which is shipped to Australia and Asia from a factory in Taranaki. How authentic - and sustainable - is that?)

Every time I drive past the Colombo St Subway and McD's (which I do often, as they are on my way to and from the city) I think about what this main street - like main streets everywhere - has lost to the global corporations. The Occupy Wall St movement inspired me to write about it, as follows...

Occupy Main Street!

The 'Occupy' movement currently sweeping the world is an enormously hopeful and encouraging sign that millions of people want real democracy instead of the current version, in which self-serving elites have parasitised the body politic, eating it away from the inside and leaving only a lifeless exo-skeleton which looks like democracy but does not think, breathe and move like democracy.

Yet we should not mistake form for substance in the Occupy movement either. Nine months after the occupation of Tahrir Square the military is still in charge of Egypt, while it will take more than central city camping to clean up the financial services sector in the USA and elsewhere. If the Occupy movement is to fulfil its promise it has to move from occupying Wall St to occupying Main Street. That is to say, it must move from the symbolic centres of power over the people to the actual centres of power to the people. It must go from words of freedom and political democracy to acts of freedom and economic democracy.

The place to do this is on every Main Street, because Main Streets are currently where sustainable economies and real democracy are bleeding to death. I can't walk the length of Colombo St, the main street of my home town of Christchurch, New Zealand, at present. A lot of it is in ruins due to the earthquakes that have been hammering the city over the past year. The form of my main street has gone – but the substance had already been ruined. Some of the ruined buildings still had the name of the original owner/occupier carved into their fabric, but with very few exceptions none of those firms are still in business, and their place has been taken not by other locally-owned and operated businesses which bank locally, pay taxes locally, and support local charities but rather by transnational chain stores, from fast food franchises to global accountancy firms. There are no real names of real people left on the storefronts and sign boards of my main street, only the names of distant corporations.

My main street could be any main street in any town or city that has consented to the corporate occupation of public space. It is hard not to, because these businesses are all legal, even though very few of them are good. They did not use military or political force to take over our towns, but economic force. In No Logo Naomi Klein describes the cut-throat tactics they use to destroy locally-owned independent businesses, which are also legal if not moral.

Did anyone protest this corporate occupation while it was happening? I did. With a handful of others who saw the writing on the wall I stood outside the first Starbucks store in Christchurch on its opening day twelve years ago, holding placards and handing out leaflets. Passers-by were either bemused or amused. It takes a lot of time and effort to unravel the connections between drinking a cup of stale corporate coffee (the beans are roasted in America) in New Zealand and not having enough money in local purses to properly fund civic amenities like libraries and swimming pools, or public services like schools and hospitals, so that all citizens can benefit from them. Or not enough adequately-paid, socially-useful jobs to keep the next generation employed at home.

The Occupy movement is saying No to all this, but what is it saying Yes to? To the things all good revolutions say yes to, of course – liberty, equality and the siblinghood of humankind – but beyond that, what is it doing to make a real difference? Here are some things that lots of the occupiers are already doing, and want to share. Their basic message is - vacate the corporation; occupy Main Street! Corporations that produce consumables only have the power and money we give them. So stop shopping with corporations. This is easy with things like healthy food; harder with things like electronic goods – but it can and must be done. Exit the corporation and enter the range of community-based alternatives. Keep your money in a community-owned bank, support independent locally-owned stores, join or start a co-op (worker, consumer, housing), grow food for yourself and others at a community garden or farm, join a Time Bank to give and get free services.

Will this be inconvenient? Not necessarily – within zero to five miles of Wall St there are twenty community-owned bank branches. I bank with New Zealand's one remaining community-owned bank, which is hundreds of kilometres away in the North Island, and I get excellent service via phone, mail and internet. Will it cost more? Not necessarily – my bank charges less interest on credit cards and loans than the foreign-owned corporate banks, pays more interest on savings accounts and term deposits, and charges no fees on accounts over $5000. But even if it is less convenient and costs a bit more upfront – that is the price of freedom.

The Occupy movement has grasped the truth that we send a message and create change much more powerfully through what we do than by what we say. Protest on the streets is a good start, but we're not stopping there. It is only by action - supporting economic alternatives and vacating the corporation – that we both bring down the existing rotten system and put a much better one in its place.

Burger your health - it's all about private equity

I really like the way the trans-fats and sugars glow in this bacon cheeseburger image.

Last month the Ministry of Health released the final results of its 2008/09 New Zealand Adult Nutrition Survey, a survey of 4,721 adults carried out between October 2008 and October 2009. This is a self-reporting survey into dietary patterns, so it is hard to know how accurate the results are, given the tendency of respondents in such surveys to tell researchers what they think they ought to be doing, or would like researchers to think they are doing, rather than what they are actually doing. There is also the issue of how representative even a large sample is of actual behaviours across the population.

For this reason I find some of the results rather hard to believe, such as the one that 66% of female respon dents and 60% of male respondents choose whole-grain bread 'most often', when these breads do not make up even 50% of all the breads available in supermarkets, let alone the cheapest ones. This seems to be a 'tell them what they want to hear' answer, and I think retail sales patterns would give a much more accurate picture of how often these breads are really chosen. For the same reason I also wonder whether the dire rates of fruit and vegetable consumption reported (41% of males and 28% of females reported that they did not eat the recommended three or more servings of vegetables per day, while 45% of males and 33% of females did not eat the recommended two or more servings of fruit per day), may be even worse than this.

However, there can be no doubting that the population weight increase figures cited in the survey are accurate. The mean weight of males surveyed in 1997 was 80.4 kg, and in 2008/09 it was 85.1 kg. For females the figures were 68.7 kg and 72.6 kg. The mean height of New Zealanders did not change in this time, so all this growth was outwards, leading to an increase in obesity rates. The percentage of obese males went from 17% in 1997 to 27.7% in 2008/09 , while obese females went from 20.6% to 27.8% of the population.

