This past Sunday, the prettiest of the year so far, why would 300 people forsake biking, gardening, or napping for a lecture in the dark Bell Museum Auditorium? To hear Joel Salatin, the “libertarian, Christian, capitalist, environmentalist” grass-farming evangelist of Omnivore’s Dilemma, and the movies FRESH and FOOD, INC. fame.

If you’ve gotten this far, you might be familiar with the ideals of the movement: the industrial commodity system is dangerously wreaking havoc on the quality of our food, health, water, air, and land. Salatin addressed the protective myths and proposed solutions:

1) Sustainable heritage local artisan foods are NOT elitist. Everyone can eat well.
2) Sustainable methods CAN feed the world.
3) The history of where and how we went wrong AND how to change things, quickly and easily, before it’s too late.

Salatin was smart, funny, and irreverently mixed personal experiences with research to present his case. Drawing on examples of his own sustainable system as well as those in Japan and Europe, he showed how using integrated methods employing rotational grazing and “multi-speciation” (lots of animals) symbiotically could allow a lot of food to be produced on small parcels of land. He addressed the issue of price by showing that once we figure out how to aggregate product and become more efficient, prices will become comparable.

Blaming “the food police,” the extremely aggressive regulatory agencies whose policies hamper small farmers and producers, he argued that it is government policies (backed by corporate power and influence) that have cramped innovation and entrepreneurial enterprises.
“If some regulator demanded that the founders of Facebook have desks a certain height and computers wired a particular way and fined them if they didn’t have enough employee bathrooms, the business never would have taken off. Its founders may not even have tried,” Salatin claimed. “Regulations control the marketplace, they aren’t making our food any safer. Who says real or raw milk from a farmer you know is NOT safer than Twinkies or Mountain Dew?” Claiming that the chicken he slaughtered in his kitchen has a lower bacteria count than the one in an industrial slaughterhouse he says, “You cannot legislate integrity.”

Drawing on lessons from the Dust Bowl, Salatin identified the period when he thinks we took the “wrong fork in the road.” Just when Albert Howard, the father scientific composting, had identified natural methods for enriching soil, chemists were capturing ammonium nitrate (used to make bombs, fertilizers, and pesticides). In the face of an overwhelming land crisis, farmers (with government backing supported by corporate “know-how”) chose the “quicker fix.”

Salatin believes it’s one we are paying for in the long run. “If we are serious about having real choices, we need to address the obstacles that prohibit clean, local food. We need to deal with the government regulations, licensing, and insurance programs that make it impossible for small farmers and producers to get their goods to the consumer. We’ve got to dispense with farm subsidies and expose the hidden costs in food. Right now, you can’t buy pickles from your neighbor or milk from the farmer down the street. It’s illegal, yet humankind has been eating this way for centuries. It’s really about choice.”

Joel Salatin’s lectures at the Bell were in conjunction with a week of events around the release of the movie FRESH: New Thinking About What We’re Eating.

If you don’t have television access, you can watch Food, Inc. online (Food, Inc. will be streaming in its entirety from April 22 to April 29, 2010)

About Food, Inc.

American agriculture has in many respects been the envy of the world. U.S. agri-business consistently produces more food on less land and at cheaper cost than the farmers of any other nation. What could possibly be wrong with that? According to the growing ranks of organic farmers, “slow food” activists and concerned consumers cited in the new documentary Food, Inc., the answer is “plenty.” As recounted in this sweeping, shockingly informative documentary, sick animals, environmental degradation, tainted and unhealthy food and obesity, diabetes and other health issues are only the more obvious problems with a highly mechanized and centralized system that touts efficiency — and the low costs and high profits that result from it — as the supreme value in food production.

Less obvious, according to Food, Inc., is the entrenchment of a powerful group of food producers, that sets the conditions under which today’s farmers and food workers operate, in order to maximize profits. The industry also maintains a revolving door of employment for government regulators and legislators to protect its power to set those conditions. Then there is “the veil,” a strange disconnect — propagated in good part by millions of dollars poured into marketing and lobbying by the industry — between the average American and the food he or she eats. As one chicken industry representative puts it, “In a way we’re not producing chickens; we’re producing food.”

Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc. has its American broadcast premiere as a special broadcast on Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 9 p.m. on PBS as part of the 23rd season of POV (Point of View), American television’s longest-running independent documentary series. POV is the recipient of a Special Emmy for Excellence in Television Documentary Filmmaking.

Award-winning food journalist Michael Pollan was invited to speak on October 15 at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo but after pressure from a university donor who is chairman of the Harris Ranch Beef Co., the university changed his speech to a panel discussion.

Pollan, whose works include The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto is the Knight Professor of Environmental Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He’s also no stranger to attacks from Big Ag.

Pollan used the forum to continue to challenge people to think about the ways in which we are growing food in our current fossil-fuel dependent system of agriculture. “We’re producing ourselves into a hole,” he warned the audience.

Joining him on the panel was Gary Smith, the Monford Endowed Chair of meat science at the University of Colorado and Myra Goodman, the co-founder of Earthbound Farm.

What follows is a transcript of the discussion, edited by the AlterNet staff for length and clarity.

Moderator: What is sustainability?

Michael Pollan: I would be remiss if I didn’t address a little bit the circumstances surrounding this event, which I don’t think we can let pass in silence. But one of the reasons we’re doing the panel and not a conventional speech is that there was a real challenge to the university posed by the government, and what is potentially a real threat to academic freedom. And as much as agriculture is what we want to talk about today, academic freedom under girds the ability to have the kind of conversation about agriculture we want to have.

Let me tie this back to sustainability. One of the things we understand from the science of ecology is that the best way to achieve resilience, in any system, is by diversity: biodiversity and intellectual diversity. And that having a diversity of views on this campus — you know, because universities are the place where these conversations should take place, without any kind of bullying, without any kind of threats. It’s critical to trying to figure out how to deal with the challenges that we have.

You could have a monoculture of a university — one that only tolerated one kind of thinking – and when the world changes, as it inevitably does, you would find yourself in serious trouble. But when you have a lot of different ideas, and they’re all nurtured, and they’re all brought into contact with one another as we hope to do today, that is where you get the resources to withstand shocks to the system. And god knows those shocks are coming.

Let me just talk about sustainability and the agricultural format, because I really do believe that it’s connected. You know, sustainability is a complex concept in one way, but it’s also very simple: A sustainable system is one that can go on indefinitely, without destroying the conditions on which it depends — or without depending on conditions it can’t depend on.

So take for example fossil fuels: a system that is highly dependent on cheap oil may not be a sustainable system when oil prices go up. A system that depends on large quantities of free or cheap water has a problem when those situations change.

So sustainability is really — it’s an ideal. There are sustainable systems. A forest. A prairie. I mean, these are sustainable systems; they can go on year after year. They don’t need inputs. They don’t destroy the conditions on which they depend. But as soon as we get involved and start changing things to feed ourselves, we get into more complicated relationships. So it’s a matter of degree, I would say.

Now the question is, ‘is the system we have sustainable today?’ I just want to offer one little prop to tell you where I think the problem is. I brought along something [laughter] from McDonald’s. This is a double quarter-pounder with cheese. Those of you in front can probably smell it. Anyone is welcome to have it [laughter].

Moderator: I believe the students might.

MP: Whoever asks the first question. And I’ve got some glasses here. Each of these glasses holds six ounces, Okay? It takes a lot of oil to make a modern fast food hamburger. An astonishing amount of oil. And I did a little research to find out just how much went into this.

The oil comes in in several different stages. There is the biggest part, probably: the petroleum needed to create the fertilizer to grow the corn, which is the diet, typically, of these animals. But there’s also the moving of that corn, the moving of the burger, the processing, you know, and getting it to a McDonald’s near you.

So oil. Six ounces. Six more ounces. Eighteen. Twenty-four. Twenty-six. That’s a lot of oil to make the burger! And you have to ask yourself: Is the system that produces that burger sustainable?

Moderator: Thanks, Michael. Myra, sustainability. Could you define it?

Myra Goodman: How do you follow that?

MP: With milk, maybe [laughter].

MG: To me, sustainability is protecting and preserving our resources so that they are there for our children, you know? And I think it feels almost impossible for me as a farmer and a manufacturer of a food product to not be consuming a lot of fossil fuels to get our food to market. And I think a big part of this conversation is the population that we’re supporting now on this planet, and I think if you look at … these perfect systems Michael talks about, I think that those little farms work well in a much less populated planet.

