fowl
TEDxSydney
Following the family tradition, Chris Darwin is leading the fight to protect animals from extinction.
Great, great grandson of Charles Darwin says we must change our diet to prevent more wildlife dying off.
Following the family tradition, Chris Darwin is leading the fight to protect animals from extinction
Great, great grandson of Charles Darwin says we must change our diet to prevent more wildlife dying off
Jane Dalton @IndyVoices Sunday 8 October 2017 00:00 BST
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The Independent Online
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“Chip is much more popular than me everywhere we go,” Chris Darwin says, jovially co-operating by posing for photos with the toy bald eagle he carries on his shoulder. “I nicked him from my children’s bedroom and he gets lots of attention.”
To meet Mr Darwin, laidback, cheerful and ultra-friendly, you would never guess he tried to commit suicide 26 years ago. He’s perfectly open about it, as much as he is passionate about his new work that sprang from the famous surname.
Mr Darwin’s great, great grandfather, Charles, may have developed the theory of the origin of species but today his descendant has picked up the evolutionary science baton to defend mass extinctions of species.
“We all have crucibles,” he says of the dark period when, aged 30, he tried to end his life by cycling over a cliff (he was saved by a random tree branch). “Critical moments when something normally bad happens that changes the rest of your life, and mine was this suicide event. Slowly I came to the concept that I needed purpose in life.”
Darwin the younger looked at all the world’s big problems – starvation, polluted water, disease – and settled on the crisis of mass extinctions as one he felt he wanted to help tackle. “So in 1991 I set off down that road.”
Bird man: Chris Darwin is making it his mission to halt wildlife decline (Jane Dalton)
When asked to what extent he was influenced by his legendary ancestor’s work in identifying the origins of man, he bursts into a roar of laughter. “It was entirely independent,” he insists in a voice heavy with irony.
Chris Darwin, 56, had come to London from his home in Australia for a groundbreaking conference attempting to tackle the growing crisis of the world’s rapidly diminishing wildlife, and one of the key causes of that loss – worldwide demand for meat.
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More than 50 of the best minds in the fields of ecology, agriculture, public health, biology, oceanography, eco-investment and food retailing joined forces over two days to brainstorm ideas on how to stem the rapid shrinkage of the natural world caused by damaging agricultural practices.
The Extinction and Livestock Conference, with at least 500 delegates, was the world’s first ever conference examining how modern meat production affects life on Earth, and, put simply, it was designed to find ways to revolutionise the world’s food and farming systems to prevent mass species extinctions.
“We have to stop this,” says Mr Darwin, and he recalls how his great, great grandfather regretted on his death not having done more for other animals – a sentiment that shaped his decision to turn around his “self-indulgent, selfish” life, which involved working in advertising, and do something for the planet.
Wildlife under attack
The fact that the food on our plates is a major cause of shocking declines in wildlife – ranging from elephants and jaguar to barn owls, water vole and bumble bees – may come as a surprise to many. But for the experts gathered for the conference the link was clear. What was less easy to see was how to force practical global change.
Nobody can be in any doubt about the alarming rate at which animals, reptiles and birds are becoming extinct. The journal Science says we are wiping out species at 1,000 times their natural rate.
In the past 40 years alone half the world’s wildlife species have been lost, with conservation giant the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) predicting Earth is on course to lose two-thirds of its species within the next three years.
Marco Lambertini, director-general of WWF International, could not have put it more starkly: “Lose biodiversity, and the natural world – including the life-support systems as we know them – will collapse.”
Changing our spots: if we don't change our diets then animals, such as jaguar, face extinction (AFP/Getty)
The depth of the crisis was underlined earlier this year when scientists announced we were already living through an era of the world’s sixth mass extinction – caused by human activity. What was happening was so urgent, they warned, it should be termed not “mass extinction” but “biological annihilation”.
The researchers revealed, in the journal Nature, their findings that tens of thousands of species – including a quarter of all mammals and 13 per cent of birds – are now threatened with extinction. The researchers, who studied 27,600 species, said: “Dwindling population sizes and range-shrinkages amount to a massive anthropogenic erosion of biodiversity and of the ecosystem services essential to civilisation.”
And it’s not just land mammals that are disappearing. Last year a study in the journal Science suggested sharks, whales and sea turtles were dying in disproportionately greater numbers than smaller animals – the reverse of earlier extinctions.
The link with food
Climate change and hunting are usually blamed for declines in the natural world but at Extinction Conference 17, WWF revealed fresh research showing 60 per cent of global biodiversity loss is down to meat-based diets.
Its report, Appetite for Destruction, laid bare how the vast scale of cereals and soya grown specifically to feed animals farmed for meat is soaking up great tracts of land, taking huge quantities of fresh water and eliminating wild species.
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What’s more, the study says, the world is consuming more animal protein than it needs: the average UK consumption of protein is between 64g and 88g, compared with guidelines of 45g-55g. Poultry such as chicken and duck are the biggest users of crop feed worldwide, with pigs second.
One study found that 60 per cent of EU cereal production (and 67 per cent in the US) is used as animal feed – yet for every 100 calories fed to animals as crops, we receive on average just 17-30 calories in the form of meat and milk.
It's a jungle out there: deforestation for food production is a massive problem (AFP/Getty)
According to the charity Compassion in World Farming (CiWF), the destructive practices were set in train after the Second World War, when intensive farming techniques spread from the US to Europe. Vast landscapes were replaced by “monoculture” – a single crop – in fields liberally treated with pesticides and fertilisers. They killed the insects, bees and butterflies at the bottom of the food chain and wiped away bird habitats, while active deforestation for food production is leaving ever smaller landscapes for mammals, from jaguar and elephants to polar bears and rhinos.
It’s happening in exotic locations – such as Indonesia, where the palm oil industry wrecks habitats and leads to elephants, porcupine and wild pigs being poisoned – and closer to home, where decades of use of nitrogen and other chemicals on farms has led to dire warnings about Britain’s soil having fewer than 100 harvests left.
But worldwide, the overwhelming problem, experts say, is the highly inefficient use of land to grow soya and cereals that are then fed to chickens, pigs and cattle slaughtered for meat.
According to The Economist, although livestock provides just 17 per cent of global calories consumed, it requires twice that proportion of the Earth’s fresh water, feed and farmland because of the crops required. And this makes it the greatest user of land in the world.
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Philip Lymbery, chief executive of CiWF, which organised the conference, set out the causal links between modern intensive farming practices and the destruction of the natural world in his book Dead Zone, which explains how intensive rearing of animals in Britain and abroad to produce meat cheaply involves destroying forests half the size of the UK for farmland each year.
In South America, rainforests have been replaced by swathes of soya crops to feed cattle, pigs and chickens. Some 13 million hectares there – about the size of Greece – are used for soya imported by the EU, nearly all for industrial feed, according to WWF.