Something else grew markedly in the same time frame, and that was the profits of fast food franchises. A month after the nutrition survey results came out, the business pages carried the news that the owners of the Burger King franchise in NZ, Australian private equity firm Anchorage Capital Partners, were about to sell it. According to the report of its purchase of the NZ Burger King franchise in 2009, ''Anchorage was formed in 2007, evolving from Interbank Capital Partners, a boutique private equity firm headed by Phil Cave AM, and targets underperforming businesses with enterprise values of between A$50m ($43.4m) and A$150m ($130.5m). The firm sold its investment in Australian fruit company Golden Circle following a share takeover by Heinz last December.''

In its first full year of owning and operating the franchise Burger King generated net profit of $6.8 million on revenue of $161.6m. Mark Bayliss, chairman of Burger King's immediate owner Antares Restaurant Group, was quoted as saying that the ''The important thing is it's now on a sustainable growth platform...We're passionate about building sustainable businesses that continue to grow sustainably in future, and to do that you need to really invest in the business.''

On October 17 the Blackstone Group announced that its private equity funds had agreed to acquire Antares Restaurant Group in New Zealand from Anchorage Capital Partners. According to its media release on the transaction, ''Blackstone is one of the largest private equity investors in the world with US$38 billion in capital committed or invested in 160 separate private equity transactions. Blackstone currently has US$17 billion of available equity capital to invest in further private equity transactions.'' Blackstone is a New York Stock Exchange listed company and considers itself to be ''one of the world’s leading investment and advisory firms''.


While Blackstone/Antares/Burger King are 'growing sustainably', something else is growing unsustainably, and that is the cost to the public purse of dealing with the damage caused by junk food consumption. A year ago the Associate Health Minister, Tariana Turia, professed herself to be delighted that public funding had been made available for an additional 300 'weight loss' operations (aka gastric bypass or 'stomach-stapling') over the next four years. This is to cost 8 million dollars. She did not say how many publicly-funded operations were already taking place, and how much they cost.

Commenting on the move, Dr Elaine Rush, Professor of Nutrition at the Auckland University of Technology, said that an Australian assessment of the cost effectiveness of obesity interventions for children and adolescents found that reducing TV advertising of high fat and/or high sugar foods and beverages directed at children was much the cheapest of the effective options, while gastric banding was by far the most expensive. (She also mentioned the really unpleasant side effects  associated with this operation, and how it could contribute to nutritional deficiencies.)

The reason why advertising restrictions cost the public almost nothing is that not only do they not involve high tech surgery, but any costs associated with them are borne by the user (the advertiser), not the taxpayer, whereas taxpayers fund the extra gastric bypass operations. Meanwhile the foreign investors in Burger King and other fast food chains not only pay nothing towards mitigating the damage their products do, but even profit from making it easier for Kiwis to eat themselves to death. 
 

What do we value more – public health or private equity profits? Hooray to my friend Reihana who answered that question by joining the Occupy Wall Street movement to tell the profiteers what she (and thousands of others) think of their anti-social behaviour. Here she is in Liberty Plaza, New York, with the Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping.

 

The politics of fertiliser

 OR                               Africa is falling down on my head

The bulk phosphate carrier docked at  the Port of Lyttelton pours streams of phosphate through the hoppers into the trucks waiting below. The trucks then head off to the fertiliser factory some 25km away.

The top-dressing plane taxis up the airstrip at Port Levy to fill up with another load of fertiliser.

At this spring time of year, hill farmers in New Zealand hope for fine weather not just for the sake of the survival of new-born lambs and calves, but so that conditions are good for the aerial application of fertiliser. As I worked in my vege garden on Monday, digging over the ground and fertilising it with crushed sheep dags, the drone of the top-dressing plane returning to the airstrip high on the hill in the next valley was an almost constant sound, recurring every ten minutes or so. When I hear that sound, my mind goes to Africa, the source of most of what is in the fine powder that the plane drops over the hills around me, and I think -  'Africa is falling down on my head.'

The links between the mining of the phosphate that is in the fertiliser and its application in New Zealand are long, and they are not pretty. Most of the phosphate used in fertilisers manufactured in New Zealand today comes from Western Sahara, a country which was illegally occupied by Morocco in 1975. In contravention of a United Nations ruling, Moroccan interests are both exporting and profiting from the Western Saharan phosphate resource (and fish as well, as Gordon Campbell documented in 2008). The New Zealand companies which manufacture the phosphate into superphosphate fertiliser (the stuff falling on my head) have close relations with the Moroccan companies which mine it, and they (and, sadly and inaccurately, the NZ Encyclopaedia on line Te Ara) say that the phosphate comes from 'Morocco'.

It does not. It is mined in Western Sahara and exported from the port of Laayoune, the port of what used to be the capital of Western Sahara before it was annexed by Morocco. Desperate Saharawis even try and leave their country by stowing away on phosphate ships bound for Australia, as Professor Klaus Neumann documents in his paper on seeking asylum in Australia. With this really sad back story the stuff arrives on the other side of the world, where I can photograph a spill of it being scooped up at the port of Lyttelton, or the plane about to drop it over my home. 

That (in brief - I have not given any details on how bad life is for many Saharawis today, penned into refugee camps in the Algerian desert and kept out of their homeland by a wall every bit as bad as the one keeping Palestinians from their former homes in Israel) is the awful political side of the story. The environmental side is also rather unhappy. But I'll leave that for another day.

A phosphate spill is cleaned off the dock at Lyttelton. Some of it will have gone into the harbour, adding to existing pollution and  nutrient overload.

The top-dressing plane takes off over Port Levy, heading out to drop another load of 'super'.

Denis Avery – an agnotological note

If I told you that this is a genetically-engineered 'man carrot', grown by Monsanto-funded Denis Avery of the Center for Global Food Issues in an heroic attempt to improve eyesight and prevent erectile dysfunction by consuming just one vegetable - would you believe me?

I thought not... but you'd better believe that agnotology is ''the study of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data''. The term was coined by a science historian, Robert N. Procter, to describe an increasingly common phenomenon in public debates over scientific matters, such as the extent of the harm caused by tobacco smoking or greenhouse gas emissions. It involves the telling of outright lies or half-truths, or the presentation of factual data in ways which are misleading.

