NEWSAGRICULTURE

Historic Mississippi River floods are still ravaging the Midwest, destroying homes, livelihoods and flooding entire towns. As CNN Money reported, professionals say "the massive flood churning its way down the Mississippi River will go down in history for its catastrophic, multi-billion dollar impact on the Midwestern economy."

As with every disaster, this one has brought reflection about the causes of the havoc and about what we might do better. There will be another spate of long-overdue moves to reform our national, state and local flood protection strategies, though whether they will succeed is another story. What is bluntly clear is that the levees and storm walls we have built to protect us from disaster are not equipped to handle historic flood events. These historic events, of course, are becoming scarily common as climate change and wetland degradation accelerate.

No one knows this better than Iowans. In 2008, the Cedar River, which flows in the Mississippi, surged over its banks into the city of Cedar Rapids. This is the type of flood event for which no one was prepared, a 1 in 500 year occurrence. Today, residents are still recovering, and three years later, local officials  are still struggling to map out a strategy for the city moving forward.

The Cerrado, a rare and beautiful ecosystem in Brazil, isn't a place that many people have heard about, despite the fact that it contains approximately 5 percent of life on Earth. That may be why its rapid destruction is falling under the radar.

Largely due to the growth of commercial agriculture (and, in particular, soy.. or 'soya' if you're in the UK), the Cerrado is disappearing faster than the Brazilian Amazon. Soy products from soy grown in this region are consumed by people and livestock around the world.

Think you're not contributing because you don't eat tofu? Well, 80% of soy crop is fed to livestock, and to chickens especially.

A representative of WWF UK filled me recently on the organization's efforts to save the Cerrado, and I learned that there is a lot that can be done to protect this ecosystem. You also can learn more about the Cerrado in the beautiful and interesting hand shadow film below or on WWF.

What can you do about all of this?

Last week, I wrote about a proposed international ban on endosulfan, and I'm back to report some awesome news.

After many years of worldwide citizen action around a proposed ban, this year, at the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants Conference in Geneva last week, success looked within reach. However, one country strongly opposed to such a ban, India, indicated that it would be hard to convince. India is the leading producer and largest exporter of endosulfan and has conducted its own governmental studies supposedly finding that endosulfan is not so horrible (many other studies have found quite the opposite).

Due to a ton of internal pressure to ban this toxic insecticide and a couple of Indian states actually banning it within their jurisdictions, as well as international pressure and negotiation, the country's leadership has come around and an international ban was agreed to on Friday.

Endosulfan — ever heard of it? It is a highly toxic off-patent organochlorine insecticide. It has been shown to stay in the environment for a long period of time, and is an endocrine disruptor.

Thought it has been banned in over 70 countries, the toxic chemical is still widely used in India, China, and a handful of others. Why? Because it's cheap, of course. Also, in India, the government-owned Hindustan Insecticides Limited is one major producer and a number of people in government and industry there benefit financially from its production. India actually exports 50% of the endosulfan it produces.

This chemical is highly controversial and it is a hot topic at the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants Conference happening this week, April 25-29 in Geneva. An international ban has been on the table for some time, but those in Indian government and industry have been strongly opposed to such a ban, despite the fact that a couple of regions in India have actually banned it themselves now. India was the lone member country that opposed an international ban at the Sixth Meeting of the Persistent Organic Pollutants Review Committee to the Convention when it was brought up last year.

Golden Agri Resources’ recent move to stop swapping rainforests and peat land for palm plantations was a landmark achievement in efforts to curb the palm oil industry's environmentally-destructive reputation. And if a recent paper by the free-market, libertarian think tank the Adam Smith Institute is any indication, it’s clear that the move has sent more than a few ripples through the ranks of industry apologists.

The ASI paper blames the ‘environmental lobby’ for distorting the truth about the palm-oil business in Southeast Asia. Among the ‘distortions’ cited in the report is the well-founded fact that the deforestation and other land use changes associated with palm growing are contributing to climate change. Indeed, the authors went so far as to assert that palm plantations actually help mitigate climate change. They also attacked conservationists’ concerns about the destruction of orangutan habitat, characterizing them as “a cynical device” that could “have profoundly negative consequences for people trying to work their way out of poverty.”

