A Tough New Row to Hoe

AGRICULTURE: WORLD FOOD CRISIS

The Green Revolution that began in 1945 transformed farming and fed millions in developing countries. But its methods over the long run are proving to be stunningly destructive. Alex Roslin reports

ALEX ROSLIN

July 19, 2008

The Globe and Mail

[original story]

The idea was to reduce hunger through the magic of economies of scale. The plan was to implement a new approach to farming across the developing world.

And so, starting in 1945, the U.S.-backed Green Revolution did to farming what the Model T did to auto production. It subsidized peasants in developing countries to abandon centuries-old, small-scale farming techniques that used diverse, locally adapted crops and instead plant vast fields of single crops specially bred for high yields. And, since the new monocrops were often less suited to local conditions, farmers were also encouraged to use plenty of pesticides and fertilizers to improve harvests.

Playing a major role in the Green Revolution was the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), set up in the Philippines in 1960 by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations with the collaboration of the Philippine government.

Now, almost half a century later, the Green Revolution's key innovations - chemicals and monocultures - are being blamed for a recent pest and disease epidemic that has ravaged Asian rice fields and sharply curtailed the supply of the main food staple of half of the world's population. The shortages have helped to send rice prices into orbit and sparked unrest across the developing world.

"This pest outbreak is actually man-created," says Kong Luen Heong, an insect ecologist at IRRI's headquarters in Los Banos, 60 kilometres south of Manila. "It's a symptom of an ecosystem breakdown."

PESTICIDE-PROOF PEST

The brown planthopper is a nasty-looking little insect that is the scourge of Asian rice farmers. It has devastated crops in Vietnam, China and Malaysia and is one of the main reasons that the price of rice has shot up fourfold since 2003, Dr. Heong says.

Ironically, a growing body of research shows that the plant-hopper is thriving because of the very pesticides that governments and chemical companies encourage farmers to use to control it.

The reason: Pesticides kill the planthopper's natural predators - spiders and crickets - which normally control the destructive insect. In a 14-year study at an experimental rice farm at IRRI, Dr. Heong found that cutting pesticide use by 88 per cent led to 75-per-cent fewer destructive herbivores as a portion of all the insects at the farm.

Dr. Heong's methods have a proven track record. In 1994, he helped the Vietnamese government create a campaign to encourage rice farmers to reduce pesticide use. Use of the chemicals dropped by half, while farm yields remained unaffected and the planthopper vanished.

But early this decade, Vietnamese farmers reverted to their old ways when rice prices started to creep up. The farmers, anxious to safeguard their increasingly lucrative crops, resumed the use of pesticides as a preventive measure and, in so doing, weakened the health of their crops, Dr. Heong says.

That led, in 2006, to the first massive planthopper outbreak Vietnam had seen in years. In order to ensure that there was enough rice for the domestic market, the government temporarily suspended rice exports, which further stoked price increases, which in turn led to more pesticide use, often with the misguided encouragement of government officials, Dr. Heong says.

He warns that should the planthopper infestation spread in Vietnam - the nation worst hit in the outbreak and the world's third-largest rice exporter - the government there will probably reinstate the ban on exports, sharply escalating the food crisis.

"Importing countries will have a panic reaction and that would further drive the price up," he says.

But his biggest fear is that the spiral of orbiting rice prices and greater chemical use could lead to a nightmare scenario of the planthoppers spreading to Thailand, the world's largest rice exporter.

DIFFERENT MINDSET

Dr. Heong's views coincide with those of a growing group of food experts who agree that farming methods must change in order to prevent future food crises. They say reform is especially needed because the methods instilled by the Green Revolution are ill suited to cope with climate change. And like Dr. Heong, they say much conventional wisdom about modern agriculture isn't borne out by recent scientific evidence.

David Pimentel, a Cornell University entomologist who has also linked pesticide overuse to planthopper outbreaks in Asian rice fields, says that when Indonesia sharply restricted the use of the chemicals on its rice crops in the 1980s, yields increased by 12 per cent in five years.

In a 22-year study he reported on in 2005 in the journal BioScience, Dr. Pimentel compared organic and conventional crop yields in Pennsylvania and found that organic methods produced the same or better harvests, while eliminating the use of pesticides and commercial fertilizers, reducing watering needs and leaving the soil healthier.

In another study that challenged conventional thinking, Mark Winston, a bee expert at B.C.'s Simon Fraser University, found that canola farmers in Alberta who let some of their land go fallow saw dramatically improved yields compared with those who planted their entire farm.

The uncultivated land became an oasis for bees, which, in turn, helped the canola flourish with improved pollination, Dr. Winston and his co-authors reported in a 2006 study in the journal Agriculture, Ecosystems and the Environment. Leaving 33 per cent of a field unplanted would have more than doubled the profit from the remaining crop because of its greater yield, the study found.

