Brighter Green served as a partner of the 2012 Brooklyn Food Conference and hosted a workshop panel.

Mia MacDonald moderated a panel tonight at NYU titled, "Global Equity and Animal Agriculture." She was joined by Professor Lori Gruen, Chetana Mirle, and Professor Peter Li.

Mia MacDonald joined Peter Li, Associate Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Houston, at a screening and discussion of "What's for Dinner?", as part of NYU Earth Week.

Mia MacDonald spoke at the State of the World 2012: Moving Toward Sustainable Prosperity release celebration today, along with other co-authors of the report and Worldwatch researchers. Mia contributed a chapter to this year's report, titled, "Food Security and Equity in a Climate-Constrained World."

Brighter Green is pleased to announce a new associate, Eve Feng. Eve is a media and communications consultant for various international organizations, and shares our interest in climate change, animal welfare, sustainable development, and equity.

Mia MacDonald attended a tree-planting ceremony, organized by Columbia University Professor Gayatri Spivak. More details here.

Today, Mia MacDonald spoke at Stanford University's Environmental Humanities Project for a special lecture titled, "Sustainability, Equity, and Rights: Human-Animal Nature Interactions & Intersections".

Brighter Green was on the host committee of the event, International Women's Day Celebration, organized by Oxfam Action Corps NYC.

Yesterday, Mia MacDonald spoke at the event, Rural Grassroot Girls and Women as Agents of Climate Justice: Living Testimonies of Wangari Maathai's Legacy, honoring the memory of Brighter Green Advisory Board member, Wangari Maathai, in the specific context of rural agriculture and women farmers.

Brighter Green's policy paper, Veg or Non-Veg? India at the Crossroads has been featured in a recent article in the Daily Mail India.

The five Tanzanian girls participating in the East African Girls' Leadership Initiative went back to school recently to start the first term of their new academic year.

The Kenyan girls participating in the East African Girls' Leadership Initiative went back to school this week, the first term of their last year. The Tanzanian girls go back later this month.

Happy New Year from Brighter Green! Please take a look at our most recent newsletter for a summary of what Brighter Green has accomplished this year.

The highly anticipated India policy paper, Veg or Non-Veg? India at the Crossroads is now available for download.

The East African Girls' Leadership Initiative is holding a workshop in Morogoro, Tanzania.

Brighter Green participated in an official side event at the UN climate summit with partners Humane Society International and Compassion in World Farming. Mia MacDonald's presentation from the event on December 2 is posted here.

Should a "work program" on agriculture be launched by the scientific and technical body of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)? Governments' perspectives on agriculture were shared vocally during a morning session at the UN climate change talks in Bonn today (longer texts were submitted earlier this year; civil society organizations also had a chance to weigh in in writing). As with many meetings at the climate talks, this one started late and ran long. And as with many meetings here, too, a distinct difference emerged in the positions of Annex I (read industrialized) and non-Annex I countries (all the others). In the main, the Annex I submissions focused on the potential for mitigation (i.e. reducing greenhouse emissions) in the agricultural sector; some also referenced the "synergies" between mitigation and adaptation (adjustments to the realities of climate change, including erratic rainfall, drought, and warmer temperatures); a few confirmed their concern for ensuring food security as a priority.

Developing countries, speaking in regional blocs and a few individually, stressed the urgent need for adaptation in their agricultural sectors—and financing, technical support, and technology transfer to make this possible. Most also rejected any notion of achieving reductions in their agricultural emissions given domestic food needs and global warming's negative impacts on agricultural productivity and reliability—already broadly evident. Interestingly, when the Annex countries speak of mitigation, their implicit (even if unstated) focus is developing countries. I didn't hear any industrialized country (and among those speaking were the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, and Japan) say or even allude to adopting a program to mitigate their own agricultural emissions, which, in most, are very large, including because they have large livestock populations and consistent, intensive production of meat, dairy products, and eggs.

Other NGOs here read between the lines: the Annex I countries want to "offset" their emissions (agricultural and non-) by supporting GHG mitigation through "carbon sequestration" in soils in the global South. Many Southern governments and NGOs are skeptical about who would benefit and who would pay . . . even more than they have for climate change already. The chairperson will reconvene the "contact group" (sorry, more UN-speak) on Friday morning. He'll summarize and then the statements will begin again. Adaptation? Mitigation? Synergies? Commitments? Action? Inaction? All are still on the table here in Bonn. More views on the potential "work program" on agriculture soon.

