In a bold move, the board of supervisors in Santa Clara County voted to ban promotional toys in kids’ meals if they don’t meet nutritional standards.

This is good news since fast food meals, like McDonald’s Happy Meals, are typically high-fat, highly processed and packaged, and meat-centered – all of which take a toll on the climate, and our kids’ health.

Join the Voices From Africa community today.

Members will be able to create their own account, access articles and documents on these issues, participate in forums, and strategize with policy-makers, activists and other stakeholders from all over the globe. Make your voice heard in this critical debate.

–Deepa

Rainforest Action Network’s Executive Director, Michael Brune, was quoted in the article, stating, “Over the last couple of years, protecting the environment has become as American as apple pie and Derek Jeter. Every company wants to at least be seen as being friendly to the environment. A lot of the things sold on eBay are new merchandise, and last time I checked the Postal Service still used fossil fuels for all of their planes and their trucks, so it’s not sustainable.
It’s fair to say that buying used goods on eBay is better for the environment, but let’s not get carried away and say this is the greenest thing since recycled paper.”

– Deepa

According WorldWatch, “The questions addressed in the State of the World 2009 are many: how do we adapt- not just as communities and nations, but as a species-to the warming that is headed our way, no matter what we do now? How will the world deal with the fact that the climate burden will fall heaviest on countries whose contributions to climate change have been the most modest? And even as we struggle to adapt, how does society maintain focus on slashing emissions to a pale shadow of their current levels?”

The report selects specific challenges (land use, energy, emissions, etc.) and proposes innovative alternatives. Some of the Innovations highlighted in the Land Use section are:
>> In Parana, Brazil, farmers have developed organic management systems combined with no-till. No-till plots yielded a third more wheat and soybean than conventional plowed plots and reduced soil erosion by up to 90 percent. (p. 36)
>> In 2005, a Pennsylvania dairy farm invested $1.14 million in a project to process the manure from 800 cows, using a digester and a combined heat and power unit. Now the farm makes a profit using biogas to generate 120 kilowatt-hours of electricity to sell back to the local utility. (p. 41)
>> Both India and China have large national programs to revegetate millions of hectares of forest and grasslands-seen as investments to reduce poverty and protect watersheds. (p. 44)
>> In Morocco, 34 pastoral cooperatives with more than 8,000 members rehabilitated and manage some 450,000 hectares of grazing reserves. (p. 44)
>> In Rajasthan, India, community-led watershed restoration programs have reinstated more than 5,000 traditional johads (rainwater storage tanks) in over 1,000 villages. (p. 44)
>> Some countries are redirecting subsidy payments to agri-environmental payments for ecosystem services, some of which explicitly include carbon storage and emissions reduction. (p. 46)

If you’re interested in reading more, download chapters or purchase a copy of this critical report here.

– Deepa

Support Just Food’s 2009 Summit on Food and Climate Change! The Summit “will help build a more educated, informed and politically involved network of urban and rural communities in the New York City region to influence food, farm and environmental policy. It will be structured to inform and educate participants, generate ideas and strategies, and build coalitions to create and mobilize around a concrete platform for action on Food and Climate Change in 2010.” Just Food’s conference coincides with the United Nations Climate Change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

For more information about this critical event, contact Nadia Johnson, the Food Justice Coordinator at Just Food. She can be reached at nadia@justfood.org or at 212.645.9880, ext. 237.

– Deepa

Check it out!

Juliette Jowit, from the British rag The Guardian, reported on a plan to eliminate meat from hospital menus across the UK. The action would be part of a larger strategy by the National Health Service (UK) to lower carbon emissions and save money, which could then be redirected into patient care.

Check it out here.

The National Health Service was inspired by a study they conducted last year through which they discovered that their emissions alone account for approximately 3% of the country’s s total emissions. If the NHS was a country, this emissions toll would rank them the planet’s 81st worst emitter in 2004.

The NHS has proposed both long- and short-term changes, from “urging people to drink less bottled water to more phone-in surgeries by GPs to the food: The NHS is planning to limit meat and dairy on hospital menus. David Pencheon, director of NHS’s sustainable development unit, said, “We’d like higher levels of fresh food, and probably higher levels of fresh fruit and veg, and more investment in a local economy.”

Sounds good to us.

Bittman, who writes the Minimalist column for the New York Times, takes a simple, holistic approach to food and cooking.

Read Salon’s s review here.

Time Mag ran its annual “top ten of everything,” including dipping their judging toes into the top ten of food. Coming in at number four was the almighty tap. With Nestle and the other Big Water companies quivering about the fate of their high-profit product lines (aka bottled water), the tap trend is certainly taking off.