SIGNIFICANT STAKES

"The data is very strong: Plant less and make more money. It's a whole different mindset," Dr. Winston says.

The stakes in all this are significant and go beyond the current food crisis, says David Montgomery, a University of Washington geologist who just wrote the book Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations. He says the world is losing soil 10 to 20 times faster than it is being replenished, mostly because of Green Revolution-era agricultural methods - such as excessive tilling and monocultures - which leave vast tracts barren after harvest and thus more vulnerable to erosion. "Some day we are going to run out," he says.

Dr. Montgomery found that soil mismanagement was a major factor in the decline of many civilizations, including those of ancient Greece and Rome, early China, the Mayans and Easter Island. "The state of the soil can be seen as helping to define the resilience of a society," he says.

"The challenge in the next century will be to adapt farming to the land. We've been trying to adapt the land to farming. But the earth bats last."

WHAT'S NEEDED NOW

While the Green Revolution did produce higher yields at first, they plateaued in the 1990s. What's needed now, Dr. Heong says, is a new round of changes to farming practices that would amount to a second Green Revolution.

Dr. Heong is no radical environmentalist. His institute, which gets funds from the World Bank, agribusiness and two dozen nations, including Canada, played a major role in encouraging Asian farmers to adopt the very practices he now criticizes.

But in June, at the International Planthopper Conference in Los Banos, he touted what seemed to many the radical idea that Asian government officials must enact policies to rein in pesticide use.

Another solution, Dr. Heong says, is to reduce reliance on monocultures. He is working with Vietnamese officials to encourage farmers to plant a greater diversity of rice varieties and allow parts of their fields to go to grass - methods that he says would create healthier farms without reducing yields.

"In the face of climate change," he says, "more diversity will help the system be more robust."

TAGS: food, pesticides, farm, soil, rice, Green Revolution, International Rice Research Institute, monocultures

Breast-feeding Gets Cold Shoulder in B.C. Hospitals

By Alex Roslin
July 3, 2008
The Georgia Straight
[original story]

Breast is best; it’s widely known. But just 29 percent of B.C. moms breast-feed their babies exclusively for the first six months of their lives as recommended by Health Canada and the World Health Organization.

Why so few? One key reason, say breast-feeding advocates, is the solid grip that infant-formula makers have on doctors and nurses. Case in point: the controversy over Nestlé that erupted last month in the maternity ward at Burnaby Hospital.

When Nestlé Nutrition, a leading formula company, invited health professionals in Burnaby for cocktails and dinner at the city’s Hilton Vancouver Metrotown hotel in June—oh, yes, and a little talk on infant nutrition and formula titled “The Infant Feeding Maze”—a staff member at Burnaby Hospital e-mailed the invitation to employees via an internal mail list.

When word got out to breast-feeding advocates, they mobilized and bombarded Nestlé and health authorities with angry e-mails. They said the event violated the World Health Organization’s 1981 International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes. The code, which Canada and the B.C. Health Ministry have signed, says formula makers shouldn’t offer “financial or material inducements” to health-care providers to promote their products.

Even B.C. Health Minister George Abbott waded in with a letter in which an official writing on his behalf said “it is clear that Nestlé is violating the [WHO] code.”

Nestlé bowed to the pressure and cancelled the event after getting “over 100” protest e-mails, said Catherine O’Brien, a spokeswoman at the company’s office in Toronto. Yet she rejected Abbott’s letter (“He had no knowledge at all of what the event was all about”) and insisted the meeting wouldn’t have violated the WHO code because “refreshments” and a meal are not a “material inducement”.

In fact, the event was the second in B.C. that Nestlé has had to cancel. Last September, staff at Burnaby Hospital invited the company to put on a similar information session, which was to have been held in the hospital itself, O’Brien said. That event was also cancelled after community protests. (The WHO code prohibits any promotion of formula products within hospitals.)

Michael Bernard, a spokesman for the Fraser Health Authority, which oversees Burnaby Hospital, said he would call back with a comment, but he had not done so by press time.

Although breast-feeding advocates were rejoicing at the latest cancellation, the dispute left maternity-care professionals at the hospital divided and prompted the resignations of lactation consultants Linda Good and Renee Hefti-Graham. “Women in Canada are paying the price for these free meals,” Good said in reference to Nestlé’s wine-and-dine. Hefti-Graham said many of their coworkers at the hospital were ambivalent about supporting breast-feeding, while one manager dismissed WHO literature on the subject—as well as documented international information on Nestlé WHO code violations—as “propaganda”.

The conflict sheds light on the persistent obstacles to breast-feeding in B.C. and Canada nearly three decades after the adoption of the WHO code. Despite Abbott’s support in the Burnaby dispute, many experts fault his government and the broader medical community for not doing enough to promote breast-feeding or reduce the sway that formula companies have over infant feeding.

