April/May 2006
Empty
Envelopes for Empty Promises
Steve Bhaerman
Restoring
the Public Trust
Bill Moyers
Nonviolence:
The Link Between Spiritual Development and Social Change
David Kupfer
One
Roof at a Time
Bill McKibben
If
Not Now, When?
Jody Woodruff
Recent
Research Shows Organic Foods Safer for Children
Stephen Leahy
Shop
Smart and Save the Planet
Annie Hoy
What's
in Your Pantry
Mary Shaw
Playing
the Quantum Field
Brenda Anderson
Autobiography
of a Blue-Eyed Yogi
Reviewed by Rachel Bendat
Living
With the Himalayan Masters
Reviewed by Rachel Bendat
The
Oneness Movement
Cate Montana
Book
Reviews
John Darling
Cosmic
Calendar
Salina Rain
Recent Research Shows Organic Foods Safer For Children
By Stephen Leahy
Organic foods protect children from the toxins in pesticides, while foods grown using modern, intensive agricultural techniques contain fewer nutrients and minerals than they did 60 years ago, according to two new scientific studies.
A US research team from Emory University in Atlanta analyzed urine samples from children ages three to 11 who ate only organic foods and found that they contained virtually no metabolites of two common pesticides, malathion and chlorpyrifos.
However, once the children returned to eating conventionally grown foods, concentrations of these pesticide metabolites quickly climbed as high as 263 parts per billion, says the study published Feb. 21, 2006.
Organic crops are grown without the chemical pesticides and fertilizers that are common in intensive agriculture.
There was a “dramatic and immediate protective effect” against the pesticides while consuming organically grown foods, said Chensheng Lu, an assistant professor at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University.
These findings, in addition to the results of another study published in Britain earlier this month, have fueled the debate about the benefits of organically grown food as compared to conventional, mass-produced foods, involving academics, food and agro-industry executives and activists in the global arena.
According to the new British analysis of government nutrition data on meat and dairy products from the 1930s and from 2002, the mineral content of milk, cheese and beef declined as much as 70 percent in that period.
“These declines are alarming,” Ian Tokelove, spokesman for The Food Commission that published the results of the study, told Tierramérica. The Commission is a British non-governmental organization advocating for healthier, safer food.
The research found that parmesan cheese had 70 percent less magnesium and calcium, beef steaks contained 55 percent less iron, chicken had 31 percent less calcium and 69 percent less iron, while milk also showed a large drop in iron along with a 21 percent decline in magnesium.
Copper, an important trace mineral (an essential nutrient that is consumed in tiny quantities), also declined 60 percent in meats and 90 percent in dairy products.
“It seems likely that intensive farming methods are responsible for this,” Tokelove said from his office in London.
Although controversial, a number of other studies have also found differences between conventionally produced foods and foods grown organically or under more natural conditions. Organic fruits and vegetables had significantly higher levels of cancer-fighting antioxidants, according to a 2003 study in Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. The organic plants produced these chemical compounds to help fight off insects and competing plants, researchers said.
A 2001 report by Britain’s Soil Association looked at 400 nutritional research studies and came to similar conclusions: foods grown organically had more minerals and vitamins.
“Modern plant breeding for quick growth and high yields could also be affecting the nutritional quality,” says Katherine Tucker, director of the nutritional epidemiology program at Tufts University in the northeastern US city of Boston, Massachusetts.
Lower levels of minerals in food we eat is cause for concern, she says, stressing that “magnesium, calcium and other minerals are very important for proper nutrition.”
Good nutrition and exercise are the major factors that can make a difference in the incidence of many diseases, including cancer, according to Tucker.
She recommends eating unprocessed foods, meat from free-range animals, and grains, fruits and vegetables grown organically or at least using more natural farming methods.
Farmers in other parts of the world should not adopt the intensive farming practices of North America or Europe, says Ken Warren, a spokesman with The Land Institute, based in the central US state of Kansas.
“It’s an unsustainable system that relies heavily on chemical fertilizers ... to keep yields high and produces ‘hollow food,’” Warren told Tierramérica.
“Hollow food” contains insufficient nutrition and is suspected in playing a role in the rapid rise in obesity, as people may be eating more in order to get the nutrition they need, he said. Crops take minerals, trace elements and other things from the soil every year. All that modern agriculture puts back into the land are some chemical fertilizers which do not replace all that has been lost, Warren said. Moreover, herbicides and insecticides kill microorganisms in the soil that play an important role in maintaining soil fertility and helping plants grow.
Pesticide residues in modern agriculture are another cause for concern. A 2003 University of Washington study found that children eating organic fruits and vegetables had concentrations of pesticide six times lower than children eating conventional produce.
The Land Institute advocates what it calls “natural systems agriculture.” This involves the use of perennial crops in polycultures, that is, planting several different crops together as has been practiced in traditional gardens and farm plots in many parts of the world.
