Today in Oak Brook, Illinois the world’s most well-recognized purveyor of unhealthy food will hold its annual shareholders’ meeting. Usually a forum to showcase profits made at the expense of the public’s health, food advocates and health professionals will be giving the burger giant’s dog and pony show pause.

For a second straight year, shareholders will vote on a resolution requiring McDonald’s to publicly assess its impacts on the nation’s health. The resulting report would, no doubt, be damning. After all, no fast food corporation sells more high-fat, -salt, -sugar, and -calorie junk food worldwide. No fast food corporation spends more marketing its unhealthy offerings. And perhaps no food corporation has had a greater impact on how we eat or how food is grown.

As Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser puts it: even if you don’t eat McDonald’s-style fast food “you’re eating food produced by the same system.” In other words, McDonald’s, as the nation’s leading purchaser of staples like beef, pork, and potatoes, isn’t just putting unhealthy food on plastic trays, it’s shaping the unhealthy methods by which its produced. Factory farms, the overuse of pesticides–you name it–McDonald’s is in some way behind it, including the harm to animals, our drinking water, the environment, and our health an externality.

That’s why this first-of-its-kind resolution is so groundbreaking. It would give us a sense of what a Big Mac and fries truly costs. Not only that, it would give shareholders a sense of the financial risk the corporation could ultimately face for continuing to saddle the public with its externalized costs.

As recently documented in AdAge, McDonald’s brand image is out of sync with sales, with McDonald’s consistently ranking near the bottom of its industry in quality perception. Analysts warn if this trend continues the pendulum could well swing for the corporation’s profitability.

Dr. Andrew Bremer, a pediatric endocrinologist and professor of pediatrics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, will speak to these points at the meeting. He is part of a growing network of more than 2500 health professionals  that are partnering with my organization, Corporate Accountability International, to compel industry-leader McDonald’s to change course as the corporation’s leadership changes hands. CEO Jim Skinner will be stepping down this month, with COO Don Thompson stepping in.

Corporate Accountability International and partners like Dr. Bremer see no reason to wait for the results of the resolution-sanctioned report to come in for the new CEO to reduce the corporation’s “health footprint.” For one, there is a growing body of research, including a recent Institute of Medicine study, highlighting the importance of limiting junk food marketing to children and adolescents in reducing disease rates. To this end the network has called for McDonald’s to stop marketing junk food to kids, helping compel the American Academy of Pediatrics to take an even more strident stance–an outright ban on junk food marketing to kids.

And most recently, the network called on hospital administrators to give McDonald’s franchises the boot. Cleveland Clinic led the charge–affirming it would not renew McDonald’s contract. A study in the journal Pediatrics has found that citing fast food in health care settings earns brands like McDonald’s an undeserved association with healthfulness. Needless to say, McDonald’s has long built brand loyalty by nutriwashing its image–a practice that needs to stop.

Grassroots pressure is only building. Since the initial introduction of the resolution at last year’s meeting, McDonald’s has made changes to its Happy Meals and competitors have scaled back their marketing to kids.

As these things go, resolutions are not expected to pass over the opposition of the Board. But bringing it to the floor before shareholders will again put the corporation on notice, compelling CEO Thompson to lend a more sympathetic ear to the concerns of health care providers and Civil Eats readers like you.

Click here to call on hospital administrators to give McDonald’s the boot.
Click here to call on McDonald’s CEO to stop marketing junk food to kids.

Corporate Accountability International (formerly Infact) is a membership organization that has, for the last 35 years, successfully advanced campaigns protecting health, the environment and human rights. Value [the] Meal is Corporate Accountability International’s campaign dedicated to reversing the global epidemic of diet-related disease by challenging the fast food industry to curb a range of abuses.

If you live in the United States, you’re never far from a land-grant university.  There are more than 100 of these institutions, which go by names like Texas A&M, Iowa State University and the University of California.

This system of schools was initiated in 1862 with lofty goals in mind—elevating agriculture to the realm of science, offering the common citizen access to higher education, and pursuing research that helps farmers improve their fields and fatten their hens. The program was a major success, providing invaluable research that was freely shared with farmers, which revolutionized American agriculture.

Unfortunately, today these public institutions are increasingly serving private interests, not the public good. Hundreds of millions of dollars are now flowing from corporate agribusiness into the land-grant university to sponsor buildings, endow professorships and pay for research. One land-grant university, South Dakota State, is headed by a man who sits on Monsanto’s board of directors.  

The influence this money purchases is enormous. Corporate money shifts the public research agenda toward the ambitions of the private sector, whose profit motivations are often at odds with the public good. It strips our public research institutions of the time, resources and independence needed to pursue public-interest research that challenges the status quo of corporate control over our food system or that offers farmers alternative agricultural systems to monocultures and factory farms.

