Author: jonkingsman

Last week I wrote about three recent rulings that went “against” mainstream agribusiness. The first, by a Californian jury, found that glyphosate, a widely used herbicide, was carcinogenic and should be labeled as such. The second, by the EU Commission, was that partial bans on neonicotinoids, an important pesticide, should be extended and enlarged to prevent harm to bees. The third, by the EU Court of Justice, was that gene editing was a form of genetic modification and should come under existing GMO legislation.

The three rulings, coming as they did in close succession, made some wonder what the world has against agriculture in general and farmers in particular.

However, the rulings show the increasing disconnect between consumers and producers. The strong growth in demand for organic food highlights that consumers, particularly urban dwellers, increasingly want their food to be produced and delivered without herbicides or pesticides, and without its genes being modified or edited in any way. Farmers on the other hand want to produce as much food as they can from as little land as possible, and as cheaply as possible. Herbicides, pesticides and breeding techniques (whether genetic or “natural”) help farmers enormously in this task.

In a piece for Foreign Affairs Bill Gates put the case for research into gene editing, writing

This sort of research is vital, because a cow or a few chickens, goats, or sheep can make a big difference in the lives of the world’s poorest people, three-quarters of whom get their food and income by farming small plots of land…

Improving the productivity of crops is fundamental to ending extreme poverty. Sixty percent of people in sub-Saharan Africa earn their living by working the land. But given the region’s generally low agricultural productivity—yields of basic cereals are five times higher in North America—Africa remains a net importer of food. This gap between supply and demand will only grow as the number of mouths to feed increases. Africa’s population is expected to more than double by 2050, reaching 2.5 billion, and its food production will need to match that growth to feed everyone on the continent.

The challenge will become even more difficult as climate change threatens the livelihoods of smallholder farmers in Africa and South Asia. Improving the productivity of crops is fundamental to ending extreme poverty.

He continues,

Gene editing to make crops more abundant and resilient could be a lifesaver on a massive scale.

 In other words, we will have to improve agricultural yields if we want to feed the world and drag people out of poverty. Climate change will make food production even more difficult in the future, while at the same time we need to reduce agriculture’s carbon footprint, both in terms of its own emissions and in terms of forest erosion.

So we have a contradiction here: rich world consumers want their food produced organically, but at the same time they want farmers to use less land. This is a tough “ask” when the world’s population is increasing and when people are eating more meat. Adding a third objective of using agriculture to pull the world out of poverty makes the task even tougher.

However Bill Gates makes an important point when he mentions that cereal yields are five times higher in the US than they are in Africa. The EU beet producers were also right to point out that the extended ban on neonicotinoids would adversely affect beet yields. Against that, the recent increase in EU sugar production has helped to drive world sugar prices down to levels where many developing countries can no longer compete. (Huge production increases in India and Thailand were the main drivers, but the EU increase did contribute.)

You could therefore argue that advances in chemical and gene technology have already increased yields to such an extent that the world is producing too much food. You could add that the fact that these technological advances have largely benefited the developed world (and India and Thailand are part of the developed world), driving down production costs to a level at which under-developed countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, cannot compete. This, as Bill Gates realizes, keeps them in poverty.

So maybe technology has got ahead of itself, (baring weather disasters) resulting in us producing too much food, too cheaply.

Some commentators have drawn parallels between the Californian ruling on glyphosate and the recent study that linked mobile phones and cancer. It is indeed curious that the press were quick to discount the mobile phone story on the basis that cancer rates haven’t increased with mobile phone use, but the media ignores the same logic when applied to glyphosate.

The media also ignore that logic when applied to sugar consumption and obesity. (Per capita sugar consumption has been falling for the past half century while obesity has been rising.)

Could it be that we apply different standards to products that we eat as opposed to products that we use? Could it be that we don’t care how the lithium is produced for our car batteries, but we do care how the wheat is produced for our bread?

Finally, there is the question as to whether the world is over-reacting in pushing back against farm chemicals. Some argue that every thing is to some degree carcinogenic (think sunshine and even toast), and that life is not risk-free.

However it may be appropriate to look back at the history of the insecticide Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, commonly known as DDT. It was first synthesized in 1874 and was widely used in the second half of World War II to control malaria and typhus among civilians and troops.

