Center for Food Safety pesticide report disappoints

When we make public policy, we depend on accuracy of information. 

Which raises the issue of repeated error in the Center for Food Safety’s new “Pesticides in Paradise’ paper. 

The mistakes in the report begin in the first paragraph, and just keep rolling along.

It’s been a few days since the report’s May 6, 2015 release, and it has not generated much discussion. 

That may be appropriate.

It would be perfectly possible to write a serious public policy document critical of genetic engineering in Hawai`i agriculture without misstatements and misdirection, but this CFS report doesn’t go there. Instead, the study makes one questionable, out-of-context or misleading statement after another. 

It begs the question, what were they thinking with a document so readily debunkable?

Throughout, the report connects genetic engineering with pesticide use, which can be related but are not the same thing. There are genetically engineered traits that have nothing to do with pesticide resistance (think Rainbow papaya, resistant to the papaya ringspot virus), and some genetic traits are actually designed to make pesticide use unnecessary (think Bt corn, which kills the larvae of the European corn borer so farmers don’t have to spray pesticides to kill it.) 

You wouldn’t know that stuff from most of the Center for Food Safety report. You have to read carefully to find the concession that “Virtually all GE crops grown commercially today have only one or both of two traits: herbicide-resistance and/or insect resistance.” 

And even that is transparently wrong. Modern plant varieties have lots of traits, some introduced through natural selection, some through conventional breeding, and occasionally some through genetic engineering. The insect resistance feature, which actually reduces pesticide use, is severely downplayed. 

“Pesticides in Paradise” opens with the statement that five companies have purchased ag land on four islands: “On O‘ahu, Kaua`i, Maui, and Moloka`i, chemical and biotechnology companies Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont-Pioneer, Dow Chemical, and BASF have purchased prime agricultural land.”

There’s a germ of truth there. Some of the companies own some land, but they lease most of their land. None of them owns land on all four islands. None owns any ag land on Kaua`i. (We called all four of them to ask, since it seemed unlikely a national organization like CFS would make that big an error in their very first sentence.)

Later in the paper, CFS concedes “About 85% of the land occupied by the Big Five pesticide-seed firms is leased.” 

This is not a significant error—more a case of intellectual sloppiness—but it serves as a sample of the fare to follow.

The study leaves readers with the perception that all seed company activity in the Islands involves genetic material testing and pesticide testing, which of course is also far from the truth.

Again in the very first paragraph, the paper suggests the companies are in the Islands “in order to field test crops that have been genetically engineered (GE) to withstand ever greater applications of pesticides.”

That’s certainly some of what they do.

But it’s not what they came to the Islands for initially. 

It’s not all of what they do and not even most of what they do. 

Most acreage farmed by the big companies is used in parent seed production—growing crops that will help produce hybrid seed for farmers. And that use is pure farming, not testing.

“These farms use both conventional as well as biotech plant breeding methods to grow seed crops,” says one of the serious scientific reports on the industry, Loudat and Kasturi’s 2013 “Hawaii’s Seed Crop Industry.” 

The companies were in the islands growing seed crops long before genetic engineering had a significant role in the industry. And a lot of what they were doing back  before genetic engineering, they’re still doing. 

CFS says, “plants genetically engineered in Hawai‘i, by and large, are engineered to resist ever greater application of herbicides.” Really? Once a crop is resistant to a particular herbicide, what would be the purpose of “ever greater application” of that herbicide?

The CFS study suggests the seed industry’s employment is minimal: “Despite claims that the seed industry is a pillar of Hawai‘i’s economy, it only employed 1,397 workers in 2012, representing just 0.23% of total Hawai‘i jobs.”

It is also fair to say that agriculture employment of all kinds is today a much smaller part of the state’s economy than it once was.

Let’s look at that the employment numbers another way. How does the seed industry compare within Hawaiian agricultural employment? 