Industry-funded research routinely produces results that are—surprise, surprise—favorable to industry. This “funder effect” produces a well-documented bias on research while weak conflict-of-interest policies throughout academia (including at many scientific journals, which don’t require full disclosure of funding source) mean agribusiness’s pervasive influence over public research is basically unchecked.

It also means that our nation’s regulators and policy makers—always clamoring for science-based rules and regulations—are making decisions about things like the safety of genetically engineered crops based on a body of research and science that is incomplete and, to some degree, biased.

So how do we weed out the agribusiness influence?  A good place to start would be increasing federal support for agriculture research—and directing this money to projects that serve the public interest.  This would go a long ways toward reducing land-grant university’s dependence on corporate funding and allow researchers more independence.

For more information about corporate influence on land-grant universities and recommendations for restoring more independent, objective academic research, read Food & Water Watch’s report Public Research, Private Gain: Corporate Influence Over University Agricultural Research

Graph note: Other government money–from states and non-USDA federal sources like the National Institutes of Health–comprises the remaining research funding. (See Endnote 29).

Last week the White House released its National Bioeconomy Blueprint  (PDF) which “outlines steps that agencies will take to drive the bioeconomy—economic activity powered by research and innovation in the biosciences—and details ongoing efforts across the Federal government to realize this goal.”

Unfortunately, this new bioeconomy is not as green as the Obama administration is making it out to be. The so-called bioeconomy is dependent primarily on the risky, unregulated field of synthetic biology and the use of unsustainably produced biomass to feed synthetic organisms created by these technologies. The National Bioeconomy Blueprint, while offering little in new substantive policy, causes more harm than good by giving the green light to the growth and profit of the synthetic biology industry without making any real effort to protect people and the environment from the novel risks posed by this emerging technology.

Synthetic biology is an extreme form of genetic engineering involving the writing and rewriting of genetic code and biological systems in order to create novel organisms that have never existed before in nature. Novel organisms created through synthetic biology could escape from the lab and become a new class of invasive species or pump out oil into local waterways. Biotech workers at put at risk if organisms are improperly contained and these synthetic bugs get inside their bodies or are carried home with them on their clothes. Check out this issue brief from Friends of the Earth, Synthetic Biology 101, (PDF) for more information on what exactly these technologies are and the risks synthetic biology pose.

According to Andrew Pollack at the New York Times, “much of what is in the 43-page-report…is a list of government programs that are already under way. So it is not clear what concrete changes, if any, will result.” But while no new major policy initiatives were announced, the Blueprint appears to be a nod of approval for moving full speed ahead for an unregulated and rapidly developing synthetic biology industry.

You may recall that last month, 113 organizations from around the world called for the proper oversight and regulation of synthetic biology in the Principles for the Oversight of Synthetic Biology. This global coalition demanded that the Precautionary Principle be applied to the governance of synthetic biology and that a moratorium be placed on the environmental release and commercial use of synthetic organisms until proper national and international laws have been established to ensure synthetic biology does not harm people or the environment.

Unfortunately, the Obama White House is moving in the exact opposite direction with this new initiative. The National Bioeconomy Blueprint calls for expanded development of “essential bioeconomy technologies” such as synthetic biology and identify points to reduce regulatory barriers for the biotechnology industry. One of the White House’s main strategic objectives is to “unlock the promise of synthetic biology” by making strategic investments in synthetic biology that “have the potential to move the bioeconomy forward in all sectors.”

The Blueprint quotes President Obama’s Bioethics Commission, which recommended back in 2010, (PDF) that federal actions be taken “to ensure that America reaps the benefits of synthetic biology while identifying appropriate ethical boundaries and minimizing identified risks” of synthetic biology. Unfortunately those recommendations, which were publically criticized by Friends of the Earth and 57 other organizations from around the world, looked to self-regulation to guide developments in synthetic biology instead of developing actual laws and regulations that are specifically tailored to the novel risks posed by synthetic biology.

The claim that the government will “minimize identified risks” from synthetic biology sounds great but so far they have failed to even look at these risks. According to a report from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, (PDF) of the $430 million spent by the federal government on synthetic biology between 2005 and 2010, zero projects were identified that focused on risk assessments related to the accidental or intentional release of synthetic organisms from the lab. Instead of truly balancing the potential benefits and risks of synthetic biology, the Bioeconomy Blueprint gives the industry the green light to rush ahead while turning a blind eye to the risks.

The bioeconomy also carries serious socio-economic risks. As the ETC Group highlighted in its brilliant report, the New Biomassters: Synthetic B iology and the Next Assault on Biodiversity and Livelihoods, (PDF) the new bioeconomy is not as green as it seems. The bioeconomy is, in fact, “a red-hot resource grab of the lands, livelihoods, knowledge and resources of peoples in the global South, where most of that biomass is located.” As the report points out, 86 percent of global biomass is located in the tropics and subtropics, and a push for a new bioeconomy, enabled by synthetic biology, will only “accelerate the pace of forest destruction and land acquisition in the South in order to feed the economies of the North.” Biomass, or land on which it is grown, is not an unlimited resource, as the Blueprint seems to assume.