But New York City is our biggest market, and they don’t have the ability to grow any fresh greens there for more than half the year. And we know that eating healthy organic food — organic produce — is a great thing for them to be eating, versus eating this burger with…how many ounces?

MP: Twenty-six.

MG: Twenty-six ounces of oil. So for our company, you know, we feel that we have made great strides in terms of how to farm on a large scale successfully, organically, without all these synthetic inputs, and we work really hard to reduce our use of fossil fuels and water and a lot of valuable resources. And then we’ve made some great strides — mostly with post consumer recycled materials. We’ve switched to post-consumer recycled cardboard and post-consumer recycled plastics with our clam shells. We were the first company to do that. But we’re still using a tremendous amount of resources.

So I ask myself: Am I leaving this planet better for future generations — I think in certain ways I am, we are. But in certain ways, we’re not, and I don’t know how to accomplish that.

Gary Smith: Well, the concept of sustainability has been around a long time. We really only started to use the word in the last five years. If you look in a dictionary, the definition is: “to provide nourishment for.” And the second definition is: “to be able to prolong or continue.” So basically, if you put it together, can you in fact provide nourishment for the foreseeable future?

The word sustainability, unless you qualify it, means nothing because it’s anything you could keep going. So you have to put some words in front of it. It’s really interesting. There’s a wonderful article by Liz Sloan in the last issue of Food Technology. She cited nine studies where they had actually gone up to people and said, “Do you use ‘sustainability’ or ‘green’ in making purchasing decisions?”

Fifty-four to 82 percent of them said yes, we do. They then asked, “What does it mean? What does the word ‘sustainability’ mean?” Sixty percent of them said, “Huh. I really don’t know.” And so they said in many of these studies, “Well, what do you think it means?” Of all the answers they were given, the number one answer was “natural.” Second was “organic.” Third was “locally grown.” Fourth was “humanely treated.” And then it got into small carbon footprint and so on.

So as those of us in universities begin to tackle sustainability, we say there is a “food supply sustainability;” there is an “agriculture sustainability;” And I like commissions like the Pew commission when they said: “What does sustainability mean to animal agriculture?” And the Pew Commission said: “The management of animal agriculture so that it can be maintained indefinitely.”

Now that doesn’t mean forever. And so our task, as people who are involved in agriculture is: We know things are going to change. We know how we’re doing at the moment. We want to be able to do the things that are necessary to make sure that we are able to feed 9.1 billion people in the year 2050.

So to us, agricultural sustainability is food security: Can we continue to do this the best we can, with all the science and technology we can put into the action, can we continue to feed the world’s hungry people?

[...]

Moderator: What do you believe are the biggest challenges facing the industry? How do we change, or move toward that ideal, that place that you might see out there that’s sustainable?

MP: Yeah, getting from here to there is a tremendous challenge, and I’m sympathetic to any producer who operates under a system that may or may not be working well for them, but it’s very hard to picture how to do it differently. One of the key challenges — just continuing with this oil issue – T. Boone Pickens says we’re going to have $350 a barrel oil within 10 years. We all saw what that did to the food system in 2008. It threw everybody’s input system through the roof. And transportation costs. You had big growers out here, when the price of broccoli went from three dollars per box to ten dollars per box to get it to New York City … buying agricultural land on the east coast to shorten the food supply.

So I think one of the metrics that’s worth thinking about is, to what extent you can squeeze fossil fuel out of your business model, and replace it with the only source of sustainable energy we really have which is to say solar energy. And the more sun in a system – the more energy that’s derived from sun and less from oil, you’re moving in the right direction. So I think that’s very important.

But it’s also very important for people to understand that I’m not an agronomist. I’m not a scientist. I teach writing; I teach journalism. And everything I have learned, I have learned by talking to producers and to academics. This is where my information comes from. And I am out looking for models, you know? Good, bad, medium.

