The Next Catastrophe Heading Our Way: Food-- And What Trump And Congress Are NOT Doing About It

-by Helen Klein

The nation’s food supply is not going very well. What will be done about it? Is anyone in government looking at it?

Last week on MSNBC, Chris Hayes aired, "The Real Reason Grocery Shelves are Empty" (above). This segment highlighted the massive amounts of food currently rotting and being dumped: thousands of gallons of milk are being spilled from storage facilities, eggs are being smashed and farmers are plowing under tons of vegetables. Why? Because there is a huge discrepancy between food grown for commercial distribution, such as for schools, restaurants, hotels and businesses, and food grown for consumers, to be sold in grocery stores. Due to the widespread closings of so many businesses and the ubiquitous stay-at-home orders in most states, the demand for food for commercial purposes has virtually dried up: farmers in this industry no longer have buyers. Yet consumer demand has increased exponentially. The supply chains are under stress because there is no method to send the food predestined for commercial entities to people and families.

Chris Hayes asked Jessie Newman, Wall Street Journal agricultural reporter, an obvious question: Why can’t food grown for commercial purposes be sent to consumers? She explained that unfortunately, this could not be easily and quickly done. The answer, it turns out, is complicated. The supply chains for commercial and consumer food distribution are vastly different. The relationships, distribution patterns, food preferences and packaging cannot easily be shifted from one to the other. To do so would be extremely challenging and costly. And take time.

While this problem has a few parallels to the current oil crisis, with no one needing or wanting oil and businesses no longer needing or wanting commercially grown food, food IS and always will be needed and wanted, regardless of the reasons behind why it is grown. The demand at Food Banks and supermarkets all over the country is skyrocketing.





On MSNBC’s The Last Word (4/16/20), Lawrence O’Donnell focused on the lengthy lines of cars and hours long waits at Food Banks, demonstrating the tremendous and drastically increasing demand for consumer food. In Dallas, over 3,000 cars lined up. In San Antonio, over 10,000 cars lined up. Eric Cooper, who runs a food bank there, said the demand is unprecedented: the food is going out as fast as it is coming in. There is a two to three week supply in their warehouses and it may soon run out. Then what? The Feed America network has seen explosive growth and is now desperate for food. The supply chains are struggling to keep up. Scenes are similar in Los Angeles, New York, and many other places around the country. And this is only the beginning of this critical aspect of the pandemic catastrophe.

Massive unemployment and loss of income are having drastic deleterious effects on feeding families. People are behind in their rent and car insurance and many have lost their health insurance, thanks to the employment tied policies that everyone was touting just a few months ago. Food is a necessity and is becoming the first priority. The desperation will only increase in coming months.

In 1943, the psychologist, Abraham Maslow presented his famous Hierarchy of Needs that motivate human beings. This construct continues to have meaning today. Maslow identified five categories of human need:

• Physiological
• Safety
• Love
• Esteem
• Self-actualization

While people in industrialized nations have taken pride in rising up the pyramid to be the best they can be, the pandemic is drawing Americans back down to the base and very foundation of the hierarchy: Physiological needs. These needs are the requirements of life and essential for survival: needs such as food, air, shelter, clothing, sleep, etc. According to Maslow, we can only reach for needs further up the hierarchy when people feel they have sufficiently satisfied the previous need.

There is some overlap in the various needs, which means that lower levels may take precedence back over the higher levels at any time. Right now, the American dream appears to be moving backwards and sliding down the pyramid. We are heading back to the basics of human survival. Will many Americans soon be starving? Will this become another horrendous parallel to the 1930’s Depression?

What can be done about all of the commercially produced food that is being destroyed and wasted while Food Banks and supermarket shelves are inching close to empty?

This exposes another blatant need for the federal government to step in and act swiftly to prepare for increasingly massive food shortages. The Defense Production Act comes to mind as a critical tool that could be used in fighting hunger in the USA. Will Trump use it for this purpose? As far as I know, this has not even come up yet as a possibility. Of course, he has refused to use the Act to supply Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), critical in fighting this virus, so why would he be willing to use it for food?

Reading up on the ACT, which came into being in 1950 during the Korean War, there are three main sections:

The first authorizes the President to require businesses to accept and prioritize contracts for materials deemed necessary for national defense. This is regardless of potential loss incurred to the businesses and allows for prohibition of hoarding or price gouging.

The second authorizes the President to establish mechanisms to allocate materials, services and facilities to promote national defense.

The third authorizes the President to control the civilian economy so that scarce and critical materials necessary for defense are available.

The Act also authorizes the President to requisition property, force industry to expand production and the supply of basic resources, impose wage and price controls, settle labor disputes, etc., and allocate raw materials towards national defense.

The ACT seems perfectly designed to mobilize the food industry and shift commercial food production to consumer food production. To do so NOW, before the shortages become overwhelming, would make perfect sense. Being proactive is the name of the game.

Thus far the Trump administration has refused to implement the ACT. If only common sense, practicality and expertise had any place in the current administration. The coming disaster with food seems obvious but there has been little discussion about this or proposals to deal with it.

Congress, of course, could take a leading role in this rising catastrophe and allocate money to shift food production from commercial to consumer, but little attention has been paid to this issue in the media. So far, none of the bills being proposed in Congress address food.

This is a very complicated issue. Should surplus commercial food be donated? Should the government buy it from the producers and promote industry to repackage and redistribute it? How can this be done? At the very least, critical discussions should be taking place by experts in the field. Perhaps Jared Kushner could take it on?

Self Portrait As Gatherer (2017) by Julie Heffernan

There Is A Safe Way To Open The Economy Back Up Again-- And Then There Is The Republican Way... Which Could Bring On Curve Steepening, Economic Depression And Food Shortages

I started listening to Chris Martenson's daily coronavirus podcasts in late January and the posting them at DWT a few weeks later. Lucky for me and for some of the readers. Because of Martsenson's warnings I got an early understanding of what this pandemic was going to be like-- and what I could do to protect myself and my family and friends. Long before it was too late, we all had N-99 and N-95 respirator masks. I bought 3 months worth of root vegetables, pasta, dried beans, grain, cooking oil, paper goods, bottled water, etc. I moved much of my retirement savings from equities to bonds and other less volatile vehicles, like real estate investments. I bought rubber gloves and Hebiclens and consulted with my doctor about my own personal vulnerabilities and what she thought I should do about protecting myself.

