Can Organic Cotton Become as Mainstream as Organic Food?

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Author: John Ewoldt | Published on: March 25, 2017

MINNEAPOLIS | Organic cotton textiles register no more than a footnote in the world’s cotton production, but Vishal Naithani wants to change that.

His company, Sustained Organic Living in suburban Minneapolis, selects certified organic cotton grown in India with non-GMO seeds. The products are made using only fair trade labor on the farms and in the factories.

The challenge for Naithani and his company, which is known as Sol Organics, is to be able to create the level of interest among consumers for organic apparel that has been generated for organic food. For now, his chief weapon is price: He aims to price his products significantly lower than his online competitors and on par with high-quality bedding that is not fair trade organic.

“Every family should have access to affordable organic cotton just like they have access to affordable organic food,” he said. “It shouldn’t be only the wealthy who can afford premium products.”

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Market Rejection of GMOs Grows — Four-Year Plan to Topple Toxic Agriculture

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Author: Dr. Joseph Mercola | Published: March 26, 2017 

Our annual GMO Awareness Week is upon us, and in this interview, Ronnie Cummins, founder of the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) details the current state of the opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

We first met about six years ago, when we collaborated to create the direct ballot initiative to label GMOs in California.

A lot has happened since then, including the passing of what’s colloquially known as the Deny Americans the Right to Know (DARK) Act, ironically misnamed “The Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act” — this despite a full 90 percent of consumers supporting mandatory labeling.

The Trump administration has also selected or appointed notorious cheerleaders for GMOs and factory farms to his cabinet — Mike Pompeo as head of the CIA, Sonny Perdue as USDA Secretary, and Rick Perry as Energy Secretary.

Meanwhile, his Tea Party allies in Congress have called for the abolition of the entire National Organic Program!1

On the upside, in 2016 we saw, for the first time in nearly 20 years, a decrease in the amount of genetically engineered (GE) crops grown around the world, in terms of acreage.

As noted by Cummins, “This represents the fact that this technology is failing, in the sense of superweeds and superpests are popping up all over the world.” In the U.S., three-quarters of farmers growing GE crops like soybeans, corn or canola are having problems with these herbicide- and pesticide-resistant pests.

Market Rejection of GMOs Has Grown

Even more importantly, consumers around the world have become aware of the many problems associated with GE crops and the toxic herbicides and pesticides used on them, and do not want any of it on their plates.

In other words, the market has started rejecting GMOs, and that’s what we’ve been fighting for all along. Nothing can or will change unless consumers apply pressure in the form of refusing to buy GMOs.

In the European Union (EU), which is the biggest agriculture market in the world, few if any GMOs are found on supermarket shelves.

In the U.S. — despite industry spending hundreds of millions of dollars to manipulate market preference — about 40 percent of Americans still believe GE foods and GE ingredients are dangerous. Another 20 percent are unsure whether GMOs are dangerous or not.

“This combination of consumer rejection and, basically, Mother Nature’s resistance, has caused a drop-off,” Cummins says. “I think this is the beginning of the end of at least this generation, the first generation, of GMO crops.

Now, industry is saying, ‘Don’t worry about the fact that we’re using more and more toxic pesticides and herbicides … Don’t worry about these pests spreading across the fields. We’ve got a new generation of GMO crops where we can just do gene editing.

We don’t have to pull some DNA from a foreign species and haphazardly splice it into a corn or a soybean crop.’

But the bottom line is that this gene-splicing and this so-called new gene editing are unnatural processes that disrupt the genetic structure, the natural workings of living organisms. These aren’t going to work either.”

Organics and Grass fed Are Increasing in Popularity

Worldwide, we’re also seeing strong growth in organics and grass fed farming and ranching. In the U.S., the organic sector grew 11.5 percent in 2016. Grass fed grew about 50 percent. In France, organics grew by 20 percent.

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Mitigation Update: Agriculture and Soil Management in the Spotlight

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Author: Jennifer Allan | Published: March 23, 2017 

Recent news has put agriculture and soil management in the spotlight, as soil is shown as a crucial carbon reservoir, and agriculture is responsible for a significant share of New Zealand’s emissions. This Update features these and other developments, that relate to the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 13 (climate action).