DDT was made available for public sale in the United States in 1945 and was promoted by government and industry as an agricultural and household pesticide. Opposition to DDT was focused by the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, which claimed that DDT and other pesticides had been shown to cause cancer, and that their agricultural use was a threat to wildlife, particularly birds. The book’s publication resulted in a large public outcry that eventually led, in 1972, to a ban on DDT’s agricultural use in the United States.

Mosquitoes (not sharks or hippos) are the world’s most dangerous creatures. Over one million people die from malaria each year, mostly children under five years of age, with 90 per cent of malaria cases occurring in Sub-Saharan Africa. Some have argued that that fewer children would be dying if DDT hadn’t been banned.

However, DDT is still used in some parts of the world to combat malaria, and its use has been increasing since it was endorsed in 2006 by the World Health Organization. In many African countries, as well as India and North Korea, the pesticide is sprayed inside homes and buildings to kill mosquitoes. In 2007, at least 3,950 tons of DDT were sprayed for mosquito control in Africa and Asia, according to a report by the United Nations Environment Programme.

A panel of scientists from the United States and South Africa said DDT should only be used as a last resort in combating malaria. The 15 environmental health experts, who reviewed almost 500 health studies, concluded that DDT “should be used with caution, only when needed, and when no other effective, safe and affordable alternatives are locally available.”

The history of DDT may suggest that there is room for compromise on chemicals. Rather than outright bans, perhaps the solution would be to work where possible to reduce the use of chemicals in agriculture. But then compromises never make headlines or pay legal fees.

Images from Pixabay under Creative Commons

Last week, Monsanto—the agribusiness company that everyone loves to hate—was ordered to pay $US289 million to Mr. Dewayne Johnson, a former school groundskeeper, after a San Francisco jury ruled that the company’s popular Roundup weed killer contributed to the cancer that is killing him.

Glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup, was first approved for use in Monsanto’s weed killer in 1974, and has since been the subject of much emotive debate both in and out of the scientific community.

In September 2017, the  U.S. Environmental Protection Agency concluded a decades-long assessment of glyphosate risks and found that the chemical was not likely to be carcinogenic to humans. However, back in 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which is part of the World Health Organisation, classified it as a “probable human carcinogen”. Since then, California has added glyphosate to its list of chemicals known to cause cancer.

Mr Johnson’s lawsuit was the first to go to trial among hundreds filed in state and federal US courts that claim that Roundup causes non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Monsanto has said it will appeal the verdict.

However, the trial was an important test of the evidence against Monsanto, and will serve as a template for litigating thousands of other claims over the herbicide. Shares in Bayer AG (Monsanto’s parent company) fell sharply as investors weighed the potential costs of protracted legal battles. Bayer bought Monsanto for $66 billion in June this year.

Among the varied lawsuits against Monsanto is one from a bee keepers’ cooperative in France that claims that glyphosate is now widely found in honey. The US’s Food and Drug Administration also recently found traces of glyphosate in US honey, even apparently in “organic mountain honey”. The U.S. Organic Consumers Association and Beyond Pesticides filed a lawsuit against Sue Bee Honey of Sioux City, Iowa, because its honey tested positive for traces of glyphosate. The lawsuit said Sue Bee’s labelling, advertising its honey as “Pure” and “Natural,” is false and misleading. Another class action was started last year in Canada against a honey producer

Meanwhile, a federal judge in Brazil has ordered the suspension of products containing glyphosate until the government re-evaluates the chemical’s toxicology. France has already ruled that the herbicide will be phased out completely within five years.

Unsurprisingly, Monsanto has been accused of a corporate cover-up, with many on social media arguing that the company knew all along that their product causes cancer. Some scientists accused the company of “ghost writing” the scientific studies into the herbicide, and of trying “to destroy the United Nations’ cancer agency by any means possible” to save glyphosate.

Some on social media were quick to draw attention to an arguably similar ruling back in March where a Californian judge ruled that coffee companies will have to carry a cancer warning label because coffee contains acrylamide, a carcinogen. The acrylamide in coffee is formed early in the roasting process. All the foods we roast or fry also contain acrylamide, with 5 micrograms in a slice of toast or 7 micrograms in a bag of potato crisps, as examples. A cup of coffee has around 0.9 micrograms to 2.4 micrograms per 150 millilitre cup.

