Besides the environmental impacts in the areas growing this agricultural export undustry us the fact of depletable critical elements to maintain it,not only natural gas to provide industrially 'fixed' nitrogen from the atmosphere but phosphate that the U.S.is depleting in Florida and Idaho etc. but potassium that we must import.
While many cry crocodile tears particularly christian fundamentalists,about abortions,the fact is that each new baby born in America or anywhere else else will require about a pound and a half of phosphates in the food of his diet in order for minimal nutrition for himself and the plants that produced that food per year or earth orbit not including erosion,etc...This was uknown until the last couple of centuries and now industrial mining operations pump up our food production that would otherwise collapse if not for mining depletable phospates and potassium.This was uinknown when the Cathoolic Church brought Aristotle's five elements - four elements being 'earth,air,water and fire' - into the European educational system.
Above image from my Berkeley Daily Californian editorial of September 22,1987
titled 'Pope's Stance Lacks Scientific Basis' which is posted here at bottom of this page.
Pope's Stances Lack Scientific Basis
The Daily Californian September 22, 1987
On Nov. 10, 1979, a meeting was held in Rome by the Pontifical Academy
of Sciences in honor of the 100th year anniversary of the birth of
Albert Einstein. The meeting marked the first time in the history of the
church, since the formation of its own science academy, that any pope
had presided over such a session.
This meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences may well be more
memorable for Pope John Paul II's statements regarding science, Galileo,
and the church than for the honoring of the centenary of the birth of
Einstein himself.
In discussing the case of Galileo and the church, Pope John Paul II addressed the academy as follows:
"Mr.President, you said very rightly that Galileo and Einstein each
characterized an era. The greatness of Galileo is recognized by all, as
is that of Einstein, but while today we honor the latter before the
College of Cardinals in the apostolic palace, the former had to suffer
much - we cannot deny it - from men and orgainzations within the church.
The Vatican Council has recognized and deplored unwarranted
interferences..."
Approximately one year after his Pontifical Academy of Science speech on
Galileo, the pope, in criticizing what he termed "artificial" methods
birth control, made a notable statement on modern agriculture,
simultaneously. The pope stated:
"There are attacks on fecundity itself with means that human and
Christian ethics must consider illicit... Instead of increasing the
amount of bread on the table of a hungry humanity as a modern means of
production can do today, there are thoughts of diminishing the number of
those at the table through methods that are contrary to honesty. This
is not worthy of civilization."
Now that the pope has pardoned Galileo for telling the church that the
earth is in orbit around the sun, it is time to tell the pope that the
other half of Aristotle's church-approved cosmology has also come
unglued. The "Four Element" concept (earth, air, fire and water) was the
other half of the Aristotelian Earth-centered universe adopted by
St.Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century.
Although the Renaissance astronomers successfully challenged Aristotle's
and the church's geocentric universe several centuries later, atoms
still had not been discovered. For this reason the Four Elements
remained intact and unchallenged long after the death of Galileo in
1642.
The discovery of atoms in the last couple of centuries has totally
transformed our concept of elements. The former "elements", earth and
air, are both composed of a variety of elements. We now know that even
the ancient element "water" can be further divided into the elements of
hydrogen and oxygen. And the element "fire" is now understood to be a
form of radiation.
Justus Von Liebig, the 19th century father of agricultural chemistry,
and other pioneering chemists did to Aristotle's Four Elements what the
Renaissance astronomers did to Aristotle's concept of the Earth as the
center of the universe - they overturned it!
Liebig first pointed out the for plants to utilize carbon dioxide in the
air for growth, they must have adequate amounts of nitrogen,
phosphorus, and potassium in their soil. Unfortunately, in popularizing
the N,P,K concept of modern chemical agriculture, Liebig paved the way
for overreliance upon energy-intensive fossil fuel consumption in the
mining of phosphorus and potassium as well as in industrial production
of nitrogen fertilizers.
We now know that for every orbit of the Earth around the sun - one year -
the pope, each member of the Catholic Church, and everyone else on the
planet consumes in their food and excretes from their bodies
approximately two pounds of phosphorus and various quantities of
nitrogen, calcium, potassium, iron, and other trace elements. All these
elements generally go unrecycled, often into rivers and oceans or even
municipal dumps, further enriching fertilizer industries (who will sell
the farmers more for a price) at the expense of the Earth's
non-renewable mineral nutrient resources.
When the remaining fossil fuels, particularly natural gas, are
exhausted, only bacteria and blue-green algae utilizing phosphorus,
potassium, and trace elements in "soil-culture" and "aqua-culture" will
be likely candidates to fix atmospheric nitrogen for agricultural
fertilization.
Both the trade of grains and the direct trade of phosphates speed the
depletion of our limited reserves of phosphate rock in the United
States, which comes mainly from mining operations in Florida. Deposits
in Idaho are also being mined, at present, and Armand Hammer of
Occidental Petroleum has eyed public land near Ojai, Calif. to
strip-mine for phosphates.
We should realize the need to conserve our dwindling reserves of
phosphates for future generations. The United States not long ago was a
net exporter of petroleum, but now we are importers. The same situation
could occur with phosphates if we refuse to learn from the past. Some
researchers have suggested that we may become dependent upon yet a new
OPEC (or Organization of Phosphate Exporting Countries), such as
Morocco, with its relatively large rock phosphate reserves.
The U.S. General Accounting Office estimates that our reserves of
phosphorus will be depleted some time in the next century. This will
inevitably lead to a food and population crisis that will make our oil
crisis seem minor by comparison.
