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The Food Issue - An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief - Michael Pollan - NYTimes.com

...Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change.

Tags: food, diet, meat, health, healthcare, agriculture, pollution, climate_crisis, energy, homeland_security, government, regulation, reform, technology, information, infrastructure on 2008-10-12 -All Annotations (17) -About

more fromwww.nytimes.com

several steps the government can take to nurture this market and make local foods more affordable. Here are a few:
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- four season farmers' markets, agricultural enterprise zones, local meat-inspection corps, establish a strategic grain reserve, regionalize federal food procurement, create a federal definition of "food", benefit programs that provide incentive to support farmers' markets and CSAs
  posted by taryn930 on 2008-10-12
the image of stewardship of the land, of self-reliance and of making the most of local sunlight to feed one’s family and community.
When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the U.S.D.A., which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.)
The F.D.A. should require that every packaged-food product include a second calorie count, indicating how many calories of fossil fuel went into its production. Oil is one of the most important ingredients in our food, and people ought to know just how much of it they’re eating. The government should also throw its support behind putting a second bar code on all food products that, when scanned either in the store or at home (or with a cellphone), brings up on a screen the whole story and pictures of how that product was produced: in the case of crops, images of the farm and lists of agrochemicals used in its production; in the case of meat and dairy, descriptions of the animals’ diet and drug regimen, as well as live video feeds of the CAFO where they live and, yes, the slaughterhouse where they die. The very length and complexity of the modern food chain breeds a culture of ignorance and indifference among eaters. Shortening the food chain is one way to create more conscious consumers, but deploying technology to pierce the veil is another.
the bigger and more global the trade in food, the more vulnerable the system is to catastrophe. The best way to protect our food system against such threats is obvious: decentralize it.
The revival of farming in America, which of course draws on the abiding cultural power of our agrarian heritage, will pay many political and economic dividends. It will lead to robust economic renewal in the countryside. And it will generate tens of millions of new “green jobs,” which is precisely how we need to begin thinking of skilled solar farming: as a vital sector of the 21st-century post-fossil-fuel economy.
in the same way we now need to learn how to run an industrial economy without cheap fossil fuel, we have no choice but to find out whether sustainable agriculture can produce enough food
The U.S.D.A. estimates that Americans throw out 14 percent of the food they buy; much more is wasted by retailers, wholesalers and institutions.
Argentina. There, in a geography roughly comparable to that of the American farm belt, farmers have traditionally employed an ingenious eight-year rotation of perennial pasture and annual crops: after five years grazing cattle on pasture (and producing the world’s best beef), farmers can then grow three years of grain without applying any fossil-fuel fertilizer.
First, your administration’s food policy must strive to provide a healthful diet for all our people; this means focusing on the quality and diversity (and not merely the quantity) of the calories that American agriculture produces and American eaters consume. Second, your policies should aim to improve the resilience, safety and security of our food supply. Among other things, this means promoting regional food economies both in America and around the world. And lastly, your policies need to reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change.
ammonium nitrate being the main ingredient of both bombs and chemical fertilizer — and the conversion of nerve-gas research to pesticides.
It is no small thing for an American to be able to go into a fast-food restaurant and to buy a double cheeseburger, fries and a large Coke for a price equal to less than an hour of labor at the minimum wage — indeed, in the long sweep of history, this represents a remarkable achievement.
It must be recognized that the current food system — characterized by monocultures of corn and soy in the field and cheap calories of fat, sugar and feedlot meat on the table — is not simply the product of the free market. Rather, it is the product of a specific set of government policies that sponsored a shift from solar (and human) energy on the farm to fossil-fuel energy.
Nations that opened their markets to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from previous administrations as well as the World Bank and the I.M.F.) lost so many farmers that they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington (like your predecessor’s precipitous embrace of biofuels) and on Wall Street. They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting trade barriers
While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet.
Four of the top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer.
chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food.