Out for a stroll in the neighborhood

But there was one step that Martsenson kept talking about that I resisted... until now. It was too scary to contemplate: starting a vegetable garden. But he's been right about every single thing and ahead of every single curve, so the worry had gnawed at me from the inside. So, when Jacquie from Blue America recommended a gardening system even I could handle-- the one she uses-- I went for it. When I was a around 15-16, I had had it with America and decided to leave. I spent a whole winter stealing packets of seeds and gardening equipment and other necessities from a 5 and dime on Kings Highway in Brooklyn and making parcels for myself and sending them to me at poste restante in Nukuʻalofa, the capital of Tonga. Eventually, I hitch-hiked from Brooklyn to San Pedro in L.A. and stowed away on a ship going to New Zealand, where I intended to stow away on the mail boat that went to Tonga every other month. I got caught on the ship before it left San Pedro. I wonder what happened to all those seeds and tools and things I sent to Nukuʻalofa.

Yesterday I read a piece in The Guardian by Fiona Harvey about the pandemic causing a famine of biblical proportions. Harvey wrote that the chief of the UN’s food relief agency has warned that mankind "is facing widespread famine 'of biblical proportions' because of the coronavirus pandemic."

Covid-19 is likely to be sweeping through the developing world but its spread is hard to gauge. What appears to be certain is that the fragile healthcare systems of scores of developing countries will be unable to cope, and the economic disaster following in the wake of the pandemic will lead to huge strain on resources.

“This is truly more than just a pandemic-- it is creating a hunger pandemic,” said David Beasley [executive director of the World Food Program]. “This is a humanitarian and food catastrophe.”

According to a report produced by the UN and other organisations on Thursday, at least 265 million people are being pushed to the brink of starvation by the Covid-19 crisis, double the number under threat before the pandemic.

None of those looming deaths from starvation are inevitable, said Beasley. “If we get money, and we keep the supply chains open, we can avoid famine,” he said. “We can stop this if we act now.”

He said the situation even four weeks from now was impossible to forecast, stressing that donors must act with urgency. He urged countries not to put in place export bans or other restrictions on the supply of food across borders, which would lead to shortages.

...Also crucial is ensuring that supply chains stay open in the face of lockdowns and the difficulty of getting workers into the fields to tend crops if they are sick or unable to travel easily. “If the supply chain breaks down, people can’t get food-- and if they can’t get food for long enough, they will die,” said Beasley.

Yesterday the NY Times' Abdi Dahir reported a similar dire situation: "The world has never faced a hunger emergency like this, experts say. It could double the number of people facing acute hunger to 265 million by the end of this year." The scary headline: "Instead of Coronavirus, the Hunger Will Kill Us." He wrote about food shortages in Africa, India, Colombia. "The coronavirus pandemic has brought hunger to millions of people around the world. National lockdowns and social distancing measures are drying up work and incomes, and are likely to disrupt agricultural production and supply routes-- leaving millions to worry how they will get enough to eat. The coronavirus has sometimes been called an equalizer because it has sickened both rich and poor, but when it comes to food, the commonality ends. It is poor people, including large segments of poorer nations, who are now going hungry and facing the prospect of starving."

This hunger crisis, experts say, is global and caused by a multitude of factors linked to the coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing interruption of the economic order: the collapse in oil prices; widespread shortages of hard currency from tourism drying up; overseas workers not having earnings to send home; and ongoing problems like climate change, violence, population dislocations and humanitarian disasters.

Already, from Honduras to South Africa to India, protests and looting have broken out amid frustrations from lockdowns and worries about hunger. With classes shut down, over 368 million children have lost the nutritious meals and snacks they normally receive in school.

There is no shortage of food globally, or mass starvation from the pandemic-- yet. But logistical problems in planting, harvesting and transporting food will leave poor countries exposed in the coming months, especially those reliant on imports, said Johan Swinnen, director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington.

While the system of food distribution and retailing in rich nations is organized and automated, he said, systems in developing countries are “labor intensive,” making “these supply chains much more vulnerable to Covid-19 and social distancing regulations.”

And in the U.S.? There are reports that "an emerging shortage of carbon dioxide gas (CO2) caused by the coronavirus pandemic may affect food supply chains and drinking water, a Washington state emergency planning document has revealed. The document, a Covid-19 situation report produced by the State Emergency Operations Center (SEOC), contains a warning from the state’s office of drinking water (ODW) about difficulties in obtaining CO2, which is essential for the process of water treatment... 'Several [water plants] had received initial notification from their vendors that their supply would be restricted to 33% of normal.'" This seems solvable. But what about the food supply chain in the U.S.? Meat seems like a big probem, albeit not for vegetarians (like myself). I noticed that grocery stores this week that had been missing organic produce two weeks ago-- like roma tomatoes, belgian endives and melons-- were amply stocked this week. Boxes of pasta are back on the shelves... as is seaweed, rice and, yes, toilet paper. But... this is California. What about other parts of the country?

The nation’s food supply chain is showing signs of strain, as increasing numbers of workers are falling ill with the coronavirus in meat processing plants, warehouses and grocery stores.

The spread of the virus through the food and grocery industry is expected to cause disruptions in production and distribution of certain products like pork, industry executives, labor unions and analysts have warned in recent days. The issues follow nearly a month of stockpiling of food and other essentials by panicked shoppers that have tested supply networks as never before.

Industry leaders and observers acknowledge the shortages could increase, but they insist it is more of an inconvenience than a major problem. People will have enough to eat; they just may not have the usual variety. The food supply remains robust, they say, with hundreds of millions of pounds of meat in cold storage. There is no evidence that the coronavirus can be transmitted through food or its packaging, according to the Department of Agriculture.

Still, the illnesses have the potential to cause shortages lasting weeks for a few products, creating further anxiety for Americans already shaken by how difficult it can be to find high-demand staples like flour and eggs.

“You might not get what you want when you want it,” said Christine McCracken, a meat industry analyst at Rabobank in New York. “Consumers like to have a lot of different choices, and the reality is in the short term, we just don’t have the labor to make that happen.”

In one of the most significant signs of pressure since the pandemic began, Smithfield Foods became the latest company to announce a shutdown, announcing Sunday that it would close its processing plant in Sioux Falls, S.D., after 230 workers became ill with the virus. The plant produces more than 5 percent of the nation’s pork.

“The closure of this facility, combined with a growing list of other protein plants that have shuttered across our industry, is pushing our country perilously close to the edge in terms of our meat supply,” Smithfield’s chief executive, Kenneth M. Sullivan, said in a statement.

As of Saturday, the plant’s Covid-19 cases were more than half South Dakota’s active total, Gov. Kristi Noem said. She called the outbreak an “alarming statistic” and asked Smithfield to shut down the facility for two weeks.

