Rachel's Democracy & Health News #960

Gristmill
May 20, 2008

EARLY WARNING SIGNS AT THE GLOBAL WARMING CAFE

[Rachel’s introduction: Most of environmentalists’ time and creative energy is bent toward policy. Books on climate, organizational manifestos, and blog posts argue the finer points of carbon taxes versus cap-and-trade and other, often arcane, details. Little of our thinking or resources goes into social change theory, political strategy (aside from elections), organizing and campaigning, applying lessons from U.S. history….]

By Ken Ward

It takes effort to suit up in the quasi-business/academic garb of the professional environmentalist and enter the lion’s den of DC politics or the state houses. Our beliefs are so fundamentally at odds with the very fabric of civic life that it requires an effort of will, particularly in the early years, not to scream bloody murder and run for the door.

Over decades, layers of accommodation and polite behavior have built up by accretion, while our rough edges have been worn down. The net result is a worldview — we may call it the “Climate Policy Paradigm” — that is so universally accepted that it goes unnoticed, yet its power is so great that we have abandoned the precautionary principle, environmentalism’s central guide for action, with barely a murmur when the two came in conflict.

Two hundred people turned out to hear Ross Gelbspan speak at the Jamaica Plain Forum a couple months ago. He gave us an hour of unvarnished truth, summarized recent climate science, and drove home the reality that nothing short of immediate, transformative, global action is sufficient.

Climate campaign staff followed up at a “Global Warming Cafe,” presenting our standard three-part story:

First, we can turn things around, indeed we are already starting to do so;

Second, sound energy policy is good for America, because it will reduce dependence on foreign oil and create green jobs; and

Third, there are two things individuals can do: urge members of Congress to support emissions reduction bills and reduce our own carbon footprints.

The audience joined in small group discussions, contributing their own tips on mulching and insulating hot water pipes, but the disparity between the terrible picture Ross painted and the flimsy action activists were invited to take left a palpable pall in the auditorium.

If the purpose of campaigning is to raise hope, spirits, and courage in the face of long odds, and channel that energy into productive political change, then we are failing. Participants in the reduce- your-carbon-footprint workshops were not joined to some larger purpose and few appeared to leave more energized then they arrived.

To the growing and increasingly sophisticated climate core — anxious individuals responding directly to climate scientists, who now address them directly via op-eds in The New York Times — our invitation to lobby Congress for tepid legislation is un-galvanizing, to put it mildly. Gifted with 200 potential activists in a national election year, our best idea is to engage them in private carbon-emissions navel gazing.

Common sense and organizing experience ought to tell us that we are beginning to lose touch with our base, but we no longer think much in terms of building the environmental core. In the long, strange trip between Earth Day 1970 and the Global Warming Cafe, the transformative vision of environmentalism — which spoke to people’s fears (as well as their hopes), sketched a vision in broad strokes of society rebuilt (in addition to lobbying for reforms), thought in terms of movement and belief (not just organization and policy), and saw environmentalism as outside the left/right spectrum, equally appealing and equally challenging to all traditional politics (and not just one of the progressive herd) — has morphed into something cramped, Balkanized, and self-conscious.

Our eco-fundamentalist vision is still there, but it is buried. The way we see the world, on a day-to-day basis, is through the lens of our Climate Policy Paradigm, an internally consistent body of beliefs which guides and structures our actions. U.S. environmentalists, from self-avowed critics to the most mainstream, agree on three things, the cornerstones of the Paradigm:

1. our most important work is to advance climate policy;

2. we must be optimistic, and;

3. climate must be put in terms other than environmental interests.

Policy is our business

Most of our time and creative energy is bent toward policy. Books on climate, organizational manifestos, and Gristmill posts argue the finer points of carbon taxes versus cap-and-trade and other, often arcane, details. Little of our thinking or resources goes into social change theory, political strategy (aside from elections), organizing and campaigning, applying lessons from U.S. history, public communications, or insights from cognitive psychology, sociology, theology, economics, or any number of other arts and sciences.

We elevate climate policy above other avenues because we believe that it is the primary responsibility of environmentalists to craft the climate change solution.

Why so? Because we think that if we hit upon just the right formula — the perfect blend of incentives, quasi-free market trappings, tax breaks, and so on — we can accomplish the political equivalent of changing lead into gold, and pass effective climate legislation without major opposition.

But political power is immutable and we are not alchemists.

Policy — a plan of governmental action — is an outcome of power, not a means of achieving it. We do not have enough power to win functional climate policy in the U.S., and until we do so, there will be no global climate solution.

For twenty years we have approached the problem by pre-negotiating with ourselves on behalf of our opposition. We don’t think about it in those terms, but that is what climate policy is all about. We calculate what concessions are necessary to placate whichever interest, power, or nation it is thought must be mollified, and then devise a scheme to fit within those limits.

There are powerful arguments against the anything-is-better-than- nothing philosophy, but there is an even more basic problem with our “policy-first” approach. The world can only draw back from the climate tipping point by transformative political action. The details (i.e. policy) of that action are unknowable to us because we are unaware of, and cannot predict, the conditions, resources, and timetable that will dictate the terms of action when America does accept responsibility for global leadership.

It is possible for us to talk about what America can do when we mobilize to face a global threat, by drawing on U.S. history. The Marshall Plan and post-WWII reconstruction are often used as analogies for a climate solution, but the U.S. gear-up for war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor is more useful example of the potential speed and scale of American mobilization.

After Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government told Detroit to stop manufacturing automobiles for private use and start building tanks and other war materiel. Automobile production was 162,000 in 1941, and zero in 1942. Tank production was less than 300 in 1940, and 25,000 by 1942.

When the U.S. does act decisively on climate, our government will tell the private sector to stop burning coal and start getting power from renewables within one year, and they will do it, because it feasible. The U.S. can’t solve the climate crisis unilaterally, so we will pay for China to go solar in exchange for shutting down its coal mines (the two nations control 40% of the worlds coal reserves), just as we couldn’t win the war alone, and paid the Soviet Union to keep the second front open.

Our agenda must aim for that level of action. Nothing short of it is sufficient, and the details will not be worked out beforehand. Our present agenda, focused on U.S. domestic emissions and anything-is- better-than-nothing, has more in common with the pre-war policies of isolationism and appeasement.

The people sitting on folding chairs in low-carbon-footprint workshops are much more sophisticated than they were a few years back, and they’re not easily snowed by charts and graphs peppered with labels — “wedges” this and RPS that — purporting to show how emissions can go down without our power first going up.

What we have going for us is truth and righteousness. What we need is a disciplined, committed climate core. Both are compromised if we keep flogging flimsy policy that cannot solve the problem.