White-tableclothed restaurants are starting to get in on the tap-is-best mantra and I couldn’t help but notice at both the Museum of Natural History in NYC and the new Academy of Sciences Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park their water fountains were draped with info-posters about the benefits of bottled water.

So drink up–from the tap and save your hard earned bucks for something more vital than water you can get for free.

Jenny Wiggins reports for the Financial Times:
“In the UK, bottled water sales volumes have slid 4.7 per cent and sales revenues have fallen 5.1 per cent in the 12 months to mid-August, according to research group Nielsen. This includes a 2.5 per cent drop in sales volumes of Evian and a 7.4 per cent drop in sales volumes of Volvic, both owned by French company Danone. In the US, where bottled water consumption is higher than in any other country, supermarket sales are at their slowest rate since bottled water became popular a decade ago.”

Check out the Take Back Your Tap campaign at Food & Water Watch to learn more and get involved.

Now after sitting through a requisite antitrust law “waiting period,” the companies can close on the multi-billion dollar transaction, provided both agree on the terms. (And that’s getting trickier as the tables have turned: Bunge made the bid earlier this summer when commodity prices–and Corn Products stock–were high). If passed, the deal will create a combined company with 32,000 employees and operations in 40 countries.

Bunge is one of those companies that has a heckuva lot to do with a lot we eat, but whose name you don’t know – yet. The St. Louis-based Bunge North America is just one of the operating arms of the global giant. “The world is our market – six billion people and counting,” says Bunge. They’re not kidding.

Founded in 1818, Bunge is a leading agribusiness and food company with operations, “stretching from the farm field to the retail shelf,” as they say.

Among its chief business operations, the company:
• manufactures fertilizer and animal feed for farmers;
• originates oilseeds and grains from the world’s primary growing regions and transports them to customers worldwide;
• crushes oilseeds to make meal for the livestock industry and oil for the food processing, food service and biofuel industries;
• produces bottled oils, mayonnaise, margarines and other food products for consumers;
• mills wheat and corn for food processors, bakeries, brewers and other commercial customers.

Why does this matter to you and me?

With this purchase of Corn Products International their reach will get that much larger, and with it their economic clout and influence over food and farm policy.

My mother likes to tell the story of neuroscientists who studied the state of our brains when we cooperate and when we compete. In one experiment, volunteers engaged in various activities, some that got them cooperating, others competing.

The results were at once surprising and clear: Our minds, they discovered, downright like to cooperate. In fact, the same regions of the brain that light up when we eat chocolate, light up when we cooperate.

If that’s true (and peer-reviewed papers say it is), then this biological fact goes a long way to explain why the group of four leaders in one of South Korea’s powerful consumer cooperatives here smiled so big and laughed so easily with each other during our conversation today.

Founded just over ten years ago, iCoop (Korean Solidarity of Consumers’ Cooperatives) already has 50,000 member households, with 68 regional offices across the country. The cooperative works with 4,500 farmer households who supply more than 1,000 locally and sustainable produced products to members through online sales and at stores across the country. The coop has 34 stores (with 10 more planned this year), including the bustling bakery in a residential neighborhood in Southwest Seoul where we meet (and eat) with them.

The cooperative’s vision is to connect consumers and producers – and in doing so, radically change people’s ideas of what it means to be a “consumer” and a “producer.”

Part of this re-education happens in their annual farm visits, they explained to us through our indefatigable interpreter.

“Consumers are always trying to buy as cheap as possible. Producers are always trying to sell for as much as possible,” said Oh Hang Sik, iCoop General Secretary.

Through their farm visits and education programs (last year, they brought 8,500 of their members to visit their farmers), the cooperative helps people to rethink these relationships: “Both consumer and producer realize that they share a common vision of sustainable agriculture that can provide safe food and a secure future,” explains Oh Hang Sik.

Added Lee Jeong Joo, a member activist and the president of their 68 regional offices: “We like to say: Ethical production through ethical consumption.” Each makes the other possible.

“We help our members have a shift in consciousness that sustainable agriculture is linked to our food sovereignty. This shift in consciousness is an important role of iCoop.” They see how consumers and producers can cooperate with each other to work toward this vision. In other words, they eat the chocolate.

For our first meeting, we visit Jin-do Park in his offices near Chungnam National University.

Jin-do Park has worked for more than three decades as an economist on rural development in South Korea. Under the last President, Jin-do Park was an advisor to the national government on agricultural policy, before being so frustrated he started his own institute and regional development foundation, the Korea Regional Development Foundation.

“When I came out of university in the 1970s,” Jin-do Park explained, “Korea was still a rural society.” Nearly 60 percent of the population lived in rural areas. 40 percent of the country’s GDP was from agriculture. In just one generation, the massive push for industrialization has transformed the country.