Soil management could “make or break” climate change mitigation efforts, according to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO). Plants and other organic residues absorb carbon and keep it in the soil, creating a reservoir of carbon, that, according to FAO, could be re-released back into the atmosphere by rising temperatures and other disturbances. The report recommends better information and good practices to help end hunger (SDG 2) while adapting to and mitigating climate change (SDG 13). The report was launched at the Global Symposium on Soil Organic Carbon where Fijian president Jioji Konousi Konrote warned that “if we fail to maintain our soils as a carbon reservoir, I am afraid that these discussions and negotiations [for the Paris Agreement] would have been in vain.” [FAO Report] [FAO Press Release]

To help countries develop agricultural strategies in the context of climate change, the UNFCCC and the FAO signed an agreement that facilitate the cooperation. The agreement will include policy advice, data sharing and promotion of access to knowledge by agricultural smallholders. It will also facilitate capacity building and sharing technical expertise between the staff of the UNFCCC, FAO and developing countries’ representatives.

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Our Current Food System Is Broken and Unjust—we Need a Paradigm Shift That Values Nutrition As a Human Right

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Author: Dr. Robert Biel | March 22, 2017

There is a sense that the world food system has reached an impasse. Hunger afflicts at least an eighth of the world population, mostly in the global South, but also in the North where austerity policies—which respond to crisis by prioritizing the interests of the wealthy—leave working people hungry. What is even more serious is that even this damaged ‘food security’ cannot be guaranteed into the future. International institutions now recognize that something fundamental must change, a realization embodied in the notion of paradigm shift and further concretized in the form of sustainable intensification.

Such recognition is all the more significant since, for most of its history, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) tended to be somewhat unwilling to offend corporate interests. Within the UN system it was mostly the two successive Special Rapporteurs on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler and Olivier de Schutter, who pushed for a more radical and systemic critique. The latter notably placed his authority behind agroecology, a term that implies bringing farming back to an understanding of natural systems, and that forms an important point of reference for this book.

A landmark in official critiques of the ruling food paradigm was the publication of Save and Grow, A New Paradigm of Agriculture—A policymaker’s guide to the sustainable intensification of smallholder crop production, which argued specifically for a revitalization of small farms and a recognition of their dignity and essential contribution. Expanding on this, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) further stated: “The world needs a paradigm shift in agricultural development: from a ‘green revolution’ to an ecological intensification’ approach. This implies a rapid and significant shift from conventional, monoculture-based and high-external-input-dependent industrial production towards mosaics of sustainable regenerative production systems that also considerably improve the productivity of small-scale farmers. We need to see a move from a linear to a holistic approach in agricultural management, which recognizes that a farmer is not only a producer of agricultural goods, but also a manager of an agroecological system…”

This and similar statements embody a welcome reflection on what the shift may entail: terms like ‘mosaics’ and ‘regenerative’ imply a change in how we think, moving away from linear and reductionist approaches and towards a systems perspective.

These ideas are stimulating. Nevertheless, we should ask whether the new paradigm is correctly framed. Not everyone, even among those critical of the old paradigm, would accept that it is, particularly the assumption that the answer is ‘intensification,’ which could imply a merely quantitative solution and contradict the more qualitative issues raised. Indeed, the notion of a ‘new paradigm’ entered the debate quite some time ago, precisely in relation to quality issues. The emphasis on quality arose as a critique of earlier mainstream policies, targeting mainly quantity, which often were critically labelled ‘productivist’ and were typified by the now-discredited Green Revolution in which hybrid crop strains were bred only for quantity of yield.

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Sink It or Lose It: The Carbon Trade-off

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Author: Rolf Sommer | Published: March 20, 2017 

In the race to keep climate change in check, our soils are an important ally. A natural carbon sponge, they represent the earth’s largest terrestrial store of this essential, life-giving element.

And if we’re to meet the climate targets laid out in the Paris Agreement, then we must take advantage of the ability to sink carbon in soil, especially because this can offset harmful greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere.

But while we’re at the forefront of understanding how to make the most of soils to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, our research shows that we’ve still got a way to go before we can realize the full potential of long-term carbon storage – or carbon sequestration.

Before anything else, we need to be realistic about how much carbon our soils actually can store, how long this will take, how this changes from region to region, and how much this would contribute to climate change mitigation.

Evidence is improving and research advancing, but we still don’t have enough data. Not surprisingly, many aspirations are based on quite a bit of guesswork.

At the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), we have found that even using the best soil management techniques known to science, we can’t seem to store enough carbon – if any – to put a notable dent in global emission figures.

Yet what we do know is that carbon is being lost from soils, especially in the humid tropics, where there is a high turnover of the organic matter in which carbon is found. So we need to focus on reducing – and avoiding – carbon losses before we talk about carbon storage, or sequestration.

