Brighter Green's Executive Director Mia MacDonald spoke about climate change and animal agriculture, and the ecological impacts of the global spread of factory farm operations, at the Seed Experience in New York City on May 18, 2013. She also screened Green's short documentary, "What's for Dinner?" Find out more about the film, including how to show it, here.

Executive Director Mia MacDonald's blog post on the U.S. National Climate Assessment and U.S. and global systems of food production was featured in the Huffington Post and was re-blogged on the American food system news website Civil Eats.

Brighter Green collaborated with Global Forest Coalition on an event and paper on the risks of industrial livestock production for the environment, communities (including indigenous communities), and animals at the World Social Forum in Tunisia.

Brighter Green guest blogger Wanqing Zhou's exploration of of the growing challenge of food waste in China ("Food Waste and Recycling in China: Too Easy, Too Hard"), including from animal agriculture, has been republished in English and Chinese on China Dialogue, an important, bilingual Web portal for global environmental news with a focus on China.

The winners of the two Katerva awards for innovation in sustainability have been announced. Mia MacDonald of Brighter Green served on the judging panel for the food security theme, and the project finalist she ranked highest, Backpack Farm, piloted in East Africa, came first in its category.

Brighter Green and Tribal Link hosted a successful fundraiser for the East African Girls' Leadership Initiative in December 2012. Over $3,000 were raised to help support two girls' education, living costs, rights training, mentoring, and leadership skill workshops for one year. Singer-songwriter Joy Askew performed at the event and Grace Koutimet, from SIMOO spoke about the role of Maasai women in the community and how educating Maasai women greatly assists the communities' progress.

Brighter Green's Mia MacDonald's blog post on COP 18 and the conference's failure to address the negative effects of industrial food systems, particularly industrial agriculture, on climate change appeared in the Huffington Post on December 6, 2012.

Brighter Green's Mia MacDonald participated in and moderated a side event to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP18) in Doha, Qatar in December 2012. The side event entitled "Climate Change & Ensuring Sustainable, Humane, Equitable Food Systems: Views from the North and South" focused on climate change and livestock farming. Xie Zheng, featured in Brighter Green's short documentary "What's for Dinner?" also spoke at the event. For more information on Brighter Green's research on climate change and the globalization of farming click here.

Executive Director Mia MacDonald attended the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 18) from November 26 to December 2, 2012. Mia shared Brighter Green's research on climate change and the globalization of intensive animal agriculture.

Brighter Green has just become a member of Climate Action Network-U.S. (USCAN), in the lead up to the COP18 climate summit.

What's for Dinner was mentioned in Veg News magazine's Media Lounge section in the November+December 2012 issue.

For Food Day 2012 Brighter Green hosted an online event for Food Day: a nationwide celebration and a movement for healthy, affordable and sustainable food. We screened three movies related to global industrial food production and held a Facebook discussion on our Facebook page.

Note: this blog was published originally on FoodDay.org for World Food Day. Food Day is October 24, 2012.

It was an astounding sight: a huge image of a beaming Colonel Sanders. The jacaranda tree in front of the shopping plaza made clear that I was in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city, and not a garden variety U.S. strip mall. This was the first KFC in East Africa and, the newspapers said, lines stretched around the corner on opening day.

In a globalizing, urbanizing, and increasingly interconnected world, the reach and appeal of U.S. fast food seems almost boundless. This reality makes for some odd juxtapositions: a McDonald’s outside the main Olympic stadium in Beijing. It’s the only food outlet in sight, and one of more than 1,500 McDonald’s in China; a new one’s opening each day.

It’s not just American fast food that’s going global; many aspects of the U.S. food system itself are. That means a priority on mass production of animals for meat, dairy, and eggs, cereals, and crops like corn and soybeans that play a huge role in the feeding farmed animals. Perhaps astonishingly, the combined “harvested acres” of vegetables and pulses (beans and lentils) in the U.S. are just 2 percent of the total.

But this system doesn’t fit the bill for a world where climate change, resource scarcity, hunger, and food insecurity are all-too-real, and concern for food justice, animal welfare, and real equity and sustainability are growing. It’s something that Food Day, October 24th, offers a terrific opportunity to explore.