In its worst form it involves compounding the lie by attributing it to a reputable scientist or public science organisation. This is what Denis Avery of the misleadingly named Center for Global Food Issues at the Hudson Institute did in 1998 when he claimed that people who ate organic food were eight times more likely to be attacked by the potentially fatal strain of E. coli 0157:H7 than those who ate non-organic food.

Not only was and is there no truth in this statement, but the individual scientist to whom Avery attributed this 'fact' never said or wrote any such thing, and neither did the US Centers for Disease Control, which Avery also cited as a source. You can read more about his lies on organic food, and how they were exposed, on the Sourcewatch site.

But the interesting (and sad) thing is that a lie repeated often enough starts to be believed as truth, especially when the source is also being lied about, and the lie is further compounded with lying 'analysis'. In the case of the E.coli lie Avery claimed that the fictitious greater contamination of organic food was because organic food is grown in raw manure, when the truth is that organic production standards in the USA and everywhere else expressly prohibit this. Organic production standards are legally enforceable. If a consumer ever found raw manure on an organic product they (or the state) could sue the grower, and if the case were proven damages and/or compensation would apply. A consumer would have no such comeback if poisoned via manure on a non-organic product, or by toxic E.coli traced back to its usual farm source – a feedlot where cattle are packed shoulder to shoulder and stand for days in raw manure.

Avery's lies about organic food are a prime illustration of the old adage ‘A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on'. I have seen Avery's lies (all of the above) propagated in the most unexpected places by the most unexpected people. For example, in the correspondence columns of the Christchurch Press by a member of the philosophy department of the University of Canterbury. (I could probably explain how this happened, but don't wish to bore readers interested in agriculture with academic absurdities.)

Culturally-induced ignorance occurs because people prefer to believe lies which fit in with their existing world-view. Lies propagated by a peer group with the same world-view are taken at face value as the truth. This was unfortunate but perhaps not too harmful in the days before lying was transformed into an industry by public relations corporations and those who hire them. These days – beware the menace of Denis and his ilk.

Climate change and food aid – the no snow show connection

Too much snow used to mean too little food for people in cool climates. 
These days, in the energy-intensive global snow tourism industry, too little snow means workers depend on food charity.

 Ski fields in the South Island of New Zealand have traditionally opened for the season on the first weekend of June (even though there has usually been only just enough snow for skiing at that time). Queenstown, the resort town at the centre of the major southern ski-fields, schedules an annual ten day winter festival at the end of June, which includes snow-based activities.

They did not take place this year. With this month tracking to be the warmest June on record, there's still no natural snow down south, and it has been too warm to use the (energy and water intensive) snow-making machines.

No snow = no work = no pay = no food for nearly a thousand seasonal ski-field and related services workers, about half of whom flew into New Zealand at the beginning of June to take up their jobs. The only foreigners eligible for unemployment relief payments are Australians, so foreign workers from the rest of the world are now dependent on charity food parcel handouts from the Salvation Army and local businesses to eat, or free lunches and dinners put on by the companies which will pay them – when the snow comes.

Snow tourism, wherever it takes place, is heavily dependent on fossil fuel energy, and hence a high emitter of CO². Thus it appears to be actively contributing to its own demise, in the same manner as fossil-fuel dependent agriculture. The food insecurity of the ski industry workers is thankfully temporary – this year – but just how sustainable is any industry that contributes to climate change?

E.cology coli

Cattle faeces can contain the highly toxic E.coli strain O157:H7. Without good hygienic practices in processing meat and producing and packing vegetables it can get into the human food supply, with potentially fatal consequences.

I have been swotting up the Wikipedia entry on E.coli, and reading an excellent article by scientists Valeria Souza, Amanda Castillo and Luis Eguiarte on 'The Evolutionary Ecology of Escherichia coli' to make sure I understand how this incredible little organism works, and why it is able to develop new (and virulent) strains so easily. Basically, it is one of the most diverse species of bacteria on the planet. There are lots of strains or sub-species, only 20% of the E.coli genome is common to all those strains, some strains have more genes than others, and some genes (up to 25% of the total) can be unique to a particular strain. (By contrast, the human species has 99% of its genes in common.)

It is easy for E. coli to be so diverse because it has three means of reproduction available to it - mutation, gene duplication and horizontal transfer of genes. It is this last characteristic which has made it useful as a tool for genetic engineering purposes, and it is also believed to be the way that the very toxic E. coli strain O157:H7 got to be that way.

It helps explain how merely nasty strains of E.coli can suddenly become super-toxic, if the 'wrong' genes are transferred, and also how E.coli strains can quickly develop antibiotic resistance (as many of them have). This is a biology which humans can't beat, so if we are going to protect ourselves from ever more deadly E.coli outbreaks in future we have to be more aware of these characteristics of the species, and pay closer attention to making it harder for more toxic strains to develop, multiply and move around.

Jeff Benedict, the author of Poisoned: The True Story of the Deadly E. Coli Outbreak That Changed the Way Americans Eat (which focuses on the 1993 E.coli O157:H7 outbreak in the USA which killed four children and made hundreds very ill after they ate tainted hamburger meat) wrote about 'The Next Outbreak' in the New York Times on June 4. He says that the way to protect Americans from more such outbreaks (which keep continuing and can now be traced to vegetables as well as meat) is to enforce mandatory government inspection and testing of raw foods. Hence he is glad that ''In December, [2010] Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act, a landmark law that goes a long way to improving food safety in the United States through mandatory recalls, stricter inspections and better resources for tracking the sources of outbreaks.''

However, he says ''...so far nothing has happened because Congress hasn’t provided money for the Food and Drug Administration to enforce the law. '' He also says that ''The most important part of the law includes stronger regulations on food imports. Only 1 percent of them are now inspected. Yet imported cucumbers, tomatoes and leafy greens are the most likely suspects behind the current outbreak.''