The stakes in the battle over the bottle are huge. Research shows that breast-fed babies have fewer ear and respiratory infections, fewer allergies, less diarrhea, a stronger immune system, higher IQ, less risk of diabetes later in life, better oral development, and more bonding with Mom. Mothers also benefit by losing weight quicker, experiencing a faster contraction of the uterus, and having a lower risk of osteoporosis and ovarian and breast cancers.

In fact, research shows breast-feeding is literally a life-and-death issue in some cases. A May 2004 U.S. study of 9,000 infants published in the journal Pediatrics found a 27-percent higher chance of death among kids who had never been breast-fed compared to those who had, including a 19-percent greater risk of sudden infant death syndrome and 69 percent more chance of death by injury.

“Breast-feeding is associated with a reduction in risk for post-neonatal death,” the study said. “Promoting breast-feeding has the potential to save or delay approximately 720 post-neonatal deaths in the United States each year.”

In B.C., officials like to tout the fact that 95 percent of women breast-feed at birth, the highest rate in the country. “We play that up and pat ourselves on the back,” said Karyn-grace Clark, a lactation consultant in Nanaimo. “Though we get them breast-feeding, we can’t keep them breast-feeding.”

Less known is the fact that hospital staff give many of those women infant formula even when their babies are healthy and breast-feeding. The practice is a violation of guidelines established by the WHO and UNICEF in 1991 as part of a program called the Baby Friendly Initiative. The initiative, which the B.C. Health Ministry and Health Canada have endorsed, is intended to reform hospital practices worldwide in order to promote breast-feeding and reduce reliance on formula.

The Baby Friendly guidelines say there are only a few exceptional situations in which formula truly is a medical necessity for newborns, such as when they or their mothers are severely ill.

Yet as many as 60 percent of healthy, breast-feeding newborns are being given supplementary formula in B.C. hospitals, estimated Sandra Yates, a doyenne of the province’s lactation consultants who teaches courses on breast-feeding to health-care providers at Douglas College.

“Nurses are overworked; formula is used as a quick-fix solution,” Yates said. “Often the problems are shovelled off to the next level because there isn’t time to do it. It takes time to sit with a mom through an entire feed.”

Sharon Prindle-Collins, chair of the Fraser Health Authority’s Breast-feeding Practice Council, estimated that about 40 percent of healthy babies get formula in the eight maternity hospitals in her region. She agreed that many of the cases aren’t motivated by any medical necessity.

“There is a bed crunch,” she explained; in order to make way for new arrivals, formula is sometimes given in order to promote a baby’s weight gain so she can be discharged. “If weight [of the baby] is not up by the time they go home, sometimes the health-care provider would recommend formula to get the weight up,” she said. The recommendation typically happens in the event of weight loss of 10 percent or more, she said.

There’s just one problem: it’s normal for breast-fed newborns to lose up to 10 percent of their birth weight due to fluid loss, according to the WHO/UNICEF guidelines. Weight gain usually doesn’t start until day four or five after birth—after the baby goes home. (The usual postnatal hospital stay is one to three days.) In other words, a lack of weight gain in hospital is pretty much the norm.

In fact, the Baby Friendly Initiative says the only weight-related situations in which formula is a medical necessity are when a baby has “very low” birth weight—less than 1.5 kilograms—or hasn’t regained his birth weight after two to three weeks. “For babies who are well enough to be with their mothers on the maternity ward, there are very few indications for supplements,” the guidelines state.

Aren’t some women just unable to breast-feed? Linda Good, one of the lactation consultants who resigned from Burnaby Hospital, said just three percent of moms can’t produce enough milk to breast-feed their babies exclusively, usually due to damage to breast ducts or nerves from cancer, burns, or surgery. But even these women can still usually breast-feed to some extent. Fewer than one percent of women can’t breast-feed at all; even women who adopt can produce breast milk, Good said.

Yet formula use in B.C. hospitals actually appears to be on the rise. Between 2005 and 2007, the percentage of all breast-feeding new moms (including those with pre-term babies and cesareans) who got some formula while in hospital went up from 24.2 to 25.3 percent, according to the B.C. Health Ministry’s Perinatal Health Program. The rate rose in four of the province’s six health authorities. (Barbara Selwood, a perinatal nurse consultant with the program, speculated that the higher numbers may just be due to more accurate data collection.)

As well, none of the province’s six health authorities managed to hit the WHO/UNICEF standard of 80 percent of all babies getting nothing but breast milk while in hospital (including those born by cesarean section). Overall, 69.2 percent of B.C. moms exclusively breast-fed their babies while in hospital last year, down from 69.5 percent in 2005.

It’s really no big surprise that health care in B.C. falls short of the WHO/UNICEF standards. Just one hospital in the province has thus far been certified as a Baby Friendly facility—Quesnel’s G. R. Baker Memorial Hospital, which got the designation last January.