The latest advancement in animal agriculture: offering cows the ability to send text messages to farmers when they are, uh, feeling amorous.
A newly developed sensor-activated device, being used by some Swiss dairy producers, is implanted into the uterus of dairy cows. As the cow goes into heat, the device sends a text message to the farmer, alerting that it’s time for artificial insemination. New York Times Swiss Cows Send Texts to Announce They're in Heat

But why the need for such intrusive technology? The stress on cows resulting from their forced-overproduction of milk, a characteristic of today’s dairy industry, has upset cow’s metabolism, causing the animals to show fewer signs of ovulation. This is leading the traditional ”visual inspection” method to become obsolete.

The use of this device is disconcerting on many fronts. It is indicative of the stress these animals’ bodies are forced to endure. Perhaps their lack of reproductive signals is a biological protection mechanism; nature has responded and their bodies are saying, “No more!” But rather than reducing the stress placed on the animals, the industry ignores nature and simply creates ways to work around it.

Another reason the texting device is so disconcerting is its symbolism: of an industry that commodifies fertility, disparages nature, and objectifies femininity.

Photo courtesy of The Digital Story

Here's what's been happening in Kenya and Tanzania with the East African Girls' Initiative over the last few months. Daniel Salau, the program coordinator, and Julie Ojiambo, a Brighter Green intern who traveled to Kenya in August, helped update Brighter Green on the girls' progress.

June

At the end of June, the Kenyan girls finished their second academic term and the Tanzanian girls finished their first academic term of the school year.  Throughout June, the girls progressed well in their studies without any interruptions.

The Kenyan girls happily reported no health problems throughout June.  During the short midterm break, four of the girls received productive mentoring and counseling from Daniel Salau, the program coordinator.  The girls developed a good attitude towards their future. They were willing and ready to study, despite the challenges, for their university examinations. Elizabeth has aspirations to be a doctor and help her community. She says, "After my degree in medicine I would like to work only for three years in my community and then go back to school and do my second degree not in medicine but in social work which will enable me to mingle with my Maasai community as I [have a] passion to uplift my community, especially the Massai girls and women."

Dairy and leather go hand-in-hand. In addition to consumer demand for dairy products, leather demand provides an often overlooked financial incentive to breed ever larger herds. Indeed, without the support of the leather industry, dairy industry profits would suffer a decline.

This is especially significant in India and China, currently among the largest global suppliers of leather. The correlation between dairy and leather is expected to grow as dairy agribusiness is introducing industrialized-scale dairy factory farms across the regions.

The Amazon rainforest spans nine different countries across South America, and plays an essential role in the biosphere. It captures global-warming-inducing carbon dioxide, and also produces oxygen necessary for life.

Although deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has decreased in recent years, other countries have picked up the pace.

Bolivia is currently the greatest deforester of the Amazon; with Colombia and French Guiana close behind. Environmentalists find deforestation in these countries even more difficult to contest, because of heightened instability.

The U.S. farm belt is broiling. Lack of rain and high temperatures have put the huge annual harvests of corn and soybeans at risk. And because the United States is the world's largest producer of these two staple crops, the ongoing drought threatens food supplies not only in North America, but around the world.

Farmers in other large agricultural nations, such as China and India, as well as those in many smaller countries, have also felt the blunt force of extreme weather in recent years. India has looked askance at the low volume of the early annual monsoon rain, which it depends on for productive harvests and agriculture.

Until recently, the United States hadn't experienced extreme weather to the same degree. And, as with so much in the world these days, the effects of the U.S. drought will be felt globally--primarily through increased food prices. Of course, it's not solely bad if prices for some foods increase -- particularly those with high climate and ecological costs, such as meat and dairy products. Consumers may respond by reducing their intake of them, which could benefit public health and the environment.

But for the billions of people around the world for whom hunger and food insecurity are a fact of life, the impacts of spiking food prices for staples, such as daily grains or nutrient-packed vegetables and fruits, are dire.

In the eastern province of Gangwon-do in South Korea, preparations are underway for the 2018 Winter Olympics, which will be held in Pyeongchang-gun. Infrastructure upgrades including highway expansions and a new subway rail line are all in the works. And beef, it seems, is on the menu. Along National Highway 50, near the Daegwallyeong pass across the Taekbaek mountains, a billboard reads:

“2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics
Together with Daegwallyeong Korean Beef”

Brighter Green’s blog recently covered food and sustainability concerns at the London Olympics. Given the role of meat production in contributing to climate change and its global threat on the environment and public health, future host cities might want to rethink what is an appropriate meal for the world’s stage.

I had written before about animal agriculture issues in Korea including national beef campaigns in response to the Korea U.S. Free Trade Agreement. In addition, two years ago, farms across the country, including some not too far from Pyeongchang were hit hard by foot and mouth disease and avian flu. In the course of a few months, over 3 million pigs were killed across the country in 2010.

