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This is the weblog of
Raymond Powers.
Here I will be sharing what I find of import, humor, concern, inspiration and on the transformational edge
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A Quote:
If you can explain it, you aren't experiencing it.
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Raymond lives in Ojai, where the time now is:
03:02AM
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used might or might not be copyrighted, but are considered fair
use. Thus the license here would best be described as:
Primarily Public
Domain.
Please ask permission if there is any question in
regards to public domain usage.
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| Thursday, October 13, 2005 |  |
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13 Oct 2005 @ 20:15
The Outsourcing of Food
By Jason Mark, AlterNet. Posted October 6, 2005.
American farmers are battling a new kind of pest -- imports from international rivals who can produce essential foodstuffs cheaper than they can be grown here.
Ronny Sloan is a farmer to his roots. Sloan's father was a farmer, and so was his grandfather, and his great grandfather, and everyone that family history can remember since the Sloans moved from Kentucky to Illinois in the early 19th century. Today Sloan and his four sons farm near the tiny town of Pana, Illinois, where they grow corn, soybeans and oats.
The Sloans are successful farmers, their 6,000-acre operation large by local standards. In recent years, however, they have had to grapple with a problem never encountered before -- foreign competition.
"Things are tough, the farm economy is tough," says Sloan, his voice a rural twang that sounds closer to Mississippi than Missouri. "We used to be the big player and had 75 percent of the soy market. That's not the case. We're now second place, behind Brazil. That's definitely hurting us."
The Sloans are not alone. From the apple orchards of western Washington to the tomato fields of Florida to the potato heartland of Idaho, American farmers are battling a new kind of pest -- imports from international rivals who can produce essential foodstuffs cheaper than they can be grown here.
After decades of being the world's top food producer, the U.S. is poised to become a net importer of agriculture products, according to data from the US Department of Agriculture. By the end of the decade, Brazil is expected to eclipse the U.S. as the number one food grower.
Call it the outsourcing of food. Following in the footsteps of blue-collar workers and, more recently, white-collar employees, the U.S.'s two million farmers face the prospect of being offshored as well.
The shift to foreign food production is clearly bad news for farmers, who have struggled for years to get their sale prices to match the costs of production. The outsourcing of food is also troubling for the U.S.'s ever-growing debt burden, since agricultural products were among the few bright spots in the country's deficit-burdened trade balance. For now, consumers benefit by getting lower food prices. But, say some food policy analysts, the U.S. could, in the long run, face a food security threat if present trends continue.
The U.S. has always been an importer of commodities that can't be cultivated here -- coffee and cocoa, bananas and mangos. But now U.S. markets are being flooded with products that Americans are accustomed to growing themselves. An increasing percentage of the produce you buy at the grocery store comes from fields and orchards thousands of miles away. If you've had any apple juice lately, it's more than likely that the concentrate used to make it was produced in China. Those raspberries you love may have been grown in Chile, the tomatoes in Mexico, and the avocados in Central America.
Even those most American of foods -- good old meat and potatoes -- often are imported. Scandinavia, for example, exports baby back ribs to the U.S., while a portion of our spuds come from abroad. Potato processing giant J.R. Simplot recently laid off 625 workers at one of its French fry factories in Oregon and plans to have the work done overseas.
Reggie Brown, vice president of the Florida Tomato Exchange, a trade group that represents the state's $500 million tomato industry and which has suffered serious loses in the last decade, puts the issue succinctly: "The fundamental question is, 'Is it America's long term interest to produce these crops here, or to have them produced elsewhere and shipped in?' We feel it's in Americans' best interest to be a producer of our own food supply. But there doesn't seem to be a national agenda to do that. The opposite seems to be the national agenda."
Trading Away the Farm
Many farmers and academics say that a decade of free trade agreements is responsible for the plight facing U.S. agriculture. During the heated debates over the creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Washington political establishment told U.S. growers that the new trade deals would be a net benefit for farmers. In hindsight, it appears that the politicians promised too much.
"A lot of growers would be negative or skeptical toward trade agreements," says Desmond O'Rourke, a former professor at Washington State University and editor of a newsletter for the fruit and vegetable industry. "They would say, 'What has it done for me? Not a whole lot.'"
The problem, according to Phillip Abbot, a professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University, is that other nations have successfully grabbed the markets U.S. farmers were counting on. Exports of the U.S.'s biggest commodities -- cheap commodities such as corn, soybeans and wheat -- have been flat for a decade as other nations boost production. At the same time, imports of pricier items like fruits, vegetables, processed foods and some meats are surging. The largest challenge for American farmers is that foodstuffs -- just like televisions or T-shirts -- can be produced more cheaply in low-wage countries. It's simply less expensive to grow oranges and soybeans in Brazil than in Florida or Illinois.
While the new trade deals have reduced the political barriers to food imports, technological improvements in refrigeration and irradiation have reduced the physical barriers to shipping food long distances without spoiling. All of which leaves American farmers on shaky ground, desperate to keep their costs as low as possible in a market environment in which their harvest prices are not increasing. Thousands of farmers have not been able to keep up and are now out of business.
"I've seen a lot of farmers go broke because of NAFTA," says a California-based land manager for a major American food corporation who asked that his name and company not be identified for fear of getting in trouble with his supervisors. "We can't compete with the labor. In Mexico they pay $5 a day. We pay $8 to $10 an hour. It's a shame -- there are greenhouses for sale up and down the state."
Asparagus is one of the crops hit hardest by the wave of food imports. Since the 1930s, Washington state has been the center of U.S. asparagus production for the processed market. But in the last decade, overseas asparagus, most of it from Peru, has devastated the state's growers. According to an official at the Washington Asparagus Commission, who says the industry is in a "state of collapse," two-thirds of Washington's asparagus fields have been taken out of production since 1990, and 2004 marked the first time in more than 60 years that there was no asparagus processing in the state.
Jim Middleton, one of Washington's few remaining asparagus growers, says that the industry's collapse has caused an irreplaceable loss of natural and financial capital. Because asparagus is a perennial that takes several years to come to maturity and then lasts for 15 to 20 years, tearing out an asparagus stand isn't as simple as plowing in a row of broccoli -- it's more like bulldozing an apple orchard.
"It's not something you do lightly," says Middleton, whose family has been growing asparagus since 1966. "It's a tough decision to pull out your crops. But if you're making no money, what choice do you have?"
Middleton says the near destruction of the asparagus industry -- which is labor intensive in both picking and processing -- has cost thousands of people their jobs. "This has always been a real stable part of the farm economy," he says. "And now those jobs are lost. I hope our state and federal governments do what they can to keep this industry alive. The jobs it provides are really important to us."
Cultivating Influence
If the increase in food imports is a raw deal for many growers and farm workers, then in whose interest does the situation serve? Agriculture analysts say all you have to do is follow the money -- and that leads straight to major processors and commodity brokers such as Cargill and Archer Daniel Midland (ADM), corporations that continue to post impressive profits even as farmers struggle.
"Who does this really work for? It's a system set up to benefit the large food companies," says Ben Lilliston, spokesman for the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a Minneapolis-based think tank. "They are playing farmers in the U.S. off of farmers in Brazil, India, Australia, even China. These companies don't care where the food comes from. They just want the cheapest price possible."
By encouraging more food imports, corporations such as Cargill and ADM -- along with the major supermarket chains like Wal-Mart and other food processors like Philip Morris's Nabisco -- keep their costs low and their profit margins high. The major food companies' first priority is cheap food, regardless of where it comes from. If it seems as if the rules have been written mostly to the advantage of the big agribusiness companies that trade on the international markets, that's because they are. For example, a former Cargill vice president, Dan Amstutz, drafted the original text for the WTO's agriculture regulations.
The large agribusiness companies also have sought to protect their interests by halting "country of origin" labeling. The 2002 Farm Bill called for the USDA to start identifying where all imported food comes from. But agribusiness allies in the House of Representatives -- led by Texas representative Tom Delay--have delayed implementation of the labeling and are trying to make it voluntary.
Stickers or decals stating food's country of origin may be small, but the issue is a major one. That's because consumer surveys consistently show that most American shoppers would prefer to buy food that comes from the U.S. If country of origin labeling became universal, it could cramp the major food processors' business model.
"The food companies are afraid," IATP's Lilliston says. "They [the corporations] have set up a global food chain. But they know Americans want to eat local when they have the opportunity. If you're in a supermarket and have a choice between American beef and Australian beef, most people will choose American beef even if it costs a little more."
For the 270 million Americans who enjoy three square meals a day, more imported food has real benefits -- among them, lower food prices and greater variety at the supermarket. Some analysts, however, caution that being dependent on other nations for a large share of our food endangers U.S. security in an unstable world. Of course, there is little risk of nationwide food shortages any time soon; when it comes to total calories produced or tonnage of food harvested, the U.S. remains the biggest farmer in the world. Yet as the U.S. becomes more reliant on food imports, the country's vulnerability to events in far-off places increases.
Phil Howard, a researcher at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at the University of California-Santa Cruz, says the U.S. is losing a key element of self-sufficiency. "This isn't like computer chips from China -- we can live without that," says Howard. "If we keep importing our food, we'll be completely dependent on other countries. Are we going to send the military around the world to protect our food imports as we do now to protect our oil imports?"
Jason Mark is the co-author, with Kevin Danaher, of "Insurrection: Citizen Challenges to Corporate Power." He is researching a book about the future of food.