We must be upbeat

Every day we we receive communications from our organizations enthusing about this or that victory. Here’s one:

Great news. Yesterday, the House of Representatives passed a strong renewable energy standard requiring utilities to provide 12.5% of the state’s electricity from clean, renewable energy sources like wind and solar by 2025.

If the world must immediately shut down coal plants to get below 350 ppm, as Hansen advises, then the utilities mentioned in the blurb above have just won themselves a great victory.

We can’t have it both ways. If we are on the fast road to cataclysm and nothing short of massive, global transformation is meaningful, then we must stop seeking and celebrating dinky achievements. At the very least, we must rephrase how they are trumpeted:

Yesterday, the House of Representatives passed a renewable energy standard requiring utilities to provide 12.5% of the state’s electricity from renewable energy sources like wind and solar by 2025. That is 1/6 of total cuts utilities must make in coal emissions to pull back from the climate “point of no return.” We believe it is crucial to get the renewable standard language onto the books, and have accepted the low percentage. [Our campaign] is pledged to immediately return to the legislature to speed up the transfer from coal to solar and wind.

Climate must be pitched to other interests

Climate programs spanning the gamut from Rising Tide to Apollo and NWF assume that people won’t respond to direct calls for climate action.

Whether this mass communications approach is advisable is neither here nor there, because it is certainly a disaster for the climate core — and it is a terrible bargain to trade a small but deeply committed base for a supposed majority that is paper thin.

The folks at the Global Warming Cafe heard two different stories. Ross talked about the end of the world, yet managed to encourage hope in the face of darkness. The gist of our story is that we don’t believe climate change is nearly the problem Ross and the scientists say it is.

We convey our skepticism in two ways. First, we blur our descriptions of the problem so as not to be too alarmist, and second, we put the primary case for climate action in terms other than avoiding disaster.

To cry catastrophe! and then list benefits like green jobs and reduced oil imports to be gained if we take preventative measures is odd and confusing behavior, like running into a crowded movie theater and shouting “Fire!… and don’t forget to buy popcorn on the way out; with all the unexpected traffic, it’s on sale!”

Unmoored from principle

We are in crisis because the Climate Policy Paradigm has demonstrably failed to solve the problem. It also prevents us from perceiving that we are in crisis. One unambiguous signal that we have sailed into murky waters is our abandonment of the precautionary principle — environmentalism’s central assumption — without debate.

Environmentalists won inclusion of precautionary language in the Rio Declaration on the Environment and the Kyoto Protocol. Climate scientists consistently refer to this language as the benchmark for deciding are necessary and appropriate responses to climate change.

In 2005, Jim Hansen published “On A Slippery Slope” (PDF), laying out the case for a 450 ppm “bright line” and outlining a scenario of glacier surface ice melt leading to ice shelf break-up and rapid sea level rise. Hansen’s position was significantly more conservative — that is, precautionary — than the 550 ppm Kyoto target, and was not endorsed by any major U.S. environmental organization for several years (even, ironically, as U.S. environmentalists rushed to support Hansen when the Bush administration sought to gag him).

Three years later, Hansen has circulated a paper making the precautionary case for a swift return below 350 ppm atmospheric carbon. Once again, nothing is heard from U.S. environmentalists but a deafening silence. As a matter of intellectual honesty, we have two options: endorse or refute. As a matter of environmental principle, there is no option, and the longer we remain silent, the greater the moral burden, the tighter our grip on the familiar, and more impossible the task that can commence only when the way is cleared.

A second unambiguous example that our thinking is out of whack is that we have yet to take even the simplest of steps to join forces. The Paradigm evolved from decisions of energy advocates and program officers, whose calculus of environmental power was organizational, rarely coalitional, not institutional, and never movement-based.

Ten years ago, that kind of thinking might be excused, but today? Where is the gathering of Green Group leadership to plan strategy? Where is the national training conference for our core? Where is the proposal to create infrastructure (communications center, training academy, fundraising, technology, etc.)?

An organization or foundation that represents itself as addressing climate change based on its own resources and program alone has not accepted reality.

Easing out from under the paradigm

We can keep plodding down the dark road of deepening despair, rigid defense of inadequate policy, and preservation of organizational power at the expense of common purpose until our base disintegrates and/or an internal flash point is reached.

Or, we can acknowledge that our Climate Policy Paradigm has failed, experiment with new program and campaigning, and craft a more robust approach. (I have argued that we might bridge the gap by creating an in-house, experimenting campaigns center to germinate and test new ideas.) Even small steps in this direction will be instantly rewarded, as a new atmosphere of creative ferment supplants sterile labor. When reality — however terrible — is accepted in place of false optimism, we will tap a wellspring of courage, joy, and hope.

How we choose to act at this critical juncture determines whether environmental principles and our institution will survive; whether a just and sustainable climate solution will be put before the world; and whether America will be mobilized to lead a last-minute global drive to avert collapse of civilization and eco-cataclysm. To achieve these things — to save the world — we must do what may be the hardest thing humans are ever called upon to do: give up deeply held beliefs of which we are barely even aware. In our case, the challenge is made easy because we have merely to unearth the values and principles we already hold but have held too long in secrecy.

Which vision will go over best at the next Global Warming Cafe? Two years back it would have been a tough call whether the climate core preferred terrible truth + long odds but functional global solution, or buffered truth + personal action and comfortable but ineffective politics. Now, if offered an alternative to civics by pre-packaged constituent email and activism defined as refusing junk mail, there is little doubt they would seize it, because they have accepted reality, and it terrifies them.

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From: Financial Times (London, U.K.) …………………
May 15, 2008

CLIMATE CHANGE STUDY POINTS FINGER

[Rachel’s introduction: Scientists have been able to say with virtual certainty for the first time that the climate change observed over the past four decades is not the result of natural phenomena but is caused by human activities.]

By Fiona Harvey

Scientists have been able to say with virtual certainty for the first time that the climate change observed over the past four decades is not the result of natural phenomena but is man made.

The research compounds the conclusion of the biggest scientific report on global warming to date, the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last year, which asserted a strong likelihood that human action was changing the climate.

The new study raises the likelihood of “unnatural” causes of global warming to near certainty.

Authors of the study, published today 6 Mbyte PDF in the peer reviewed journal Nature, examined a greater range of data than any other study so far. “Changes in natural systems since at least 1970 are occurring in regions of observed temperature increases, and these temperature increases at continental scales cannot be explained by natural climate variations alone,” they say.

They give warning that man-made climate change is having “a significant impact on physical and biological systems globally”. The authors of the Nature study, including scientists from the Australia, China, the US and several other countries, found that more than 90 per cent of the data sets they examined showed evidence that natural systems were responding to warming.

Spring is coming earlier, permafrost is melting and coastal erosion is increasing under the influence of rising sea levels, while animals and birds are changing their migration and reproductive patterns.