Others drew similarities between the Monsanto ruling and the recent EU’s almost complete ban on the use of neonicotinoid insecticides across the EU. Just as glyphosate is the world’s widest used herbicide, neonicotinoids are the most widely used insecticides. Back in 2013 the European Union opted for a partial ban on the use of the three chemicals in this class: Imidacloprid, clothianidin and thiamethoxam. The restrictions applied to crops including maize, wheat, barley, oats and oil seed rape. The newly agreed Commission regulation goes much further, meaning that almost all outdoor uses of the chemicals would be banned.

The action was driven by a recent report from the European Food Safety Authority (Efsa), which found that neonicotinoids posed a threat to many species of bees, no matter where or how they are used in the outdoor environment.

The decision is likely to particularly affect sugar beet production across the EU. The French sugar beet growers group CGB said, “This decision has a devastating impact on beet growing. With this ban, all French regions are likely to be affected by viral jaundice, with potential yield losses estimated at 12 pct at national level, and up to 50 pct in certain ocean climate zones.” Producers in the UK and Germany expressed similar opinions while others questioned whether neonicotinoids actually cause bee colony collapse disorder

These two latest rulings follow on from one by the European Court of Justice (on 25th July) that organisms obtained by mutagenesis plant breeding technique (gene-editing) are GMOs and should fall under the GMO Directive. The decision shocked the agriculture industry, which described it as a severe blow to innovation in EU agriculture and warned about economic and environmental consequences.

In a piece for Foreign Affairs published in April, Bill Gates outlined the case for using CRISPR and other gene-editing techniques on a global scale to meet growing demand for food and to improve disease prevention, particularly for malaria. “It would be a tragedy to pass up the opportunity,” he wrote.

In agriculture, Gates argues, gene-editing technologies could be used to make animals more productive while editing crops to withstand harsher growing conditions, or to include naturally occurring pesticides and herbicides, would improve crop yields.

These three rulings will make life more challenging for some farmers and may have major secondary implications. I will take up some of the issues in next week’s blog.

Images under Creative Commons from Pixabay

Earlier today, when I went for my morning swim in the lake, I suddenly found myself caught up in a large semi-submerged plastic bag. My guess is that it  had once packaged a large-screen TV, possibly recently purchased for the World Cup. As to what it was doing in the lake, someone may have brought it down to one of the lakeside beaches to sit on during an evening barbecue. They had  inadvertently, probably after a few too many beers, left it there to wash out into the waves..

One moment I was swimming peacefully in crystal clear water; the next I was confused and panicked as I struggled to free myself from the plastic. At one stage my hands and arms were inside it and I had trouble staying afloat. My panic only lasted a few seconds, but as I brought the plastic bag back to the shore to dispose of in one of the rubbish bins on the beach, I thought of all the turtles and other marine life that get caught and perish in the plastic debris floating in our oceans. They too must suffer the same sense of panic and confusion that I had felt earlier today. One moment they are free; the next they are trapped in a thing of which they have no comprehension.

I had already been thinking about plastic last Saturday evening when my wife and I went out to dinner and we were served our cocktails with unnecessarily large—and unnecessarily plastic—straws. I thought about complaining to the waiter about them, but my habitual British fear of embarrassment stopped me. I didn’t want to spoil what was a lovely evening.

Starbucks announced this week that they would be completely eliminating plastic straws from their 28,000 stores around the world by 2020. And that is no small thing: the company currently uses more than one billion plastic straws per year.

McDonald’s also recently announced it will ban plastic straws at its U.K. and Ireland restaurants; other food outlets and airlines are following the trend. Cities are also joining in, with Seattle becoming the latest city in the US to do so. The UK environment minister has gone on record as saying he would like to ban plastic straws completely in the UK, while the EU has also proposed a ban on plastic straws and single use cutlery.

This week National Geographic published an excellent article on the history of plastic straws and how they took over the world. They write that in just the U.S. alone, one estimate suggests 500 million straws are used every single day. One study published earlier this year estimated as many as 8.3 billion plastic straws pollute the world’s beaches.

However, eight million tons of plastic flow into the ocean every year, and straws comprise just 0.025 percent of that.