Loudat and Kasturi say, “At current employment levels, the seed crop industry percentage of all agricultural jobs equals: 20.2% of statewide agriculture jobs; 27.8% of Oahu agricultural jobs; 12.4% of Neighbor island agricultural jobs.”

And, of course, there’s a lot of associated employment by companies that provide goods and services to the seed companies, and that benefit in other ways from the presence of a large agricultural sector. 

Loudat and Kasturi go on to say: “Seed crop industry direct annual contributions to the Hawaii economy from annual expenses equals $239.4 million. This is 33.3% of total direct annual contributions to Hawaii’s economy from all Hawaii agriculture. Seed crop industry labor income equals to $69.2 million.  This is 28.1% of the total labor income of Hawaii’s agricultural sector.”

And why is the seed industry’s contribution to labor income higher than its contribution to statewide ag jobs? Because they pay better than most industries, Loudat and Katsuri say: “Overall average earnings for the seed crop industry are 11.1% greater than the statewide average.”

The Center for Food Safety is fully capable of putting out, and does put out credible data. We cited one of their reports in our previous blog post. But this one is different.

It all raises the questions, what was this document intended to accomplish, and in a year when farming issues are highly political, why did it show up only after the Hawai`i Legislature’s 2015 session? 

When the Center for Food Safety announced the opening of their Honolulu office last year, they promised more.

“Hawaii Center for Food Safety is ready and equipped to add the legal, scientific, and organizational capacity that community groups need to push their efforts forward,” local program director Ashley Lukens was quoted as saying in Pacific Business News.

On its website, CFS offers to make presentations about the report to community groups. It is to be hoped that they make a whole lot of corrections before they do.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2015

In the Islands and across the globe, organic food is burgeoning

Organic is on a roll.

Hawai`i shoppers looking for organic foods are no longer limited to neighborhood health stores and Whole Foods, but can now find big organic sections in many Safeways, Walmarts and other big stories.

(Image: U.S. organic food sales by category. Source: USDA)

In the middle of a global battle over how we grow food, about genetic engineering vs conventional breeding, about whether organic pesticides are more dangerous or safer than ones that don’t carry the organic label…

In the middle of all that, organic products are moving.

A recent story suggested that Whole Foods markets are losing some of their cachet—but not because people aren’t buying organic. It’s because everyone else is selling organic. It’s no longer a niche. 

The Center for Food Safety cheered when Kroger, Safeway and a bunch of other stores opted not to sell genetically engineered salmon, calling it “part of a growing trend of food companies distancing themselves from GMO foods.”

The 2012 Census of Agriculture found organic food sales jumped 83 percent in the 5 years from 2007.

The market research firm Research and Markets reported that “an overwhelming majority of consumers in the US give more preference to health and hygiene than cost, which is expected to further boost organic food consumption over the next five years.”

It said organic is a $45 billion industry in the U.S. alone. The Organic Trade Association puts the 2015 number at $39.1 billion.

That’s on par with the total combined global sales of Monsanto (2013 $14.8B), Syngenta (2014 U.S. $15.2B), Dow Agrosciences (2014 global $7.3B) and DuPont Pioneer (2012 $6.3B). 

All that said, and while organic is a growing market, it’s still a pretty small part of the food system. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said that in 2012 it was just 4 percent of total food sales. And little of it was represented in the processed food category. More than half of all organic sales are fruits, vegetables and dairy.

And while the argument over genetic engineering versus organic threatens to suck all the air out of the room, there’s a suggestion of a new category of food emerging—in between them.

The USDA’s Agriculture Marketing Service (AMS) is developing a new label,  GMO-free. It will represent foods that are not genetically modified, but aren’t organic either, said The Associated Press.

Said U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack: ““Recently, a leading global company asked AMS to help verify that the corn and soybeans it uses in its products are not genetically engineered so that the company could label the products as such. AMS worked with the company to develop testing and verification processes to verify the non-GE claim.”