Barry Brook, director of climate change research at the University of Adelaide, said: “[We should] consider that there has been only 0.75�C of temperature change so far, yet the expectation for this century is four to nine times that amount.

“So these changes are only a minor portent of what is likely to come, especially if we continue on our carbon-profligate pathway.”

Climate scientists know they may be facing difficult times ahead in persuading the public and politicians of the urgency of global warming, as research published recently in Nature suggested that global temperatures were not likely to increase in the next decade, and could even decline.

Scientists from Germany’s Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences and the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre say natural variations in the climate linked to the Pacific cooling system known as La Nina, and a cooling phase of a system of Atlantic currents called the meridional overturning circulation, may push down temperatures despite the effects of greenhouse gases.

After those effects wear off, within about a decade, temperatures are likely to rise much more strongly as the warming effect of carbon emissions regains the upper hand in altering the climate.

Scientists fear that the expected lull in temperature rises might dispel any sense of urgency in tackling global warming and provide ammunition for climate change sceptics.

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From: Ascribe Newswire ……………………………..
May 21, 2008

SHOULDN’T CHEMICALS BE PROVEN SAFE FOR KIDS BEFORE MARKETING?

[Rachel’s introduction: Currently, U.S. chemicals law is so toothless that the U.S. EPA was unable to ban asbestos under its provisions, even though asbestos is perhaps the most potent cancer-causing substance ever introduced into commerce and kills about 10,000 people per year. Time for a new law.]

Amid rising concern over toxic chemicals in consumer products and in the bodies of Americans, landmark legislation has been introduced in Congress to make sure chemicals are safe before they are allowed on the market.

Under current law known as the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), unchanged since 1976, most new chemicals are approved with little or no safety testing, and more than 62,000 existing chemicals have remained on the market for three decades despite evidence that some pose serious health risks. The Kid Safe Chemicals Act (KSCA), by Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-NJ) and Reps. Hilda Solis (D-CA) and Henry Waxman (D-CA), would place the burden of proof on the chemical industry to show that chemicals are safe for children before they are added to consumer products.

“Every day, consumers rely on household products that contain hundreds of chemicals. The American public expects the federal government to keep families safe by testing chemicals, but the government is letting them down,” Lautenberg said in a press release. “We already have strong regulations for pesticides and pharmaceuticals. It’s common sense that we do the same for chemicals that end up in household items such as bottles and toys.”

The current law is so toothless that the U.S. EPA was unable to ban asbestos under its provisions, even though asbestos is perhaps the most potent cancer-causing substance ever introduced into commerce and kills about 10,000 people per year. In the 32 years since TSCA was passed, EPA has evaluated the safety of just 200 out of 80,000 chemicals, and banned only 5.

The Kid Safe Chemicals Act would give EPA the mandate to protect public health from chemical exposures and the authority to get the job done. The bill puts the burden of proving chemical safety where it belongs — with the manufacturers — and makes available to the public a wealth of health and safety information used to make safety determinations. KSCA recognizes the magnitude of the task and sets priorities for action based on whether chemicals are found in people, with special priority for chemicals found in human umbilical cord blood.

Ken Cook, president of Environmental Working Group (EWG), whose tests found 287 industrial chemicals in 10 samples of umbilical cord blood, called KSCA a long-overdue move to put public health ahead of chemical industry profits.

“When babies come into this world pre-polluted with hundreds of dangerous industrial chemicals already in their blood, it’s clear that the regulatory system is broken,” said Ken Cook, president of Environmental Working Group (EWG). “The Kid Safe Chemicals Act will change a lax, outdated system that presumes chemicals are safe into one that requires makers of toxic chemicals to prove their safety before they’re allowed on the market.”

KSCA does not propose to invent new public health criteria, but instead adopts tough health standards that chemical manufacturers already comply with for other products like pesticides and food additives, and applies these same standards to industrial chemicals that also end up in people.

A coalition of grassroots, state and national organizations led by EWG sent a letter to the lawmakers today applauding their action and pledging support as the work begins to make this legislation law. The letter and list of organizations is available at http://www.ewg.org/.

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From: Future Hope ………………………………….
May 19, 2008

MAZZOCCHI, SPETH AND CAPITALISM’S FUTURE

[Rachel’s introduction: Gus Speth — the current Dean of Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies — and Tony Mazzocchi, an important labor leader who died in 2002, traveled very diffferent paths to arrive at the same conclusion: capitalism as we know it is incompatible with the natural environment and therefore will change, one way or another.]

By Ted Glick

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“Capitalism as we know it today is incapable of sustaining the environment.” — James Gustave (Gus) Speth, in “The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability”

“In the late 1980s, Tony was arguing that global warming might force us to fundamentally alter capitalism. He believed that the struggle against nature was the irreconcilable contradiction that would force systemic change.” — Les Leopold, in “The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi”

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I don’t know if Gus Speth and Tony Mazzocchi knew each other personally. Speth’s work career has been as a co-founder and senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, with President Jimmy Carter’s Council on Environmental Quality, as founder and president of the World Resources Institute, as Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and, since 1999, as Dean of the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

The late Tony Mazzocchi, on the other hand, following service in the army during World War II, was completely immersed in the world of the U.S. labor movement. He rose from the ranks to become a national leader of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union, and he was the founder and leader of the Labor Party.

But as these two fascinating books make clear, their distinct life experiences led them both to believe that the capitalist system which now dominates most of the world is the ultimate problem which humanity must face up to and deal with if we are to survive and if, in Tony Mazzocchi’s words, “people are [to be] able to enjoy the arts, relaxation, interaction with other people, free time… You know, there’s an awful lot of wealth out there. If it was distributed appropriately, everyone could have a fairly decent life — I think globally. And people could be happy transforming the way we live. Not everyone has to live in a mansion, but everyone can live in a decent environment. It’s all possible.” (pps. 480-481)

Tony Mazzocchi died in 2002. As Les Leopold’s well-researched book makes clear, Mazzocchi was not your typical U.S. labor leader. He was a visionary, while being very practical and very “close to the ground” in his political sensibilities. He was a radical in his political beliefs, for sure, in the best sense of radicalism as getting at the root of things.

“His brush with heavy manual labor convinced him that the good life required something beyond traditional work. Slowly, that sense would crystallize into a stinging critique of the left’s obsession with ‘jobs, jobs, jobs.’ Mazzocchi would later apply his version of radicalism to anticipate a different kind of contradiction of capitalism: He believed the clash of capital against nature (as in global warming or environmental health) — not just a clash over economic resources — would force systemic change.” (pps. 76-77)

Mazzocchi was likely the first labor leader, if not one of the first labor activists, to get it on global warming. 20 years ago, in 1988, he organized the first U.S. union conference on global warming, and he was responsible for the publication and circulation of Global Warming Watch, by the Labor Institute’s Mike Merrill, “certainly the first publication on the implications of climate change for American workers.” (p. 433)

Mazzocchi’s commitment to linking worker’s rights and environmental issues was deeply-grounded. As the legislative director of OCAW he played a major role in 1973 when 4,000 OCAW members who worked for Shell Oil Company went on strike at eight plants and refineries around the country. In part because of Mazzocchi, the health and safety of the workers, at risk because of high amounts of asbestos in their workplaces, was the primary issue of the strike.

