Food Safety | Civil Eats

Is Recycled Plastic Safe for Food Use?

Meg Wilcox — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 09:00:22 +0000

Recycled content in food packaging is increasing as sustainability advocates press manufacturers to cut their use of virgin plastic.

Since 1990, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the agency responsible for ensuring food contact materials are safe, approved at least 347 voluntary manufacturer applications for food contact materials made with recycled plastic, according to a database on its website. Approvals have tripled in recent years, from an average of seven to eight per year through 2019, to 23 per year since then, and they continue to climb. The FDA has already approved 27 proposals through June this year.

Other than Coca-Cola, most manufacturers seeking approval are petrochemical giants such as Eastman Chemicals, Dupont, and Indorama; and lesser-known plastic packaging manufacturers, including many from China, India, and other countries.

“The FDA has been very reluctant to adopt a modern perspective.”

The end buyers of the recycled materials aren’t included in the FDA database, but many popular brands are using recycled content. Cadbury chocolate bars come in a wrapper marketed as 30 percent recycled “soft plastic packaging.” The Coca-Cola Co. in North America reports it sells soft drinks in 100 percent recycled PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles, while General Mills says its Annie’s cereal boxes use a liner made from 35 percent recycled plastic film.

Increasing recycled content in packaging may be good news for the planet, but researchers say the FDA has a lax approval process for plastic food packaging that hasn’t kept pace with the science on chemical hazards in plastics. The agency’s approval process for recycled plastics is voluntary and ignores the potential risk of chemical mixtures, researchers told EHN. Companies can seek guidance on their recycling process, but they are not required to. In addition, the FDA relies on manufacturers’ test data when it approves materials, leaving companies essentially in charge of policing themselves. Meanwhile, some studies show that recycled plastic can harbor even more toxic chemicals—such as bisphenol-A (BPA), phthalates, benzene and others—than virgin plastic.

FDA spokesperson Enrico Dinges defended the process, telling EHN the agency “reviews [industry] data against stringent scientific guidelines” and can “use its resources to spot test materials” if it sees an issue.

But researchers say the agency fails to protect the public from the toxic chemical soup found in recycled plastics.

“[The] FDA is most concerned about pathogen contamination coming with the recycled material, rather than chemicals,” Maricel Maffini told EHN. The approval process “is very lax,” she said.

Recycled Plastic Is More Toxic

Globally, just 9 percent of plastic is recycled. Most is recycled mechanically, by sorting, washing, grinding, and re-compounding the material into pellets.

Most recycling centers collect a mix of materials, allowing milk jugs, say, to intermingle with detergent bottles or pesticide containers and potentially absorb the hazardous chemicals from those non-food containers. Recycling facilities that are set up to collect one plastic type, such as PET bottles, can better control potential contamination, although chemicals could still be introduced from bottle caps or the adhesives in labels.

Hazardous chemicals can also be introduced when plastics are decontaminated and stabilized during recycling. Plastics degrade with recycling, “so you may need to add more stabilizers to make the material as robust as the virgin material,” Birgit Geueke, senior scientific officer at the nonprofit Food Packaging Forum, told EHN. “Recycling can therefore increase the material complexity and the presence of different additives and degradation products.”

Geueke, who led a review of more than 700 studies on chemicals in plastic food contact items, said that research on recycled plastics is limited. Despite that caveat, “there are a few studies really showing that contamination can be introduced more easily if you use recycled content.”

One study found 524 volatile organic chemicals in recycled PET versus 461 in virgin PET. Chemicals detected in the recycled PET included styrene, benzene, BPA, antimony, formaldehyde, and phthalates—chemicals linked to an array of health issues, including cancer, and the ability to hack hormones and cause development delays in children, obesity, and reproductive problems.

Most studies have focused on recycled PET, which is “not as prone to picking chemicals up,” in comparison to other plastics such as recycled high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and polypropylene, or PP, Geueke said. “HDPE milk bottles really take up chemicals during all stages of their life cycle, much more than PET bottles, and [those chemicals] are harder to remove, because they stick harder to the material,” she said.

Indeed, a study on recycled HDPE pellets obtained from various countries in the Global South identified pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and industrial chemicals in the pellets.

FDA’s Lax Approach

The FDA must authorize all materials that contact food before they reach the market. To be authorized, a material cannot contain intentionally added cancer-causing chemicals nor any other chemicals that leach from the material at a level of more than 0.5 parts per billion.

But as Maffini pointed out, the FDA recommends, but does not require, the type of testing that manufacturers should do to ensure their products are safe, and it doesn’t always require them to submit any safety data, she said.

“If you tell the FDA the substance or substances used to make the plastic are not mutagenic or genotoxicant, and the exposure in the diet would be less than 0.5 parts per billion, FDA does not expect you to send any safety data [to back up these claims].”

In defense, the agency’s Dinges said, “the FDA has robust guidelines for the underlying scientific data that should be provided” by industry. But he also said, “it is the responsibility of the manufacturer to ensure that their material meets all applicable specifications.”

For recycled plastics, companies may also voluntarily submit a requested review of their recycling process. In this case, the FDA asks companies to provide a description of the process, test results showing that the process removes possible incidental contamination, and a description of how the material will be used.

The FDA further advises manufacturers to conduct “surrogate testing,” which involves challenging recycled materials with, or submerging them into, different classes of hazardous chemicals that could theoretically contaminate the plastic, to determine whether the company’s recycling processes can eliminate those toxic chemicals.

Surrogate testing is the “best available practice” for evaluating chemical migration from recycled plastics, Gueke said, although research shows it works better for PET than for other plastics like PP or HDPE. Though the FDA doesn’t require surrogate testing, Tom Neltner, executive director at Unleaded Kids, said, “I don’t think you’re going to find a market in the industry without having gone through FDA review.”

Neltner, who formerly worked with Environmental Defense Fund’s Safer Chemical Initiative, said that in his experience, big food companies are skittish about using mechanically recycled plastic on packaging that touches food.

According to the FDA database of recycled plastic applications, two-thirds of the approvals are for recycled PET, for a broad range of products from drink bottles to clam shell containers for fruits and vegetables to tea bags. Most of the remaining approvals are for recycled PP for products including clam shells, disposable tableware, cutlery, caps, and lids; recycled HDPE for grocery bags, milk and juice bottles, meat trays, and disposable tableware, and recycled polystyrene (PS) for meat and poultry trays and clam shells.

Most requests are for mechanical recycling processes, though a couple dozen were submitted for chemical recycling, which uses an energy-intensive, largely unproven, process to convert plastics back to their original monomer chemicals. [The FDA no longer evaluates chemical recycling proposals for PET because it says the process produces material of suitable purity for food-contact use.]

Outdated Approach to Evaluating Toxics

“The FDA has been very reluctant to adopt a modern perspective,” Tom Zoeller, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told EHN, referring to testing for the effects of endocrine disruptors or for the mixtures of chemicals found in plastics.

FDA’s requirement that a chemical not exceed a threshold of 0.5 parts per billion is based on cancer risk, Zoeller said, and while that number is protective for evaluating exposure to a single chemical, “I’m not sure that means a lot, when you consider the 16,000 chemicals that are put in plastic.”

In other words, the FDA’s approach doesn’t account for multiple chemical exposures, even as research shows that chemical mixtures can have significant health impact. A European study, for instance, found that a mixture of nine different chemicals had a greater impact on children’s IQ than what was expected based on individual risk assessments.

“It’s the combination of chemicals that are impacting IQ and basically stealing human potential,” Zoeller said. “We are way behind the curve,” in assessing chemical risks, he added.

Dinges responded that “while it is unlikely that appropriately sourced and controlled feedstock will experience incidental contamination to any appreciable amount, potential incidental contamination is addressed by the FDA’s surrogate testing recommendations.”

Yet the ability to control feedstock is what worries experts. Researchers who found BPA and heavy metals migrating at higher levels from recycled PET compared to virgin PET, stressed that the plastic’s safety depends on transparency and cooperation across the value chain. Moreover, surrogate testing is not required.

Neither does FDA’s approach account for endocrine-disrupting chemicals, which can act at levels in the parts per trillion by disrupting metabolism, Maffini and Zoeller commented. “This concept that there’s a threshold below which there are no effects or no adverse effects is fundamentally incorrect,” said Zoeller.

Dinges countered that the “effects on the endocrine system are just one of many areas of toxicology that the FDA evaluates,” while also repeating industry talking points. “Endocrine activation . . . does not necessarily translate into toxicity,” he wrote. “Consumption of any food (for example, sugar) can activate the endocrine system.”

Such responses have led Zoeller to conclude that FDA has “become a foil for industry,” and that their “precautionary principle is applied to industry, not public health.”

Unless government agencies can do a better job at ensuring manufacturers are keeping chemical hazards out of recycled plastic, experts think it shouldn’t be used for food contact materials.

“I’m not a big fan of recycled plastic and food contact, because it’s really hard to know [if it’s safe], and I think producers have to be more careful than when they produce virgin materials,” Geueke said, adding that she thinks that only recycled PET should be considered because the other types so readily absorb chemical contaminants.

“If you have a very good process and can prove that it gets rid of most of the contaminants . . . but nobody knows whether that really happens or not,” she said.

This article originally appeared in EHN, and is reprinted with permission.

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Tracking Tire Plastics—and Chemicals—From Road to Plate

Virginia Gewin — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 09:00:49 +0000

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

In the last few years, vehicle tires have emerged as a shockingly prolific producer of microplastics. It probably shouldn’t come as a surprise. Each year, roughly 3 billion new tires are made, consisting of synthetic rubber, which is a plastic polymer, as well as natural rubber, metal, and other materials. And each year, about 800 million of them become waste. As tires wear down—from contact with the road or the friction of the brakes—they shed chemical-laden particles, and those chemicals, it turns out, can find their way into crops.

A new study has shown for the first time that store-bought lettuce contains chemical tire additives.

Tire-derived microplastics are a growing source of plastic pollution and a target of the United Nations International Plastic Treaty negotiations. Further, concern is growing about the hundreds of chemicals, up to 15 percent of the weight of the tire, that are shed into the environment via tire microplastics. “It is the additives that are the toxic compounds,” says Thilo Hofmann, an environmental scientist at the University of Vienna.

While scientists agree that tire particles contribute significantly to microplastic emissions in the environment, the numbers are difficult to quantify. Recent studies have found tire particles made up to 30 percent of microplastics in Germany, roughly 54 percent in China, 61 to 79 percent in Sweden, and a whopping 94 percent in Switzerland.

Researchers have already demonstrated that some crops, including lettuce and fruits, can take up microplastics, possibly putting human health at risk. But a new study has shown for the first time that store-bought lettuce contains chemical tire additives. It is an unexpected finding, according to study co-author Anya Sherman, a doctoral student working with Hofmann at the University of Vienna.

Sherman and colleagues found one or more of the 16 tire additives they looked for in 20 of 28 lettuce samples. The concentrations of tire additives in leafy vegetables were low overall, but two compounds were most common: benzothiazole, used to strengthen rubber, was detected in 12 of the 28 samples; and 6PPD, used to prevent its oxidation, was found in seven.

It’s hard to know the exact source of the pollutants. Leaching from tire-wear particles is a major source of benzothiazoles in the environment, but the compound is used in other applications, including agrochemicals and consumer products. Likewise, 6PPD can be found in sporting equipment and recreation facilities.

Sherman’s methodology, meanwhile, couldn’t target all of the tire additives, and therefore can’t provide the total chemical load in lettuces. “We don’t know the total chemical burden; that’s left out of the conversation,” she says. “Some compounds are toxic or mutagenic at trace levels.” Even less is known about the toxicity of the mixture of chemicals.

Still, the study highlights the increased dangers from our industrialized world. Scientists have documented microplastics in human breast milk, semen, placentas, and blood. These tiny particles can accumulate in organs including the lungs, heart, and brain. Microplastics can have a range of health impacts: They can cause oxidative stress, disrupt metabolism, interfere with gut microflora, disrupt immune systems, and alter reproductive health. Perhaps the biggest concern is cardiovascular distress caused by microplastics.

In March, scientists revealed that people who had microplastics in their carotid arteries had a four-fold higher risk of heart attack or stroke. Perhaps not surprisingly, researchers are urgently trying to determine the degree of microplastic risk from ingestion versus inhalation.

To that end, Sherman’s lettuce findings were a surprise in another regard: How did these chemicals get into lettuce fields in the first place? Of the three most likely suspects—biosolids, atmospheric deposition, and recycled irrigation water—none has emerged as the most likely offender.

Biosolids to Blame?

As tire particles are shed on roadways, they are often washed into water catchments by rain. From there, microplastics can become concentrated in wastewater, where the waste products—biosolids or as irrigation water—can be applied to the land.

Sherman analyzed lettuce grown in four countries with very different policies for biosolids or recycled irrigation water—the two most direct avenues by which tire plastics could concentrate in farm fields. Switzerland, for example, has banned biosolids applications; Spain and Italy had the highest and lowest application rate, respectively, of biosolids; and Israel relies heavily on recycled irrigation water. But there was no discernable pattern related to waste application policies, suggesting that these particles may be more ubiquitous than anticipated.

“There are so many different pathways by which contaminants can reach fields,” Sherman says. “We are nowhere close to understanding the full picture yet.”

Amid nutrient scarcities, many countries around the world, including the U.S., are dramatically increasing the application of biosolids to farmlands. But because pollutants can concentrate in biosolids, some scientists are concerned that soil biosolid applications could exceed the high concentrations have been found in marine environments. “The solutions are an attempt to be sustainable, but they could be introducing more contaminants to the agricultural environment,” Sherman says.

Roughly 56 percent of biosolids are applied to the land in California and across the U.S.—but state and county policies are sharply divided on their use. “The percentage of biosolids application varies by state,” says Scott Coffin, a research scientist at California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. Some states are near 0 percent; others are near 80 percent.

Map source: Holmes et al (2018). “Estimating environmental emissions and aquatic concentrations of sludge-bound CECs [Contaminants of Emerging Concern] using spatial modeling and US datasets.” SETAC North America 39th Annual Meeting Sacramento, California.