And I think this is really where the university comes in. I think it is the university’s job to be the kind of antenna of the industry. The antenna, you know, looking at what’s next, testing new models. Figuring out, you know, how productive could you be putting cows back on grass? How well could local food systems — foodsheds — feed a given area? What happens to agriculture at $350 a barrel oil? And it’s a reason we all need to support the university, as a place where those questions — scary as they may be, threatening as they may seem, get tried out. Where we do our test tube experiments.

But as an organizing principle, think about that idea of … just to take you back to your grandparents’ age. Pre-war farming: For every calorie of fossil fuel energy we put into the system — the farm system on the farm — we got back two calories of food energy. Calories are just measurements of food energy; they could be anything — could be a Twinkie, could be oil. The modern industrial food system, which I completely acknowledge its achievements in terms of making food really, really cheap … that is quite an achievement, but you have to look at cost, also. As in everything in life, it’s a trade-off. That modern food system, it takes ten calories of fossil fuel energy to produce one calorie of fast food, or processed food.

So that again … can we count on that? I don’t think we can.

[...]

I don’t think it’s about “Do we want?” This isn’t about taste. This isn’t about “I like this kind of food and I like that kind of food.” This is about the fact that we’re entering a kind of scary time characterized by less fossil fuel, less water, climate change — which is an enormous threat to agriculture. It introduces a whole new level of uncertainty. There are already wine makers in the Napa Valley … they’re already saying it’s changing their economy, and they have to adapt and figure out new varieties.

So that change is coming whether we want it or not. And the challenge is, do you kind of go into it willing to be experimental, or do you fight?

Now, let’s take the oil example with the oil industry. Detroit did a fantastic job of defending itself against change. And they have the Congress of the United States, and all the representatives fighting back all the forces that said, “You know, you really need better gas mileage. This is a mistake.” And they won. But they lost by winning.

And we have to make sure agriculture — big agriculture, little agriculture, all different types of agriculture — doesn’t find itself in that boat.

[...]

Moderator: Myra … what do you see as the challenges you’re going to face, and how do you think we might be addressing those?

MG: On the macro scale, of course, knowing that our fossil fuel resources are limited and are going to get more expensive, going to get more limited. We’re going to get huge water problems in the state. Climate change terrifies me, especially as an organic farmer, because we don’t have these silver bullets to deal with pests. And everyone talks about climate change making pests a much bigger problem.

I also think when you’re a business owner, you also have to look at financial sustainability. And have to look at making an ethical profit, so you can afford to pay your workers a living wage, and get them to return to the farmers that they stay in business. And I think especially in California, what’s happening now is that retail has consolidated so much that the last thing I heard was five major retailers own eighty percent of the supermarket space, and there’s so many different farmers, and we have no power in these negotiations. There’s an auction system for a lot of this business, and you’re seeing our margins get really squeezed, and so I think our agenda for financial survival is something that we need to balance with these long term threats. And it would be great, like you were saying, in universities like this, where you’re not trying every day to make ends meet and make your payroll and make your company happy, to have some help with some of those big issues that we’ll be facing in the future.

[...]

GS: There’s no question that fossil fuels, and the emissions that are called greenhouse gases, are a huge problem. EPA did a study in 2009, and they said, “Where is most of the fossil fuel used, and in which sectors are the most greenhouse gas emissions created?” Number one on that list was the electricity generation. Number two on that list was transportation. Number three on that list was manufacturing. Number four on that list was eight percent of fossil fuels from agriculture.

It’s very, very difficult for those of us in agriculture – and I have owned a wheat farm; I own part of a natural beef company; I own a laboratory testing company that serves the food industry. Why do we out of our eight percent have to make the price of food increase in order to save fossil fuel? No. Let’s don’t have a “meatless Monday.” Let’s have a “no electricity Tuesday.” Let’s have a “nobody can drive a car Thursday.” Why do we focus on eight percent of fossil fuels? I want to feed people. And to tell them we’re going to solve their problems by making the cost of food higher?

Thirty-one states increased the level of poverty in this last economic downturn. Increasing the price of food is not the route by which to provide food security to us and the world.

[... ]

MP: It’s not as if this system is working so well for farmers. If you look at … what dairy farmers are doing — the fact that hog farmers today are losing forty-six bucks for every hog they’re growing. Corn and bean farmers this year are projected to lose eight dollars per acre on what they’re planting. This regime, based on high efficiency, expensive inputs and overproduction — sometimes done in the name of feeding the world — does not really serve the farmer very well. We’re producing ourselves into a hole. And yes, there is a larger population coming, but according to the UN, last year, we grew enough food in the world to feed — as things stand now — to feed 11 billion people, if we used it as food.

