For the eleventh entry in our series “Corn-Fed Cars: On the Road with Ethanol,” we asked biofuels expert Donna Perla, MPH, senior advisor with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development, for her thoughts on the future of the biofuels industry.
Patti Truant: What’s new in the world of biofuels right now? What do you think are the greatest opportunities and challenges right now in moving toward a more bio-based economy?
Donna Perla: I think there are several. One is that the industry has really evolved. Certainly it started with corn ethanol, but there still is this push for cellulosic ethanol. Read More >
Also contributing to this post is Rachel Pinson, an MPH student focusing on food access, food policy, and program planning.
One of Baltimore City’s most underserved neighborhoods received funding for a facelift recently in the form of a $60,000 grant from the USDA. The grant, known as the People’s Garden Grant, was designed “to invest in urban and rural areas identified as food deserts and/or food insecure areas, particularly those with persistent poverty” (USDA). Cherry Hill—a neighborhood without a full-service supermarket and where more than 90 percent of non-married families live below the Maryland Self-Sufficiency Wage (an index of how much income is needed for a family to adequately meet their basic needs without public or private assistance)—is a quintessential food insecure area. Read More >
Which is the culprit? Ethanol or corn?
This is the third blogpost in the series, “Corn-Fed Cars: On the Road with Ethanol.”
When environmentalists complain about ethanol, they complain about the negative impacts of an ethanol economy: increased levels of nitrate, sediment and pesticide pollution, as well as decreased biodiversity and fewer small farms. Are these valid complaints? Or are they actually complaining about corn? Are we talking about “failed agronomy?”
First, some facts. The amount of land dedicated to corn today is at an all-time high. And so is the land in soybeans. The reason is clear: corn and soybeans are at all-time high prices and returns. The USDA is putting less emphasis on conservation reserve programs, and so farmers with their eyes on the bottom line are putting more land into corn and soybeans. Read More >
The pork and beef industries are having a field day with the recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on antibiotic resistance—and they are distorting the findings dramatically. Both industries are saying that the GAO found insufficient evidence to link antibiotic use in food animals and antibiotic resistance in humans. But what the report really tells us is that the FDA and USDA are not doing a good enough job collecting data on the connection between antibiotic use and resistance.
Two years ago, Rep. Louise Slaughter (D–NY) asked the GAO, the impartial research arm of Congress, to look into the efforts of two federal agencies (FDA and USDA) to curb antibiotic resistance that results from the inappropriate use of antimicrobials in food animal production. The GAO’s mandates included an examination of the extent to which these federal agencies are collecting data on the issue, as well as examinations of lessons learned by FDA and regulators in Denmark and the European Union. I think it’s very important to note that Rep. Slaughter did not ask the GAO to evaluate the extensive scientific literature connecting the use of antibiotics in food animal production to antibiotic-resistant infections in humans. Read More >
Nina Federoff, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and professor at Penn State University penned an opinion piece in the New York Times recently, asking for less regulation of genetically engineered (GE) crops. Professor Federoff would like to see more grant money available for research and more scientists working on the development of GE foods, but she states in her article that the regulatory bars of the EPA, USDA, and FDA are set too high and are stifling scientists from making innovations.
Ignoring the rest of her argument that GE seeds dramatically improve crop yields (they don’t and in fact agricecological farming methods are not only better for the environment but better for yields), reduce the use of chemicals (they don’t; pesticide use has increased since the introduction of GE crops in the U.S.), improve the lives of farmers (not in India or the U.S.), and have not been shown to cause harm to the environment (she forgot about the development of superweeds, pollution of waters, and harm to soil), let’s focus on her idea that regulations are too complicated and stringent. As you will see, this is simply not the case. In fact, regulations may be too lax, as they allow corporations driven by profit, not protecting public health, to drive the research (or lack thereof) to demonstrate safety, and, as well explained in many of the above articles, the U.S. experience with GM crops has indeed led to environmental problems. Read More >
The newest superbug in town is Salmonella Heidelberg, and the USDA has issued words of caution to U.S. consumers and instructions for proper meat handling—but it needs to press for reform in agricultural practices, as well.
The CDC has identified S. Heidelberg as “resistant to many commonly prescribed antibiotics,” and so far the outbreak, which is linked to ground turkey, has sickened 77 people in 26 states and killed one person in California. (The CDC has not specified the drugs to which this Salmonella strain is resistant.)
The emergence of the antibiotic-resistant strain prompted the USDA last Friday to issue a public health alert urging consumers to use caution when handling ground turkey, and to cook all poultry products to an internal temperature of 165 degrees. And today, meat processing firm Cargill Meat Solutions Corporation voluntarily recalled 36 million pounds of its ground turkey products. (For details on Cargill’s decision to suspend ground turkey production at its Arkansas facility, read yesterday’s New York Times and Mother Jones articles.) Read More >
For whom does the USDA work? A recent development involving a vanished technical review makes me wonder if the agency is working to assure a safe and nutritious food supply for the U.S. citizenry, or to protect the profits of the agro-industrial complex.