Presumably that covers the folks who choose traditionally bred crops, but also use conventional agricultural chemicals as opposed to the chemicals approved for organic use. (If you’re surprised that organic farmers are authorized to use pesticides, including synthetic pesticides, see our earlier post on that topic.)

© Jan TenBruggencate 2015

Organic vs conventional farming, not so different

The difference between conventional and organic agriculture increasingly seems more like the difference between Lutherans and Presbyterians than between Christianity and witchcraft.

Latest case in point: Organic farmers are asking federal regulators to approve 200 new chemicals for agricultural use, including some synthetics.

You could be forgiven if you believed organic farming means no synthetic chemicals are used. You’d also be wrong.

Even the EPA is confused on this issue. It asserts, “’Organically grown’ food is food grown and processed using no synthetic fertilizers or pesticides.”

But there is a long list of synthetic compounds, including pesticides, permitted by the federal government for use in organic agriculture. You can find the list on the National List of Allowed and Prohibited Substances under the heading, “Synthetic substances allowed for use in organic crop production.” 

Yep.

Farming, ultimately, is farming. And the line between “organic” and “conventional” is pretty misty.

Even Monsanto, everybody’s favorite whipping boy on chemical agriculture, gets the point: “A lot of ‘organic’ food is grown using conventional farming techniques. And a lot of ‘conventional’ crops benefit from agronomic practices developed by organic farmers.”

There are, for example, organic farmers who plow their fields, and conventional farmers who practice no-till farming. There are organic farmers who spray pesticides, and ones who practice aggressive Integrated Pest Management and avoid pesticides where possible. Same with conventional farming. 

Chlorine, which is not found naturally in its pure state, is permitted under the National Organic Program as an algaecide in post-harvest use. 

That doesn’t, however, mean it still isn’t controversial. “The search for acceptable alternatives should not be abandoned just because chlorine is on the National List,” said the National Organic Coalition in testimony to the National Organic Standards Board last week.

Ethylene gas is permitted in organic farming as a hormone. It’s produced by steam-cracking petroleum products. 

Various soap-based synthetic compounds are permitted for weed control.

Some of the differences are purely based on principle. Acetic acid (the bite in vinegar) is commonly produced either synthetically or by fermentation. (Surprised? Vinegar can be made from apples, but can also be made from natural gas.) If you want to be organic and use it for weed control, you can only use the stuff produced through fermentation.

National Public Radio a while back printed a report, “Organic Pesticides: Not an Oxymoron,”

The Washington Post last week published a piece on the National Organic Standards Board’s review of new chemicals for potential approval in organic farming. 

Which is to say once again, there’s nothing black and white about this stuff. Life is played out in shades of gray.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2015

Pollen makes seeds, but can also make weather

Grains of pollen on flowers or blowing on the Hawaiian tradewinds have many purposes, but perhaps the strangest is in rainmaking.

(Image: Pollen grains. Credit: Eric Grimm, National Climatic Data Center, NOAA.)

Certainly pollen’s primary function is to facilitate the sexual reproduction of plants. It often does that with the help of the winds, or various pollinators like birds and bees. Occasionally, as with the vanilla, pollen must be manually transferred by humans, since the natural pollinator of vanilla orchids is not present in most vanilla-growing areas.

Honeybees use pollen is also a vital food source, for bees are pollen-eaters. The white to yellow to cream-covered grains are collected in sacs on their hind legs and brought back to hives to provide protein and other nutrients that don’t come with the nectar they also collect.

Pollen maddens folks with specific allergies.

But until recently. it has been clear that pollen grains are generally too large to play a role in cloud formation. They drop to the ground—or onto blossoms, too soon. 

New scientific research indicates there’s more to that story.

A paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters notes that pollen grains break up into smaller pieces. Sometimes merely getting wet can do this—causing the grains to explode into smaller piece. And those pieces can be small enough to form the core of water droplets—cloud condensation nuclei.

