KAREN STEUER, - Pew Environmental Group
Stephan: Most of those pretty pictures of family farms you see in TV ads, and on the sides of containers are no more than propaganda. The great family farmer experiment that began in the 19th century with the great immigrations from Europe has been destroyed by corporate special interests that have given us the mono-culture chemical industry and and animal husbandry model of food production. Utterly dependent on petroleum and poisons it treats life forms, both plant and animal as little more than mechanical widgets.
Karen Steuer directs the Reforming Industrial Animal Agriculture campaign at the Pew Environment Group.
During the past 50 years, animal agriculture has gone through a seismic shift in the United States. Long gone are the iconic scenes of American landscapes dotted with family farms and red barns.
Most of these have been replaced by industrialized facilities controlled by large corporations that rely on concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). In this system, cavernous warehouses crowded with thousands-even tens of thousands-of animals form the equivalent of an agricultural assembly line. And independent farmers, once the cornerstone of rural America, struggle to compete in a marketplace dominated by a few big corporations.
As large corporations (known as integrators) have applied an industrial model to farming, they have also generated a host of new problems.
The CAFO model relies on three interlinked practices in order to increase profits:
Maximize the number of animals squeezed into the least amount of space and require the fewest number of employees to provide care.
Administer continual doses of antibiotics to the animals to prevent the diseases prevalent in their close- quarters housing.
Minimize the disposal cost for the substantial volume of animal waste produced by the facilities.
These practices may turn a profit for the big corporations, but they are disastrous for human health and the […]
No Comments
KAREN M. CHEUNG, - Fierce Healthcare
Stephan: It is amazing to me that they thought this would work. I don't think the people who cook these schemes up really understand what it is like to work in a hospital in the U.S. today in the belly of a system that seems perversely designed to make their work exhausting and needlessly complex. Nor does there seem to be much recognition as to why they do it.
It is going to take restructuring our healthcare system to really move the needle. Healthcare systems through Europe and parts of Asia have better outcomes and spend far less.
Flying in the face of the government’s national pay-for-performance initiatives, new research finds that hospital incentives failed to achieve their goal of improving patient outcomes, specifically, 30-day mortality rates. The New England Journal of Medicine study published yesterday found little evidence pay-for-performance programs actually helped keep patients alive longer.
‘It really didn’t move the needle very much on patient outcomes,’ study lead author Ashish Jha, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, told Reuters. ‘There was no evidence that patient outcomes got better under this different financing scheme.’
Researchers looked at 252 hospitals participating in the Medicare Premier Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration (HQID), a partnership between the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and nonprofit hospitals, compared to other 3,363 nonparticipating hospitals. Hospitals in the top 20 percentile earned 1 or 2 percent bonuses in Medicare payments, while those in the bottom 20 percent were penalized 1 percent to 2 percent.
However, mortality rates were similar regardless of whether hospitals were in the bonus program. The mortality rates for patients who had heart attacks, congestive heart failure or pneumonia, or who underwent coronary-artery bypass surgery dropped slightly in both groups.
But mortality rates aren’t the only goal of the Premier demonstration, according […]
No Comments
CARL ZIMMER, - The New York Times
Stephan: Here is yet more evidence about the death of the bees. I think it is now a race against time; a question of whether humanity can overcome the power of the corporate interests that own the pesticide insecticide industry before the bees, both honey and bumble, are gone. The bees have other problems, but as this report makes clear, more and more the finger points to these special interests and the products they produce that are the killers of the bees. Don't be confused about the careful wording and hedging in some of these interviews. That is the nature of science. Gradually the evidence just keeps accumulating. As it does the hedging will decrease, and greater certitude will emerge.
If the bees disappear our world will be plunged into a food crisis that will lead to the starvation of millions. Because we are the nation that is the source of the problem it is here that these toxins are used most widely, and it will be our agriculture that is most devastated. If you live on land that is at a distance from any commercial farming I urge you to consider keeping bees.
Scientists have been alarmed and puzzled by declines in bee populations in the United States and other parts of the world. They have suspected that pesticides played a part, but to date their experiments have yielded conflicting, ambiguous results.
In Thursday’s issue of the journal Science, two teams of researchers published studies suggesting that low levels of a common pesticide can have significant effects on bee colonies. One experiment, conducted by French researchers, indicates that the chemicals fog honeybee brains, making it harder for them to find their way home. The other study, by scientists in Britain, suggests that they keep bumblebees from supplying their hives with enough food to produce new queens.
The authors of both studies contend that their results raise serious questions about the use of the pesticides, known as neonicotinoids.
‘I personally would like to see them not being used until more research has been done,
No Comments
JESSE ELLISON, - The Daily Beast
Stephan: How can anyone read this and not ask: Is this what we have spent thousands of lives and billions upon billions of dollars to achieve?
The plight of Afghanistan’s women was supposed to improve with the Taliban’s ouster, but a new Human Rights Watch report shows the injustice persists, detailing the cases of 60 women and girls in prison for ‘moral crimes’ like premarital sex and fleeing abusers.
When Heather Barr began interviewing female Afghan prisoners and detainees for a new Human Rights Watch report released Wednesday, one phrase stood out. ‘So many of them started out saying, ‘I fell in love with a boy,’
No Comments
Thursday, March 29th, 2012
MOLLY JAHN, Contributor - University of Wisconsin-Madison
Stephan: The mono-culture chemical and petroleum intensive industrial agriculture and animal husbandry that has arisen over the last century cannot continue. It is destroying the Earth's normal cycles and systems. The propaganda from agri-industry claims this is the only way to feed the world. That is not the truth, and this is increasingly recognized, as is the urgency to change.
MADISON – An independent commission of scientific leaders from 13 countries today released a detailed set of recommendations to policymakers on how to achieve food security in the face of climate change.
In their report, the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change proposes specific policy responses to the global challenge of feeding a world confronted by climate change, population growth, poverty, food price spikes and degraded ecosystems. The report highlights specific opportunities under the mandates of the Rio+20 Earth Summit, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Group of 20 (G20) nations.
‘Food insecurity and climate change are already inhibiting human well-being and economic growth throughout the world and these problems are poised to accelerate,
No Comments