The system is so inefficient, says Lymbery, that “worldwide, if grain-fed animals were restored to pasture and the cereals and soya went to people instead, there would be enough for an extra four billion people”. Feeding animals on crops that are fit for humans is “the biggest single area of food waste on the planet”.
Sting in the tail: use of pesticides in fields is one of the factors leading to a decline in bees (CiWF)
“Many people claim factory farming is the answer to feeding a burgeoning population but this couldn’t be further from the truth,” he says.
Intensively grazed landscapes, with fertilisers and pesticides and the demise of stubble, have led to steep declines in barn owls and other farmland birds and small mammals, while chemical run-off from fields is seen as a key cause of bee decline.
CiWF is not the only voice linking extinctions with our diets. The UN has stated that “intensive livestock production is probably the largest sector-specific source of water pollution”. The Soil Association says the UK’s food system accounts for 30 per cent of our greenhouse gas emissions, largely because of industrialised processes.
And WWF has warned: “We could witness a two-thirds decline in the half-century from 1970 to 2020, unless we act now to reform our food and energy systems and meet global commitments on addressing climate change, protecting biodiversity and supporting sustainable development.”
Solutions
Seven years ago, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity drew up a strategic plan, signed by 196 countries, of detailed targets for 2020 to slow wildlife decline. Since then scientists have repeatedly warned not just that the targets would be missed but also that biodiversity loss was worsening. The lack of action was one factor behind the Extinction Conference.
Lymbery said it should be the start of a “global conversation” on transforming food and farming worldwide, and called for a fresh UN convention. “To safeguard the future, we need some kind of global agreement to replace factory farming with a regenerative food system. But that’s not all. We all have the power, three times a day, to save wildlife and end an awful lot of farm animal cruelty.”
Mucking in: We have it in our power to prevent factory farming – by changing our behaviour (AFP/Getty)
Duncan Williamson, of WWF, proposed feeding farm animals on specially cultivated insects and algae, to dramatically reduce deforestation and water use needed as animal feed.
Food producers, meanwhile, showcased a new vegan burger that “sizzles and bleeds like meat”, endorsed by Joanna Lumley, the star of Absolutely Fabulous.
Less meat
Time and again, the solutions by conference experts led to a need to end industrial animal farming – which meant animal campaigners were suddenly no longer the only ones urging people to scale back drastically the amount of chicken, pork, beef, salmon, dairy and eggs consumed.
Chris Darwin, who spent six weeks on a container ship travelling to Britain to avoid flying, said: “Verifiable evidence indicates meat consumption globally will double in the next 35 years, and if that occurs so much forest will have to be cut down around the world that we’re going to cause a mass extinction of species within the next hundred years. And we cannot let that happen.”
He explained passionately how a typical diet uses “two-and-a-half planets” in terms of resources but cutting out wasteful animal produce uses “a quarter of the planet”.
Cut it out: Rainforests are being chopped down and replaced by soya crops (AFP/Getty Images)
He is using modern technology that would have astounded his great, great grandfather to fight back against the seemingly relentless decline of the natural world – in the form of an iPhone app helping people to switch to a more plant-based diet.
By tapping in what they eat, people can receive feedback over time on how many animals, carbon emissions and how much land and water they have saved, as well as days of lifespan added, and their placing on a leaderboard.
“What is the single silver bullet to solve this problem?” he says. “We need behavioural change to solve this problem – and that is to eat less meat.”
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Investor Jeremy Grantham is worried about the world.
“It’s one thing for the world to be deteriorating, but deteriorating at an increasingly fast rate is particularly dangerous and scary.“
BARRON'S MFQ
Jeremy Grantham is Worried About the World
The veteran investor now runs a $900 million foundation focused on protecting the environment. What he supports, where he invests.
By SARAH MAX
Oct. 6, 2017 11:42 p.m. ET
Tony Luong for Barron's
Investors know Jeremy Grantham as the chief investment strategist of GMO, the $77 billion Boston-based asset management firm he co-founded in 1977. The venerable value investor is praised for his prescient market calls, including predicting the 2000 and 2008 downturns. He also told investors to “reinvest when terrified” in a piece published in 2009 on the very day the market hit its postfinancial crisis low.
In environmental circles, Grantham, who just turned 79, is equally esteemed. In 1997 he and his wife, Hannelore, converted their foundation to focus exclusively on the environment. The $900 million Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment gives money to organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund and World Wildlife Fund, and supports climate-related research and communication at four academic institutions. It has contributed to the training of more than a hundred Ph.Ds in climate-related work, and funded two Pulitzer-winning projects and one recipient of an Emmy. Last year Grantham, who is British, was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his philanthropic contributions to the environment.
As an investor, Grantham’s priority is earning the best return. Still, he says, it’s impossible to separate what he knows about the environment and how he thinks about risk and opportunity. “If you believe, as I do, that climate change is so severe that it’s an actual question about survival as a well functioning global society, then you know that I take it extremely seriously,” he says.
If we don’t solve climate change, he warns, “all the other things we are trying to protect and encourage are a waste of money and energy.”
Barron’s: What sparked your interest in climate change?
Grantham: Twenty-eight years ago, I had a series of fairly epic summer vacations with my wife and three kids. The first trip was in the Amazon, the Galapagos, and the Andes, and involved taking dugout canoes up rivers in pouring rain with my four-year-old daughter hiding under my poncho. The next one was in Rwanda, during a pause in the civil war, and on to Tanzania. The final one was to Borneo. We sailed up to the middle of nowhere and stayed in longhouses that had one visitor a year.
This exposed us to the masses of clear-cut forests and the interminable piles of logs lying along the side of the rivers. We all became increasingly obsessed by the significance of climate change and the damage to the environment.
What is one of your biggest concerns?
Acceleration. Carbon dioxide is going up at an increasing rate, with the three biggest increases occurring in the last three years; the climate is warming at an increasing rate; and the water is warming at an increasing rate; and therefore, the level at which oceans are rising is increasing at an accelerating rate. It’s one thing for the world to be deteriorating, but deteriorating at an increasingly fast rate is particularly dangerous and scary.
“It’s one thing for the world to be deteriorating, but deteriorating at an increasingly fast rate is particularly dangerous and scary.“ —Jeremy Grantham Tony Luong for Barron's
Tell us about your foundation.
Total annual giving runs about $25 million to $30 million. About 30% is in the U.K., where, all things being equal, research costs half as much as it does in the U.S.
We fund four climate-change institutes—at Imperial College, the London School of Economics, and Sheffield University, as well as a related investment at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
We give 20% to about a dozen small organizations engaged in communications. We allocate about 40% of our giving to some of the usual suspects, The Nature Conservancy, Environmental Defense Fund, and the World Wildlife Fund, and a fourth group called RARE, which is U.S.-based but spends everything abroad protecting the environment.