Is a government inspection system the best or the only way to protect consumers from toxic forms of E.coli? There are lots of downsides to such a system. It is very expensive to ensure that sufficient numbers of inspectors get to every meat processing and vegetable packing facility and every importing warehouse regularly, and that scientists keep testing foods regularly. Who should pay for this? Why should taxpayers subsidise corporations which don't or won't include food safety in their production standards? Isn't food safety a basic cost of being in the food trade? Shouldn't the food businesses be paying whatever it costs to keep toxic E. coli strains out of our food? Yet can such corporations be trusted to maintain suitable safety standards without public oversight?

Raw food 'safety' regulations can also penalise small, artisan producers who are unable or unwilling to meet the standards set by government bureaucrats to ensure that mass-produced industrial food is not contaminated. In New Zealand free-range egg producers have been put out of business because it is too expensive (as well as being silly and unnecessary) to install the expensive hygiene technologies required by battery farms (which are disease-breeding grounds). Thus perfectly safe and environmentally-friendly food sold on local markets is penalised by the state, while long-distance industrial food (degraded at best and dangerous at worst) is given state sanction and support.

Vehicles which are inherently unsafe can not be made safer by being inspected and tested more often. The same goes for food systems. Mass production and corporate concentration are central features of the industrial food system. They  will always undermine the safety of what is produced this way, and in so doing they will always compromise public health.

 

E.xploitation coli – an utterly predictable outbreak of a new disease

 Produce on the Pak Thai stall at the Matakana Farmers' Market was grown less than 5 km from the market by the stall-holders/farm-owners.
Exploitation-free, disease-free and really fresh - what other kind of good food is there?





Yesterday the World Health Organisation announced that the E.coli outbreak currently affecting Europe, and now believed responsible for at least eighteen deaths and hundreds of serious illnesses, is a very rare strain which has never before created an outbreak of the disease in humans. It is more toxic and damaging than any previous known strains (some of which, such as E. coli O157:H7 were already capable of causing death and debilitating illnesses).

Although the outbreak first started in northern Germany, the finger of blame for the cause was at first pointed at organic cucumbers imported from Spain. Journalists and even scientists (who should know better, yet I heard a British one doing it on New Zealand's Radio National this morning) repeated the lie (originally propagated by American corporate farming propagandist Dennis Avery) that organic produce is a prime source E.coli contamination, supposedly because organic farmers use raw manure, including human excrement, as fertiliser. (They do not; the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements' standards, which are used as a best practice benchmark for national-level organic standards – explicitly prohibit the use of human excrement in fertilisers used on crops intended for human consumption in ordinary circumstances).

Derek Hargreaves, a British cucumber grower writing in The Guardian on June 1, stated that uncut cucumbers were actually quite hard to contaminate. He did say it was possible that contamination could have occurred on the farm due to

''...someone going to the toilet without washing their hands afterwards, or someone handling animals and then preparing food without washing their hands.'' He then said that ''Those risks can be minimised by being vigilant. Hand-washing before growers enter the crop, coupled with the use of hospital-style alcohol gel hand sanitisers, are these days used to help protect the consumer. These precautions are used in the growing houses and also in the grading and packing areas, so that the produce that is sent out is clean and wholesome.''

This may well be the practice followed by ethical cucumber growers such as Mr Hargreaves, but in the south of Spain where a good deal of the fresh produce consumed in Europe these days is produced, the workers are not even provided with proper toilets or washing facilities, let alone sanitising gels. An investigation and film of working and living conditions for migrant greenhouse workers in Spain released in February this year found that migrant workers from Africa are living in shacks made of old boxes and plastic sheeting, without sanitation or access to drinking water, and were being paid wages that are routinely less than half the legal minimum wage. ''The situation of migrants working in the tomato, pepper, cucumber and courgette farms of Almeria is so desperate that the Red Cross has been handing out free food to thousands of them.''

This desperate situation has come about because of the rise of industrial horticulture on a massive scale. From the 1980s there has been a shift in emphasis in the global food trade towards fresh fruit and vegetables, and new transformations of fruit and vegetables (e.g. pasteurised packaged juices and frozen juice concentrates). It has also become commonplace to truck fresh produce across continents (from California to New York, from the south of Spain to the north of England), to ship it across the world (from New Zealand to Canada), and even to fly it from Africa to Europe. Like the plantation commodity crops of the nineteenth century (and today), most of this produce is grown in extensive monocultures, in fields or latterly in greenhouses which may cover thousands of hectares. (1) Unlike the nineteenth century crops of fresh produce, the field and greenhouse crops of today are grown with the use of heavy applications of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides, on soil which is often over-worked and exhausted. (In the greenhouses, soil is usually dispensed with all together, and plants are propped up in a sterile growing medium and fed pure chemicals.) The work is mostly done by labour which is far too cheap, and has little or no protection from the exploitation and abuse which is rife in the industry.

The level of exploitation in Europe has been documented by Jean-Jacques Bozonnet of Le Monde in ''Italy's harvest of hypocrisy'' (2)  and by Felicity Lawrence of The Guardian in numerous articles, including ''The dark side of the Christmas orange harvest ''and ''Bitter Harvest''. (3)  In the USA a history of exploiting immigrant labour in the food chain keeps repeating itself. This has major health consequences for consumers of the meat and produce processed and picked by those workers. Poor hygiene on the farm is believed to be the main reason for the increase in illnesses and deaths from food-borne Hepatitis A in the USA in recent years, (4) while lack of hygiene and poor work practices generally in produce-packing and meat-processing plants seems to be the main reason for the increasingly frequent outbreaks of the potentially fatal and often disabling form of E. coli (E. coli O157:H7) infections in the USA. (5)

This version of E. coli is believed to cause over 73,000 cases of severe illness in the US every year, and some 60 deaths. (6)  Small children who become ill from it may suffer from a permanent and severe kidney disease. Although usually contracted from eating contaminated minced meat, the most recent major outbreak in the US in 2006 (which killed three people) was from spinach and lettuce which had been in contact with soil and water contaminated with E. coli O157:H7. (7)

In New Zealand E. coli is not such a problem, with fewer than two cases per 100,000 per year, and only one known fatality. This is probably because New Zealand does not have confinement feeding operations for beef cattle. Nor, until recently, did New Zealand have migrant labour working in the horticultural industry. Now that it does, bad infectious diseases like typhoid have already come into the country via migrant labourers, and one wonders if new and worse strains of other diseases can be far behind.