And just last week, a new report was released by the Global Forest Coalition titled Bio-economy Versus Biodiversity, (PDF) which argues how the so-called bioeconomy will have “serious negative impacts…on forests, forest-dependent peoples, and biodiversity.” According to Simone Lovera, Executive Director of the Global Forest Coalition, “the bioeconomy is a massive effort to privatize nature for corporate profit…high-risk technologies like synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and genetically engineered trees will only drive the planetary ecosystem further into crisis.” This report concludes by challenging the Obama administration and other global leaders to “abandon the green sheen of biotechnology and market-based conservation schemes, and to affirm the kinds of biocultural approaches demonstrated by Indigenous Peoples and social movements in the Global South that eschew infinite economic growth for sustainable livelihoods, local living economies, and integration with the natural world.”

The Obama administration had a chance to take the driver’s seat and ensure that synthetic biology does not cause more harm than good. Instead, the White House is sitting in the passenger’s seat while the biotechnology industry speeds ahead without proper regulation, safety assessment, or oversight.

In the end the National Bioeconomy Blueprint feels more like an attempt for President Obama to claim he is creating jobs. What we really need is a serious discussion over how we should regulate new technologies and just what kind of future economy we want. If we are to have a truly sustainable economy moving forward, it cannot be based on risky, unregulated (and patented) technologies such as synthetic biology that pose serious harms to the environment and our health. The risks posed by synthetic biology and other biotechnologies must be studied before we rush forward with this new bioeconomy in which industry stands to make large profits while the risks are spread to the public.

Originally published on Friends of the Earth

Edible entrepreneur/video editor Dafna Kory is an ideal candidate for a food-focused Kickstarter campaign. Kory, founder of Inna Jam, an organic artisan preserves company in Berkeley, Calif., supplements her budding food business with commercial film, video, and web editing gigs and is well-acquainted with the crowd-funding platform. So, when it came time to expand her jam company this winter, she decided to give Kickstarter a whirl.

“It’s a very public thing—putting yourself out there like this—and it could have gone either way,” says Kory, who produced her own video for a campaign to renovate a commercial kitchen. The jammer already has some small business loans and didn’t want to take on any more debt. Kory, who just wrapped up her Kickstarter campaign, says it was by no means an easy endeavor. “I used every skill I have to make this campaign a success.”

Kickstarter, based in New York, earned its early reputation as the go-to place for up-and-coming filmmakers, gamers, and designers looking for funds. Increasingly, though, it’s become a hub for those involved in the sustainable, local food scene seeking capital for their creative pursuits as well. In the Kickstarter worldview, food artisans are artists too, whether they’re behind a community olive oil press in Berkeley, a beekeeping business in Brooklyn, or a Lebanese food truck in Asheville, N.C.

Starting an edible enterprise is expensive and risky, particularly in tough economic times. An infusion of cash via Kickstarter can be just the boost a food venture needs to go from fantasy project to viable business—with no loans to repay. A typical food project raises about $5,000. Kory, who began making jam commercially in 2010, sought $25,000 to buy equipment like convection ovens, cooking ranges, stainless steel work tables, and other tools of her trade. Her recent success, gathering nearly $28,000 from 474 backers, landed her on a list of the most funded Kickstarter food projects to date. “I’ve been truly humbled by the generosity,” she says.

Recent record donations for food projects

Kory’s windfall is by no means the biggest. That honor—tallying a whopping $257,307 last December—currently goes to Windowfarms, a Brooklyn-based vertical gardening enterprise, which allows people to grow herbs and produce in small spaces in the privacy of their own homes. Via video, Britta Riley, who runs the hyper-local company, essentially asked investors to pre-buy a product that hadn’t been manufactured yet. The company’s goal—in retrospect, a modest $50,000—followed a successful initial Kickstarter campaign in 2010 that netted $28,000 for the new business (a record for its time too).

In second place for the most money raised to date: A Washington, D.C., public school kitchen($60,000), and in the No. 3 slot, a meat-curing processing facility in Pennsylvania ($48, 000). Last year, 241 successful Kickstarter food projects netted over $2.8 million from more than 30,000 backers. The projects reflect recent food trends—think artisan brewing, mobile cupcakes, urban farms, edible education, vegan pop-ups, and community restaurants—and appeal directly to a generation that has grown up online.

Why do food projects do so well with this new fundraising mechanism? For starters, behind these appeals is a good story, and everyone loves a good story, note the Kickstarter crew. Creators who articulate clearly what they’re working to accomplish in a compelling way do well, says Kickstarter’s Justin Kazmark, as do campaigns that offer creative rewards or a behind-the-scenes view of the creative process.

