Photo by Brian Ulrich/The New York Times

Adam Drewnowski, an obesity researcher at the University of Washington, was stymied by the correlation between a person’s wealth (or, more important, the lack thereof) and the likelihood of becoming overweight. To find some answers, he gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend at a typical American supermarket.

In today’s New York Times Magazine, the inimitable Michael Pollan relates how Drewnowski discovered that you got the most calories for your money among “the towering canyons of processed food and soft drink.”

Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice.

If you’re eating on a budget, Drewnowski concluded, your most-rational economic strategy is to eat nutritionally bankrupt empty calories and pack on the pounds.

Pollan asks: How did we end up in a economic situation where a pair of Twinkies—with no fewer than 39 ingredients, not to mention packaging and marketing costs—is markedly cheaper than a bunch of carrots? “For the answer,” he says, “you need look no farther than the farm bill.”

The farm bill, which is reexamined approximately every five years—it’s come around again in 2007—determines which U.S. crops will be subsidized by the government, and which will not.

Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat—three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades—indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning—U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.

The result, Pollan says, is a “food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). When it comes to supporting fresh produce, however, the farm bill leaves those farmers bereft.

As a result of encouraging overproduction, we also end up flooding overseas markets with a glut of cheap crops that undercut world prices, threatening the livelihoods of millions of small farmers around the world, especially in developing countries. And, according to Pollan, the post-NAFTA flow of the Mexican immigrants that gives Bill O’Reilly so much agita, is “inextricably linked” to the flow of U.S. corn south of the border.

Read the rest of this very important issue here. You can also urge your members of Congress to reform the farm bill via Oxfam America’s online system.

Related articles:
1. Unhappy Meals
2. The Vegetable-Industrial Complex
3. Wake up, America!
4. Michael Pollan vs. Whole Foods
5. The School Lunch Test

Photo by Aantonin Kratochvil/OnEarth

California’s San Pedro Bay hosts a sprawling metropolis of polluting cargo ships, trucks, and locomotives filled with bulk cargo and cheap Asian consumer goods. Massive refineries stretch for nearly a half a mile toward the water.

The twin ports spew more pollution than the top 300 industrial sources and refineries in the Los Angeles Basin combined, most of it from ships and boats—themselves many times more polluting than all the power plants in Southern California put together. They form a “diesel death zone” that sets off allergies and asthma attacks in children, while sending the risk of developing cancer from air pollution skyrocketing. Welcome to the New Economy.

From the latest issue of OnEarth:

The off-shoring of manufacturing has moved some of the smokestacks away, but it has stoked countless new ones in the breakneck industrialization and urbanization of the developing world. And all that stuff made abroad has to be brought back to us, on demand, satisfying our ever-greater desire for speed and low cost. We click off our wishes on Web sites, setting in motion diesel engines by the tens of thousands: trucks, loaders, cranes, and locomotives, armadas of little smokestacks toiling to deliver us the goods. Ninety percent of international trade still moves by ship, as it has since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

What makes diesel exhaust different from ordinary exhaust is the soot particles typical disesel engines emit. Fine particulates that make up 94 percent of diesel emissions can penetrate lung tissue and cause genetic and cellular damage. You also get volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as benzene and formaldehyde, along with smog-causing nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxides. Add to that arsenic, cadmium, dioxin, mercury, and nearly 40 other cancer-causing substances, and you can see why diesel exhaust is responsible for 71 percent of the cancer risk from air pollution in the state of California. (The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach contribute more than 25 percent of the diesel exhaust in the region; emissions have gone up at least 20 percent since 2001.)

The article quotes Noel Park, a long-time San Pedro resident and a community activist who has finally decided to leave town after years of trying to convince officials that public health was a greater concern than “economic growth”:

“I swore to God I was going to live my life out in that house,” he said. “I’ve lived here 38 years.” Most of all, he was saddened by the implications of his own departure: “Anyone who takes the trouble to understand the issues leaves. And who’s left behind? The people who can’t leave. Well, God have mercy on them. If that’s not environmental injustice, I don’t know what is.”

Read the entire article here.