Due to Mazzocchi’s leadership, a blue-green alliance developed around this struggle. Major environmental groups supported the strike and built support for a nationwide boycott of Shell products. Four months after it began, the strike was settled. Historian Robert Gordon, writing 25 years later, wrote of OCAW’s “remarkable progress. Almost all of the union’s contracts with other oil companies were renewed with the strict health and safety clause… In addition, OCAW’s efforts heightened public awareness of health hazards confronting millions of American workers… Perhaps most importantly, the Shell strike solidified the tentative labor-environmental alliance.” (p. 308)

Gus Speth appreciates the importance of such alliances if we are to create a just and sustainable society. In the concluding pages of his book, he says that “perhaps above all, the new environmental politics must be broadly inclusive, reaching to embrace union members and working families, minorities and people of color, religious organizations, the women’s movement, and other communities of complementary interest and shared fate.” (p. 228)

Coming from someone who Time magazine called the “ultimate insider,” Speth’s well-reasoned call for a new environmental movement, for a new movement in which environmental issues are central, is a welcome and much-needed contribution, particularly for the climate and environmental movements.

It is no small thing when someone with Speth’s background and connections writes, “my conclusion, after much searching and considerable reluctance, is that most environmental deterioration is a result of systemic failures of the capitalism that we have today and that long-term solutions must seek transformative change in the key features of this contemporary capitalism.” (p. 9) Or this more stark formulation: “Capitalism as we know it today is incapable of sustaining the environment.” (p. 63)

On the other hand, Speth makes clear that he’s no socialist, a difference with Mazzocchi, who liked the basic idea even though he was critical of much of “actually existing socialism” and much of the organized socialist and communist Left in the U.S.

Speth writes approvingly of a government-regulated market economy, one in which environmental impacts and the “polluter pays” principle would be paramount, essentially a form of environmental social democracy. Included would be “policies that promote an environmental revolution in technology… a wholesale transformation in the technologies that today dominate manufacturing, energy, construction, transportation and agriculture. The twentieth-century technologies that have contributed so abundantly to today’s problems should be phased out and replaced with twenty-first-century technologies designed with environmental sustainability and restoration in mind.” (p. 113)

Speth calls for a rejection of the necessity of constant economic growth — a central tenet of capitalism. He calls, instead, for policies that “strengthen families and communities,” “measures that guarantee good, well-paying jobs,” “measures that give us more time for leisure, informal education, the arts, music, drama, sports, hobbies, volunteering, community work, outdoor work…,” “measures that give everyone a good education,” and more. (p. 145)

He rejects “consumerism and commercialism.” Instead, “Confront consumerism. Practice sufficiency. Work less. Reclaim your time — it’s all you have. Turn off technology. Join No Shopping Day. Buy nothing… Simplify your life. Shed possessions. Downshift.” (p. 163)

He is critical of corporations and wants to see the public good come before private profit, with the implications of that for actually existing corporations, especially the huge and powerful ones, left unclear. He supports “ownership by workers, public ownership, and public and private enterprises that do not seek traditional profits. They offer opportunities for greater local control, more sensitivity to employee, public, and consumer interests, and heightened environmental performance. Collectively, they signal the emergence of a new sector — a public or independent sector — that has the potential to be a countervailing center of power to today’s capitalism.” (p. 194) Left unaddressed — a weakness — is how this “countervailing center of power” would relate to the military/industrial/fossil fuel complex that dominates our economy and government.

Speth sees the importance of “a new consciousness” and “a new politics” if the change needed is to take place. He appreciates that “government is the principal means available to citizens to collectively exercise their stewardship responsibility to leave the world a better place.” (p. 217)

He is particularly supportive of the movement-building that is going on among young people and within the World Social Forum process. He concludes by writing, “Our goal should be to find the spark that can set off a period of rapid change, like the flowering of the domestic environmental agenda in the early 1970s. In the end, we need to trigger a response that in historical terms will come to be seen as revolutionary — the Environmental Revolution of the twenty-first century. Only such a response is likely to avert huge and even catastrophic environmental losses.”

One weakness of Speth’s book, highlighted by comparison to the one on Mazzocchi, is that, while he supports alliance-building and grassroots movement-building, he says nothing about our corporate-dominated, two party political system. He doesn’t address whether he thinks it will be possible to make the changes necessary through the Democratic Party alone and how he sees that political animal. Does he believe that we do — or don’t — need to transform a political system that pretty much restricts voters’ choices to Republicans and Democrats, that makes it extremely difficult for third parties to gain a foothold and grow? What about the role of our propagandistic, corporate-dominated mass media and our 19th-century, winner-take-all, non-proportional electoral system in suppressing popular resistance to capitalism’s negative and destructive impacts?

Tony Mazzocchi, experiencing the relative powerlessness of the working class, understood this in his bones, which is why he devoted the last years of his life to efforts to form a U.S. labor party.

A related weakness is a lack of specificity when it comes to the tactics of struggle in the process of making the urgently-needed “Environmental Revolution.” The role of direct action and nonviolent civil disobedience — the centrality of leadership in this new movement from historically disenfranchised constituencies like people of color, working-class people and women — the building of thoroughly democratic and transparent organizations and alliances that empower grassroots people and new members — how to counter the inevitable efforts to divide and repress a growing movement that threatens the obscene wealth and power of those who currently have it: these are very real issues.

Albert Einstein once said, “In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.” Thanks to Les Leopold, many people who did not know Tony Mazzocchi will have their spirit rekindled when they read about this 20th century hero of our history.

And we are fortunate that “ultimate insider” Gus Speth will continue to help lead us as we build towards the Environmental Revolution which must occur. May “the spark that can set off a period of rapid change” come soon.

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Ted Glick has been active in the climate movement since 2003 and in the progressive social change movement since 1968. He can be contacted at indpol@igc.org or P.O. Box 1132, Bloomfield, N.J. 07003.

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From: Reuters Alertnet ………………………………
May 20, 2008

CHRONIC DISEASES TOP CAUSES OF DEATHS GLOBALLY

[Rachel’s introduction: The World health Organization reports that chronic diseases — mainly heart disease and stroke — have now displaced infectious diseases as the major killers worldwide.]

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA — Chronic conditions such as heart disease and stroke, often associated with a Western lifestyle, have become the chief causes of death globally, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Tuesday.