The New York Times' ethicist, Ariel Kaminer, has announced the results of her Ethical Meat-Eating Contest. Turns out eating meat is ethical when it's ethical (More about the winner below). Fortunately, Ms. Kaminer addressed some of the criticism she got for the contest: "Some critics insisted that even contemplating a life without meat was an indulgent luxury, a silly game for a wealthy first-worlder. I found this puzzling — as if the poor feast nightly on roast suckling pig and only the 1 percent eat boiled tubers." True, the majority of the world's population is not eating roast suckling pig. What meat-eaters are eating is for the most part malnourished, mistreated, factory-farmed pork, beef, and chicken by the ton. And actually, I think it is true that the "1 percent" can probably freely decide to plant, harvest and boil their organic tubers with much greater ease than the "99 percent." Some folks, like the people who submitted to the ethicist's competition, can decide to eat a pig or to eat potatoes every day for the rest of their life, and others cannot.

The competition winner, for example, decides not to buy beef from an industrial farm, and also has the option of maintaining a small farm with legal rights in place to prevent land-usurpation from governments and corporations, pollution by nearby industry, and pressure from GMO seed companies like Monsanto. Some omnivores do not have that option, which means their choice to eat meat is not quite like the winner's. Many of the contests' submissions recognize the general problem with the way meat is produced. It is the production, not the ethics of meat, that requires mainstream attention and action.

The New York Times launched a contest last month that asked its readers to ethically defend their meat-eating. Six finalists have been chosen by a panel of (all-star and, some have noted, all white male) judges, and the winner was chosen Wednesday. The contest is obviously an interesting challenge, since it is usually vegetarians and vegans who have to defend their eating habits, but as some of the readers of the initial article pointed out in their comments, the question of ethics in meat-eating is a "first-world problem." The ethics of meat-eating is only discussed in a very small circle, while nutrition, status, convenience and other less choice-driven factors are the more pervasive culprits of meat production on a massive scale.

All of the articles (except the two that don't technically defend eating meat as it is traditionally defined) make excellent arguments for the conscientious eating of meat -- and 'in moderation,' when not explicit, is implied. Most of them make arguments along the lines of: eating meat is natural, the cycle of life depends on animal farming, with thoughtfulness and moderation meat-eating is morally correct, etc. And of course, this all may be true, and the farmers, environmentalists, and conscientious humans who have written these winning essays clearly have given extra-ordinary amounts of thought to this question.

An estimated 7 billion people are living on this planet, and that number is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050. In any situation in which sharing is involved, issues of equity and distribution arise. USAID recently released an infographic related to population growth and the need to improve our agricultural practices in order to feed 9 billion mouths by 2050. It is evident that the only way to feed a growing population is to increase our food production, but at what cost?

This blog was originally posted on Brighter Green partner A Well Fed World's blog on April 13, 2012. This is the second of two parts.

What made KFC’s entry into the Kenyan market possible was securing a reliable supply chain. That is, finding a producer of chicken that could ensure consistency to KFC’s specifications, meet demand, and provide refrigeration and traceability from “farm to fork” as Kenchic, the largest poultry integrator in east and central Africa defines it. Kenchic, which runs hatcheries, “farms,” slaughterhouses, and processing plants, as well as its own quick serve restaurant chain in Kenya, “Kenchic Inn,” fit the bill. The company’s tag line is “We are ‘kuku’ about chicken.” Kuku is Swahili for chicken; in English, the spoken word conveys an almost loopy enthusiasm.

This blog was originally posted on Brighter Green partner A Well Fed World's blog on Friday April 13, 2012. This is the first of two parts.

I read about it before I actually saw it: the first East African outpost of an American fast food chain, a KFC in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. Media reports said that a throng of Kenyans had lined up to get in on opening day, filing past the yellow external facade and a huge plastic image of Colonel Sanders’ goateed face, red apron, and Southern U.S. string tie. Many had eaten at KFC or other U.S. fast food outlets while traveling or living outside Kenya, like one of KFC’s first customers in Nairobi, Zahir Lalji. “We’re really happy it’s here,” he told the Associated Press. “We’re hoping McDonald’s will come in too.”

This is the second of two blogs examining just a few of the unspoken cultural costs to India as a result of the transition from small-scale dairy operations to factory-style mega-dairies, like the recently opened Bhagylaxmi Dairy Farm.

For India, the killing of cows is a cultural taboo. Currently cow slaughter is illegal in all but two states, and is regularly met with much controversy. But all cows within industrialized farms will befall the same slaughterhouse fate, and subsequent to intensification of dairy will be a drastic rise in both abattoirs and slaughtered animals. How will traditional Indians react to this undermining of thousands of years of moral and cultural heritage?

Last year, Bhagylaxmi Dairy Farm in the city of Pune opened as India’s first industrialized mega-dairy with a total of 3000 Holstein-Friesian cows. Although India is currently the world’s top producer of cow’s milk, the burgeoning middle class is increasing demand for more westernized diets, including meat, eggs, and dairy. Subsequently, the industrialization of dairy is on the verge of taking over India’s current village coop model.

Bhagylaxmi Dairy promotes their farm as producing a more hygienic cow’s milk and presenting improved welfare conditions for the animals. However, as supporters speak greatly of the benefits, they fail to mention the costs of introducing intensive dairy farms to India, including costs imposed upon India’s cultural values. This is the first of two blogs examining just a few of these unspoken cultural costs.