Atmospheric Microplastics and Chemicals

When microplastics are incorporated into soil, they behave differently from soil particles: They are more easily carried by wind. In January, Jamie Leonard, a UCLA Ph.D. candidate, found microplastics in wind-blown sediments from fields amended with biosolids.

“Microplastics are very light,” Leonard says. They also don’t like water, and therefore they are less bound to the soil, which makes them loft into the air at windspeeds far lower than expected for bare soils. As a result, Leonard says, the current dust emission models may underestimate the microplastic component of dust from biosolid-amended soil. It may also help explain why microplastics are able to travel thousands of miles and contribute an estimated 6.6 million U.S. tons of tire particles globally per year, equivalent to approximately 5 percent of airborne ambient particulate matter concentrations.

When microplastics are incorporated into soil, they behave differently from soil particles: They are more easily carried by wind.

That includes microplastics from tires, which tend to be overlooked, due to the technological challenges in identifying them. The biggest problem? Black microplastics, including tire wear particles, absorb (rather than reflect) radiation from the instrumentation used to find them.

An alternate approach exists to detect tire microplastics, one that involves heating up a sample to measure its composite chemicals via gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. But few laboratories have this equipment, Coffin says. “That’s why the tire particle aspect of microplastics wasn’t really considered until quite recently; they were just simply not detected.”

Biosolids are complex mixtures of nutrients and pollutants from disparate sources, and they present difficult challenges when trying to separate out microplastics. Scientists have to know which compounds they are searching for, as well as their breakdown products. Given there are thousands of chemicals in tires, it’s literally impossible to trace the environmental fate of all of them.

Furthermore, tire producers do not disclose what additives are used in tires because they’re considered a trade secret. “[Tire additives] are not regulated, which may change in the coming years,” Hofmann says.

Microplastics and Chemicals in Irrigation Water

Evidence of microplastics’ toxic impacts has largely been found in marine and freshwater systems, because it’s relatively easy to measure microplastics in water, says Coffin. In 2020, for instance, researchers identified 6PPD-quinone, the breakdown product of 6PPD, as the culprit behind massive salmon deaths in Washington after storms washed tire particles into streams.

Given that water is easier to work with than solids, the scientific community has begun to develop a methodology to quantify microplastics in aquatic environments.

“We were strategically using our very limited resources dedicated to microplastics on what we think that we can make the most progress on in the short term; pretty much all of our effort is focused on the marine environment,” Coffin says. Environmental researchers have so far developed hazard thresholds in marine environments, to be adopted by the California State Water Board, to evaluate water body impairment. For a long time, Coffin adds, “the conversation about water has detracted from what’s happening on land.”

Water is also far easier to monitor—and treat—than biosolids, Coffin says. “Treating biosolids is effectively out of the equation,” he says. “Even if we do determine this is a huge problem, we’re basically left trying to find solutions upstream,” he adds, meaning preventing microplastics from getting into biosolids to begin with. There’s also little incentive to challenge the use of biosolids in agriculture, as it’s been touted as an example of sustainable return of nutrients to the soil.

In response to a lawsuit by the Yurok, Port Gamble S’Klallam, and Puyallup tribes, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is currently reviewing 6PPD as tire makers scramble to come up with alternatives. California’s Department of Toxic Substance Control, which is also part of the state EPA, has a consumer products section that is evaluating safer chemical alternatives to replace 6PPD in tires as well.

Forging Ahead with Research

Despite all these efforts, researchers are not yet able to determine the health threat of the tiniest microplastics. That’s because it’s not yet possible to detect the smallest, most hazardous particles. “Below 10 micrometers is when we start to care about [the health effects of] particles that we’re ingesting—and we can’t detect those in the environment with standardized methods yet,” Coffin says. While researchers continue to make progress developing detection methods for water, the monitoring campaigns are expensive and scientifically challenging, he adds.

“We’re not even close to developing standardized methods for detecting microplastics in biosolids or soils or terrestrial samples,” says Susanne Brander, who studies microplastics at Oregon State University in Corvallis. “Gathering data on [microplastics in] food systems is where [research] needs to go next.”

That research is starting to get underway. Funding to study plastics in agriculture is limited, but Brander says that the USDA is prioritizing microplastics research going forward. Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley is sponsoring a Research for Healthy Soils Act to fund studies on microplastics in land-applied biosolids.

Although this is a move in the right direction, it sidesteps the main problem. “Those of us who are concerned and have been doing research for a decade are pushing for source reduction and waste management approaches that don’t create more problems,” Brander says. She says the singular focus on 6PPD in recent years risks overlooking the impacts of all the other tire chemicals that are leaching into the environment.

“We know enough to act—that’s the feeling and opinion of most of the other scientists in the [U.N.] global plastics treaty,” Brander says. “We need to push for chemical reduction and a reduction in the production of virgin plastics.”

Reporting for this piece was supported by the Nova Institute for Health.

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Pesticide Industry Could Win Big in Latest Farm Bill Proposal

Lisa Held — Wed, 29 May 2024 09:00:27 +0000

“As a doctor, I am concerned about eroding protections for those most affected by dangerous pesticide exposures—the workers who apply them,” said Representative Yadira Caraveo (D-Colorado) during last Thursday’s session to discuss, amend, and vote on the House Agriculture Committee’s first draft of the 2024 Farm Bill.

Despite those objections, Caraveo was one of four Democrats on the committee who joined Republicans in moving the bill forward, complete with several controversial provisions that would make it harder for states to regulate pesticides and hamper individuals’ ability to seek compensation for harm caused by the chemicals.

Lawmakers have tried, unsuccessfully, to get similar language into past farm bills. Now, ongoing lawsuits involving Roundup’s link to cancer and paraquat’s link to Parkinson’s disease and recent state efforts to restrict the use of certain pesticides have raised the stakes. As a result, insiders say the industry is fighting harder than ever before and the new provisions reflect that push.

“This is an effort to not only cut off the ability of farmers, farmworkers, and groundskeepers to hold the companies accountable, it’s an effort to prevent the public from ever learning about the dangers in the first place.”

Bayer, CropLife America (the industry’s trade association), and allied agricultural organizations including the American Farm Bureau are lobbying on Capitol Hill, and CropLife has been running frequent ad campaigns targeting D.C. policymakers. Bayer has also been pushing to get laws passed that would achieve some of the same goals in individual states.

A coalition of 360 agricultural industry groups have signed on to support their efforts, while public health and environmental groups and local government officials have joined together to oppose them.

Some of the language in the farm bill would position the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) pesticide labels the be-all-end-all when it comes to spelling out safety and environmental risks. But Daniel Hinkle, the senior state affairs counsel for the American Association for Justice, said labels are not immediately updated as new research on risk becomes available. And pesticides can be mislabeled, as in the case of dicamba, which was initially approved without protections to prevent drift and subsequently destroyed millions of acres of various crops, including soybeans and peaches.

Those are just a few of the reasons Hinkle believes preserving the ability for individuals to sue companies over health harms is critical.

“Litigation has already revealed that companies have spent decades covering up harm,” he said. “This is an effort to not only cut off the ability of farmers, farmworkers, and groundskeepers to hold the companies accountable, it’s an effort to prevent the public from ever learning about the dangers in the first place.”

Additional language in the bill could also overturn state and local laws that restrict the use of pesticides. For example, many counties and cities around the country have banned the spraying of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, in parks where children play. And just last week, California lawmakers voted to move a bill that would ban paraquat in fields and orchards starting in 2026 forward.

“Paraquat is a perfect example of a case where there are special circumstances that justify taking action that is stronger than the action taken by EPA,” said Scott Faber, senior vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group (EWG). A growing body of research shows paraquat exposure can significantly increase the risk of Parkinson’s disease, and the chemical is banned in dozens of countries.

In support of the ban proposed in California, EWG has been looking at paraquat use data in the state and found intensive spraying in just a few agricultural counties. Faber said the data also shows many pesticide applicators are using more paraquat than the label permits and are not following practices required for safety. “Farmers and farmworkers are being exposed to far more paraquat than EPA estimates,” he said.

In an email, a spokesperson for the House Agriculture Committee leadership argued neither provision would restrict states’ ability to regulate the sale or use of pesticides in a new way and that they would simply clarify and codify a section of federal pesticide law that is already on the books (and in some cases strengthen state regulatory power over local jurisdictions). The spokesperson said the bill “clarifies that only the EPA can make safety findings related to pesticides” and that it “would still allow for users of pesticides to litigate legitimate claims based on EPA safety findings.”

Yet another less-discussed provision buried in the farm bill text makes changes to how an “interagency working group” set up to improve regulations related to pesticides and endangered species would operate. The provision requires the group, when consulting with the private sector, to “take into consideration factors, such as actual and potential differences in interest between, and the views of, those stakeholders and organizations.”

While it’s not entirely clear how the language would be interpreted, Brett Hartl, the government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said it would likely “tip the scales significantly toward industry.” For example, during past meetings, representatives from pesticide companies, farm groups, and environmental groups offered public comments. As read, the language suggests agencies could make a determination that one group has a greater “interest” compared to another. According to the House Agriculture Committee spokesperson, the provision will ensure the EPA consults the working group “before developing any future strategies for improving the consultation process for pesticide registration and minimizing the impact on agriculture.”

At this point, due to contentious provisions related to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and climate-focused conservation funding, the farm bill is unlikely to pass in the House and is essentially dead on arrival in the Senate. In fact, behind the scenes, most D.C. insiders doubt a farm bill will happen this year at all. If it does, it almost certainly won’t be this exact version.

But Hartl and others still believe stopping the progress of the pesticide provisions is crucial. “While it’s certainly true that Bayer is spending more than ever to try to escape accountability for the harms caused by their pesticides,” said Faber at EWG, “it is also true that ordinary people who are impacted by the harms of pesticides, whether it’s farmworkers, farmers, or school teachers, have never worked harder to defend these protections.”

Inflation Interrogation. During an at-times heated Senate subcommittee hearing last week, Senators battled with witnesses and each other over the underlying causes of high food prices over the last several years. Republican senators invited economic experts from conservative think-tanks The Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute, who bolstered their case that President Biden is to blame by pointing to increased federal spending as a driver of inflation.

On the other side of the aisle, the executive director of left-leaning economic policy organization Groundwork Collaborative, Farm Action’s chief strategy officer, and the owner of a small grocery store pointed to consolidation in the food industry and corporate profiteering as the cause. Consolidation across the food system, from farms to meatpackers to retailers, has been increasing, and the Biden administration has made it a priority to increase competition by both sending funds to small farms and businesses and cracking down on anticompetitive practices, for example, filing lawsuits against the biggest chicken companies for conspiring to fix prices. A March Federal Trade Commission report concluded some grocers used pandemic price spikes to charge even more and increase their profits.

Feeding Away Greenhouse Gas Emissions. How much new feed additives could actually reduce methane emissions from belching cows remains unclear, according to a review of the research to date published by the Expert Panel on Livestock Methane. Red seaweed (asparagopsis) and a synthetic compound called 3-NOP (sold as Bovaer) added to cows’ diets have been pitched by many companies as having the potential to reduce the powerful planet-warming emissions by upwards of 90 percent. However, the scientists found that while lab studies found impressive reductions, studies that have measured emissions in animal trials have reported much more variable results, from 6–98 percent in seaweed trials and from 4–76 percent with 3-NOP.

Most notably, the longest and largest trial of red seaweed in cattle produced no reduction in methane intensity (the amount of the gas produced per unit of milk or meat) because the 28 percent reduction in burped methane was offset by the fact that the cattle ate less and gained less weight. The researchers also pointed to barriers in getting the additives to more animals, including the ability to grow enough seaweed without harming ecosystems and how often supplements need to be administered, which currently makes it nearly impossible for farmers to feed them to grazing cattle.

“All of these additives vary substantially in their methane mitigation potential, meaning that it is difficult to confidently say how much of current emissions they will be able to reduce,” the experts concluded. “More studies testing the interactions of different variables are needed to offer robust long-term estimates of their mitigation potential and of their costs, benefits and risks.”

Forever Contaminated. Organic farmers in Maine are threatening to sue the EPA for its failure to prevent PFAS from contaminating their fields. Over the last few years, farms have discovered the chemicals—which are linked to multiple health risks—in their soils as a result of past applications of sewage sludge. In a “Notice of Intent” to sue the agency, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardener’s Association (MOFGA) argues that the Clean Water Act requires the EPA to identify pollutants in biosolids every two years and, when risks are identified, to adopt regulations that prevent harm to human health or the environment.

“If the EPA had been regulating appropriately, many of our farmers wouldn’t be facing the harm they are today,” said Sarah Alexander, the executive director of MOFGA. “We demand that the EPA do the work required under the Clean Water Act and stop allowing these toxic chemicals to contaminate the U.S. food and water supply.” MOFGA will file suit if it believes EPA has still not met its obligations within 60 days.

The EPA has also been playing catch-up on regulating PFAS in drinking water over the past several years, and last week released new data showing PFAS are present in drinking water systems that serve 90 million people across the country. Earlier this year, the agency finalized the first limits on PFAS in drinking water.

Class-action lawsuits have already been filed against companies over PFAS contamination, and experts expect the legal battles to heat up in the coming years.

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New School Meal Standards Could Put More Local Food on Students’ Lunch Trays

Lisa Held — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 09:00:25 +0000

Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) finalized long-anticipated changes to the nutrition standards that regulate school meals. Among the changes that attracted the most attention were the first-ever limits on added sugar and a scaled-down plan to reduce salt.

But another small tweak has big implications for the increasing number of schools working to get more fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats produced by nearby farmers onto students’ trays. Starting July 1, when districts put out a call for an unprocessed or minimally processed food—whether it’s tomatoes, taco meat, or tuna—they’ll be able to specify that they’d like it to be “locally grown, locally raised, or locally caught.”

“We’re . . . freeing up schools to continue to look for ways in which they can partner with producers and with local and regional food systems,” agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack said during a press conference last week, “so that we create additional market opportunities for farmers and ranchers in the area, but also create a better connection between those who produce the food and those who consume it.”

