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