 

Whenever and wherever animals are subjected to overcrowding, poor sanitation, under-feeding, over-working and high stress levels (be they battery-farmed pigs or chickens, soldiers in trenches, or exploited migrant workers in squatter camps) disease outbreaks are inevitable, and the optimum conditions for the mutation of existing diseases into new diseases, or more virulent forms, are created.

In January this year there was a 'dioxin scandal' in Germany when up to 3,000 tonnes of an animal feed additive contaminated with this highly toxic substance were imported. In February 2011, when the Slow Food Movement founder Carlos Petrini was interviewed by Welt Online, he said that Europeans must be prepared to pay for the cost of food produced by environmentally-friendly and ethical means ''Sonst werden wir bald Schlimmeres als Dioxinfleisch essen.'' (Or else we will soon be eating something much worse than dioxin-meat.)

Only three months later, he was proven right.  Why? Because, according to Petrini, ''Der größte Fehler, den wir gemacht haben, war, die industrielle Logik auf die Landwirtschaft zu übertragen.'' (The biggest mistake that we have made was to apply the logic of industry to agriculture.) And it is also so unnecessary. Right now, all around Germany in home gardens and market gardens, healthy cucumbers and other fresh vegetables are being grown sustainably and ethically, and recipes for tasty salads are being shared in person and on-line. Sure beats eating up your (imported) greens - and dying.

 * * * * * * * * * * *

1  The 26,000 ha of greenhouses in the Almeria region of Spain are the largest grouping of greenhouses in the world. Ironically for a production method which is so resource and water intensive and polluting that it is destroying the health of the region, such a huge amount of white polythene has a bizarre climate change upside. It is so large that it creates an albedo effect, reflecting the sun's rays to such an amount that Almeria, unlike the rest of Spain, is not experiencing the warming due to global 'greenhouse gas' emissions that affect the rest of the country. See http://climatesci.org/2008/10/03/surface-temperature-cooling-trends-and-negative-radiative-forcing-due-to-land-use-change-toward-greenhouse-farming-in-southeastern-spain-by-campra-et-al-2008/

2 Published in English in the Guardian Weekly, October 13-19, 2006, p. 17

3 Available atwww.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/dec/19/eu.ethicalliving.

4 See

www.about-hepatitis.com/hepatitis_outbreaks/news/us-reports-problems-at-4-onion-companies/ for one of the most severe examples of this, and other posts at

www.about-hepatitis.com/ for more information on this subject.

5 See www.about-ecoli.com/ecoli_sources for details on this. See also Eric Schlosser's 2002 book Fast Food Nation for the connections between the exploitation of migrant labour in the American meat processing industry and the contamination of meat, and how the failure to protect workers is also endangering consumers.

6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escherichia_coli_O157:H7

7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_United_States_E._coli_outbreak

Should the Gates Foundation stick to honest horse manure?

Horse manure ready to be added to my compost bin. A much cheaper and more sustainable source of nitrogen than fertiliser synthesized from natural gas or genetically-engineered into plants.

In September 2010 the Gates Foundation bought a big tranche of Monsanto shares (500,000 of them, worth US$23 million). The Guardian's environment reporter John Vidal seemed surprised by this, but groups such as AGRA Watch and La Via Campesina (which have been tracking the Gates Foundation's record of putting its money where its friends' mouths - and wallets - are) were not surprised, or amused.

I am currently analysing exactly what the Gates Foundation spends its money on when it claims to be 'investing in African agriculture', and finding that most of it goes to replicating the monopolistic market model favoured by Microsoft and Monsanto in the rest of the world Africa. More on that to come on this blog, but meanwhile it is worth putting on record that six months after investing heavily in Monsanto the Gates Foundation hosted a meeting in Seattle for twenty researchers working on genetically engineering cereals [1] (such as wheat, maize and rice) to fix nitrogen in the way that leguminous plants (such as peas and beans) are able to do, via a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria.

Why would the researchers want to create nitrogen-fixing cereals? The main reason they give is to reduce the amount of nitrogenous fertiliser currently used to make cereal crops give good yields. This would be a great thing to do, because nitrogenous pollution of water, soil and air (nitrous oxide is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide) is one of the huge downsides of industrial farming. It is now causing damage at a planetary level, from its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and hence climate change, and its role in contributing to dead zones in the planet's oceans. Writing in Science on 'Spreading Dead Zones and Consequences for Marine Ecosystems' [2] Robert J. Diaz and Rutger Rosenberg say

''Dead zones in the coastal oceans have spread exponentially since the 1960s and have serious consequences for ecosystem functioning. The formation of dead zones has been exacerbated by the increase in primary production and consequent worldwide coastal eutrophication fueled by riverine runoff of fertilizers and the burning of fossil fuels. Enhanced primary production results in an accumulation of particulate organic matter, which encourages microbial activity and the consumption of dissolved oxygen in bottom waters. Dead zones have now been reported from more than 400 systems, affecting a total area of more than 245,000 square kilometers, and are probably a key stressor on marine ecosystems.''

Add to this the fact that synthetic nitrogenous fertilisers are steadily rising in price and are due to decrease in availability (because they are made from natural gas, which has almost reached its peak global production level for all time) and you can see why alternatives are urgently needed. But opinion is divided over what kind of alternatives. There are tried and true non-synthetic and non-polluting ways of fixing nitrogen in soil rather than having it run off or gas off.  Leguminous cover crops are the main means. These can provide nutritious fodder for animals while growing, or, when dug in, composted or used as companion plants, become fertiliser for cereals and vegetables. Either way, they improve soil structure, protect soil life, and conserve carbon as well – none of which is achieved by synthetic fertilisers. Properly-composted animal wastes, or animal wastes thinly-spread, also add nitrogen without causing pollution. These are proven methods for achieving sustainable yields, without dead zones and other ghastly downsides. They don't cost much money or require much effort either – clover and lupin seeds are cheap, and easy to grow.

