Corporate megafarms grow everything but food

                                                           

The world’s food supplies are at risk because farmland is becoming rapidly concentrated in the hands of wealthy elites and corporations, a study has found. The UN says that small farmers grow 70 percent of the world’s food, but a new analysis of government data suggests that the land which they control is shrinking every year, as megafarms and plantations squeeze them onto less than 25 percent of the world’s available farmland, according to international land use group Grain. These megafarms are less efficient in terms of the amount of food they produce per area of land, the report says.

“Small farms have less than a quarter of the world’s agricultural land, or less than 20 percent excluding China and India. Such farms are getting smaller all the time and if this trend persists they might not be able to continue to feed the world,” said the report, which draws on government statistics and calls for a stop on land grabs by corporations.

                                                       

The report suggests that the single most important factor in the drive to push small farmers onto ever smaller parcels of land is the worldwide expansion of industrial commodity-crop farms.“The powerful demands of food and energy industries are shifting farmland and water away from direct local food production to the production of commodities for industrial processing,” it says.

The land area occupied by soybean, oil palm, rapeseed and sugar cane has quadrupled over the past 50 years, with more than 140 million hectares of fields and forests taken over by plantations of these four crops since the 1960s — approximately the same area as all the farmland in the EU.

                                           

“What we found was shocking,” Grain’s Henk Hobbelink said. “If small farmers continue to lose the very basis of their existence, the world will lose its capacity to feed itself. We need to urgently put land back in the hands of small farmers and make the struggle for agrarian reform central to the fight for better food systems.”
Big farms have been getting bigger nearly everywhere, with rising numbers of small and medium-sized farmers going out of business in the past 20 years, the report’s authors write. Belgium, Finland, France, Germany and Norway have each lost about 70 percent of their farms since the 1970s, while Bulgaria, Estonia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia have each lost more than 40 percent of their farms from 2003 to 2010. Poland alone lost almost 1 million farmers between 2005 and 2010.

                                                             

“Within the EU as a whole, over 6 million farms disappeared between 2003 and 2010, bringing the total number of farms down to almost the same level as in 2000, before the inclusion of 12 new member states with their 8.7 million new farmers,” according to the report.

The concentration of land ownership is not occurring just in Europe, it can be seen on every continent. Argentina lost more than one-third of its farms in the two decades from 1988 to 2008. Between 1997 and 2007, Chile lost 15 percent of its farms, with the biggest ones doubling their average size, from 7,000 to 14,000 hectares per farm, while the US has lost 30 percent of its farms in the past 50 years. Across the pond in the UK, the number of very small farms has almost tripled, while the number of very large farms has more than quintupled.


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Pesticides not only kill bees but also eagles

                                               

A study of bald eagle nestlings found pesticides and flame retardants in their blood. The chemicals are suspected in slowing the eagles' post-DDT recovery in Michigan. There are lots of new flame retardants in use, the health effects of which we know little or nothing.Ever since the banning of the pesticide DDT, which weakened eggshells, bald eagles have been making a comeback in the Great Lakes region.

                                                   

In Michigan, however, that recovery has been lackluster, and researchers have found one potential reason why: flame retardants and pesticides in the blood of eagle nestlings." They have recovered mostly, but not to what was expected," said Marta Venier of Indiana University. Venier is the lead author of a paper in the August issue of the journal Chemosphere, which describes a "snapshot" of what is in eagle nestlings' blood in near lakes around Michigan.

Venier and her colleagues were able to collect blood samples of bald eagle nestlings in the Great Lakes region by arduously climbing trees, bagging the large nestlings and carrying them carefully to the ground to draw a small sample of blood. The birds were then returned to their nests angry, but unharmed.

                                                     

Tests on the blood show that the national symbol of the United States is ingesting flame retardants and pesticides via its food. The chemicals are originally from pesticides or foam padding for furniture and mattresses, which contain a variety of flame retardants.

"Eagles are very vulnerable to chlorinated compounds," said Ronald Hites, also of Indiana University and a co-author of the study. Flame retardants can make up 10 percent of the weight of foam padding, Hites told Discovery News. Because the chemicals spew out every time we sit or lie down on the padding, the same chemicals are also found abundantly in humans, he said.

Discarded furniture in landfills moves the flame retardants into runoff, soil and the air, Hites said. These sources last for decades and make their way to such animals as bald eagles. It's not known if the chemicals are having health effects on the eagles. But they are a suspect, as is habitat loss, in the slowed eagle recovery.

The eagle nestling discovery has broader implications about the way chemicals are produced and used in the United States, said Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

"We shouldn't be making chemicals that don't go away for a long time," Birnbaum told Discovery News. And we should not replace newly banned chemicals with potentially even more dangerous untested chemicals, she said. "There is very little information on their toxicity. It's a problem with our regulatory system.

Some of the substitutes for polyurethane foam, for instance, are now found in human blood and urine. Are they a health threat? Nobody knows. There is legislation in Congress which would change this, said Birnbaum, if it ever becomes law. In the meantime the bald eagle nestlings should be a matter of concern.

"Just because you don't know anything (about a chemical) doesn't mean you're safe," Birnbaum said.

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