The remaining part is an army of 15 or 20 more specialized enterprises, one of which is based on population. Population is a massive problem, particularly in Africa. All the safety margins, the resilience of these countries, has been chewed up by having so many people. Resources are a threat in the long run. Overpopulation is a threat. Climate change interacts with all of them in a rather pernicious way.
What is the foundation’s approach to grant-making?
We try to look at critical areas for the future. We require that grantees are urgent in their style and have fire in their bellies. We are especially focused on areas that are important but haven’t yet been recognized—and where the need for speed is critical. We also look for important areas that are politically incorrect and have a hard time attracting money because they are so controversial—like population growth.
How does the foundation invest its assets?
We have $900 million spread across a family foundation, a public trust, and, to a substantially lesser degree, my personal assets. The three pieces are run as one with the help of Cambridge Associates [an investment consultant]. We have a stunningly large amount, about 45% of assets, in early-stage venture capital funds chosen by Cambridge.
We’ve got 35% in what I modestly call world-class, very conservative hedge funds, including GMO. The remaining 20% is invested by the foundation’s executive director, Ramsay Ravenel, and myself. About 12% is in emerging markets, 5% in cash, and 3% is in our GMO Resources IV [ticker: GOVIX] in 2013, and GMO Climate Change III [GCCHX].
How has your insight into climate change influenced your investment decisions at GMO?
I’m not doing any direct investing at GMO. For the last 10 years, I have spent my time thinking about the big picture—productivity, economic booms and busts, climate change, and resource limitations. But, as an investor, you can never know too much. I can’t separate how my investing instincts were affected by knowing a lot more about resource limitations and the effects of climate change. It was part of the background music, like everything else I know.
The two funds you mentioned, GMO Resources and GMO Climate Change, are for institutional investors. Tell us about them.
We launched Resources in 2013, and Climate Change this year. Lucas White is the portfolio manager of both funds. One of the advantages for the Resources fund is that, because resource prices are volatile, most investors hate them. Value managers who might normally buy them shy away; they outperform over time because they’re cheap. Meanwhile, these stocks tend to have a low correlation with most other investments.
How do you reconcile your views on climate change with investments in the Resources fund?
It’s complicated because the biggest resources are fossil fuels. New technology is an arrow aimed at the heart of fossil fuels; after a decent one or two years, the slow burn of green energy will substitute them away. They will have to manage a long, slow decline. [About 30% of the portfolio is in oil and gas, versus nearly 70% for most market-cap-weighted resource benchmarks.] We would expect over the next 10 years to be handsomely underweighted. That does not mean that there may not be a time when the fund will choose to invest.
And the Climate Change fund?
The goal is to make money by understanding the bewildering amount of change going on. We’re not pretending that every holding is ESG. Our job is to understand this rapidly changing world and make an attractive fund for clients who would like to be investing on the right side of climate change. For example, copper mining can be a dirty business, but it’s hugely critical for electric cars. [ Freeport-McMoRan (FCX) is one of the fund’s top holdings.]
Where else does it invest?
Clean energy is almost a third of the portfolio, including companies focused on solar and wind power, and storage. [The fund owns Vestas Wind Systems (VWS), First Solar (FSLR), and Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile (SQM), which mines lithium used for storage.]
Energy efficiency is 24% of the portfolio. One aspect of this is transportation, which includes companies that are making items to increase the efficiency of motors and cars themselves. It also includes energy efficiency in buildings, as well as diversified efficiency enterprises. [Two holdings, Schneider Electric (SU.France) and Eaton (ETN), have multiple businesses tied to energy efficiency.]
There is also a fair amount in timber, fish farming, and suppliers of farming materials and equipment, such as Deere [DE], right?
We have, by other people’s standards, a stunningly large allocation of more than 17% to agriculture.
Can technology help feed more people?
Technology in agriculture is much harder, because it comes up against the laws of physics. There is just so much energy you can get out of the sun if you are a plant. We have spent a few thousand years boosting that efficiency level. We are approaching a theoretical limit.
On top of that, you have to throw in the increasing effects of storms, droughts, and temperature. Higher temperatures carry more water vapor, 4% to 5% more up in the air than there used to be. You don’t get more storms, but when you get them, they’re heavier. If you chart the incidence of heavy storms, say one inch in an hour, you will find that they are doubly grown over the last 40 years. That is so obviously the case when you read the news.
What about new food sources or agricultural methods?
There is steady progress on agriculture and feeding the public. We may have to change what we eat. To take a very tough example for Westerners, insects are incredibly nutritious and much, much more efficient sources of energy than chicken. They’re eaten a lot in Africa and the East.
Fish are being overfished, but there are great opportunities in seaweed, which is entirely edible. Seaweed can grow 10 to 20 inches a day, four times faster than the fastest-growing land plant. In that context, the sea is amazingly underoptimized. We’ve squeezed the common grains as much as they can be squeezed, but there are plenty of secondary grains important in Africa and Asia that have much more productivity potential.
Humans have all the skills and technology required to have a perfectly recyclable world that doesn’t face imminent danger from climate change, and doesn’t have massive poverty. But we have chosen to go on a rather more chaotic and help-yourself route.
Capitalism does a brilliant job on millions of decisions balancing supply and demand and so on, but on a handful of issues, it seems, it is clearly ill-equipped to deal with the problem. How do you handle global overfishing? How do you handle long-term erosion of soil and the overdevelopment of underground water, each of which is owned by an individual farmer, or an individual? These require more global cooperation and more concrete internal cooperation, and thinking and planning.
Can capitalism help with some of that? Using ESG criteria to choose securities is becoming more common.
Interest in ESG isn’t necessarily because of the rush of blood to being good. It could be just good business. If you’re a producer of consumer goods, and people become worried about the plastics in your product, or botulism in your food, you lose business.
There’s quite a lot of work that suggests that people who are early movers on good behavior are demonstrating that they are simply thinking more about the future, how it will look, how it will play out over 10 or 15 years. A study by Harvard Business School concluded that in the past, the companies that were good on ESG did exactly that, and they were outperformers.
But the heavy lifting [in combating climate change] will still be technological. By the early stage of the next decade, solar and wind will be three cents per kilowatt hour and by the middle of next decade—which is just seven years away—it will be cheaper than the marginal cost of nuclear and coal. The cost of running [a coal plant] and mining will be more than building a solar plant or wind farm from ground zero.
When that point is reached you’re talking economics. People who would have stood their ground until the end of time will be eagerly signing up for solar farms, storage facilities, etc.
Thank you, Jeremy.