But that’s not all. “There’s also an increased awareness in the importance of supporting local, independent businesses as a way to preserve the unique character of our communities,” says Elizabeth Ü of Finance for Food, who curates a page of food project favorites on Kickstarter. “These projects allow people to experience a sense of vicarious pride for those who turn their passions into a tangible project,” adds Ü, author of the forthcoming Raising Dough: The Complete Guide to Financing a Socially Responsible Food Business.

For those unclear on the concept: Kickstarter curates its site (projects are selected and must meet specific guidelines). A tiered reward system is set up based on the pledge amount. For instance, Kory offered pledgers who gave $25 or more a jar of her jam while those who gifted $50 or more will receive three jars, and so on. Anyone who donated $2,500 was guaranteed their moniker on a convection oven. (No takers.) In addition, locals were offered incentives such as a behind-the-scenes tour of the kitchen, an invitation to the grand opening, and tickets to Kory’s jam-making classes.

Unlike another internet-based fundraising platform, IndieGoGo, which includes food projects and allows creators to keep all the money they raise, Kickstarter has an all-or-nothing approach: People seeking support must meet their stated financial goal in a specific time frame, often 30 days, or they get none of the money pledged. On the plus side, this adds a sense of urgency to the campaigns—and a good deal of anxiety for those running them. Food projects have a higher success rate (56 percent), compared with all Kickstarter projects combined (47 percent), Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler told the Los Angeles Times.

Project creators must keep in mind that for successful campaigns, Kickstarter keeps a 5 percent cut of pledges, and an additional 3 to 5 percent comes off the top for Amazon Payments, which handles the monetary transactions. Recent changes to reporting requirements mean that these donations are now subject to taxes too, which was something of a grey area (gifts versus revenue?) in the past.

While there are many pluses to food-specific projects, there is one obvious drawback: Food products make great rewards for pledgers, but prospective funders can’t sample the merchandise via cyberspace, in the way they can, say, consume an art project or film trailer online. So there’s also a certain leap of faith required on the part of prospective funders.

Benefits beyond bankrolling a business

Kory believes there are benefits beyond bringing in the big bucks. “It’s been amazing publicity—just getting my product out there to a national audience,” says Kory, whose initial support came from family, friends, other food artisans, and customers. But as word spread, more pledges started coming in from people she didn’t know. “It’s also created this much larger community around what I do,” she adds. “When people get involved with a project in this way, they have a vested interest in seeing you succeed.”

The pair behind the popular sustainable food video series The Perennial Plate, Minneapolis-based chef/filmmaker Daniel Klein and cameragal/co-producer Mirra Fine, used Kickstarter to fund their local series because it was the easiest web-based fundraising platform to use. It was also the best looking, and had garnered a lot of attention. “I think people are more likely to put their money into something that looks legitimate,” says Klein. The first time around, The Perennial Plate raised over $10,000 for its Minnesota-focused weekly web series. In April of last year, for their road trip video tour across the country, they reeled in over $22,000.

It’s not enough, says Klein, to have an awesome project. “The key to a successful campaign is to have built a community that wants to support your work and values it,” he says. “Most people who give aren’t random browsers. They’re more likely to be someone you’ve engaged with online or met in real life.” His other advice: Make your video short, funny, and personable. “People make their videos too long.” He also points to the importance of appealing rewards. “People want something in return, whether it’s a DVD or T-shirt or whatever.”

What else brings in the bucks? It’s key that a project has a specific beginning and end, or is something that’s already in the works, and exudes an authentic approach that is more personable than professional (think cocktail party over job interview). Getting the nod from Kickstarter as a “project we love,” social media buzz, and traditional media coverage can make a difference too. Kory agrees with Klein’s advice and adds one more piece: Show your gratitude. She thanked every donor individually, and included an update of herself jumping for joy after reaching her goal on her Kickstarter page.

“Being public about financial struggles is kind of scary,” she says. “But I got so much positive feedback it was worth those anxious moments when I wasn’t sure I’d make my goal. I wasn’t prepared for how meaningful it would be to build a whole new community. You can’t put a price on that.”

Originally published on Grist.

When I was in the Ukraine in 1992, I heard an interesting story about small and large-scale farming happening side by side in the countryside. Although most rural people worked on the massive state-controlled collective farms, each person was allowed a small garden plot next to his dacha for personal use. Predictably, folks ended up using these plots to produce a lot of fruits and vegetables and even, through barter and the black market, income for their families. Meanwhile, the collective farms did not usually live up to expectations. The way the Ukrainians told it it, they made more income off these sub-acre plots than they did off the huge collective farms.

At first blush, this story is a lesson about capitalism rewarding hard work in the midst of the general failure of Soviet-style communism. Of course there are some other lessons more applicable to our current situation. One is that small-plot agriculture like we often see in urban settings can be incredibly productive. Studies by the Rodale Institute have shown that organic agriculture is at least as productive as conventional chemical-dependent agriculture, and the experiences of intensive urban farmers everywhere continue to demonstrate how much can be done with a little space.

