AgFoodGovernance.org - Exploring emerging forms of power, knowledge, and resistance in the global food system

Tragedy in a watermelon patch in the Gaza strip

Thu, 11 May 2006 15:34:32 -0500

I think that as private standards become increasingly pervasive means of regulating the global food system, we'll be seeing development funds increasingly devoted to subsidizing the training and certification programs that enable export-oriented farmers in the Global South to access these markets.

There's a story in the Middle East Times about one such scheme funded by the Dutch government to train some of the 800 farmers in the Gaza Strip in the Eurepgap protocols (100% Dutch supermarkets sell 100% EurepGAP-certified produce). The program is run by Israel/Palestinian Center for Research and Information (IPCRI).

Sadly, one of the 40 farmers in the first graduating class was killed last Sunday, May 7, as he tended to his watermelon crop, by an Israeli shell supposedly aimed at militants who fire homemade rockets from Gaza into Israel. It makes me wonder a couple things: 1) if growing food under military occupation and state-sponsored terror can be considered "Good Agriculture Practice", with all the extra market value for European consumers.

WSJ: Organic food goes mass market

Thu, 04 May 2006 15:06:42 -0500

So when's Wal-Mart going to join the rush? This is from an article in the Wall Street Journal:

In a bid to capture a slice of the fast-growing organic-foods market, mainstream supermarket chains are rushing out their own store-brand lines that can cost significantly less than comparable specialty brands often found at health-food and gourmet stores. The pricing could remove a big barrier for many Americans who have wanted to try organic rice, cookies or cans of soup but have been put off by the prices. Though the store brands are less expensive, the chains say they adhere to the same federal standards for what constitutes organic as other brands.

SuperValu Inc., poised to become the nation's second-largest supermarket chain after it acquires Albertson's Inc., this month is introducing a line of 50 organic products called Nature's Best, including cereal, juice, apple sauce and pasta. By the end of June, the company will add 100 more private-label organic products, and plans to offer about 300 by mid-2007.

Organic Consumers Association Calls for Boycott of Bogus Organic Milk Brands

Sun, 23 Apr 2006 18:57:45 -0500

WASHINGTON, April 4, 2006 -- The Organic Consumers Association (OCA) is calling on consumers to boycott milk brands that claim to be organic while routinely importing calves from conventional farms and raising the animals in intensive confinement, with little or no access to pasture.

"Consumers buying products labeled 'organic' do not realize that they often essentially being scammed by some of the larger companies who put pictures of happily grazing cows on their products, but in reality keep their cows confined in ways very similar to traditional factory farms. OCA is calling on consumers to boycott these bogus organic products , and give their consumer dollars to ethical producers who are upholding strict organic standards," says Ronnie Cummins, executive director of the Organic Consumers Association.

For the confused consumer trying to buy ethical organic dairy, there is a new study, Maintaining the Integrity of Organic Milk, produced by the Cornucopia Institute that rates 68 organic dairy name-brands and private labels, exposing the dubious practices of some so-called organic companies, and highlighting companies that are producing truly organic milk.

"IDology: You'll Identify With Us" (branding irons are so 20th century)

Sat, 22 Apr 2006 06:10:18 -0500

I.D.ology "treats cows as individuals", as they say on their website.

This video gives a decent glimpse of not just what traceability looks like for livestock, but more importantly, how the technology behind it is being marketed. One of the RFID tag readers is, not surprisingly for agribusiness marketing, named using a military analogy: "Crossfire". Enjoy! (.mpg, 32 Mb, 3 min 14 s). Beeeeeeoooooooop.

Traceability as barriers to entry (or doors to exit!) for small farmers

Tue, 11 Apr 2006 19:10:18 -0500

BeefStocker USA has created a spreadsheet to estimate the cost of the RFID tagging component of compliance with NAIS.

