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2024 Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards
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Congratulations to Staff Reporter Grey Moran, who won a 2024 Covering Climate Now Journalism Award in the Food and Agriculture category. Their award-winning story detailed how the Federal Crop Insurance Program’s policies failed to benefit, and in some cases penalize, farmers for adopting climate-friendly strategies.
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Senator Cory Booker Says FDA Proposal Could Worsen Antibiotic Resistance
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BY LISA HELD • July 10, 2024 | Exclusive to Civil Eats
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A pending proposal from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) could “worsen the catastrophic impacts of antimicrobial resistance” if finalized, according to Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey).
On Tuesday, Booker sent a letter to commissioner Robert Califf expressing concerns about changes to “duration limits” in the FDA’s revised guidance on antibiotic use in animal agriculture. Continuously using drugs for long stretches is known to lead to antibiotic resistance. And just as antibiotics are now prescribed for humans for the least number of days possible, the FDA has long recognized the need to set limits in feeding them to groups of pigs, chickens, and cows.
However, in the proposal, Booker said, agency officials went in the other direction and eliminated a 21-day limit for the most critical drugs, replacing it with guidelines that allow courses to be determined on a case-by case-basis. “This will set a dangerous precedent by prioritizing the needs of the regulated industry over the FDA’s primary mission to protect public health,” Booker said. “I urge you to finalize Guidance for Industry that meaningfully protects medically important antibiotics from
overuse.” Read the Civil Eats exclusive.
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Are Companies Using Carbon Markets to Sell More Pesticides?
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BY LISA HELD • July 9, 2024
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Carbon markets were first created decades ago as a means for companies to offset their greenhouse gas emissions by paying to reduce emissions somewhere else. Think: planting trees that hold carbon in South America to balance emissions from a factory in South Carolina.
And over the last several years, policymakers, environmental and farm groups, and private companies began hyping the idea that specific markets could be created to pay farmers for adopting practices that could reduce emissions and hold carbon in soil. Flashy startups including Nori and Indigo Ag jumped into the game, Democrats included the idea in their 2020 plan to address the climate crisis, and a bitterly divided Congress passed the Growing Climate Solutions Act on a bipartisan basis in an effort to jump-start the markets.
As a result, a new era of paying farmers for carbon-holding practices became the talk of many farm conferences and climate panels, where the same points came up over and over. Spreading regenerative practices that build soil carbon across more cropland would produce so many other benefits, advocates said. Farmers would be able to hold water and nutrients in the soil, reduce pollution, and increase biodiversity. And over time, not only would they access a new source of revenue, regenerative practices would allow farmers to cut costs as they decreased the use of chemicals—including pesticides and
fertilizer—producing yet another environmental win. In 2021, for example, The New York Times put that narrative in print by featuring a carbon-market farmer who had stopped tilling, diversified his crops, and planted cover crops, eventually building his soil health enough to completely eliminate the use of synthetic fertilizer.
However, while the highest-profile carbon markets are run by public entities like the state of California or New England’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), many of the agricultural markets that have made more recent progress are run by powerful companies—including Bayer, Corteva Agriscience, and Land O’Lakes—that are in the business of selling those same pesticides and fertilizers. Read the full story.
This story is included in our investigative series, Chemical Capture, in which we examine whether consolidated corporate power may be contributing to the ubiquitous use of pesticides, herbicides, and other chemicals. Follow the investigation.
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In Brazil, a Powerful Law Protects Biodiversity and Blocks Corporate Piracy
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BY MARK SCHAPIRO • July 8, 2024
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In the center of Rio de Janeiro sprawls a lush enclave of tropical flowers, vines, and palm trees, with howler monkeys screeching from the leafy canopies. Just blocks from the traffic-clogged bustle of Rio’s boulevards, the Jardim Botanico do Rio de Janeiro is a remaining 130-acre patch of the rainforest from which the city was carved three centuries ago. Locals and tourists alike go there to enjoy the bounty of Brazil’s legendary abundance of plant and animal life.
But if you are in Brazil
representing a company in search of new food, drugs, or cosmetics, the Jardim’s research center is of far greater significance than the meandering garden paths. Here, inside a former colonial villa, the Jardim maintains what amounts to an inventory of the nation’s plant life, more than 65,000 samples.
Each one is a potential treasure trove for companies seeking new plant-based products. And each is now subject to a Brazilian law governing genetic resources, the Law on Access to Genetic Heritage and Associated Traditional Knowledge—known as the genetic heritage law—which is finally being implemented after almost a decade of political and logistical hurdles.
While data on the nation’s plant life is inventoried at the Jardim in Rio, the most powerful tool for implementing this
ambitious new law resides in a locked chamber 600 miles away in the nation’s capital of Brasilia. There, in the basement of the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change, sits an extensive database for registering access to and paying benefits for the nation’s abundant quantities of genetic resources. Read the full story.
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