I've been away from my desk for several days, dealing with some weather damage here on the farm. While that was happening, I was debating whether to keep alive a topic that some folks were already tired of discussing. I considered dropping it, but, I did say I'd provide data, so here goes. Feel free to delete if it's not of interest. I'll break it down by topic so that if folks are interested in some parts but not in others, they can pick and choose what to read:
Food Waste:
USDA and EPA are both very active in curbing food waste, with multiple programs aimed at reducing waste in various ways. Different programs exist to cover on-farm losses (both pre-harvest and post-harvest), processing chain losses, retail losses, institutional losses (schools, prisons, hospitals, etc), and post-consumer purchase losses (think leftovers). This first link is a summary of all the USDA programs (often in conjunction with another federal agency):
http://www.usda.gov/oce/foodwaste/usda_commitments.html
This second link is more information about one particular USDA program, called the Food Waste Challenge. This page includes some FAQ's about how the USDA defines food waste, what the statistics are (yes, 30% is the federally defined average, but some put it higher), and more details about that particular program:
http://www.usda.gov/oce/foodwaste/faqs.htm
Food Safety:
The FDA is the leading agency in American food safety policy and enforcement. Their FAQ's page covers more about causation, regulation and prevention:
http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/FSMA/ucm247559.htm
Land Use/Forestland Losses
These next few links are summaries about American farmland trends, forest area losses, and land conversion trends. In all three, these processes are driven by complex patterns of political, economic and environmental changes.
This first link is about forestland change trends published by the FAO. They distinguish between losses in industrial areas, versus developing areas. In each case, patterns are complex:
http://www.fao.org/docrep/article/wfc/xii/ms12a-e.htm
The second link is a report generated in 2005 by researchers at the University of Michigan, about farmland areas in the United States and what factors drive farmland loss. It's a long report, but it provides a few graphs at the end, and a conclusion on page 16. Of particular note, one of their conclusions (visible on page 17) was that "Agricultural productivity simply does not have any impact on the farm land acreage." That one was startling to me, because that's often used as a justification for many new production tools (not just GMOs). I'll be looking for verification of that. In the meantime, here's the report:
http://business.pages.tcnj.edu/files/2011/07/liu.thesis.tcnj_.pdf
Why GMO's are Used
Here's the single best objective summary I've ever found of who is actually using GMO crops, which crops, for what purpose, and on how much land, on both a national and global basis. It was part of Nature magazine's special issue on the pro's and con's of GMO usage. This link is to the one of those articles, but you can get most of the "meat" of the article just from studying the four slides. Of particular interest to our conversations:
In the United States, the single biggest reason for using GMO crops is to provide herbicide resistance
Only five nations (USA, Canada, Brazil, Argentina and India) use the vast majority of the world's GMO crops at present
Only three crops (corn, soybeans and cotton) use the vast majority of GMO varities
Here's the link :
http://www.nature.com/news/gm-crops-a-story-in-numbers-1.12893
I'll wrap up with two statements. First, I don't generally comment on these conversations because frankly a lot of it is over my head. But when I see statements made which I know to be inaccurate, youbetcha I'm going to challenge them.
Secondly, to the question of why should we care, I am reminded of the first lecture given in Introduction to Ecology, where our professor defined ecology as "the study of relationships". We tend to have a very mechanistic worldview in the West. We are under the impression that we can remove a piece of the mechanism, or swap it out with something else, and everything else will run the same. Ecological studies may be complex and involved and convoluted, but we have at least figured out that everything is related to everything else. If we start pulling on strings here, we're going to see movement over there. So my takeaway from that is that land use, food waste, crop trends and regulatory trends will all affect honeybee health in some way, because bees are living in the systems we're manipulating. For that matter, so are we. At which point I would describe honeybee survival rates as one more canary in the coal mine. If they're struggling to survive in an environment where they used to thrive, then something has changed, and we'd better figure it out. If they're thriving where they used to struggle, something has also changed, and we should figure that out as well. But we're kidding ourselves if we think we can make changes in our planetary living systems, without impacting everything else in that system. So we should care if only to preserve the various life cycles which support us, on the one planet we can currently live on.
Kathryn Kerby
Frogchorusfarm.com
Snohomish, WA
***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html
|