Right now in the U.S., there are many consumers who are willing to pay a premium for beyond-organic, local produce, and there is a growing number of urban farmers who are coming up with inventive ways to harvest produce in tight quarters. Last week I was sitting around a table in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans at the Blair Grocery project as part of the filming for my upcoming documentary “Plant This Movie.” Nat Turner and the Blair Grocery team do a lot of great things including a good bit of education and a whole lot of community building. But the grocery’s business model is particularly compelling.

I observed a group of high school students busily stuffing bags full of sprouts to be sold at a local co-op and to restaurants. Each 4.2 ounce bag sold for $5, and the co-op was turning around and selling them for more than $7. Some of this exchange trickles down to the students themselves in the form of $50 weekly checks for their roughly 10-hour per week commitment. The Blair Grocery farmers also sell at farmers markets and to their neighbors, who usually get a discount from the co-op prices.

New Orleans isn’t exactly crawling with healthy marketplaces, so if this model works there, it can certainly work in more affluent communities in the developed world. Sure, the kids are absorbing many intangible benefits by being part of a farm team and taking responsibility for their product, but I know from talking to them that the weekly stipend is definitely one of their motivations for getting and staying involved. It’s hard to imagine community gardens generating the same kind of excitement in a teenage population who need to make a living.

Even in Cuba, where food security was much more than an academic term, urban farming developed into a vital part of local economies across the island. What began as a dramatic effort to fend off starvation turned into a way for many Cubans to make a living. They formed co-ops where many of them still make three to five times the average Cuban monthly salary. I asked Macon Fry, a legendary urban farmer in New Orleans, his opinion on the profit versus free question. We were in one of his three farm plots at the time, a space owned by Xavier University. As part of his answer to the question, Macon pointed to a run-down plot in the corner of the garden. “People need to have ownership,” he said. He thinks the best answer for most people is tending a backyard garden.

To borrow an idea that I read about years ago, why don’t we have more people working two part-time jobs–20 hours a week inside doing office work or anything else, and the rest of the work week spent outside, growing food? Of course when the need is very great or where the growing is very easy, people are going to grow food regardless of their ability to make money doing so. But I do think that the dacha garden example does make an argument for the profit motive. Community gardens have been around for a long time, and while they do their part for creating community and putting fresh vegetables on the table, I think if we are interested in scaling up urban agriculture in the developed world, we need to support for-profit ventures. Now more than ever we need to think about the way our food is produced and how best to keep our urban farmers in business.

However—and this is no small matter—by conflating fringe climate-deniers with established scientists raising valid concerns about the effects of GMOs, Federoff undermines the scientific integrity that she purports to uphold. The hypocrisy is astonishing.

The reason we cannot get a reality-based conversation started on GMOs is because we have precious little independent science on their effectiveness or safety. We know so little about GMOs’ safety or efficacy because global ag biotech firms like Monsanto, Dow and DuPont actively suppress science under the heading of protecting “confidential business information.” Companies routinely deny scientists’ research requests and suppress publication of research by threatening legal action, a practice one scientist describes as “chilling.”

In February 2009, 26 corn-pest scientists anonymously submitted a statement to U.S. EPA decrying industry’s prohibitive restrictions on independent research, especially as concerns ag biotech. They submitted the following statement anonymously for fear of being blacklisted:

“Technology/stewardship agreements required for the purchase of genetically modified seed explicitly prohibit research. These agreements inhibit public scientists from pursuing their mandated role on behalf of the public good unless the research is approved by industry. As a result of restricted access, no truly independent research can be legally conducted on many critical questions regarding the technology, its performance, its management implications, IRM, and its interactions with insect biology. Consequently, data flowing to an EPA Scientific Advisory Panel from the public sector is unduly limited.”

The same year, the editors of Scientific American warned of the debilitating effects of the ag biotech industry’s attacks on science:

 “Unfortunately, it is impossible to verify that genetically modified crops perform as advertised. That is because agritech companies have given themselves veto power over the work of independent researchers.”

When the world’s top scientists have been allowed to examine freely the available evidence, unfettered by corporate restrictions, the results stand in startling contrast to industry claims. Four years ago, the agricultural equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was completed, the World Bank and UN-led International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD). I participated as a lead author in that rigorous 4-year process, in which over 400 scientist and development experts from more than 80 countries conducted the most comprehensive assessment of international agricultural technology to date. The IAASTD’s findings were clear:

1. Genetically engineered crops have failed to deliver on industry promises of increased yields, nutritional value, salt or drought-tolerance.
2. The unprecedented pace of corporate concentration in the pesticide and seed industry has enabled the ag biotech industry to exert undue influence over public policy and research institutions, funneling public resources towards products that have benefited their manufacturers without generating benefits for the world’s poor.
3. The developing world’s best hopes for feeding itself, especially under conditions of climate change, lie not in GMOs, but rather in approaches such as agroecology—the integration of cutting-edge agroecological sciences with farmer innovation and locally appropriate, productive and profitable, ecological farming practices. The ability of agroecology to double food production within 10 years was recently re-affirmed by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.