Two days later, Vilsack landed in Michigan, where his travel schedule attempted to trace that connection, with a first stop at a Detroit middle school followed by a visit to Williamston to talk about helping farmers access “new and better markets.”

Karen Spangler, the policy director for the National Farm to School Network, said the change has long been a priority for the group because it often hears how the shift will simplify the process for school nutrition directors while also making it possible for more farmers to get involved in the first place. In addition to funding institutes and expanding farm-to-school efforts to early childcare centers, she sees as one piece of the USDA’s current focus on “integrating farm-to-school and local purchasing to a degree that hasn’t been seen before,” she said.

From the start of the Biden administration, Vilsack announced a priority on nutrition security and building regional markets for farmers, and farm-to-school efforts happened to sit right at the nexus. Since the release of the latest Agricultural Census in February showed small- and mid-size farms continue to disappear as consolidation in agriculture accelerates, Vilsack has been beating the drum of saving smaller farms by supporting markets they can sell into even more intensely. In addition to the shift to local purchasing, the nutrition standards also strengthen the “Buy America” provision already in place for school meals.

But forging a stronger connection between fields and cafeterias goes back to 2010, when Congress passed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act championed by Michelle Obama. It was the first Child Nutrition Reauthorization to push nutrition to the forefront of school meal programs, and it included the first federal farm-to-school grants. Since then, the federal government has supported the efforts in additional ways, alongside numerous state incentives and grant programs as well as work done by nonprofit organizations. During the 2018–19 school year, about 77 percent of school food authorities (districts or individual schools) reported serving some local food, spending a total of $1.26 billion.

However, that number is still a small sliver of total school meal spending, and buying local can be more complicated for districts and schools than just making up a funding gap. In addition to delivery, packaging, and labor challenges, school food procurement involves a complicated bid process with many rules attached. That’s where this change comes in.

Spangler explained that right now, schools can list a “geographic preference” as one factor to be evaluated alongside others such as price, volume, and other criteria. For example, if a New York district wants to buy apples grown in-state today, they would have to evaluate bids from in-state orchards alongside bids from out-of-state distributors, many of which are likely to come in with a much lower price. “It discourages local producers from participating in the process because they can be drastically undercut,” Spangler said.

With this change, if the district is confident that plenty of in-state orchards have enough Macintosh and Granny Smiths to satisfy their students’ appetites, it could specify up-front that it only wants bids from in-state orchards.

Alongside the National Farm to School Network, groups including the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, National Farmers Union, and FoodCorps have been pushing for the change for years. In its summary of the new standards, USDA officials said the agency received close to 400 comments on the proposed change.

“Commentors noted that expanding the geographic preference option to allow local as a specification will broaden opportunities for CNP [Child Nutrition Program] operators to purchase directly from local farmers, reinforce local food systems, and ease procurement challenges for operators interested in sourcing food from local producers,” they wrote.

Previously, Representative Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) attempted to go the Congressional route to make it happen, introducing the Kids Eat Local Act multiple times with bipartisan support. But the bill never went anywhere because the overall Child Nutrition Reauthorization process is now nine years overdue.

Pingree celebrated the USDA for moving forward with the change in the meantime, and she plans to continue to reintroduce the bill so that it will eventually be set in law and therefore be more likely to stick. “Our children deserve healthy, nutritious school meals that are made with locally-sourced ingredients—not highly processed foods,” she said in a press release applauding the agency.

At Morgan Hill Unified School District in California, Michael Jochner said he’s ready to make that happen. Jochner has been working to improve meal quality by forging relationships with organic farmers in his area and growing his own lettuces using hydroponic shipping container systems for several years.

“As a district going out to bid across all food items for next school year, we’re very excited to have the flexibility to use ‘local’ as a bid specification,” he told Civil Eats. “We feel this will allow us to prioritize our local farmers, ranchers, and fisherman, and in turn help the local economy.”

Pesticide Ban Moves Forward. California legislators advanced a state bill proposed to ban the herbicide paraquat, sending it to another committee for consideration. Paraquat has been linked to Parkinson’s disease and is banned in dozens of other countries due to its health risks, including the United Kingdom, throughout the European Union, and in China. Over the past few months, the Environmental Working Group has been supporting the campaign to ban paraquat in California, releasing reports that show it is sprayed disproportionately in counties home to low-income communities of color and that the top users in the state include the Wonderful Company, which sprays it to produce pomegranates, pistachios, and almonds. The legislation comes at a time when the pesticide industry is fighting on several fronts to prevent states from passing laws that regulate farm chemicals.

Confronting Poultry Problems. As avian influenza continues to spread in dairy cattle herds in nine states, the USDA announced it will now require mandatory reporting of infections in cattle and testing before moving cattle to other states. Some states, meanwhile, had already closed their borders to incoming cattle. And on Thursday, Colombia became the first country to restrict beef imports from the U.S. based on the situation. While beef cattle have not tested positive for the virus to date, retired dairy cows are generally processed into beef at the end of their lives.

Prior to the crossover into cattle, the virus had been circulating in poultry since early 2022 and is still is, primarily affecting egg-laying hens and turkeys. One dairy worker, whose only symptoms were conjunctivitis, remains the only reported infection in humans, and while particles of the virus have been found in milk, officials from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) say the milk is still safe to drink, since pasteurization kills the virus.

Meanwhile, the FDA also finalized a food safety rule that will allow the agency to enforce limits on Salmonella in some chicken products for the first time. The rule only applies to “frozen, breaded, and stuffed” chicken products, but in those products, if salmonella is found to exceed the limit, the products will be considered adulterated and will not be able to be sold. It’s a major change for the agency and is one piece of a larger plan to reduce illnesses from the common bacteria.

Farmworker Rights. On Friday, the Department of Labor finalized new regulations intended to increase protections for workers employed on farms through the H-2A guestworker program. Under the new rules, workers have more tools to advocate for their rights and obtain legal assistance, foreign recruiters are required to provide new documentation to increase transparency, and new procedures are in place to kick out farms that break the rules.

“With these new rules, the power of the federal government has sided with farm workers—both those who are born here and those from other countries—who for too long have been exploited, silenced, displaced, or harmed by the H-2A program,” United Farm Workers (UFW) President Teresa Romero said in a press release.

The news came days after the UFW Foundation released a new documentary video series showcasing the impacts of climate change on farmworkers. As the effects of climate change worsen, workers in the field increasingly face and lack adequate protection from hazards including dangerous heat, flooding, and wildfire smoke.

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Can Agriculture Kick Its Plastic Addiction?

Naoki Nitta — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 09:00:49 +0000

Plastics are tightly woven into the fabric of modern agriculture. Black polyethylene “mulch film” gets tucked snugly around crop rows, clear plastic sheeting covers hoop houses, and most farmers use plastic seed trays, irrigation tubes, and fertilizer bags.

These synthetic polymer products have often been used to help boost yields up to 60 percent and make water and pesticide use more efficient. In China, for example, research shows that plastic field covers keep the soil warm and wet in a way that boosts productivity considerably; an additional 15,000 square miles of arable land—an area about the size of Switzerland—would be required to produce the same amount of food.

Research shows that as the chemicals from degrading debris leach into the soil, their persistence decreases crop productivity while snaking up the food chain, appearing in earthworm guts and even human placentas.

But plasticulture, or the use of plastic products in agriculture, also comes with a wide range of known problems. Plastic contaminates fields at a much greater scale than it does our oceans, posing an acute threat to soil health and food security. Research shows that as the chemicals from degrading debris leach into the soil, their persistence decreases crop productivity while snaking up the food chain, appearing in earthworm guts and even human placentas.

In the larger scope, agriculture accounts for a small slice of the plastics pie—less than 3 percent of the annual 440 million tons produced worldwide. Yet their pervasive use—along with farmland, plastics cover everything from individual seeds to bales of hay and packaged produce—has allowed them to plant themselves deeply in our food supply. “Relatively speaking, it’s a small volume,” says Philip Demokritou, vice chair of Rutgers University’s environmental occupational health and justice department and author of a recent international report on plastics in agriculture. “But it carries the highest risks.”

Given the challenges of feeding a ballooning global population, curtailing our dependence on plastics to grow food is a daunting proposition. Simply put, “there are no magic solutions,” says Demokritou. Mitigation requires slashing production and consumption, he adds, and increasing recycling and reuse all along the supply chain.

From implementing policies, incentives, and regulations to engaging producers, farmers, and consumers, it’s an all-encompassing effort that “we need to battle collectively as a society,” he says. And yet considering the impacts to both environmental and human health, investing in comprehensive, innovative, and proactive measures will be far more cost-effective, Demokritou suggests, “than feeding disease and disasters down the line.”

Polluting the Food Chain

The world has a voracious appetite for plastic. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) estimates that global plastic waste is on track to nearly triple by 2060. With less than a fifth of the end stream getting recycled, single-use products make up the bulk of the waste, and it’s destined to go to landfills, be incinerated, or escape into the larger environment.

Meanwhile, 98 percent of disposables are made from “virgin” feedstock, driving renewed growth for fossil fuel companies that supply the raw material. All told, annual greenhouse gases released from plastic production, landfilling, and incineration total 850 million tons, or 4.5 percent of global emissions. And studies also show that plastic pollution disproportionately affects disadvantaged communities.

According to FAO, plastic films such as black mulch and greenhouse covers account for the bulk of annual global use, at more than 8 million tons.

Nevertheless, the versatility, affordability, and convenience of synthetic polymers make them indispensable to most industries, including agriculture. The field consumes 14 million tons of plastics every year, with crop and livestock production accounting for 80 percent.

In 2021, the United Nations (U.N.) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) issued a report highlighting the urgent need for more sustainable use of agricultural plastics. The landmark assessment subsequently paved the way for the U.N. to push for a global treaty to slash plastic pollution.

According to FAO, plastic films such as black mulch and greenhouse covers account for the bulk of annual global use, at more than 8 million tons. In addition to extending the growing season by warming the soil, safeguarding plants’ roots, and preserving soil moisture, these plastics also suppress weeds.

The drawbacks, however, are just as consequential. Plastic mulch creates an impervious surface that concentrates chemical runoff while overheating fields and impacting soil health. And the single-use product is neither recyclable nor reusable, requiring seasonal retrieval and disposal. The Rodale Institute, a nonprofit research institution for organic farming, cites that every acre of land farmed with plastic mulch creates upwards of 120 pounds of waste that typically end up in landfill, or otherwise break down into the soil or nearby watersheds.

In China, where farms use enough plastic film to cover the surface area of Idaho every year, the difficulty of end-of-season removal led growers, at one point, to plow the plastic directly into the field. The widespread practice, which took place through the late aughts, “had a deleterious effect on soil quality,” says Richard H. Thompson, a former agricultural plastics sustainability expert at FAO and a lead author of the 2021 report. As contamination rose, crop yields fell by 15 percent.

That practice was banned, but plastics have continued to disintegrate and leave an unavoidable trail of debris and impacts—wherever they’re used. “It takes about 10,000 chemicals to produce plastics,” says Rutgers’ Demokritou, noting that the additives are necessary to give polymers flexibility and other functionality.

As they fragment under sunlight, temperature fluctuations, and wear and tear, the micro- and nanoplastic (MNP) particles remain chemically stable even as they physically decompose. Accumulating in soils over time, the residues hinder water absorption and impact microbial communities. Eventually, MNPs “pollute the food chain,” Demokritou says, posing health risks such as disrupting endocrine and digestive functions and harboring drug-resistant superbugs.

Driving Coordinated Action

In the past decade, the massive reliance on plastic mulch has spurred the development of greener alternatives employable on an equivalent scale. Several agrochemical companies have developed biodegradable plastic mulches (BDMs) that, while doubly expensive, relieve farmers of the cost and labor of removal by decomposing into the soil.

Yet independent studies on their long-term impacts to both soil health and crop productivity remain inconclusive. To give them the requisite plasticity, BDMs contain many similar additives as those found in conventional films, says Thompson, “so the jury is still out.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Organic Program (NOP) regulations require organic growers to use BDMs made with no less than 80 percent bio-based sources. Currently organic farms are permitted to use petroleum-based, non-PVC covers, granted that they are removed from the field at season’s end. However, no biodegradable films meet the NOP’s minimum threshold. (The European Union‘s organic farming regulations, however, permit bio-based, biodegradable films.)

While regulations can help drive innovation, driving coordinated action requires the development of an international framework that outlines sustainable use and management practices, says Thompson. By setting legally binding targets along the lines of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, the proposed U.N. treaty will be a groundbreaking effort to address plastic waste.

But achieving universal consensus is never easy, he says, so a voluntary code of conduct—a blueprint of sorts that outlines best practices and establishes responsibility for “all the different actors in the plastic supply chain”—would be much more effective in directing country-specific policies and legislation.

The U.S., for its part, has dragged its feet on endorsing a binding U.N. treaty, despite being the world’s largest generator of plastic waste. National efforts to stem the tide have also largely stalled. The latest federal bill, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act of 2023—the dead-on-arrival proposal was the third of its kind introduced in Congress in the last four years—called for a ban on certain single-use products and more end-of-life responsibility for producers.

“Without binding agreements, these programs fail when they begin to threaten [the] bottom line.”

A few states have made strides in directing the onus of waste management onto the industry itself. Maine, Oregon, and Colorado have approved extended producer responsibility (EPR) programs, which require packaging producers to shoulder the costs of recycling their products. And California recently passed the Plastic Pollution Producer Responsibility Act. The comprehensive law, which includes EPR provisions that go into effect in 2027, is intended to decrease single-use plastics and packaging, support communities vulnerable to plastic pollution, and promote a path toward a circular economy.

“Mandatory EPR policies are a powerful tool for transparency and accountability in an industry that is currently anything but,” says Anja Brandon, Ocean Conservancy’s associate director of U.S. plastics policy.

Industry-supported programs such as the Ag Container Recycling Council (ACRC)—the 30-year-old, not-for-profit trade association that collects pesticide drums and containers for recycling into landscaping pavers, drainpipe, and other end products—are voluntary. Yet producer-set goals and targets lack financial accountability for end-of-life product management, Brandon says. “Without binding agreements, these programs fail when they begin to threaten [the] bottom line.”