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| Wednesday, October 5, 2005 | |
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5 Oct 2005 @ 00:24
Harvest" Eco-Label as Greenwashing Rather Than as A Transition to Organic
Web Note: Below noted author and green business advocate Paul Hawken’s letter is a news article describing the new controversial California eco-label called “Protected Harvest.” Protected Harvest's board of directors includes representatives from the World Wildlife Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
9/30/05
Carolyn Brickey
Executive Director
Protected Harvest
Sustainable produce? Why not Orwell's Produce?
I am sorry, but there are terms that accurately describe what you are
attempting to do, but to take sustainable as a label term for foods
grown with herbicides, insecticides, fungicides and soil fumigants is
a travesty. You have no right to cherry pick the language in order
to sell this program. Who did you consult? Did you check in with the
tens of thousands of other NGOs in North America and the world who
have tried to make the word meaningful? The standards you propose are
good management practices-for chemical farmers. Any farmer using
pesticides would benefit from them. Three cheers for good
agricultural practices but thumbs down on the deceptive labeling and
branding.
Sustainability is not a fuzzy-wuzzy term. It means living off of
current solar income. Easy to say, difficult to do. Anyone who is
moving along the path towards sustainability is to be lauded. Organic
farmers aren't there either. But to take a type of transitional
agriculture that actually never aims to make the transition and call
that sustainable is unscientific, and betrays the term.
As a writer, I am disappointed to see the usurpation of language. You
used a term that would sell but violating language is just as toxic
as violating ecosystems. It is no great comfort to birds, beneficial
insects, and soil micro-organisms that Farmer John is counting his
Toxicity Units carefully. The most highly toxic pesticides are
prohibited. Only good old regular toxics can be used. In your
standards, if you don't have a drift control plan when you spray,
it's ok, there are no deductions. Amazing. You just don't get points
to overcome your Toxicity Units. I get the drift. This is not
sustainability folks.
Know that by using this term, instead of something like Responsible
Agriculture, you are creating myriad opponents to a program that
deserves widespread support.
Sincerely,
Paul Hawken
Natural Capital Institute
3 Gate Five Road
Sausalito, CA 94965
415 332 6990
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5 Oct 2005 @ 00:22
Palm Oil in Food, Cosmetics Linked to Orangutan Extinction
From: Environment News Service
Popular Oil in Food, Cosmetics Linked to Orangutan Extinction
LONDON, UK, September 28, 2005 (ENS) - Consumption of palm oil, a vegetable oil found in one in 10 products on supermarket shelves, is driving the orangutan towards extinction, new research shows. The "Oil for Ape Scandal," a report published Friday by Friends of the Earth and orangutan conservation groups, concludes that without urgent intervention the palm oil trade could cause the extinction of the orangutan, Asia's only great ape, within 12 years. Palm oil is found in bread, crackers, chips, margarine and cereals as well as personal care and beauty products such as soap and lipstick. Environmental groups have warned for years that oil palm plantations are associated with rainforest destruction as well as human rights abuse, but the report finds that most UK companies do not know where their palm oil comes from.
Ninety percent of the world’s palm oil exports come from the oil palm plantations of Malaysia and Indonesia. Most of these plantations are on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra. The same lowland forest that the oil palm industry favors for conversion to palm plantations is the only remaining habitat of the orangutan.
Mother and baby orangutan are both at risk as oil palm plantations take over their ha (Photo © Helen Buckland courtesy Friends of the Earth) The report finds that almost 90 percent of the orangutan's habitat in Indonesia and Malaysia has now been destroyed. Some experts estimate that 5,000 orangutan perish as a result every year.
The researchers found that oil palm plantations have now become the primary cause of the orangutans' decline, wiping out its rainforest home in Borneo and Sumatra.
Dr. Willie Smits, founder of the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, said, "The rate of loss of orangutan has never been greater than in the last three years, and oil palm plantations are mostly to blame."
New evidence shows that orangutan rescue centers in Indonesia are over-flowing with orphaned baby orangutans rescued from forests being cleared to make way for oil palm plantations.
The Indonesian government is now planning to convert a significant area of Tanjung Puting National Park, the world's most famous protected area for orangutan, into an oil palm plantation.
Professor Biruté Galdikas, founder of the Orangutan Foundation International, has worked for years to conserve orangutans in Indonesia's national parks. "The orangutan is endangered because of habitat loss. Today the greatest threat to orangutan habitat is the continued expansion of oil palm plantations," she said. "Palm oil is the greatest enemy of orangutan and their continued survival in the wild."
Professor Birute Galdikas with orangutan mother and juvenile at Camp Leakey in Kalimantan Tengah, Borneo, Indonesia. (Photo by Susan Thornton courtesy NREL)
In the food industries, palm oil is the oil of choice for manufacturing solid fat products. Palm oil olein and stearin are popularly used worldwide in making margarine, shortenings and confectionery, and in frying snack foods.
Palm oil is cost-effective as it needs not go through the hydrogenation process and does not contain artery clogging trans-fats. Its high content of natural antioxidants and its stability at high temperatures make it excellent as a deep frying medium. It also gives fried products a longer shelf life, while its bland taste brings out the natural flavors of food.
Palm oil is also used in the manufacture of soaps, detergents and other surfactants. It is a raw material for producing oleochemicals, fatty acids, fatty alcohols, glycerol and other derivatives for the manufacture of cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, household and industrial products.
Oleochemicals manufactured from palm oil and palm kernel oil are now popular for the manufacture of environmentally friendly detergents as they are readily biodegradable.
Research by Friends of the Earth found that at least 84 percent of UK companies are failing to take effective action to ensure they do not buy palm oil from destructive sources and that not one single UK supermarket knows where the palm oil originates in the products it sells.
Friends of the Earth and orangutan conservation groups say that the failure of UK companies to take action shows that they cannot be trusted to act responsibly. They are calling on the UK government to give company directors a legal duty to minimize their environmental impacts through the Company Law Reform Bill, which will have its first reading in Parliament later this year.
Baby orangutans like this one are being thrown into shelters as their habitat is destroyed for oil palm plantations. (Photo © Orangutan Foundation)
Two weeks ago the United Nations published the Kinshasa Declaration, an action plan backed by the UK government to protect crucial forest areas and save the world's great apes from extinction. The Indonesian Government signed on to this agreement but so far Malaysia has failed to do so.
Friends of the Earth and the orangutan conservation groups urge both governments to implement the declaration and end the conversion of orangutan habitat into oil-palm plantations.
Friends of the Earth Palm Oil Campaigner Ed Matthew said, "While the UK Government is prepared to fund international ape conservation it is failing to clean up its own back yard. Over 100 UK companies and every single British supermarket is helping fuel the obliteration of orangutan habitat. The Government must amend the Company Law Reform Bill to stop UK companies acting so destructively."
Research by Friends of the Earth shows that the forest fires which ravaged the island of Sumatra in August, and continue to burn today, were mostly set by palm oil companies clearing land to set up their plantations. It is estimated that one third of the orangutan population on Borneo was killed by the massive forest fires of 1998.
Dr. Ian Singleton, Scientific Director for the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme, said, "We have already lost huge areas of orangutan habitat and tens of thousands of orangutan to the palm oil industry. Now there are reports of an "oil palm fence" which will stretch 845 kilometers (525 miles) along the border with Malaysia in Borneo, crossing through orangutan habitat. The problem is truly immense." More >
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| Monday, October 3, 2005 | |
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3 Oct 2005 @ 21:35
Serving Earth 9.29.2005
A thousand years ago, Mayan civilization collapsed. Today, a Space Age "situation room" in Panama is helping Central Americans avoid mistakes that doomed the Maya.
September 29, 2005: Central America, that narrow land bridge between North and South America, represents less than 0.5 percent of Earth's land mass. But it is home to 7 or 8 percent of the world's species of plants and animals.
That rain forest home, however, is assaulted by both nature and man: earthquakes, hurricanes, illegal logging and ranching, and deforestation from slash-and-burn agriculture. Now, NASA scientists are helping Central America keep watch on its biological treasures and stop environmental depredations through SERVIR, an acronym standing for the Spanish words meaning Mesoamerican Regional Visualization and Monitoring System.
This link hasphotos and in depth description of the system
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3 Oct 2005 @ 02:28
The satellite image on the left shows the minimum concentration of Arctic sea ice in 1979, while the image on the right shows the concentration of sea ice recorded on Sept. 21. New satellite observations show that sea ice in the Arctic is melting faster while air temperatures in the region are rising sharply, scientists say More >
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| Tuesday, September 27, 2005 | |
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27 Sep 2005 @ 01:22
Demand for Organic Coffee & Tea Increasing
Sacramento Bee - CA, USA
Organic perks up
Capital-based Beantrees is taking its brand of coffee into mainstream markets.
By Jon Ortiz — Sacramento Bee Staff Writer
Published September 21, 2005
It all started 12 years ago in a three-bedroom River Park home, coffee stacked to the garage rafters and a grinding machine working overtime as Barrie Gromala and Joyce Lemley looked for the perfect blend of organic beans.
They opened their first Beantrees Espresso Bar inside Hewlett-Packard in Roseville.
"When we started in 1993, Starbucks wasn't in Sacramento yet," said Gromala, Beantrees' 42-year-old president and co-founder. "I remember thinking, 'I hope I'm not getting in on the tail end of a fad.'"
Now Sacramento-based Beantrees is taking its line of organic beans from the coffee stand to the checkout stand in an exclusive deal with West Sacramento-based Raley's.
The arrangement marks Beantrees' first entry into the retail grocery aisle, right next to coffee giants Starbucks Corp. and Peet's Coffee & Tea Inc. It's also another sign that the small, but growing, organic food and beverage sector has gone mainstream.