Bloomberg argues that giving up plastic straws may make you feel better about yourself, but will have little effect on ocean plastic. The news agency cites a recent survey  that found that at least 46 percent of the plastic in the oceans by weight comes from a single product: fishing nets. Other fishing gear makes up a good chunk of the rest. (Bloomberg suggests that all fishing gear should be marked with the name of the ship that uses it: a complicated and difficult solution that will take time to implement.)

Banning plastic straws, like taxing calorific soft drinks, is a simple response to a complex problem. Doing so enables politicians to say that they are doing something to solve a problem, whether it is plastic waste or obesity, but in reality they must know that their actions will have little impact.

So what is the solution to plastic waste—and what can the food and agriculture industry do to help? The answer is, as usual, complicated.

The BBC published this week an excellent analysis of the issues involved with plastic packaging in the food industry. They argue that although plastic is viewed as bad, “the shrink wrap used on cucumbers for instance, can more than double the length of time the vegetable can last, allowing it to be kept for up to 15 days in the fridge and cutting food waste in half.

The BBC adds,

“Much of the food we now buy in supermarkets comes tightly wrapped in sealed plastic films and protective trays. This keeps fresh meat in an oxygen-free atmosphere, helping to prevent it from spoiling. Delicate fruit and vegetables are also kept safe from bumps that can degrade them, meaning they’re more likely to be sold. Putting grapes in their own individual plastic boxes has been found to cut food waste by 75%.”

The BBC also looks at the environmental cost of replacing plastic drink bottles with glass ones. They write that “it is generally not that much more expensive to produce a glass bottle versus one made from PET – about $0.01 more, according to some analysis. 

“However, when manufacturers start transporting produce in glass bottles, costs start to rise. A 330ml plastic soft drink bottle contains around 18 grams of material while a glass bottle can weigh between 190g and 250g. Transporting drinks in the heavier containers requires 40% more energy, producing more polluting carbon dioxide as they do and increasing transport costs by up to five times per bottle.

As a result, some, including those the packaging industry, argue that in many cases plastics are actually better for the environment than the alternatives.

But what about plastic made from renewable sources? There again the answer is not a simple one.

Coca-Cola became a leader in bioplastics when two years ago they launched the PlantBottle,  partially made with Brazilian sugarcane. However just because they are made from renewable green sugarcane doesn’t mean the bottles are biodegradable or compostable. They have to be recycled, but they also have to be separated from PET in the recycling process, driving up the costs.

France is a leader in the use of biodegradable and home-compostable plastic bags in supermarkets, and in 2017 took partial steps to ban single-use plastic bags. France’s Environment Ministry estimates that before the ban 17 billion plastic bags were used in France each year. Of those, some five billion were handed out at check-outs and 12 billion were for fruit and veg. An average plastic bag takes one second to make, is used for roughly 20 minutes and takes up to 400 years to degrade naturally.

The example of France shows that real progress can be made if the political will is there, even if only by one small step at a time. Further comfort can be taken from the fact that with petrol prices rising, recycled plastic is actually cheaper than fresh, virgin plastic made from oil. A tonne of virgin PET costs around £1,000 while clear recycled PET costs just £158 per tonne.

We can all be part of the solution by drinking from a reusable bottle whenever we can, and by conscientiously recycling the PET bottles whenever we can’t. As for plastic straws, they have become a totem for the anti-plastic movement; they help to focus our attention on the issue. So don’t wimp out like I did last Saturday evening: refuse a plastic straw whenever it is offered to you.

And one last thing: please don’t take any plastic with you when you go to the beach this summer. I had enough of a panic attack already!

All images from pixabay under Creative Commons

A report published last week by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) highlighted the way that the palm oil industry is encroaching on rainforest and endangering biodiversity.

However the IUCN also highlighted the little-reported point that alternative oil crops, such as soy, corn and rapeseed, require up to nine times as much land as palm. Palm oil provides a third of the world’s vegetable oil, from 10% of the land used for all oil crops. Switching to alternative crops could result in the destruction of wild habitat in other parts of the world, such as Brazil and Argentina.

The director general of the IUCN told The Guardian, “When you consider the disastrous impacts of palm oil on biodiversity from a global perspective, there are no simple solutions. If we ban or boycott it, other, more land-hungry oils will likely take its place.”