Today, less than 7 percent of Koreans are farmers and just under 15 percent live in rural areas. One-quarter of South Koreans live in the city of Seoul. Not surprisingly, nearly 100 percent of ingredients for the processed foods most Koreans eat come from outside the country’s borders.

So, I think, if South Korea can renew its countryside, can reknit the farmer and consumer connection, than any of us can.

Check out the full report in English (China translation coming soon): www.brightergreen.org/files/brightergreen_china_print.pdf

Here’s Mia’s press release:

New York–based policy action tank Brighter Green’s new report, Skillful Means: The Challenges of China’s Encounter with Factory Farming, explores the emerging superpower’s “livestock revolution,” which is having serious impacts on public health, food security, and equity in China—and the world. The Beijing Summer Olympics are showcasing a resurgent nation, which only two generations after a devastating national famine is eating increasingly high on the food chain. In the past ten years, consumption of China’s most popular meat, pork, has doubled. In 2007, China raised well over half a billion pigs for meat.

Given that every fifth person in the world is Chinese, even small increases in individual meat or dairy consumption will have broad, collective environmental as well as climate impacts. Increasingly, what the Chinese eat, and how China produces its food, affects not only China, but the world, too.
“When I was a child, every person was allotted one pound of pork a month,” says Peter Li, a professor of political science at the University of Houston in Texas who grew up in Jiangxi province in southeast China says in Eating Skillfully. “We could not eat more than that. You could not get it. Now, though, more people have access to more meat and want to eat a lot of it.”

In yuan terms, meat is the second largest segment of China’s retail food market. China has also opened its doors to investments by major multinational meat and dairy producers, as well as animal feed corporations, including Tyson Foods, Smithfield, and Novus International. Western-style meat culture has gone mainstream. Fast food is a U.S. $28-billion-a-year business in China. McDonald’s, a major sponsor of the Olympics, had more than 800 restaurants in China, with at least a hundred more set to open by the time the games began. Four McDonald’s are operating in Olympic venues, including the press center and the athletes’ village.

“China is not yet a bone fida “factory farm nation” like the U.S.,” says Mia MacDonald, Brighter Green’s executive director and co-author of Skillful Means. “But the strains of its fast-growing livestock sector are becoming harder to ignore. In the U.S., a re-examination of the multiple human, environmental, economic, and ethical costs of factory farming is taking place. Such a process needs to get underway in China—before it’s too late.”

Although these realities won’t be fully obvious to the millions of people cheering on the Olympic athletes in China and across the globe, they demand attention:
• China’s livestock produce 2.7 billion tons of manure every year, nearly three and a half times the industrial solid waste level. Run-off from livestock operations have created a large “dead zone” in the South China Sea that is virtually devoid of marine life.
• In northern China, overgrazing and overfarming lead to the loss of nearly a million acres of grassland each year to desert.
• Diet-related chronic diseases now kill more Chinese than any other cause, and nearly one in four Chinese is overweight.
• More than 90 percent of some bacteria in Asia can no longer be treated effectively with “first-line” antibiotics like penicillin—due to their overuse in farmed animals.
• China can still feed itself. But this is likely to change as its meat and dairy sectors expand and intensify. The Chinese government is looking abroad, not only to international food markets but also to Africa, Latin America, and other parts of Asia for land on which to produce food for people and feed for livestock.
• In 2008, China surpassed the U.S. to become the world’s leading emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2). Per capita emissions of CO2 in China have more than doubled, from 2.1 tons of CO2 equivalent in 1990 to 5.1 tons today. Meat and dairy production have a direct relationship with global climate change: fully 18 percent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions stem from the livestock industry.

Even though the Chinese government seems set on emulating industrialized nations’ meat and dairy culture, a small but growing number of Chinese non-governmental organizations and individuals are questioning this path. To them food quality, not quantity, is important, along with issues of sustainability and animal welfare.

The urban farm installation will serve as a mouth-watering backdrop for Pollan, author of most recently In Defense of Food, who will talk about the importance of seeing the world from a “plant’s point of view.”

I like this one from Solitaire Townsend of Futerra Communications: “For me sustainable development doesn’t mean maintaining the status quo – it means positive disruption, improving the environment and quality of life.”

I’m interviewing her today for the book and look forward to getting more insight from her!

Bunge, one of the world’s largest grain processors, recently announced its quarterly profits were up 70 percent. At the end of last month, Archer Daniels Midland, agribusiness big gun and the country’s second-largest ethanol producer, announced its third-quarter profits had increased by 42 percent.

This food industry windfall, while the poor struggle to afford the most basic food items, feels eerily similar to the record profits of the oil industry, while people scrape the bottom of their piggy banks to fill their tanks.