# Head	Annual Total Cost	Cost per head
——-	——-	——-
1	$1,363	$1,363
2	$1,366	$683
5	$1,374	$275
10	$1,389	$139
20	$1,418	$71
50	$1,505	$30
100	$1,650	$17
250	$2,086	$8
1,000	$4,263	$4
10,000	$30,395	$3

But as NoNAIS points out,

Mad Cow III leads to more tracking, less testing

Tue, 11 Apr 2006 04:13:48 -0500

Ag Observatory published two somewhat contradictory stories from the newswires on March 15th that both relate to the discovery of the third case of mad cow disase. The first deals with legistlators who are capitalizing on this discovery to make the National Agricultural Identification System (NAIS) for tracing cattle mandatory. Right now it's voluntary, and as this article states,

About 10 percent of the 2 million premises nationwide have been registered.

They fail to mention, however, that these are mostly the largest feedlots and slaughterhouses.

Meanwhile, the other article outlines the USDA's plans to reduce the amount of testing of cattle at the time of slaughter.

Traceability as competitive advantage

Fri, 07 Apr 2006 21:54:37 -0500

To what degree are food security and profit, the two goals of animal identification, amenable? The USDA just released their implementation plan (PDF) for the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), a "a cooperative State-Federal-industry partnership to standardize and expand animal identification programs and practices to all livestock species and poultry", and USDA secretary Mike Johanns just held a press conference about it. Straight from the horse's mouth...:

As many are aware, [NAIS] will also help the U.S. livestock industry to remain competitive. Traceability is being used as a marketing tool by several countries. For example, Australia is aggressively marketing animal traceability to gain a competitive advantage over us. We know how important the export market is to livestock producers, and we want to retain our competitiveness in the international arena.

BTW, don't you love use of cowboy graphics to market this stuff?

Stop Federal Preemption of State Food Safety Laws!

Thu, 06 Apr 2006 22:35:37 -0500

Contact Your Senators TODAY to defend local control over food safety!

Congressional Switchboard: #202-224-3121

Tell them to oppose the “National Uniformity for Food Act,” when it comes before the Senate.

On March 2nd the House passed H.R. 4167, the “National Uniformity for Food Act,” which would basically overturn any state or local food safety laws that are not "identical" to federal law. Hundreds of laws and regulations that are tougher than federal rules are now at risk, including those governing the safety of milk and shellfish. With massive federal budget cutbacks, local and state officials are now responsible for 80% of the nation's food safety enforcement. These officials regularly improve training, sanitation and labeling standards to address new food borne diseases and other dangers to our food supply whether natural or man made. This preemption legislation, if it passes the Senate and is signed by Pres. Bush. would put a straitjacket on local food safety efforts and severely compromise the principle of food sovereignty in the U.S.

RFID worm created in the lab

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 17:12:30 -0500

The computer scientist who wrote Minix, which was the inspiration for Linux, has just shown that Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are vulnerable to viruses and worms. In a laboratory setting, Andrew S. Tanenbaum, infected RFID tags with a computer worm, capable of transmitting itself to other tags.

As an article at New Scientist states,

A tag infected with a worm and attached, for example, to a piece of luggage could rapidly infect other luggage in an airport, the Dutch researchers say. "On arrival at other airports, these cases will be scanned again and within 24 hours, hundreds of airports throughout the world could be infected.

EU reheats speciality food scheme

Mon, 03 Apr 2006 16:34:35 -0500

The brits are hands-down the best headline writers in the world, so i had to leave this one intact. It's from an article about the new Quality Food Designations in the EU.

Here's the quick summary:

PDO: Produced, processed and prepared in a given geographical area using recognised know-how
PGI: The geographical link must occur at the production, processing or preparation stage
TSG: Highlights traditional character, either in ingredients or means of production

"We are better off sticking to lassi": Shiva argues against India's "Food Fascism Law"

Mon, 03 Apr 2006 16:22:48 -0500

Check out Vanadana Shiva's article about India's Proposed Food Safety & Standards Bill. One excerpt:

While food hazards grow, food safety laws are being shaped which deregulate large corporations and over-regulate the small scale self organized economy. Such industrial food safety standards promote large scale globalised production, and act against local foods. These laws are also the basis of the Sanitary and Phyto Sanitary Agreement of WTO.