On The Edge: The Femicide in Ciudad Juarez

On The Edge is a documentary covering the brutal murders of hundreds of poor young women in the border town of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico

Tags: film, mexico, women, drugs, organized_crime, crime, corruption, homeland_security, border, immigrant on 2008-08-19 -All Annotations (0) -About

more frompolitical.detritus.net

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China's All-Seeing Eye : Naomi Klein

Tags: china, 911, homeland_security, communism, capitalism, olympics, microsoft, google, civil_liberties on 2008-08-08 and saved by10 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.rollingstone.com

China today, epitomized by Shenzhen's transition from mud to
megacity in 30 years, represents a new way to organize society.
Sometimes called "market Stalinism," it is a potent hybrid of the
most powerful political tools of authoritarian communism —
central planning, merciless repression, constant surveillance
— harnessed to advance the goals of global capitalism.
security cameras are just one part of a much broader
high-tech surveillance and censorship program known in China as
"Golden Shield." The end goal is to use the latest people-tracking
technology — thoughtfully supplied by American giants
increased unrest — a process aided by access to
cellphones and the Internet — represents more than a security
problem for the leaders in Beijing. It threatens their whole model
of command-and-control capitalism. China's rapid economic growth
has relied on the ability of its rulers to raze villages and move
mountains to make way for the latest factory towns and shopping
malls. If the people living on those mountains use blogs and text
messaging to launch a mountain-people's-rights uprising with each
new project, and if they link up with similar uprisings in other
parts of the country, China's dizzying expansion could grind to a
halt.
130 million
migrants roaming the country looking for work. By 2025, it is
projected that this "floating" population will swell to more than
350 million.
With its militant protests and mobile population, China
confronts a fundamental challenge. How can it maintain a system
based on two dramatically unequal categories of people: the
winners, who get the condos and cars, and the losers, who do the
heavy labor and are denied those benefits? More urgently, how can
it do this when information technology threatens to link the losers
together into a movement so large it could easily overwhelm the
country's elites?

The answer is Golden Shield. When Tibet erupted in protests
recently, the surveillance system was thrown into its first live
test, with every supposedly liberating tool of the Information Age
— cellphones, satellite television, the Internet —
transformed into a method of repression and control. As soon as the
protests gathered steam, China reinforced its Great Firewall,
when the games begin, much
of the Tibetan movement will be safely behind bars — along
with scores of Chinese journalists, bloggers and human-rights
defenders who have also been trapped in the government's high-tech
web.
The company's reticence to publicize its activities in China
could have something to do with the fact that the relationship
between Yao and L-1 may well be illegal under U.S. law. After the
Chinese government sent tanks into Tiananmen Square in 1989,
Congress passed legislation barring U.S. companies from selling any
products in China that have to do with "crime control or detection
instruments or equipment."
The crackdown in Tibet has set off a wave
of righteous rallies and boycott calls. But it sidesteps the
uncomfortable fact that much of China's powerful surveillance state
is already being built with U.S. and European technology. In
February 2006, a congressional subcommittee held a hearing on "The
Internet in China: A Tool for Freedom or Suppression?" Called on
the carpet were Google (for building a special Chinese search
engine that blocked sensitive material), Cisco (for supplying
hardware for China's Great Firewall), Microsoft (for taking down
political blogs at the behest of Beijing) and Yahoo (for complying
with requests to hand over e-mail-account information that led to
the arrest and imprisonment of a high-profile Chinese journalist,
as well as a dissident who had criticized corrupt officials in
online discussion groups). The issue came up again during the
recent Tibet uproar when it was discovered that both MSN and Yahoo
had briefly put up the mug shots of the "most wanted" Tibetan
protesters on their Chinese news portals.
"If you walk out of this building, you
will be under surveillance in five to six different ways," he says,
staring at me hard. He lets the implication of his words linger in
the air like an unspoken threat. "If you are a law-abiding citizen,
you shouldn't be afraid," he finally adds. "The criminals are the
only ones who should be afraid."
New
York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., are all experimenting with
linking surveillance cameras into a single citywide network. Police
use of surveillance cameras at peaceful demonstrations is now
routine, and the images collected can be mined for "face prints,"
then cross-checked with ever-expanding photo databases.
"Bush helped me get
my vision," he has said. Similarly, when challenged on the fact
that dome cameras are appearing three to a block in Shenzhen and
Guangzhou, Chinese companies respond that their model is not the
East German Stasi but modern-day London.

Human-rights activists are quick to point out that while the
tools are the same, the political contexts are radically different.
The global homeland-security business is
now worth an estimated $200 billion — more than Hollywood and
the music industry combined.