We didn’t. We put a lot of it in our cars, in our gas tanks. And we fed a lot of it to animals.

So we have to look at this question of overproduction. It’s almost like built into the DNA of how we do it in America. All of our foreign policies are about “faster, quicker, cheaper.” Has that really served us? Has it served us as eaters, and has it served us as growers?

The people who have managed to get out of that commodity trap … figured out another product — something that was, at the time you started, a really specialized niche, and found new markets. They built new markets. The problem is, over time, you’re another commodity, and it’s hard to keep innovating that way.

Also, cheap food. We all like cheap food. But if you look at what cheap food has done to us, it’s not all good. It’s true that we spend less than any people who have ever lived on this planet on food. As a percentage of income, it’s under 10 percent. I don’t know what other industry boasts about the fact that their products are so cheap. And cheap food has given us all sorts of health care problems. Three quarters of the money we spend on health care in this country goes to treat preventable, chronic diseases. And not all of those are food related, but most of them are.

So we can pay the farmer, or we can pay the doctor. We’re moving toward paying the doctor … and wouldn’t it be better to pay the farmer?

Walmart and the Kroger supermarket chain have severed ties with one of the country’s major blueberry growers after an ABC News investigation found children, including one as young as five-years-old, working in its fields.

The children were discovered at the Adkin Blue Ribbon Packing Company, in South Haven, Michigan, this summer by graduate school students working with ABC News as fellows with the Carnegie Corporation.

A five-year-old girl, named Suli, was seen lugging two heavy buckets of blueberries picked by her parents and brothers, aged seven and eight.

An 11-year-old boy in the Adkin fields told the Carnegie fellows he had been picking blueberries since the age of eight.

The owner of the company, Randy Adkin, was once featured on a Walmart billboard advertising his “locally produced and locally sold” blueberries.

“Walmart will not tolerate the use of child labor,” said a spokesperson who said the retailer was unaware of the children at the Adkin facility until contacted by ABC News.

“We will not purchase any additional product from Adkin Blue ribbon Packing Company pending the outcome of an investigation by our ethical sourcing team,” the Walmart spokesperson said.

Separately, the Department of Labor cited Adkin this week for violating federal child labor laws. Inspectors reported they found a six-year-old picking blueberries in Adkin’s fields this summer.

As part of the ABC News investigation, the four Carnegie fellows spent weeks in fruit and vegetable fields in Michigan, New Jersey and North Carolina.

“What it really comes down to is small fingers picking the smaller fruits and vegetables,” said Joel Stonington, a recent graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

In Michigan, a legal aid attorney who works with migrant families, Teresa Hendricks, said the enforcement of the federal child labor law is “very lax.”

On Friday, the United Fresh Produce Association sent a letter to its members referencing the “alarming” ABC News investigation, urging members to “redouble your efforts to ensure that no young children are ever working illegally on our farms.”

The Law & Child Workers

The law prohibits, with only a few rare exceptions, the use of any child under the age of 12 on large agricultural operations.

Yet, as migrant families try to scrap by on meager earnings, they often put their children to work with the tacit acquiescence of growers and their foremen.

“Everybody knows that’s the economic reality for the families,” said Hendricks, “and so it’s something that happens and people just put their head in the sand and know that it happens, a nod and a wink and we look the other way.”

Adkin, the Michigan grower, told ABC News he “would fire” anyone who allowed children to work in his fields. Indeed, Carnegie fellows Angela Boyd, from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and Kieran Meadows, from the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, saw a sign in Adkin’s fields one day saying children were prohibited.

The sign was lying in the back of a truck the next day when the Carnegie fellows videotaped the children in the fields.

Human rights groups say the use of child labor is widespread in fruit and vegetable fields across the country.

“Americans think of child labor as a problem elsewhere, but in fact we have that problem in our own backyard,” said Zama Coursen-Neff of Human Rights Watch, which is conducting its own investigation of child labor practices in the U.S.

“There is child labor in agriculture in almost every state in the United States,” she told ABC News.