Over the past few years, groups from Greenpeace to WWF have been campaigning to stop the ravages of palm oil cultivation on the unique rainforests of Indonesia.

This week, they had a big big victory. The world's second largest producer of palm oil, an Indonesian company called Golden Agri Resources (GAR), announced that it would no longer cut down rainforests in order to plant palm oil. And possibly even more important, it committed to protecting peatlands—the carbon rich soils underneath many rainforests that are outsized carbon emitters when destroyed.

The move comes after several large Western companies—including General Mills, Nestle, Burger King and HSBC—stopped doing business with GAR and its parent company, Sinar Mas, as a result of the group's notorious environmental damage. Additionally, the industry’s only certification body—the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil—issued them the group’s first-ever censure last fall.

Life isn't so sweet now for honeybees. According to the Pesticide Action Network of North America, a record 35 percent of honeybee populations have died off since 2006, victim of what's now termed Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

The environmental "disorder" created by the bees massive die-off is part of a larger planetary extinction that threatens humanity. With the last great extinction being dinosaurs, now "we're living through the sixth great extinction event," the group notes.

This dramatic loss of biodiversity is one of the most severe threats to the planet because we've moved way past any sustainable levels. And bees are the canary in the coal-mine.

North Carolina is chicken country: Its $3.8 billion dollars in farm income makes it the third poultry-producing state in the U.S. with more than 10 percent of national production. That's a lot of bird.

But even in North Carolina there should be limits to the hell of factory farms.

This is the premise of the campaign by the Southern Nash Landowners Association on Change.org.

"Nash County is the WRONG location for the proposed slaughterhouse, hatchery and poultry waste spray field," the group writes in their petition, as it asks for everyone's help in protecting their local air and water quality from factory farm pollution.

The association formed earlier this month specifically to push back against Sanderson Farms' proposal. As Change.org's Sustainable Food reports, the plant would dump thousands of gallons of manure and arsenic-laden wastewater over a 600-acre spray field, feeding right into the local watershed that more than 50,000 residents rely on for drinking water. And once one plant opens its gates, more hatcheries and poultry concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) could follow.

It's a frigid 35 degrees in central Texas (that's cold for Texas), and I'm going to visit Harvey Hayek, a former pecan farmer in the small town of Ellinger.

I say "former" pecan farmer because his livelihood has been nearly wiped out due to sulfur dioxide pollution from the Fayette coal plant, only a couple miles away, which provides a third of the city of Austin's power.

We drive onto his orchards, and he's going to point out the dead and dying trees. "I don't even know where to begin, they're all dead, it's everywhere. Here, there, there, there...," he says. One after another, in rows, in piles, there are oaks, elms, willows, and, of course, pecan trees. All look like they will turn into dust at a single touch.

"They're saying that it's drought, but that doesn't make any sense. They have survived drought before, they're made to do that. It's not a water issue."  We walk to a pond and he shows me the willow trees around the water.  They have a constant source of water, they take directly from the pond, and yet, they too are disintegrating.

Further evidence that it couldn't be drought? All of the orchards were irrigated. He points out piles of rusted pipes. "Those piles of irrigation pipes, they would take days of work to install," he pauses, then reflects, "I guess I don't have to worry about that anymore."

It looks like the U.S. Department of Agriculture is set to approve genetically-modified alfalfa, another blow to efforts to stop the growing nationwide use of genetically-engineered (GE) crops.

So this may be a good time to note some recent positive news that should buoy activists: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has decided to end the use of GE crops in all national wildlife refuges in a dozen Northeastern states, as a result of pressure from advocacy groups. This announcement was the result of a settlement to a lawsuit brought by conservation and food safety groups, including the Center for Food Safety, Delaware Audubon Society and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

While one might imagine wildlife refuges as pristine, dramatic, natural areas providing protected environments for flora and fauna, there's much more there taking root. Historically, farming has been allowed in national wildlife refuges to prepare and seed native grasslands and provide food for birds. However, in recent years, farmers have primarily been growing GE crops on these lands.