Before you check into your favorite online store and start clicking frenetically on your mouse button like a famished woodpecker, click over to a virtual swap meet such as Freecycle or Craig’s List, instead. Chances are, you’ll find what you need at only a fraction of what you’d have paid for something brand new, without sending your carbon emissions whizzing into the stratosphere. We recently snagged a like-new Ikea craft table (with a solid-wood top and steel legs) for $20 because the previous owner didn’t have room in his new apartment. Because the guy lived only 2 blocks from a PATH station, I made my humans haul it back home via mass tranist and their own God-given pedal power.

Photo from Charity Global

I’m feeling ambivalent about Charity: Water. On the one hand, it’s helping draw attention to the fact that 1 billion people lack access to a safe supply of drinking water. On the other, it’s a $20 disposable bottle of water that, price aside, is going to contribute to just another embattled facet of the environmental-justice equation: landfill problems. (The non-profit is likely hedging its bets on our first-world lust for exclusivity with that price tag. WWOD?¹)

Unlike Ethos Water, however, where only 5 cents out of the $1.80 you pay per bottle actually goes to “helping children get clean water”—and leaving Starbucks coffers more than 20 times its much-hyped financial bestowment—Charity Global says 100 percent of your donation goes to fund clean-water-well projects in Africa. Each $20 donation provides one person with clean and safe drinking water for 15 years, it says.

To the non-profit’s credit, it won’t ship single bottles via its Web site. (You’ll have to purchase crates of 24 bottles for a cool $480.) You can also buy a “virtual bottle,” meaning you pay the 20 smackers but you don’t get to tote around the minimalist-chic bottle and flash your largesse to poor, ignorant plebs. Or you can make a direction donation and not appear tragically and insufferably bourgeois.

As cause-related marketing goes, Charity Global at least appears somewhat sincere. But, as I’ve said so before, if you want to give, simply give. Don’t merely buy something you don’t need under the guise of “doing charity.” It’s disingenuous, at best. And, nine times out of 10, it doesn’t do a dollop of good.

¹What Would Orlando Drink?

Related articles:
1. The Truth About Bottled Water
2. World Water Day
3. Must be Something in the Water

Image by World Ark

During the second half of the '90s, the number of people suffering from “chronic extreme hunger” jumped by 18 million, which means that a total of 842 million people in developing and transition countries are severely undernourished.

A common misconception regarding world hunger is that we don’t have enough food for the teeming masses. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 2,807 food calories per capita were produced worldwide in 2001—far more than what everyone needs to be well-nourished.

In “Poverty: Why the Poor Stay Poor,” published in the July/August 2006 issue of World Ark, Stephen C. Smith, an economics and international affairs professor, says the answer isn’t “to ship more food, except as an emergency response to families and food crises.”

Instead, we must work to help improve agricultural productivity—especially among poor farmers in Africa. And, as a priority, we must work harder for increased income for the poor and for local food entitlements as a safety net among the rural and urban poor. This includes supporting proven programs such as nutritional supplements for mothers and infants, as well as compensation in food or in cash for impoverished parents who must forgo income to send their children to school.

Despite the manifold traps of poverty, whether due to illiteracy, debt bondage, undernutrition, or a lack of skills, experts like Smith believe that ending hunger and poverty within our lifetime is a real possibility, but we lack the political will. “The fact that ending global poverty is possible but not inevitable gives us a moral imperative for action,” he says.

Even if that action is as simple as insisting on a cup of fair-trade coffee. Unfortunately, there is no salvo for human indifference.

You can read the rest of the article here (PDF).

Related articles:
1. Mapping Poverty
2. Still Hungry

Further resources:
1. Global Giving
2. Heifer International
3. Kiva: Loans that change lives
4. Transfair USA

Image from PovertyMap.net. Click to enlarge (PDF).

If you ever wanted to know what the projected world population for 2015 is, or the relationship between poverty and internal conflict, or simply quantify the growing disparity between the incomes of rich and poor countries, you’ll find an abundance of visual data regarding these and other issues relating to poverty around the globe at PovertyMap.net.

Poverty maps are visual tools that illustrate “linkages between poverty and food insecurity, the environment, and development,” and are essential tools for government agencies, non-governmental organizations, or the concerned citizen. You’ll find an example in the World Bank Report, which combined survey and census data to draw up poverty maps to show where the areas of greatest need policymakers should focus scarce resources on were.

What started out as a project funded by the Norwegian government is now a comprehensive database maintained by the United Nations Environment Programme and compiled using sources such as the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Food Policy Research Institute, and the Worldwatch Institute.