So yes, let’s beat back the “anti-science lobby” and restore scientific integrity to public policy and independence and transparency to our research institutions. The future of our planet depends on it.

Originally published on PANNA

To divert attention away from its human right abuses and otherwise abysmal image that was deflating its bottom line, Walmart made a lot of lofty promises over the past couple years, including: run 100 percent on renewable energy, buy more produce from local farmers, and to open 300 stores in food deserts. Because of these public relations campaigns, some have started to look at the retail behemoth as a potential ally and are wondering how to harness Walmart’s power and influence to fix our broken food system. However, looking to Walmart to fix anything will not work, because Walmart is part of the problem, not the solution.

Walmart’s success is not just because of its size but is the result of several very specific factors in its business model. In addition to being fervently anti-union, Walmart’s logistics and distribution model is much different from other companies. Essentially, Walmart’s model boils down to sucking money out of the supply chain.

Walmart bases its logistical operations on shifting costs and responsibilities to suppliers. Walmart is so large that food processors cannot refuse demands that Walmart makes upon them. With Walmart as their biggest customer, suppliers have no choice but to comply. When Walmart makes a decision to change the way it does business, an entire industry will shift to keep up. And despite what Walmart would have the public believe, this decision is made with profits in mind. The company continually puts downward pressure on its suppliers, forcing them to cut costs. The company’s model drives consolidation; takes money away from farmers, workers, and processors; and pushes agriculture to get more industrialized.

Walmart size enables it to exercise an unprecedented amount of power in all sectors of the economy, and food is no exception. When there is one player this large connecting food producers and food consumers, consumers are no longer the food industry’s customers–Walmart is. Walmart is so powerful that we can’t look to the government to keep Monsanto’s genetically engineered sweet corn out of our grocery aisles. We have to instead address what would ultimately be GE sweet corn’s biggest customer: Walmart.

Walmart is all about improving the bottom line, so it must continue to open new stores to increase sales. Since Walmart has already saturated rural and suburban areas, the only option left is to move into cities. However, Walmart has come up against organized resistance from urban communities. The various initiatives it has undertaken to ‘address’ nutrition and food access are nothing more than publicity stunts designed to improve their public image and thus lower resistance to plans for expansions. Plus, the company makes its suppliers pay for any sustainability or packaging changes while Walmart gets to reap the benefits to its public image. The latest goal of opening Supercenters in food deserts is just one more ploy to reduce resistance to its plan to move into urban areas.

As consumers and policy-makers continue to be bombarded with PR messages about Walmart’s efforts to help people live better, it is time to look at the impact that Walmart’s rise has had on our food system and to reconsider whether the Walmart model has any place in trying to fix it.

For more information, read Food & Water Watch’s report released this week: Why Walmart Can’t Fix the Food System.

I manage supply chains for Bon Appétit Management Company, which is another way of saying that my job is to think about chicken and pork. Not just the meat, but the lives of the animals themselves. I suspect there are few other non-meat-eaters whose corporate roles require them to think about farm animals as much as mine does.

But thinking about production systems and negotiating with suppliers can only go so far. Today, we’re saying that we’re fed up. Bon Appétit Management Company today announced that by 2015 all our pork will be sourced from companies that don’t use gestation stalls–the densely packed metal cages that imprison pregnant sows in spaces so tight they can’t even turn around. Imagine hundreds of 200-pound dogs confined that way all day, every day, and it should be easy to understand why this system is so egregious.

We also announced that in addition to our shell eggs, which have come from farms Certified Humane by Humane Farm Animal Care since 2005, all of our eggs will meet that standard or those set by other credible certifiers. That includes eggs that are separated from their shells, known as “liquid eggs,” which are commonly used in very busy restaurant kitchens like ours. (You try cracking eggs for 2,000 people daily!) Liquid eggs, after all, come from laying hens just as shell eggs do, and we believe that the 67-square inches a battery cage affords each hen is simply unacceptable.

We are the first and only food service company to make such a serious commitment. And we’re not just raising the minimum standards of what we’ll accept in the way of pork and eggs, we’re also raising the ceiling. We’re committing that 25 percent or more of all our animal proteins will be the most humanely raised possible—not just cage- and crate-free, but also raised without subtherapeutic antibiotics and hormones, and allowed to engage in their natural behaviors. We won’t rely on producers to reassure us, but on independent, third-party-certified labels.

So why does “going humane” keep me up some nights?

The true answer, perhaps paradoxically, is that there isn’t a ready supply today of gestation crate-free pork or Certified Humane liquid eggs that we can buy. We’re going to have to catalyze sources to live up to our commitment.

