“Agriculture officials insist that the supply itself is not in question, but matching that supply with demand and getting it to where it’s needed most is a new and urgent problem.

This time last year, half of Paul Allen’s green bean and cabbage crops at RC Hatton farms in Pahokee, Florida, would have been destined for food service. Now he’s plowing 5m to 6m pounds of vegetables back into his fields.

“Retail cannot absorb it,” he said. “Whatever else you’ve got just goes unharvested and you’ve got to mulch it back into the ground.”

Allen is far from alone. He laments the circumstances his tomato-growing friends find themselves in, with 80% or more of their crops previously bound for food service. “Everybody’s in the same situation.”

South Florida is a major producer of vegetables for US consumers, especially in the winter and early spring. Now, for many farmers, the cost to pick and pack that produce is higher than the market price.

“It’s all combined to just be a disastrous situation for south Florida growers, who actually had a bumper crop coming into the harvest season,” said Lisa Lochridge, director of public affairs for the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association.

“This is really having a disproportionate effect on warm-weather states and smaller farms,” said Kara Heckert, California regional director for the American Farmland Trust. “It was kind of an overnight shift to at least a significant portion of the food system.”

Strawberries on the California coast and lettuce in the Salinas Valley “salad bowl” – which grows roughly 70% of the nation’s lettuce crop – have been hit particularly hard. And efforts to keep farmworkers safe and socially distanced in the fields mean even slower harvesting.

“There’s still a lot being left on the field, and a lot is being tilled underground,” said Heckert. More still is sitting in storage facilities.

Dairy producers in Wisconsin, Vermont and other states have taken to dumping excess milk en masse, flooding their fields or pouring it down drains in production facilities. The loss of food service business, particularly schools systems that are large buyers of dairy products, has left producers with a highly perishable glut that they can’t easily resolve.

Preparing and packaging food for retail as opposed to wholesale, and getting it packed and shipped on trucks, is an entirely new and expensive problem. And spring is an especially productive season for dairy cows, leading to even more supply in a time with even less demand. Over the last six weeks, US dairy futures prices have nosedived.

Still, said Heckert, there’s confusion over where the pipeline is facing the most stress. “A lot of the grocery stores are limiting how much milk people can buy, thinking it’s going to run out. There’s a disconnect there.”

Farmers filling the gaps

For farmers with direct-to-consumer produce box services, the chaos has been a boon. In the northern San Francisco Bay area, every farm delivery program is full, some with waiting lists in the hundreds.

“We’re using this as an opportunity to encourage collaboration and farmers working together to try to fill the gaps in this disruption,” said Evan Wiig, membership director at the Community Alliance with Family Farmers, which is working to pair farms that previously sold direct to schools and restaurants with already established delivery logistics.

“It’s been kind of a mad rush to figure out supply and demand and who needs what, who has what,” he said. “This is usually something that you do carefully over the course of an entire year. And here we are trying to do it in a matter of a week in order to prevent the closure of the farms, and also a lot of food waste.”

Before the coronavirus, nearly all of Brothers Produce business was food service and school delivery. In March, Brent Erenwert, CEO of the Houston, Texas, food distributor, created an entirely new model to keep his employees in business and his company afloat: selling produce boxes with fruits, vegetables, eggs and milk through co-ops in the region, and direct to customers online.

“Some consumers don’t feel safe going to the grocery store, unfortunately, because of too many people being there. I know how to get that product safely to a consumer’s hand,” said Erenwert. “The biggest thing was to keep my employees’ jobs and keep the supply chain moving – because if people see the supply chain stop, they go into even more of a panic.”

But that supply chain is missing a crucial link, bridging the gap between food that would be wasted and a growing need in food banks nationwide.

Many growers already reeling from huge losses in sales aren’t able to further eat the cost of harvesting, packing and transporting crops to needy food banks without any financial aid. Florida growers have asked the US Department of Agriculture to buy the surplus produce so it could be donated to people in need without further hurting farm finances. The California department of food and agriculture is partnering with the California Association of Food Banks to provide funding and resources for farm donations to feeding programs across the state.

Still, there’s only so much that food banks can take.

“What’s really weird right now in the supply chain is the grocery stores seem to be pretty heavy on product, farmers are throwing away stuff, and food banks are full. We don’t know where the demand lies,” said Erenwert.