The strains of industrial animal agriculture continue to show. In Anheung in Gangwon-do, where tens of thousands of pigs were buried alive, water supplies have become contaminated. The government is currently installing tunnels and pipes to transport water from a different region to each home in this area.

Perhaps for the first time in China’s history since the reign of Emperor Wu of Liang, more than 1,600 years ago, a vegetarian diet is being embraced by a governmental initiative. The difference is that instead of having a religious reason, the nation-wide action plan seeks to lower China’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and to engage every Chinese citizen in curbing climate change. And who knows? Maybe China’s leaders are also endorsing the values of sustainable living from China’s ancient belief systems, including those practiced by Wu who embraced Buddhism and Confucianism, learned from Indian spiritual traditions, and banned animal sacrifice and opposed execution.

The "Cool China" National Low-Carbon Action Plan was introduced in October 2011 by China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), and sponsored by the Department of Environmental Protection’s Education Center and the U.S. Environmental Protection Association of China. The guidelines for the general public suggested seven “once a week” low-carbon lifestyle tips, which included as the second on the list, “one vegetarian day a week”. The seven tips are:

The 2012 London Olympic Games staged a spectacular farewell to the world on August 12. Looking back, amongst all the medal winners, it’s not difficult to spot two vegetarians. One is Lizzie Armitstead who chose to give up eating animals at the age of 10, and won Great Britain’s first silver medal in the 87-mile road cycling competition. The other is Chen Ruo Lin, the 20-year-old Chinese gold medalist in the women's 10-meter platform dive, who's been a vegetarian for the past 4 years for weight loss. But she's not the only "forced to be vegetarian" among China's Olympians.

Most of them had to give up meat long before they got to London. For example,, ‪Chinese hurdler and former Olympic champion Liu Xiang hasn’t been eating pork for many years to avoid ingesting leanness-enhancing drugs, which are banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). In the four years since the 2008 Beijing Olympics, sports officials have often ordered Chinese athletes to avoid eating outside of their training centers in the run-up to competitions to avoid drugs in meat. ‬

The London 2012 Olympic Games are in full swing. Although there has been some controversy over security and NBC's coverage of events, the games go on, exciting fans around the world.

Brighter Green was curious how these Olympic Games were responding to issues of sustainability, given the massive amount of resources required to put on the global pastime. Just before the opening, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Executive Director Achim Steiner visited the site in London and praised the London Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) for implementing various green targets:

After spending much time reading and researching the intensification of factory farming as part of my work with Brighter Green, it is refreshing and heartening to see articles about growth in more sustainable areas of agriculture. A recent page in National Geographic entitled "Future of Food" featured chickpeas prominently among other foods, including bug protein and potatoes. But the magazine is not alone--chickpeas have long been known to be excellent sources of protein and nutrition.

With China’s growing wealth and demand for western diets, the Chinese government is posed to dramatically increase agricultural production, with goals of becoming more agriculturally self-sufficient. A laudable aim- but it’s questionable if their strategy is undermining the economic stability of rural villages and livelihoods of traditional farmers.

Despite my research on emerging nations India, China, Ethiopia, and Brazil as part of Brighter Green's Food Policy and Equity Program, it's not often that I think about their trade connections. I usually view meat and dairy intensification as internal issues--first and foremost affecting local communities, cultures, and populations, and perhaps later branching out to involve multinational corporations based in agricultural powerhouses in the U.S. or Europe. That's why a recent article proclaiming that "Africa Presents Business Opportunities for Indian Poultry" was more than a bit jarring.

This week is "Meat Week" on National Public Radio's Morning Edition program. They have a short interview each day that focuses on some aspect of meat (from analyzing the paleo diet to looking at the environmental effects of modern meat production). They also created this entertaining "cookbook" that pokes fun at human history and eating habits.

It's hard to know what's on the menu at the Earth Summit (Rio+20) in terms of people's plates, but food and agriculture, and their critical intersection with global sustainability and equity, are being discussed in interesting and potentially important ways. In an interview for Rio, Carlos Serre of the International Fund for Agricultural Development described the global food situation this way: "…we have a rapidly growing population, rapidly growing incomes, changing consumption patterns, people eating more animal products, vegetables, fruits, oils, and all of this is compounding to a very rapid increase in the total amount of food needed. At the same time, the resources of the world are finite and we’re getting more and more to the limits of what we can do. So this means that it’s getting tighter…."