Censored 2014 (19 page)

Although no long-term research on the effects of fracking on humans, livestock, or plants exists, a peer-reviewed study by Michelle Bamberger and Robert Oswald linked fracking to illness in animals.
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They believe chemicals leaking from fracking sites could start appearing in human food supplies, due to lack of regulation and testing.

Along with the potential dangers to both animals and humans, fracking also releases greenhouse gases that have been shown to contribute to climate change. “Carbon sequestration” refers to the long-term storage of carbon dioxide or other forms of carbon in order to mitigate climate change. It has been proposed as a way to slow the atmospheric and marine accumulation of greenhouse gases, which are released by burning fossil fuels.
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As Christa Marshall reported, natural gas production and carbon sequestration may be headed for an underground collision course: shale-gas extraction involves fracturing rock that could
be needed as an impenetrable cover to hold CO
₂
underground permanently, without it leaking back into the atmosphere. There is an obvious conflict between fracking and carbon sequestration.

OUR ENVIRONMENT, OUR FOOD SUPPLY

On a global scale, the world's food supply is fragile.
Censored
story #15, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed's “Food Riots: The New Normal?,” and a set of supporting validated independent news stories, address the connections between the world's food supply and our environment.
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Global food prices have been consistently higher than in preceding decades leading to dramatic price increases in staple foods and triggering food riots across the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, Ahmed reported. The crux of this global phenomenon is climate change: severe natural disasters including drought, flood, heat waves, and monsoons have affected major regional food baskets. By mid-century it is estimated that world crop yields could fall as much as 20 to 40 percent because of climate change alone.
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Industrial agricultural methods that disrupt soil also contribute to impending food shortages. As a result, global land productivity has dropped significantly, from 2.1 percent, 1950–1990, to 1.2 percent, 1990–2007.
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To contrast this, corporate media coverage of food insecurity tends to treat it as a local and episodic problem. For example, an April 2008 story in the
Los Angeles Times
covered food riots in Haiti, which resulted in three deaths.
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Similarly, a March 2013
New York Times
piece addressed how loss of farmland and farm labor to urbanization contributes to rising food costs in China.
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Corporate media have not connected the dots to analyze how intensifying inequality, debt, climate change, and consumption of fossil fuels contribute to the potential for a global food crisis in the near future.

Drawing on figures from the United Nations and the USDA, the BBC's Richard Anderson reported that we will need to produce 70 percent more food by 2050 to feed the world's expanding population; yet global corn stocks have dropped by 50 percent since 1998; more than 100 million more people across the world suffer from hunger due to recent increases in food price rises; and globally, one in eight people do not have enough food.
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One partial solution to the looming food crisis is to reduce food waste. The US alone wastes about 40 percent of the food it produc-es.
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Consumers in rich countries waste almost as much food as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa.
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Jeremy Seifert's documentary film,
Dive!,
offers a personal perspective on the problem of food waste.
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Although cutting back on food waste is definitely part of the solution, we must also reevaluate different types of food production and their comparative effects on the environment and world hunger. Thus, in “Embracing Sustainability: Forsaking Meat and Chemical Agriculture,” Colin Todhunter reported that, according to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization, livestock accounts for nearly 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.
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Since 1965, the number of animals slaughtered each year has increased from ten billion to fifty-five billion. This in turn means that 9 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, 37 percent of methane emissions, and 65 percent of nitrous oxide emissions come from livestock alone. Livestock also occupy 26 percent of the earth's usable land.
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Livestock is not the only issue; modern food production techniques also harm the global environment. In the industrial age, farming relies heavily on fossil fuels, pesticides, and hormones, which not only harm consumers but also the earth's soils and atmosphere. A shift from these practices to more sustainable, organic farming is necessary to reduce the impacts of cars and industry on the global environmental.
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The human need for food impacts our oceans as well.
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As the
Guardian
reported, rising acid levels in our oceans now threaten coral reefs to an extent that poses dangers for global food security.
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Scientists claimed nearly one billion people in the world depend on seafood as their main source of protein. The high acidity levels are due to the oceans absorbing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Gradual climate change in conjunction with the increase in ocean acidification presents many problematic issues for marine life and the food supply.
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According to Jane Lubchenco, chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), oceanic acid levels are increasing quicker than originally predicted, making acidification climate change's “equally evil twin.”
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For example, higher acid levels slow
the growth rate of oyster shells and the formation of coral skeletons, and impairs the sense of smell of clown fish and salmon.
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As Suzanne Goldenberg reported, “The Gulf, Libya, and Pakistan are at high risk of food insecurity in the coming decades because climate change and ocean acidification are destroying fisheries.”
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In these and other countries characterized by high rates of population growth and malnutrition, Goldenberg reported, fisheries provide crucial sources of protein and economic livelihood. However, a report released by Oceana, titled
Ocean-Based Food Security Threatened in a High CO
₂
World,
indicated that many such countries will lose up to 40 percent of their fish catch by 2050, while the Gulf is estimated to lose over 50 percent of its fisheries.
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The Oceana report predicted that the US will lose 12 percent of its catch by 2050.