To be sure, the situation isn’t much better elsewhere in Canada. Seventeen years after Health Canada endorsed the Baby Friendly Initiative, only 18 of Canada’s some 500 hospitals and health facilities offering maternity care have gotten the certification. (Thirteen are in Quebec, the only province to mandate all its maternity facilities to achieve the designation.) About 20,000 hospitals have been certified worldwide, but only 500 are in industrial countries.

In B.C., authorities have talked a good talk about Baby Friendly. Back in 2003, the province’s deputy health minister, Dr. Penny Ballem, wrote a letter to the CEOs of the six regional health authorities urging them to get certified. But no funds were attached to the recommendation, and it remains up to each authority to decide whether or not to go for it.

The B.C. Women’s Hospital and Health Centre has been working toward accreditation since 2004 and hopes to get it this month. That process, which typically takes five to 10 years, is just beginning for the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, whose senior executive team will decide whether or not to pursue the designation in coming weeks, according to spokesperson Viviana Zanocco.

Baby Friendly would usher in a sea change in hospital routines in B.C. Getting certified means changing practices like taking babies from mothers right after birth in order to do a physical exam, administer a shot and eye ointment, and swaddle them. That process, which can last five minutes, has been shown to interfere with the establishment of breast-feeding, Yates said. Instead, Baby Friendly rules say newborns should be immediately placed on Mom’s chest so they can start trying to suckle; nurses can examine the baby there.

The WHO/UNICEF guidelines would also mean education for all maternity-care providers and moms on breast-feeding techniques. It used to be that a new mother’s aunts or mother would show her what to do, but after doctors and nurses started touting infant formula as being as good as breast milk in the 1950s—a belief that numerous studies have since discredited—several generations of women lost that knowledge.

Today, the 40 percent of mothers who encounter problems with breast-feeding—like sore nipples, infections, failure of the baby to latch, or poor milk supply—usually turn for help to public-health nurses and family doctors, but few of those professionals have undergone the breast-feeding training that the WHO/UNICEF guidelines recommend.

In early 2007, the B.C. Health Ministry brought 90 nurses from across the province to Vancouver to take a 20-hour course on breast-feeding, with the idea that they’d return to their facilities and teach the course to their coworkers. That second phase has stalled, however, amid squabbling between the ministry and health authorities over who will pay for staff to take time off work for the training.

Lactation consultants say change is also needed at the federal level and in the broader culture. Ottawa has yet to adopt the 1981 WHO code on formula marketing as law, which means formula companies are free to flout the code’s admonishments against formula ads in the media and giveaways of product samples to parents at Vancouver’s frequent baby fairs.

“Formula is so ubiquitous and integrated into our thinking that when we think of a baby, we think bottle. When there are breast-feeding challenges, the first thing women try is the bottle,” Yates said.

Good, who worked as a midwife in South Africa before she emigrated here 25 years ago, agreed. “I was shocked when I came to Canada. It felt like it was almost a different species. Mothers [here] live in a culture where we never see a baby on a breast. The whole society doesn’t know what breast-feeding should look like.”

On the other hand, many breast-feeding experts are heartened to see new generations of women challenge the medical community and formula companies like Nestlé. “As a culture, women have to take their power in breast-feeding,” Yates said. “They should do the research beforehand and know the potential problems [with breast-feeding], much as they plan out the birth. Then women won’t be as easily misled by health professionals.”

For more on this subject, check out Pieta Woolley's blog post on the trials and tribulations of being a breast-feeding mother in Vancouver.

Green Dream Comes True

LEED Comes to Canada

Townships house is a prototype of environmentally friendly homes of the future

Alex Roslin

Friday, June 20, 2008

Montreal Gazette

Alexandre Thibodeau takes in the spectacular view of the lush green, mist-shrouded Glen Valley below his mountainside home in the Eastern Townships. A series of Applachian peaks cascade to the south into Vermont.

Thibodeau doesn't know their names. He'll figure that out when life slows down a little for him and his partner, Marie-Eve Cloutier.

They've had two children, Léopol and Mirek, and, when Mirek was just a month old in early 2006, they moved here to the hamlet of West Bolton from Montreal in order to oversee work on their green dream home.

The 2,200-square-foot home nestled among tall maples and birch will include features like straw bail insulation, passive solar heat from a bank of windows, concrete floors to store heat and a custom combo of geothermal piping and an ultra-efficient masonry heater.

After two years, the house is almost ready to be lived in, with the custom-made, super-insulated windows to be installed in coming weeks.

It's been an amazing journey for the first Canadian home to be accepted under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) green-building standard of the non-profit U.S. Green Building Council, the most stringent certification process of its kind in North America.

Thibodeau, who has a bachelor's degree in architecture, designed the house himself to achieve a LEED platinum rating, the council's highest level of certification.

Conceived in 1998 by the Natural Resources Defense Council and ecologically minded building professionals, LEED has quickly become the most widely recognized green-building standard in Canada and the U.S.