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Goodbye - and good riddance - to livestock farming.
The suffering inherent in mass meat production can't be justified. And as the artificial meat industry grows, the last argument for farming animals has now collapsed.
What will future generations, looking back on our age, see as its monstrosities? We think of slavery, the subjugation of women, judicial torture, the murder of heretics, imperial conquest and genocide, the first world war and the rise of fascism, and ask ourselves how people could have failed to see the horror of what they did. What madness of our times will revolt our descendants?
There are plenty to choose from. But one of them, I believe, will be the mass incarceration of animals, to enable us to eat their flesh or eggs or drink their milk. While we call ourselves animal lovers, and lavish kindness on our dogs and cats, we inflict brutal deprivations on billions of animals that are just as capable of suffering. The hypocrisy is so rank that future generations will marvel at how we could have failed to see it.
The shift will occur with the advent of cheap artificial meat. Technological change has often helped to catalyse ethical change. The $300m deal China signed last month to buy lab-grown meat marks the beginning of the end of livestock farming. But it won’t happen quickly: the great suffering is likely to continue for many years.
The answer, we are told by celebrity chefs and food writers, is to keep livestock outdoors: eat free-range beef or lamb, not battery pork. But all this does is to swap one disaster – mass cruelty – for another: mass destruction. Almost all forms of animal farming cause environmental damage, but none more so than keeping them outdoors. The reason is inefficiency. Grazing is not just slightly inefficient, it is stupendously wasteful. Roughly twice as much of the world’s surface is used for grazing as for growing crops, yet animals fed entirely on pasture produce just one gram out of the 81g of protein consumed per person per day.
A paper in Science of the Total Environment reports that “livestock production is the single largest driver of habitat loss”. Grazing livestock are a fully automated system for ecological destruction: you need only release them on to the land and they do the rest, browsing out tree seedlings, simplifying complex ecosystems. Their keepers augment this assault by slaughtering large predators.
In the UK, for example, sheep supply around 1% of our diet in terms of calories. Yet they occupy around 4m hectares of the uplands. This is more or less equivalent to all the land under crops in this country, and more than twice the area of the built environment (1.7m hectares). The rich mosaic of rainforest and other habitats that once covered our hills has been erased, the wildlife reduced to a handful of hardy species. The damage caused is out of all proportion to the meat produced.
Replacing the meat in our diets with soya spectacularly reduces the land area required per kilo of protein: by 70% in the case of chicken, 89% in the case of pork and 97% in the case of beef. One study suggests that if we were all to switch to a plant-based diet, 15m hectares of land in Britain currently used for farming could be returned to nature. Alternatively, this country could feed 200 million people. An end to animal farming would be the salvation of the world’s wildlife, our natural wonders and magnificent habitats.
Now it is time for a new revolution, almost as profound as those other great shifts: the switch to a plant-based diet.
Understandably, those who keep animals have pushed back against such facts, using an ingenious argument. Livestock grazing, they claim, can suck carbon out of the atmosphere and store it in the soil, reducing or even reversing global warming. In a TED talk watched by 4 million people, the rancher Allan Savory claims that his “holistic” grazing could absorb enough carbon to return the world’s atmosphere to pre-industrial levels. His inability, when I interviewed him, to substantiate his claims has done nothing to dent their popularity.
Similar statements have been made by Graham Harvey, the agricultural story editor of the BBC Radio 4 serial The Archers – he claims that the prairies in the US could absorb all the carbon “that’s gone into the atmosphere for the whole planet since we industrialised” – and amplified by the Campaign to Protect Rural England. Farmers’ organisations all over the world now noisily promote this view.
A report this week by the Food Climate Research Network, called Grazed and Confused, seeks to resolve the question: can keeping livestock outdoors cause a net reduction in greenhouse gases? The authors spent two years investigating the issue. They cite 300 sources. Their answer is unequivocal. No.
It is true, they find, that some grazing systems are better than others. Under some circumstances, plants growing on pastures will accumulate carbon under the ground, through the expansion of their root systems and the laying down of leaf litter. But the claims of people such as Savory and Harvey are “dangerously misleading”. The evidence supporting additional carbon storage through the special systems these livestock crusaders propose (variously described as “holistic”, “regenerative”, “mob”, or “adaptive” grazing) is weak and contradictory, and suggests that if there’s an effect at all, it is small.
The best that can be done is to remove between 20% and 60% of the greenhouse gas emissions grazing livestock produce. Even this might be an overestimate: a paper published this week in the journal Carbon Balance and Management suggests that the amount of methane (a potent greenhouse gas) farm animals produce has been understated. In either case, carbon storage in pastures cannot compensate for the animals’ own climate impacts, let alone those of industrial civilisation. I would like to see the TED team post a warning on Savory’s video, before even more people are misled.
As the final argument crumbles, we are left facing an uncomfortable fact: animal farming looks as incompatible with a sustained future for humans and other species as mining coal.
That vast expanse of pastureland, from which we obtain so little at such great environmental cost, would be better used for rewilding: the mass restoration of nature. Not only would this help to reverse the catastrophic decline in habitats and the diversity and abundance of wildlife, but the returning forests, wetlands and savannahs are likely to absorb far more carbon than even the most sophisticated forms of grazing.
The end of animal farming might be hard to swallow. But we are a resilient and adaptable species. We have undergone a series of astonishing changes: the adoption of sedentarism, of agriculture, of cities, of industry.
Now it is time for a new revolution, almost as profound as those other great shifts: the switch to a plant-based diet. The technology is – depending on how close an approximation to meat you demand (Quorn seems almost indistinguishable from chicken or mince to me) – either here or just around the corner. The ethical switch is happening already: even today, there are half a million vegans in the land of roast beef. It’s time to abandon the excuses, the fake facts and false comforts. It is time to see our moral choices as our descendants will.
• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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Climate change creating food shortages across the Pacific, says support agency.
Food shortages and eroding coastlines are an increasingly urgent problem across the Pacific, thanks to climate change.
Food shortages and eroding coastlines are an increasingly urgent problem across the Pacific, thanks to climate change.
Caritas has just released Turning the Tide, its 2017 report on the state of the environment in Oceania.
Problems accessing safe food and drinking water were highlighted, with the increasing frequency of natural disasters making the problem more urgent.
"Our experience in 2016/17 is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the health and integrity of these sources [of local food supplies] - especially after a disaster," the report said.
"The poor are most affected when local supplies are disrupted - they often cannot afford to buy food and water from other sources."
George Alabeni from Arihu Rural Training Centre in Solomon Islands, told Caritas the sea was now becoming so hot, it was unpleasant.
"Before you just go down to the shore and might take fish and see a lot of seashells, crabs and the beauty of the sea; everything.
"There are birds all around the beach, very white beach.