The problems at the Sioux Falls pork plant show the food processing industry’s vulnerability to an outbreak. Employees often work shoulder to shoulder, and some companies have granted sick leave only to employees who test positive for the coronavirus. That potentially leaves on the job thousands of other infected workers who haven’t been tested, hastening the infection’s spread.

Other major processors have had to shut down plants. JBS USA, the world’s largest meat processor, closed a plant in Pennsylvania for two weeks. Last week, Cargill closed a facility in Pennsylvania where it produces steaks, ground beef and ground pork. And Tyson halted operations at a pork plant in Iowa after more than two dozen workers tested positive.

“Labor is going to be the biggest thing that can break,” said Karan Girotra, a supply-chain expert at Cornell University. “If large numbers of people start getting sick in rural America, all bets are off.”

At the other end of the supply chain, grocery stores are also dealing with increasing illnesses among workers, as well as absences by those afraid to go in to work.

Even as company officials called them “essential” for their role in feeding the country, grocery store workers went weeks without being provided with face masks and other protective gear.

Some food companies have been slow to provide the gear, while others tried but found that their orders were rerouted to the health care industry, where there is also a dire need. A few grocery workers say they are still waiting to be supplied with masks, despite federal health guidelines that recommend everybody wear one in public.

The workers also face a threat from their exposure to customers, who continue to stock up on food. Some, the workers say, don’t wear masks and fail to keep an adequate level of social distancing.

There are no government agencies tracking illnesses among food industry workers nationwide. The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which represents 1.3 million grocery store, food processing and meat packing employees, said on Monday that at least 1,500 of its members had been infected with the virus and that 30 of them have died.

“The Covid-19 pandemic represents a clear and present danger to our workers and our nation’s food supply,” U.F.C.W. International’s president, Marc Perrone, said.

Even before the illnesses began to spread through the industry, the supply chain had been tested intensely. Truck drivers, who were already scarce before the pandemic, couldn’t make deliveries fast enough. Hot dog factories and dairy farmers ramped up production in response to waves of panic buying.

Those surges continue to take a toll on a system that had been built largely for customers seeking speed and convenience, not stockpiling. On Sunday, Amazon said it was getting new customers seeking online grocery delivery from Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh to effectively sign up for a wait list. It’s an unusual concession for an internet giant that is used to unimpeded growth.

On some days, shoppers still cannot find flour, eggs or other staples that are in high demand. Retailers and manufacturers have offered reassurances that these shortages are temporary and merely reflect a distribution and production network that cannot work fast enough.

The parts of the food system that will suffer the worst disruptions are the ones dependent on heavily consolidated supply chains that employ large numbers of people, Mr. Girotra of Cornell said.

The Smithfield plant in South Dakota is a stark example of a vulnerable link in the chain. On its own, it produces 130 million servings of food per week. It employs 3,700 people, many of whom work closely together deboning and cutting up meat.

Last week, South Dakota officials watched the number of cases there increase at an alarming rate. Smithfield said it would shut down the building for three days to sanitize the facility. But as the number of Covid-19 cases surpassed more than half of all cases in Sioux Falls and the surrounding county, state officials asked the plant to close for 14 days “to protect the employees, the families, the Sioux Falls community and the people of South Dakota,” Governor Noem said on Saturday.

The next day, Smithfield said it would shut down “until further notice” and pay its workers for the next two weeks.

As of Wednesday the U.S. had 820,600 confirmed COVID-19 cases, 2,479 cases per million in the population. South Dakota, unfortunate to be burdened with one of America's least competent governors, has 1,755 cases.

A couple of days ago the AFL-CIO sent out a press release about how to safely reopen the economy-- as opposed to how nitwits like Brian Kemp (R-GA), Ron DeSantis (R-FL), Greg Abbott (R-TX) and Señor Trumpanzee are going about it. Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO president: "We must do what the federal government has refused to: protect America’s workers. We should not be focusing on when we can reopen the economy but rather on how we should reopen it to ensure the health and safety of working people."

Safety First: Working People’s Plan for Reopening the Economy the Right Way:

1- Workers must have a say in these decisions at every level: workplace, industry, city, state and federal.
2- Decisions must be based on worker safety and sound science.
3- Strong, clear, and enforceable workplace health and safety standards must be in place.
4- Workers must have stronger protections against retaliation.
5- There must be a massive increase in adequate levels and types of personal protective equipment for workers currently on the job-- and then for those returning to the job.
6- There must be a massive increase of rapid and reliable coronavirus testing.
7- The federal government must oversee a system of recording, reporting and tracking worker infections.
8- Employers, in coordination with local and state public health departments, must trace the contacts of infected workers and remove exposed workers from work with pay and without retaliation.

“Worker safety, economic recovery and public health are intertwined,” Trumka said. “Moving too fast or doing too little on one front poses an extreme danger to everyone.”

Trumka emphasized how a premature reopening will endanger lives and livelihoods and lead to a rapid subsequent reclosing.

"Flash Drought" Threatens Half the High Plains Wheat Harvest

Abnormally dry conditions now cover 100 percent of South Dakota according to U.S. Drought Monitor

by Gaius Publius

The climate crisis has already started. Early signs include the refugee crisis in Europe, begun in large part by a deadly drought in Syria. The dots leading from the drought to Europe's current troubles are not difficult to connect.

First, from Joe Romm writing at ThinkProgress:

The Link Between Climate Change And ISIS Is Real

... For three years now, leading security and climate experts — and Syrians themselves — have made the connection between climate change and the Syrian civil war. Indeed, when a major peer-reviewed study [pdf]came out on in March making this very case, retired Navy Rear Admiral David Titley said it identifies “a pretty convincing climate fingerprint” for the Syrian drought.

Titley, a meteorologist who led the U.S. Navy’s Task Force on Climate Change when he was at the Pentagon, also said, “You can draw a very credible climate connection to this disaster we call ISIS right now.”

About that "very credible connection," this is from the underlying study (emphasis mine):

Before the Syrian uprising that began in 2011, the greater Fertile Crescent experienced the most severe drought in the instrumental record. For Syria, a country marked by poor governance and unsustainable agricultural and environmental policies, the drought had a catalytic effect, contributing to political unrest. We show that the recent decrease in Syrian precipitation is a combination of natural variability and a long-term drying trend, and the unusual severity of the observed drought is here shown to be highly unlikely without this trend...

Which leads to the Syrian civil war, which leads to the flood of immigrants, primarily Syrian but including others as well, into Europe, whose nations as a result are going through a destabilization-and-response crisis that appears not to have an end.

