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

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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

The beginning of the end

What's wrong with this picture? 

It shows a contemporary dairy farm on the Canterbury Plains, a part of New Zealand not previously used for intensive dairy farming because it is one of the driest parts of the country. It still is – and it is predicted to get even drier as climate change impacts on NZ – but in the past ten years it has experienced an explosion of dairy farming, driven by four key factors.  They are:

(1) the investment of millions of dollars by successive NZ governments into achieving bi-lateral and multilateral trade agreements which remove tariff and other barriers to NZ dairy exports, giving dairy products an advantage over other export commodities;
(2) the absence of strong national and regional policies and programmes to protect fresh-water sources from unsustainable levels of extraction and toxic levels of pollution;
(3) local and national government support for major irrigation schemes which effectively subsidise dairy farming while displacing more sustainable cropping farms and non-irrigated cattle and sheep farming;
(4) the application of high-energy water extraction and distribution technologies.

(Ironically, in Canterbury, the hydro-electricity used to run the huge irrigation booms is derived from rivers which are also being used, or targeted, for irrigation water.)

Back to the picture... Hundreds of cows are plodding from the giant milking shed back to their pastures, using an underpass beneath the road so as not to hold up traffic for an hour or more (or destroy the road surface with their urine and faeces). The milk from these cows is most likely destined to end up some 50 km away, at the Clandeboye dairy factory owned by the world's largest dairy company, Fonterra. There it will mingle with milk brought from as far as 500km away, and it will be dried into milk powder – a process which uses around 150,000 tonnes of coal per year in the Clandeboye plant alone, and makes Fonterra the third largest user of coal in NZ.

No wonder New Zealand can't seem to cap its greenhouse gas emissions, which have risen steadily in the past twenty years, despite making international commitments to cut back to 1990 levels. But it's not just (or even) the fossil fuels used by the expanding dairy industry that are causing this - it's the cows themselves. What they eat (see Grass my ass! Climate-changing cow feeding), and what they excrete. Forty-nine per cent of NZ's greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, with the expanding dairy herd (NZ has one million more dairy cows than people) making the biggest contribution to methane and nitrous oxide emissions. The nitrogen sources (cow urine and faeces) also pollute soil and water when the cows herded together in small spaces. The industrial mindset has 'solutions' to these problems, which all involve tinkering with animals, soils and grass (sometimes using genetic engineering) to change the amount of greenhouse gases given off, and/or the nitrogen absorbed.

This very expensive and complicated way of addressing problems which could easily be fixed by reducing herd numbers and stocking rates to what the land can sustainably support, and also using proven organic management techniques, may fall over when (if ever) the dairy industry has to pay the true environmental cost of its activities, including its greenhouse gas emissions. This is supposed to start happening in NZ in 2015, but on past form I expect to see aerial pig emissions first.

Meanwhile, don't blame the cows – they are victims too, who didn't ask to be treated like senseless machines, let alone be forced to endure the brutality of the euphemistically named 'calf inductions' i.e. late-term abortions to bring the cow into milk sooner, while the premature calf is clubbed to death.

There's one more sad thing to note in the picture. Those tiny plants in the bare soil are all native plants, ones which would have grown in this area (which is close to the foothills of the Southern Alps) over one hundred years ago, before the land was cleared for European-style farming. If they succeed in growing to their full height, they will one day mask the most unsustainable form of natural resource use this area has ever seen. It will be interesting to see if their growth rates are positively affected by the warming of the area due to climate change, or negatively affected by this as well as the greater dryness due to climate change.