Currently, none of the EPR laws on the books specifically address agricultural plastics, focusing instead on reducing single-use packaging and food containers. California has required pesticide containers of a certain size to be recycled since 2009, though with no deposit or tracking system for returning containers in place, the estimated recycling rate runs about 50 percent, according to a spokesperson for the California Department of Pesticide Regulation, which runs the program

Creating transformational change and investment in the circular economy require policies that extend across the industry, Brandon adds. And along with redesigning plastics to “actually be recyclable,” improved reuse and recycling processes and investment in cleanups are crucial to meeting those goals, she says.

Weaning the Industry Off Plastic

Still, the broad impacts of agricultural plastics create an inherent opportunity to engage a diverse range of players. A 2019 study by the California Marine Sanctuary Foundation (CMSF) shows the extensive reach of farm-generated debris, particularly along watersheds adjacent to agricultural hotspots. Researchers found the state’s coastline along the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary (MBNMS)—the country’s largest federally protected marine area—littered with mulch and film, as well as irrigation tape, tubing, and hoses that had escaped from nearby fields in the farm-rich region.

The findings also revealed an array of stakeholders, who have since worked in tandem to develop effective waste management strategies. The Monterey County-based effort has created “strong collaboration all across the supply chain,” says Jazmine Mejia-Muñoz, CMSF’s water quality program manager, one that has prompted similar efforts further down the California coast.

By enlisting stakeholders—from small to large-scale growers, product manufacturers, and service providers that provide on-farm plastics collection and retrieval—through awareness and incentivized action, the regional waste management district has vastly increased the collection and recycling of drip tape and plastic film, says Mejia-Muñoz. (Growers get discounted dumping fees for cleaning, separating, and bundling products, all of which streamline the recycling process.)

The work is also supported by the MBNMS and the Agriculture Water Quality Alliance, a partnership of agriculture industry groups, resource conservation agencies, researchers, and environmental organizations stewarding Monterey Bay. CMSF has also partnered with the USDA and academic institutions in trialing biodegradable and recyclable films, helping to create a feedback loop between farmers, manufacturers and soil scientists on field-specific needs and performance. “It’s definitely a big team, but every member is so critical,” Mejia-Muñoz says.

But despite these efforts, tackling the scourge of plastics will still take large efforts to wean our dependence on disposables. “We need to mandate a reduction in plastic production across the board,” says Ocean Conservatory’s Brandon, “starting with single-use plastics.”

“We cannot continue to throw chemicals and materials out there . . . and clean up the mess 20, 30, 40 years later.”

For agriculture, bio-based alternatives to its biggest offender may not, in fact, require extensive innovation. Instead of film, many small farms employing sustainable and regenerative practices use natural mulches such as wood chips, leaves, or straw, relying on the low-cost, time-honored practice to keep weeds in check and regulate soil moisture and temperature. And while kraft paper has fallen short of matching the yields and durability of plastic mulch, a recently trialed version promises an uncoated and industrially compostable product that, according to the manufacturer, “provides a comparable level of protection.”

The Rodale Institute has also studied cover crops as a viable solution: Mowing or rolling vetch or rye grass into a solid mat has “great potential to replace plastic mulch,” says Vegetable Systems Trial Director Gladys Zinati. Though crop type, growing region, and the existing weed bank—the level of invasive seeds present in the soil—all impact effectiveness, her research showed that a solid mat of crimped vetch or rye grass resulted in greater crop yields with lower implementation costs than plastic sheets. (Soil moisture also increased, though minimally, and not enough to replace irrigation.)

While the trials were limited to farms less than 80 acres in size, Zinati sees major promise in expanding the practice. “Depending on [those] factors,” she adds,” everything is scalable.” (Rodale has even designed an add-on device for tractors, making the blueprint publicly available.)

Ultimately, history has repeatedly shown that the cycle of plastic pollution “is not a sustainable model,” says Rutgers’ Demokritou. “We cannot continue to throw chemicals and materials out there . . . and clean up the mess 20, 30, 40 years later.” And as much as our widespread reliance on plastics may seem inseverable, transformative change, he adds, is possible.

“Look what happened to asbestos,” Demokritou says. “That industry [all but] disappeared, right?”

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Will a Food and Ag Focus at COP28 Distract From the Fossil Fuel Economy?

Lisa Held — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 08:00:48 +0000

Last year, in the lead-up to COP27, the biggest global convening on climate change, many groups worked to call attention to the fact that governments and businesses were not doing nearly enough to address food and agriculture in their plans to tackle the crisis. Now, as COP28 approaches at the end of November, some of the same advocates say the event may finally put food and agriculture “at the center” of the conversation.

“For the first time during a global climate summit, heads of states of many countries are expected to commit to transforming their food and agricultural systems,” said Patty Fong, the program director of climate at the Global Alliance for the Future of Food (GAFF), during a press conference last week. “In addition, actors from across the food system—from food producers to financial institutions—are expected to pledge their own resources and advance ambitious plans.”

The urgency is clear. In the last year, the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summed up the takeaways from its Sixth Assessment of the climate crisis by calling for “rapid and far-reaching transitions in every sector.” Expert panel members pointed to food and agriculture solutions, including reducing deforestation, improving cropland management, and shifting diets as critical to meeting targets that will ensure “a livable and sustainable future.”

At last week’s press conference, a group of panelists, some of whom are directly involved in COP28, spoke in broad terms about the new prominence the food sector will have in Dubai. The agenda for the two-week-long event currently includes a full day dedicated to food, agriculture, and water, and another focused on nature, land use, and oceans.

In terms of specific outcomes, David Nabarro, senior advisor to the COP28 food systems team, said that at least 50 (and possibly closer to 100) countries are expected to sign a “declaration” around food and climate.

“The declaration is key to what will be a two-year process through which countries will converge their work on climate and their work on food in ways that serve the interests of farmers and . . . consumers of all kinds,” said Nabarro. “There is built into the declaration the notion that there will also be accountability.”

Diane Holdorf, the executive vice president of pathways at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, added that businesses will sign on to their own declaration, which she said would build on the Business Declaration for Food Systems Transformation created at the U.N. Food Systems Summit in 2021.

Photo by Sascha Schuermann, Getty Images

At the time, some hailed that summit as a pivotal step forward for food and climate, but hundreds of Indigenous organizations, smallholder farmer groups, and scientists boycotted it because they felt it allowed corporations to steer the ship away from grassroots solutions like agroecology in the name of profit and control.

In response to a question about how consolidation in food and agriculture might impact climate solutions and equity coming out COP28, panelists at the press conference diverged on their concerns.

Estrella “Esther” Penunia, the secretary general of the Asian Farmers’ Association for Sustainable Rural Development, called consolidation a “big problem” and talked about transforming the food system to “shift the power to the people.”

But Tim Benton, research director of the Environment and Society Programme at the think tank Chatham House, said that concentrated power presented both risks and opportunities. If businesses maintained the status quo, the power asymmetry could prevent efforts to build resilience on small farms at the local level, he said, but, “the opportunity is that . . . if we convince five or six companies to do the right thing in the right way, then large scale change can happen very, very quickly,” he said.

“It is unprecedented that food systems is on the political agenda in this coming COP and it’s an opportunity that we need to support. On the other hand, it is not separate from the need to phase out fossil fuels and is not separate from the energy transition.”

Regardless, questions about what kinds of food and agriculture solutions get prioritized and who will benefit from those solutions will undoubtedly continue to arise as more details emerge in the run-up to November 30.

The host of COP28, the oil-rich United Arab Emirates—with its increasingly hot and arid landscape, heavy dependence on imports, and sizable investments in ag-tech—has made the food sector a big priority. In May, Mariam bint Mohammed Almheiri, the U.A.E.’s minister of climate change and environment, was in Washington, D.C. working alongside U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to advance AIM for Climate, a joint U.S.-U.A.E initiative developed in partnership with the world’s biggest chemical, seed, and meat companies—many of whom drive the food system’s biggest sources of greenhouse emissions. Farmers and environmental groups were also notably sparse at the summit.

In August, Almheiri declared in an op-ed that the U.A.E. will “put the focus squarely on food systems and agriculture, encouraging governments to update their nationally determined contributions or NDCs, with specific food targets, and gathering commitments from private and public sector stakeholders for funding and technology.”

But it’s not clear whether this focus on food will draw attention away from the world’s superpowers and their responsibility to immediately, rapidly decrease fossil fuel production.

Less than two weeks before Almheiri’s op-ed ran, reporting out of France found that despite plans to increase renewable energy production, the U.A.E’s own contribution falls far short of the action needed to align with the 1.5 degree warming target set in the Paris Agreement due to the state oil company’s plan to continue increasing oil and gas production. U.A.E. leadership also chose the head of Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. as president of COP28, and OPEC will have a dedicated pavilion for the first time at a COP conference.

When asked, panelists at the press conference said they did not see the focus on food as distracting from that larger push. “It is unprecedented that food systems is on the political agenda in this coming COP and it’s an opportunity that we need to support. On the other hand, it is not separate from the need to phase out fossil fuels and is not separate from the energy transition,” said Fong from GAFF, who also flagged an upcoming report from her organization that will look at how fossil fuels and agriculture are intertwined.

Packaged Food Policy. Last week, California governor Gavin Newsom signed two different bills into law that will have significant impacts on eaters and food companies both within and beyond the state.

The first will require baby food manufacturers to regularly test samples of their products for heavy metals and to make the results available both on their website and to the California Department of Health. Over the past several years, multiple testing efforts have discovered arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury in baby foods at levels that are considered dangerous for developing brains. Federal regulators have set limits on the metals but do not require final product testing.

The second law bans the use of four additives currently used in some processed foods: brominated vegetable oil, potassium bromate, propylparaben, and red dye no. 3. All of the additives have been linked to health risks.

“This is a milestone in food safety, and California is once again leading the nation,” said Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group (EWG), which pushed the law forward. California has a long history of moving first on food regulations. Other states and the federal government sometimes follow, and because of the state’s market size, food companies typically choose to change their products and processes for the entire nation.

Bison Boost. On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that the federal program that provides food aid on federal reservations will expand its purchasing of bison meat from small and mid-sized Indigenous producers, creating a closed loop in which those producers are able to feed their communities. Over the past several years, the agency began testing other changes to the program that could increase food sovereignty on reservations. “This pilot is an important step to use government procurement flexibly for the benefit of tribal and our smaller producers and their surrounding communities,” said USDA Director of Tribal Relations Heather Dawn Thompson.

Recently, the idea of using government procurement to support all kinds of small- and mid-size producers who have historically been left out of the picture has been catching on in Washington, D.C. In September, for example, Senator John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania) introduced a bill that would eventually require the USDA to spend 20 percent of its meat and poultry procurement dollars with small- and mid-size processors. A coalition of farm groups are pushing to get the program written into the upcoming farm bill.

Active Ingredients Only. After several years of delay, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) denied a petition filed by environmental groups asking the agency to begin testing whole pesticide formulations, essentially pesticides in the form that they would typically be used. Currently, the EPA focuses its evaluation on the “active” ingredient in pesticides, but formulations include other ingredients called “inert,” such as compounds that help disperse the liquid, and groups had argued that the mixtures of different chemicals could result in new toxicity concerns that aren’t currently being captured.

In its denial, the agency said it “disagrees with the petitioner’s assertion that EPA does not adequately assess risks from formulations or ‘tank mixes.’” In a press release, Sylvia Wu, senior attorney at the Center for Food Safety and counsel in the case, called the denial “an irresponsible and unlawful decision that leaves farming communities and endangered species unprotected from exposure to different pesticide formulations and mixtures.”

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AI Is Writing Books About Foraging. What Could Go Wrong?

Claudia Geib — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 08:00:09 +0000

Like mushrooms after an autumn rain, a new flush of books have popped up on Amazon that claim to provide everything you need to forage your next meal from local parks and woodlands—an increasingly popular hobby in the wake of the pandemic. The books appear to part of a large new wave of books that are being assembled and “published” using artificial intelligence (AI). And experts are concerned that some of them may give misleading, even dangerous, information to novice foragers.

Chef and forager Alan Bergo says he first heard about the books from a worried Facebook post by John Kallas, a fellow forager and author, who runs Wild Food Adventures in Portland, Oregon. Kallas wrote, “We are in a new era of scams,” calling the books a “disturbing trend” and the product of people “that don’t give a hoot about wild foods, don’t know wild foods, and want to drain you of your money.”

But Bergo didn’t think much of this complaint until he was reviewing a manuscript for a new foraging book and saw that the author had referenced a book that he knew from Kallas was “plagiarized blatantly” from the work of fellow forager Sam Thayer.

“I was just incensed, and it was on from there,” Bergo says. The reference was a wake-up call, he says, that “this is way more of a pervasive problem than I had imagined, and we need to squash this right now.”

“This is way more of a pervasive problem than I had imagined, and we need to squash this right now.”

The alarm in the wild food community goes well beyond plagiarism, however. A trained forager—the sort that would usually publish a book on the topic—would not only guide readers towards foods that are safe to harvest and detail how to prepare them for consumption but would also talk about how to avoid overharvesting for the health of the wider ecosystem. By scraping and collating information without an expert’s guiding hand, these AI books could lead novices to make damaging and potentially deadly mistakes.

Generative AI, the technology behind the popular ChatGPT tool, can be used to “write” books in seconds by drawing from text available online and in published manuscripts. With the use of self-publishing tools like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, those books can be made available for purchase within a few hours. At present, there are over 3,000 books on Amazon that list ChatGPT as an author or co-author, less than a year after the tool’s debut.

The book world is already grappling with controversy around AI as a result, including a scandal around allegedly AI-written books published under a real author’s name without her consent, and a New York Times investigation into a flood of AI-written travel guides. Comedian Sarah Silverman is one of three authors suing both OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement, alleging that the companies trained their systems on datasets illegally containing their books.

In July, nearly 8,000 authors signed a letter asking AI companies to stop using their writing to generate text without the authors’ consent and without compensation; this summer, these complaints received some solid backing when an journalist from The Atlantic obtained the Books3 data set, which listed 183,000 copyrighted ebooks that had been pirated and used to train generative AI systems at Bloomberg and Meta. .

