Ag. policy + NAFTA increase illegal immigration

This connects the dots:

"Beyond a broken immigration system, U.S. policies make U.S. farm products cheap, open borders so we can dump them on Mexico, promote an economic development model that fails to create jobs, and make it easy for companies to use undocumented workers to drive down wages and prevent unionization."

The Only Real Way to Fix Immigration

Unless we address our trade, agricultural and labor policies, any efforts to fix out immigration system will fail.

By Tim Wise

May 21, 2010 | Foreign Policy in Focus

URL: http://www.alternet.org/story/146804/the_only_real_way_to_fix_immigration/

U.S. farms weaken our antibiotics

I just finished reading the best-selling book The Omnivore's Dilemma, which describes in detail the use of antibiotics in industrial farms. I'm almost to the point where I don't believe any meat produced large-scale in the U.S. is healthy to eat, or good for the public health, or even cheaper for the people, when all the hidden health and environmental costs are factored in.

This study by Johns Hopkins only supports my apprehension about industrial meat.

I am not a vegetarian though, nor do I plan to be one. But we can buy locally and eat seasonally, like our grandparents did. (Don't confuse this with buying "organic," which doesn't mean much.) This directory of local farmers who raise grass-fed animals is a useful tool to eat healthy and enjoy meat the way it's supposed to be. If you live in a city, you can look for so-called metropolitan buying clubs (aka farm subscription clubs) in your area, a type of community-supported agriculture, which pool orders from city residents, making it economically worthwhile for small farmers to deliver their products. Even when you eat out, you can ask the server if any menu items feature locally sourced foods.

Today we spend less on food, relatively, than our parents & grandparents did. Food didn't used to be a commodity, where beef was beef, eggs were eggs, and price was all that mattered. Americans used to know and care where their food came from, and often who grew and/or processed it.

Farmacology

By Dale Keiger

June 2009 | Johns Hopkins Magazine

Johns Hopkins researchers are investigating a troubling potential source of resistant pathogens: the American farm

URL: http://www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/0609web/farm.html

Re: Cow farts & energy costs

Yep, cap-and-trade of cow farts is next on Obama's agenda.

Seriously though, eating less meat is very good for the environment. The meat supply chain takes a lot more grain to feed, and fuel and energy to process livestock than it does to bring vegetables and grains to market. Livestock also require lots of inputs: it takes 5 kilos of grain to produce 1 kilo of meat. Raising livestock and processing meat also generates a lot of waste -- including direct runoff into our water supply. This is not to mention all of the (sometimes illegal) steroids and antibiotics they feed livestock nowadays, which go into us.

Check out this extremely interesting analysis from the NYT, which compared meat to oil:

"... if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius. Similarly, a study last year by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days."

And, as usual, the poorer countries suffer the most because of our high consumption:

"Though some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens. This despite the inherent inefficiencies: about two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption, according to Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics at Stanford University. It is as much as 10 times more in the case of grain-fed beef in the United States."

It's also healthier and cheaper to eat less meat: there is a growing "meatless Monday" movement. Americans eat about 8 oz. of meat a day, twice the global average. If China starts eating beef like we do, the world will be in trouble.