Projects get points for reducing energy consumption with solar or geothermal heating and good insulation, lowering water intake and using recycled or sustainably produced building materials that don't emit chemicals like formaldehyde.

It's all part of one of the fast-growing areas of combating climate change -a revolution in the building industry.

The U.S. market for green building jumped from $7 billion in 2005 to $12 billion last year and is projected to rise to $60 billion by 2010, according to the U.S. Green Building Council. Over 11,000 projects totaling 330 square kilometres of floor space are LEED-certified or working through the certification process in the U.S.

The stakes for the environment are huge. Putting up and maintaining buildings and homes accounts for 70 per cent of U.S. electricity consumption and 39 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions.

In Canada, where LEED was first implemented in 2004, interest has exploded, too. Nine square kilometres of building floor space have been LEED certified in Canada or are working toward that goal.

Municipalities like Vancouver, Calgary, Kingston and Ottawa have pledged to build some of all of their facilities to LEED standards, as have the provincial governments of British Columbia, Alberta and Manitoba.

At the Canadian Green Building Council's first national convention last week in Toronto, interest was so great that the exhibitors' floor space had to be expanded three times to accommodate participants, said Nancy Grenier, spokeswoman for the council, which has 1,600 member companies and nearly 5,000 individual members in its eight chapters-mostly architects and other building professionals.

Much of the demand is motivated by the most pragmatic of reasons: building green makes sense financially.

A 2003 study of LEED commercial buildings for the state of California found that while they cost 2 per cent more upfront than conventional construction, the investment begets long-term savings of 12 to 16 times that amount due to lower energy, water and maintenance bills and improved worker productivity and health from better indoor air quality.

¶¶¶

So far, however, LEED has mostly been applied in large commercial, industrial and government buildings.

Thibodeau's project in West Bolton was the first in Canada to be accepted into a new U.S. LEED pilot project for the residential sector, which is intended to spread green building to home construction.

Since Thibodeau signed on in 2006, about 100 other Canadian residential projects have been accepted.

Bowing to the demand, the Canadian Green Building Council, which adapts LEED standards to this country's harsher climate, announced earlier this year it would start work on a unique "LEED Canada for Homes" standard specifically intended for residential construction. It's to be launched in spring 2009.

The council's goal is to use LEED to inspire changes in the broader construction industry and reduce the environmental footprint of 1 million new and existing Canadian homes and 100,000 other buildings by 2015.

In Montreal, Emmanuel Blain-Cosgrove is delighted. "After 10 years of screaming in the dark, it's nice to see the field taking off," he said.

Blain-Cosgrove is the owner of Écohabitation, a Montreal ecological-building consulting firm. He sits on the committee that is designing the made-in-Canada LEED standard.

He also helped pioneer green residential building in Canada with his renovation of a Mile End house to U.S. LEED standards in 2006.

He got the idea from Thibodeau. Blain-Cosgrove, who comes from a family of carpenters and building professionals, was already renovating the house using an environmentally-friendly design.

Thibodeau heard about the project and called Blain-Cosgrove up, saying he had just managed to convince the U.S. Green Building Council to accept his West Bolton house in into LEED.

At first, the U.S. council had hesitated about taking in a Canadian house because it felt the Canadian Green Building Council should certify projects in this country. At the time, however, the nascent Canadian body had its hands full just trying to get LEED going in the industrial and commercial sectors.

Thibodeau persisted and won the U.S. council over, opening the door for other Canadians.

"(Thibodeau) is the original one to put the pieces together in Canada," said Blain-Cosgrove.

In April, Blain-Cosgrove was chosen as Quebec's first LEED-certification inspector for residential projects by the U.S. Green Building Council. Builders here will no longer have to pay for an inspector to come from Vermont to certify that a project complies with LEED standards.

¶¶¶

Back in West Bolton, Thibodeau has fired up his high-performance brick masonry heater to take the edge off a cool rainy day in early June. The heater burns wood that he plans to harvest from his five-acre lot in order-another way to reduce the home's reliance on outside energy.

The heat will radiate through the house from a stylish round two-storey brick-and-lime chimney that Thibodeau and Cloutier have just finished building.

It's part of an innovative system of energy efficiency that Thibodeau estimated will reduce the house's heating bill by 70 percent and eliminate the need for air conditioning.

Also involved is an adapted geothermal air-exchange system-70 metres of pipes embedded in the ground behind the house that will draw in warm air during winter and cool air in summer. Heat during the winter will also come from a solar-heated wall-a black-painted steel siding on the roof that the sun will warm to as much as 74 degrees Celsius.

An automated control system will control the house's temperature by tapping into the various heating and cooling systems through an elaborate system of ducts, fans and shutters.

"This house is supposed to be able to take care of itself," Thibodeau said. "I always dreamed when I had a family that we'd live in a home that was a little crazy."