>From the beginning, Beantrees shunned the torn-jeans-and-tattoo grunge look prevalent in the Seattle-inspired '90s specialty coffee industry for a clean-cut look that fit corporate surroundings. By 1996, the company was selling its organic coffee at 15 espresso bars from Reno to Santa Rosa to the Silicon Valley - all on word-of-mouth.
"We became the exclusive coffee at Yahoo when it had 200 employees," Gromala said. "We got that account from a (Hewlett-Packard) referral."
Today, Beantrees licensees operate six espresso bars at the Internet service company's Sunnyvale headquarters. Another Beantrees-licensed coffee bar is scheduled to open at Yahoo's Burbank operations in November.
Beantrees itself has moved to a modest South Land Park office and warehouse complex and employs a staff of 60.
Company officials declined to divulge privately owned Beantrees' finances or sales figures.
Location has worked in Beantrees' favor. Sacramento and San Francisco are among the leading U.S. cities in per capita consumption of organic products, according SPINS Inc., a San Francisco-based market researcher.
Beantrees' quick expansion took a toll on its leaders. The company divested its daily espresso bar operations by licensing them in 1998, including the Beantrees café at 925 L St. in Sacramento.
Beantrees began selling coffee through Maryland-based U.S. Foodservice to restaurants and hotels.
"We realized that we didn't want to be in the employee managing business any more," Gromala said. "We wanted to focus on the coffee."
About the same time, U.S. sales of organic foods, including coffee and tea, perked up.
Organic food sales in the United States increased nearly 20 percent each year from 1997 through 2003, more than doubling their share of the total food market to 1.9 percent, according to Chicago-based research firm Mintel International Group Ltd.
Meanwhile, organic coffee and tea sales went from $65 million in 1998 to $124 million in 2003, according to the Long Beach-based Specialty Coffee Association of America.
Still, organic beans make up just 18 million pounds of the 2.45 billion pounds, or 0.7 percent, of U.S. coffee imports each year.
Starbucks Corp. bought 5.7 million pounds of organic beans in fiscal 2004, about 2 percent of the total 299 million pounds it bought that year. The sector has been so small for the Seattle-based company that it didn't even tally its organic coffee purchases until last year.
"We starting tracking organic sales because we're really focusing on the fact that customers want to know how much coffee we buy is organic," said Starbucks spokeswoman Lara Wyss. "(Organic coffee) is a very important area for us."
Some experts question whether organic foods and beverages are a fad.
" 'Organic' is a vague term for people who don't actually farm," said Ben Ball, senior vice president of retail consulting firm Dechert-Hampe & Co. in Northbrook, Ill. "They think they are buying it because they have been told it is healthier, but the truth of the matter is that most consumers are buying it because they know it is trendier."
The upside for Beantrees and other organic sellers is that "perceived need" will keep consumers buying organic products even during slow economic times, Ball said. "The downside is that when the trend is gone, it's gone."
Going organic doesn't guarantee success.
Roseville-based Peabodys Coffee Inc. announced in late 2003 that it would sell its Black Rhino organic coffee in 150 Wal-Mart stores in the West. It followed that with an announcement last year that Black Rhino was bound for 200 grocery stores in the Southeast.
Today, the company's stock - ticker symbol PBDY.PK - is trading for less than a penny per share over the counter.
Beantrees signed chef Jaime Laurita - whose clients include The Rolling Stones, Sheryl Crow and Sarah McLachlan - to promote Beantrees after Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler asked Laurita to get the coffee for the band to drink while on tour. Tyler and Gromala had met while both were vacationing in Hawaii.
Raley's is selling eight varieties of Beantrees coffee at 121 of its Raley's, Bel Air Markets and Nob Hill Foods stores in Northern California and Nevada. The coffee retails for $10.99 per 12-ounce bag. Starbucks organic brand retails for $11.99 per bag.
"Consumers are becoming more health-conscious," said Raley's spokeswoman Jennifer Ortega. "They want to know more about the food they're consuming and how it was produced. This is another option for those customers."
The Raley's deal could be a springboard to similar exclusive retail agreements with other regional grocery chains throughout the country, Gromala said.
"Our strategy is to avoid teaming with national players," he said. "We chose Raley's because it's like us: a smaller company that's willing to take a step up."
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27 Sep 2005 @ 01:08
Food Giants & Leading Organic Companies Publicly Support "Sneak Attack" on Organic Standards in Congress
Web Note: Organic consumers are urged to compare the rather misleading statements in this letter below for why a “sneak attack” on organic standards is Congress is justified (i.e. a last minute rider to the Congressional 2006 Agricultural Appropriations Bill, developed and lobbied for in secret by the companies listed below, with no input or negotiations from the broader organic community), with the “Myths and Realities” position paper posted on our website
The Organic Consumers Association opposes this OTA/Food Giant’s Sneak Attack in the Congress, and recommends, in a letter already signed by 50,000 organic consumers and sent to Congress:
(1) Leave the federal statute, OFPA (Organic Food Production Act) intact on organic standards.
(2) Leave control over policies governing synthetic ingredients, animal feed, and commercial availability of organic ingredients in the hands of the National Organic Standards Board and the organic community, not the USDA.
(3) Fund and fully support appropriations for the NOSB, as well as appropriations to help farmers meet strict requirements for organic production.
__________________________________________________________________________________
Letter sent Sept. 23, 2005 to members of the Organic Trade Association
ORGANIC TRADE ASSOCIATION
The undersigned companies and associations support immediate action by the Congress to restore the USDA's existing organic food rules to the status quo after three key parts of the federal organic program were altered this past June by a federal court ruling. An independent analysis of the economic impact of the ruling projected a significant loss in sales of organic ingredients and consumer products and widespread economic damage.
In order to maintain the use of the USDA's organic seal without causing major disruption to the booming market for organic farm and processed products and without loss of consumer confidence, clarification of the affected parts of the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 (OFPA)is required before the end of the year. The necessary changes will stabilize the marketplace for organic farmers, and businesses that contract with farmers for organic agricultural commodities, and do nothing more than restore the current interpretation of the statute by the USDA and the citizen advisory board that was created by Congress to advise the Secretary on organic matters, the National Organic Standards Board (³NOSB²).
Carefully targeted amendments will also restore the rules that were carefully crafted following 10 years of notice and comment rulemaking based on the board¹s recommendations and make no new policy.
We support the work of the citizen advisory board created by Congress, and the Secretary's adoption of the board's recommendations as well as the board's ongoing role as the key oversight entity for organic standards. We urge Congress to promptly act to remedy the unintended consequences of the court's June 2005 ruling.
Whole Foods Market Organic Valley/CROPP Cooperative Earthbound Farms
Wild Oats Markets Inc.
Stonyfield Organic Dairy Aurora Organic Dairy Dean Foods/Whitewave Foods/Horizon Organic Dairies/Silk Soymilk Kraft/Back to Nature/Boca Foods Small Planet Foods [General Mills] Dole Fresh Fruit Company Grocery Manufacturer’s Association United Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Association Wholesome Sweetners Florida Crystals Nature¹s Path Global Organic Levlad/Nature’s Gate J.P. Smucker Company [Knudson’s/Santa Cruz Organic] Lumia Organic Ciranda `Outraged'
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| Wednesday, September 21, 2005 | |
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21 Sep 2005 @ 20:38
PLUGGING IN TO THE WIND AND SUN
GO OFF THE GRID WITHOUT LOSING POWER
By Rose Miller
Utne.com
July 28, 2005 Issue
[link]
Letting go of electric appliances and other modern conveniences is a form of
environmental asceticism that most people aren't willing to undertake. But
unlike those in the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s, not everyone who
moves off the grid has to do away with all, or even any, modern
accoutrements. Contemporary back-to-the-landers aren't retreating from
modernity; they're bringing it with them, constructing homes and retreats
equipped with solar panels and wind turbines that provide plenty of power
year-round.
Writing in E Magazine, Jim Motavalli highlights the success stories of a
handful of families who live electrified lives off the grid
. After five years that included
hand-cranking a wringer for laundry and cooking by flashlight, the Lillys
installed solar panels and wind turbines to bring electricity to their West
Virginia farm. Jim and Mindy Phypers don't have to do without a
refrigerator, stereo, computer, or even a microwave, let alone lights and
hot water. The couple, who live in sun-drenched Tucson, Arizona, get their
power from twelve solar panels, a wind turbine, and solar heating tubes that
put hot water in the taps.
For those who would follow in the Lillys' and Phyperses' footsteps,
organizations in the US and Canada are springing up to help. Grist's Umbra
Fisk provides a trove of such resources for people looking to install
micro-wind turbines on their property
. She
recommends visiting the National Wind Technology Center's online Clean Power
Estimator , which helps
determine the viability of wind power in a specific area. The Wind Energy
Resource Atlas of the United States
also gives information
that can be helpful in deciding whether to turn to wind as an alternative
power source. The Solar Living Institute , a
nonprofit spin-off of Real Goods , a northern
California green-living company, has the goods on renewable energy and green
building design and demonstrates them in action at the organization's Solar
Living Center in Hopland,
California.
Several companies sell products that help consumers convert their households
to alternative power sources. Among them is John Schaeffer's aforementioned
Real Goods, founded in 1978 to meet the needs of participants in the
original back-to-the-land movement. The company now sells solar panels,
micro-wind turbines, batteries, and environmentally friendly appliances.