“We’re working with the state to try to get it to charities. But quite frankly, a lot of those avenues are full,” said Paul Allen, a Florida vegetable grower. “They can’t absorb it all, no way.”

Food banks aren’t set up to be warehouses for such vast quantities of stranded and highly perishable food.

“Everything under the sun produce-wise is showing up. We’re getting the cream of the crop,” said Brian Greene, CEO of Houston Food Bank. “We have a potential bonanza – now we’re working on the ability to capitalize on it. All the food banks have to solve this puzzle. What are the partnerships we set up so we can utilize this? Because we’re not going to get the other things.”

With shelf-stable staple goods selling out at markets nationwide, food banks are finding it difficult to secure surplus dry and frozen goods. This influx of produce could help shore up a dip in donations, but it requires more workers and volunteers to sort and package the food when charities are in short supply of helping hands. There’s no doubt, said Greene, that much of this food will unfortunately still go to waste.

“The reality is what makes the food chain work normally is there are just tens of thousands of arrangements that have been developed over time in order to match supply and demand. Then you just suddenly break all that and you’re trying to, with voluntary relationships, piece something together in a very short timeframe,” he said. “There’s going to be a lot of failure.”

These are excerpts from the article below:

Title: ‘A Disastrous Situation’ : Mountains Of Food Wasted As Coronavirus Scrambles Supply Chain
Author: Cagle, Susie
Publication(s): The Guardian
Date: 9 April 2020
Link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/09/us-coronavirus-outbreak-agriculture-food-supply-waste

In the study, an international team of scientists announced they successfully sequenced the A. filiculoids genome as well as the genome of another floating fern known as Salvina cucullata. Co-author and University of California Berkeley integrative biology professor Carl Rothfels, Ph.D. tells Inverse that having these genomes brings scientists one step closer to “understanding some of the crazy biology of these particular species.”

Rothfels says that one of the most “extraordinary features” of this fern is its ability to have a symbiotic relationship with cyanobacteria, which in turn gives it the ability to “fix” nitrogen. Nitrogen fixation is the process by which plants use the chemical element as a fertilizer: Most plants typically can’t do this alone, but the blue-green cyanobacteria that live in the Azolla leaves allow for this process to happen. In turn, Azolla can sustain rapid growth in favorable conditions.

That’s important for multiple reasons, the first being that the fern shows “great promise as a biofuel,” says Rothfel. While it’s been used as a fertilizer for rice paddies in Asia for the past 1,000 years, he and his team are now curious to know whether it could be used as a sustainable fertilizer elsewhere. Its ability to help agricultural crops is compounded by its resistance to pests: Farmers have noticed for decades that bugs generally don’t like ferns, and now the sequencing of the Azolla genome reveals it carries certain genetic mutations that allow it to repel insects.

All of this has earned Azolla the nickname “green manure,” and co-author and Cornell University assistant professor Fay-Wei Li, Ph.D. says it is “perhaps the most economically important fern that has ever lived!”

But Li and Rothfel both note that the fern’s incredible ability to grow and thrive could help humans save themselves from climate change. In fact, it’s actually helped out the planet before.

“There was a massive Azolla bloom in the Arctic 50 million years ago so large that geologists believe it drove down a significant amount of C02 (carbon dioxide) and helped cool the Earth,” says Li.

That means that Azolla, one of the fastest-growing plants on the planet, has the potential to be a significant carbon sink today. A massive rise in modern-day atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are directly linked to the warming of the planet and overall climate change.

Millions of years ago, this fern “sequestered so much carbon that it switched the globe out of ‘hothouse’ conditions into the relatively cooler conditions that we experience now,” says Rothfel. If we grow a huge amount of this tiny plant, we might be able to make that happen again.”

“In the spring of 1918, the federally operated and newly minted Food Board, a regulatory body in charge of ensuring food remained affordable and in good supply, bought more than 1,000 tractors and sold them to farmers at cost as a way to support the requested increase in production, according to Canada’s War Effort 1914 – 1918 , issued by the Director of Public Information in Ottawa in 1918. It was also the year the Spanish Flu spread across the nation, in the end killing more than 50,000 Canadians, most of them between the ages of 20 and 40.