And while numbers are hard to come by, the popularity that foraging saw during the worst of the pandemic seems to have continued: foraging accounts are booming on social media, and those who run wild food workshops continue to report record attendance.

After Bergo posted a video about AI-generated foraging books on Instagram, Alexis Nikole Nelson, a forager with a cumulative 5.9 million followers on her popular @blackforager Instagram and TikTok accounts, posted her own warning about the books. Since then, several have been taken down by Amazon.

“Amazon is constantly evaluating emerging technologies and is committed to providing the best possible shopping, reading, and publishing experience for authors and customers,” Amazon spokesperson Ashley Vanicek told Civil Eats in an email. “All publishers in the store must adhere to our content guidelines, and while we allow AI-generated content, we reserve the right to reject or remove AI-generated content that does not meet those guidelines. We’re committed to providing a safe shopping and reading experience for our customers, and we take matters like this seriously.”

Amazon has recently taken some steps towards controlling the proliferation of these books, by limiting the number of books an author can self-publish through the site to three per day and requiring that self-publishers disclose whether their work was AI-generated. However, the company did not say if they have any method of verifying these disclosures, and copyright compliance is entirely the responsibility of the seller.

In other words, new books appear to replace the ones removed quite easily. In her video, Nelson compared them to the mythical hydra, which grows two heads every time you cut one off.

Computers Don’t Make Good Foragers

The reason that generative AI is likely to make mistakes in this field, explains computer scientist Margaret Mitchell, is that these programs are not built to generate information based on fact. “They are trained to make what look like reasonable sentences, but [it] isn’t necessarily going to be factual,” she says. Mitchell is a researcher and the chief ethics officer at HuggingFace, a software company focused on building what it calls “good” machine learning.

“Saying [language models] have human-like intelligence, human-like, fact-based reasoning—that put forward to the general public that language models are factual,” Mitchell adds. “I think that the larger companies that put forward this technology for search did the public a great disservice in giving this impression.”

One of the most obvious concerns about AI-generated foraging books is around misidentification: the potential that they provide incorrect or incomplete information, which could cause newbies to misidentify dangerous plants. Bergo gave the examples of wild carrot, commonly known as Queen Anne’s Lace, which has edible roots and flowers; and wild parsnip, which has edible roots. Both can easily be confused with poison hemlock and water hemlock, all parts of which are toxic enough that consuming even small amounts could be fatal.

“There’s a big possibility of missing small details that can make people really sick, or injured in some way.”

“I think there’s a big possibility of missing small details that can make people really sick, or injured in some way,” Bergo added in a follow-up email. He pointed to an instance from a few years ago, when a publisher recalled a foraging blogger’s book because it contained recipes with raw morel mushrooms, which can cause illness.

Mushrooms are at the center of the conversation about AI-written books: In August, the New York Mycological Society warned followers about the new books in a tweet, noting that a mistake could “literally mean life or death.”

While there are fewer toxic mushrooms than popular culture suggests, eating inedible fungi can lead to intense gastrointestinal distress at best and organ damage or death at worst. Some online sleuths have already found AI-generated books misidentifying mushrooms in their pages, including labeling non-edible fungi as edible.

The biggest species of concern is the death cap mushroom, which can easily be confused with edible lookalikes, and which is becoming more common in North America. The Canadian province of Quebec recently reported that there has been an increase in hospital visits for mushroom poisonings as foraging becomes more popular there.

Nathan Wilson, an experienced forager who runs the website Mushroom Observer, isn’t specifically concerned that AI-generated books could lead to mushroom poisoning. He points out that plants actually tend to be much more dangerous than mushrooms and thinks that the concerns around mushrooms can mostly be chalked up to “fungi-phobia.” To him, AI-written books likely aren’t a huge departure from other books and field guides, which have “common and well documented errors” in mushroom identification.

“There have always been charlatans, and one of the challenges of AI is it potentially masks those charlatans in a way that’s harder to dig into, at which point you just have to be skeptical,” he says.

Beyond concerns about identification, experienced foragers and their books often teach readers about the ethics of harvesting, such as leaving enough of certain species for other foragers and for the wider ecosystem. Interest in wild food has grown enough that it has put certain species at risk. For example, ramps and wild onions have become darlings of the culinary scene even as botanists have warned they grow too slowly to sustain heavy foraging.

They’re considered plants of “special concern” in three states, and there’s a law regulating ramp collection in Quebec that comes with a steep fee for violators. According to a 2021 study, “crop wild relatives” hold pest and disease-resistant traits that could be essential to protecting the wider food supply, yet many of these plants are endangered.

Additionally, many in the foraging field are taking a decolonizing approach. Modern foraging often comes with an acknowledgement of the colonial and white supremacist laws that intentionally prevented marginalized groups from gathering wild food. Experts in the field are highlighting the Indigenous knowledge that underpins foraging, in which respect for plants’ role in the larger community builds in a naturally cautious approach to harvesting.

In a 2020 panel by the Indigenous food sovereignty group I-Collective, ethnobotanist Linda Black Elk of the Catawba Nation highlighted the need to return this perspective to modern-day foraging: “If non-Indigenous people can go around knowing plants are relatives, people are way less likely to exploit,” she said.

These are perspectives that artificial intelligence can’t bring to the table. And Bergo is concerned that books written by computers could also be extremely damaging to real authors’ livelihood if they flood the market.

“These are the people that would be hurt the most by something like this: small independent authors,” he said. He suspects that whoever is responsible for the new books moved into foraging quite intentionally. “I think they . . . identify literary niches that have high sales, high interaction and engagement, and low competition. So, they spit out a bunch of books to create competition in that market to skim some cream off the top,” said Bergo.

Reining In the Risks

Outside of his mycology habit, Mushroom Observer’s Wilson has worked in computer science for four decades, and he’s currently designing an AI-powered mushroom identifier for the site. And while AI writing books doesn’t raise alarms for him, he sees the current hubbub over this technology as simply the surface of a bigger issue: that artificial intelligence is getting smart enough that it could be trained for much deadlier purposes, and that it’s currently completely unregulated.

“The rates at which [AI interfaces] are growing is terrifying, and the way that these technologies are learning is beyond human comprehension,” he says. “I am not at all scared of a book written on foraging, but if someone actually created an interface whose purpose was to persuade people to do something deadly? That’s the kind of thing I am terrified about AI doing.”

“The rates at which [AI interfaces] are growing is terrifying, and the way that these technologies are learning is beyond human comprehension… If someone actually created an interface whose purpose was to persuade people to do something deadly? That’s the kind of thing I am terrified about.”

The lack of regulation around language models is particularly frustrating to Margaret Mitchell, as she’s worked for much of the last decade on guardrails that could be used to prevent AI from putting human life at risk. One form of this is a type of documentation called model cards, which tell a developer the potential uses, limitations, and ethical considerations of a program.

Developers are then directed to display a disclaimer for the public—Mitchell compares them to the choking hazard warnings you might find on toys with small parts—that explain what the models shouldn’t be used for. This would include any text generated about activities that could lead to someone poisoning themselves, including cooking, mixing household chemicals, and yes, foraging.

“The fact [AI is currently] being used in a domain where poison is involved says that they’re being used out of scope,” Mitchell says. “Any situation where you’re going to be giving advice on eating things, you need to be grounded in a knowledge base.”

Currently there are no repercussions for companies who allow their software to be used in this way, as model cards are only adopted voluntarily. However, there’s a movement aimed at changing that: the European Union is currently in the process of implementing the EU AI Act, which would require model cards along with other regulations that make AI “safe, transparent, traceable, non-discriminatory, and environmentally friendly.” According to Mitchell, the U.S. and the U.K. are considering similar policies.

Until then, Wilson’s number-one recommendation for foragers continues to be skepticism; he notes that even experienced wild food gatherers often cross-reference multiple sources before they decide to eat something unfamiliar.

For newcomers who might be most at risk from falling for computer-generated information, Wilson has a standard suggestion: “When I was first starting, my iron-clad rule was that I would not eat something unless I have been taught what it is by a person—and if someone is a beginner, I strongly recommend that.”

The post AI Is Writing Books About Foraging. What Could Go Wrong? appeared first on Civil Eats.

PFAS Shut Maine Farms Down. Now, Some Are Rebounding.

Kirsten Lie-Nielsen — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 08:00:52 +0000

Until a few years ago, Songbird Farm in Unity, Maine, grew wheat, rye, oats, and corn, as well as an array of vegetables in three high tunnel greenhouses, and supported a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program for over 100 customers. It was a successful farm, says Adam Nordell, that supported he and his wife Johanna Davis, their two children, and an employee.

“The business was working,” Nordell says. “We were hitting our stride.”

But at the end of 2020, the Maine Department of Environmental Protection tested their farm and found elevated levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, commonly called PFAS, PFOS, or forever chemicals—and found them in shockingly high numbers. Forever chemicals have been linked to a number of serious health problems including cancer, reproductive issues, and liver and kidney disease.

Consumption of crops or animals grown on PFAS-contaminated land puts humans at high risk of illness. To Nordell’s dismay, Songbird Farm’s well water tested 400 times the state’s safety threshold of 20 parts per trillion.

Songbird Farm (Photo credit: Jenny McNulty)

Maine had been spreading what is called sludge on its farmland and fields since the 1980s. The fittingly named sludge is a combination of wastewater and sewage, and its application on farms has been seen as a way to keep waste out of waterways and feed fields.

For years, application of sludge in Maine was regarded as safe, as it was in a number of other states; a 1994 booklet from the EPA claimed that the “beneficial application of biosolids to provide crop nutrients or to condition the soil is not only safe but good public policy.” The state later discovered, however, that the sludge contained harmful PFAS.

The sources of contamination were numerous. Once the Clean Water Act passed in 1972, many chemicals and toxins that had flowed freely from paper mills into Maine’s rivers started to be processed through sewage plants. Additionally, forever chemicals that appeared in cleaning chemicals, makeup, and nonstick pans made their way down household drains and ended up in local sewage plants.

The biosolids created as sewage breaks down can be used as fertilizer on farmland, a practice that the Environmental Protection Agency still touts as “beneficial,” even though spreading these highly toxic chemicals across farmland allows the compounds to leach into the groundwater, contaminate crops grown on the land, and affect grazing animals.

The spreading of sludge as fertilizer in Maine was documented thanks to licensing requirements to apply biosolids. In late 2021, the Maine DEP identified 60 sites where 10,000 cubic yards of biosolids were applied as fertilizer with homes within half an acre of the application, a practice the agency called “Tier 1” because it presented the highest risk to human health.

The state began testing soil and water samples from those sites, which included Songbird Farm, in the fall of 2021. In addition, it began to test more than a thousand sites with lower levels of contamination in 2023. While the affected sites are situated across the state, most are concentrated in agricultural areas.

By the spring of 2022, more than 50 farms in Tier 1 areas learned they had high levels of forever chemicals in their products, their fields, and their water. Some farms were able to stop production temporarily while they identified possible solutions. However, several farmers, including Nordell and Davis, were forced to close up shop permanently. Farmers were hurting, consumers were worried, and Maine’s food system looked to be in crisis.

“From an agriculture perspective, we want the soil to come out the other side usable and healthy. But in the meantime, we have adopted the truism that PFAs do not have to mean the end of a farm, and there may be alternative options.”

While the Environmental Working Group has estimated that over 2 million acres of farmland across the United States have been spread with sludge, only Maine and Michigan have done significant testing for chemical contamination of farmland. The spreading of sludge as fertilizer remains legal in all U.S. states aside from Maine, where it was outlawed in 2022.

Scientists are still piecing together what happened in the state, but it’s clear that some forever chemical contamination has also come from other waste materials, such as jet fuel and firefighting foam, particularly in Northern Maine, in and around the former home of the Loring Air Force Base.

Today, many of the Maine farms originally affected are operational again. While Songbird Farm is no longer commercially productive, Nordell now works for Defend Our Health, a local organization dedicated to removing toxins from the environment. A series of special fundraisers and an emergency relief fund helped to keep farms afloat in the aftermath of the discovery, and since then, some have changed what they grow or altered their crops. Others have been able to relieve the problem through water treatments and removal of affected hay and manure. And some are considering building solar arrays instead of farming.

“We are trying to be as optimistic as possible that there will be feasible scientific strategies in the future,” says Nancy McBrady, deputy commissioner of the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation, and Forestry (DACF). “From an agriculture perspective, we want the soil to come out the other side usable and healthy. But in the meantime, we have adopted the truism that PFAs do not have to mean the end of a farm, and there may be alternative options.”

First Steps: Supporting Farmers and Conducting Research

In January of 2022, as the level of contamination became clear, the Maine Farmland Trust, which holds easements on many of the farms that were directly affected by contamination, organized with the DACF and the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA) to work with the farmers who were now without a livelihood, providing them with income replacement for lost crops.

Financial support from the PFAS Emergency Relief Fund assists with direct monetary assistance and covers to cost of biosolids testing, health coverage for affected farmers, and has also been used to invest in infrastructure for PFAS relief and remediation.

“We provide a continuum of support,” McBrady says DACF’s Brady of the collective effort. “First and foremost, we are on the ground doing scientific analysis of the source of the PFAS with comprehensive testing that we pay for. This gives a blueprint of the situation and provides an opportunity to consider mitigation strategies such as changing the rotation of livestock, cleaning up the water, or trying a different crop.”

In addition to soil and water testing, the emergency fund also covers continued product testing, allowing farmers to return their goods to store shelves with confidence. In an effort to embrace full transparency, some affected farms even post their PFAS test results on their websites. Testing, however, is only the first step towards regaining use of PFAS contaminated farmland.

“There isn’t that much great land for farming in Maine,” says Amy Fisher, President & CEO of the Maine Farmland Trust, referring to the state’s famously rocky soil. “So we cannot lose any of it to contamination. These farms have easements on them which permanently restrict development, so we have a long-term legal interest in returning these properties to agriculture.”

The trust also moved rapidly to learn more about the problem and potential solutions, reaching out to researchers and universities studying forever chemicals and the challenges of soil remediation.

“There are a lot of theories being tested. We are eagerly awaiting research breakthroughs that we can start implementing.”