In North Carolina, Carnegie fellows Stonington and Linsay Rousseau Burnett, of the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, recorded children working in tomato fields in the western part of the state.

The nurse with a migrant health clinic program, Josie Ellis, told the fellows she is concerned for the health of the young children given the widespread use of pesticides in the fields.

“A lot of the chemicals that the kids are around cause respiratory illness, neurologic impairments, contact dermatitis, really severe rashes on their bodies,” Ellis said.

The nurse said her complaints to the U.S. Department of Labor office, several hours away in Raleigh, rarely resulted in any action.

“They just don’t seem to really care,” she said.

The Obama administration’s Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, promised a crackdown on child labor violations after taking office.

This summer, labor inspectors cited blueberry growers in North Carolina, Arkansas and New Jersey for using children in their fields, with fines averaging $1,100 per child.

While advocates for children welcomed the enforcement efforts, many say the fines levied by the Department of Labor, are so slight they’re little more than a slap on the wrist.

“I think it’s shameful that our nation tolerates child labor,” said Ellis, the North Carolina nurse.

Human Rights Watch investigators say the law needs to be broadened so that it is illegal for children who are 12 and 13 to work in agricultural settings.

“We don’t let them work in factories,” said Coursen-Neff, “only in agriculture are kids allowed to trade in their health and education.”

The executive director of the North American Blueberry Council, Mark Villata, said the industry “does not condone the use of child labor.”

But, said Villata, “we cannot control the practices of every one of the more than 2,000 blueberry growers in the United States.” He said he believes the ABC News report “represents only a tiny segment of our industry.”

Over the years, The Nation and I have closely tracked the heroic work of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) as they have fought to protect agriculture workers in the fields of Florida from exploitation. CIW has exposed cases of slavery and worked with the Department of Justice to successfully prosecute them. It has carried out a Campaign for Fair Food to raise wages and improve working conditions. In short, it has led a movement that recognizes the dignity of the people who harvest the food we eat, and rewards and protects their labor.

In recent years, the organization has focused on obtaining “penny per pound” pay raises for tomato workers from major food retailers that purchase the produce. It doesn’t sound like much, but it would result in about a 75 percent wage increase–from $10,000 annually to $17,000–significantly improving workers’ living and working conditions, and making them less vulnerable to unscrupulous employers and traffickers. CIW struck penny per pound deals with McDonalds, Burger King, and Yum! Brands (whose subsidiaries include Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC, Long John Silver’s and A&W) after long, hard fought campaigns.

But the community-based farmworker organization has reached a new milestone with its latest victory.

On Friday in Capitol Hill, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis attended a press conference along with representatives of CIW and the world’s largest food service company, Compass Group, to announce that the company will pay an extra 1.5 cents per pound of tomatoes that it purchases annually, with one cent per pound going directly to the farmworkers. Compass Group purchases over 10 million pounds of tomatoes every year, and serves 6 million meals at over 10,000 locations every day.

But the key difference between this agreement and previous ones is that Compass Group will only purchase tomatoes from Florida if there is a grower or growers willing to implement the pay raise and a “code of conduct” which includes: a system of clocking in and out to accurately record working hours; the ability of workers to voice labor and safety concerns without fear of retribution; freedom for CIW to educate workers on their rights on company time and at the worksite; and third party auditing for full transparency. If no Florida grower were to step up to these Fair Food standards, Compass Group would remove tomatoes from its menus and use the absence to educate customers about the working conditions that led the company to make this decision.

In the previous agreements brokered by CIW, the food retailers didn’t take this extra step of mandating that they would only purchase from socially responsible growers. That’s significant because the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange (FTGE)–a trade association representing over 90 percent of the state’s growers–has threatened to fine any grower $100,000 for every worker that receives a penny per pound raise. The result? Growers refused to pass along the monies owed to the farmworkers so approximately $1.5 million is now held in escrow by the food retailers.

This time, however, Florida’s third largest grower–East Coast Growers and Packers–broke ranks, dropping out of the FTGE in order to participate in the new agreement between Compass Group and CIW. This was a courageous decision. The Madonia family which founded the farm 53 years ago (to the day of the press conference) will be ostracized by a rather tight-knit group of growers and lose the services of the trade association that represents them. But it will also gain the business of Compass Group and the corporations that signed onto the previous agreements–because all of the CIW-brokered contracts require the companies to preferentially purchase from any grower who is willing to meet the specified Fair Food standards.