Thibodeau's heating system has attracted the interest of Hydro-Quebec, which will consider funding a study of how it performs under its technical innovation program.

Also bringing down the heating bill is a ridiculous amount of insulation. The roof will achieve an R60 insulation rating (R30 is the industry standard for new homes in Quebec), while straw bails in the walls will insulate them to R30 (R15 is the standard).

The house will also use dramatically less water because rainwater will be collected in underground cisterns for washing clothes and watering the four-terrace, 820-square-foot garden on the house's "green roof."

Some of the features were challenges because so few homes have been built according to LEED standards, especially in Canada. One was getting an environmentally friendly source of lumber for the houseframe.

Thibodeau spent weeks contacting suppliers to try to find lumber certified by the Forest Stewardship Council as having been harvested in a sustainable manner. No luck. The companies with FSC-certified woodlots were using it for paper products, not lumber.

The one Quebec company able to provide FSC-stamped lumber ordinarily sold its entire supply in Germany and didn't have any in stock, so the wait would have been three months.

In the end, he found a farmer in the Townships who harvested the needed trees from his woodlot in a sustainable way.

Thibodeau hopes LEED's spread will help spark a market for suppliers of green-friendly wood and other construction material.

"The first contractor to call up and ask for FSC wood is going to pay top dollar. But if large developers begin ordering it in quantity, lumber companies are going to start fighting for that market."

Ultimately, he hopes small projects like his will help convince the mass real-estate market to embrace environmentally-friendly design. "Building yourself is difficult. We're not the typical project."

Blain-Cosgrove agreed. "The whole purpose (of LEED) is market transformation. Certification is not the end. That's just a means to greening the industry."

Yet, he said homebuilding and renovation aren't likely to change very quickly without much larger government incentives for going greening. Research shows such incentives are among the most efficient uses of government subsidies to cut overall greenhouse-gas emissions, he said.

"Where we live changes how we live," Thibodeau said. "If that wasn't the case, I wouldn't be in architecture."

SIDEBAR: What Makes a House Green

- Hot heat: Heating bills will be cut an estimated 70 percent by a combination of a high-performance brick masonry heater, passive solar heating from a huge bank of south-facing windows, a geothermal air-exchange system and a solar-heated wall on the roof. The geothermal system will also bring in cooler air in summer, eliminating the need for air conditioning.

- Smart controls: The futuristic house has an automated control system to regulate interior temperature by tapping into the various heating and cooling systems through an elaborate system of ducts, fans and shutters.

- Insane insulation: Piles of insulation will give the roof an R60 insulation rating (R30 is the industry standard for new homes in Quebec), while straw bail walls will achieve R30 (R15 is the standard).

- Green wood: Wood for the houseframe comes from a sustainably cut, local woodlot.

- Non-polluting materials: Interior materials were chosen that don’t emit toxic chemicals like formaldehyde.

- Water: Rainwater will be collected in underground cisterns for washing clothes and watering the four-terrace, 820-square-foot garden on the house’s “green roof.”

For more information:

- Alexandre and Marie-Eve's website

[TAGS: Eastern Townships]

Monocrops Bring Food Crisis

Author John Jeavons is reviving small-scale farming to counter monocrops.

By Alex Roslin
April 17, 2008
The Georgia Straight
[original story]

Move over, peak oil and global warming. A new crisis is exploding right now across the developing world: peak food.

Rising costs for staples like rice have sparked unrest across Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa this month, including food riots in Haiti that have killed five, strikes in Jordan, and rice-hoarding in the Philippines and Hong Kong.

Exploding fuel prices are largely to blame for a 65-percent jump in the cost of food globally since 2002. But that’s not the main reason for the current crisis. Ground zero is in the world’s rice bowl in Southeast Asia. A nasty epidemic of disease and pests has struck Vietnam, the world’s third-largest rice exporter, sharply cutting supplies of the food staple of half of the world.

The problems in Vietnam have quickly rippled beyond its borders. In neighbouring Thailand, the world’s largest rice exporter, the price of medium-grade rice for export has doubled since the beginning of the year. In the Philippines, the world’s largest importer of the staple, the government has deployed soldiers to guard rice stocks, while President Gloria Arroyo has threatened to jail for life anyone who steals supplies.

Some exporting countries have started to limit rice sales abroad in order to build up domestic stocks, and the UN says food riots due to exploding prices for rice and other staples have hit a dozen countries in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, with 37 countries altogether facing food crises.

What caused the disease and pest outbreak in Vietnam? Some rice experts have said that’s unclear. “We’re faced with a lot of unknowns,” said Robert Zeigler—head of the Manila-based International Rice Research Institute, which developed high-yield rice strains in the 1960s—in an Agence France-Presse dispatch. “The fact is, they got taken by surprise and they had some significant yield losses that they were just not expecting.”