Until Maine began its soil testing, there was little known about the extent of the chemicals’ impact on agriculture, and even less known about reversing those impacts. In July 2023, the Maine legislature passed a bipartisan bill to devote $60 million to a fund to address PFAS contamination. A portion of those funds was allocated to farm and soil research. Then MFT partnered with the University of Maine, Colby College, and Michigan State University to study the farmland impact of forever chemicals.

Michigan State University was already home to one of the premier PFAS research centers in the country. Maine was able to offer the researchers there access to a number of case studies of affected farm as well as areas of contaminated farmland on which to test remediation methods.

“There are a lot of theories being tested,” says Maine DACF’s PFAS director Meagan Hennessey. “We are eagerly awaiting research breakthroughs that we can start implementing.”

Methods of Remediation

Researchers are testing various methods of remediation in the field, including using biochar, a form of charcoal, to bind to the dangerous chemicals so they then be extracted from the soil, and absorbing the dangerous chemicals with plants that can then be removed, processed, and burned at temperatures over 2,730 Fahrenheit with special incinerators.

The hope is to help farmers continue farming despite PFAS contamination. “One thing that we recognized as we went was just how specific every farm is,” explains Hennessey. “A lot of farms may have a hot area, but it is pretty rare that the land is contaminated through the whole farming property.”

Hennessey also notes there are high-risk and low-risk plants. Plants that bear fruit, as well as garlic and asparagus, have a low transfer rate, which means even when grown in contaminated soils they do not contain high levels of PFAS.

Leafy greens, such as lettuce, have a high transfer rate and can easily carry dangerous levels of forever chemicals as can hay and grasses usedfor animal forage. Hay provides a particular challenge because it is often sold and transported to other farms where it is fed to livestock who spread the chemicals through their manure.

For this reason, McBrady adds, some farms are being encouraged to switch to grains, which are less likely to absorb PFAS. “We can fund a farm to switch from hay to grain cultivation, which requires new equipment, new storage, and new drying facilities,” she added. “In doing so, they now have a robust alternative feed supply and their impacted fields are still being utilized. That’s an example of keeping a farm and acreage in production with an alternative crop.”

On Contaminated Mi’kmaq Land, Hemp as a Solution

While farms around the state are adjusting to the new reality, in far Northern Maine in Aroostook County, a novel idea for soil remediation is in the experimental stages.

Upon the deactivation of the Loring Air Force Base in 1994, the state of Maine returned 800 acres to the Aroostook Band of the Mi’kmaq, a tribal community of approximately 1,500 people living in the remote Maine county. Because the area of the former air force base had been the site of firefighting foam testing and jet fuel spills, it was supposed to have been cleaned before being returned to the Mi’kmaq. But tests in 2020 showed levels of PFAS, PFOS, and heavy metals in the soil that were so high they have made the land unsuitable for farming, gardening, or human habitation.

Chelli Stanley and the organization she founded, Upland Grassroots, have been working with the Mi’kmaq people since 2019 to test fiber hemp as a crop that extracts PFAS from the soil as it grows. The organization, based in Limestone, Maine, is growing hemp on contaminated Mi’kmaq land with the assistance of tribal members.

Monitoring the hemp crop. (Photo by Chelli Stanley, Upland Grassroots)

“My initial interest was cleaning the environment in general,” Stanley explains. “Hemp is known for its soil-remediation abilities. We started working on PFAS, and just as the problem in Maine became evident, we were already looking for a solution.”

“We know that hemp is taking PFAS out of the soil,” says Stanley. “What we are working on now is the breakdown method.”

University of Virginia scientist Bryan Berger works with Stanley on the hemp project. “For the past two years, we’ve done greenhouse testing with hemp to see how much [PFAS] it can take up and how growth conditions affect it,” he says. “It is pretty remarkable how much PFAS you can put in hemp. It is levels that would melt our skin. It seems to have almost an unlimited capacity to absorb things out of the environment.”

The challenge facing the scientists now is the removal of the PFAS from the hemp plants once they’re harvested. “This year,” says Stanley, “We’re sending samples to the University of Minnesota to test breaking [the hemp] down and turning it into biofuels.”

Hemp as an option for soil remediation has been slow to catch on in the rest of the state. Further studies need to be done and the process of complete soil rehabilitation would likely take several years. But the Mi’kmaq tribe understands the need for a longer timeline.

“This is an area where the air force was spraying PFAs for over 50 years,” explains Stanley, “so it doesn’t make sense that you can pollute for that long and have a solution in a very short time. [Mi’kmaq] Chief Peter Paul said this land will be with us forever, so if it takes a generation or two to clean it, it will be worth it for the people in the future.”

Holding on to Hope

The Maine DEP maintains a map of where the sludge was originally spread and continues testing farms where contamination is a concern. But for now, many of the experts we spoke to say they feel hopeful about what the future holds for PFAS remediation in the state.

“It’s important to realize we have over 76,000 farms in Maine, and the vast majority do not have PFAs concerns.”

“It’s important to realize we have over 76,000 farms in Maine, and the vast majority do not have PFAs concerns,” says McBrady of DACF.

Despite his own farm’s trajectory, Adam Nordell is proud of how Maine stepped up to support its farmers. “We embraced transparency,” he says. “Those who stayed in business won an incredible amount of trust, and several of them have actually grown their sales in the same year they had to stop sales—that’s an incredible success story coming out of a crisis.”

Songbird Farm (Photo credit: Jenny McNulty)

Nordell hopes other farmers, scientists, and NGOs can learn from what has transpired in Maine. “Other states are starting to test,” he says. “They need to be ready with a safety net when farmers discover they have contamination on their land, so people can stay in business.”

The organizations that originally banded together to handle the emergency response to the PFAS crisis have now shifted to searching for long-term solutions. And they remain optimistic that they’ll find them.

In late October, delegates from MFT and the three universities involved in researching farmland will gather in Michigan for the second annual symposium on the Current Knowledge and Application for Agricultural Production of PFAS, where they hope to encourage collaboration and present research on farmland remediation possibilities.

“Academics around the world want to work on this and solve these problems,” says Fisher MFT. “Connecting them to farmers is how we can contribute.”

The post PFAS Shut Maine Farms Down. Now, Some Are Rebounding. appeared first on Civil Eats.

The True Cost of Tuna: Marine Observers Dying at Sea

Lee van der Voo — Tue, 23 May 2023 08:00:11 +0000

Simi Cagilaba could hear the fighting outside his cabin door. In the hallway of the 209-foot tuna seiner, drunken crewmen were roiling the ship yet again. It was late, and the vessel was bobbing on the currents of the South Pacific, the fighting typical of nights when the cook let the crew drink the rice wine. Now, the unwelcome clamor moved toward his door like another bad omen in a trip that was steadily devolving.

An official observer of marine fisheries, Cagilaba was miles offshore of the Marshall Islands, dispatched aboard the seiner then known as the Sea Quest. It was 2015. He had a background in marine affairs and was working for the Fijian government in its national Ministry of Fisheries, tasked with upholding a patchwork of regulations meant to safeguard tuna.

Among the harassment observers have faced: Being locked in their rooms, threatened at knifepoint, chased around docks, forced to accept bribes, raped, starved, pressured to sign off on sustainability criteria. Conditions in the South Pacific are among the worst.

He was used to being a lone technician amid raucous crews, overseeing fishing on vessels from all over the world. He had been an observer for 18 years, deployed for weeks at a time in gigs that net some of the best wages around. But this deployment was an outlier. Earlier in the trip, Cagilaba had watched as the captain of the Sea Quest twice falsified catch reports.

Then he’d seen two crewmen dumping 10 hefty bales of plastic and straps into the sea. The captain had been menacing Cagilaba ever since, pestering him to censor his report in a not-nice way that went from uncomfortable to unnerving. Once back on land, it was a saga that would cost Cagilaba his job. But the trick at the time was to stay alive until he got there.

“Others will not be coming home at all,” Cagilaba said. Years later, he recalled the experience in testimony to Congress during a probe of observer harassment at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), an agency his employer frequently partnered with.

His story echoes others like it. Harassment of marine observers aboard fishing vessels is one of the industry’s worst-kept secrets. In a survey of observers in the United States alone, about half said that they had been harassed on the job. Anecdotally, Liz Mitchell, president of the Association for Professional Observers (APO) and herself a former observer, says the APO routinely logs stories of such incidents. The APO’s website describes them in detail: observers locked in their rooms, threatened at knifepoint, chased around docks, forced to accept bribes, raped, starved, pressured to sign off on sustainability criteria. Conditions in the South Pacific are among the worst.

This is the true price of a can of tuna, that lucrative shelf-stable fare that whips from the Pacific Ocean onto grocery shelves like millions of widgets flung from a slingshot. Amid rising numbers of marine observers allegedly murdered and disappeared at sea, Cagilaba’s story underscores how little words like “sustainably caught” and “certified” may mean when it comes to protecting the humans in the supply chain. And how much grocery and retail brands profit anyway.

Industry experts say that purveyors of canned tuna—major grocers like Walmart, Costco, Aldi, and Albertsons and the brands that stock their shelves—have the power to pressure tuna suppliers to ensure the safety of marine observers, not to mention fishing crews. Mostly, they don’t. In years past, that’s been because they’ve had little way of knowing when the boats they buy from are responsible for throwing observers overboard, bringing them lifeless into port after “accidents,” or harboring polluters, carrying slaves, or indulging in other kinds of human rights abuses.

Technology is now slowly making these questions answerable, however. So, too, are strategies to strengthen the laws and relationships that make such behavior unacceptable, or at least unprofitable.

“Global seafood supply chains are notoriously opaque. No one knows what’s going on there. And the companies are benefitting from that.”

As connecting problem boats to products becomes possible, advocates for at-sea workers question whether it is now just inconvenience, rather than geography or logistics, that still causes retail brands and grocers to stand aside while observers like Cagilaba are risking—and increasingly losing—their lives at sea. Whatever the reason, critics say those who earn the most money on tuna aren’t doing enough to secure the well-being of those who earn the least.

“As you go back in the supply chain, the difference in profits between what retailers make and what you see at the fishing vessel level is so vast . . . It’s almost four times more,” said Mallika Talwar, a senior oceans campaigner at Greenpeace.

Tuna brands like Bumble Bee, StarKist, and Chicken of the Sea and the grocers that sell their products anchor one end of the supply chain. Workers aboard fishing vessels and the observers entrusted to watch them are on the other. In between, “Global seafood supply chains are notoriously opaque,” said Talwar. “No one knows what’s going on there. And the companies are benefitting from that.”

Observing How Your Canned Tuna Gets Caught

To understand how this all works, and how it could work better, imagine the vast swath of water between the west coast of the U.S. and the eastern flank of Asia being cradled by a string of islands—Pacific Island nations—like a watermelon teetering on the bowl of a long-handled spoon. More than 1.5 million square miles of ocean make up the watermelon and are home to migrating tunas worth billions in the global market. The fish don’t care about national borders. But people do, especially in places where there is little land and few natural resources to claim besides the fish in the water.

So it is that island nations and states—from Papua New Guinea to Hawaii and south to New Zealand—have staked their claims to swaths of ocean in the tunas’ paths. On maps, each nation sits within its own ring. And everyone generally agrees that the rings denote each nation’s territorial seas. A smattering of treaties and agreements delineate who can fish where within the rings. And the unclaimed sea beyond is governed by regional authorities that function about as efficiently as the U.S. Congress.

Marine observers like Cagilaba are deployed in concert with the rules that nations and regional authorities make. Employed by a handful of companies and several governments, their job is to collect important data about the fish and to ensure that the people on the boats don’t pillage or pollute. Thus, marine observers are the last men and women standing between any island nation and the destructive potential of its seafaring visitors. Sometimes that’s a dangerous place to be standing.

Illustration credit: Tina Zellmer

This is where more than half of the world’s tuna supply comes from. It includes fresh-caught fish as well as canned, though the cans fuel the wealthiest actors. Canned tuna accounts for two-thirds of the $42 billion industry worldwide. The companies behind the Bumble Bee, Chicken of the Sea, and StarKist brands control the largest share of those cans. It is this multi-billion-dollar haul that entices vessels from all over the world to hunt what is arguably the largest and most lucrative wild protein supply left on Earth. But while marine observers protect the fish, there are scant protections for the observers themselves. Sometimes, the job is a little like being sent behind enemy lines to make sure that the other army plays fair.

For Cagilaba, the trip aboard the Sea Quest was one of those times. After he refused the captain’s entreaties to fudge his reports to authorities, as he later told Congress, he heard the captain on the phone, complaining loudly and falsely about him in what the captain had warned would be a call to a friend at NOAA. The captain was highly motivated to influence NOAA’s official narrative of the trip.

The plastics dumping alone was a violation of a MARPOL convention, an international treaty that spelled big trouble for any vessel. It was especially big trouble for this vessel, which had just been fined for hanging lights off the boat and into the water to cause the fish to aggregate there, a violation of another treaty between the U.S. and island nations. The dumping and the fictitious catch reports could provoke legal action, fines, and possibly criminal charges.

Inside the wheelhouse, a rough cube with windows towering high above the Sea Quest’s deck, Cagilaba could hear the captain describing him in harsh and fictitious terms. The next day, he received an email from his boss via the captain, who’d been contacted by NOAA. It read:

“Simi . . . Just to remind you that you are an observer . . . You are never to direct or make threats to anybody on board the vessel.”

Rules to Protect Marine Observers

Protections for marine observers would begin to take shape later that year. The effort followed the disappearance of a prominent American observer who went missing during the transshipment of tuna from one boat to another somewhere west of Peru soon after Cagilaba’s Sea Quest tour. The investigation of his disappearance soon gave new urgency to other reports of disappearances and deaths of marine observers. Within two and a half years, one of the primary regulatory authorities presiding over the watermelon—the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, or WCPFC—would pass a measure committing its member nations to observer safety to discourage these kinds of things from happening again.

This would be the first mandate to protect marine observers adopted by the world’s international authorities. It followed rules intended to equip observers with two-way satellite radios to give them a direct line of communication back to land. This, so they could subvert ship systems if ever they were under threat, bypassing the captain and crew. Under the measure, participating nations would also be expected to ensure that observers made it off the boat alive.