 A blue lupin leguminous cover crop starting to grow in my garden, replacing the nitrogen and other nutrients lost to harvesting a crop of sweetcorn from this patch.

Then there are unproven, high-tech, high-cost and inevitably proprietary and possibly even monopolistic methods, which are being worked on by the researchers funded to meet in Seattle in April by the Gates Foundation.

Investigations into how legumes do their nitrogen-fixing thing, and whether and how it might be transferred to other crops, began in the early 1970s. Ray Dixon, who is currently a professor at the John Innes Centre in Britain, and who was at the Seattle meeting in April, began working on the subject then, [3] and is still working on it forty years later. Disappointingly for Gates' mates at Monsanto, it seems that the researchers are still nowhere near being able to engineer cereal seeds which would reliably fix nitrogen. Another Seattle meeting attendee, Giles Oldroyd, summed up where the science was at in a short paper, 'How close are we to nitrogen-fixing cereals?' written with his fellow scientist Myriam Charpentier in 2010. They concluded that there are still lots of things that the scientists don't know about how legumes do what they do, and similarly how the nitrogen-fixing bacteria do what they do – let alone how to genetically engineer the relevant capacities into cereals. Despite all this ignorance, they are nevertheless certain that ''...the essential role that nitrogen fixation will play in future food production necessitates a priority to start the process of cereal engineering...''

Oldroyd and Charpentier are right that nitrogen fixation will play an important role in future food production, as it has in all past food production. They are wrong that the world has a problem with nitrogen fixation that can only be solved by hideously expensive, convoluted, and slow genetic engineering means. Civilisations which have lasted for hundreds and even thousands of years have been built on naturally-occurring nitrogen sources which do not create pollution if properly used. Even a source as humble as llama dung, which powered the Inca civilisation for hundreds of years.

In any case, as Charles Merfield points out, [4] what would be the point in genetically engineering crops to have them fix an atmospheric nutrient which is not in short supply, only to run out of essential mineral nutrients (such as phosphorus and potassium), the supply of which is limited. These minerals are currently incorporated into commercial fertilisers. Like the nitrogen in these fertilisers, much is wasted and ends up washing into waterways and contributing to pollution and dead zone problems. Meanwhile the phosphorus that could be recycled from human wastes literally goes down the drain for lack of suitable large-scale collection and reuse methods, while the separation of crop and animal farming into large-scale monocultures of one or the other means that there is literally no cross-feeding and fertilisation of one to the other, as in the sustainable farming methods of the past. 

If the Gates Foundation really wants to help the world grow food sustainably, it should be funding scientists who are studying this subject and educators who can take it out to the fields where the farmers are, not laboratory-based gene jockeys. Until it does so, there is only one way to describe its supposed aim of improving crop yields sustainably  - horse manure. 

 Notes

 1  See Andy Coghlan, 'Food crops to fix fertiliser from air', New Scientist, 7 May 2011, Issue 2811, pp 8-9

2  Science, 15 August 2008: Vol. 321 no. 589, pp. 926-929

 

3 ''In 1971, Ray Dixon, at the then Agricultural Research Council Unit of Nitrogen Fixation, University of Sussex, successfully transferred the genes responsible for nitrogen fixation by Klebsiella to Escherichia coli, so creating a new genus of nitrogen-fixing bacteria. His experiment first raised the serious possibility of using genetic manipulation to generate new kinds of nitrogen-fixing crop plants.'' (From 'Fixing the nitrogen fixers ' by John Postgate, New Scientist, 3 February 1990, Issue 1702.)

4 'No long-term fix' New Scientist, 25 May 2011, Issue 2814

.

From iron rice bowl to exploding watermelons

My organically-grown watermelons were never in any danger

of exploding this year.

Food security has always been a prime concern of the Chinese state, from ancient times to the present. When I visited China as part of a New Zealand student group tour in 1974 I was impressed by two symbols of how important – and precarious – food security is in such a populous country.

At a large communal farm we were shown the emergency grain store – a huge barn stacked to the ceiling with sacks of rice. In the museum at the tombs of the Ming Dynasty emperors, alongside the opulent clothing and other artefacts of the imperial families, the typical possessions of those who built the tombs were displayed. These included a small china bowl, broken in three pieces but wired together so that it was still able to hold the meagre meals of its owner, who was too poor to buy a new bowl.

No wonder the term 'iron rice bowl' was later coined to refer to guaranteed, well-paid employment – it can't be broken and it never loses grain. Although 'iron rice bowl' jobs (and welfare supports) have been slashed in recent years in China, and many people are suffering as a result, overall food quantity remains the concern of the state at the highest level. Stocks of grain are regularly checked, and Chinese companies are buying and leasing land and farms as far away as Africa and New Zealand in order to produce food for China.

But while quantity is assured this way, the quality varies wildly, from excellent organically-grown food through to utterly toxic chemical-contaminated food. The toxic food ranges from the tragic (the children killed and maimed by melamine-contaminated milk formulas) to the ludicrous, such as the exploding watermelons which were reported widely this week. This has been attributed to the misuse of forchlorfenuron, a growth accelerator, sprayed on the melons during wet weather (although other reports say that the weather conditions themselves are to blame). Certainly all the sprayed melons started exploding, and could not be eaten by humans.

In the centre of Beijing in July 1974 I was struck by the huge watermelons being sold on the streets. They were stacked on the footpaths, in rows up to five metres long and piles about a metre high. At the end of each row a vendor with a chopping block and chopper cut them to the desired size. A big slice for quenching thirst in the summer heat, or half a melon to take home for the family. I don't expect that happens any more, even if there are still melons fit to eat in China. There are probably 'health' regulations to prevent it. China, like everywhere else, puts the industrial cart before the healthy horse when it comes to food safety and quality.

Industrial kiwifruit - the typhoid connection

Non-industrial kiwifruit growing 
and picking at home. 