Go ahead, click around at your leisure—you just might gain a more-informed perspective of what’s going on in this crazy, mixed-up planet of ours. I know I did, and, for perhaps the first time, can think of nothing else to add.

[via World Ark]

Further resources:
1. “The causes of poverty,” GlobalIssues.org
2. Millenium Development Goals: Poverty
3. UN Division on Social Policy and Development: Poverty Eradication

Photo by Stephen Toner/Getty Images

From the Chicago Tribune: “The demand for cheap Chinese goods is driving destructive logging around the world, threatening livelihoods and dividing fragile nations.”

Night and day, the timber ships reach this Yangtze River port, one of the world’s busiest clearinghouses for logs from every corner of the globe: Southeast Asia, the Amazon, Russia, the Congo.

Soon, this wood will be yours.

It will be your hardwood floor and your coffee table, your bedroom dresser and your plywood—all stamped with the most successful label of our time: Made in China.

In less than a decade, China has transformed the global timber trade, importing more wood each year than any country in history and quadrupling the amount of wood products it ships around the globe.

And no one is consuming more of it than Americans. U.S. shoppers have become the world’s best customers of low-cost Chinese flooring, furniture and plywood, buying 10 times as much as a decade ago.

You can trace just one log’s journey to the port at Zhangjiagang from 3,000 miles of the Pacific across to Papua New Guinea, which “nearly abandoned logging until China came along.” The article tracks the log to the nation’s remote northwest province of Sanduan, where “millions in timber profits and payments have left children without shoes and schools without plumbing.” Then the log’s trail ends at its origin: a specific patch of forest where “the torn landscape of logging has left a tribal leader unsure [of] where to hunt for food and fearful for the future.” (And this is in addition to landslides due to soil erosion, as well as greenhouse gases from deforestation and the loss of our “carbon sinks,” both of which further contribute to global warming.)

Besides the socio-economic reasons for why we should care about where our wood comes from—and how responsibly it was harvested—is the fact that forests are our planet’s richest stores of biodiversity. The article continues:

Such tropical rain forests cover barely 6 percent of the planet but hold 50 percent of all the known organisms on Earth. Half of the world’s tropical forests have been felled already, leaving researchers to speculate how many species are going extinct before they are discovered.

That prospect makes New Guinea even more of a treasure in the lucrative world of biomedical research. Tropical forests hold unique value for researchers who rely on new genetic ingredients for cures and vaccines. By one count, no less than 40 percent of all prescriptions written in the U.S. are for drugs derived from plants, animals and microorganisms.

Loggers in Papua New Guinea are cutting so fast that experts calculate that the rest of its accessible forests will be cut down within 16 years.

“Those are some of the finest remaining forests in the tropical world,” said American biologist Bruce Beehler, who has made more than 40 research trips to New Guinea.

“If you take just 1 hectare [2 1/2 acres] of it, it probably has thousands of species living there—plants, animals and other life-forms—that haven’t been described by science. So we don’t even know what’s in that box that is being meddled with.”

Related articles:
1. Logging Decimates Africa’s Forests
2. Mail Call: Toxic Wood
3. Bring Your Ever-Lovin’ Own
4. It’s Getting Hot in Here: Act Now

Further resources:
1. Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC certification assures you that your product was made with wood from sustainably managed forests)
2. Sustainable Forestry Initiative
3. Co-op America’s Woodwise program

Illiteracy (and the poverty it fuels) is a global pandemic. An estimated 781 million adults globally are illiterate, with approximately 64 percent of that number composed of women, according to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. The National Assessment of Adult Literacy estimates that 30 million adults in the U.S. possess below-basic literacy skills, while 11 million are non-literate in English. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 42 million children are not enrolled in school.

Buy used books, fund global literacy. That’s the premise behind Better World Books, a “radically different kind of bookstore” based in Northern Indiana that contributes a portion of your purchase towards non-profit literacy programs such as Room to Read, Books for Africa, and the National Center for Family Literacy. The company also helps libraries and schools sell used books through “online sidewalk sales” you can locate by zip code so your moola goes back to your community.