Mass migration to Europe from Africa and the Middle East (click to enlarge; source)

All of this is connected and forms one branch of the already-started climate crisis. As I wrote here earlier:

[C]limate chaos won't involve just drought, famine and a destroyed environment — all physical stresses and dangers to human life. Climate chaos will start with some of those physical stresses, but be coupled with human anticipation, which will result in social and political chaos first, and if we're really unfortunate, eventually with collapse.

The two sets of problems — physical stress on the one hand, social and political stress on the other — are intertwined, but because humans are an anticipating species, I think the social chaos will ramp up first, ramp to a greater degree in the initial stages, ultimately producing political collapse prior to full-on physical collapse of our support systems, like food production.

In the case of Europe, the political crisis has indeed started ahead of the full-on physical threat to physical support systems.

"Flash Drought" in Montana and the Dakotas

Another branch of this already-started crisis involves extreme heat in the U.S., which creates not only larger and earlier wildfires than the nation is used to dealing with, but threats to food supply as well.

Consider this recent event in America's High Plains as reported at Grist:

‘Flash drought’ could devastate half the High Plains wheat harvest

It’s peak hurricane season, but the nation’s worst weather disaster right now is raging on the High Plains.

An intense drought has quickly gripped much of the Dakotas and parts of Montana this summer, catching farmers and ranchers off-guard. The multi-agency U.S. Drought Monitor recently upgraded the drought to “exceptional,” its highest severity level, matching the intensity of the California drought at its peak.

The Associated Press says the dry conditions are “laying waste to crops and searing pasture and hay land” in America’s new wheat belt, with some longtime farmers and ranchers calling it the worst of their lifetimes. Unfortunately, this kind of came-out-of-nowhere drought could become a lot less rare in the future.

“The damage and the destruction is just unimaginable,” Montana resident Sarah Swanson told Grist. “It’s unlike anything we’ve seen in decades.”

Rainfall across the affected region has been less than half of normal since late April, when this year’s growing season began. In parts of Montana’s Missouri River basin, which is the drought’s epicenter, rainfall has been less than a quarter of normal — which equals the driest growing season in recorded history for some communities.

The piece contains much more, but let's stop to notice several points made above that might not have stood out.

First, the drought caught farmers and ranchers "off-guard." This means it caught the weather services, on which farmers and ranchers always rely, off-guard as well. It is indeed a "flash drought." I think we can expect an increasing number of these, with government and private weather prediction services racing to catch up.

Second, many communities are experiencing their "driest growing season in recorded history." This regional event is exactly what's happening globally — that the three most recent years were also the three warmest years on Earth since the start of the instrument record:

Earth Sets a Temperature Record for the Third Straight Year

Marking another milestone for a changing planet, scientists reported on Wednesday that the Earth reached its highest temperature on record in 2016, trouncing a record set only a year earlier, which beat one set in 2014. It is the first time in the modern era of global warming data that temperatures have blown past the previous record three years in a row.

Finally, the Grist story above said that dry conditions are laying waste to crops in "America’s new wheat belt." That's a back-handed way of saying that U.S. wheat production is moving north, away from places like Kansas and Nebraska and into the Dakotas and Montana. Grist again:

Recently, as the climate has warmed and crop suitability has shifted, the Dakotas and Montana have surpassed Kansas as the most important wheat-growing region in the country. The High Plains is now a supplier of staple grain for the entire world.

Which means the drought is dangerous for another reason as well. As Grist notes, "According to recent field surveys, more than half of this year’s harvest may already be lost."

The climate crisis has started; these are obvious early-stage events. Stay tuned for more of them. Is it an emergency yet?

GP
 

"Rusty-Patched Bumble Bee" Joins Endangered Species List

The Rusty-Patched Bumble Bee, disappearing from an orchard near you (Photo © Johanna James-Heinz; source)

by Gaius Publius

The plant world has been losing its pollinators (pollinating insects) for a while due to species decline and, in the case of bees, colony collapse. I suspect most people have had this story on the far edge of their radar for a while. It's time to bring the story nearer.

For the first time, a bee species, the "Rusty-Patched Bumble Bee," has been put on the endangered species list by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. This means two things — one, the species gets "special protection," and two, the long-term threat to U.S. and world food supply from loss of pollinating insects should not be underestimated.

The bumble bee story is in many places. Let's start with Lorraine Chow, who follows this at EcoWatch (my emphasis):

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has declared the rusty patched bumble bee an endangered species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA). This is the first-ever bumble bee in the U.S., and the first wild bee of any kind in the contiguous 48 states, to receive ESA protection.

This landmark decision was made in "a race against extinction" of the Bombus affinis which is "balancing precariously on the brink of extinction," the agency said in its announcement Tuesday.

The bee, known for its distinctive reddish mark on its abdomen, was once common and abundant across 28 states from Connecticut to South Dakota, the District of Columbia and two Canadian provinces, but has plummeted by 87 percent since the late 1990s. Only small, scattered populations remain in 13 states and one province.

"The rusty patched bumble bee is among a group of pollinators—including the monarch butterfly — experiencing serious declines across the country," USFWS Midwest Regional Director Tom Melius said. "Why is this important? Pollinators are small but mighty parts of the natural mechanism that sustains us and our world. Without them, our forests, parks, meadows and shrublands, and the abundant, vibrant life they support, cannot survive, and our crops require laborious, costly pollination by hand."

The rusty patched bumble bee is already listed as "endangered" under Canada's Species at Risk Act and as "critically endangered" on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List.

The insect is an important pollinator of prairie wildflowers, as well as food crops such as cranberries, blueberries, apples, alfalfa and more.

"Bumble bees are especially good pollinators; even plants that can self-pollinate produce more and bigger fruit when pollinated by bumble bees," the USFWS said. "Each year, insects, mostly bees, provide pollination services valued at an estimated $3 billion in the United States."

There's more in the article if you wish to read further. The Washington Post puts it this way:

The rusty patched bumble bee was so prevalent 20 years ago that pedestrians in Midwest cities fought to shoo them away. Now, even trained scientists and experienced bee watchers find it difficult to lay eyes on them. “I’ve never seen one, and I live here pretty close to where there have been populations documented,” said Tamara Smith, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist stationed in Minneapolis.

Fearing that the striped black and yellow pollinator with a long black tail could be lost forever, Fish and Wildlife designated the animal as endangered Tuesday. ...

Why was the rusty patched bee selected for the list and not others? The answer, Smith said, is its former abundance and astonishing plummet.

Apparently the speed of this species' collapse got people's attention.