The shift from infectious diseases including tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and malaria — traditionally the biggest killers — to noncommunicable diseases is set to continue to 2030, the U.N. agency said in a report.

“In more and more countries, the chief causes of deaths are noncommunicable diseases such as heart disease and stroke,” Ties Boerma, director of the WHO department of health statistics and informatics, said in a statement.

The annual report, World Health Statistics 2008, is based on data collected from the WHO’s 193 member states.

It documents levels of mortality in children and adults, patterns of disease, and the prevalence of risk factors such as smoking and alcohol consumption.

“As populations age in middle- and low-income countries over the next 25 years, the proportion of deaths due to noncommunicable diseases will rise significantly,” it said.

By 2030, deaths due to cancer, cardiovascular diseases and traffic accidents will together account for about 30 percent of all deaths, it said.

WHO Director-General Margaret Chan, in a speech to the WHO’s annual assembly on Monday, voiced concern at the growing toll of chronic noncommunicable diseases.

“Diabetes and asthma are on the rise everywhere. Even low-income countries are seeing shocking increases in obesity, especially in urban areas and often starting in childhood,” Chan said.

Tobacco use is the single largest cause of preventable death worldwide, killing “a third to a half of all those who use it”, according to the WHO. It contributes to deaths from ischaemic heart disease, stroke and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease which numbered 5.4 million in 2004.

More than 80 percent of the 8.3 million tobacco-attributable deaths projected to occur in 2030 will be in developing countries, it says.

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From: The Nation …………………………………..
May 16, 2008

MANUFACTURING A FOOD CRISIS

[Rachel’s introduction: The global food crisis was created by public policies imposed on third-world countries by industrialized nations eager to sell surplus food.]

By Walden Bello

When tens of thousands of people staged demonstrations in Mexico last year to protest a 60 percent increase in the price of tortillas, many analysts pointed to biofuel as the culprit. Because of US government subsidies, American farmers were devoting more and more acreage to corn for ethanol than for food, which sparked a steep rise in corn prices. The diversion of corn from tortillas to biofuel was certainly one cause of skyrocketing prices, though speculation on biofuel demand by transnational middlemen may have played a bigger role. However, an intriguing question escaped many observers: how on earth did Mexicans, who live in the land where corn was domesticated, become dependent on US imports in the first place?

The Mexican food crisis cannot be fully understood without taking into account the fact that in the years preceding the tortilla crisis, the homeland of corn had been converted to a corn-importing economy by “free market” policies promoted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and Washington. The process began with the early 1980s debt crisis. One of the two largest developing-country debtors, Mexico was forced to beg for money from the Bank and IMF to service its debt to international commercial banks. The quid pro quo for a multibillion-dollar bailout was what a member of the World Bank executive board described as “unprecedented thoroughgoing interventionism” designed to eliminate high tariffs, state regulations and government support institutions, which neoliberal doctrine identified as barriers to economic efficiency.

Interest payments rose from 19 percent of total government expenditures in 1982 to 57 percent in 1988, while capital expenditures dropped from an already low 19.3 percent to 4.4 percent. The contraction of government spending translated into the dismantling of state credit, government-subsidized agricultural inputs, price supports, state marketing boards and extension services. Unilateral liberalization of agricultural trade pushed by the IMF and World Bank also contributed to the destabilization of peasant producers.

This blow to peasant agriculture was followed by an even larger one in 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect. Although NAFTA had a fifteen-year phaseout of tariff protection for agricultural products, including corn, highly subsidized US corn quickly flooded in, reducing prices by half and plunging the corn sector into chronic crisis. Largely as a result of this agreement, Mexico’s status as a net food importer has now been firmly established.

With the shutting down of the state marketing agency for corn, distribution of US corn imports and Mexican grain has come to be monopolized by a few transnational traders, like US-owned Cargill and partly US-owned Maseca, operating on both sides of the border. This has given them tremendous power to speculate on trade trends, so that movements in biofuel demand can be manipulated and magnified many times over. At the same time, monopoly control of domestic trade has ensured that a rise in international corn prices does not translate into significantly higher prices paid to small producers.

It has become increasingly difficult for Mexican corn farmers to avoid the fate of many of their fellow corn cultivators and other smallholders in sectors such as rice, beef, poultry and pork, who have gone under because of the advantages conferred by NAFTA on subsidized US producers. According to a 2003 Carnegie Endowment report, imports of US agricultural products threw at least 1.3 million farmers out of work — many of whom have since found their way to the United States.

Prospects are not good, since the Mexican government continues to be controlled by neoliberals who are systematically dismantling the peasant support system, a key legacy of the Mexican Revolution. As Food First executive director Eric Holt-Gimenez sees it, “It will take time and effort to recover smallholder capacity, and there does not appear to be any political will for this — to say nothing of the fact that NAFTA would have to be renegotiated.”

Creating a Rice Crisis in the Philippines

That the global food crisis stems mainly from free-market restructuring of agriculture is clearer in the case of rice. Unlike corn, less than 10 percent of world rice production is traded. Moreover, there has been no diversion of rice from food consumption to biofuels. Yet this year alone, prices nearly tripled, from $380 a ton in January to more than $1,000 in April. Undoubtedly the inflation stems partly from speculation by wholesaler cartels at a time of tightening supplies. However, as with Mexico and corn, the big puzzle is why a number of formerly self-sufficient rice-consuming countries have become severely dependent on imports.

The Philippines provides a grim example of how neoliberal economic restructuring transforms a country from a net food exporter to a net food importer. The Philippines is the world’s largest importer of rice. Manila’s desperate effort to secure supplies at any price has become front-page news, and pictures of soldiers providing security for rice distribution in poor communities have become emblematic of the global crisis.

The broad contours of the Philippines story are similar to those of Mexico. Dictator Ferdinand Marcos was guilty of many crimes and misdeeds, including failure to follow through on land reform, but one thing he cannot be accused of is starving the agricultural sector. To head off peasant discontent, the regime provided farmers with subsidized fertilizer and seeds, launched credit plans and built rural infrastructure. When Marcos fled the country in 1986, there were 900,000 metric tons of rice in government warehouses.

Paradoxically, the next few years under the new democratic dispensation saw the gutting of government investment capacity. As in Mexico the World Bank and IMF, working on behalf of international creditors, pressured the Corazon Aquino administration to make repayment of the $26 billion foreign debt a priority. Aquino acquiesced, though she was warned by the country’s top economists that the “search for a recovery program that is consistent with a debt repayment schedule determined by our creditors is a futile one.” Between 1986 and 1993 8 percent to 10 percent of GDP left the Philippines yearly in debt-service payments — roughly the same proportion as in Mexico. Interest payments as a percentage of expenditures rose from 7 percent in 1980 to 28 percent in 1994; capital expenditures plunged from 26 percent to 16 percent. In short, debt servicing became the national budgetary priority.