And I work for a very impatient boss. Fedele Bauccio, Bon Appétit’s CEO, served on the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production a few years ago and came back from site visits around the country complaining about how factory farming made him sick. I wanted to phase in this policy over five years, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He made it a companywide commitment to start now.

With pork, we really have our work cut out for us. Several big companies have announced plans to phase out gestation-stall confinement systems by 2017, but at least one buys most of their meat from the open market, so their claim of changing what they produce is pretty shallow. Another owns and operates production facilities in states with regulatory mandates that could be reversed in the wake of a recent Supreme Court decision.

A third company sent their CEO and a squad of senior executives to our offices to demonstrate their commitment to humane and environmentally responsible practices. After months of talking, we made little headway on developing a supply chain. As big as our demand is–over 800,000 pounds of bacon alone per year–that company processes so many hogs that they couldn’t separate the products they might raise humanely for us from their massive supply of other pork products. How would we know we’re making good on our commitment if they couldn’t track what they were selling us?

There are some fairly responsible, smaller regional producers whose names you might recognize from high-end supermarket meat cases. Some are certified by credible third-party agencies to distinguish themselves from other producers, but others spin aspirational tales — and their shortages of certain cuts are legendary.

I’m frustrated but not discouraged. If these questions had easy answers, our problems would have been solved already. The failures to develop a national supply chain have given me insight on better questions to ask and partners to identify.

I’ve learned, for instance, that most pigs are raised by quasi-independent smaller producers, not corporate-owned hog farms. These guys have made capital investments in these hideous confinement technologies and it will take serious money to make changes–the kind of capital that isn’t readily available unless their giant corporate pork-contract holders extend them credit to make changes.

I’ve also learned that Bon Appétit needs partners such as supermarkets and upscale fast-food operators, because we primarily use different cuts of pork. We can’t have humane systems for our bacon, pork chops, and sandwich meat without finding partners for the carnitas shoulders and Easter hams. They all come from the same animal.

Much as I hate to admit it, we actually need the big producers in this mix. Many people deeply believe that our food system would be vastly improved if we just went back to our agrarian past of small farmers. Yet that’s not how most people are going to feed themselves. It’s too expensive, at least for the foreseeable future.

Our role, as a company that serves 135 million meals a year, must be to put significant pressure on the big producers who currently feed the 300 million Americans—and others—to improve what they do.

Good animal welfare isn’t just about the animals. It’s about starting to dismantle a system that has enormous costs for our society, including the loss of medically important antibiotics, the pollution of our air and water from animal waste, and horrible working conditions in factory farms.

So we are announcing a commitment—even though the products we need aren’t produced in the quantities we need. Why? We’re convinced of one thing: The best chance for change is to stop waiting for everyone else to make the first move. We’re committed to shifting production practices in the marketplace one way or another.

Photo: Bon Appétit Farm to Fork partner Pure Country Pork raises hogs in hoop barns near Ephrata, WA and has attained Food Alliance certification.

For example, having invented the concept of ‘trait hectares’ to calculate the global uptake of GM that even a child could see doesn’t add up (e.g., if one acre of crop has six stacked GM traits in it, the ISAAA counts it as 6 hectares of GM), this year the ISAAA once again relies on material from the controversial Brookes and Barfoot team behind the pro-GM consultancy PG Economics.

PG Economics, which claims to be ‘objective and focused on using reliable and substantiated facts,’ in fact has significant ties to the biotech industry, calling into question the impartiality of its analysis, which has time and time again been challenged on their manipulation of data.

The illegitimacy of their approach was exposed in 2009 by agronomist Charles Benbrook, whose many roles include executive director of the Board on Agriculture at the US National Research Council and National Academy of Sciences.

Nevertheless, PG Economics enjoys a wide-ranging appeal in pro-GM policy and lobbying circles. As well as being used by the biotech industry to support their marketing strategies, the company supplies consultancy services to the British and the American Soybean Association.

Brookes and Barfoot’s work was even used in 2008 by the European Commission to demonstrate elevation in GM yields without reflecting PG Economic’s own admission: “In other regions, however, profits were only marginal” (ie, the yield was only higher in one province of the three Spanish regions studied, but GM did not actually improve yields anywhere else).

This is significant as it was an early part of the framing of the debate on devolved GM cultivation decisions (or ‘bans,’ at that time referred to as ‘socio-economic considerations’) the EU is still wrestling with as member states look at the evidence of wider negative impacts of GM crops emerging from a host of scientists worldwide.

Some EU members appear to appreciate the relationships–in a 2010 study the GM-sceptic Austrian government explored the socio-economic impacts of GM cultivation and listed Brookes and Barfoot as ‘Industry or somehow affiliated to industry’.

The stakes are high, so information matters. During the global food crises of 2007–08 and 2010–11, agribusiness gained massive profits. Pro-biotech interests—particularly industry giant Monsanto—have since launched a variety of public relations strategies, including advertising campaigns and a series of reports touting the benefits of transgenic agriculture to farmers and the environment.

