A propos of organics and climate change, friends from IFPRI will be wowing the climate change negotiators assembled in Bonn, Germany tomorrow night with a side event devoted to Demonstrating Agricultural Mitigation: Examples from the field. I do hope everyone will be listening.
Organic farming and climate change: still seeking silver bullets?
There’s a long piece over at the Freakonomics blog examining recent claims about organic agriculture and climate change. Two approaches are contrasted. First, the Rodale Institute’s 2008 report which claimed that organic agriculture could sequester 40% of global carbon emissions. Ah but, carbon dioxide is not the primary greenhouse gas associated with agriculture. Methane and nitrous oxide contribute far more. And organic ag releases far more of those, according to Steve Savage, a plant scientist and blogger, who concludes that “organic farming is not the best option from a climate change point of view”.
At which point everything could descend into the entrenched mud-slinging we’re used to, except that in the Freakonomics piece, it doesn’t. James McWilliams outlines the different ways in which “conventional” and “organic” make their different contributions to climate change, and even goes so far as to suggest that there could be ways in which organic practices could be modified to reduce their contributions (the reverse, not so much).
To me, though, there are a couple of things wrong with the whole approach. One is that the attempt to come up with global estimates of the “productivity” and “carbon footprint” 1 of any single system is bound to run into problems regarding specific elements of the estimate. And then the debate gets bogged down in those elements rather than in trying to move forward. A clear example is that as far as I can tell neither McMillan nor Savage includes the carbon footprint of food transportation. And the model of organic agriculture seems to be one of intensive monoculture, but using manure and organic fertilizers rather than energy-intensive synthetic fertilizers. I’m not saying we need to become geophagous strict locavores, but maybe we do need to look more closely at integrated food and farming systems, on a smaller scale. Climate change may be a global problem, but local efforts can contribute to solutions. I like the idea of just cutting out a couple of meals of factory-farmed red-meat a week myself. Except that I already do. So what’s the next small change I could make?
Nibbles: Roses, Stripe Rust, Cuba, Carnival, India, GCARD, Urban ag, Genetic diversity and herbivory, Biocultural diversity
- The wages of Kenyan rose growers increase 22% — to $59 a month. Sinful.
- Wheat stripe rust uses sex to break down barriers.
- Q&A with Cuban whiz Humberto Ríos.
- Latest Carnival of Evolution is up; we’re the only ag, alas.
- Proposed agricultural biodiversity heritage sites in India. (Is this new?)
- Investing in Underutilised Crops to Achieve Food Security. A report from the CGARD conference in March.
- The Hanging Gardens of Kenya.
- Living in genetic mixtures helps plants against herbivores. No, really.
- “Restoring human cultures to the web of life.”
Green tomato goes red, gets thumbs up
Rebsie Fairholm at Daughter of the Soil has written up the tomatoes she grew last year. One of them I called Pugliese Green, because the seeds came from a variety I buy at the Pugliese shop around the corner. It is green, sharp and tasty. Rebsie’s went red, but at least she agreed with the taste: she says they will “probably become a flavour benchmark”. I wonder whether mine would go red too if they were left longer on the vine. I’ll have a chance to find out soon enough as my seedlings are coming along fine. Meanwhile, Rebsie, try tasting them a bit green.
Why good food is good for you
I don’t know about you, but I do sometimes wonder why (or do I mean how?) good foods are good for you. I know that they contain more things like anti-oxidants and vitamin precursors and vitamins and minerals, but I don’t have a very clear idea of how those things work their magic, if indeed they do. And then I was watching a Tedtalk by a chap called William Li, a doctor with a special interest in cancer.
He was talking about blood vessels and the extremely delicate balance that regulates the life and death of blood vessels in the body, and I realized that I could remember almost nothing about angiogenesis and the hormones that control it. Once I did. Then Li slipped into cancers, and showed that tumours depend for their survival on their blood supply. Cut it off, and tumours shrink. In fact, he said, we probably have loads of mini tumours popping up all the time, less than the size of the tip of a ball-point pen, but in the absence of a blood supply, they just wither and die. Fascinating, so there are fancy drugs that block the growth of blood vessels — antiangiogenesis drugs — and that offer a new approach to treating cancer. And those same drugs can treat obesity in mice genetically predisposed to eat until they become, in Li’s words, “furry tennis balls”.
And then he moved smoothly into diet. And lo, there were lots of foods, many of them them fruits and vegetables, that seemed to have potent anti-angiogenic activity in lab tests. Some of them, combined, are more potent than either on its own or both together. He listed a bunch of foods, and then something that made me perk up even more.
“For each food type, we believe there is different potencies within different strains and varietals. And we want to measure this because, well, while you’re eating a strawberry or drinking tea, why not select the one that’s most potent for preventing cancer?”
Wow. A man who starts from the assumption that not all varieties are equal. While I am not too happy with the continuing medicalization of nutrition and diet, treating good food as no more than a series of active ingredients, I am glad that at least someone in the medical establishment is taking agricultural biodiversity seriously. Li’s bottom line:
Everyone could benefit from a diet based on local, sustainable, antiangiogenic crops.