Spending on agriculture fell by more than half. The World Bank and its local acolytes were not worried, however, since one purpose of the belt-tightening was to get the private sector to energize the countryside. But agricultural capacity quickly eroded. Irrigation stagnated, and by the end of the 1990s only 17 percent of the Philippines’ road network was paved, compared with 82 percent in Thailand and 75 percent in Malaysia. Crop yields were generally anemic, with the average rice yield way below those in China, Vietnam and Thailand, where governments actively promoted rural production. The post-Marcos agrarian reform program shriveled, deprived of funding for support services, which had been the key to successful reforms in Taiwan and South Korea. As in Mexico Filipino peasants were confronted with full-scale retreat of the state as provider of comprehensive support — a role they had come to depend on.

And the cutback in agricultural programs was followed by trade liberalization, with the Philippines’ 1995 entry into the World Trade Organization having the same effect as Mexico’s joining NAFTA. WTO membership required the Philippines to eliminate quotas on all agricultural imports except rice and allow a certain amount of each commodity to enter at low tariff rates. While the country was allowed to maintain a quota on rice imports, it nevertheless had to admit the equivalent of 1 to 4 percent of domestic consumption over the next ten years. In fact, because of gravely weakened production resulting from lack of state support, the government imported much more than that to make up for shortfalls. The massive imports depressed the price of rice, discouraging farmers and keeping growth in production at a rate far below that of the country’s two top suppliers, Thailand and Vietnam.

The consequences of the Philippines’ joining the WTO barreled through the rest of its agriculture like a super-typhoon. Swamped by cheap corn imports — much of it subsidized US grain — farmers reduced land devoted to corn from 3.1 million hectares in 1993 to 2.5 million in 2000. Massive importation of chicken parts nearly killed that industry, while surges in imports destabilized the poultry, hog and vegetable industries.

During the 1994 campaign to ratify WTO membership, government economists, coached by their World Bank handlers, promised that losses in corn and other traditional crops would be more than compensated for by the new export industry of “high-value-added” crops like cut flowers, asparagus and broccoli. Little of this materialized. Nor did many of the 500,000 agricultural jobs that were supposed to be created yearly by the magic of the market; instead, agricultural employment dropped from 11.2 million in 1994 to 10.8 million in 2001.

The one-two punch of IMF-imposed adjustment and WTO-imposed trade liberalization swiftly transformed a largely self-sufficient agricultural economy into an import-dependent one as it steadily marginalized farmers. It was a wrenching process, the pain of which was captured by a Filipino government negotiator during a WTO session in Geneva. “Our small producers,” he said, “are being slaughtered by the gross unfairness of the international trading environment.”

The Great Transformation

The experience of Mexico and the Philippines was paralleled in one country after another subjected to the ministrations of the IMF and the WTO. A study of fourteen countries by the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization found that the levels of food imports in 1995-98 exceeded those in 1990-94. This was not surprising, since one of the main goals of the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture was to open up markets in developing countries so they could absorb surplus production in the North. As then-US Agriculture Secretary John Block put it in 1986, “The idea that developing countries should feed themselves is an anachronism from a bygone era. They could better ensure their food security by relying on US agricultural products, which are available in most cases at lower cost.”

What Block did not say was that the lower cost of US products stemmed from subsidies, which became more massive with each passing year despite the fact that the WTO was supposed to phase them out. From $367 billion in 1995, the total amount of agricultural subsidies provided by developed-country governments rose to $388 billion in 2004. Since the late 1990s subsidies have accounted for 40 percent of the value of agricultural production in the European Union and 25 percent in the United States.

The apostles of the free market and the defenders of dumping may seem to be at different ends of the spectrum, but the policies they advocate are bringing about the same result: a globalized capitalist industrial agriculture. Developing countries are being integrated into a system where export-oriented production of meat and grain is dominated by large industrial farms like those run by the Thai multinational CP and where technology is continually upgraded by advances in genetic engineering from firms like Monsanto. And the elimination of tariff and nontariff barriers is facilitating a global agricultural supermarket of elite and middle-class consumers serviced by grain-trading corporations like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland and transnational food retailers like the British-owned Tesco and the French-owned Carrefour.

There is little room for the hundreds of millions of rural and urban poor in this integrated global market. They are confined to giant suburban favelas, where they contend with food prices that are often much higher than the supermarket prices, or to rural reservations, where they are trapped in marginal agricultural activities and increasingly vulnerable to hunger. Indeed, within the same country, famine in the marginalized sector sometimes coexists with prosperity in the globalized sector.

This is not simply the erosion of national food self-sufficiency or food security but what Africanist Deborah Bryceson of Oxford calls “de-peasantization” — the phasing out of a mode of production to make the countryside a more congenial site for intensive capital accumulation. This transformation is a traumatic one for hundreds of millions of people, since peasant production is not simply an economic activity. It is an ancient way of life, a culture, which is one reason displaced or marginalized peasants in India have taken to committing suicide. In the state of Andhra Pradesh, farmer suicides rose from 233 in 1998 to 2,600 in 2002; in Maharashtra, suicides more than tripled, from 1,083 in 1995 to 3,926 in 2005. One estimate is that some 150,000 Indian farmers have taken their lives. Collapse of prices from trade liberalization and loss of control over seeds to biotech firms is part of a comprehensive problem, says global justice activist Vandana Shiva: “Under globalization, the farmer is losing her/his social, cultural, economic identity as a producer. A farmer is now a ‘consumer’ of costly seeds and costly chemicals sold by powerful global corporations through powerful landlords and money lenders locally.”

African Agriculture: From Compliance to Defiance

De-peasantization is at an advanced state in Latin America and Asia. And if the World Bank has its way, Africa will travel in the same direction. As Bryceson and her colleagues correctly point out in a recent article, the World Development Report for 2008, which touches extensively on agriculture in Africa, is practically a blueprint for the transformation of the continent’s peasant-based agriculture into large-scale commercial farming. However, as in many other places today, the Bank’s wards are moving from sullen resentment to outright defiance.

At the time of decolonization, in the 1960s, Africa was actually a net food exporter. Today the continent imports 25 percent of its food; almost every country is a net importer. Hunger and famine have become recurrent phenomena, with the past three years alone seeing food emergencies break out in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, and Southern and Central Africa.

Agriculture in Africa is in deep crisis, and the causes range from wars to bad governance, lack of agricultural technology and the spread of HIV/AIDS. However, as in Mexico and the Philippines, an important part of the explanation is the phasing out of government controls and support mechanisms under the IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs imposed as the price for assistance in servicing external debt.