Not only are our oceans in peril, but our freshwater sources are increasingly at risk. As Richard Anderson reported in his article, “Global Food Crisis in the Making,” without water, crops cannot grow and the world cannot eat.
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And in 2012, wasn't enough water. The US has seen its worst drought in more than fifty years, vast swathes of Russia have been left parched by lack of rain, India has had a dry monsoon season, while rainfall in South America early in the year fell well below expectations. As a direct result, harvests of many crops have been decimated, forcing the price of some cereals back up toward levels last seen four years ago—a time when high prices sparked riots in twelve countries across the world and forced the United Nations to call a food price crisis summit.
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In May 2013, a global summit involving 500 of the world's leading water scientists concluded that without major reforms, within two generations a majority of the world's population will “be living under the handicap of severe pressure on fresh water.”
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GENETICALLY MODIFIED CROPS TO THE RESCUE?

Advocates of genetically modified (GM) crops have touted them as a technological solution to the problem of food supplies in a world characterized by human growth and limited natural resources. However, as one of the most powerful producers of GM crops, Monsanto has been anything but a champion in terms of feeding the world's
hungry. As shown by
Censored
story #21, “Monsanto and India's ‘Suicide Economy,'” and story #24, “Did Monsanto Plant GMOs Before USDA Approval?,” Monsanto is focused on profits over people.

Jason Overdorf of the GlobalPost and Belen Fernandez of Al Jazeera reported on Monsanto's impact on farmers in India.
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Since 1995, an estimated 250,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide due to massive debt.
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Vandana Shiva and other critics have concluded that Monsanto's profit-driven policies have led to a “suicide economy” in India.
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Monsanto has argued that these suicides have no single cause. But evidence involving the corporation's pest-resistant Bt cotton implicates Monsanto, according to Shiva. She noted, “The price per kilogram of cotton seeds [has gone] from 7 to 17,000 rupees. . . . Monsanto sells its GMO seeds on fraudulent claims of yields of 1500 kg/year when farmers harvest 300–400 kg/year on an average.”
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Although Overdorf avoided directly blaming Monsanto, he identified India's financial sys
tem, characterized by high interest rates and predatory lending practices, as a contributing factor to the despair of India's farmers.
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A new documentary film,
Dirty White Gold
by Leah Borromeo, goes beyond the issue of farmer suicides to explain how the global fashion industry and international consumer habits contribute to the lives and deaths of Indian farmers.
Dirty White Gold
examined the cotton supply chain, with the aim of generating support for legislation that will, in Borromeo's words, “make ethics and sustainability the norm in the fashion industry.”
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A previous documentary film, Micha X. Peled's
Bitter Seeds,
also illuminated Monsanto's negative impacts in India.
Bitter Seeds,
which followed a teenage girl whose father committed suicide due to debt, showed how Monsanto lies directly to Indian farmers, going as far as making up fictitious farmers who “have success” with the new Bt cotton. Monsanto has claimed that there has also been a 25 percent reduction in pesticide costs. In
Bitter Seeds,
both of these claims were proven false.
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The uniformity created by Monsanto's seeds, and by GM seeds more generally, has led to agricultural catastrophes because there is less seed diversity compared to earlier times. For example, today only four varieties of potatoes are widely grown, and one study indicated that we have lost about 97 percent of the varieties of vegetables grown before the twentieth century.
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What's been done is done: we may not be able to recover seed lines lost in the process of our desperate desire to make all tomatoes look identical or “perfect.” However, agricultural standards of uniformity are not the only issue. We may be able to survive with only a few varieties of vegetables, but GM crops have been shown to pose health risks.
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Our faith in technology, coupled with our desire for perfection, comes at great cost, not only for farmers, such as those in India, but also for consumers.

One solution is to assure that consumers are better informed about the health risks of GM foods. If members of the public had better information about the potential risks of eating genetically modified food, then they could make informed decisions about whether or not to eat it. In California, Proposition 37 was an attempt to inform the public. If passed, it would have required labels indicating if a product contained any GM ingredients. In November 2012, the proposition failed to pass due to large donations from big corporations, including Monsanto.
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Though
consumers in California suffer less than farmers in India, both are victims of Monsanto's pursuit of money at the expense of public health.

Previous
Censored
reports have addressed the health risks associated with GM foods, as well as efforts by Big Ag and the US government to affect policy, both domestically and abroad, on their regulation.
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In this year's
Censored
story #24, Cassandra Anderson and Anthony Gu-cciardi reported that Monsanto's GM alfalfa may have been set free in 2003—a full two years or more before it was deregulated in 2005.
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In a letter obtained by health website NaturalSociety with permission to post for public viewing, it becomes clear that the USDA may have turned a blind eye to the entire situation, allowing the possibility of widespread GM contamination of GM-free crops.

The case is especially problematic because alfalfa is a perennial crop; it does not need replanting each year, like annual crops do. As a perennial, it is vulnerable to cross-pollination and, therefore, GM contamination. For this reason, genetically modified alfalfa could quickly spread to crops across the US, threatening the integrity of organic products—including organic meat and dairy products, if those animals are fed alfalfa believed to be GMO-free, but are in fact carrying Monsanto's patented genetically modified trait.
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