  Typhoid fever is a very unpleasant bacterial disease, which if not treated quickly can be fatal. It is prevalent in parts of the world which have poor sanitation systems, and poor public health systems which do not monitor for the disease and act quickly to control outbreaks. In the nineteenth century New Zealand and Australia were such countries; in the twenty-first century our Pacific Island neighbours still suffer from a medium prevalence of the disease (10-100 cases per 100,000 people) every year. (These and other facts about the global prevalence of typhoid can be found in the WHO report The global burden of typhoid fever.)

Kiwifruit are a very pleasant fruit, with their hairy skins concealing sweet green or gold flesh, which is (if properly grown) highly nutritious. The kiwifruit plant (Actinidia spp), is native to southern China, and its seeds were first brought to New Zealand in the early twentieth century. A New Zealand cultivar, Hayward, was developed in the 1920s, commercial growing began in the Bay of Plenty in the 1930s, and the first exports of kiwifruit left NZ for England in 1952.

At this stage the fruit was still known by the name first used in New Zealand – Chinese gooseberry. Its name was changed to kiwifruit in 1959 when exports to North America began. The exporters wanted a distinctive name and were told by an American importer to stay away from 'melonettes' and anything with 'berry' in the name, because melon and berries attracted high import duties in the USA at that time. Since trade was the aim of the game, kiwifruit they became.

But whatever they were called, who would buy this unfamiliar fruit? In 1962, over thirty years before US exporters began their government-subsidised marketing campaign for out-of-season American stone fruit in New Zealand, importers and NZ exporters collaborated to create a market for kiwifruit in the US and elsewhere. They kept at it for years, enlisting the help of chefs, government ministers, and anyone else who would promote the fruit, until by the late 1970s kiwifruit was a boom industry. The price of kiwifruit-growing land in the Bay of Plenty reached an all-time high, commercial kiwifruit growing expanded to other parts of New Zealand, and Queen St farmers¹ were rushing to put their money into kiwifruit orchards.

The kiwifuit bonanza bubble burst in the usual way for the usual reasons in the late 1980s, and quite a few Queen St farmers became, if not exactly shirtless, then at least no longer able to buy designer shirts. What was now an industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars in export trade was restructured in 1988 with the establishment of the New Zealand Kiwifruit Marketing Board, which was given monopoly powers to distribute and market kiwifruit everywhere except Australia. In 2000 it adopted the corporate identity ZESPRI International Ltd, and it is this entity which on May 13 announced that its export markets need not fear that they would be receiving fruit contaminated with typhoid, because

''ZESPRI has a highly sophisticated supply chain with quality traceability systems and this has allowed us to quickly identify the location of fruit and isolate it. As a result around 100,000 trays of export kiwifruit have been withdrawn from the supply chain and options to dispose of it are being worked through.''

Those 100,000 trays represented less than 0.1 percent of the 2011 exports. ZESPRI expects to export over 100 million trays of kiwifruit this year worth around NZ$ 1 billion. Nevertheless, it was still NZ$800,000 down the drain. How and why did it happen?

The short answer is that a worker infected with typhoid may have touched those fruit. The long answer is: since 2007 New Zealand has had an official strategy (the Recognised Seasonal Employer scheme) of recruiting foreign labour, mostly from the Pacific Islands, for the horticulture and viticulture industries. Around 8,000 workers are currently coming to NZ every year for these purposes. The workers are allowed to work seven months in every eleven, and mostly pick NZ's big export crops - kiwifruit, apples and grapes. (The grapes are exported as wine.)

A 2010 University of Waikato/World Bank study found that per capita incomes of households sending workers were approximately 40% higher than for matched households without seasonal workers. The study found that those receiving this income were more likely to make dwelling improvements and make major purchases of durable goods, while in Tonga older teenagers in seasonal worker households were more likely to be in secondary school. So it is a good scheme, then?

For increasing the number of television sets in Pacific Island homes, very likely. For making a real and lasting difference to the health and wellbeing of the Pacific Islands, probably not. For the 'public good' part of these workers' wages, i.e. the taxes they pay to provide public goods and services, such as sanitation systems and public health systems, stays in New Zealand and benefits New Zealanders, while the sanitation and public health standards in their home towns and villages in the Pacific remain low for lack of funding. Hence, typhoid fever is still a common disease in the Pacific, and it comes to New Zealand from those who live or travel there.

But this economic opportunity for (some) Islanders and threat to (some) New Zealanders may be short-lived in any case. In December 2009 the inventor of automated robotic kiwifruit picking and packing machines, Dr Rory Flemmer, was named engineering innovator of the year at the New Zealand Engineering Excellence Awards in Wellington. These machines can outpick and outpack any humans in any given hour – and they can do it 24/7. The system was developed with Zespri, which was concerned that a lack of labour to pick and pack kiwifruit was hurting the industry. And machines don't get typhoid fever...

...now, what was the point of kiwifruit again? A fantastically nutritious and delicious addition to the winter diet (if grown locally and organically) – or a billion dollar industry with some very big ecological and social downsides?²

1. Queen St farmers are businesspeople and investors who invest in primary industries but don't do any farm work. Queen St is the main street in Auckland.
2. Such as the heaviest use of synthetic pesticides and heavy use of non-sustainable fertilisers.

The unfair trade in fresh produce

 

Are you paying a fair price for your food?

 [First published in Organic NZ, May/June 2011]

 Home-grown apricots are sweeter than those imported out-of-season 
from California - in every way.

In the olden days (before the 1980s) if you wanted to buy table grapes you waited until grape season, then walked or cycled to the nearest greengrocer. There you found grapes which were grown in New Zealand, and went on sale the day after picking.

Those grapes probably cost more in real terms than grapes cost today, and they were only available for two months of the year. On the plus side they were much fresher (and hence tastier and more nutritious), you didn’t have to own a car and pay more than two dollars for a litre of petrol to drive to a supermarket to get them, and they did not have a disgracefully large carbon and chemical footprint, acquired as they were grown and fumigated in California and then shipped right across the Pacific Ocean.