According to Motavalli, many back-to-the-landers rely on Lehman's
, a Kidron, Ohio-based company that sells
nonelectric appliances and other necessities for an off-the-grid lifestyle. More >
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21 Sep 2005 @ 18:53
SOS - Safeguard Organic Standards
After 35 years of hard work, the U.S. organic community has built up a multi-billion dollar alternative to industrial agriculture, based upon strict organic standards and organic community control over modification to these standards.
Now, large corporations such as Kraft, Wal-Mart, & Dean Foods--aided and abetted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and members of the Organic Trade Association are moving to lower organic standards by allowing Bush appointees in the USDA National Organic Program to create a broad list of synthetic ingredients that would be allowed in organic production. Even worse these proposed regulatory changes will reduce future public discussion and input and take away the National Organic Standards Board’s (NOSB) traditional lead jurisdiction in setting standards. What this means, in blunt terms. is that USDA bureaucrats and industry lobbyists, not consumers, will now have more control over what can go into organic foods and products. (Send a quick letter to your Senator online here)
During the week of Sept. 20 through Sept. 23, acting in haste and near-total secrecy, the U.S. Senate plans to vote on a rider to the 2006 Agriculture Appropriations Bill that will take away control over organic standards from the National Standards Board and put this control in the hands of federal bureaucrats in the USDA (remember the USDA proposal in 1997-98 that said that genetic engineering, toxic sludge, and food irradiation would be OK on organic farms, or USDA suggestions in 2004 that heretofore banned pesticides, hormones, tainted feeds, and animal drugs would be OK?).
For the past week in Washington, OCA has been urging members of the Senate not to reopen and subvert the federal statute that governs U.S. Organic standards (the Organic Food Production Act—OFPA), but rather to let the organic community and the National Organic Standards Board resolve our differences over issues like synthetics and animal feed internally, and then proceed to a open public comment period. Unfortunately most Senators seem to be listening to industry lobbyists more closely than to us. We need to raise our voices. (Send a quick letter to your Senator online here)
In the past, grassroots mobilization and mass pressure by organic consumers have been able to stop the USDA and Congress from degrading organic standards. This time Washington insiders tell us that the “fix is already in.” So we must take decisive action now. We need you to call your U.S. Senators today. We need you to sign the following petition and send it to everyone you know. We also desperately need funds to head off this attack in the weeks and months to come. Thank you for your support. Together we will take back citizen control over organic standards and preserve organic integrity.
Call the Capital Switchboard here: 877-762-8762, and tell your US Senator to not support any ammendments to the ag appropriations bill that would lower organic standards - or send a quick letter to your Congressperson online here: www.organicconsumers.org/rd-ofpa.htm More >
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| Saturday, September 17, 2005 | |
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17 Sep 2005 @ 00:35
New York Times Covers the Controversy in Organic Community over Factory Dairy Farms
From: New York Times
September 14, 2005
Does Organic Imply Grazing?
By MARIAN BURROS
JOHN MACKEY, chairman of Whole Foods Market, with the buying power of his 173 stores across the country behind him, said in a telephone interview yesterday that he wants the Department of Agriculture to strengthen its standards for organic milk.
"I'm worried that it is getting bogged down in some kind of political process," said Mr. Mackey, who wields great power in the organic food industry.
For at least four years, the National Organic Standards Board, which advises the department's National Organic Program, has sought a regulation to make the standards more rigorous so that milk labeled organic comes from cows that spend a certain amount of time grazing in pastures. Currently dairy farms that keep cows confined most or all of the time can legally claim their milk is organic if they use organic feed and do not use antibiotics or growth hormones.
The current organic standards, which took effect in 2000, require that cows have "access to pasture," but do not require cows to be put in the pasture.
"We think the average customer believes organic dairy cows are grazing full time," Mr. Mackey said, "and we would like organic standards to be more rigorous so the perception meets the reality." Mr. Mackey first discussed his company's position in an interview with Jim Slama in Conscious Choice, a monthly magazine.
The organic standards board has proposed that dairy cows be allowed to graze during the growing season and that a lactating cow should not be confined in a barn.
Farmers who confine cows can give them high-energy feed that helps them produce more milk than cows on pasture, reducing the cost.
In public comments, two companies opposed the proposal: Aurora Dairy and Wild Oats, the 111-store chain of natural food supermarkets.
Aurora Dairy does not allow its lactating cows in pastures. In its comments Wild Oats said the system was working well because it "facilitates the expansion of the organic milk supply."
Ed Loyd, press secretary to the Secretary of Agriculture, said that the labeling of milk as organic has been an issue since 1993. "We don't know whether there is need for additional rule making or for guidance to the industry," he said.
Within the next 12 months Whole Foods will announce what it calls "compassionate" standards for treatment of dairy cows. Mr. Mackey said he was almost certain the company would go beyond the standards the National Organic Standards Board is seeking.
"We will clearly label products that are not animal compassionate so our customers can be fully informed about their practices," he said. Those who meet the company's standards will be so designated.
"We don't want to see organic standards diluted down to where they don't mean what consumers think it means," he said.
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| Thursday, September 8, 2005 | |
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8 Sep 2005 @ 15:55
GE Soya Disaster in Latin America
GM Soya Disaster in Latin America Hunger, Deforestation and Socio- Ecological Devastation
Prof. Miguel A. Altieri, University of California, Berkeley and Prof. Walter A. Pengue, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina
[link] sis.org.uk/SDILA.php
Posted 9/8/05
Hollow triumph of GM crops In 2004, the biotech industry and their allies celebrated the ninth consecutive year of expansion of genetically modified (GM) crops. The estimated global area of approved GM crops was 81 million hectares, a growth of 15 per cent over the previous year. In 22 countries, they claim, GM crops have met the expectations of millions of large and small farmers in both industrialized and developing countries; delivering benefits to consumers and society at large through more affordable food, feed and fiber that require less pesticide and hence more environmentally sustainable [1].
It is difficult to imagine how such expansion in GM crops has met the needs of small farmers or consumers when 60 percent of the global area of GM crops is devoted to Roundup Ready herbicide- tolerant crops. In developing countries, GM crops are mostly grown for export by big farmers, not for local consumption. They are used as animal feed to produce meat consumed mostly by the relatively wealthy.
The new soya republics in Latin America The Latin America countries growing soybean include Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay. The expansion of soybean production is driven by prices, government and agro-industrial support, and demand from importing countries, especially China, which is the world's largest importer of soybean and soybean products. The expansion is accompanied by massive transportation infrastructure projects that destroy natural habitats over wide areas, well beyond the deforestation directly caused by soybean cultivation. In Brazil, soybean profits justified the improvement or construction of eight industrial waterways, three railway lines and an extensive network of roads to bring inputs and take away produce. These have attracted private investment in logging, mining, ranching and other practices that severely impact on biodiversity that have not been included in any impact assessment studies [2]. In Argentina, the agro-industry for transforming soybean into oils and pellets is concentrated in the Rosario region on the Parana river. This area has become the largest soy-processing estate in the world, with all the infrastructure and the environmental impacts that entails. Soybean deforestation The area of land in soybean production in Brazil has grown on average at 3.2 percent or 320 000 hectares per year since 1995, resulting in a total increase of 2.3 million hectares. Soybean today occupies the largest area of any crop at 21 percent of the cultivated land. The area has increased by a factor of 57 since 1961, and the volume of production by a factor of 138. In Paraguay, soybeans occupy more than 25 percent of all agricultural land. In Argentina, in 2000, soybean cultivation area reached 15 million hectares and the total production was 38.3 million tonnes. All this expansion is at the expense of forests and other habitats. In Paraguay, much of the Atlantic forest has been cut [3]. In Argentina, 118 000 hectares of forests have been cleared in Caco State, about 160 000 hectares in Salta, and in Santiago del Estero a record 223 000 hectares. In Brazil, the cerrado and the savannas are falling victim to the plow at a rapid pace.
Expulsion of small farmers and loss of food security Biotech promoters always claim the expansion of soybean cultivation as a measure of the successful adoption of the transgenic technology by farmers. But these data conceal the fact that soybean expansion leads to extreme land and income concentration. In Brazil, soybean cultivation displaces 11 agricultural workers for every one who finds employment in the sector. This is not a new phenomenon. In the 1970s, 2.5 million people were displaced by soybean production in Parana, and 0.3 million in Rio Grande do Sul. Many of these now landless people moved to the Amazon where they cleared pristine forests. In the cerrado region, where transgenic soybean is expanding, there is relatively low displacement because the area is not widely populated [4].
In Argentina, the situation is quite dramatic as 60 000 farms went out of business while the area of Roundup Ready soybean almost tripled. In 1998, there were 422 000 farms in Argentina while in 2002 there were only 318 000, a reduction of a quarter. In one decade, soybean area increased 126 percent at the expense of dairy, maize, wheat and fruit production. In the 2003/2004 growing season, 13.7 million hectares of soybean were planted but there was a reduction of 2.9 million hectares in maize and 2.15 million hectares in sunflowers [5]. For the biotech industry, huge increases in the soybean area cultivated and more than a doubling of yields per unit area are an economic and agronomic success. For the country, that means more imports of basic foods, therefore loss of food sovereignty, and for poor small farmers and consumers, increased food prices and more hunger [6].