Shiva is one of the best critics of the WTO and this article is a case in point. However, in focusing on the WTO, she overlooks corporate para-state institutions like EurepGAP, which actually bypass the WTO by one-upping it on free market rhetoric by suggesting that their policies merely reflect the demands of its ("sovereign"?) consumer base.

According to the Business Standard entitled `EU standards bleed Indian traders':

In some cases, the cost of complying with the EU standards [i.e. EurepGAP] is as high as 65 per cent of the production cost of the goods, with the high cost of EU compliance certificates and the lack of availability of certifying agencies in the country making exporting to the EU difficult, the survey said.

Note that even though Eurep, which operates EurepGAP, is a consortium of entirely private firms, this article in the Business Standard basically equates exporting to EurepGAP to exporting to the EU.

Perfectly uniform laws, perfectly uniform food, perfectly uniform consumers.

Mon, 03 Apr 2006 09:58:41 -0500

Shelf space at supermarkets is one of the most valuable and therefore contested forms of real estate square footage in the world. That's one reason why food processers, united in the US as the Grocery Manufacturers Association, sponsor anti-democratic bills like the one that passed 283-139 in the US House to override state and local food-label laws.

It seems like whenever citizens and consumers express desires that go against the will of supermarkets and agribusiness, they respond with calls for "science-based" regulation, as if a) the GMA suddenly represents Science, and b) citizenry and consumers are the last to know what is good for them.

Their ultimate goal? Uniformity for food. Sounds awful. Who comes up with this stuff?

A "new spectre" is facing the agriculture industry: EurepGAP

Mon, 03 Apr 2006 07:33:21 -0500

I just came across this 2004 article by Wendy Johnson about the standards for cherry production in British Colombia.

What is surprising to me is not only that industrialized fruit farms in the South are adapting more quickly to new standards than their Canadian counterparts, but also that on some of the farms in Chile and Argentina each field "grows for a specified country and follows its particular maximum residue levels designations".

The conclusion?

It is hard to argue with a system that puts the quality of food first, but there is the nagging suspicion this will spell the end of some family farms. This industry-changing event is just a sign of things to come.

RFID gets slashdotted

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 16:05:13 -0600

Someone recently posted about RFID tags on food on the hugely popular "news for nerds" website Slashdot:

Angry_Admin writes "According to the article at IT World Canada, Recent food security scares have triggered public outcries and intense concern. People want to know exactly what is in their food, and what is done to it by whom. In response, Canada and many other countries are introducing traceability requirements - records that track all links in the food supply chain, from farmers to processors to retailers to consumers. The Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada agency recently released a policy framework, stating the goal is to make 80 per cent of all food products traceable by 2008."

Of course, you only read Slashdot for the hundreds of witty comments by hackers, such one guy who predicts this will prompt questions like: "Why is my Big Mac linking back to a horse farm??". Unfortunately, most of the tech geek comments are very optimistic about RFID, partially because many realize that RFID will be creating an increasingly

Consumer dreams in the new EU

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 15:05:28 -0600

I went to see a showing of Ceský sen (Czech Dream). There's so much to say, both good and bad, about this film. But i'll make this brief.

First, it's clear to me that state-funded filmmakers in the Czech Republic have way less rigorous ethics standards than any North American social science department. In order to make their statement, the two gonzos behind this film tricked thousands of (mostly poor) consumers, all seeking the consumer paradise that's supposed to be found at the end of the EU rainbow, to show up to the opening of their nonexistent big-box supermarket called "Czech Dream" (a would-be competitor to the UK supermarket Tesco that is rapidly coming to dominate European retailing).

The filmmakers' condescending attitude towards the consumer hordes seemed to get transferred to the liberal Madison audience with whom i was sitting. Just as 20 years ago tourists in Prague would snap photos of Czechs lining up to buy bananas (a vignette that is retold by one of Ceský sen's disappointed would-be customers), here were 1000 film-goers getting entertainment value from watching people of a different nationality ache longingly for cheap mineral water and other things we take for granted.