This was a watershed year for agriculture in Canada. It was a year the industry increased its resilience. After the First World War, farm-gate sales changed from a representation of how hard a farmer worked to how well he or she could turn a profit in an increasingly global and regulated marketplace. Farmers became professionals in a way they weren’t previously.

Agriculture in 2020 needs its own dose of resilience.

The markets are poor. Talks with China over canola exports have been suspended over COVID-19 fears. Soybeans have suffered a similar fate at the same hand. That market isn’t rallying in any significant way, either.

Land prices remain high. Machinery costs, too, represent a time when companies felt vindicated in adding bells and whistles to new model years all at additional costs that profit margins could justify. It’s been a few years since that line of reasoning bore any meaningful connection to how things are on the average crop farm in Canada.

Transportation disruptions have cost the agricultural industry in ways it hasn’t fully seen yet. Demurrage is a cost that gets passed down the line to the primary producer — the farmer — and there is still a backlog of bulk vessels waiting at port. That expense line is still growing.

Amid these disparate and disruptive elements, there’s the seemingly galvanized skepticism towards our current government’s ability to draw and follow a proper roadmap for agriculture to thrive in Canada.

Then, as our cultural and political scaffolding of popsicle sticks come unglued and institutions like the NHL, NBA and awards ceremonies start to fall away over COVID-19, we’re left to make sense of another disruption. This one is not terrible, but social isolation is a hard thing for the average person to interpret as anything other than cause for panic, regardless of the fact that it should be far from panic inducing.

This will affect the markets. COVID-19 will affect things in ways that are difficult to foresee, as the news is changing every minute and regulators are making bold, unpredictable and immediate moves.

The industry will work on restoring markets. Machinery and land are ultimately vulnerable to what people are able and/or willing to spend. Canada and other affected countries will do their best to contain and control COVID-19, transportation systems will get back on-track and governments come and go.

The agricultural sector has a lineage of resilience. It has survived the Great Depression, two world wars and the high interest rates of the ‘80s (not without casualties, however).”

Title: The resilience of the agriculture community is being tested anew amid the COVID-19 outbreak
Author: Dyck, Toban
Publication(s): The Chronicle Herald
Date: 16 March 2020
Link: https://www.thechronicleherald.ca/business/perspectives-on-business/the-resilience-of-the-agriculture-community-is-being-tested-anew-amid-the-covid-19-outbreak-424674/
Notes:

“Although the Global Seed Vault contains more than one million seed samples from around the world, this marks the first time that a U.S. Native American tribe has been invited to store its seeds inside the facility. Anadisgoi, the Cherokee Nation newsroom, reports that nine samples of heirloom seeds were collected to send to the vault, including Cherokee White Eagle Corn—which the tribe considers to be its “most sacred” corn—Cherokee Long Greasy Beans, Cherokee Trail of Tears Beans, and Cherokee Candy Roaster Squash.”

To read more about this article:
https://www.foodandwine.com/news/cherokee-indigenous-seed-vault-donation-norway

Pie Kamau recently released an article on this in Africa Agribusiness on 16 January 2020:

Link: https://africabusinesscommunities.com/agribusiness/news/southern-africa-in-throes-of-climate-emergency-45-million-people-facing-hunger-across-the-region-wfp/

“A record 45 million people, mostly women and children in the 16-nation Southern African Development Community are gravely food insecure following repeated drought, widespread flooding and economic disarray.

As the crisis deepens, the world must step up now to save lives and enable communities to adapt to climate change, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has warned. “This hunger crisis is on a scale we’ve not seen before and the evidence shows it’s going to get worse,” said Lola Castro, WFP’s Regional Director for Southern Africa. “The annual cyclone season has begun, and we simply cannot afford a repeat of the devastation caused by last year’s unprecedented storms”.”

It is important to note that many of the individuals facing food insecurity in this region have little direct involvement with the food being exported, it is still critical to question the role that large-scale agriculture in this region has and whether there is opportunity to better distribute these resources for the benefit of regional residents.