"Canary in the Coal Mine"

This is just the beginning of the loss of pollinating insects. Honey bees have been in trouble for a while, and as the Post writer says, more species are sure to follow this bumble bee:

Although rusty patched bumble bees are the first to be considered endangered, and the first bee species on the U.S. mainland to get the designations (the yellow faced bee in Hawaii became the first overall in October last year), they are likely to be joined by others. “This bee is kind of like the canary in the coal mine,” Smith said, an indicator that many pollinator species — bees and butterflies — are in deep trouble.

There were nearly 3.5 million honeybee colonies in 1989, according to the Agriculture Department. That number fell by a million colonies when colony collapse disorder was first documented in 2006. in the 10 years sinc[e], the number of colonies has climbed only slightly, by about 100,000.

One state, Maryland, shows how eerie and perilous the decline has been for professional beekeepers. In 2015, the state lost more than 60 percent of its hives, each containing up to 20,000 honeybees. Beekeeper Steve McDaniel, owner of McDaniel Honey Farms, lost half of his hives in Manchester, Md., and all of them where he kept bees in downtown Baltimore. Hives with up to 20,000 bees cost about $1,200.

So, what's causing this? For a change, the answer isn't climate change.

Pesticides Are Killing the Bees

The scientific community has reached a consensus that the agent causing these species collapses is a group of widely used pesticides called "neonicotinoids" or "neonics." EcoWatch, from a different article:

Neonicotinoids—a potent class of pesticides used on many crops in the U.S.—have long been blamed for the widespread decline of our pollinators. Now a major new study has found a direct correlation between the use of these "neonics" and honeybee colony losses across England and Wales.

Meanwhile, a report from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) revealed that the controversial insecticides were present in more than half of both urban and agricultural streams sampled across the U.S. and Puerto Rico.

 Back to the first EcoWatch article:

"A number of scientific articles clearly document the lethal and sublethal effects that these chemicals are having on bees and other pollinators, and their use has intensified extensively within the rusty patched bumble bee's range during the same time period that declines have been observed," the Xerces Society explains.

The world's largest producer of neonics is Bayer. They're not just an aspirin company; they're a chemical producing giant (and, by the way, part of the cartel that sold poison gas to Nazis for concentration camps).

But neonicotinoids aren't the only culprit:

The Xerces Society also suggests that the massive rise in the use of the controversial herbicide glyphosate on genetically modified corn and soybean fields in the last 20 years has effectively eliminated milkweed and other wildflowers from the agricultural landscape.

"While no direct link has been made from the use of these pesticides to the declines observed in the rusty patched bumble bee there is little doubt that stressors like pesticides at the very least put increased pressures on an already imperiled bumble bee, especially when one considers the scope at which these chemicals are being adopted and used," the group points out.

Which bring us to ... Monsanto.

Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup, a pesticide used around the world. And Monsanto is one of the world's leading megalomaniacal corporations. Which leads to this.

Is Monsanto Killing the Bees? 

Above, the EcoWatch writer noted that "no direct link" showed that glyphosate is responsible for the collapse of the rusty-patched bumble bee population, which brings me to these final points:

Monsanto is one of the most obsessively profit driven companies in the world. It aims to create a worldwide monopoly for its GMO food products, and has thus, ironically, been tabbed as a leading cause of world hunger. The reason is simple. Monsanto doesn't really grow food; it grows money, and food is just the middle-man. If too much corn is being planted for ethanol (see link above), taking productive fields offline for other uses, Monsanto doesn't care, so long as the money comes in.

Which means that if Monsanto, the corporation — or more specifically, its CEO class — has to choose between making millions from a mega-profitable operation versus providing sufficient food for actual humans, well, what choice do you think they're going to make, ten times out of ten?

Special Protection?

Which brings us back to where we started — the Endangered Species Act and the "special protection" offered to species on its list. Here's how the Post writer quoted above put the pesticide problem:

Fearing that the striped black and yellow pollinator with a long black tail could be lost forever, Fish and Wildlife designated the animal as endangered Tuesday. The designation triggers protections such as regulations against knowingly destroying the bumble bee’s habitat and habitat creation. It also raises awareness about the plight of the bumble bee and requires a detailed, long term recovery plan to restore its population.

What are the odds that Monsanto and other pesticide companies will be required by the U.S. givernment to eliminate sales of their products within the habitats of these insects? Or will the agency simply content itself with "raising awareness"?

The Post article lists these causes of bumble bee population collapse: "farm pesticides, household herbicides, human development over bee habitat, disease and climate change." A convenient list for corporate giants; it could be your fault too, even though the farm pesticide usage is magnitudes greater as a cause than anything else in that list.

And, as the writer notes, there really is no direct link, just as there is no "direct link" between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. The link is strong, but no one can say that any individual death was caused by smoking, even if the deceased died of lung cancer and was a heavy smoker. Doubt-inducers can always point to individuals who smoked heavily and lived to ripe ages, and to lung cancer patients who never smoked at all.

Yet ... this seems specious, doesn't it? In the case of smoking, the statistical evidence finally became too overwhelming even for an industry-captured government to ignore, and the U.S. finally issued regulations designed to reduce or eliminate smoking, because human life is irretrievable and the risk of death from smoking is high.

Same on this case. Only now the risk is to food across the planet: "The honeybee is the most important commercial pollinator, globally responsible for pollinating at least 90% of commercial crops." The rusty-patched bumble bee population has collapsed 87%. In the U.S., between April 2014 and 2015, honey bee loss was 42%, up from 34% the previous year.

If the honey bee joins this bumble bee on the endangered species list, look out. Because if Monsanto and other pesticide companies can't be stopped, only they and their friends will be eating well. Fun times ahead.

Bayer-Monsanto Merger

A final note: Remember the two companies listed above? Guess who wants to merge — Bayer and Monsanto. The combined company would be "the largest agribusiness giant in the world, 'selling 29 percent of the world’s seeds and 24 percent of its pesticides.'"

And the $66 billion deal is done; it just needs regulatory approval:

[T]he proposed merger will likely face an intense and lengthy regulatory process in the United States, Canada, Brazil, the European Union and elsewhere. Hugh Grant, Monsanto's chief executive, said Wednesday the companies will need to file in about 30 jurisdictions for the merger.

I'm willing to bet that in the U.S. — even with a government fully controlled by Democrats — regulatory approval would be granted. Under a Republican administration, approval is a foregone conclusion. As to worldwide approval, stay tuned.

GP
 

Crime Watch: Incoming! Beware of flying cheese!

Um, weaponized cheese?