The Earth Island Journal recently published a resource-filled article on natural law, which is becoming an ever-hotter topic in the environmental advocacy realm. Covering the history and key players in the ongoing campaign for the rights of nature, author and editor of the Earth Island Journal, Jason Mark, begins the article with Tamaqua, Pennsylvania's unprecedented recognition of the rights of "natural communities to flourish." The councilwoman who enacted it, Cathy Miorelli, had no ecological agenda when she ran for city council, but she thought it was self evident that nature should have rights, and collaborators from The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) helped carry her thinking into law.

Last week, I had a chance to see The Island President, a film by Jon Shenk about Mohammed Nasheed, the former President of the Maldives, and his fight for climate justice. Shenk followed Nasheed from his election in 2008, which overthrew 30 years of dictatorship under Maumoon Abdul Gayoon, through the COP15 climate change talks in Copenhagen in 2009. There, he was an impassioned advocate for the future of his country, a low-lying archipelago that is vulnerable to sea level rise.

“What is the point of having a democracy, if you don’t have a country,” Nasheed asked, launching his battle to instill the reality of climate change to his fellow heads of state. Nasheed reminds us that Male, the capital of the Maldives, is no higher than Manhattan. “What happens to the Maldives today is going to happen to everyone else tomorrow."

In her book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo chronicles the lives of the squatters in a slum called Annawadi on the outskirts of Mumbai’s airport. Boo provides an intimate look at a changing India and the divide between the rich and poor. In this case, the divide is physical. Annawadi sits behind a concrete wall plastered with advertisements for a floor tile company with the slogan “Beautiful Forever.” This installment of the Literary Animal: Reading India blog series, will highlight some of Boo’s literary reportage.

Part V: Waste pickers, Women, and Horses

One of the main characters in this book is a young man named Abdul: “What he knew about, mainly was trash. For nearly all the waking hours of nearly all the years he could remember, he’d been buying and selling to recyclers the things that richer people threw away.” Annawadi, Boo writes, was “magnificently positioned for a trafficker in rich people’s garbage.”

Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, presented a report to the UN Human Rights Council on March 6th calling for governments to promote individuals' right to a healthy diet. He argued that in all of its efforts to supply medical remedies to the malnourished (which, importantly, includes the 1.3 billion people who are overweight or obese), industrialized countries have done very little to, "tackle the systemic problems that generate poor nutrition in all its forms." The right to food, De Schutter says, must not only assert access to sufficient calorie intake, but more specifically to nutritious, inexpensive food.

It's in the works at a lab at Eindhoven University in the Netherlands: meat made in a Petri dish. Mark Post is multiplying stem cells extracted from a single cow (still alive), until they make muscle cells, which are then juiced up by a separate growth process of fatty cells.

Dr. Post is hoping to satisfy the world's rapidly growing rate of meat consumption without all the animal slaughter. Though his project is expensive dollar-wise—the burger he plans to produce by October will cost about $300,000—Dr. Post's creation may help to alleviate the extreme costs to the environment and millions of animals slaughtered every year for human consumption (about 30% of the world's viable land is used for raising animals).

So if Dr. Post can make burgers in the confines of a tiny Petri dish without killing an animal, the question will be: will animal rights activists and vegetarians start biting down on a new kind of "meat"? And more importantly, will millions or billions of omnivores do so?

Photo courtesy of Ron Dollete

This installment of the Literary Animal: Reading India blog series is set in Walavati, India in Maharastra State.

Part IV: On Bird Flu and Terror

Amitava Kumar's book, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of his Arms a Tiny Bomb, is about the global repercussions of the war on terror, not about bird flu, but the two subjects intersect briefly in the prologue.

Kumar interviewed the Haspatels, who had been wrongfully detained and subjected to torture. At their home in Walavati, he met Abul Jalal, a poultry farmer, who told him, "What the Americans were doing in Abu Ghraib, they learned from our policemen here." Kumar refers to Jalal as a “harmless fabricator of history,” realizing his fabrication:

“was only trying to link what had happened in Walavati to the wider world. Abu Ghraib was a name that people all over recognized. The torture practiced there had attracted universal condemnation. Could Walavati, too please get its fair share of outrage if not justice?"

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
-James Madison

As of March 2, the U.S.'s first ag-gag law passed in the state of Iowa. Iowa House File 589 is designed to protect industrial animal farms from, "animal facility interference" (i.e. any photo, audio, or video recording of an animal facility without the consent of the owner). To date, seven other states are considering similar legislation.

Factory farm undercover investigations have exposed to the American public the agricultural industry’s standard treatment towards farmed animals, and have repeatedly recorded accounts of what many consider to be animal abuse. Through bringing awareness of these practices, these exposés have essentially empowered American citizens, enabling them to make decisions for themselves and for their families about what they deem is ethically correct.