Our analysis finds that the Monsanto-funded reports use questionable methods and present misleading assessments of the impacts of genetically engineered crops.

From 2009 to 2011, Monsanto sponsored annual reports on the global economic and environmental impacts of GM crop varieties published by PG Economics. While the findings in these reports have been well received by industry and pro-biotech groups, a closer look at the 2011 report titled ‘GM crops: Global Socio-economic and Environmental Impacts, 1996-2009′ reveals faulty analysis that overstates the benefits of genetically engineered crops, while understating their costs.

The use of creative data methods does not change the fact that GM is not needed to feed the world and that more sustainable and equitable alternatives can be just as, if not more, productive. A more reliable assessment of whether transgenic agriculture fits into a more sustainable and equitable future would require a look at the full range of socioeconomic and environmental consequences.

This means using real-world data where available and fully accounting for negative impacts on crop diversity, non-target species, soils, small farms and people’s ability to control their food system. It should also include consideration of how consolidation of market power in the seed, chemical and grain industries affects farmers and consumers around the world.

When this is done, the GM picture is far from rosy, whatever the industry says, or pays others to say, and it’s past time for European policy makers to stop relying on such questionable sources. Rampant weed resistance and growing insect resistance in the U.S. and elsewhere are exposing the serious flaws in the GM experiment.

In the past few weeks alone Monsanto has pulled its GM maize out of France and BASF said it would suspend the development of GM crops in Europe, with a member of the company’s board saying “it does not make business sense” to continue trying to operate in a market that doesn’t want what they have to sell.

The only way the GM industry and their supporters can make GM look good is if they cook the books. The only way they can sell their product is in unlabelled packages in the US and elsewhere so consumers don’t know where it is. This smacks of desperation, not success.

Originally published on EurActiv

Today, some will feel the sting of cupid’s arrow and fill their days with red roses and chocolate (hopefully fair trade) and a romantic dinner at a fancy restaurant. Other people call today Black Tuesday and will boycott all the hype and commercial schmaltz and stay home, maybe alone, eating leftovers. Still others will eschew people and proclaim their love of profit above all else. This is a love story about the latter category. Sure, we may not consider these two dollar-signs-in-their-eyes lovers people, but the Supreme Court does, so they deserve to couple up like the rest of us, right? 

He’s a mad scientist who got rich producing chemical agents for war in his lab and is now trying to pawn off those old toxic chemicals as pesticides and herbicides and squeeze as much money as possible out of raindrops. He calls himself GE Seed King, but we know him as Monsanto.

She ran away from her small hometown in Arkansas to take over every suburb and rural town in America and is now setting her sights on urban centers and every country in the world. To her inner circle, she’s known as Big Box Mama, but to us, she’s Walmart. 

Like other celebrity power couples these two have a gossip page on Facebook tracking their every move and informing anti-fans of their latest exploits. And, like TomKat and Brangelina before them, they even have their own portmanteau: Walsanto.

Food & Water Watch has created this fictional social media romance as part of its wider campaign to pressure Walmart to refuse to sell Monsanto’s GE sweet corn.

The couple met, like so many today, over the internet after they both decided to give Twitter a try. Monsanto took to the web seeking a retail “mate” to sell his latest science experiment, GE sweet corn, and make his next fortune. After being turned down by Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods and General Mills, he set his eyes on industrial food darling, Walmart.

Though the relationship got off to a rocky start because of Monsanto’s seedy past, Walmart eventually warmed up to her suitor after she saw the size of his bank account and his potential to make her even richer. Today, the couple plans to celebrate Valentine’s Day with a lab-made GE dinner prepared by Monsanto and maybe a few corny poems and Valentine’s Day cards.

Curious to see how this sordid affair will play out? You’re in luck: Walsanto Watch is your No. 1 source for the play-by-play for the relationship, publishing paparazzi photos of the two together, analyzing their Twitter discourse and letting us poke fun at their ruthlessness.

It seems as though Walmart and Monsanto are on their way to a horror-storybook ending with Monsanto’s untested, unlabeled and potentially unhealthy GE sweet corn on Walmart’s shelves everywhere, which is really bad news for consumers. Fortunately, they haven’t tied the knot yet and there’s still time to break up this diabolical duo. You can help stop this match made in hell by:

• Signing and sharing the petition
• Liking and sharing the Walsanto Watch page on Facebook
• Calling the Walmart customer service line and asking them to reject GE sweet corn
• Signing up to get involved in your community and learn about upcoming store actions
• Tweet about @geseedking and @bigboxmama using the #walsanto hashtag

No matter how you feel about Valentine’s Day, Food & Water Watch hopes you’ll choose love of workers, farmers, the environment and consumer health over Walsanto’s love of profit and sign the petition and follow the misadventures of this titan corporate twosome.