The multiple impacts of soybean expansion also reduce the food security potential of target countries. Much of the land previously devoted to grain, dairy products or fruits has been diverted to soybean for exports. As long as these countries continue to embrace neoliberal models of development and respond to demand from the globalized economy, the rapid proliferation of soybean will increase, and so will the associated ecological and social impacts. [The fully referenced version of this article is posted on ISIS members' website. Details here [link] ]
CLICK TO READ More >
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| Wednesday, September 7, 2005 | |
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7 Sep 2005 @ 19:29
Jeremy Rifkin: The Controversy After the Storm
From:
Published on Tuesday, September 6, 2005 by The Chosun (Korea)
Global Warming Hits New Orleans: The Controversy After the Storm
by Jeremy Rifkin
First the deafening roar of Katrina bearing down at 145 miles per hour on the gulf coast of the United States. Now the eerie silence, as victims wash ashore and out to sea. And in the aftermath, it seems that all of official Washington is holding its breath, less the dirty little secret gets out: that Katrina is the entropy bill for increasing CO2 emissions and global warming. The scientists have been warning us for years. They said to keep our eyes on the Caribbean where the dramatic effects of climate change are first likely to show up in the form of more severe and even catastrophic hurricanes. Indeed. Over the course of the past several years, hurricane activity and intensity has picked up in the Caribbean basin. Now the killer storm Katrina has hit with a vengeance, exacting incomprehensible devastation on a wide swath of the southeastern portion of the United States.
The reality is, Katrina will be looked back on as a “tipping point” of the fossil fuel era the moment when the American public began to discard the comfortable myth that the end of the oil era and the cataclysmic effects of global warming lie far in the distant future. The future arrived on the shores of Lake Ponchartrain with a giant wave of water rushing through the streets of New Orleans, wreaking destruction and havoc on the low-lying lands of the Mississippi gulf region on Monday, August 29th and the result is that America and the world have changed forever.
Katrina is not just bad luck, nature’s occasional surprise thrust on an unsuspecting humanity. Make no mistake about it. We created this monster storm. We’ve known about the potentially devastating impact of global warming for nearly a generation. Yet, we turned up the throttle, as if to say, we just don’t give a damn. What did we expect? 52% of all the vehicles owned in America are SUVs, each a death engine, spewing record amounts of CO2 into the earth’s atmosphere.
How do we explain to our children that we Americans represent less than 5% of the population of the world, but devour more than 1/4 of the fossil fuel energy produced each year. How do we say to the grieving relatives of the victims whose lives were lost in the hurricane that we were too selfish to even allow a modest 5 cent additional tax on a gallon of gasoline to encourage energy conservation? And when our neighbors in Europe and around the world ask why the American public was so unwilling to make global warming a priority by signing on to the Kyoto Treaty on climate change, what do we tell them?
In the coming days and weeks, millions of Americans will rush to the assistance of the victims of hurricane Katrina with offerings of food, shelter and financial assistance. Natural calamities bring out the best of the American character. We pride ourselves on being there for our fellow human beings when they cry out for help. Why can’t we muster up the same passionate response when the earth itself is crying out for help? Shame on the United State of America and the peoples of other countries we’re not alone who have put their personal short-term whims and gratifications ahead of the welfare of the planet.
Of course, now even we are paying the price. We’re caught up now between two storm fronts. On the one hand, global oil demand is, for the first time in history, eclipsing global oil supply. The price of a barrel of oil is hovering at $70.00 on world markets. Gasoline and heating oil are rising as fast as the flood waters in the gulf-states, in part because the storm knocked out oil rigs across the Gulf of Mexico and crippled a large portion of our gasoline refining facilities.
We are entering the last few decades of the oil era, with ominous consequences for the future of a global economy run virtually entirely on fossil fuels. While our petro-geologists are not sure when global oil production will peak the point when half the world’s recoverable oil is used up it’s clear to all but the few delusional souls in the oil industry that the beginning of the end is in sight.
On the other hand, our Biosphere is convulsing from the buildup of CO2 gases, and there is nowhere to hide or escape. Our planet is heating up, trapping all of us in an unpredictable new period in history.
There will be thousands of memorial services in coming weeks to pay respects to the dead, the missing and the injured. There will be hand-wringing and recrimination. The public will demand to know why the dikes protecting New Orleans and the gulfport region failed. Why necessary precautions weren’t taken to lessen the impact of Katrina. Why the relief effort was too little, too late. Still, what we are not likely to hear from President Bush and The White House or from business leaders, or for that matter from all of us still driving our SUVs is a collective “we’re sorry!”
President Bush has called on the American people in this hour of our grief to rally to the task, to help restore the dykes and causeways, patch up the streets, and rebuild the homes and communities lost in the devastation. To what end, if we leave the demon of global warming unchecked. The next time it will be a Category 5 storm or something even far worse and unimaginable.
If I could get the ear of President Bush, for just a moment, here’s what I would say. Mr. President, if you had looked deeply into the eye of the storm, what you would have seen was the future demise of the planet we live on. It’s time to tell the American people and the world that the real lesson of Katrina is that we need to mobilize the talent, energy, and resolve of the American people and people everywhere to weaning ourselves off the oil spigot that’s threatening the future of every creature on earth. President Bush, spare us your homilies about American grit and determination to “weather the storm and persevere.” Instead, tell us the truth about why Katrina really happened. Ask all of us to consider a change of heart about our profligate energy-consuming lifestyles. Call on us to conserve our existing fossil fuel reserves and make sacrifices in our future use of energy. Provide us with a game plan to move America beyond fossil fuels to a new sustainable energy future based on renewable sources of energy and hydrogen power. We’re waiting.
Jeremy Rifkin is the author of The Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the World Wide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth (Tarcher/Putnam: September 2002).
Copyright 2005 Chosun Ilbo More >
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| Friday, August 26, 2005 | |
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26 Aug 2005 @ 21:23
India: Everything Gets Worse With Coca-Cola
From: Published on Monday, August 22, 2005 by Inter Press Service
India: Everything Gets Worse With Coca-Cola by D. Rajeev
PLACHIMADA, India - In the end it was the 'generosity' of Coca-Cola in distributing cadmium-laden waste sludge as 'free fertilizer' to the tribal aborigines who live near the beverage giant's bottling plant in this remote Kerala village that proved to be its undoing.
On Friday, the Kerala State Pollution Control Board (KSPCB) ordered the plant shut down to the jubilation of tribal leaders and green activists who had focused more on the 'water mining' activities of the plant rather than its production of toxic cadmium sludge.
''One way or another, this plant should be shut down and the management made to pay compensation for destroying our paddy fields, fooling us with fake fertilizer and drying out our wells,'' Paru Amma, an aboriginal woman who lives in this once lush, water-abundant area, told IPS.
Chairman of the KSPCB, G. Rajmohan, said the closure was ordered because the plant ''does not have adequate waste treatment systems and toxic products from the plant were affecting drinking water in nearby villages'' and that the plant ''has also not provided drinking water in a satisfying manner to local residents''.
Apparently, the generosity of the Coca-Cola plant was limited to distributing sludge and waste water free and did not extend to providing drinking water to people seriously affected by its operations.
In a statement Saturday, Coca-Cola said it was ''reviewing the order passed by the chairman of the Pollution Control Board, Kerala state,'' and that ''going forward, we are in the process of evaluating future steps, including a judicial review''.
The KSPCB closure order is only the latest episode in a see-saw battle between Coca-Cola and the impoverished but plucky local residents ever since the Atlanta-based company began operating its 25 million-dollar bottling plant in this village, located in the state's fertile Palakkad district, in 2001.
The question of toxic materials in the sludge distributed to farmers by the Coca-Cola factory as fertilizer was also highlighted, among others, by Inger Schorling, a delegate from Sweden and a green member of the European Parliament.
A 'Plachimada Declaration' adopted at the end of the conference asserted that people everywhere should ''resist all criminal attempts to market, privatize and corporatize water''.
CLICK TO READ More >
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26 Aug 2005 @ 21:22
And this is why whoever controls water rights controls the people. The petroleum shortage is "real" however there arealternative enrgy resources, there is no alternative to water.
------------------------------------
Increasing Shortages of Water Across the Globe
From: The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com
Water supply bogs down in complexity
By Patricia Brett
SATURDAY, AUGUST 20, 2005
PARIS Sustainable water development is a contradiction in terms, says
Bernard Rousseau, an expert on water issues at France Nature Environment, an
umbrella organization representing nearly 3,000 French environmentalist
associations with 300,000 members.
Rousseau may be pessimistic, but he talks from experience. A member of the
local water board for the French regions of Loire and Brittany, he says that
most consumers neither know nor care how water gets to their tap.
The unsolved paradox of water development is this, Rousseau says: Human
activity depletes and pollutes water reserves; the more activity is
developed, the more it depletes and pollutes; and the more progress is made
in providing clean water at affordable prices, the more people waste it.
An estimated 1.1 billion people worldwide lack clean drinking water and 2.4
billion lack access to basic sanitation. Targets adopted by the United
Nations in September 2000 aim to halve these figures by 2015; but
projections suggest those goals, which would require more than 100,000
people every day to be connected to clean water supplies, will not be met.
Water management requires broad cooperation - between upstream and
downstream users of a river; between regions and states sharing a water
resource; governments, regulators, providers and consumers.
The Jordan River basin, which includes Israel, Jordan, Syria and Palestine,
is an extreme but not rare example of the political complexity of water
management. Even without overt hostilities, the problems are never simple.
In the past decade a consensus has emerged that improving, expanding and
maintaining basic water services, whether in developed or developing
economies, can be done only through partnerships between the public and
private sectors.
CLICK TO READ MORE More >
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26 Aug 2005 @ 21:16
Will the Cost of Organic Food Come Down Over Time?
From: Grist Magazine
Cost in Translation
Seriously, now -- why aren't organics getting affordable?