To date, Better World has raised more than $1.3 million for over 70 literacy and education non-profits, provided more than 450,000 books to Books for Africa and the National Center for Family Literacy. It also prides itself in diverting over 5 million pounds of books from landfills, along with more than 560,000 pounds of metal shelving from libraries across the U.S. Plus, Better Books works with Carbonfund.org, a non-profit provider of carbon offsets, to buy renewable energy credits (and support reforestation) with every purchase. Both the shipping of books to its customers (free in the U.S.; $2.95 per book internationally), as well as to its literacy partners, are offset in this manner.

The company, which stresses that it’s a for-profit social venture, has a philosophy that is decidedly crunchy, yet savvy:

One book that really got us thinking was The Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken. Paul argues that a true economy mimics ecology and rebuilds rather than destroys. It produces no waste, no toxic byproducts and it is simply more expensive to pollute. In a perfect world, we’d package your books in indestructible hemp pouches and load them into Willie Nelson’s BioDiesel bus, where he’d hand deliver them and sing you a song or two. We aren’t quite there yet, but we’ve got a few things we think you’ll like.

Learn more about the work Better World does and the projects it funds at its Web site, then track the company as it combats worldwide illiteracy, one book at a time, on its blog.

Inquire directly about gift certificates for the book-lover on your holiday-shopping list. Or make a donation in their name directly to one of the many non-profit literacy programs.

Why buy used?
1. You save money.
2. You’re not expending new resources; you’re not contributing anything new to the waste stream.
3. You’re diverting a serviceable asset from the landfill.

Co-op America has a fantastic article on the issues surrounding fair-trade rice. Unsurprisingly (oh cynicism, my old friend), rice farmers face the same problems coffee growers do obtaining a decent price for their goods.

Most of the white and brown rice we eat in the US is grown on US farms. But most of the sweet smelling “aromatic” varieties of long grain rice—which are increasingly popular in the US—come to our tables from Asia: Jasmine and Coral from Thailand, and Basmati from India and Pakistan. If you’ve had a meal including aromatic rices recently, chances are that that rice was grown in rain-fed paddies and that small-scale farmers harvested it by hand. Unfortunately, what smelled so sweet on the stove may not have reflected a sweet deal for farmers. These producers are vulnerable to shifting prices and exploitative middle merchants, so they often earn far below a fair wage on which they could support their families.

For example, Kyra [Busch of Educational Network for Global and Grassroots Exchange (ENGAGE)] describes Thai villages in which all of the local farmers were dependent on rice mills whose owners didn’t always treat farmers with integrity. “At home you would have ten kilograms, but the mill owners would weigh it on their scale and say, ‘It’s only 8.5 kilos.’ The mill might promise in advance to pay farmers six baht per kilo, but the farmers would get their rice to the mill and then the mill owner would reduce that to four baht per kilo, which is less than five cents.” (US supermarkets charge consumers at least 35 times that price for Jasmine rice, starting at five cents per ounce.)

When farmers cannot make enough by growing rice to support their families, many are forced into debt, pushed to sell their land, or compelled to seek jobs in the cities as laborers, factory workers, or sex workers. In Thailand, for example, which provides 75 percent of the rice imported to the US, 68 percent of farmers in the northeast growing region are saddled with debts that are three times their annual income.

Another problem stems from American scientists trying to genetically modify Jasmine rice plants for cultivation in the U.S., which not only would devastate the Thai economy—dependent as it is on global rice exports—but is also incredibly bad form. What is this, genetic plagiarism? The egghead equivalent of kicking sand in a preschooler’s face at the playground and going “nyeah, nyeah, nyeah”? For shame, America. FOR. SHAME.

With the fair-trade system, over 1,000 Indian farmers and 8,000 Thai farmers now receive a living wage, and are able to invest in the infrastructure of their villages (such as building raised roads and bridges that can withstand floods), supplies for local schools, and even a program that protects endangered forests from loggers. Plus, fair trade means the farmers are encouraged to use sustainable production methods—pesticides, which poison water supplies and endanger farmers’ health, are a gigantic no-no, for instance. In fact, half of fair-trade-certified rice is also certified organic.

Farmer Prasong, for example, noticed a difference when he began farming organically.

“It’s allowed him to have a livelihood and restored his health,” says Kyra, who accompanied Prasong on a US speaking tour in February. In the communities that have been impacted by the Fair Trade rice program, “you can see steady progress,” says Kyra. “These communities are beautiful. There are frogs, and flowering trees, fruits and vegetables growing. There is biodiversity instead of decimated fields with just rice. And you see all of the generations together, instead of just the elderly people and children you used to see when the middle-aged people had to leave to work [in cities].”