There are 8 million stories in the Naked City, and some of them are stories you know are serious but you nevertheless can't resist, you know, smiling at. Possibly even guffawing. Like this story from our Crime Watch team. -- Ken

UPPER EAST SIDE and ROOSEVELT ISLAND   Crime and Mayhem

Man Chucks Block of Cheese at Morton Williams Shopper, Police Say

By Shaye Weaver |
Updated January 9, 2017 8:29am


The Morton Williams at 1066 Third Ave.

UPPER EAST SIDE -- A man threw a block of cheese at a Morton Williams shopper during an argument outside the grocery store Wednesday night, police said.

Barry Bernstein, 62, got into a argument with a 38-year-old Brooklyn man, who was about to enter the 1066 Third Ave. store near 73rd Street just before 9 p.m., according to a police report.

During the dispute, Bernstein threw a block of cheese at the man's stomach causing "substantial pain," police said.

It was unknown what type of cheese it was or what the argument was about, police said.

Bernstein was charged with assault and harassment and was released without bail. He's due back in court on Feb. 22, records show.

His attorney did not immediately return a call for comment.

Offered without further comment, except maybe to underscore the line: "It was unknown what type of cheese it was or what the argument was about, police said."

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A Modern Dust Bowl Would Be Just as Devastating as the Original One

Not sure why I'm featuring Obama's climate failure here? Maybe you can figure it out. (If the video above doesn't play, click here.)

by Gaius Publius

I'm presenting this for a different reason than the obvious one. It's not actually a shock-people-into-climate-awareness piece. That's just the set-up. What's my actual point? Read on (or click here to jump to it).

A recent study at the University of Chicago took a look at the drought (actually, droughtsplural) during the legendary and destructive Dust Bowl of the 1930s and applied those conditions to U.S. agriculture today. They expected to find U.S. farming systems to be much more resilient.

They didn't. A modern Dust Bowl would have the same destructive force on U.S. food production (and the economy) as the original one did.

From Phys.org (my emphasis):

Dust Bowl would devastate today's crops, study finds

A drought on the scale of the legendary Dust Bowl crisis of the 1930s would have similarly destructive effects on U.S. agriculture today, despite technological and agricultural advances, a new study finds. Additionally, warming temperatures could lead to crop losses at the scale of the Dust Bowl, even in normal precipitation years by the mid-21st century, UChicago scientists conclude.

The study, published Dec. 12 in Nature Plants, simulated the effect of extreme weather from the Dust Bowl era on today's maize, soy and wheat crops. Authors Michael Glotter and Joshua Elliott of the Center for Robust Decision Making on Climate and Energy Policy at the Computation Institute, examined whether modern agricultural innovations would protect against history repeating itself under similar conditions.

"We expected to find the system much more resilient because 30 percent of production is now irrigated in the United States, and because we've abandoned corn production in more severely drought-stricken places such as Oklahoma and west Texas," said Elliott, a fellow and research scientist at the center and the Computation Institute. "But we found the opposite: The system was just as sensitive to drought and heat as it was in the 1930s."

The severe damage of the Dust Bowl was actually caused by three distinct droughts in quick succession, occurring in 1930-31, 1933-34 and 1936. From 1933 to 1939, wheat yields declined by double-digit percentages, reaching a peak loss of 32 percent in 1933. The economic and societal consequences were vast, eroding land value throughout the Great Plains states and displacing millions of people.

In the eight decades since that crisis, agricultural practices have changed dramatically. But many technological and geographical shifts were intended to optimize average yield instead of resilience to severe weather, leaving many staple crops vulnerable to seasons of unusually low precipitation and/or high temperatures.

As a result, when the researchers simulated the effects of the 1936 drought upon today's agriculture, they still observed roughly 40 percent losses in maize and soy yield, while wheat crops declined by 30 percent. The harm would be 50 percent worse than the 2012 drought, which caused nearly $100 billion of damage to the U.S. economy.

There's more in the piece, but you get the point. Note the idea above that these effects won't be felt until "the mid-21st century" — in other words, after the current crop of citizens is dead. Don't believe it. Everything's happening way faster than anyone is willing to predict. If this tragedy is allowed to occur, most of us will see it.

But Is It the Right Kind of Emergency?

At this point, I usually ask, "Is it an emergency yet?" (That's still a valid question, since it doesn't look like we're stopping our carbon emissions any time soon, and under President Trump, we'll accelerate the already deadly pace.)

This time, though, I'd like to offer a different thought, something related to the "Easter Island solution" I sometimes propose. That solution goes like this:

You're a villager on Easter Island. People are cutting down trees right and left, and many are getting worried.

At some point, the number of worried villagers reaches critical mass, and they go as a group to the island chief and say, "Look, we have to stop cutting trees, like now." The chief, who's also the CEO of a wood products company, checks his bottom line and orders the cutting to continue.

Do the villagers walk away? Or do they depose the chief?

There's always a choice ...

What would it take for enough of our nation's "villagers" to get upset enough to "depose the chief" this time, just like they did during the Great Depression? Would regional devastation (with, of course, no lives lost; we always stipulate that) — something like a Haiyan-style hurricane sweeping through Florida, for example — wake people up nationally... get us to react as a nation? Or would we treat a Florida storm, no matter how severe, as a Florida problem with a Beltway (FEMA) solution?

In other words, what would actually wake up (freak out) this nation as a nation, to create a national mandate for radical change and radical solutions to the climate problem? What would it take for the nation to rise up and, yes, "depose the chief" — in the earlier case, President Hoover; in the latter case, President Trump? Because it will certainly take a national mandate to create the national Congress and a committed-to-an-emergency-solution the situation requires.

(And yes, I'm ignoring for now the timing, though that's important. If you're going to freak out effectively, best to freak out before there's nothing but air beneath you.)

When it comes to panic, timing counts. His came a little too late.

I've pondered this question for a while, and I offer it as an exercise to you as well. What kind of emergency will do the job nationally?

In the 1930s, of course, it was the Dust Bowl, more so perhaps than the factory closures, bank closures and the mortgage foreclosures, though those were national events as well. It's now the 21st century. Factory closures and the mortgage foreclosures have panicked the nation into trying Donald Trump on for size — but not with respect to climate. We're still at ground zero, implementing "business as usual" policies on the climate issue, just as President Hoover did during the economic crisis of the 30s.

But a permanent 30-to-40 percent drop in U.S. crop yield — what would that do? Would it get the nation's attention? It would certainly get mine, no matter where in the U.S. I lived. After all, we're all the market for food, more or less daily.

Consider the Alternative

Before you ask, "But hey, isn't that cruel, that kind of thinking?" please consider the alternative. On the one hand, this generation wakes up — admittedly in a panic, but that's not bad — and suddenly does the most it can do as fast as it can do it to fix the climate problem. Which means the climate problem has a chance to more or less stay fixed — admittedly with some loss in global livability, but not a total loss — for a thousand years.