"Now seabirds' coastal homes are being destroyed, and dead fish are washing up on shore.
"We don't expect it, and it's new to us. We have never seen those things happening."
Meanwhile those living in Tuvalu and Vanuatu had been forced to permanently change their diet after Cyclone Pam.
Climate justice advocate Aso Ioapo said locals hadn't been able to replant crops damaged by the storm surges and flooding of the 2015 disaster.
"Since the cyclone they have had to use more imported food, from stores, including chicken, meat, because our food was destroyed in the cyclone.
"Imported food is very new for us in our lives.
"We miss all of our local foods, because in Tuvalu they really need the fish every day ... you have breakfast, morning, lunch and dinner with the fish."
Caritas rated the impact of coastal erosion, flooding, and rising seas as "severe".
It said coastal flooding and sea level rise was displacing increasing numbers of people, especially around Papua New Guinea.
While Caritas acknowledged climate aid money was increasing, it said the funding still fell short of what was needed.
In particular it said that New Zealand "could be playing a pivotal role", yet "seems to be lagging and even reducing its commitments to the Pacific".
The organisation made a raft of recommendations, including a call for the global community to do more to help people who will lose their homes through climate change.
This includes a call to create legal protections for people who are forced to leave their country because of climate change, and putting together a regional body to map which communities are likely to be worst affected.
It's also pushing for the Australian and New Zealand governments to prioritise investments in agriculture, fisheries, and water sources that are climate resilient, to make sure Pacific communities have access to sustainable local sources.
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We’ve played chicken with food safety … and we’ve lost.
The meat industry is bad for us and bad for the planet. It’s time to end unsustainable 'food Fordism.'
We’ve played chicken with food safety … and we’ve lost
Felicity Lawrence
The meat industry is bad for us and bad for the planet. It’s time to end unsustainable ‘food Fordism’
Chicken being processed and labelled for sale to supermarkets in the UK.
Chicken being processed and labelled for sale to supermarkets in the UK. Photograph: For Guardian investigation with ITN
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Tuesday 3 October 2017 01.00 EDT
The dirty business of chicken processing is in the spotlight, with a Guardian undercover abattoir investigation revealing dodgy practices. As supermarkets suspend sales from the factory involved and Labour promises a parliamentary inquiry, some members of the food industry are sighing at the media’s obsession with the subject of poultry hygiene. But the subject will keep coming up, however much business wishes it away, because industrial chicken is one of the defining commodities of our era. Its cheapness comes at a high price.
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Meat production has quintupled in my lifetime, in large part thanks to the ubiquitous skinless factory chicken breast, and chicken accounts for around half of the meat we eat. At any one time there are more than twice as many chickens on Earth as humans – around 19 billion of them, bred to put on weight at turbocharged rates and mature in record time as uniform units of production that fit abattoir machinery. We have invented food Fordism – meat for the masses from the conveyor belt, no longer a luxury but an everyday ingredient. But, for all its apparent democratising possibilities, it is a commodity fraught with inescapable dilemmas.
Intensive livestock production is one of the most significant drivers of climate breakdown. It contributes nearly one fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, rivalling the whole global transport sector. True, feedlot cattle leave a greater environmental footprint than poultry, but if you care about mitigating global warming, plant-based proteins are far better than intensively reared birds. Most of us in developed countries eat far more protein than we actually need for health, and most people could do more for the climate by cutting meat than giving up their car and plane journeys.
Politicians dare not say it for fear of sounding like Marie Antoinette, but the price of cheap is too high
As the world’s population grows, the question of how we produce enough to feed everyone becomes ever more urgent. Intensively reared livestock is an inefficient way of meeting needs. Farm an acre of decent land and you can produce 20kg (45lb) of animal protein from it; give the same acre over to producing wheat and you’ll get 63kg of protein. If the grain that is currently used to feed animals were fed directly to people, there might be just enough food to go round when population peaks. If instead we continue to spread our industrial meat habit to poorer countries, we’ll need three planets to feed the world. The ethical argument is overwhelming: we need to get back to thinking of meat as a luxury, to be enjoyed occasionally, if not entirely forsworn.
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The reason the sector is beset by repeated scandals is that it is economically unsustainable. Even leaving aside the big planetary questions, meat can only be this cheap if the price is paid elsewhere. The livestock revolution took off in the 1950s because of three factors: cheap energy, which allowed farmers to house animals indoors; cheap synthetic fertiliser, which produced surplus grain for concentrated feed; and the mass production of cheap drugs, particularly antibiotics – you can only keep large numbers of birds in close confinement if you have the means to control the disease that inevitably accompanies the practice.
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For centuries before that, farmers had been constrained in their production by how much their land could support. Chickens were fed waste and acted as scavengers of food and insects, allowed to range free so that they could eat food that would otherwise go unused, with the added advantage that they spread their manure as they went.
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The next leap forward for industrial chicken production came with the development of processing machinery in the 1960s – an engineering feat that automated the mass slaughter, plucking, eviscerating and cutting of birds in one continuous conveyor belt. Large numbers of workers are still needed to process chickens, but they are in low-skilled production-line jobs. All this slashed costs and allowed the populations of developed countries to consume meat in a completely new way.
But now the consequences are coming home to roost. Energy is no longer cheap; nor is the grain needed for concentrated feed, despite agricultural subsidies. Some of the raw materials for fertiliser are running out globally. Frontline antibiotics needed for humans are losing their efficacy in large part because of overuse in farming. Supermarkets with their oligopolies of buying power have used cheap chicken as a weapon in their price wars and kept prices low, so that processors have to work on high volumes with low margins, despite the pressure of rising costs.
The sector is highly concentrated, with just a few corporate players. Just five companies account for 90% of the birds slaughtered in Britain each week. The pressure to cut corners in factories and sweat capital-intensive machinery, leaving little time for cleaning, is intense. Food-borne illness caused by chicken is a stubborn problem. Meanwhile, if a supermarket wanted to go elsewhere to punish an errant supplier, it has little choice left.
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There’s plenty you could do to make it a more sustainable industry. You could slow the growing time and give birds more room on farms, using less engineered breeds that take 12 weeks, rather than just over a month to reach slaughter weight. That would help curb some of the cruellest aspects of the business, which see densely packed, overbred birds, prone to disease and bacterial infection, collapsing under their own weight. But that would cost more. In the factory you could slow the speed of the lines, so that cross-contamination of carcasses was less likely, and workers’ jobs less relentlessly tough and unpleasant, thus easing the pressure to break hygiene rules and making the sector more attractive to local staff. But that, too, would cost more.
We know roughly how much more, since the top end of organic production already does these things, and a posh chicken from that sort of outlet is three to four times as expensive as a conventional supermarket one. But there are hardly votes in arguing we should pay that much for our chicken. Politicians dare not say it for fear of sounding Marie Antoinette-ish. But the price of cheap is too high, and we should probably be eating something else.