I wonder if Alter Eco will sell its rice to me wholesale. At the rate I go through rice—we fill reusable bags to the brim at the bulk-foods section of our organic grocery—those undersize boxes are impractical (and, for someone who grew up in a home with a, I kid you not, 3-foot-tall rice bin, almost laughable).

Additional resources:
1. Alter Eco Fair Trade, 415-701-1212
2. Ahaar Organic Foods, 925-365-0585
3. Woodstock Farms, 800-877-8898
4. Co-op America’s Adopt-a-Supermarket campaign

Illo by Starbucks

From The Guardian: “Starbucks, the coffee beans, and the copyright row that cost Ethiopia £47m.”

Starbucks, the giant US coffee chain, has used its muscle to block an attempt by Ethiopia’s farmers to copyright their most famous coffee bean types, denying them potential earnings of up to £47m a year, said Oxfam.

The development agency said the Ethiopian government last year filed copyright applications to trademark its most famous coffee names—Sidamo, Harar and Yirgacheffe. Securing the rights to these names would enable the impoverished African country to control their use in the market and allow farmers to receive a greater share of the retail price.

The move would have increased its annual export earnings from coffee by 25 percent. But Oxfam said Starbucks, which enjoyed a 22 percent rise in annual global turnover to £7.8bn in the year to October, has acted to block Ethiopia’s application to the US Patent and Trademark Office. The USPTO has denied Ethiopia’s applications for Sidamo and Harar, creating serious obstacles for its project.

Oxfam had a one-year cooperation agreement in 2004 with Starbucks which saw both provide support to coffee farmers in Ethiopia as part of wider attempts to reduce poverty in the country. But Oxfam now feels that the Seattle-based company’s attitude is questionable.

Phil Bloomer, Oxfam’s policy director, said: “Starbucks has made some progress towards helping poor farmers in recent years, but their behaviour on this occasion is a huge backwards step, and raises serious questions about the depth of their commitment to the welfare of their suppliers. By acting responsibly, they could set an example for others by supporting Ethiopia’s plan to help the 15 million struggling Ethiopian farmers who depend on coffee for their survival.”

This bit in particular caught my eye:

Starbucks insisted, however, that it was committed to paying premium prices to producers in more than 27 countries and its purchases of Ethiopian coffee had grown by more than 400 percent in the past four years. It said it paid an average of $1.23 (65p) per pound last year, 23 percent above average market prices.

Ah, but how would you know, Starbucks? According to your own Web site, you only have economic-transparency requirements for 59 percent of all coffee purchases. This means, contractually, you have no way of knowing how much of the “premium prices” you pay actually go to the farmers—and not to voracious middlemen—41 percent of the time. (Props, as always, to Green LA Girl for pointing this out.)

Under the fair-trade model, where transparency and direct trade are key, importers are required to pay a minimum of $1.26 per pound of coffee beans (plus a 15-cent-per-pound premium if it is also certified organic). Only 3.7 percent of Starbucks’ total coffee is fair-trade-certified, yet it accounts for 25 percent of the fair-trade coffee imported into the U.S. Obviously we’re talking about a company with the wherewithal to make a significant difference but is, instead, content to pay the minimum social premium for maximum public-relations benefits in a real-time, live version of Risk: Caffeinate & Conquer, while starving African infants are crushed beneath the spiked wheels of the capitalist war machine. In other words, “socially responsible” my flat, yellow fanny.

Tadesse Meskela, head of the Oromia coffee farmers cooperative union in Ethiopia, and who was featured in Black Gold, sums up the coffee crisis small-scale coffee farmers and farm workers at the very bottom of the supply chain are facing.

“Coffee shops can sell Sidamo and Harar coffees for up to £14 a pound because of the beans’ specialty status. But Ethiopian coffee farmers only earn between 30p and 59p for their crop, barely enough to cover the cost of production.

“We sell organic coffee for less than £1 a pound but that pound can make 52 specials in coffee shops selling for £2 each, meaning the retailer is selling it for £104. The people who are producing this in Ethiopia don’t have enough food, clean water or health centres.

“Farmers are losing out while others in the chain are making huge amounts of money. That is hugely unfair.”

Additional resources:
1. Oxfam Press Release