Posts tagged United States
UN report: Industrial agriculture feeds starvation trends
Jan 9th
UN says only sustainable agriculture will feed the world’s hungry
The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food has put out a new report on how best to feed the world’s exploding population. Of the report, the Special Rapporteur Olivier De Schutter remarks, “To feed 9 billion people in 2050, we urgently need to adopt the most efficient farming techniques available.”
So far it sounds like what you’d expect from a bureaucrat whose mandate is essentially to find more food. But the report concludes that “Today’s scientific evidence demonstrates that agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilizers in boosting food production where the hungry live — especially in unfavorable environments.”
Agroecology is most similar to biodynamic agriculture, but it’s also a pretty good synonym for “sustainable” or “organic.”
In other words, where big corporations, the influential Gates Foundation and, arguably, the United States government insist that industrial agriculture and even genetically modified crops are needed to feed the hungry, the UN has found quite the contrary — that knowledge-based, environmentally sustainable farming will produce more food for more people.
This stance represents a sea change, in which eco-friendly methods are not being advocated for their own sake, but rather on health and human rights grounds.
Of course “agroecology” also makes a lesser contribution to climate change than conventional agriculture — and climate change will, as readers of this blog know, also erode health outcomes around the world. But the UN report also makes the case that sustainable farming methods offer a better model for making agriculture able to adapt to climate change. Dr. De Schutter said in the press release, “Conventional farming relies on expensive inputs, fuels climate change and is not resilient to climatic shocks. It simply is not the best choice anymore today.”
The report goes on to make the case for public policies that support agroecological methods, which are “knowledge-intensive.”
Notes Dr. De Schutter: “States and donors have a key role to play here. Private companies will not invest time and money in practices that cannot be rewarded by patents and which don’t open markets for chemical products or improved seeds.”
Unfortunately, that support may hing on still another sea change.
CU Boulder “snakeman” moving on and up
Dec 13th
CAREER PATH FOR GRADUATING SENIOR
After two years of working in a University of Colorado Boulder laboratory that recently gained international media attention for its work with snakes and heart disease, graduating senior Ryan Doptis has set his sights on becoming a research scientist.
Doptis, a molecular, cellular and developmental biology major from Las Vegas, will graduate on Dec. 16. He has worked the past two years in the laboratory of CU-Boulder Professor Leslie Leinwand, the chief scientific officer of CU’s Biofrontiers Institute.
“At CU-Boulder I’ve had a lot of opportunities when it comes to getting real-world experience,” Doptis said. “After two years of going through the molecular biology program, I decided I wanted to try lab work. And I really wanted to do meaningful research that wasn’t the same cookie-cutter experiment every semester.”
He found a perfect fit working in the laboratory of Leinwand, who is an expert in genetic heart diseases including hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, the leading cause of sudden death in young athletes. Doptis’ work involves both cardiovascular and metabolic responses to eating conducted in a very unusual animal model – the Burmese python..
The research opportunity has been very fulfilling, he said, because he enjoys working with snakes and studying how they can provide insight into new ways to think about and treat some of the most serious medical problems people face, such as heart disease.
One of the things the Leinwand lab is investigating is the process by which a Burmese python’s heart size drastically increases after a gigantic meal. A python’s meal can often be 25 to 100 percent of its own body weight.
“What our research focuses on is in those few days when the snake is digesting the meal, they ramp up their metabolic rate by fortyfold,” Doptis said. “In doing that, their heart and their liver are able to get 50 to 100 percent larger than they are at a resting state. And after they digest their meal, they actually drop those organs back down to their resting size.”
A lot of the research in the lab centers around how the pythons’ heart size can change so quickly without ill side effects. Answering that question could someday lead to medical breakthroughs in the area of treating heart disease, which is the leading cause of death in the United States. When people develop certain types of heart disease, they develop something called cardiac hypertrophy, which means their heart gets enlarged. Once that happens, it’s irreversible.
“These snakes are able to increase the size of their hearts, and then shrink the size of their hearts after every meal,” Doptis said. “We’re trying to understand the mechanism of how that can apply to possibly bring down the size of a human heart that has become enlarged.”
As part of his work in the lab, Doptis applied for and received a research grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to help fund some of the python research he was working on.
“I designed an experiment and completely conducted that experiment myself, and was funded by Howard Hughes Medical Institute for that experiment,” he said. “I don’t think that’s something you can find at every university.”
Once he graduates, Doptis plans to go to graduate school and work on a doctorate degree that involves lab work.
“The experience I’ve had here will be invaluable when I enter graduate school, because I know my way around a lab, I know how to work a lot of the equipment and I’ve learned how good experimental design is done,” he said
#Occupy Denver takes on Wal Mart for workers
Dec 11th