The IUCN report’s lead author added, “Palm oil is decimating south-east Asia’s rich diversity of species as it eats into swaths of tropical forest.” But, quoting US writer HL Mencken, he said, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

The answer is to not to ban palm oil, but to make its production more sustainable. That is easy to say and difficult to do. Indeed, the IUCN report criticised current sustainability efforts, arguing that certified palm oil is little better than non-certified palm oil.

A spokeswoman for the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), which certifies almost 20% of all palm oil, disagreed. She told The Guardian that, “While we acknowledge that the certification system is not perfect, it has made a real contribution against deforestation.” She added that the RSPO is currently strengthening its standards.

So here we have two of the ten factors that Hans Gosling highlighted in his recent book Factfulness: Ten reasons we’re wrong about the world—and why things are better than you think. First, things are more complicated than they seem. Second, they are not perfect, but they are getting better.

An example of that second point can be found in the slowdown of soybean expansion in the Amazon basin following a moratorium by trading and food companies  on purchases of soybeans from newly deforested land. The annual rate of deforestation for soybeans in monitored municipalities has fallen 85 percent since 2008 and has accounted for only 1.2 percent of total cutting in the Amazon region in the period.

According to Greenpeace, the moratorium shows that zero deforestation is a possible pledge, and that similar protection should be expanded to other areas facing destruction.

The problem, of course, is that we still have to feed the world’s growing population. Agricultural expansion is the single largest driver of biodiversity loss, and it makes sense on a global scale to increase yields from existing areas rather than expand into new areas. This can be done by improving seeds, breeds and processes, or by planting more efficient crops.

As the IUCN study admits, a hectare of palm oil trees produces roughly 4,000 kg of oil per year, while a hectare of soybeans produces only 475 kg. (Cynics might argue that it is this difference in yields, and hence costs, that is driving the western world’s anti-palm oil lobby, not concern over biodiversity loss.)

Looking at different crops in terms of calories, palm is one of the most efficient at 3,520 calories per square metre, just behind sugar beet at 3,652 calories per square metres, but ahead of sugarcane at 2,781 calories. So if you really needed to feed the world, you would cover the planet with those three crops.

Of course nothing is that simple. First, calories alone are not enough: the body also needs proteins, vitamins, fibre and micronutrients. (Although my kids might disagree, you cannot live on Nutella alone.) Second, those three crops aren’t suitable for all climates; they don’t grow everywhere. Third, as the Irish potato famine showed us, monoculture can be extremely risky.

However there is a fourth issue here: fairness. The IUCN estimates the total area of industrial scale palm oil plantations at 18.7m hectares, with smallholder plantations taking the total to 25m hectares. This means that smallholder farmers grow about one quarter of all palm oil. Those smallholder farmers are no different from any of us; they are simply looking to provide for their families and ensure a better future for their children. It is difficult to tell them that they can’t do that.

In his book, Hans Gosling warns against another human instinct: to always blame someone when something goes wrong. Just as polar bears have become the totem of global warming, orang utans have become the totem of all that is wrong with palm oil. But unlike polar bears, whose numbers are increasing, Borneo’s orang utan population has fallen by an estimated 150,000 in the past 16 years.

The IUCN estimates that most of that decline has been caused by hunting, rather than through habitat loss as a result of agricultural encroachment. (There is an argument that agricultural expansion is bringing humans into closer contact with wildlife, and and that it is this that has lead to an increase in hunting.)

All in all, if you were to ask your friends and neighbours why orang utans are dying out, they will blame palm oil. If the palm oil industry wants to win back the hearts and minds of the world’s consumers, they will need to work with the local population to reverse that decline in the orang utan population.

As one of the coauthors of the IUCN report said, “We need to work with people to help them understand that orang utans are not dangerous and that it’s illegal to kill them. We know this decline has been largely due to hunting, and if we can turn that around, these orang utans could, over a long period, bounce back. When you lost the habitat, it’s gone forever, but the forests are still there. If we can stop the hunting and killing, we can reverse the trend.”

The conclusion has to be that boycotting palm oil is not a solution to the problem of biodiversity loss; it may in fact displace and aggravate it. The only (horribly complex) solution is to work with bodies such as the RSPO to improve sustainability, to help smallholder families lead better lives without cutting down virgin forest, and to educate the local population not to kill protected wildlife. The solutions are as difficult as the problems are complex, but they are nonetheless urgent.

Images from Pixabay under creative commons