• Felicity Lawrence is special correspondent for the Guardian
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Why we should make room for debate about high-tech meat.
The burgeoning alternative protein industry is drawing new lines and making interesting bedfellows—all the more reason to stay engaged in the conversation.
Why We Should Make Room for Debate about High-Tech Meat
The burgeoning alternative protein industry is drawing new lines and making interesting bedfellows—all the more reason to stay engaged in the conversation.
BY GARRETT BROAD | Animal Welfare, Business, Climate, Commentary, Food Safety, HEALTH, Labeling
09.28.17
“We built a lab with glass walls. That was on purpose,” Ryan Bethencourt, program director for the biotech accelerator IndieBio, told me as we sat in the company’s wide open basement workspace in the South of Market district of San Francisco.
Glass walls—it’s a design philosophy that many animal rights activists have argued could turn the world vegan, if only people could see into the slaughterhouses that produce their meat.
But IndieBio is taking a different approach. “If we put a lightning rod in the ground and say we are going to fund the post-animal bioeconomy,” Bethencourt, a self-described ethical vegan, explained, “then we’re going to create foods that remove animals from the food system.”
He pointed me to two examples currently in the accelerator: NotCo, a Chilean startup using a mix of plant science and artificial intelligence to create mayonnaise and dairy products, and Finless Foods, a two-man team using “cellular agriculture” to create lab-grown or “cultured” seafood. The latter is just one of several new products in development that creates meat without relying on actual livestock, using only a few cell tissues from animals instead.
While the number of alternatives to animal protein has been growing steadily over the last several years, it remains a relatively niche market. Bethencourt and his colleagues at IndieBio are eager to get their food into the hands of the masses. “If we don’t see our products used by billions of people, then we’ve failed,” he told me.
But it’s not just altruism that drives this emerging industry. There’s big money betting on a future of animal products made without animals.
Just look at IndieBio alum Memphis Meats, a cultured meat company that announced late last month that it had raised $17 million in Series A funding. High-profile investors have included Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and ag industry giant Cargill, none of whom seemed deterred by the fact that no lab-grown meat product has ever actually been made available to consumers yet.
Mempis Meats’ Southern fried chicken. (Photo courtesy of Memphis Meats.)
Major investment has also been pouring in for high-tech products made solely from plants. Hampton Creek, best known for its eggless mayo and dressings—and numerous controversies involving its embattled CEO Josh Tetrick—has been dubbed a “unicorn” for its billion-dollar valuation. (The company recently announced that it’s getting in on cultured meat innovation, too.)
Products from Beyond Meat are now in over 11,000 stores across the United States, supported in part by early investment from Gates and a 2016 deal with Tyson Foods. Gates is also a backer of Impossible Foods, which has raised upwards of $300 million since it launched in 2011 and has the capacity to churn out one million pounds of “plant meat” each month in its new Oakland production facility.
All of this big money, of course, has followed big promises. According to the innovators and investors involved, a sustainable, well-fed, economically thriving world that makes factory farming obsolete is now within our reach.
I’ve spent the last few months talking to scientists and entrepreneurs in the plant-based and cultured meat landscape. As a vegan since my college days, it’s been hard for me not to get excited by the vision they present.
Bu,t as someone who has spent the better part of the last decade working as a food justice researcher, author, and activist, lingering concerns have kept my enthusiasm in check. The truth is, food scientists, corporations and philanthropists have made big promises before, but the food system is still a mess. Farmers and workers continue to be marginalized, environmentally irresponsible practices remain the norm, animals are mistreated on a massive scale, rates of hunger and food insecurity are alarmingly high, and chronic diet-related disease is on the rise across the globe.
I find myself with mixed feelings about the whole enterprise. On one hand, I’m skeptical that these technological fixes will automatically lead us to some sort of agricultural utopia. But I’m also concerned that many who identify with the food movement might be missing out on the chance to shape the future of food because they’re turning their backs on food science altogether.
According to Professor Cor van der Weele, a philosopher of biology at Wageningen University in the Netherlands who studies public perception of animal protein alternatives and has a book forthcoming on the topic, my reaction is far from unique.
“Meat has, for a long time, led to a very polarized debate—you were either a vegetarian or a staunch meat lover,” she explained. “Cultured meat has been very effective in undermining those polarities. It brings ambivalence more to the foreground, and it also makes possible the formation of new coalitions.”
Impossible Burger meat photo courtesy of @Impossible_Burger.
I’m interested in the possibilities these new coalitions present. But it’s hard not to wonder: Could what’s good for Silicon Valley really be good for eaters in South L.A., food entrepreneurs in Detroit, and farmers in Iowa? Could the “post-animal bioeconomy” bring us the kind of sustainable and fair food system we’ve all been waiting for?
Farming Beyond Meat
When I stepped into the El Segundo, California office of Ethan Brown, CEO of Beyond Meat, the writing was literally on the wall. Four stylishly designed posters outlined the company’s mission: improving human health, positively impacting climate change, addressing global resource constraints, and improving animal welfare.
“We’re lucky that for the first time in a long time, profit-seeking behavior and what’s good are aligning,” Brown told me.
“The whole genius of the thesis of what we’re doing is that you don’t have to have the mission in mind for it to be the right thing to do,” added Emily Byrd, a senior communications specialist at the Good Food Institute, a non-profit that promotes and supports alternatives to animal agriculture and works with companies such as Beyond Meat. “That’s why writing efficiency into the process is so important.”
Food-tech proponents insist that animals are really poor bioreactors for converting plants into protein. They suggest we simply skip that step—either by building meat directly from plant sources or using a laboratory bioreactor to grow meat cultures.
It would be a clear win for animals, and one that could mitigate the negative environmental impacts of factory farming at a moment of growing global demand. But what would it mean for farmers?
For one, it would require a lot less corn and soybeans—the two crops that currently dominate this country’s farm landscape. Shifting the commodity system wouldn’t be easy, but Brown argues that, “If you were to redesign the agricultural system with the end in mind of producing meat from plants, you would have a flourishing regional agricultural economy.”
By relying on protein from a wider range of raw ingredients—from lentils to cannellini and lupin—he says companies like his have the potential to diversify what we grow on a mass scale. It would be better for the soil and water, and farmers could theoretically benefit from having more say in what they grow with more markets to sell their goods.
Beyond Meat burgers. (Photo courtesy of Beyond Meat.)