One of the contributors to carbon loss is tilling the soil, a common activity on most smallholder farms in developing countries. Here, only very small amounts of organic matter – from crop residues, manure or compost – are dug back into the soil, as these resources are usually in short supply.

It’s a tall order to call on African smallholders to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and build carbon in the soil when food insecurity, drought and other challenges are looming. For them, harvesting food – to eat or sell – is the number one priority. And, these farmers already contribute very few emissions to start with, paling in comparison with large commercial farms.

But our research shows that little changes could have tremendous impacts. For instance, quantifying the climate smartness of best soil protection and restoration practices in Kenya, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, India and Benin revealed that there are methods that can sustainably intensify farming systems without adding to greenhouse gas emissions.

If we can convince farmers to adopt small soil conservation practices, we can slow carbon loss down significantly, quickly and without too much effort. The bottom line is that we need more sophisticated management practices than the ones being advocated right now, since sustainable and smart cropping systems have not yet been widely adopted.

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The Business Case for Soil

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Author: Jess Davies | March 15, 2017 

Nobody likes dirty business, but the business world must get to grips with dirt. Soil provides food, fibres and fuels, and regulates water resources and climate. Yet most businesses are unaware that their bottom lines depend on soil; nor are they aware of the risks they face from its degradation. More must recognize that improving soil quality is a smart investment.

One-third of all soils and more than half of agricultural soils are moderately or highly degraded. Erosion, loss of organic carbon, compaction and salinization reduce soil’s fertility and ability to hold moisture1. Every year, we damage another 12 million hectares — an area the size of Bulgaria — through deforestation, overgrazing, intensive farming, urbanization and pollution2. Climate change and biodiversity loss exacerbate soil problems. Yet global needs for food and resources are rising as populations grow, lifestyles shift and the world transitions to a low-carbon economy.

Many businesses in the agricultural and forestry arenas, and some in the food sector, describe the measures they’ve taken to reduce soil impacts in their sustainability reports. Most others do not. Soil is vital to all industries that use plant or animal products in their supply chains, from fashion to pharmaceuticals and, increasingly, energy. Insurers and investors have a stake — when crops fail, they lose money, commodity prices rise and operations are disrupted.

Businesses are aware of the risks of climate change: more than 900 companies petitioned President Donald Trump for the United States to stay in the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Extreme weather, water scarcity, natural disasters and climate change were listed in the top five risks in terms of impact in the World Economic Forum’s 2017 Global Risks Perception Survey. Soil cuts across all these environmental concerns but was not mentioned.

If the private sector is serious about sustainability and commitments to climate change, it must take action on soil. In collaboration with researchers, businesses should advocate for international legislation, assess their soil risks and impacts and invest in maintaining and enhancing this resource.

Buried treasure

Soil’s invisibility in the boardroom is the result more of unfamiliarity than apathy. For instance, last October, I ran a session on the risks and opportunities that soil presents at the annual meeting of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), a chief-executive-led forum of more than 200 multinational companies. Participants from across the accounting, agriculture, chemicals, engineering and food sectors said that they were surprised to learn of soil’s roles beyond agriculture.

Water regulation is one function in which business has a stake. Soil moisture is crucial for rain-fed agriculture, which accounts for three-quarters of human usage of fresh water3. Soils that are compacted, eroded or lacking in organic material hold less water. This increases the likelihood of floods and the impact of droughts, and intensifies competition for water resources. Water scarcity is widely acknowledged as a major risk to the global economy4: in 2016, droughts and shortages cost businesses US$14 billion5. The contributions of soil to water problems and its potential for mitigating risks are uncertain, however.

Water-intensive industries such as beverages, mining and energy are taking action in the catchments where they operate. For example, the Coca-Cola Company has been working with wildlife charity WWF and communities to maintain irrigation channels in Nepal, remove invasive sugar cane from the banks of Rio Grande and reforest in Mexico to improve water availability6. It should also look at protecting local soils by, for example, reducing disturbance and promoting conservation agriculture.

Climate risk and mitigation is another area in which businesses underappreciate soil’s potential. It is the largest global reservoir of organic carbon. Land-use change and poor soil management have resulted in a loss of 42–78 gigatonnes of carbon from soils over the past century7. The majority was emitted as carbon dioxide. This compares with 450–600 gigatonnes of anthropogenic carbon emissions since the industrial revolution.