Tom Philpott did a great job covering the turn of events in a Mother Jones article published on Friday. In a nutshell, the USDA asked Vaishali Dharmarha, a Food Safety Information Specialist at U.S. Department of Agriculture/University of Maryland, to summarize recent academic findings on the link between antibiotic resistant bacterial infections (such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA) and industrial farm animal production. The agency blessed the report, which summarized research from 63 academic papers, as peer-reviewed, scientific, and scholarly. And then they quashed it.
Read More >
U.S. National Archives | 1941
In the midst of economic instability, it’s become clear that funding for major federal programs will be subject to cuts, and nutrition programs are no exception. Perhaps cuts are unavoidable, but it is essential that we examine their potential impact on public health.
According to a recent USDA Economic Research Service report, more than 50 million Americans, including 17 million children, were food insecure in 2009, meaning they were uncertain of having enough food or unable to acquire enough food for their household members. Food insecurity and hunger can have far-reaching consequences—numerous studies suggest that children in food-insecure households have higher risks of health and development problems than children in otherwise similar food-secure households. Any changes to these nutrition programs must not undermine the safety net they provide for millions of Americans. Read More >
A new technical review by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “A Focus on Antimicrobial Resistance,” calls the issue a growing public health concern worldwide, stating the misuse of antimicrobial drugs in food animal production and human medicine is the main factor accelerating antimicrobial resistance.
The USDA report, in the National Agriculture Library, is a compilation of research from 63 scholarly and peer reviewed journals, including research supported by the Center for a Livable Future. It says limiting the inappropriate use of antimicrobials in animals agriculture can be achieved by:
- Understanding the risks and benefits of antimicrobial use in food animals.
- Development and implementation of principles guiding appropriate antimicrobial use in the food animal production.
- Improvement in animal husbandry and food production practices to reduce the dissemination of AMR.
- Development of regulations for prudent use of antimicrobials in food animals.
- Development of testing and reporting protocols for drug-resistant foodborne pathogens by regulatory agencies.
- Reduction in the usage of antimicrobials that are “critically important” for human medicine in food animals.
According to data released last December by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 80% (or 28.8 million pounds) of the antibiotics sold in 2009 were used to raise livestock and poultry.
In an article in last Saturday’s New York Times, “When Food Kills,” Columnist Nicholas Kristoff calls attention to the ongoing E. coli outbreak in Europe, noting 325,000 people are hospitalized from food-borne illnesses each year. “We have an industrial farming system that is a marvel for producing cheap food, but lobbyists block initiatives to make food safer,” writes Kristoff. “Perhaps the most disgraceful aspect of our agricultural system….is the way antibiotics are recklessly stuffed into healthy animals to make them grow faster.”
Kristoff calls for more testing and education about E. coli adding, “a great place to start reforms would be banning the feeding of antibiotics to healthy livestock.”
By Dr. Dennis Keeney, Visiting Scholar, Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future
The USDA 2011 Prospective Plantings Report was one of the most anticipated planting reports in several years. It came on the heels of a shocking Grain Stocks Report issued last month, which showed that corn stocks have come down 15% since March 2010. Ending stocks are projected to be only 675 million bushels, about 5% of the projected marketing year consumption, while consumption of the current marketing year corn was higher than in 2009 and well above projected consumption. Lowered stocks were also caused by a smaller than expected corn crop due to cold and rainy weather in the Corn Belt in 2010. Corn prices almost immediately increased by another $1 per bushel on the heels of a doubling of price during the past year. This dramatic price jump portends another round of world-wide food price increases, similar to those in 2008-2009. Already, some political uprisings in the Middle East have been blamed to some extent on rapid food price increases. In 2008-2009, yields bounced back to normal and the ethanol demand was much lower.
Why has this happened? Will it be alleviated by a bumper crop on more acres in 2011? Or has the grain commodity price structure started a trend towards a “new normal” of steadily increasing prices and more shortages?
The March 31 crop report indicated that farmers “intend” to plant 5% more acreage in corn, 8% more in wheat and 15% more in cotton while cutting soybean planting by only 1%. This adds up to 4 million more acres of cropland than there were in 2010. One wonders where that extra land is coming from. Most likely, it is land being retired from the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), and includes more fragile meadow and grassland. That is not good news for the environment. Just recently, a number of congressional members called for the immediate release of some of the 31.2 million acres of CRP for cropland.
I would like to explore what corn is used for and why the sudden drop in ending stocks surprised so many people, before presenting some scenarios that may play out in the near future. Read More >
For the eleventh entry in our series “Corn-Fed Cars: On the Road with Ethanol,” we asked biofuels expert Donna Perla, MPH, senior advisor with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development, for her thoughts on the future of the biofuels industry.
