Articles by Grist staff

Industrialized countries’ GHG emissions near all-time high

Take it away, Yvo de Boer of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change: “Industrialized countries’ overall greenhouse-gas emissions rose to a near all-time high in 2005. Greenhouse-gas emissions between 1990 and 2000 went down, but then between 2000 and 2005 they increased again, by 2.6 percent.” Oy. Bali can’t come soon enough.

Congo nature preserve set up to protect bonobos

A swath of Congo rainforest larger than the state of Massachusetts will be designated as a nature reserve in a collaborative effort between American and Congolese environmental groups and agencies. Advocates hope the reserve will be a significant step toward protecting the endangered bonobo, one of humans’ closest ape relations. Bonobos, which live only in […]

Revenue insurance is a promising option for farm aid

This is a guest post from Britt Lundgren, an Agricultural Policy Fellow at Environmental Defense. It is part of a recent conversation on agricultural policy.

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Fixing farm policy, which has been the single largest influence on the shape of agriculture in the U.S. since the Dust Bowl, is not easy. "Not easy" will seem a drastic understatement to anyone who has followed the endless debate on the Senate floor over the past two weeks, which has produced much hand-wringing and rhetoric about our "safe and abundant food supply," but no actual Farm Bill.

Tom Philpott has argued in recent posts that farm subsidies are a symptom of the problems associated with modern agriculture rather than the cause, and that efforts to end subsidies are bad policy. In his view, overproduction is the true culprit, and unless farm bill reforms include a mechanism to control supply we will continue to have problems.

It's easy to blame everything on overproduction, but it is just not accurate. Prices for corn, soybeans, and many other commodity crops are higher than they've ever been right now. Prices don't rise when there's too much of a commodity, they rise when demand exceeds supply.

I do agree with Mr. Philpott on one point: simply ending farm subsidies is not going to immediately end all of the environmental problems caused or aggravated by agricultural production.

But farm subsidy reform advocates are not talking about ending subsidies. We don't want to pull the rug out from underneath farmers. Instead, we want to exchange the wall-to-wall shag carpet for something more modest -- a safety net for farmers that is less market-distorting and costs less than $9 billion a year. A better safety net will do far less to amplify problems caused by agricultural production than current farm policy does, and will also free up funds that can be used to address these problems.

USDA orders Tyson Foods to stop using antibiotic-free labels on poultry

Tyson Foods will no longer be allowed to use its “raised without antibiotics” label that the U.S. Department of Agriculture originally approved in May, due to a mix-up at the agency and disagreement over whether a medication used in Tyson’s chicken feed should be classified as an antibiotic. Tyson launched a $70 million ad campaign […]