 It’s a unique situation in which the biological world interfaces with the meteorological world—and some pundits will doubtless see Gaia-inspired implications in this association.

Living plants, the paper’s authors say, may thus influence climate. An American Geophysical Union press release uses the headline. “Pollen and clouds: April flowers bring May showers?”

“When we were looking in the allergy literature we discovered that it’s pretty well known that pollen can break up into these tiny pieces and trigger an allergic response,” said lead author Allison Steiner, an associate professor of atmospheric, oceanic and space sciences at the University of Michigan.

They did some research and found that “when pollen gets wet, it can rupture very easily in seconds or minutes and make lots of smaller particles that can act as cloud condensation nuclei, or collectors for water,” Steiner said.

There’s a YouTube report on the research here. 

Water droplets in the atmosphere form around all kinds of nuclei. They can be dust particles, bits of human-caused pollution, and now,

we find, bits of busted pollen.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2015

Pollen shortage a major threat to honeybees

There have been lots of breathless reports about the decline of honeybees, but no consensus on the cause.

A new study suggests it’s not so much pesticides, although they play a role. And not entirely parasitic pests, another favorite bad guy. 

(Image:  A honeybee settles onto a wildflower. Photo credit: U.S. Department of Energy Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.)

But nutrition. The youngest bees may simply not be getting enough nutritious food to eat, causing impacts for the rest of their lives. Specifically, not enough pollen.

That’s a conclusion of a paper in the journal PLOS ONE, by Hailey Scofield and Heather Mattila, both of the Department of Biological Sciences at Wellesley College.

It's a major discovery, since pollen shortages have not been at the top of anybody's mind with regard to the national loss of bees called colony collapse disorder. It's not even mentioned on the Fish and Wildlife Service web page on the loss of honeybees.

To be clear, parasites, pesticides and diseases are threats—but they’re bigger threats for a weak bee, the authors of the new paper say. 

“A chief concern about the impact of poor nutrition on honey bee colonies is the possibility that it acts synergistically with other environmental stressors to undermine colony function. Notably, undernourished larvae are particularly vulnerable to some of these stressors, including pests, pathogens, and pesticides,” they write.

A hive’s pollen resources can be limited because it’s not flowering season, or because the habitat is poor (just not enough flowering plants around), or because the hive is being so aggressively managed that the bees for one reason or another don’t collect enough pollen—“commercial management practices that put colonies in intense competition for pollen sources that may lack diversity, be poorly nourishing, or flower infrequently.”

Pollen is a bee’s source of protein as well as other nutrients: “The chief source of nutritional stress in colonies is inadequate access to pollen, which provides the essential protein, lipids, vitamins, and minerals that are required for larval development and adult function.”

It is a reason that sugar water, which is sometimes fed to bees in lean times, can be a poor substitute for real food—pollen and nectar.

Pollen shortages can impact a bee for life if they occur during the insect’s larval stage, the paper says.

“Pollen stress during larval development had far-reaching physical and behavioral effects on adult workers. Workers reared in pollen-stressed colonies were lighter and shorter lived than nestmates reared with adequate access to pollen,” the authors write.

The authors don’t say pollen shortages are the only problem for bees, but that the impacts of any other threats are magnified in the presences of nutritional deficiencies.

“We found that pollen stress during larval development had far-reaching negative effects on task performance by adults later in life. Critically, performance deficits extended to foraging and recruitment, which are the most important tasks that honey bees perform as provisioners for their colonies and as pollinators of human-cultivated crops,” they write.

Wild bees as well as managed hives have been severely impacted in the Islands by pests like the varroa mite and the small hive beetle. The health of bees is important, since so many Hawaiian crops are highly dependent on bees for pollination. They include avocado, lychee, longan, rambutan, starfruit, macadamia and guava. 

For more information on Hawaiian bees, check the University of Hawai`i Honeybee Project website. 

© Jan TenBruggencate 2015