Sustainable land management can reverse this trend by increasing the amount of carbon stored in soils. On 21–23 March, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) will hold the first Global Symposium on Soil Organic Carbon. The aim is to review the role of soils in climate change and integrate the issue into the regular assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

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Soil Management Could Make or Break Climate Change Response Efforts

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Published: March 21, 2017 

Warning of “colossal” negative impacts for the environment and human societies if the massive stores of carbon trapped in the Earth’s soils are released, Fijian president Jioji Konousi Konrote called for stronger management of this critical natural resource at the start of an international symposium today.

There is currently more carbon locked up in just the first meter of the planet’s soils than can be found in the atmosphere and all terrestrial plant life combined, he said during his keynote address to the Global Symposium on Soil Organic Carbon (21-23 March).

Referring to international commitments to limit global temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius made under the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, Konrote warned: “If we fail to maintain our soils as a carbon reservoir, I am afraid that these discussions and negotiations would have been in vain.”

“We cannot afford to neglect a resource that could be our serious and viable ally against climate change,” he added.

Fiji and other small island developing states are on the front lines in the battle against climate change. The government of Fiji is poised to assume the presidency of the next Conference of Parties of the UN Climate Agreement that will take place in in Bonn, Germany, in November.

FAO Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva in his remarks stressed that beyond their critical role as a carbon sink, healthy soils underpin multiple environmental processes upon which humankind depends and which are the foundation of global food security.

“Soils with high organic carbon content are likely to be more fertile and productive, better able to purify water, and help to increase the resilience of livelihoods to the impacts of climate change,” he noted.

This means that improving the health of the planet’s soils and boosting their organic carbon content is critical to achieving several of the international development goals established by the UN’s 2030 agenda, especially the second goal of eradicating hunger and malnutrition, FAO’s Director-General said.

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Ben Hewitt: A Groundswell for Agricultural Change

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Published: March 10, 2017 

When I was a young boy, I traveled every summer to the Iowa farm where my mother was raised. There, my grandparents grew hundreds of acres of corn and soy. It was not the biggest farm in Iowa, not by a long shot, but it was plenty big enough. I remember standing at the edge of a cornfield, gazing toward the horizon, trying to discern where the field ended. And failing. I remember riding in the combine with my grandfather at harvest time, listening to the crop report on the radio, watching row after row after row of corn fall beneath the cutter bar. My grandfather didn’t talk much. Neither did I.

This was in the late ’70s and early ’80s, in this nation’s halcyon days of commodity cropping. Those who truly understood how damaging this style farming was to the land, the soil, the consumers and even the farmers themselves were relatively few and far between, while the rest of us were in the thrall of rapidly increasing yields, economies of scale and the lure of new technology.

Forty years later, we no longer have any excuse for failing to acknowledge the destructiveness of contemporary commodity agriculture and the fragility it has engendered across the spectrums of economy, ecology and human health, to name but a few. In Vermont, this is most visible in the perennially stressed commodity dairy industry, in which farmers are currently paid less than the cost of production, and over the years have been coerced to rely upon practices and products that negatively impact animal health, while playing a significant role in the degradation of our waterways and environment. This is emphatically not the fault of the farmers; as my grandparents were, so are today’s farmers caught in a tangled web of policy and economic incentives that are not of their making, yet which drive many of their decisions.

The need to reform our state’s agricultural policies and practices extends far beyond the dairy industry. Although Vermont’s local food movement has made tremendous progress, the ability for all farmers to achieve access to land and maintain a reasonable livelihood, while supporting the health of their communities and the land, is severely and unjustly compromised. The economic incentives still point in the wrong direction — consolidation, concentration, commoditization, exploitation of cheap labor and exporting of products and wealth. These incentives, coupled with policies that too often disadvantage community-scale food production, ensure that Vermont’s local food offerings remain unaffordable to a wide swath of our population. And as goes viable, accessible community-scale production, so goes the vibrant, diversified farms that once defined and nurtured Vermont’s rural landscape, fed our communities, and invigorated our economies.

Regenerative agriculture is a term meant to describe agricultural and food-production practices that return more to the land, community and farmer than they extract. Often the term is associated with improved grazing and cropping methods that grow and protect rather than deplete topsoil, in the process sequestering carbon, increasing water retention capacity (critical in the context of massive flooding events like hurricanes Irene and Sandy), and creating wildlife habitat.

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Challenges Facing Agriculture and the Regenerative Solution

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Author: Alexis Baden-Mayer | Published: March 22, 2017 

There are three interrelated challenges facing agriculture over the next 50 years.

The first is soil loss.