By Christy Harrison
25 Aug 2005
So you like whole-grain bread, pesticide-free plums, and low-fat meat?
Better ask for a raise.
A recent study by researchers at the University of California-Davis
reported that U.S. shoppers who consistently choose healthy foods spend
nearly 20 percent more on groceries. The study also said the higher price of
these healthier choices can consume 35 to 40 percent of a low-income
family's grocery budget. That's bad news for public health. It's also bad
news for the organic-food market, since organics usually carry the highest
price tag of all the healthy stuff out there.
Do organics make the list?
Eventually, analysts keep telling us, demand for organics will set the
wheels in motion that will drive prices down. But eventually never seems to
come. Even though organics sales are growing by about 20 percent a year --
almost 10 times the rate of increase in total U.S. food sales, according to
the Nutrition Business Journal -- these cleaner, greener products still
carry a hefty premium.
How many shoppers have to jump on the organic bandwagon before we actually
see prices fall? How long will that take? And what's the government's role
in all this? It depends who you ask.
CLICK TO READ More >
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| Thursday, August 18, 2005 | |
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18 Aug 2005 @ 23:45
San Francisco: Sweatfree, Local, and Organic
San Francisco Bay Guardian
Sweating slave labor
As state agents conduct sweeping raids, San Francisco is poised to pass the country's strongest anti-sweatshop law
By Camille T. Taiara
As activists and bureaucrats chiseled out the final details of a historically rigorous, sweat-free purchasing standard for San Francisco, state agents raided dozens of garment manufacturing plants throughout California.
The actions shed light on the stubborn ills of substandard wages and working conditions in the clothing industry. But labor advocates say raids have only a limited impact on the problem and San Francisco's pending law may offer a more systemic remedy.
"These sweeps promote fear and intimidation, create more unemployment, and don't genuinely address the root causes of these labor violations and sweatshop conditions," said Alex Tom, an organizer at the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA).
The Economic and Employment Enforcement Coalition, a new, interagency task force, raided 135 garment factories in the Bay Area and southern California Aug. 3 through 5. Thirty of those shops are in San Francisco and Oakland, and most of the violations investigators found locally consisted of shops operating without a license or violating worker compensation laws, according to details released to the Bay Guardian by the California Department of Industrial Relations.
DIR spokesperson Renee Bacchini couldn't tell us how many of these had been shut down, but the department expects civil penalties for Bay Area shops to total more than $100,000.
In the past, many manufacturers simply filed for bankruptcy to avoid paying any fines, then reopened, said Tom, who works directly with San Francisco's mostly middle-aged, monolingual, female, and Chinese garment workers.
Tom argues that free-trade policies are the real culprits: Local manufacturers can't hope to compete with companies that take advantage of dirt-cheap labor and meager workplace standards abroad.
In the early 1990s, San Francisco's garment industry employed about 20,000 people, he said. Now that number has shrunk to 2,000 a 90 percent decrease.
"Since April we've had about 900 workers come to us who've been laid off as a result of globalization," he told us.
Thanks to the CPA, Global Exchange, the Asian Law Caucus, and dozens of other organizations that joined the Sweatfree Bay Area Coalition, though, San Francisco's pending sweat-free legislation could breathe new life into the dying industry while ensuring that local manufacturers pay a decent wage and follow the rule of law.
The proposed law would establish a Sweat-Free Advisory Group charged with devising a workable plan for granting preference to local clothing manufacturers. The ordinance also requires that the city contract a private, nonprofit agency not funded by any corporations to monitor the contractors and subcontractors selling goods to San Francisco, and post detailed findings on the Internet, including the wages paid to their employees.
Following intense, last-minute negotiations between labor advocates and local officials, the city agreed to include language in the proposed ordinance that will both grant preference to locally produced goods and support freedom of association for workers abroad making it the first of its kind.
"For us to be involved in the sweat-free campaign, it had to include the local preference," said Tom, who was among the strongest advocates for including such language in the ordinance.
At first, the city had left the local preference regulation out of the
legislation. Many clothing suppliers, explained Wade Crowfoot, Mayor Gavin Newsom's liaison to the Board of Supervisors, are large companies. "We didn't want to eviscerate the Disadvantaged Business Enterprise ordinance," which grants preference to smaller, underprivileged firms, he told us.
But the two sides were able to work out a deal that met both their needs.
And practical details were also hammered out to prioritize workers' rights to organize independently, while stopping short of boycotting goods from countries like China and Vietnam, where laborers are only allowed to belong to state-sponsored unions.
"San Francisco will be able to use this legislation as leverage to improve working conditions in those factories" and support workers' struggles rather than penalizing them as a result of their countries' unfair laws, Valerie Orth, Global Exchange's sweat-free campaign organizer, told us.
The Board of Supervisors' Budget and Finance Committee passed the amended proposal Aug. 4. With Newsom and Sup. Tom Ammiano as its principal sponsors, the bill is expected to sail through the full board Aug. 16.
Newsom already included $100,000 in this year's budget to enforce the new
laws. "We intend to continue such funding in subsequent years to ensure effective enforcement of the ordinance," he vowed in a June 27 letter in which he also lent his support to resolutions encouraging the purchase of fair-trade and organic products.
"San Francisco will be setting the highest standard in the country," Orth said. Upward of 70 anti-sweatshop ordinances exist across the nation, but they fail to set such strict standards and generally lack the means of enforcement, she explained.
San Francisco buys $600 million worth of goods every year, which gives it some purchasing muscle in the market.
But sweat-free advocates have set their sights even higher.
"Part of our goal is to create an infrastructure that could be replicated anywhere in the country," Crowfoot told us. Former state senator Tom Hayden, now an adjunct professor at New College of California, has committed to marketing the model nationwide in the hope of creating a broad consortium of municipalities that would act as one, he said.
"Nationally, the sweat-free movement has been looking to San Francisco," Orth said. She's looking forward to the day when "we have 15 or 20 really strong sweat-free ordinances [and can operate] together as a block."
Aug. 28, join the Sweatfree Bay Area Coalition in a victory party featuring an anticapitalist revival sermon by Reverend Billy, all-star Afrobeat by Albino!, trip-hop by Zonk, song by the Labor Chorus, Latin-infused rock by Valerie Orth, slam poetry and dance by Team!, and a sweat-free fashion show. 4-8 p.m., Project Artaud Theater, 450 Florida, SF. $10-$20 donation. (415)
575-5541. More >
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18 Aug 2005 @ 23:44
Alexander Cockburn: A Meat-Oriented History of the World
August 16, 2005
[link]
First of Four Parts: Peter's Dream
A Short Meat-Oriented History of the World from Eden to the Mattole By ALEXANDER COCKBURN Start with God.
'And [Peter] saw heaven opened, and a certain vessel descending unto him, as it had been a great sheet knit at the four corners, and let down to the earth: wherein were all manner of four-footed beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air. And there came a voice to him, Rise, Peter; kill, and eat.' (Acts 10: 11?13.)
The Bible is a meat-eater's manifesto. Before the Fall, Adam and Eve were
vegetarian. They fed on grains, nuts and fruits. Then Eve ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil-or at least that's the way Adam explained it to God. They were cast forth from the Garden, plunging mankind into original sin from which redemption can come only through the grace of Christ, whose flesh is eaten periodically in the form of the Eucharist. Hardly were Adam and Eve out of Eden before God was offering 'respect' to the flesh sacrifice of Abel the keeper of sheep and withholding 'respect' from Cain the tiller of the ground. Next thing we know, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, slew him and we were on our way. [1]
Man's Dominion
Ringing in Man's ears was the Almighty's edict, as reported in Genesis
1:26?28: 'Let us make Man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominio. . .over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. . .Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it.' Thus did the biblical God launch humans on the exploitation of the rest of the natural world, theirs for the using. [2] Dominion over 'Un-Christian' nature was at the heart of it, as C.S. Lewis spelled out frankly enough: 'Atheists naturally regard. . .the taming of an animal by man as a purely arbitrary interference of one species with another. The "real" or "natural" animal is to them the wild one, and the tame animal is an artificial or unnatural thing. But a Christian must not think so. Man was appointed by God to have dominion over the beasts, and. . .the tame animal is therefore, in the deepest sense, the only "natural" animal-the only one we see occupying the place it was made to occupy.' [3]
Such arrogance towards non-human creatures was similarly displayed towards women and human slaves. Not long after His commands in Genesis about animals we find God-in the row immediately following the Fall-telling Eve that 'in sorrow shall thou bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.' So far as human slaves were concerned, once again the slave-owners were able to point to Genesis 9, 25?7 and God's curse on Canaan, and the children of Ham: 'A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.' The early Christians never rejected slavery. [4]
The Butcher Slaves
Throughout the sixteenth century, intelligent people were having doubts about the distinctiveness of humans or their superior station in the Great Chain of Being. Montaigne wrote that there were no important differences between humans and other animals. The latter, he said, displayed powers of logic, discrimination, judgement, cunning and even religiosity. [5] Such sentiments were powerfully abetted by the growing distaste among intellectuals like Erasmus, Sir Thomas More and Montaigne for hunting, a pursuit whose refinements had transfixed the upper classes for five
centuries. 'And thus with their butchering and eating of beasts,' Erasmus wrote in In Praise of Folly, at the start of the sixteenth century, 'they [the genteel hunters] accomplish nothing at all unless it be to degenerate into beasts themselves. . .' Montaigne concluded, 'It is apparent that it is not by a true judgment, but by foolish pride and stubbornness, that we set ourselves before the other animals and sequester ourselves from their condition and society.' [6]
Sir Thomas More's Utopia, published in 1516, brings together some of these themes:
Outside the city are designated places where all gore and offal may be washed away in running water. From these places they transport the carcasses of the animals slaughtered and cleaned by the hands of slaves. They do not allow their citizens to accustom themselves to the butchering of animals, by the practice of which they think that mercy, the finest feeling of our human nature, is gradually killed off.