Devlin Kuyek begs to differ. He says the cause is no big mystery. It’s monoculture. Kuyek is the author of a book titled Good Crop/Bad Crop: Seed Politics and the Future of Food in Canada, which came out in December. He says the rice crisis is an example of the food-related calamities we can expect in growing numbers due to a looming “perfect storm” combo of self-imploding crop monocultures and global warming.

Remember the Irish potato famine of the 1840s that wiped out up to a quarter of Ireland’s population and changed the Emerald Isle’s history. It started when the British took over Ireland’s best farmland for beef-grazing pasture, pushing the Irish onto marginal land where they became virtually dependent on the potato for survival.

Today’s rice crisis has disturbingly similar roots. Vietnam was one of the major recipient nations for the monoculture craze that swept the non-Communist world in the form of the U.S.–sponsored “Green Revolution” in the 1960s. The stated goal was to reduce poverty by spreading the economies of scale of U.S. mass agriculture. Monoculture would be to farming what the Model T had been to auto production.

The Green Revolution provoked a sea change in centuries-old farming practices worldwide. It meant dropping millenniums-old farming practices of planting diverse fields of frequently rotated, native-adapted crops that evolved as local soil and environmental conditions changed. Those methods based on diversified seed varieties and varied crops were developed during the earliest days of human farming in order to prevent plant diseases, pest infestations, and soil degradation. Now governments would subsidize farmers to grow vast tracts of single crops from uniformly produced seeds.

The new crops were bred in government labs—and today, by a half-dozen large seed companies that control the bulk of the $30-billion U.S. annual seed business worldwide—in order to maximize yield, not other characteristics, like, say, nutritional value. “They try to do the Coca-Cola or Pepsi of corn: one crop that could be sold everywhere,” Kuyek says. “What you see in corn today is nothing like what you saw before, traditionally. They’ve industrialized that crop to the hilt. It’s quite sad because it had so much nutritional value. You could essentially just live on corn.”

Because the new monocrops were poorly adapted to local conditions, the plants didn’t do so well unless sustained by massive amounts of water, fertilizers, and pesticides. Little wonder that almost all of the world’s largest seed companies, including the likes of Monsanto, Syngenta, and DuPont, got their start as chemical manufacturers.

“A lot of diseases that had never been a problem started appearing during the Green Revolution,” Kuyek says. “All of a sudden, instead of adapting seeds to local conditions, the farm had to be adapted to the seed variety.”

The result of all this has been a tremendous loss of biodiversity. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization says 75 percent of crop varieties have disappeared since 1900. Nine-tenths of the world’s calories now come from 20 crop species, with four making up half of total calories: rice, corn, wheat, and potatoes.

Soaking farmland with chemicals has had other impacts as well. It meant only a few larger farming operations could afford the astronomical costs of the new type of farming. Small farms were crowded out, making communities less self-reliant. As well, the chemicals produced environmental problems, like the explosion of toxic blue-green algae in Canadian lakes, due largely to fertilizer runoff.

Monocrops also deplete soil of key nutrients and billions of microorganisms that help keep plants disease-free, reducing soil productivity 18 times faster than natural processes can rebuild it on average in the U.S., says John Jeavons, a Willits, California–based author and farming researcher who teaches small-scale food-production techniques. “We’re putting extraordinary pressure on our soil base,” he says.

Jeavons was on Salt Spring Island in February, giving a workshop for local farmers about the looming “peak food” crisis and his sustainable “mini-farming” techniques. He says peak food is actually related to four other intertwined crises: peak farmable land, peak water, peak oil, and global warming.

This unholy gaggle of calamities comes together like this: farmland globally is declining due to soil depletion, erosion, urban development, and the diversion of land to biofuel production. Throw in the depletion of aquifers, rising energy costs for farmers, and global warming flinging unprecedented environmental conditions at poorly adapted monocrops, and Jeavons says it’s just a matter of time before we get a lot more Vietnams.

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The irony of all this is the Green Revolution looks like it was barking up the wrong tree. Evidence is starting to show monocultures aren’t the only way to feed the planet—and aren’t necessarily the most efficient. “I’m quite confident we don’t have to do mass agriculture,” says Mark Winston, a former professor of apiculture at Simon Fraser University.

Winston coauthored a groundbreaking study of monocultures published in 2006 in the journal Agriculture, Ecosystems and the Environment. It found that canola farmers in Alberta who let some of their land go fallow dramatically improved their yield compared to those who planted their entire farm. The reason: the uncultivated land became an oasis for bees, which, in turn, helped the canola flourish with improved pollination. With 33 percent of land left unplanted, a farmer’s profit would have more than doubled from $24,000 to $65,000 on a 1,400-hectare piece of land.