In the United States, soil is swept and washed away 10 times faster than it is replenished. That costs $37.6 billion every year. Globally, all of the world’s topsoil could be gone within 60 years.

The second challenge is diet-related disease.

About half of all American adults have one or more preventable chronic diseases related to diet. Diet is now the number-one risk factor for disease. More than two-thirds of adults and nearly one-third of children are overweight or obese. This costs $190 billion a year. Obesity is the new malnutrition. Globally, a growing number of people have plenty to eat and yet remain malnourished.

The third challenge is climate change.

Floods, droughts, wildfires and extreme or unseasonable temperatures cause crop and livestock losses. In 2011, exposure to high temperature events caused over $1 billion in losses to U.S. agricultural producers.

Phasing out greenhouse gas emissions is important, but it won’t reverse climate change. Until we remove enough CO2 from the atmosphere to get back down below the dangerous tipping point of 350 ppm, the impacts of climate change will persist.

Luckily, there’s an inexpensive and easy-to-use technology for reliable carbon dioxide removal and sequestration. Soil.

Agricultural activities have removed roughly 660 GtCO2 from terrestrial ecosystems. The good news is we can put it back.

Shifting to agricultural practices that can draw that carbon back down to the soil would:

  • Reduce atmospheric CO2 by 40-70 ppm by 2100,
  • Build soil instead of losing it, and
  • Improve resilience to drought and floods, while
  • Producing more food that’s more nutritious, and
  • Generating higher farm incomes from increased production of nutrient-dense food.

We need more research on the microbial communities in the soil that generate carbon storage. Plants give the carbon they get from photosynthesis to soil microorganisms in exchange for water and nutrients. It works best when there are lots of different plants exchanging lots of different nutrients with lots of different microbes. The greater the plant biodiversity, the more carbon gets stored. The best way to reverse soil loss and sequester carbon is to continuously cover soil with a diverse array of living plants.

Scientists are currently documenting microbial soil carbon sequestration using carbon-13 isotope pulse labeling. Using this method, they can track the carbon flows from plants to and through soil microorganisms and identify the plants and the microorganisms that store the most carbon.

Fence line comparisons have demonstrated greater resilience to droughts and floods in carbon rich soils. Now, scientists can measure water flows through soil in three dimensions and accurately document soils’ water infiltration and holding capacity.

Grazing and pasture-raised animals can be managed to increase plant biodiversity and microbial activity. Well-managed pastures can sequester even more soil carbon than cropping systems. But we need a deeper understanding of how methanotrophs in the soil utilize methane emitted from grazing animals.

Finally we need an assessment of the socio-economic impediments to, and opportunities for, realizing the full potential for soil carbon sequestration.

If increasing soil carbon can help produce more food than you ever thought possible on less land than you can imagine, as John Jeavons would say, then why don’t more farmers do it?

If increasing soil carbon produces food that is flavorful, aromatic, and so healthy and nutritious that it could cost-effectively reverse diet-related diseases, why aren’t more consumers demanding it?

What We Need Are Farms That Support Farmers, Consumers and the Environment

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Authors: Andrea Basche, Marcia DeLonge | Published: March 15, 2017 

The past several years have been rough for many U.S. farmers and ranchers. Net farm incomes this year could fall to 50 percent of 2013 levels in a fourth consecutive year of income declines that is leading some producers to seek alternatives. At the same time, rural and urban Americans share growing concerns related to agriculture: worries that water pollution will be increasingly costly and harmful, that water supplies are at risk from extreme swings in rainfall, and that global warming due to fossil fuel burning threatens our food system and will necessitate changes in how we farm.

What if all of these challenges could find a common solution? It might just be that they can. In a commentary published this week in the scientific journal Elementa, we contend that agroecology offers a promising approach to solving food system problems while mitigating, water and energy concerns — and propose a way to overcome the obstacles to fully embracing it.

U.S. agriculture has trended for several decades — as a result of policy, economics and other drivers — toward systems that are more simplified over both space and time. This has had adverse consequences for food, energy and water.

Agroecology takes a different approach, applying ecological concepts tocreate and maintain diverse, resilient food systems. Promising research demonstrates that bringing diversity back to farms can begin to reverse the problems simplification has created. For example, scientists have found that strategically incorporating perennial plants (including food, energy or non-crop plants) into small areas of commodity crops can significantly reduce water pollution and soil loss. Studies also show that using multiple crops rather than a monoculture is associated with improvements in the amount of carbon (important to help soils hold onto more water and mitigate climate change) and nitrogen (critical for plant growth and soil function) in the soil.

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