When it comes to putting this type of system into practice, however, a lot of details still need to be worked out. Byrd pointed me to the writings of David Bronner, CEO of Dr. Bronner’s soap company, who envisions a world of plant-based meats and regenerative organic agriculture. He suggests that the soil fertility-boosting power of diversified legume rotations, combined with a modest amount of Allan Savory-inspired livestock management, could put an end to the factory farm and the massive amounts of GMO corn and soy (and the herbicides) that feed it.
Even cultured meat advocates see a future that is better for farmers once we move away from raising animals for food.
“In my mind, farmers are the ultimate entrepreneurs,” said Dutch scientist Mark Post, who created the first cultured hamburger, at the recent Reducetarian Summit in New York. “They will extract value from their land however they can. And if this is going to fly and be scaled up, we need a lot of crops to feed those cells. And so the farmers will at some point switch to those crops because there will be a demand for it.”
What crops and what types of farms would feed those cells? Right now it’s unclear, since up to this point cultured meat has used a grisly product called fetal bovine serum to do the job. Along with the continued use of animal testing, it’s one of the few ways that these food-tech innovators have been unable to move beyond using animals completely. Several companies claim they’ve begun to find plant-based replacements for fetal bovine serum, assisted in the discovery process by complex machine learning systems like Hampton Creek’s recently patented Blackbird™ platform. But intellectual property keeps them tight-lipped on the particulars.
As for how those crops—and others used in the production of meat alternatives—would be produced, there’s not much more clarity. In my conversations with people in the food-tech world, the opinions on organic and regenerative agriculture ranged from strongly opposed to agnostic to personally supportive. But with the likes of Gates and Cargill playing an increasingly big role in the sector, it’s unlikely that a wholesale switch toward these practices is on the horizon.
It’s not surprising, then, that some food activists are not buying what the alternative animal product advocates are selling.
Big Questions About Big Promises
“We want to see a food system in the hands of people and not in the hands of profit-driven companies,” said Dana Perls, senior food and technology campaigner for Friends of the Earth (FOE).
She expressed a set of misgivings about the role of genetic engineering and synthetic biology in the plant-based and cultured meat space. Are these products really about sustainably feeding the world or are they more about investor profit? Are we sure we know the long-term health impacts?
Perls noted the U.S. Food & Drug Administration’s (FDA) recent decision to stop short of declaring that a key genetically modified ingredient in Impossible Foods’ plant-based “bleeding” Impossible Burger was safe for human consumption. That determination did not mean the burger was unsafe, however, and Impossible Foods stands by its integrity.
Impossible Burger photo courtesy of @Impossible_Burger.
Perls was encouraged by the fact that some plant-based products—like those produced by Beyond Meat—do not use GMO ingredients. And she recognized that, from a technical perspective, cultured meat does not necessarily use genetic modification either—although it could in the future. But she and others are still uneasy. “The fact that there is a lot of market-driven hype propelling these genetically engineered ingredients ahead of safety assessments and fully understanding the science is concerning.”
Other concerns have been raised about the healthfulness of highly processed alternative meats which often lack a strong nutrient profile. But food-tech advocates maintain that conventional meat products go through multiple layers of processing, too, even if the label doesn’t always reflect it. And they are quick to note that meat is a major source of foodborne illness and has been associated with cardiovascular disease.
“[Our] number-one driver is far and away human health,” Beyond Meat’s Brown explained. “It’s absolutely the number-one thing that brings people to this brand.”
Plant-based and cultured meat producers see themselves promoting sustainability, promising healthier options in a world that demands convenience and good taste. But it’s not clear yet how universally accessible these products will be. Plant-based burgers made by Beyond Meat are now for sale in a number of grocery stores (including Safeway), for instance. But at about $12 a pound, they’re still much more expensive than conventional ground beef, which costs around $3.50 a pound, and even more than some higher-end ground grass-fed and organic ground beef, which sells for around $10 a pound.
NotCo Mayo (Photo courtesy of TheNotCompany.com)
Residents and activists in so-called food deserts are still calling for investments that provide access to fresh vegetables and create local economic growth. Alternative meat producers insist prices will come down once their supply chain improves, but only a concerted plan to promote equity will stop the venture-backed food-tech industry from reinforcing these types of longstanding nutritional and economic disparities.
“The decision about what an equitable food system looks like shouldn’t be determined by biotech itself,” FOE’s Perls argued. “We need to move with precaution, with transparency, and with a full understanding of what we’re doing so that we can make sure that we’re moving ahead in a way that has more benefits than harm.”
It’s hard to disagree with those assertions. At the same time, groups like FOE have been locked in a battle with the biotech world that often doesn’t allow either side to engage in a genuine dialogue. I, for one, don’t want to see that happen with these high-tech meat alternatives. Precaution is an important value, but aren’t there also serious risks if we don’t boldly engage with these scientific endeavors?
An Appeal to Dialogue
IndieBio companies like NotCo and Finless Foods say they want to communicate more with the public, helping to demystify new food technology and get people to become participants in the process of innovation.
“You have to be very transparent when you are changing the way that people eat. And that’s what we’re trying to do here,” said Finless Foods co-founder Michael Selden. “I’ve always been a political activist. And for me this is part of my food activism.”
If there’s any hope to build solidarity between food scientists and food activists, now is the time for those talks to begin. Perhaps the bigger question, though, is whether anyone is willing to listen.
“Within the scientific community, there’s this idea that every innovation leads to a future world that’s better,” Christopher Carter, a professor of theology who studies food justice and animal ethics, said. “But for many people of color, innovation and science have sometimes been harmful, or even come at their expense.”
In other words, if the biotech boosters are really interested in dialogue, it’s important for them to engage with critical histories of food and technology, which will help them understand why earlier promises to sustainably feed the world have fallen short. Equity should be at the center of their work and addressing the concerns of the most vulnerable eaters and food producers must be part of their bottom line.
“If you have people at the table who are asking those kind of questions, and the people who are doing the innovation are actually taking them as valid questions, I think that could help mitigate some of the potential problems that are going to come up,” Carter argued.
On the other side, a necessary first step for the most diehard critics of genetic engineering would be to become more familiar with the basic biochemistry involved in these new products. Food movement advocates should also avoid knee-jerk reactions that romanticize “natural” foods while villainizing any and all food-tech innovation.
It’s clear that food tech isn’t a silver bullet, but I’m also optimistic about the new coalitions that could take shape between scientists, investors, farmers, entrepreneurs, and eaters. We might never come to a clear consensus, but progress is only possible if we channel our ambivalence into honest, evidence-based, and historically grounded dialogue.
So if, like me, you are interested in a future of food tech that promotes real sustainability and food justice, I hope you’ll join the conversation. I’ll see you there, behind the glass walls.
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Puerto Rico’s agriculture and farmers devastated by Maria.
In a matter of hours, Hurricane Maria wiped out about 80 percent of the crop value in Puerto Rico — making it one of the costliest storms to hit the island’s agriculture industry.