However, none of that was rule yet. Stuck aboard the Sea Quest, Cagilaba had safety gear to help him survive the water should the crew decide to throw him in. But he lacked a radio.

So, he did what he could. He sent an email through the ship’s system detailing the situation to one of his supervisors back in Fiji. It was a dangerous move—the captain could see all that he wrote. But Cagilaba wanted the opportunity to explain himself to his employer. And he wanted to get off of the Sea Quest. Still, he knew the score. The captain’s NOAA contact was a long-serving officer in the National Marine Fisheries Service, a fixture in the small enclave of South Pacific fishery regulators since at least the ‘90s. Cagilaba’s own bosses already favored the man.

That the Sea Quest was American-flagged was part of the rub. In reality, the ship was Taiwanese. So were all the officers on board, save for the captain, an American whose nationality enabled the flag. Taiwanese vessels are notoriously bad actors in these parts. An investigation of the nation’s more than 1,390 flagged and foreign operated vessels by the Environmental Justice Foundation between 2016 and 2020 would later surface charges of illegal activity on 10 percent of those boats, ranging from abusing and enslaving crews to illegal fishing and other international atrocities, like killing whales and using dolphins as bait. These were crimes that the American government was, by proxy in this scenario, now associating with.

To further complicate things, the two men whose fighting later unspooled outside Cagilaba’s cabin door were not at all his fans, thanks to his having turned them both in for violations on other trips. And because of the jurisdictional challenges of prosecuting any crime at sea—Cagilaba was a Fijian aboard an American-flagged vessel crewed by Taiwanese officers and whose fishing port was in the Marshall Islands—there was no guarantee of consequences if the Sea Quest returned to port without him.

Illustration credit: Tina Zellmer

So, Cagilaba told Congress later, he stayed up most of that night and every other night after, sleeping during lulls in the fishing during the day while the crew was kept sober and busy. Days passed.

Challenges with the U.S. Approach to Illegal Seafood

In Europe, it’s illegal to sell a product that’s tied to illegal fishing. In the U.S., not so much.

The brands that rule the cans—StarKist, Chicken of the Sea, Bumble Bee—have all been purchased by Asian companies since 2000, and their sustainability commitments have shifted.

“In Europe, the retailers over the last 10 years have evolved in a different way,” said Daniel Suddaby, vice president at the international nonprofit Ocean Outcomes, which promotes healthy ocean ecosystems, fishing communities, and plentiful and profitable seafood. “Most will have a team of three to four quite qualified and experienced marine scientist advocates who really understand the issues. And they will engage in it in more of a deep, meaningful, and careful way. It’s not to say there isn’t a ton of risk in the supply chain in Europe.”

The purchasing risks he describes come with responsibilities. Businesses that import seafood are legally required to undertake due diligence to ensure they’re not buying illegal catch. They also have to be able to demonstrate the steps they take to ensure the legal purchase.

Those steps support port inspectors, whose job is to check catch certificates supplied by foreign exporters. Regular audits assess whether the countries that import seafood to the European Union—there’s an approved list—are honoring agreements to keep illegal catch out of their exports. Problem nations are graded with yellow and red cards that help businesses understand where the greatest risks lie when they’re buying seafood from abroad. When they improve, those colors switch to green.

In the U.S., there’s no such framework. Instead, port inspectors are the only bulwark against all illegal catch. The U.S. does have a Seafood Import Monitoring Program, but the regulators that oversee it don’t often issue information that helps businesses understand purchasing risk. Brands that import seafood face no legal liability if they buy illegal catch. Neither do retailers. In short, there is little incentive to do anything more than shrug about widely known abuses of fishing and humanitarian rules.

Some American importers are interested in trying to resist illegal fare anyway, especially more boutique retailers that serve a more socially conscious shopper. But the marketplace doesn’t make it easy. Huw Thomas, a seafood industry consultant for Global Fishing Watch, says that to really assess the sustainability and human rights record of a product, “there’s 200 data sets that a business would need to know. It’s beyond their capabilities to get their arms around it.” Retailers also stock tens of thousands of products, and struggle to prioritize what to check.

But retailers do have power. Lots of it, though the weight of the lucrative end of the supply chain has not been brought to bear on better regulations, frameworks, and accountability for tuna suppliers. It’s a fact that allows bad actors to fish as profitably as the vast majority of those who follow the rules, if not more so.

What’s more, the brands that rule the cans—StarKist, Chicken of the Sea, Bumble Bee—are all following the lead of the U.S.’s largest grocers. Those brands have all been purchased by Asian companies since 2000. Bumble Bee was bought by Fong Chun Formosa Fishery Company, Ltd. (FCF) of Kaoshiung, Taiwan, in 2021; StarKist by Dongwon Group of Seoul and Busan, South Korea, in 2008; and Chicken of the Sea was fully acquired by Thai Union Group of Samut Sakhon, Thailand, in 2000. As each company has reorganized its leadership, sustainability commitments have shifted.

Chicken of the Sea has continued some efforts. The company has a vessel code of conduct program, and it said in a statement that it is engaged in third-party audits of its supply chain. Its leadership has joined the boards of other organizations aimed at reducing illegal fishing and human rights abuses. It’s also made commitments to source all of its tuna from monitored vessels, either human or otherwise, and to reduce fishery bycatch, though the deadlines for meeting those goals are still ahead.

Illustration credit: Tina Zellmer

At Bumble Bee, however, trends toward cleaning up the supply chain have reversed course, with its former sustainability targets ratcheted downward since its FCF buyout. Bumble Bee did not respond to requests for comment about these issues. StarKist also did not respond to a request for comment about its efforts to combat illegal seafood and human rights abuses. “These companies are super sensitive to what the retailers are asking,” said Suddaby. And yet, he adds: “Some of the big retailers in the U.S. have limited understandings of the sustainability issues.”

This is why many large U.S. retailers default to third-party certifiers like the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) instead of staffing or partnering with qualified, experienced marine science advocates. “What would really be supportive for sustainability, as well as the MSC push, is having the big retailers say to FCF, ‘You need to greatly increase observer coverage,’” said Suddaby.

Instead, MSC certifies seafood to environmental standards. It is seen as better than nothing by advocates. But it lacks clear human rights standards, even though its certifications depend on the work of marine observers, as well as the work of the crews that catch the fish. The approach hasn’t worked to defend against human rights abuses. In the last seven years, Human Rights at Sea (HRAS) found, four observers have gone missing from or died suspiciously aboard four different vessels that were authorized to fish MSC-certified tuna by regional authorities. A fifth observer had also disappeared from a vessel in 2010. His remains were later recovered—his legs and body bound by chains.

In a statement, MSC’s head of social policy, Oluyemisi Oloruntuyi, stressed that the organization certifies only fisheries, not the boats that catch MSC fish, which are determined by regional fisheries authorities. Two of the boats on which observers died never did fish MSC catch, despite having permission to, according to the statement. And MSC questions the motivations behind the report, which HRAS discloses was funded by World Wise Foods. World Wise Foods shares a chairman with the International Pole and Line Foundation, an organization that promotes competing sectors and is a historic critic of the fishery, and sources tuna from a commercial competitor.

Such hair-splitting statements effectively allow MSC to avoid accountability for the challenges faced by observers, but they are hallmarks of the global tuna industry. And while the Sea Quest was fishing conventional—not MSC—tuna at the time, this is the marketplace that Cagilaba was working in while under threat and under-slept aboard the Sea Quest in 2015.

Certain of the dangers, he hastened to get off at the next port. His supervisors had already told him to stay on board via email. But once the Sea Quest docked in the Marshall Islands, Cagilaba quickly made contact with the observer coordinator for the Ministry of Fisheries. He tried again to relay his unease about the fudged catch reports, the threats from the captain, and the captain’s call to the American official who’d relayed the fictitious narrative of the trip to his bosses. The coordinator downplayed Cagilaba’s account, according to Cagilaba’s statements to Congress. Then he told him to get back on the boat.

Later, Cagilaba learned that the coordinator was friends with the Sea Quest’s agent, another cog in a shaky wheel, rattled by corruption. Once told to get back aboard, he knew his report would be buried. And that if he didn’t make it known soon, somehow, he was unlikely to get off the Sea Quest alive.

‘Retailer Apathy’ for Addressing Marine Observer Safety

This is the part of the industry that is lesser known: How shaky this wheel is. Observer harassment aboard fishing vessels is well understood. But that observers face harassment from compromised program and agency staff is less common knowledge.

According to the survey of American observers by NOAA Fisheries, among the 46 percent who said they had been harassed at sea, most were either dissatisfied or nonplussed by the experience of reporting it. Nearly 60 percent of those who made reports said there was no response. And some feared the repercussions of saying anything: fewer deployments, assignments back to problem vessels. “Some respondents mentioned that most of time they handled situations on their own, since they felt that some observer program staff would not take their reports seriously,” the survey found.

The extent to which officials in observer programs and oversight agencies were being co-opted into the dark underworld of tuna—and how often tuna brands play along—would become better understood in 2020. That’s the year that Eritara Aati Kaierua, a fishery observer from Kiribati, was brought ashore lifeless by a Taiwanese purse seiner, the Win Far 636, after a tuna fishing trip off the coast of Nauru.

Observer harassment aboard fishing vessels is well understood, but observers also face harassment from compromised program and agency staff.

Kaierua should have been protected under the new WCPFC mandate for observer safety. But while working as part of a special project to certify tuna for MSC, he was found dead in one of the boat’s cabins. An autopsy later conducted in Fiji found he had died from a blow to the head. Local authorities next opened a murder investigation, but it has never concluded.

“We initially heard that it was homicide. Then seven months later, we heard of a second opinion that changed the cause of death to natural causes due to hypertension,” Nicky Kaierua, his sister, said in an email. She added that she has seen the initial autopsy report on her brother and is confident that hypertension didn’t cause his death. That word—hypertension—has now been used to explain two other observer deaths, and families of observers missing and murdered in the Pacific have come together in grief to note their experiences with its use.

Some charge that authorities are unmotivated to resolve such cases in countries that are economically dependent on fishing, or reluctant to take a tough stance on all crimes at sea. Tuna accounts for a substantial share of jobs in the Pacific Islands and an often-larger share of public spending. In Kiribati, for example, tuna revenues fuel 63 percent of the national budget. The geopolitics and jurisdictional mayhem involved with prosecuting crimes aboard foreign fishing vessels, or involving citizens from other countries or both, also don’t make it easy.

Meanwhile, Nicky Kaierua said, “My brother’s ‘unsolved’ death has had devastating impacts on our family.” Like many observers, Kaierua was his family’s breadwinner, supporting a wife and four children who have had little financial support since he died. “Fisheries observers are often forewarned that the job is risky. They are also told that the position comes with good pay because of the risk that comes with it. My brother earned 60 Australian dollars a day. Should we be lenient on their safety because they get a little bit extra?”

According to the investigation by Human Rights at Sea, after the Win Far 636 brought Kaierua’s body back to port, it took regional authorities another 38 days to suspend the boat’s certificate to fish in the MSC program. MSC later emphasized that its certification was an environmental standard, not a human rights one, in a statement, which noted that it took steps to assure that no catch from the vessel entered the supply chain as MSC-certified.

Some charge that authorities are unmotivated to resolve such cases in countries that are economically dependent on fishing; in Kiribati, for example, tuna revenues fuel 63 percent of the national budget.

APO has since recommended that programs like MSC have criteria that protect observers and processes that gauge whether those programs work. APO has also pressed the international community to outlaw observer harassment globally and document observer deaths for the public.

In response to such critiques, the MSC introduced new requirements in October 2022 that “entities involved in unacceptable conduct inclusive of mistreatment of crew and fisheries observers must be removed from MSC certificates.” It also gave $137,000 toward the development of communications technology and a review of observer programs in April 2021. But those changes won’t impact the Win Far 636. In July 2022, after no criminal charges were filed in Kaierua’s death, the boat was again certified to fish MSC tuna through 2025.

Observer advocates admit that blacklisting problem boats and companies can sometimes backfire anyway, making space for other bad actors. Most believe the best response to human rights abuses would be for grocers to use their market heft to directly push their suppliers toward better practices, moving the whole market. Among retailers that use MSC as a proxy for examining supply chains, however, that conversation isn’t happening, at least not publicly.

Costco declined to comment for this article. Neither Albertsons, Walmart, nor Aldi responded to requests for interviews or comments. And it’s this distinctive indifference, an overall lack of action, that critics describe as most problematic, an institutional buck-passing that is a defining characteristic of the tuna marketplace.

“You can call it retailer apathy,” said Talwar of Greenpeace. In its own survey of tuna retailers, Greenpeace found that only five of 16 of the largest retailers that sell tuna took specific steps to advocate for observer protections. Among those, most had only gone as far as to formally encourage observer programs to work together toward an International Observer Bill of Rights. In evaluating tuna retailers overall, Talwar said, “They’re far behind anything that we would expect from companies that are in this business.”

Most believe the best response to human rights abuses would be for grocers to use their market heft to directly push their suppliers toward better practices, moving the whole market.

Most large retailers just return to the same big cans. They buy from StarKist, Chicken of the Sea, and Bumble Bee, primarily, and acquiesce to whatever supply-chain due-diligence the brands provide. In its investigation of Kaierua’s death, Human Rights at Sea found that it was most likely Bumble Bee’s parent company, FCF, that bought the tuna from the ill-fated voyage. It wasn’t the first time that suspected illegal fishing was found in the Bumble Bee supply chain. In March 2023, Bumble Bee agreed to remove the terms “fair and safe supply chain” and “fair and responsible working conditions” from its website, social media, and advertising for a decade after being sued by a labor rights group for allegedly violating consumer protection laws by claiming them.

But not much, otherwise, has changed. The Win Far 636, while it continues fishing, is just as connected to the tuna marketplace as ever, one of 27 vessels owned by a consortium of companies that delivers its MSC catch to FCF for canning for Bumble Bee and Chicken of the Sea, among other brands. Then there’s that other vessel, the Sea Quest. At the time of Cagilaba’s voyage, it was owned by a company run by a prominent group of tuna executives, including those with ties to Chicken of the Sea, Mitsui, and headed by FCF president, Max Chou. A spokesman for the company declined to comment, citing corporate policy.