Structural adjustment brought about declining investment, increased unemployment, reduced social spending, reduced consumption and low output. Lifting price controls on fertilizers while simultaneously cutting back on agricultural credit systems simply led to reduced fertilizer use, lower yields and lower investment. Moreover, reality refused to conform to the doctrinal expectation that withdrawal of the state would pave the way for the market to dynamize agriculture. Instead, the private sector, which correctly saw reduced state expenditures as creating more risk, failed to step into the breach. In country after country, the departure of the state “crowded out” rather than “crowded in” private investment. Where private traders did replace the state, noted an Oxfam report, “they have sometimes done so on highly unfavorable terms for poor farmers,” leaving “farmers more food insecure, and governments reliant on unpredictable international aid flows.” The usually pro-private sector Economist agreed, admitting that “many of the private firms brought in to replace state researchers turned out to be rent-seeking monopolists.”

The support that African governments were allowed to muster was channeled by the World Bank toward export agriculture to generate foreign exchange, which states needed to service debt. But, as in Ethiopia during the 1980s famine, this led to the dedication of good land to export crops, with food crops forced into less suitable soil, thus exacerbating food insecurity. Moreover, the World Bank’s encouragement of several economies to focus on the same export crops often led to overproduction, triggering price collapses in international markets. For instance, the very success of Ghana’s expansion of cocoa production triggered a 48 percent drop in the international price between 1986 and 1989. In 2002-03 a collapse in coffee prices contributed to another food emergency in Ethiopia.

As in Mexico and the Philippines, structural adjustment in Africa was not simply about underinvestment but state divestment. But there was one major difference. In Africa the World Bank and IMF micromanaged, making decisions on how fast subsidies should be phased out, how many civil servants had to be fired and even, as in the case of Malawi, how much of the country’s grain reserve should be sold and to whom.

Compounding the negative impact of adjustment were unfair EU and US trade practices. Liberalization allowed subsidized EU beef to drive many West African and South African cattle raisers to ruin. With their subsidies legitimized by the WTO, US growers offloaded cotton on world markets at 20 percent to 55 percent of production cost, thereby bankrupting West and Central African farmers.

According to Oxfam, the number of sub-Saharan Africans living on less than a dollar a day almost doubled, to 313 million, between 1981 and 2001 — 46 percent of the whole continent. The role of structural adjustment in creating poverty was hard to deny. As the World Bank’s chief economist for Africa admitted, “We did not think that the human costs of these programs could be so great, and the economic gains would be so slow in coming.”

In 1999 the government of Malawi initiated a program to give each smallholder family a starter pack of free fertilizers and seeds. The result was a national surplus of corn. What came after is a story that should be enshrined as a classic case study of one of the greatest blunders of neoliberal economics. The World Bank and other aid donors forced the scaling down and eventual scrapping of the program, arguing that the subsidy distorted trade. Without the free packs, output plummeted. In the meantime, the IMF insisted that the government sell off a large portion of its grain reserves to enable the food reserve agency to settle its commercial debts. The government complied. When the food crisis turned into a famine in 2001-02, there were hardly any reserves left. About 1,500 people perished. The IMF was unrepentant; in fact, it suspended its disbursements on an adjustment program on the grounds that “the parastatal sector will continue to pose risks to the successful implementation of the 2002/03 budget. Government interventions in the food and other agricultural markets [are] crowding out more productive spending.”

By the time an even worse food crisis developed in 2005, the government had had enough of World Bank/IMF stupidity. A new president reintroduced the fertilizer subsidy, enabling 2 million households to buy it at a third of the retail price and seeds at a discount. The result: bumper harvests for two years, a million-ton maize surplus and the country transformed into a supplier of corn to Southern Africa.

Malawi’s defiance of the World Bank would probably have been an act of heroic but futile resistance a decade ago. The environment is different today, since structural adjustment has been discredited throughout Africa. Even some donor governments and NGOs that used to subscribe to it have distanced themselves from the Bank. Perhaps the motivation is to prevent their influence in the continent from being further eroded by association with a failed approach and unpopular institutions when Chinese aid is emerging as an alternative to World Bank, IMF and Western government aid programs.

Food Sovereignty: An Alternative Paradigm?

It is not only defiance from governments like Malawi and dissent from their erstwhile allies that are undermining the IMF and the World Bank. Peasant organizations around the world have become increasingly militant in their resistance to the globalization of industrial agriculture. Indeed, it is because of pressure from farmers’ groups that the governments of the South have refused to grant wider access to their agricultural markets and demanded a massive slashing of US and EU agricultural subsidies, which brought the WTO’s Doha Round of negotiations to a standstill.

Farmers’ groups have networked internationally; one of the most dynamic to emerge is Via Campesina (Peasant’s Path). Via not only seeks to get “WTO out of agriculture” and opposes the paradigm of a globalized capitalist industrial agriculture; it also proposes an alternative — food sovereignty. Food sovereignty means, first of all, the right of a country to determine its production and consumption of food and the exemption of agriculture from global trade regimes like that of the WTO. It also means consolidation of a smallholder-centered agriculture via protection of the domestic market from low-priced imports; remunerative prices for farmers and fisherfolk; abolition of all direct and indirect export subsidies; and the phasing out of domestic subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture. Via’s platform also calls for an end to the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights regime, or TRIPs, which allows corporations to patent plant seeds; opposes agro-technology based on genetic engineering; and demands land reform. In contrast to an integrated global monoculture, Via offers the vision of an international agricultural economy composed of diverse national agricultural economies trading with one another but focused primarily on domestic production.

Once regarded as relics of the pre-industrial era, peasants are now leading the opposition to a capitalist industrial agriculture that would consign them to the dustbin of history. They have become what Karl Marx described as a politically conscious “class for itself,” contradicting his predictions about their demise. With the global food crisis, they are moving to center stage — and they have allies and supporters. For as peasants refuse to go gently into that good night and fight de-peasantization, developments in the twenty-first century are revealing the panacea of globalized capitalist industrial agriculture to be a nightmare. With environmental crises multiplying, the social dysfunctions of urban-industrial life piling up and industrialized agriculture creating greater food insecurity, the farmers’ movement increasingly has relevance not only to peasants but to everyone threatened by the catastrophic consequences of global capital’s vision for organizing production, community and life itself.

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Walden Bello is senior analyst at and former executive director of Focus on the Global South, a research and advocacy institute based at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. He is the author or co-author of many books on politics and economic issues in the Philippines and Asia, including, most recently, Deglobalization (Zed), and recipient of the 2003 Right Livelihood Award, also known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize.” In March he was named Outstanding Public Scholar for 2008 by the International Studies Association.

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From: The New York Times (pg. WK3) …………………..
May 18, 2008

ONE COUNTRY’S TABLE SCRAPS, ANOTHER COUNTRY’S MEAL

[Rachel’s introduction: Food shortages are causing sporadic riots in poor countries throughout the world, while Americans are wasting “an astounding amount of food — an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption.” It works out to about a pound of food wasted every day for every American. It doesn’t have to be this way.]