“The contracts are designed to move the demand of the largest tomato buyers in such a way as to reward those growers who are paying and treating their workers better and take business away from those who don’t,” explained CIW staff member Greg Asbed.

At the press conference, Lucas Benitez, co-founder of CIW and recipient of the 2003 RFK Human Rights Award, said: “The future of Florida agriculture is contained in this agreement. And that future is founded on mutual respect and mutual benefit. It’s a future based on common purpose in which farmworkers, growers, and leaders in the retail food industry, and consumers, will create together a true social responsibility…. It’s a future that guarantees that both businesses and workers can receive benefits from a more fair industry.”

“This is a great victory for the farmworkers,” said Secretary Solis. “When my father came to this country as an immigrant, he also came as a farmworker…. My mother toiled in an assembly line for almost twenty years…. What I remember most importantly about what they instilled in the family is that you respect work, honor the worker. To know that wherever you work there should always be dignity and respect…. I feel very, very honored to be here today to be able to see that such progress has been made at this local level. And I hope to be a part of this partnership so that we can extend this kind of progress throughout the country.”

Indeed the vision that CIW has pursued and is beginning to see come to fruition is an inspiring one, and a model for the nation.

“I want to see more of this happen, way beyond just the agriculture arena, but also in the service sector fields where you see a lot of people of similar backgrounds being taken advantage of,” Secretary Solis said after the press conference. She indicated that the new Administration was providing “more incentive for these kinds of cooperative agreements to come about.”

“In the previous administration, we didn’t have much enforcement or visibility by the Department of Labor, and Wage and Hour, and OSHA,” she said. “Now you will see a difference.”

There is still work to be done in Florida–the FTGE still stands in the way of growers who might not possess the same kind of courage as East Coast Growers. Will the Department of Labor get involved to help growers who want to do the right thing? “We’ll look at ways,” said Secretary Solis. “…This is a moral issue–one about fairness in the workplace and dignity and respect for those workers that bring the food items that…[are] served to the consumer.”

CIW now has the four largest restaurant companies in the world, the largest foodservice company in the world, and the largest organic grocer signed on to its Fair Food contracts, with more undoubtedly to come. A major grower has now quit the draconian FTGE and will soon be rewarded by the market for doing so.

“The flood wall can’t hold forever,” Asbed said. “This would seem to be the start of the ‘mighty stream’ that we have been waiting for.”

Read the whole conversation over at Jonathan’s site.

Exchanges like these bring a couple of things to mind. 1. Working for justice is messy. Even when one group tries to do what is right and help people, there are others out there working against them. And 2. It can be hard to know who to trust. Can we believe that Chipotle is doing everything they can to pay the workers fairly, or are they hiding behind the messiness of the system in order to not make changes. It’s complicated and it’s the workers who continue to pay while the mess gets sorted out.

August 5, 2009—Talk about a sea change.

From 2006 through 2009, Central Asia’s vast Aral Sea dramatically retreated, with its eastern section losing about 80 percent of its water in just four years (above, newly released NASA satellite images are animated to show the regression).

The immense body of water, which straddles Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan (see map), was once the world’s fourth largest freshwater lake.

But in the past 30 years, 60 percent of the lake has disintegrated, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory.

In the 1960s farmers in this arid region began diverting water from two major rivers that flow into the lake to irrigate cotton fields and rice paddies.

By the end of the 1980s, the Aral had split in two lakes: the Small Aral Sea to the north and the horseshoe-shaped Large Aral Sea to the south.

By 2000 the Large Aral Sea had split into two sections, an eastern and western lobe.

Without an influx of freshwater, the concentration of salts and minerals in the soil began to build up, making the remaining water saltier. This caused the commercial fishing industry to collapse.

Many people have since switched to rice farming, which requires even more diverted water, according to Earth Observatory.

The governments of the surrounding countries have not tried to slow the lake’s demise, experts say, and the poverty-stricken region’s dependence on exports means that the southern section of the lake may soon be gone for good.