Hidden costs of cheap imports

 

How can grapes imported from California now be cheaper than grapes grown in New Zealand then? There are two main ways. Firstly, the grape-buyer is not being charged the full environmental costs of their energy- and chemical-intensive production and distribution. Secondly, the grape-buyer is not paying the full social costs of their production. The people who pick and pack the grapes, and care for the vines, are not being paid fairly or treated fairly.

Underpaid workers

 

Even organic fruit growers in California, who are protecting the environment and their workers from especially nasty chemicals (like methyl bromide, used in strawberry production), may not be paying their workers more than the current Californian minimum wage of US$8 per hour (NZ$10.96 – the New Zealand minimum wage in April 2011 was NZ$13). Nor will they be paying any overtime. Not even after a 10-hour day, or a 60-hour, six-day week. The average wage in the industry has dropped to $US5 an hour, with workers earning a little more by being paid a piece rate for the amount of fruit they pick. For grapes this is as low as 1–5 cents per pound. Pruning grapes is also done on a piece rate, which means a long day to earn as little as US$80. Wages for farm workers are so low that they are more than twice as likely as other Americans to be food insecure (45%) and receiving food stamps (48%).¹

Working conditions

 

When Californian fruit is being picked over the hottest months of the year field temperatures often exceed 35º C. The fruit is rushed straight to cooling sheds to chill down before being put into refrigerated trucks for distribution, but there is no cooled place for the field workers to have their one statutory 30-minute meal break of the day (after five hours work, which often begins at 6 am). Nor do most employers provide drinking water, or shaded places for breaks. In 2008 two workers died from heatstroke in vineyards in California. One victim was a 37-year-old man and the other a pregnant 17-year-old.

How can the Californian fruitpickers (tens of thousands of them) be so badly exploited? The majority are migrant workers, mostly from southern Mexico and Guatemala. They are not in the USA legally, and many speak neither English nor Spanish. On their half-broken backs a global industry of produce exports from California worth hundreds of billions of dollars has been built in the last twenty years.

Creating demand in NZ for Californian fruit

 

California has one million acres of vineyards, with 48% of this acreage used for wine grapes, 40% for raisins and 12% for table grapes. Most of this production leaves California, either to the rest of the US or the rest of the world. New Zealand started importing fresh produce from the US in 1996. In 1999 New Zealand hosted the annual meeting of APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation – a US-dominated regional trade bloc). This featured a special reception for produce importers hosted by various American agencies, showcasing Californian grapes and stone fruit. The following year the agricultural attaché at the US Embassy in Wellington, David Young, and the New Zealand representative of the California Table Grape Commission and the California Tree Fruit Agreement, Lisa Cork, reported on the US Department of Agriculture’s website that ‘The table grape market is ripe for picking; New Zealand does not produce significant quantities.’² New Zealand’s purchases of US grapes in 1999 had increased by 25% to 3,370 tons, valued at $5.7 million, which represented a 52% market share for the US.

Stone fruit imports and sales (mainly nectarines and peaches) were also up (over 1,250 tonnes and $1.8 million dollars) and Young and Cork attributed this to ‘Effective trade education and market promotion work by the CTFA, backed by Market Access Program funds.’ The US Market Access Program ‘…uses funds from the US Department of Agriculture’s Commodity Credit Corporation to help US producers, exporters, private companies, and other trade organizations finance promotional activities for US agricultural products … Activities financed include consumer promotions, market research, technical assistance, and trade servicing.’³ Young and Cork attributed the rise in sales to the (US government-subsidised) California Tree Fruit group conducting consumer awareness programmes in New Zealand, beginning in 1998. These were designed to create demand for summer fruits in winter. They included two years of national advertising, plus in-store demonstrations, recipe leaflets and various public relations efforts.

So the American government, and American agribusiness, has plenty of money to spend encouraging New Zealanders to buy imported fruit out of season, but not enough money to pay a fair wage to seasonal workers who pick the fruit, or provide them with decent working conditions. This sad state of affairs is not confined to the US, but is worldwide.

Campaign against cheap fresh produce imports 

 

In Switzerland last year the Platform for Sustainable Social Agriculture and a coalition of parliamentarians launched a protest campaign against cheap fresh produce imports. They said that huge industrial farms in southern Spain and Italy were employing illegal immigrants in intolerable conditions. Wages were as low €20 (NZ$38.76) for a 14-hour day, and living conditions were also terrible.⁴ This has been well-documented by the British journalist Felicity Lawrence,⁵ while the American writer Eric Schlosser has exposed gross exploitation in the processing and retail side of the US food industry as well.⁶ It is happening in New Zealand too, with several successful prosecutions for people trafficking and exploitation of fruit pickers to date.⁷

Eating imported produce out of season makes no environmental sense, and is hideously exploitative of people. In many cases Third World farmers can no longer make a decent living growing staple crops at home because unfair trade rules, and huge production and export subsidies given to American and European agribusiness companies, mean that they can’t compete in their home market. Via Campesina, the worldwide federation of peasant and small farmer organisations, has a core demand: ‘Take agriculture out of the WTO’ (World Trade Organisation).⁸ If you want food to be fair for everyone, ending the trade in unfair food is a good place to start.

Sources and footnotes

1. These and other facts about wages and conditions for American farm workers are from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s November 2010 publication Injustice on our plates (www.splcenter.org/get-informed/publications/injustice-on-our-plates/food-industries) and from the Food First publications Migrant Farmworkers: America’s New Plantation Workers (Food First Backgrounder Spring 2001, 10:2), and Food Workers-Food Justice: Linking food, labour and immigrant rights (Food First Backgrounder Summer 2010, 16:2).
2. www.fas.usda.gov/info/agexporter/2000/July/usfruit.html
3. www.fas.usda.gov/mos/programs/map.asp
4. www.freshplaza.com/news_detail.asp?id=62144
5. Felicity Lawrence, Not on the Label, London, Penguin Books, 2004
6. Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The dark side of the all-American meal, New York, Perennial, 2002
7. Tony Wall, ‘Slaving for a living’, Sunday Star Times, 11 January 2008
8. viacampesina.org