The pope's apparent ignorance of science history and modern agricultural
technology obscures from his vision the disastrous effects of his
policy of unchecked population growth on future generations who will
find "no food on the table" nor the resources with which to grow it.
This ignorance also shows that the pope has no more expertise in the
fields of agricultural science, population planning, or resoure
management than the pope in Galileo's time did in the area of astronomy.
The nutrients that subsidize the life of the pope, and everyone on the
planet, are a finite resource. Unless the pope realizes the seriousness
of the linear flow of elements through himself and the rest of humanity,
he shall be partly responsible for contributing to the collapse of
modern agriculture.
To sum up, Pope John Paul II is as confused about the movement of atoms
as the pope of Galileo's time was about the movement of the Earth and
celestial bodies. Based upon the rate of depletion of chemical
fertilizers, the present pope does not have 300 years to re-evaluate his
view on modern agriculture and birth control. The question still
remains as to why the Pontifical Academy of Sciences has not made this
disastrous movement of atoms clear to the pope.
http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2014/01/are-agriculture-exports-killing-us?google_editors_picks=true
Are Agriculture Exports Killing Us?
| Wed Jan. 22, 2014 2:55 AM GMT
A large hog farm and its ammonia–spewing "manure lagoon."
Agricultural exports cause $36 billion in annual healthcare costs, along with about 5,100 premature deaths.
That kind of thinking has driven agriculture policy at least since
the days when Richard Nixon's ag secretary Earl Butz exhorted farmers to
scale up operations and plant "fencerow to fencerow" in order to supply foreign markets.But a new paper (PDF) from Harvard suggests massive ag exports might not be the economic boon imagined by USDA secretaries. The researchers looked at a single farm pollutant, ammonia (NH3), which makes its way into the air from fertilizer applied to farm fields and from the manure that accumulates on livestock farms. Once it enters the atmosphere, as Erik Stokstad explained in an excellent (pay-walled) news item in Science, it "reacts with other air pollutants to create tiny particles that can lodge deep in the lungs, causing asthma attacks, bronchitis, and heart attacks."
The
Harvard team found data on the ammonia emissions associated with
various major crops and meat products between 2000 and 2009, calculated
what percentage of each commodity goes to exports, and figured out what
share of total ag-based ammonia emissions come from growing food for
export.
Having calculated the total, they set about figuring out the
public-health costs associated with all of that export-driven ammonia
billowing about in the air we breathe. The results, as our friends at
UpWorthy might say, will astonish you—but not in a warm and fuzzy way.
They calculated that our agricultural exports cause $36 billion in
annual ammonia-realted healthcare costs, along with about 5,100
premature deaths.
Now, $36 billion might seem somewhat modest compared to the total value of US ag exports, which as Vilsack recently announced, have surged to a record. But the headline export numbers are raw—they don't account for how much farmers spent to produce their export-bound bounty. When the researchers looked at the 2000-2009 period and averaged total exports minus production costs, they found that the net value of US ag exports came in at about $23.5 billion annually (see chart above).
Thousands of deaths aside, simple math—$23 billion in gains vs. $36 billion in costs—suggests that the US policy of pushing ag exports is a net economic loser. And as the authors make clear, ammonia emissions are only one of the hidden costs associated with large-scale agriculture. Others include eutrophication (fertilizer-fed dead zones in lakes and deltas), loss of biodiversity, and greenhouse-gas emissions, including another by-product of excess fertilizer and manure, nitrous oxide.
Of course, the $36 billion in costs associated with ammonia emissions don't affect the bottom lines of the gigantic meat and grain-trading firms that move all that meat and grain from here to foreign markets. Nor does it affect the input suppliers that sell farmers the fertilizers and pesticides to grow the grain that's exported, both directly and in the form of grain-fed beef, pork, and chicken. Such costs are what economists call "externalities"—burdens that fall not on the corporations that profit from making a problematic good, but rather on society as a whole.
And that's a pretty good deal, if you're in the business of, say, producing pork in the US for the booming Chinese market. No wonder a Chinese company bought US pork giant Smithfield last year.
Now, $36 billion might seem somewhat modest compared to the total value of US ag exports, which as Vilsack recently announced, have surged to a record. But the headline export numbers are raw—they don't account for how much farmers spent to produce their export-bound bounty. When the researchers looked at the 2000-2009 period and averaged total exports minus production costs, they found that the net value of US ag exports came in at about $23.5 billion annually (see chart above).
Thousands of deaths aside, simple math—$23 billion in gains vs. $36 billion in costs—suggests that the US policy of pushing ag exports is a net economic loser. And as the authors make clear, ammonia emissions are only one of the hidden costs associated with large-scale agriculture. Others include eutrophication (fertilizer-fed dead zones in lakes and deltas), loss of biodiversity, and greenhouse-gas emissions, including another by-product of excess fertilizer and manure, nitrous oxide.
Of course, the $36 billion in costs associated with ammonia emissions don't affect the bottom lines of the gigantic meat and grain-trading firms that move all that meat and grain from here to foreign markets. Nor does it affect the input suppliers that sell farmers the fertilizers and pesticides to grow the grain that's exported, both directly and in the form of grain-fed beef, pork, and chicken. Such costs are what economists call "externalities"—burdens that fall not on the corporations that profit from making a problematic good, but rather on society as a whole.
And that's a pretty good deal, if you're in the business of, say, producing pork in the US for the booming Chinese market. No wonder a Chinese company bought US pork giant Smithfield last year.