Technology, Policy, and Consumer Pressure for Change

Cagilaba never got back aboard the Sea Quest. After his supervisor told him to, he refused and walked straight to the refuge of the U.S. Embassy in Majuro, Marshall Islands, where officials reacted swiftly. They sent a message to NOAA recommending that Cagilaba not be sent back to the vessel. And, he told Congress, they secured his report to keep it from being buried once he arrived back in Fiji and gave it to his employer.

That report later led to an investigation that, like that of Kaierua’s death, went nowhere. Then the Sea Quest also disappeared. Records show it was renamed Joe Turner, sold to a new owner in the Philippines, and now fishes tuna for a seafood company that charters it from Papua New Guinea. Nambawan Seafoods PNG Limited is one of FCF’s many partners in the region.

It is common for formal inquiries like Cagilaba’s to be abandoned, languishing in a state of perpetual unresolve, and for problem boats to vanish into the opacity of the tuna supply chain, while issues aboard go unresolved. Yet a combination of technology, policy, and consumer pressure on suppliers could actually keep the problem from happening in the first place.

Illustration credit: Tina Zellmer

Most people working for brands and retailers know this. But none were willing to go on record to talk about an effort that’s now underway to connect the fish they sell with whatever happens on the boats when it’s caught.

That work—called the SCRP, or Supply Chain Risk Project—is being led by a trifecta of institutions adept at using technology and data to track illegal fishing. They include Global Fishing Watch, which creates and shares knowledge about human activity at sea; the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions, which leads research and innovation involving oceans; and FishWise, which works with companies to address environmental and humanitarian goals in seafood supply chains. Hosted by the World Economic Forum, the three are steeped in a massive data project that can help retailers check a supplier’s word. And maybe twist their arm.

The data comes from global tracking devices that use transceivers on ships, called AIS or Automatic Identification System, that are required aboard vessels and can be tracked by satellite and analyzed by the likes of Global Fishing Watch. To watch a vessel through AIS is to understand where it is in the ocean, when it ports and anchors, and when it’s making the kinds of maneuvers associated with fishing. It’s possible to use that data to see, say, when a boat is fishing in a marine protected area. Or when a vessel’s beacon shuts off right outside of one.

Such systems don’t eliminate the need for observers, even when paired with cameras aboard boats. Fisheries scientists maintain that having a human presence at least 20 percent of the time is still critical to guaranteeing that the science underpinning stock assessments that guide fishing are accurate. Observers also collect a lot of other information—details about the age of the fish caught, and ratios of males to females, for example—that help set the rules about what fish can be caught where.

That said, digital oversight that can command better practices is increasingly possible, if not imminent. Some private sector companies that use blockchain to collect data at various points along the supply chain, such as Wholechain, say they are already close to pinpointing vessels tied to observer deaths and other human rights abuses. Whether that oversight someday comes with consumer-facing tools that assure customers a safe supply chain is up to the companies. But it’s now conceivable. And that’s no small thing.

Details about which corporations’ data is powering the SCRP’s test drive are top secret and, again, none of the major tuna brands or grocers—Aldi, Walmart, Costco, Albertsons, Bumble Bee, StarKist, and Chicken of the Sea—would comment on the effort to daylight the seafood supply chain, or say whether they’re involved. Right now, it is being funded by philanthropists.

The fact that some retailers are indeed in the mix, even behind the scenes, is likely good news for Cagilaba’s ilk, who had no such potential ally back in 2015. It’s unclear who bought the catch from his harrowing trip, to what market it flew, or where in the world it landed. But it’s clear that the answers to those questions would allow people on one end of the supply chain to bolster the safety for those on the other end.

While digital oversight can command better practices at sea, fisheries scientists maintain that having a human presence at least 20 percent of the time is still critical to guaranteeing the accuracy of the stock assessments that guide fishing.

For Cagilaba, back in Fiji, safety was a relative term. He was fired within months, while the NOAA investigation of his rough tour aboard the Sea Quest was still underway. It took six months for NOAA’s law enforcement to interview him. And as far as he could tell later, the only result was an early retirement.

“It made me realize that some government officials from the Pacific island countries are overly familiar with the fishing company personnel and their boat agents and have been compromised, making our jobs as fisheries observers impossible and dangerous,” he wrote in testimony to Congress later.

Cagilaba eventually moved to America, became a criminal investigator first, and then a lawyer. No more boisterous drunks in the night, captains that could order him thrown into the sea, or employers who wouldn’t prevent it.

It’s too late for 13 of his colleagues who have died since 2014. It may not be too late for the rest.

Ofani Eremae contributed reporting.

This story was produced with support from Internews’ Earth Journalism Network and the Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources.

The post The True Cost of Tuna: Marine Observers Dying at Sea appeared first on Civil Eats.

How the Jackson Water Crisis Is Hurting Its Restaurants

Christina Cooke — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 08:00:18 +0000

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

When historic flooding caused the pumps to fail at a water treatment plant in Jackson, Mississippi, last August, leaving the city without running water for about a week, restaurateur Jeff Good had to close all three of his establishments.

Even when water finally did return to the tap, it was unsafe to drink. In order to operate under the nine-week boil-water notice, Good had to buy bottled water for baking, washing vegetables, and filling customers’ glasses. He also had to turn off his ice machines and soda fountain and serve commercial ice and canned sodas.

“It’s $2,000 per restaurant per week in extra expenses,” said the owner of BRAVO! Italian restaurant, the Broad Street bakery and café, and Sal & Mookie’s pizza and ice cream joint. “So that’s $18,000 over nine weeks for three restaurants. And we never get that money back.”

“If we can fix this water system and start a different narrative, investment can come back and the city can rebirth, and we can be a great story.”

Other restaurateurs also reported damage. At Johnny T’s Bistro and Blues in the Farish Street Historic District, John Tierre bought the same extra supplies—and paid his staff to come in one to two hours early each day to unpack and distribute them and boil dishwater, Tierre said.

At Lou’s Full-Serv, owner Louis LaRose said, “We went from having a good summer and a little bit of cash flow to basically zero cash flow. We were so slow that it literally almost bankrupted us.”

The August water crisis resolved, at least for the short term, after Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves declared a state of emergency and brought in the Mississippi National Guard to distribute safe water and oversee emergency repairs, and after President Joe Biden declared Jackson a disaster area and sent in the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) with resources and assistance.

While the city’s water shutdown made national news, it wasn’t the first time water issues have plagued the Mississippi capital. Decades of deferred maintenance to the crumbling water system—some parts of which are more than 100 years old—coupled with recent extreme weather events like freezes and flooding have brought the system to its breaking point.

Some see mismanagement and poor planning at the local level at the root of the water crisis. Others see racism as the cause; as a progressive city that is 84 percent Black in a conservative, white-led state, the city for years has not often received the state support it has requested to address its challenges.

But now, for the first time, the federal government has stepped in in a major way. In November 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice appointed a third-party manager—water systems expert Ted Henifin—to fix the drinking water and the associated billing system, allocating $600 million for that job exclusively.

With the repair process underway, many hope this can be a turning point—for the city’s residents and also for the restaurants and other businesses that keep the city’s economy afloat and its identity intact.

Good says repairing the infrastructure is a crucial first step. “If we can fix this water system and start a different narrative, investment can come back and the city can rebirth, and we can be a great story,” he said.

A Long-Failing Water System

Jackson has faced population decline and severe economic challenges over the last few decades. The city shrunk from around 203,000 residents in 1980 to around 150,000 residents in 2021 as many white people fled the city limits, taking their wealth—and tax dollars—with them.

While the suburbs surrounding Jackson—nonexistent in the ’80s—are growing and thriving, the city’s 26 percent poverty rate is more than twice the national rate of 11.6 percent.

“Our city has been tanking year after year,” said Good, who in addition to owning three restaurants is past president of the Jackson Chamber of Commerce. “Every system we have—social, educational, economic, public safety, public works—is strained and failing. And that’s led to the outflow of care and economics. We have hit rock bottom.”

Without a solid revenue stream over the last few decades—and with problems including residents altering their meters to avoid paying for water and the 2012 installation of a faulty water meter and billing system by the German technology company Siemens—city leaders have not had the money necessary to maintain the water system. And with severe worker shortages and high turnover, the water department does not have enough operators on staff to conduct preventative maintenance.

Amidst this dysfunction and neglect, Jackson residents and businesses became accustomed to regular service shut offs, line breaks, boil-water notices, low pressure, and exposure to lead and harmful bacteria like E. coli. In March 2020, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued an emergency administrative order for the Jackson water system—one of many official warnings about the city’s water—saying it put consumers’ health at risk.

Then in February 2021, when the winter freeze took out the Texas power grid, old pipes in Jackson froze and burst, leaving the city without clean water for more than a month.

“A two- to three-day boil notice poses challenges for restaurants,” said LaRose of Lou’s Full-Serv. “You multiply that by 50 days, and you can’t wash lettuce, you can’t wash fruits and vegetables, you’ve got to boil water and cool it or buy distilled water. Your costs go through the roof.”

“My mom and my aunt say, ‘You’ve got this big fancy restaurant in Jackson, but y’all don’t have running water.’ It’s kind of embarrassing that in 2023 a city doesn’t have running water.”

Tensions between the city and state leaders have been running high, including a particularly hostile relationship between Chokwe Antar Lumumba, Jackson’s progressive mayor, and Reeves, Mississippi’s conservative governor. Reeves has described the water situation as “a crisis of incompetence,” implicating Lumumba, and Lumumba has characterized the state’s dealings with Jackson as “racist” and “paternalistic.” When Jackson asked for $47 million from the state to fix the pipes after the big freeze to try to get ahead of the problem, for instance, it received $3 million, 6 percent of the requested amount.

Though the city’s water system has stabilized since the August crisis, there have been a number of boil-water notices issued, and people generally don’t trust Jackson water, which makes them wary of eating out, restaurant owners say.

“My mom and my aunt say, ‘You’ve got this big fancy restaurant in Jackson, but y’all don’t have running water,’” Tierre said. “It’s kind of embarrassing that in 2023 a city doesn’t have running water.”

Good sees water as vital to restaurants’ success—and restaurants as vital to the city’s success. “I hire 210 people—they’re all Jacksonians,” he said. In his 30 years in business, he estimates he has hired between 10,000 and 20,000 people. “I am a major job provider here, and a major quality-of-life provider, and an economic engine,” he said.

After the August outage, Good organized a coalition of 46 Jackson restaura teurs, including Tierre and LaRose, asking city, county, and state representatives to cooperate to solve the problems. Without a solid fix, he said, “we’re going to become a burned-out donut—we will be the hole and around us will be great wealth and prosperity.”

Brent’s Drugs manager Sarah Donald pours bottled water into a coffee pot during the September 2022 water crisis. (Photo © Rory Doyle)

Neglect, Bad Planning, Racism—or All Three?

Some Jacksonians blame local lawmakers. “There has been mismanagement through local government and leaders for so long,” said LaRose. “I don’t care if they’re blue or red, it has been mismanaged. People choose not to work with one another, and nothing gets done.”

Tierre of Johnny T’s sees the issue as primarily about money. “You can shake it how you want to, but the bottom line is, it’s economics, it’s funding,” he said.

Others, however, see racism at the root. In September 2022, the NAACP filed a complaint with the EPA under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, citing a history of discrimination through the repeated rejection of requests for federal funds to address the problem.

“The water crisis in Jackson is just the latest example of a negligent—if not racist—pattern of underfunding basic water services for Black communities,” added Abre’ Conner, NAACP’s Director of Environmental and Climate Justice. “Our country has a longstanding history of mistreating and neglecting Black communities, putting the lives of men, women, and children at risk.”

Cindy Ayers Elliott, owner of the 68-acre Foot Print Farms, which sits within the Jackson city limits, sees the disinvestment as an intentional move on the part of conservative state leaders to disempower the Black city and take control, as has happened in other parts of the U.S.

“The policies that they are pushing and the legislation that they have been passing, without a doubt, brings you back into the ’40s or ’50s,” she said. “They keep this state depressed, deprived of resources that [should be] available to the people . . . It’s just a different way they’re lynching now. And it’s with the dollar, and with something as basic as water.”’

Indeed, in recent years, the state has repeatedly attempted to gain control of the city’s spending, services, and infrastructure. State leaders have tried to take over the Jackson airport and expand the jurisdiction of the Capitol police. Then, in January, Republican state legislators introduced a bill that would place Jackson’s water systems under state control, giving the state access to the $600 million designated by the federal government for the repairs.

Notices posted on the social media pages of Broad Street Baking Company & Cafe and Lou’s Full-Serve during the 2022 water crisis.

‘I Believe in the City; I Fight for the Underdog’

Since he started, Henifin, the third-party manager, has set to work on 13 main priorities. To rebuild trust, he has created a water bill debt-relief program for residents who were unfairly overcharged.

Additionally, Henifin’s team is identifying leaks in the system and creating plans to replace small-diameter water lines with larger ones. They have also lined up systems for corrosion control and identifying lead.

The restaurateurs Civil Eats spoke to expressed confidence in Henifin’s leadership, and a sense of relief that the water system is in the hands of a competent federal appointee with the money to complete the work. And many are committed to sticking with the city through what they expect to be a long process.

“I understand it won’t get fixed overnight. It’ll probably take 10 to 15 years,” said Tierre. “But I think the people of Jackson are strong. So, we’ll get through it, and we’ll continue to thrive.”

Good is aware he could move across the Pearl River into Rankin County and earn more in sales—without the water issues. “But I believe in the city, and I fight for the underdog. I have a deep-seated belief that business has a responsibility to the community,” he said. “And I tend to believe that we’re going to rebirth, and this is going to be the phoenix from the ashes.”

“I have high hopes,” said LaRose. “If nothing else, I’ve got hope.”

The post How the Jackson Water Crisis Is Hurting Its Restaurants appeared first on Civil Eats.