By Andrew Martin

Grocery bills are rising through the roof. Food banks are running short of donations. And food shortages are causing sporadic riots in poor countries through the world.

You’d never know it if you saw what was ending up in your landfill. As it turns out, Americans waste an astounding amount of food — an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption, according to a government study — and it happens at the supermarket, in restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen. It works out to about a pound of food every day for every American.

Grocery stores discard products because of spoilage or minor cosmetic blemishes. Restaurants throw away what they don’t use. And consumers toss out everything from bananas that have turned brown to last week’s Chinese leftovers. In 1997, in one of the few studies of food waste, the Department of Agriculture estimated that two years before, 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten. Fresh produce, milk, grain products and sweeteners made up two-thirds of the waste. An update is under way.

The study didn’t account for the explosion of ready-to-eat foods now available at supermarkets, from rotisserie chickens to sandwiches and soups. What do you think happens to that potato salad and meatloaf at the end of the day?

A more recent study by the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that Americans generate roughly 30 million tons of food waste each year, which is about 12 percent of the total waste stream. All but about 2 percent of that food waste ends up in landfills; by comparison, 62 percent of yard waste is composted.

The numbers seem all the more staggering now, given the cost of groceries and the emerging food crisis abroad.

After President Bush said recently that India’s burgeoning middle class was helping to push up food prices by demanding better food, officials in India complained that not only do Americans eat too much — if they slimmed down to the weight of middle-class Indians, said one, “many people in sub-Saharan Africa would find food on their plate” — but they also throw out too much food.

And consider this: the rotting food that ends up in landfills produces methane, a major source of greenhouse gases.

America’s Second Harvest — The Nation’s Food Bank Network, a group of more than 200 food banks, reports that donations of food are down 9 percent, but the number of people showing up for food has increased 20 percent. The group distributes more than two billion pounds of donated and recovered food and consumer products each year.

The problem isn’t unique to the United States.

In England, a recent study revealed that Britons toss away a third of the food they purchase, including more than four million whole apples, 1.2 million sausages and 2.8 million tomatoes. In Sweden, families with small children threw out about a quarter of the food they bought, a recent study there found.

And most distressing, perhaps, is that in some parts of Africa a quarter or more of the crops go bad before they can be eaten. A study presented last week to the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development found that the high losses in developing nations “are mainly due to a lack of technology and infrastructure” as well as insect infestations, microbial growth, damage and high temperatures and humidity.

For decades, wasting food has fallen into the category of things that everyone knows is a bad idea but that few do anything about, sort of like speeding and reapplying sunscreen. Didn’t your mother tell you to eat all the food on your plate?

Food has long been relatively cheap, and portions were increasingly huge. With so much news about how fat everyone was getting — 66 percent of adult Americans are overweight or obese, according to 2003-04 government health survey — there was a compelling argument to be made that it was better to toss the leftover deep-dish pizza than eat it again the next day.

For cafeterias, restaurants and supermarkets, it was just as easy to toss food that wasn’t sold into trash bins than to worry about somebody getting sick from it. And then filing a lawsuit.

“The path of least resistance is just to chuck it,” said Jonathan Bloom, who started a blog last year called wastedfood.com that tracks the issue.

Of course, eliminating food waste won’t solve the problems of world hunger and greenhouse-gas pollution. But it could make a dent in this country and wouldn’t require a huge amount of effort or money. The Department of Agriculture estimated that recovering just 5 percent of the food that is wasted could feed four million people a day; recovering 25 percent would feed 20 million people.

The Department of Agriculture said it was updating its figures on food waste and officials there weren’t yet able to say if the problem has gotten better or worse.

In many major cities, including New York, food rescue organizations do nearly all the work for cafeterias and restaurants that are willing to participate. The food generally needs to be covered and in some cases placed in a freezer. Food rescue groups pick it up. One of them, City Harvest, collects excess food each day from about 170 establishments in New York.

“We’re not talking about table scraps,” said Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, explaining the types of wasted food that is edible. “We’re talking about a pan of lasagna that was never served.”

For food that isn’t edible, a growing number of states and cities are offering programs to donate it to livestock farmers or to compost it. In Massachusetts, for instance, the state worked with the grocery industry to create a program to set aside for composting food that can’t be used by food banks.

“The great part about this is grocers save money on their garbage bill and they contribute a product to composting,” said Kate M. Krebs, executive director of the National Recycling Coalition, who calls the wasting of food “the most wrenching issue of our day.”

The City of San Francisco is turning food waste from residents and restaurants into tons of compost a day. The city has structured its garbage collection system so that it provides incentives for recycling and composting.

There are also efforts to cut down on the amount of food that people pile on their plates. A handful of restaurant chains including T.G.I. Friday’s are offering smaller portions. And a growing number of college cafeterias have eliminated trays, meaning students have to carry their food to a table rather than loading up a tray.

“It’s sort of one of the ideas you read about and think, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ ” Mr. Bloom said.

The federal government tried once before, during the Clinton administration, to get the nation fired up about food waste, but the effort was discontinued by the Bush administration. The secretary of agriculture at the time, Dan Glickman, created a program to encourage food recovery and gleaning, which means collecting leftover crops from farm fields.

He assigned a member of his staff, Mr. Berg, to oversee the program, and Mr. Berg spent the next several years encouraging farmers, schools, hospitals and companies to donate extra crops and food to feeding charities. A Good Samaritan law was passed by Congress that protected food donors from liability for donating food and groceries, spurring more donations.

“We made a dent,” said Mr. Berg, now at the New York City hunger group. “We reduced waste and increased the amount of people being fed. It wasn’t a panacea, but it helped.”

With thecurrent food crisis, it seems possible that the issue of food waste might have more traction this time around.

Mr. Bloom said he was encouraged by the increasing Web chatter about saving money on food, something that used to be confined to the “frugal mommy blogs.”

“The fundamental thing that I’m fighting against is, ‘why should I care? I paid for it,’ ” Mr. Bloom said. “The rising prices are really an answer to that.”

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Rachel’s Democracy & Health News highlights the connections between issues that are often considered separately or not at all.

The natural world is deteriorating and human health is declining because those who make the important decisions aren’t the ones who bear the brunt. Our purpose is to connect the dots between human health, the destruction of nature, the decline of community, the rise of economic insecurity and inequalities, growing stress among workers and families, and the crippling legacies of patriarchy, intolerance, and racial injustice that allow us to be divided and therefore ruled by the few.

In a democracy, there are no more fundamental questions than, “Who gets to decide?” And, “How DO the few control the many, and what might be done about it?”

Rachel’s Democracy and Health News is published as often as necessary to provide readers with up-to-date coverage of the subject.

Editors:
Peter Montague – peter@rachel.org
Tim Montague – tim@rachel.org

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