Brighter Green Associate Sangamithra Iyer writes from India, where she is investigating the intensification of the livestock sector (as well as visiting family) this summer. She’ll be uploading more blogs and photos in the next week or so, so come back for those. In the meantime, here’s a quick rundown of what she’s been seeing, experiencing and reading. “Traveling in South India [the states of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu] still has been very veg-oriented,” Sangu writes, “with vegetarian restaurants for eating (on banana leaves) and makeshift rest stops for coconut water—just a guy and a machete and coconuts.” However, she’s seen evidence of the shift toward greater consumption of meat and dairy that’s taking place in much of India. “We are finding Suguna Chicken stands (basically small live markets) in all the small towns and cities we are driving through.” Suguna, which began as a small business 25 years ago, is now a multi-million dollar hatchery and feed enterprise with 15,000 contract chicken “growers” producing eight million birds a week across India.

Sangu flew north to Delhi and right from the airport went to a Nutrich “hygienic chicken” slaughterhouse and processing plant. “The live bird transport, stunning and de-feathering had already happened when we got there,” she writes, “but we saw the whole place and the processing area,” including about 100 workers, most of whom that work directly from the birds come from Nepal. Local women do much of the cutting of the fat. Read More

From mere idea to more likely reality: a huge solar power project in North Africa, funded by European investors, to provide electricity to much of Europe and perhaps to much of North Africa as well. The many billion dollar initiative could, its backers suggest, provide up to 15% of the European Union’s power in a light shade of green. Of course, Europe has sun, too, although not in the abundant, and consistent, quantities North Africa does. While the project might indicate that solar power has “arrived” and the industry could attract significant investment and policy and public support. Some question the efficiency of transporting power over a sea, when it also could be harvested from Europe’s roofs, backyards or fallow or neglected land (rural or urban).

But the project, as planned, also seems to repeat a pattern that’s been set for centuries: move resources from the south to the north. Sub-Saharan Africa is bedeviled by massive energy poverty. It stymies industries large and small and hampers provision of health care, schooling (if kids don’t have access to at least some power, how well can they study at night?), even the production of solar panels or wind turbines. The entrepreneurs behind “Desertec,” as the North African solar initiative is known, are mostly looking north. Green power for the rest of Africa is, at a large-scale, still on the drawing boards. How illuminating is that?

So, what’s a foodprint? And what’s its significance today? New York City foodprint resolution introduced today, June 30th. See news item for details on Wednesday, July 1st press conference at New York City Hall. Foodprint (n): our food system’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and global climate change. Why a foodprint resolution? And why in New York City? New York City has approved a number of directives to reduce global warming and encourage environmental awareness. But none addresses the enormous role food and agriculture has in accelerating or mitigating climate change. Globally, some 30% of GHG emissions come from the fossil fuel-based agricultural system ‘from pesticides and fertilizer production to how food is produced, processed, packaged, transported, stored and disposed.
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While the local food movement is growing in the U.S., Europe and even Japan (where Community Supported Agriculture – CSA – was invented), we don’t hear much about similar movements in southern regions of the world. Sometimes it seems like there’s a feeling that people in poor countries, and poor people especially, don’t have the time or the money to care about where their food comes from. Of course, this “sense” has led to the global reach of mass-produced, processed foods. But there are pockets of resistance, and also resurgence, of local food cultures. In fact, plenty. One that I heard about recently on the BBC was intriguing: fresh, organic vegetables being grown and marketed in Kenya’s, and perhaps Africa’s, largest slum: Kibera in Nairobi. And Kibera’s residents are willing to pay quite a lot of their small daily income for pesticide-free, fresh produce.

A key item of the harvest is kale, which 95% of Kenyans eat, says one of the urban farmers. An interesting aspect of the story was this. The BBC reporter told a woman buying her “Kibera kale” and other vegetables that most people in the West think she and people like her wouldn’t care about organic food — and that they’d lack the money to pay for it. In a genial tone, the woman repeated the statement back to the reporter as a question, and answered. “But we do,” she said, and went on to describe how she manages her household budget to make her purchases possible.

This struck me, even as I digested (sic) the news that mega fast food chain Burger King has a new set of commercials in which it takes its burgers to far corners of the world and records the reaction of people there who eat them. The campaign has, rightly, been criticized as an attempt at food hegemony, served up with a mocking tone: can you believe they haven’t tasted a burger? And can you imagine what it would be like to live all the way out here?! A good critique of Burger King’s venture by Derrick Z. Jackson ran recently on Common Dreams. I excerpt a few of its most trenchant paragraphs here:

In a bizarre parody of an actual documentary, Burger King sent a crew out to remote Hmong parts of Thailand, Inuit parts of Greenland, and a village in Romania where people have both never seen a hamburger nor ever heard of one through advertising. The narration starts, “The hamburger is a culinary culture and it’s actually an American phenomenon [as if we didn’t know this].”

The first part of the video involved plucking some villagers to come to a modern office in local and native dress to compare Burger King’s signature burger with a McDonald’s Big Mac. Read More

Some good news from the global climate talks in Poznan, Poland that, like many UN meetings, didn’t wrap up until the wee hours of the morning last Saturday. Groundwork was laid for a new, post-Kyoto climate agreement to be agreed this time next year in Copenhagen. And forests did make it more fully onto the climate agenda–that is, protecting standing forests and restoring those that have been lost. County delegations also agreed on the importance of supporting REDD initiatives for slowing global warming, that is reducing emissions from forest destruction and degradation. In fact, a new web portal has been set up by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to share information on REDD initiatives. However, there are some significant, shortcomings in the forest deal: language on the rights of indigenous peoples was struck, at the request of several industrialized nations, including the U.S. and New Zealand. And the forest agreement, bizarrely, doesn’t mention biodiversity protection, which could, some observers argue, allow countries to clear forests for agricultural commodities like palm oil and soy.

Nobel laureate Al Gore was in Poznan and he was impassioned. His speech drew a standing ovation. Basically, he told the delegates, the world needs to get real and loud. “I call on the people of the world to speak up more forcefully,” he said. Read More