These mountain water towers are critical to the world’s water supply because they store and transport fresh water to communities through glaciers, lakes and streams. The researchers, comprised of 32 scientists from around the world, assessed the 78 water towers and ranked them based on how much people in the area rely upon them. They found that the Indus water tower, located in the Himalayas and covering portions of Afghanistan, China, India and Pakistan, is both the most relied-upon system and also one of the most vulnerable. The Rocky Mountains water tower was labelled as the most important in North America.”

Link: https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/climate-change-threatens-water-resources-for-1-9-billion-people-study-reveals-1.4722622

Here is the link to the original article in “Nature” published December 2019 by Prof. Walter W. Immerzeel and a team at the University of Utrecht University and FutureWater – Netherlands-based research institutes. There whole project involves 32 researchers on the team – spanning several countries and institutes.

Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1822-y

Jonathan Amos at the BBC additionally offered an interpretation of these findings.

“These are the 78 mountainous regions that are able to generate and then store vast quantities of water.

They deliver it in a controlled way to major populations living downstream.

The Dutch-led team finds Asia’s Indus basin – fed by the Himalayan, Karakoram, Hindu-Kush, and Ladakh ranges – to be the most important storage unit on the planet.

Its waters, produced at high elevation from rain and snow, and draining from lakes and glaciers, support more than 200 million people settled across parts of Afghanistan, China, India and Pakistan.

But the Indus water tower, the researchers point out, is also the most vulnerable on their list of 78.

It’s subject to a range of current and future pressures, from ever greater demand – for more drinking water, for increased irrigation and industry, etc – to issues that could severely curtail supply. The latter will include geopolitical tensions, given the Indus intersects national boundaries; but the most obvious threat is climate change. A warming world will disrupt precipitation patterns and denude glaciers of their storage capacity.”

[…]

“Africa does not appear in this listing, principally because it is devoid of major glacier systems. Ice bodies do exist on the continent, in places such as on Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya, but their contribution to downstream catchments is limited.

And one of the defining aspects of the towers is the way they are able to maintain essential water supplies to populations even in drought years through the steady melt of high-elevation ice in summer months.”

Link: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-50707138

Furthermore, Dr. Bethan Davies – a lecturer in glaciology at Royal Holloway: University of London and a researcher affiliated with the team (of 32 researchers globally) who published the paper in Nature offers the following comments in an article in the Conversation:

“The Indus basin is the most important water storage unit in Asia. Fed by rain and snow high up in the Himalayan, Karakoram, Hindu-Kush, and Ladakh mountain ranges, the water that drains from lakes and glaciers here supports 206 million people across parts of Afghanistan, China, India and Pakistan. Much of it is used for irrigating crops and in industry, as well as drinking water.”

[…]

“In Europe, the Alps is the most important water tower for the number of people dependent on its supply, followed by the Rhone, Rhine and Po basins. In North America, the Fraser and Columbia basins are the most critical water towers. The river Fraser has a high natural water demand in the downstream forest ecosystem, while the Columbia basin is rich in snow and ice and has high demand for irrigation from local farms. In South America, the South Chile, South Argentina, Negro, La Puna and North Chile water towers are the most critical suppliers of water to the thirsty South Atlantic and South Pacific coasts.”

[…]

“If global heating can be limited to 1.5°C, the world could retain 75% of its mountain glacier area and avoid the most significant impacts.”

Link: https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-mountain-water-towers-are-melting-putting-1-9-billion-people-at-risk-128501

It is vital to ask where these populations will get their water from once these mountain sources are depleted. One researcher recommended “towing” ice bergs for drinking water – but what happens when that resource melts away too? It is vital to analyze this present scenario to predict future trends in environmental and geopolitical instability as a result of water-based challenges, limitations, and trends.

“It is time to change drought approaches from crisis to risk management based on prediction, planning and preparedness,” Mansur stressed.

At the Drought Preparedness Day …the FAO, World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the Secretariat of the UNCCD established a proactive drought policy based on three pillars – monitoring, forecasting and early warning, vulnerability and impact assessment and preparedness, mitigation and response.

It acknowledged the role of many international and national institutions in dedicated technology research in dry lands, including the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in India, the Brazilian Company for Agricultural Research (Embrapa) and the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) in Lebanon. However, efforts to strengthen institutions and adopt new technologies usually come after an emergency has already occurred, the report observed….