A few pages further on, More's Utopians 'have imposed the whole activity of hunting, as unworthy of free men, upon their butchers-a craft, as I explained before, they exercise through their slaves.' There was a long-running popular myth that butchers were at various periods excluded from English juries, on the grounds that their trade had coarsened their powers of moral discrimination. [7]
The Breaking of Soft Machines
From these humane sentiments of the sixteenth century we approach the seventeenth century and Descartes, who regarded humans as machinery imbued with the divinely bestowed intellectual essence. Animals were mere machinery. At Port-Royal, the Cartesians cut up living creatures with fervour and, in the words of one of Descartes' biographers, 'kicked about their dogs and dissected their cats without mercy, laughing at any compassion for them and calling their screams the noise of breaking machinery.' The butchering industry has always been stoutly Cartesian in outlook for obvious reasons. 'The breeding sow', an executive from Wall's Meat Co. wrote in National Hog Farmer in the late 1970s, 'should be thought of, and treated as, a valuable piece of machinery whose function is to pump out baby pigs like a sausage machine.' [8] As a Christian you either concluded with Descartes that animals did not suffer, that their cries were of no greater consequence than the snap of a clock spring breaking, or you reckoned God had a deeper plan, hard for humans to comprehend. John Wesley, the Methodist divine, thought that animal suffering offered 'a plausible objection against the justice of God, in suffering numberless creatures that had never sinned to be so severely punished.' Wesley's answer was a sort of Pythagorean metempsychosis, whereby at the last trump they would be resurrected with human intelligence and, thus equipped, enjoy life everlasting. [9] But the core text for Christians remained the edict in Genesis, along with the divine injunction to St Peter to kill and eat with God's blessing. St Francis of Assisi may have had strong rapport with the birds of the air, but in the New World the Franciscans, Jesuits and Dominicans pioneered cattle ranching. [10] In 1638, the Jesuits abandoned a mission east of the Rio Plata in what is now Uruguay, leaving behind five thousand head of cattle. These and other herds multiplied at a staggering rate. By 1700, Felix de Azara reckoned the cattle in what is now Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay at 48 million, most of them feral. [11] Further north, these religious orders founded ranches on Marajo, the island in the mouth of the Amazon, in Sonora, in Texas and in Alta California. By the early nineteenth century, the mission herds in Alta California were estimated at anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 longhorns of Spanish descent, parents of the gigantic herds later driven to the inferno of the Chicago stockyards. [12] Christians have no dietary sanction against eating the flesh of creatures other than themselves. The many days-most notably Fridays in the old Roman Catholic calendar-of non-flesh consumption, were penitential in function.
Lent was similar. Contrary to common belief, Hindus do not have a religious interdict on the eating of meat. As in More's Utopia, the attitude is caste-based, with Brahmins (intellectuals and priests) and Vaisyas (merchants) regarding meat-eating as the province of Kshatriyas (warriors) and Sudras (labourers). Tanning and butchering are done by the Untouchables. Meat-eating is regarded by Brahmins as unclean, and caste mobility in Hindu society is often expressed by giving up meat and becoming vegetarian.
Many modern Christians do not care much for the prescriptions in Genesis and use the same sort of language one Bishop of Durham once did about the
Resurrection: it was all a lot of bother about a heap of old bones. (God responded by striking Durham Cathedral with a lightning bolt, serving the Bishop right.) But the theology still has strength. In an influential essay published in 1967, 'The Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis', Lynn White Jr. discussed the verses from Genesis 1: 26?28 about man's dominion over the earth and concluded that 'we shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.'
An Earthly Paradise
Thus was the gauntlet thrown down. In 1991, I heard it being picked up by us Representative Bill Dannemeyer, talking to a crowd of businessmen in the Eureka Inn, in Eureka, northern California, some two hours north of where I
live. 'We should understand,' Dannemeyer told the crowd, 'that this environmental party has in its objective a mission to change this society, to worship the creation instead of the creator. You have to understand their theology. I can't prove this by empirical analysis, but my gut reaction to their thoughts is simply this: if you go through life and you don't believe in a hereafter and all you see before you today are trees, birds. . .if anybody begins to consume those things, you can get excited about that because it's your whole world. And this is where the militancy comes.'
Five years later, at a gun rally outside Detroit, I heard similar execration heaped on environmentalists for preferring rats to humans, plus a savage attack on Jeremy Bentham, the eighteenth-century English utilitarian who famously declared in his Introduction to Principles of Morals and Legislation, published in 1780, that animals have rights and that 'the question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?' Bentham drew explicit comparisons between the rights of animals and the rights of slaves, equating the abolitionist cause for human slaves with the cause of rights for animals. Alluding to the French Code Noir of 1685, regulating the status of slaves in the West Indies and forbidding their murder by their masters, Bentham expressed the hope that animals would also thus be saved from their torturers and that one day 'the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum' would be equally insufficient reasons for maltreatment. Soon after the Second World War, Bertrand Russell wrote:
If men developed by such slow stages that there were creatures which we should not know whether to classify as human or not, the question arises: at what stage in evolution did men, or their semi-human ancestors, begin to be all equal?. . .An adherent of evolution may maintain that not only the doctrine of the equality of all men, but also that of the rights of man, must be condemned as unbiological, since it makes too emphatic a distinction between men and other animals. [13] In his marvellous book on hunting, A View to a Death in the Morning,
Our culture offers to justify that [too emphatic] distinction by viewing human beings as separate from nature and innately superior to it. At the same time, however, we view the natural order as sacred and establish elaborate machineries to protect it from human intervention. Though different subcultures place different stress on these two views, probably most of us would assent in some degree to both. But it is obvious they do not fit very well together. Our vision of nature as man's holy slave is both incoherent and dishonest, like the patriarchal Victorian vision of Woman as a sort of angelic chattel.
The incoherence and dishonesty inherent in that Victorian ideology were eventually corrected by recognizing that the similarities between master and chat tel had greater moral and political importance than the differences.
Since there proved to be no morally interesting differences between women and men, the only way men could preserve their self-respect and integrity was to extend citizenship to women. The same was true of masters and slaves and of whites and blacks. In each of these cases, a heavily marked status boundary ultimately had to be given up because it was intellectually
indefensible. And if the cognitive boundary between man and beast, between the world of history and the world of nature, is equally indefensible, we cannot defend human dignity without extending some sort of citizenship to the rest of nature-which means ceasing to treat the non-human world as a series of means to human ends.
Tomorrow, Part 2: Porkopolis
This essay appears as part of Dead Meat
Footnotes
[1] God's line is that it's Man's and Woman's fault. He set up a vegetarian
world, and then the founding parents, exercising free will, wrecked
everything, and creatures fell to eating one another. 'Vegetarianism was
also encouraged by Christian teaching, for all theologians agreed that man
had not originally been carnivorous. . .Many biblical commentators
maintained that it was only after the flood that humans became meat-eaters;
in the period of disorientation following the Fall they had remained
herbivorous. Others, noting that Abel was a herdsman, suggested that it was
the Fall which had inaugurated the carnivorous error, and that the liberty
of eating flesh which God gave Noah was merely the renewal of an earlier
permission. Commentators argued over whether meat-eating had been permitted
because man's physical constitution had degenerated and therefore required
new forms of nutriment, or because the cultivation of the soil to which he
was condemned required a more robust food, or because the fruits and herbs
on which he had fed in Eden had lost their former goodness. But everyone
agreed that meat-eating symbolised man's fallen condition. 'God allows us to
take away the lives of our fellow creatures and to eat their flesh,' wrote
Richard Baxter in 1691, 'to show what sin hath brought on the world.' The death of brute animals to supply the wants of sinful man could even be made a paradigm of Christ's atonement.' Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World, New York 1983. [2] Man is 'this thing,' Francis Bacon wrote in The Wisdom of the Ancients, as he proposed his principles of scientific investigation in the early seventeenth century,' in which the whole world centres, with respect to final causes; so that if he were away, all other things would stray and fluctuate, without end or intention, or become perfectly disjointed and out of frame; for all things are made subservient to man, and he receives uses and benefits from them all. . .so that everything in nature seems made not for itself, but for man.' In Bacon's view, the Fall had suspended man's sovereignty over nature; and to restore this prelapsarian dominance was the proper aim of all science, whose true aim, as he put it in the Novum Organum, is 'to extend more widely the limits of the power and greatness of man,' and to endow him with 'infinite commodities.' Tyson or Purdue should have Bacon's portrait on every chicken shed. Always alert to the possible utility of nature to man, Bacon was riding along in his coach in the early English spring of 1626, when the notion of experimenting with frozen chicken crossed his mind. He stopped the coach, descended, bought a fowl and stuffed it with snow thus contracting the chill from which he soon died in Lord Arundel's house a few weeks later.
