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Mountain News: Telluride symposium looks at food chain

TELLURIDE, Colo. - Ski towns sit atop the food chain. That's true in the metaphoric sense in that even the most third-tier resorts cater to the world's richest people. But it's also true in the literal sense of food.

TELLURIDE, Colo. - Ski towns sit atop the food chain. That's true in the metaphoric sense in that even the most third-tier resorts cater to the world's richest people. But it's also true in the literal sense of food.

First, nearly all meats, vegetables and deserts must all be hauled up-valley. There is little local agriculture. As is true more generally across the developed world, food is hauled long distances. The average food item in the United States is transported 1,500 miles.

But people in developed countries eat lots of meat, and those in places like China and India aspire to eat much more meat. Ultimately, industrialized meat production requires vast amounts of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels, of course, have caused our nasty problem of global warming.

At Moving Mountains, the annual symposium held prior to Telluride Mountain Film, the global - but very rarely local - food supply system was examined in great detail. As National Geographic - a sponsor of the session - noted in a recent issue, it's a big, big problem. The world population, which sat at 2.5 billion in 1950, has now reached 6.7 billion, with projections that it will hit 9 billion by mid-century.

More alarming, evidence has emerged that technology innovations that produced the so-called green revolution of the late 20 th century are coming up short in trying to meet this growing population. In 2007, the most recent year for which evidence was available, 40 million more people became hungry.

To Dennis Dimick, executive editor of National Geographic , the problem starts with the soil. He grew up on a farm in Oregon, and for a decade has agitated for attention to the role of soil. "The question is, can we save our soil, and in the process save ourselves?"

Salinization of soil - which results from salts being deposited on farm land during irrigation - is a big, long-term issue, he said.

He also noted that unlike in the United States, where food has become cheaper over the decades, it remains a major cost to people in poor countries, where individuals spend 50 to 70 per cent of their income on food.

Jerry Glover, of the Kansas-based Land Institute, said achieving a sustainable food supply will require more use of perennials, which do a better job of using water and regulating nitrogen, than the annuals.

Pamela Ronald, a professor of plant pathology at the University of California-Davis, called for a balance of genetically engineered plants with organic farming. Pesticide use annually causes the death of 300,000 people, she said. But the need for food is great, and organic farming currently is responsible for only 1 to 3 per cent of total production.

Other speakers called for food less based on growing plants to feed animals. Much grain - especially corn - is grown to feed cattle in livestock.

"One of the best things we can do is eat plants instead of animals," said Gene Baur, the founder of Farm Sanctuary and an activist that works to end cruelty to farm animals.

But there are exceptions, pointed out Dave James, who operates a ranch 10 miles north of Durango, Colo. He argues that cattle fattened on grass are the exception. "There is no reason you can't have gorgeous cattle fat on grass," he said. "Grass is a very efficient solar-collecting system."

What James - and many others - advocate is a return to smaller-scale agriculture operations. Several speakers at the symposium pointed out that smaller acreages can be farmed more intensely, and with great diversity. James, for example, produces pork, milk, cheese and also some vegetables and fruits on his relatively small farm, which is supplemented by grazing on national forests lands west of Telluride.

Joshua Viertel, the new president of Slow Food USA, urges that people consider "eating as an agriculture act." It's also a major part of two of the top problems in the United States, and the world. One is increasing illnesses tied to diet, one of them being diabetes. Cheap food, he said, really isn't cheap, once those health-care costs are calculated.

The average hospital cost for diabetes is $13,000, compared to $2,500 for the broader average, he said.

Another speaker, Rosamond Naylor, a scientist from Stanford University, said that 200 million Chinese will have diabetes by 2020. "We can't produce enough insulin," she said. She, too, advised eating lower on the food chain: lots of beans and rice, with occasional vegetables, and meat only very sparingly.

Without a change in diet away from cheap but bad food that lower-income people more often eat, she predicted a "health care crisis that is going to cripple our country."

To Helena Norberg-Hodge, a pioneer of the localization movement, the problem lies in the subsidizing of long-range transport of agriculture products. Potatoes from Sweden, she said, are hauled to Italy to be washed and packaged, then hauled back to Sweden.

She claimed that subsidizing transport results in food that costs less when it is produced halfway around the world than food produced a mile away.

But there's a broader, psychological dimension being learned in developing countries, she said. "The message is that Western consumer culture is the future" and your culture is in the past, she said. As a result, school children in places like China are learning that their future lies in cities. "That message is a total fraud," she declared.

Locally grown food is important, she said, because it leads to diversification, and hence also to gains in productivity.

Writer and activist Bill McKibben described a "series of very deep, systematic problems" with current food production: loss of water from aquifers and other sources, loss of land used for farming, degradation of soil, and the aforementioned shift to eating higher on the food chain. In addition, there is the question whether oil supplies have peaked. Modern agriculture is extremely dependent on oil, both for transport and for production of fertilizer.

But all these are overshadowed by climate change. "The rise in temperatures going forward is likely to have a profound effect on our ability to harvest food," he said.

For McKibben, as for most of the speakers, a return to the past ways of producing food, with an emphasis on local production, is the only way to move in the future.