YABUCOA, P.R. — José A. Rivera, a farmer on the southeast coast of Puerto Rico, stood in the middle of his flattened plantain farm on Sunday and tried to tally how much Hurricane Maria had cost him.
“How do you calculate everything?” Mr. Rivera said.
For as far as he could see, every one of his 14,000 trees was down. Same for the yam and sweet pepper crops. His neighbor, Luis A. Pinto Cruz, known to everyone here as “Piña,” figures he is out about $300,000 worth of crops. The foreman down the street, Félix Ortiz Delgado, spent the afternoon scrounging up the scraps that were left of the farm he manages. He found about a dozen dried ears of corn that he could feed the chickens. The wind had claimed the rest.
“There will be no food in Puerto Rico,” Mr. Rivera predicted. “There is no more agriculture in Puerto Rico. And there won’t be any for a year or longer.”
Hurricane Maria made landfall here Wednesday as a Category 4 storm. Its force and fury stripped every tree of not just the leaves, but also the bark, leaving a rich agricultural region looking like the result of a postapocalyptic drought. Rows and rows of fields were denuded. Plants simply blew away.
In a matter of hours, Hurricane Maria wiped out about 80 percent of the crop value in Puerto Rico — making it one of the costliest storms to hit the island’s agriculture industry, said Carlos Flores Ortega, Puerto Rico’s secretary of the Department of Agriculture.
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Across the island, Maria’s prolonged barrage took out entire plantations and destroyed dairy barns and industrial chicken coops. Plantain, banana and coffee crops were the hardest hit, Mr. Flores said. Landslides in the mountainous interior of the island took out many roads, a major part of the agriculture infrastructure there.
The island suffered a loss of $780 million in agriculture yields, according to the department’s preliminary figures. Hurricane Georges in 1998 wiped out about 65 percent of crops and Hurricane Irma, which only grazed the island, took out about $45 million in agriculture production.
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Félix Ortiz Delgado looked over the damage to his crops on Sunday. Credit Victor Blue for The New York Times
For over 400 years, Puerto Rico’s economy was based on agriculture, historically focused on sugar cane, tobacco and citrus fruits. The island’s economy rapidly industrialized after World War II, leading to the downfall of agriculture production. In recent years, in part because of the island’s economic recession, people went back to the fields, and the industry is going through a small renaissance, growing at 3 to 5 percent every year over the past six years, Mr. Flores said. A growing farm-to-table movement has generated optimism in recent years about an agricultural rebirth.
Puerto Rico already imports about 85 percent of its food, and now its food imports are certain to rise drastically as local products like coffee and plantains are added to the list of Maria’s staggering losses. Local staples that stocked supermarkets, school lunchrooms and even Walmart are gone.
“Sometimes when there are shortages, the price of plantain goes up from $1 to $1.25. This time, there won’t be any price increase; there won’t be any product,” Mr. Rivera said. “When I heard the meteorologist say that the two had turned into a three and then a four, I thought, ‘Agriculture in Puerto Rico is over.’ This really is a catastrophe.”
He noted that other islands that export food to Puerto Rico, such as the Dominican Republic, Dominica and St. Martin, were also hit, and that the food supply could be even more precarious if the island’s other suppliers were also affected.
“There won’t be any gandules at Christmas this year,” Mr. Ortiz said, referring to a local favorite usually served as a combination of rice, pigeon peas and pork called arroz con gandules. “Even if we planted now, they won’t be ready.”
Mr. Ortiz, 80, said he had been working these fields for seven decades. He has lived through his share of hurricanes, including Georges, which wiped out the local sugar refinery in 1998.
“I have never seen losses like these in any of my 80 years,” he said as he stood on a riverbank, counting the number of coconut trees that fell. He could earn $100 a month from each one of them. A dozen cracked in half, beside a nursery where the winds swept away all the seedlings and left behind broken glass and ruin.
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“Those palms take about 10 years to grow,” he said. “I will be dead by then.”
He is not the owner, but he said it hurt all the same. “You know what it’s like to see the place where you earn your daily bread destroyed?”
Efrain M. Robles Menendez, a dairy farmer, said cattle ranchers had been hit hard, because not only was there major damage to the infrastructure needed to maintain the business, but the supply chain was also cut off. With stores closed and the power out, the dairy trucks have not come.
“Since Wednesday, I have thrown out 4,000 liters of milk a day,” he said. “Come back later, and watch me pour it all down the drain.”
Some see the potential for something positive to come out of a disaster. Agricultural officials are hoping this will be the island’s chance to modernize its outmoded agriculture industry.
“Agriculture is the most vulnerable sector to natural disasters,” Mr. Flores said. “But it’s also the one that can have the speediest recovery, and it’ll be the great surprise in the Puerto Rican economy, because we’re going to come back stronger.”
Mr. Flores said much of the traditional agriculture in the island had depended on energy-inefficient practices that waste too much water and produce large amounts of waste. Federal funds that will help farmers rebuild infrastructure damaged by the hurricane will present an opportunity to improve the industry, he said.
“We had an antiquated agricultural infrastructure that maybe now is the opportunity to make it more efficient,” he said. “Now is the moment because we’re starting from zero. Maybe it hadn’t been done before because there was no way of financing it. We’re going to rebuild better this time.”
Photo
José A. Rivera, left, and his brother Ángel Rivera and nephew Javier Cacho Serrano surveyed the destroyed plantain crop in Yabucoa. Credit Victor Blue for The New York Times
Eduardo Bhatia Gautier, a local senator, said, “We can start developing an agriculture industry that is more profitable and start exporting Puerto Rican products, something this island hasn’t done in decades.”
Puerto Rico currently imports about 85 percent of the food it consumes and exports only 15 percent of what it produces, according to the government. Puerto Rico, Mr. Bhatia said, could service a growing demand for organic foods in the mainland United States. He estimated it could take at least a year to get the industry back up and running, as the soil recovers and farmers replant trees.
But long-term optimism does little to help farmers contemplating the destruction they see around them.
Mr. Pinto, 62, drove to the capital last week to stock up on vegetables to sell at a kiosk he runs with his wife. He did so because his 14,000 plantain trees are all dead and he had nothing of his own to sell.
On the ride to San Juan, he looked around at toppled trees, downed telephone poles, tangled power lines, roofs and crumbled wood structures and wept.
“I could not take seeing my country in pieces like that,” he said, holding back tears.
Mr. Pinto also lost all of his cattle. Literally. He does not know where they are.
He plans to start over as he did a decade ago when he lost everything to a flood. He will get about 35 percent of the value back from insurance, and will not quit, he said, using an expression that has become a popular hashtag: #yonomequito — I will not give up.
“A people without agriculture,” he said, “are a people without food.”
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