The report highlights how practices that preserve ecosystems can also benefit drought preparedness. Sustainable land, soil and water management help increase resilience to droughts. Such practices also have other benefits such as capturing carbon, increasing water supply and protecting biodiversity, it states. It also points out that many countries are already adopting good practices, such as establishing integrated production systems that combine forestry and agriculture, or agroforestry-livestock systems that contribute to land use sustainability and increase drought resilience.

The report was developed by FAO in collaboration with UNCCD, WMO, Global Water Partnership and the Integrated Drought Management Programme as contribution to the Global Framework on Water Scarcity in Agriculture (WASAG.)
Twitter, September 12, 2019

769.1 square kilometres were lost last month – a stark increase from the 488.4 sq km lost in June 2018, INPE’s data showed. That equates to an area of rainforest larger than one and a half soccer fields being destroyed every minute of every day.
More than two-thirds of the Amazon are located in Brazil and environmental groups blame far-right leader Bolsonaro and his government for the increase, saying he has relaxed controls on deforestation in the country.

Why Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro has environmentalists worried for the Amazon

“Over the past six months, Bolsonaro and his environment minister have been devoting themselves to the dismantling of the Brazilian environmental governance and neutralizing regulatory bodies”, Carlos Rittl, executive secretary of the environment NGO network Observatorio do Clima (Climate Observatory) told CNN.

Greenpeace called Bolsonaro and his government a “threat to the climate equilibrium” and warned that in the long run, his policies would bear a “heavy cost” for the Brazilian economy. “Bolsonaro already accounts for gigantic setbacks for the environment and for Brazil’s image”, Márcio Astrini, a spokesman for Greenpeace in Brazil said in a statement on Friday.
CNN asked the Brazilian Environment Ministry for comment on the recent numbers but has not received a response.

Delivering on a campaign promise

During Bolsonaro’s election campaign, he promised his government would focus on recovering the Brazilian economy and said he would look at ways of exploring the Amazon’s economic potential. Six months after his inauguration, the populist president is certainly delivering on his promises.

“The strong indication of the increase in the deforestation rate during the government of Jair Bolsonaro shouldn’t surprise anyone,” Rittl said. “It’s, after all, the accomplishing of a campaign promise: Bolsonaro was the first president in all of Brazil’s history to be elected with an openly anti-environmental and anti-indigenous speech”.

Rittl says loggers, farmers and miners emboldened by Bolsonaro’s pro-business stance have jumped on the opportunity, taking advantage of reduced controls and less oversight to seize control of a growing area of land within the Amazon forest.

Meanwhile, the government is hampering the efforts of those who are supposed to keep deforestation in check.

The Brazilian Environment and Renewables Institute (IBAMA), the country’s environmental enforcement agency, has seen its budget cut by $23 million, and six months in, the government has only nominated the heads of four of IBAMA’s 27 state offices. None of those four are located in states with jurisdiction over the Amazon rainforest.

In addition, official data obtained by Observatorio do Clima and sent to CNN shows the number of operations IBAMA has conducted in 2019 has gone down since the beginning of the year, around the same time Bolsonaro was sworn in.

“The explosion of the number of [deforestation] alerts in the past couple of months should lead to an intensification of inspection operations, but that hasn’t happened,” Rittl said.

He also put some of the blame on some European countries. “As much as European leaders have made ‘beautiful’ speeches showing concern about Bolsonaro’s environmental policies, and even though the [Paris Climate] agreement has environmental safeguards, the EU is signaling that it is at least tolerant with the ongoing anti-environmental agenda”.

International criticism

French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have both said they were concerned about the erosion of environmental protections in Brazil, but neither France, Germany or the European Union have gone beyond words. Last Friday, the European Union struck a deal with the South American trade bloc Mercosur, which includes Brazil, a move environmentalists say will only put additional pressure on the Amazon and its fragile ecosystem.

The Amazon forest is often referred to as the planet’s lungs, producing 20 per cent of the oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere. It is considered vital in the ongoing efforts to slow down global warming and it is also home to uncountable species of fauna and flora. With roughly half the size of the United States of America, it is the largest rainforest on the planet.

Its area has been steadily shrinking over the past century with deforestation reaching its peak in 1995, when 29.059 km² were lost. The rate of destruction had then been decreasing, reaching its lowest point in 2012.

It has been accelerating ever since.