Bacon discusses vivisection in somewhat muffled terms: 'To prosecute such inquiry concerning perfect animals by cutting out the foetus from the womb would be too inhuman, except when opportunities are afforded by abortions, the chase, and the like. There should therefore be a sort of nightwatch over nature, as showing herself better by night than by day. For these may be regarded as night studies by reason of the smallness of our candle and its continual burning.' Novum Organum, Book ii, 41. But while Bacon was indulging himself in these niceties, his doctor, William Harvey-who also looked after Arundel-was busy vivisecting. Bacon published the Novum Organum in 1620. Harvey published his treatise on the circulation of the blood, De Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Frankfurt in 1621. It began with the words, 'When, by many dissections of living animals, as they came to hand. . .I first gave myself to observing how I might discover. . .' He presumably discussed his work with Bacon, who did not feel affronted enough to change doctors.
On the other hand, see the extraordinary passage on vivisection, amnesia and pain, 'Le Prix du Prográs', in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, Verso, London 1979 (this was presumably Adorno):
Despite these admirable remarks, Adorno and Horkheimer do not seem to have had much empathy with animals, if 'Man and Animal'-which comes a few pages later in the book-is anything to go by. Walter Benjamin's paragraph on 'Gloves' in One-Way Street, Verso, London 1979, expresses a positive revulsion towards animals. Like Adorno and Horkheimer, he was better at describing domination than affinity.
[3] C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, New York 1962. Cited in Matt Cartmill,
A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature through History, New
Haven 1993. Christian and Marxist shook hands over this deal. Cartmill reports that in the 1930s 'some Marxist thinkers . . .urged that it was time to put an end to nature and that animals and plants that serve no human purpose ought to be exterminated.' [4] The historian Geoffrey de Ste. Croix declared that he was not aware of any general Christian condemnation of slavery before the petition of the Mennonites of Germantown in Pennsylvania in 1688, and the Mennonites were founded by a sixteenth-century Anabaptist, whose attitude to property was communist in outlook. See G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World. London 1981. [5] 'Presumption is our natural and original malady. The most vulnerable and frail of all creatures is man, and at the same time the most arrogant. He feels and sees himself lodged here, among the mire and dung of the world, nailed and riveted to the worst, the deadest and most stagnant part of the universe, on the lowest story of the house and the farthest from the vault of heaven, with the animals of the worst condition of the three [i.e. those that walk, fly and swim], and in his imagination he goes planting himself above the circle of the moon, and bringing the sky down beneath his feet. It is by the vanity of this same imagination that he equals himself to God, attributes to himself divine characteristics, picks himself out and separates himself from the horde of other creatures, carves out their shares to his fellows and companions the animals, and distributes among them such portions of faculties and powers as he sees fit. How does he know, by the force of his intelligence, the secret internal stirrings of animals? By what comparison between them and us does he infer the stupidity that he attributes to them?' Amplifying his essays a few years later, Montaigne added after the passage just quoted, the famous sentence 'When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?' From 'Apology for Raymond Sebond,' The Complete Essays of Montaigne, translated by Donald M. Frame, Stanford 1965. [6] By the mid sixteenth century Giovanni Battista Gelli, a Florentine scholar, was writing Circe, a dialogue in which the enchantress of the title tells Ulysses she will restore the animals she transmogrified back into his original crew, so long as he can secure their agreement. The animals remain unpersuaded. You men, the doe replies to Ulysses's invitation to resume the form of a woman, 'make mere slaves and servants out of us. . .Among animals, any animals you want to name, the female partakes equally with the male in his pleasures and diversions.' Only one, an elephant, makes the return journey and shouts triumphantly, 'What a marvelous sensation it is to be a man!' But he was a philosopher. R. Adams, ed., The Circe of Signior Giovanni Battista Gelli, Ithaca 1991. Cited in Matt Cartmill, A View to a Death in the Morning. [7] Sir Thomas More, Utopia, edited by Edward Sturz, Yale 1964. Keith Thomas discusses the legend of jury exclusion of butchers in Man and the Natural World. [8] Quoted in Animal Factories by Jim Mason and Peter Singer, New York 1990. [9] See Cartmill, A View to a Death in the Morning. This concept of eighteenth-century promotion was resumed by a French biologist, Charles Bonnet, who thought that man would eventually move on 'to another dwelling place, more suitable to the superiority of his faculties', and then the beasts would be elevated accordingly: 'In this universal restoration of animals, there may be found a Leibniz or a Newton among the monkeys or the elephants, a Perrault or a Vauban among the beavers.' [10] Christians were deeply involved in the development of the human slave trade between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, since enslavement could be the prelude to conversion, just as the 'beef Christian' Indians of the Californian ranchos run by the Franciscans took on board spiritual grace along with their ribeye. The vaqueros tending these Western herds could maybe trace some of their skills in part back through Andalucian and Marisman herders to the West African Fulani of the pre-Columbian era, some of whom may have been taken as slaves to Spain. See Terry Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers, Albuquerque 1993.
[11] Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of
Europe, 900-1900, Cambridge 1986.
[12] See Terry Jordan, North American Cattle Ranching Frontiers. Jordan
suggests this in the context of his estimate that cowboys of African descent
were extremely uncommon on the western cattle frontiers.
[13] Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, New York 1945. More >
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18 Aug 2005 @ 23:39
Students Purchasing More Green & Organic Products for Back to School Needs
From: Center for a New American Dream - www.newdream.org
Aug 16, 2005
Press Release August 16, 2005
Contact: Sarah Roberts
Sarah@newdream.org
301-891-3683/ cell 202-255-8332
College Students Spend Cash Wisely As They Search for Back-To School Products That Reflect Positive Values Survey shows 91% of college students and 88% parents say they would be likely to purchase environmentally friendly products if they were available at stores they shopped at.
Takoma Park, MD According to a back-to-school survey commissioned by Center for a New American Dream, an environmental nonprofit, nearly all (93%) of college students agree that American consumers can conserve resources, protect workers, and build a better world by shopping carefully for environmental and fair trade products. The survey shows a growing number of college students, eight in ten (89%), are willing to spend extra money for products produced by companies that pay workers good wages and provide desirable working conditions.
Second only to the December holidays when it comes to spending, the back-to-school retail season offers an opportunity for consumers to make a difference by supporting environmentally and socially responsible products with their dollars and collective voices. This year college students plan to spend average of $1,539 on back-to-school shopping, compared to the estimated $574 parents expect to spend. With more campus cash to go around, retailers that sell fair trade and environmental friendly products may see increased sales among a new set of conscious consumers.
"College students are bringing their values into the marketplace. Companies need to wake up and provide more environmental and fair trade products if they want to win lifelong loyalty from young consumers," says Betsy Taylor, president of New American Dream.
According to the survey, a majority of students (88%) want their campus store to offer more environmental and fair trade products. Some campuses are leading the charge. Duke University and Middlebury College offer recycled paper, notebooks, binders, and fair-trade clothing in their campus bookstores. According to Betsy Taylor, "people are starting to realize that simple consumer choices can help resolve complex problems such as global warming, deforestation, and depletion of the Earth's precious natural resources." New American Dream offers tips and product information for students and parents to help them find those necessary school items without straining their wallets or the environment. At www.shopbacktoschool.org, you will find a buying guide directing consumers to environmentally and socially responsible products like clothes, backpacks, electronics, paper, personal care items, and much more.
Top Five Tips for Back-to-School Shopping:
1. Before heading out to shop, dust off leftover notebooks, pens and pencils from last year and re-use, re-use, re-use.
2. Look for products made from recycled materials. If you don't find any, bring some suggestions to the attention of the store manager. There are numerous options for recycled paper, notebooks, scissors, paper clips, and binders for example.
3. While searching for a new laptop or computer and other electronics, look for the "Energy Star" label. This guarantees you use less energy when you "power up." Also keep in mind many manufacturers offer refurbished computers at a fraction of the cost of brand new machines more information visit www.newdream.org/computers.
4. Avoid unnecessary packaging. It¹s wasteful and often ends up in our landfills and streams.
5. When searching for the latest in fashion, check labels for sweatshop free and organic cotton materials.
Visit www.shopbacktoschool.org for more product information and a virtual green dorm room tour for the savvy student.
Please contact Sarah Roberts at 301-891-3683, if you would like to interview with Betsy Taylor of the Center for a New American Dream or college students about their experiences on campus or parents.
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The Center for a New American Dream helps Americans consume responsibly to protect the environment, enhance quality of life, and promote social justice. We work with individuals, institutions, communities, and businesses to conserve natural resources, counter the commercialization of our culture and promote positive changes in the way goods are produced and consumed. www.newdream.org Back-to-School Stats Back-to-School Poll Highlights
The following statistics are results are from one online poll of 553 parents who have children 18 years of age or younger and a second 512 college students ages 18-23. All data has been re-weighted to be representative of the U.S. population (2000 Census). The poll was conducted by Widmeyer Research & Polling for the Center for a New American Dream. The margin of error is +/- 4.2% (95% confidence level).
* 8 in 10 (83%) of students have purchased an environmentally friendly or fair trade products in the past year.
* Nearly all (93%) of students say they American consumers can conserve resources, protect workers, and build a better world by shopping carefully for environmental and fair trade products.
* More than 3 in 5 parents (62%) say they will spend MORE on back-to-school shopping this year compared to last year. Only 23% say they will spend LESS.
* More than a third of (36%) college students will you spend an average of $1,539 on "back to school" shopping this year, including school supplies, clothing, electronics, and other major purchases.
* Nearly all parents (96%) are familiar with environmentally friendly products and 3 in 4 (75%) have purchased them in the last year. Nearly 9 in 10 parents (88%) say they would be likely to purchase environmentally friendly products if they were available at stores they shopped at.
* 3 in 5 parents (60%) are familiar with fair trade products and more than 1 in 3 (38%) have purchased them in the |
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Sounding Circle - Category: Permaculture