Or ... this generation lives in relative comfort (it hopes) for another ten years or so, and then the long, crushing, angry, deadly march back to the Stone Age begins, in full view of everyone in the world.

The making of stone tools began more than three million years ago. Before that our ancestors, those in our species line, hunted and lived using found objects only.

The Stone Age ended with the smelting of ore, about 6000 years ago at the earliest. That's the span of time — more than three million years — our ancestors lived using stone tools only. Three million years in the Stone Age. It's so long that it's divided into parts, and its parts are divided into parts.

If human civilization devolves to the Stone Age again — and we survive without an extinction event — we  could be there, chipping stone, having forgotten everything we think we call "knowledge" today, for a very long time.

So when we're weighing our preferred event sequences — a timely, uncomfortable-but-head-clearing "climate event" today ... vs. at most ten years of comfort (meaning, no one acts in any effective way), then a rapid, deadly collapse and millions of years living as stone-tool, skin-wearing animals, hunters and scavengers, smelling like the great unwashed, for millennia ... let's consider what we're actually choosing, which outcome we'd actually find preferable.

Me, I'd much prefer that people figure it out today (not tomorrow, today) and act like it's already urgent, with no painful nudging needed. If I had to guess, though, I don't think that's in the cards. Yet we do need a wake-up moment, relatively soon. Do you have a better pick for what would do it?

Just a thought.

GP
 

To market, to market! Or: Daybreak over the (New) Fulton Fish Market

Photo courtesy of the NYC Economic Development Corp. (NYCEDC)

Set your alarm clock early for a trip to the New Fulton Fish Market with OHNY and New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), where you’ll see the principal wholesale market for seafood in the New York City area in full swing. Learn about the history of the market, located in the historic South Street Seaport area until 2005, on the bus ride there, and then walk the massive market shed with Security Director Victor Seguinot. Talk to vendors, jobbers, buyers, and other market regulars and hear about life in the city’s food hub.

--the description of today's Open House New York tour, in
the series The Final Mile: Food Systems of New York

by Ken

It was, chronologically speaking, about as an unusual outing as I can recall ever undertaking. I tore out of my apartment building in Washington Heights a little after 2:45am on whichever day it was (yesterday? today?) and ambled back in the downstairs door in broad daylight a little before 8:30 that (this?) same morning.

The "little after" 2:45 is important, because according to what I'd gleaned from the MTA's online schedule information, there should be a train coming through my station about 2:56. Of course, that didn't mean there'd be a train at exactly 2:56, so I'd hoped to make it a little earlier just in case, because the information I tended to trust more from what I'd gleaned was that at that hour the train was running every 20 minutes, and while I probably would have been okay with a hypothetical train coming through at 3:16, that would be cutting it close. After all, I still had to do a change of trains at Times Square.

The time I was aiming for was the start of check-in at the office of Open House New York, at Broadway and 26th Street, at 3:45am, but if I could be screwed if I didn't make it by 4am, at which time the bus was supposedly leaving for sure for the trip up to the Hunts Point peninsula of the South Bronx for our visit to the (New) Fulton Fish Market. Meaning that if I'd been out of the house really and truly at 2:45, I should have had a fairly easy time catching a train that passed through at 2:56. But the few minutes I lost to slow-motionness with the three hours' sleep I'd notched put that schedule in jeopardy. Hence the "tearing out" of my building.

Where there's a will there's a way, sometimes, and I actually got to the platform a good minute before the train, which actually arrived maybe a minute early! Score! According to the station countdown clocks, the next train was indeed 20 minutes away. The rest looked to be easy, and it was. I had placed myself almost perfectly on the train to head up the stairs at Times Square for the walk to the southbound BMT platform and even made a good connection to an N train that was indeed making local stops (in the event of an express, I was prepared to walk the distance from 34th Street), and a little after 3:35 I approached a cluster of people outside a bus parked at the sidewalk, with the OHNY people on the job to check me in and pass me through to board the bus!

For the outing we were given excellent "dress code" instructions, which called for "hard-soled, closed-toed shoes that you don't mind getting a little dirty" ("the fish market will be at its most active during our visit, so it may be a little messy") and included this advisory:

The fish market is, as you might imagine, a pungent place. You may want to bring a change of clothes if you are planning to go directly to work after the tour. According to people we've spoken with who've been to the market before, the smell of fish will linger on your clothes.

Luckily, I had cleared the day from work and didn't plan to continue on to the job, in either smelly old or fresh new clothes.

Of course the bus didn't leave on the dot at 4, but not that much after we indeed had our busload of hardy nocturnal adventurers in place, and we rolled out in time to roll into the parking lot not much after 5 for the final stage of the day's market activity. They get going, we learned, at midnight, and for a good part of that time there's a lot of activity, as the day's procession of buyers -- wholesalers, retailers, restaurateurs, brokers, even the odd retail buyer -- arrive to inspect the offerings of the more than two dozen purveyors lining the two sides of the well-refrigerated indoor grand allée that is the (New) Fulton Fish Market, make their choices, and have their purchases loaded onto forklifts for conveyance out to their waiting trucks for the trip on to, well, wherever the chosen fish and seafood -- most of it on ice but still fresh is destined.

It's an incredibly complex symphony, this meeting up of sellers and buyers, as buyers choose when during those hours of market to arrive for their hoped-for optimal combination of ultimate freshness, choice, and pricing. The sellers are, as they have been since the Fulton Fish Market came into existence down on South Street, and certainly since the new market at Hunts Point opened in 2005, in competition with each other, and the most obvious thing they have to compete with during each day's market is price. All of the buyers know what they're looking for, and what they're looking at. At the end of each day's market everyone packs up and prepares to do it all again the next day.

Which is how, if I got the figure right, some 50 percent of the fish and seafood coming into the Greater New York area, is passed on in the chain from the fishermen who made the catch to the consumers who eat it. I believe that was Victor the security director mentioned in the tour description who accompanied us on the tour, but we were led by the manager of the market, on behalf of the company that runs it on lease from the city.

En route to Hunts Point we had been briefed on the history and operation of the food-oriented markets and other facilities occupying the city-owned Hunts Point campus by the alarmingly well-informed Julie from the NYC Economic Development Corporation, a nonprofit org whose board is appointed by the mayor, and whose many functions include overseeing the Hunts Point operations, including the Produce Market (of which there will be an OHNY tour on May 28; see below), the cooperative-run Meat Market (which is very differently organized and not amenable to tour visitation), and the Baldor Specialty Foods facility (of which there will be an OHNY tour on June 10; see below), and a host of others.