“Farmers in other parts of the world should learn from American agriculture’s mistakes. Looking to nature is a better model for farming,” Warren said.
Stephen Leahy is a Tierramérica contributor. Originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network, a specialized news service produced by Inter Press Service (IPS), www.ipsnews.net, with the backing of the United Nations Development Program and the United Nations Environment Program.
Researchers
Say Combining Food Additives May Be Harmful
New research on aspartame (used in Nutrasweet™ and other sugar free sweeteners) and food colorings indicates their interaction may interfere with the development of the nervous system. Researchers examined the toxic effects on nerve cells in the laboratory using a combination of four common food additives—aspartame, monosodium glutamate (MSG) and artificial colorings. They reported that when mouse nerve cells were exposed to combinations found in concentrations that reflect the compound that enters the bloodstream after a typical children’s snack and drink, the additives stopped the nerve cells growing and interfered with proper signaling systems. The mixtures of the additives had a much more potent effect on nerve cells than each additive on its own.
A new report released last February by GRAIN links factory farming and the international poultry trade with the spread of bird flu and says wild birds are being unfairly blamed for the disease. According to the report the H5N1 virus developed inside intensive poultry units in Asia and was spread through exports of live birds and the use of chicken manure as fertilizer.
Many scientists understand that while the flu began in wild birds it developed in the crowded conditions of factory farms. The Journal of the US National Academy of Sciences has also reported that the poultry trade is responsible for the virus spreading from China to Vietnam.
Backyard or free-range poultry are not fuelling the current wave of bird flu outbreaks stalking large parts of the world. The deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu is essentially a problem of industrial poultry practices. Its epicenter is the factory farms of China and Southeast Asia and—while wild birds can carry the disease, at least for short distances—its main vector is the highly self-regulated transnational poultry industry, which sends the products and waste of its farms around the world through a multitude of channels. Yet small poultry farmers and the poultry biodiversity and local food security that they sustain are suffering badly from the fall-out. To make matters worse, governments and international agencies, following mistaken assumptions about how the disease spreads and amplifies, are pursuing measures to force poultry indoors and further industrialize the poultry sector. In practice, this means the end of the small-scale poultry farming that provides food and livelihoods to hundreds of millions of families across the world. The GRAIN paper presents a fresh perspective on the bird flu story that challenges current assumptions and puts the focus back where it should be: on the transnational poultry industry.
The spread of industrial poultry production and trade networks has created ideal conditions for the emergence and transmission of lethal viruses like the H5N1 strain of bird flu. Once inside densely populated factory farms viruses can rapidly become lethal and amplify. Air thick with viral load from infected farms is carried for miles, while integrated trade networks spread the disease through many carriers: live birds, day-old-chicks, meat, feathers, hatching eggs, eggs, chicken manure and animal feed.
“Everyone is focused on migratory birds and backyard chickens as the problem,” says Devlin Kuyek of GRAIN. “But they are not effective vectors of highly pathogenic bird flu. The virus kills them, but is unlikely to be spread by them.”
For example, in Malaysia, the mortality rate from H5N1 among village chicken is only 5%, indicating that the virus has a hard time spreading among small scale chicken flocks. H5N1 outbreaks in Laos, which is surrounded by infected countries, have only occurred in the nation’s few factory farms, which are supplied by Thai hatcheries. The only cases of bird flu in backyard poultry, which account for over 90% of Laos’ production, occurred next to the factory farms.
“The evidence we see over and over again, from the Netherlands in 2003 to Japan in 2004 to Egypt in 2006, is that lethal bird flu breaks out in large scale industrial chicken farms and then spreads,” Kuyek explains.
The Nigerian outbreak earlier this year began at a single factory farm distant from hotspots for migratory birds but known for importing unregulated hatchable eggs. In India, local authorities say that H5N1 emerged and spread from a factory farm owned by the country’s largest poultry company.
A burning question is why governments and international agencies, like the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, are doing nothing to investigate how the factory farms and their byproducts, such as animal feed and manure, spread the virus. Instead, they are using the crisis as an opportunity to further industrialize the poultry sector. Initiatives are multiplying to ban outdoor poultry, squeeze out small producers and restock farms with genetically-modified chickens. The web of complicity with an industry engaged in a string of denials and cover-ups seems complete.
“Farmers are losing their livelihoods, native chickens are being wiped out and some experts say that we’re on the verge of a human pandemic that could kill millions of people,” Kuyek concludes. “When will governments realize that to protect poultry and people from bird flu, we need to protect them from the global poultry industry?”
Read the full report at http://www.grain.org/briefings/?id=194. GRAIN (www.grain.org) is an international non-governmental organization which promotes the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity based on people’s control over genetic resources and local knowledge.
