Food

Food/Agriculture

When starting this blog assignment on food, I knew I had to turn to the makers of the movie, Food, Inc. Award winning filmmaker Robert Kenner worked for over 6 years to bring Food, Inc. to the screen. His question was “How much do we really know about the food we buy at our local supermarkets and serve to our families?” www.foodincmovie.com

Some of our most important staple foods have been fundamentally altered, and genetically engineered meat and produce have already invaded our grocery stores and our kitchen pantries.

High calorie, sugar laden processed foods coupled with our sedentary lifestyles is growing our waistlines and contributing to serious health like diabetes, heart ailments and cancers.

Factory farms, often confining thousands of animals, are major culprits in climate change. (humansocienty.org/issues/environment) These mega-farms create huge amounts of manure that pollute the soil, water, and air. Animal factories also waste grain, water, fuel, and other resources. Approximately 10 billion animals (chickens, cattle, hogs, ducks, turkeys, lambs and sheep) are raised and killed in the US annually. Nearly all of them are raised on factory farms under inhumane conditions.

All of this comes at a substantial cost to the environment. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN), the animal agriculture sector is responsible for approximately 18%, or nearly one-fifth, of human-induced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In nearly every step of meat, egg, and milk production, climate-changing gases are released into the atmosphere, potentially disrupting weather, temperature, and ecosystem health. Mitigating this serious problem requires immediate and far-reaching changes in current animal agriculture practices and consumption patterns.

Expanding farm animal production plays a major role in deforestation, turning wooded areas into grazing land and cropland for the production of feed. But this destruction comes at a cost beyond the loss of the forests. According to the FAO, animal agriculture-related deforestation may emit 2.4 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. Tropical forests act as carbon sinks, sequestering carbon and preventing its release into the atmosphere. Thus, deforestation releases large amounts of carbon, both from soil and vegetation. As animal product consumption grows, grazing land, soybean monocultures, industrial feedlots, and factory farms encroach on forests.

Deforestation has been especially devastating in South America, where expansion of pasture and arable land has been the most prevalent. The continent is suffering the largest net loss of forests and resulting carbon fluxes, the releases of stored carbon from vegetation and soil into the atmosphere.

In 2005 the FAO found that cattle ranching is one of the main causes of forest destruction in Latin America. The FAO predicted that by 2010, more than 1.2 million hectares of forest will be lost in Central America, while 18 million hectares of South American forest will disappear, in large part, because of clearing land for grazing cattle.

According to a 2004 report by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), rapid growth in the exportation of Brazilian beef has accelerated destruction of the Amazon rainforest. The total area of forest lost increased from 41.5 million hectares in 1990 to 58.7 million hectares in 2000. In just ten years, an area twice the size of Portugal was lost, most of it to grazing land. Brazil is the fourth-largest GHG emitter, largely because of agricultural burning in the Amazon, which contributes 70% of the country‘s emissions.

The concept of sustainable agriculture embraces a wide range of techniques, including organic, free-range, low-input, holistic, and biodynamic.

The common thread among these methods is an embrace of farming practices that mimic natural ecological processes. Farmers minimize tilling and water use; encourage healthy soil by planting fields with different crops year after year and integrating croplands with livestock grazing; and avoid pesticide use by nurturing the presence of organisms that control crop-destroying pests. www.environment.nationalgeographic.com

A 2007 study by the University of Michigan, comparing data from almost 100 studies of conventional and sustainable agriculture, concluded that a worldwide switch to organics could actually increase global food production by as much as 50%—enough to feed a population of 9 billion people without any additional land. www.usfoodcrisis.org