“The data is very strong: plant less and make more money,” says Winston, now director of SFU’s undergraduate semester in dialogue. “It’s a whole different mindset. Monocultures create pest outbreaks that are greater than natural predators [like ants and wasps] can deal with. In a balanced crop, natural predators balance pest insects.”

A growing movement of farmers, agronomists, and environmentalists is trying to revive traditional farming methods in reaction to the monocrop steamroller. Nestled in the Pacific Coastal Range 220 kilometres north of San Francisco, Jeavons is busy trying to teach the world about his “grow biointensive” mini-farming techniques from his base at the 20-acre spread of his nonprofit organization, Ecology Action.

His book How to Grow More Vegetables (and Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops) Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine has sold 500,000 copies in seven languages and several editions. He travels worldwide, giving three-day workshops on his techniques, and he is currently hosting seven interns and apprentices at his farm, including some from Africa and Mexico.

Jeavons says mini-farming can feed a person a nutritious vegan diet with 4,000 square feet of land, compared to 7,000 square feet needed for a vegan diet with conventional farming and 30,000 square feet to produce the average American diet.

How does it work? He starts with double-dug, raised beds tilled two feet down in order to create what he calls a “soil sponge cake” or a “living, quadridimensional tapestry in your soil”. Other tips: plenty of compost; close spacing of plants to reduce erosion, the need for watering, and room for weeds; companion planting; and carbon-heavy legumes to replenish the soil so it requires no fertilizer. And above all, no chemicals. “You’re feeding the soil and yourself,” he says.

Jeavons says the approach simply revives techniques first used in China and Greece thousands of years ago. North American farms, Kuyek says, used to be hotbeds of efficiency and biodiversity before the advent of modern agriculture. Agricultural fairs played a central role, with awards showcasing farmers who bred high-performance seeds. “There was a lot of innovation on farmers’ fields,” he says.

Another part of this movement is growing networks of small-scale farmers selling their wares locally. “Small, diverse farms can feed the local population,” says Heather Pritchard of Farm Folk/City Folk, a nonprofit concerned with agricultural issues that encourages consumers, restaurants, and grocery stores to buy food locally at farmers markets or directly from local producers.

Pritchard lives most of the week at the Glorious Organics Cooperative in the Fraser Valley, where she grows herbs and flowers and balances the books. Her group’s idea has caught on big-time, with demand so great that suppliers are struggling to keep up. “We don’t have enough supply. We’ve done our job too well,” she says, laughing.

Other activists are working to create seed banks to save locally grown crop varieties from extinction. One example is the Salt Spring Island–based Seed and Plant Sanctuary for Canada. It hopes to collect, study, and preserve the seed of every edible, medicinal, and other potentially useful plant in Canada before it’s too late and they’re gone.

Apart from its own seed bank of more than 600 varieties of herbs, grains, peppers, tomatoes, and garlic, the sanctuary also coordinates a network of small-scale farmers who preserve “heirloom” seeds—endangered traditional varieties grown for centuries until they were crowded out by monocultures. “It’s kind of a living gene bank spread through the country,” says the sanctuary’s Dan Jason in a phone interview.

The goal of all this is to resupply farmers struck by crop failure, natural disaster, or genetic contamination. “Monocultures have little in-built adaptability, especially with climate change,” Jason says. “We’re narrowing the gene pool to just a few varieties, and they’re pretty shitty varieties. They’re designed not for nutrition but yield.”

One of Jason’s dreams is for every city, town, and country village to have its own seed bank to store locally grown seeds and collect records on them. Another idea he has helped promote is Seedy Saturdays and Sundays—monthly organic- seed fairs for local farmers and small seed vendors. Over 50 Seedy Saturdays are now being held regularly held in places like Salt Spring Island, Kelowna, Halifax, even Toronto. “The only way we’re going to have good food is [by] taking it into our own hands,” Jason says.

Some seed activists are less enthused, however, about the opening in February of a UN–affiliated global seed bank in Svalbard, Norway, that has been likened to a Noah’s ark for plants. Concern has grown that the seed bank could give agribusiness access it has sought for years to seed varieties of the developing world, while farmers will have few rights to their own seeds stored in the vault.

Kuyek notes that the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the international agency that spearheaded the seed bank, accepts private donations from biotech seed giants Syngenta and DuPont. “There is a really aggressive effort by seed companies to patent the seed supply and lock it up,” he says. “If we’re in this monoculture model and we throw in patents, it increases our vulnerability even further.”

If Kuyek is right, it means the very effort of trying to protect our food supply at the seed bank could threaten it like never before.

Info:

Grow Biointensive: John Jeavon's Ecology Action

King Corn: a documentary on corn monoculture

Seed and Plant Sanctuary for Canada

UN's Food and Agriculture Organization: world biodiversity report

Farm Folk/City Folk

Beyond Factory Farming

[TAGS: peak food, food crisis, monocrops, monoculture, seed banks, Global Crop Diversity Trust, Svalbard, biodiversity]