The new Fulton Fish Market, we learned, was built to house 30 vendors from the old Fulton Street site, which was impossibly cramped, unhygienic, and without temperature controls or loading faciilities. Some 70 percent of those original vendors remain tenants; there has been steady turnover (and, yes, vacancies) in the rest of the space.


THE GAME PLAN FOR OHNY'S 201 SERIES "THE FINAL MILE"



The New Fulton Fish Market tour description I've put atop this post continues:

The Final Mile: Food Systems of New York is a year-long series of public programs, organized by Open House New York as part of its ongoing Urban Systems Series. The Final Mile is intended to shed light on New York City’s dynamic and multi-layered food economy while introducing and exploring approaches to render this invisible system more tangible.

The linked Final Mile page expands on this:

Why are we doing it?

In the age of superstorms, rapidly rising inequality, and global distribution systems, we are all increasingly aware of the connections between food, public health, and environmental stewardship. The Final Mile helps New Yorkers to better understand how food shapes the city in critical ways that all too often go unnoticed.

How can you participate?

The Final Mile will be comprised of a series of tours and events over the course of 2015. Tickets for individual programs will become available two weeks in advance. Watch the Schedule for updates and details as they become available, or subscribe to OHNY’s Mailing List. You can also follow our Blog to learn more about how the city’s food system operates.

THE SPRING SCHEDULE

The announced plan is:

Spring 2015: Industrial-Scaled Distribution in the Global City
Summer 2015: Uncovering the Remnants of Historic Food Systems
Late 2015: Exploring New Models for a Sustainable Future

Already scheduled are:

Lecture-discussion: How Great Cities Are Fed
Wednesday, April 29, 6:30pm
SVA Theatre, Chelsea, Manhattan

"A very special public talk and discussion to kick off The Final Mile," featuring Karen Karp ("New York-based food systems expert, president of Karp Resources") and Robert LaValva ("founder and president of the New Amsterdam Market").

Free for OHNY members, OHNY volunteers, and students; $10 for general admission. Registration in progress.

Tour: Hunts Point Produce Market
Thursday, May 28, 8am

A cooperative market through which 60% of the produce consumed in the New York Metropolitan Area passes every day. On this morning tour, you’ll walk one of the four massive “row” buildings, each a third of a mile long, then visit a variety of packaging plants within the facility. Afterwards, market manager Myra Gordon will lead a group discussion of the role that the produce market plays in the city’s food system.

Tickets go on sale at 10am on May 14.

Tour: Baldor Specialty Foods
Wednesday, June 10, time TBD

Tour the facility of Baldor, a major regional food distributor that started off as Balducci’s Fruit Stand in the Village in 1946, to better understand how private firms fit into the mix in the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center. Explore the sprawling warehouse with food systems expert Johanna Kolodny, who works directly with suppliers to expand the company’s diverse offerings to the New York market. Participants will learn how the company keeps track of the thousands of varieties of fresh food on-site, and how they bring food from a thousand partners around the world to plates across the five boroughs.

Tickets go on sale at 10am on May 27.

For the tours, OHNY members are likely to get a discounted price, and registration as close as possible to the start of the on-sale time is advisable; my guess is that they'll fill up fast. For the other Hunts Point tours, as with today's Fulton Fish Market one, round-trip bus transportation is provided from OHNY's office at 1133 Broadway (at 26th Street).


MEANWHILE, OHNY IS IN THE THICK
OF ANOTHER NEW LONG-TERM PROJECT

It's called Monographs in Motion>, and it's a series of events "that highlights the work of firms that have had a significant impact on New York City's built environment through public tours of the firm's most exemplary projects." First up is the architectural firm FXFOWLE, and we've already toured the substantial renovation and major expansion of the Juilliard School at Lincoln center undertaken by the firm in collaboration with Diller Scofidio + Renfro and a host of outside experts in a host of fields.

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Eight Foods You're About To Lose To Climate Change

Red wine grapes; click to enlarge (source)

by Gaius Publius

Meanwhile on the climate beat ...

In a piece on the California drought, I added this as an aside:

Note that [Ian Welsh] lists obvious implementable solutions [to alleviate the California drought], like rationing, mandated crop selection — a state-wide ban on almond-growing, for example — and the like. 

Almonds are a very thirsty crop, and almond growers have a lot of state-wide economic power:

Asia’s love of nuts is draining California dry.

Amid one of the worst droughts in the state’s history, farmers are scrambling to find enough water to irrigate lucrative almond trees they planted after abandoning other, less thirsty crops. 

Why’s there such a market for California nuts? As incomes in countries such as China, South Korea, and India have risen, so has demand for nuts that formerly were out of reach for many Asians. Added to the mix are Wall Street firms who, smelling a quick buck, are paying top dollar for vegetable farms and converting them to orchards.

(I hope, as you read, you notice the "free market" working its "solving the climate crisis" magic; or not.)

More about almonds (my emphasis everywhere):

10 Percent of California’s Water Goes to Almond Farming

... This year, farmers have to make important decisions—and it often comes down to money. If given a choice between keeping fruit trees alive (which take years to mature and can bring 10 times more money per acre), or planting rows of vegetables that live only a few months, that’s a no-brainer if you’re trying to maximize profit. This year, farmers are fallowing vegetable fields and scrambling to save high-dollar fruit and nut orchards. The result is counterintuitive: In the midst of the worst drought in half a millennium, the most water-intensive crops are getting priority. ...

Almonds alone use about 10 percent of California’s total water supply each year. That’s nuts. But almonds are also the state’s most lucrative exported agricultural product, with California producing 80 percent of the world’s supply. Alfalfa hay requires even more water, about 15 percent of the state’s supply. About 70 percent of alfalfa grown in California is used in dairies, and a good portion of the rest is exported to land-poor Asian countries like Japan. Yep, that’s right: In the middle of a drought, farmers are shipping fresh hay across the Pacific Ocean. The water that’s locked up in exported hay amounts to about 100 billion gallons per year—enough to supply 1 million families with drinking water for a year. 

Independent of "free market" considerations (and invisible well-funded hands helping politicians make water-allocation decisions), climate change is causing serious food issues. Before I go on, though, two points. These are:

• U.S. issues, not limited to some faraway dark and foreign place.
• Current issues, which will worsen each year until we get serious about stabilizing the climate.

We can "win the climate war" by getting serious about climate change — WWII-economy serious, "man on the moon" serious (for what that means, see "An Easter Island Solution" here) — but until we do, this is what awaits our food supply.

Eight Foods You're About To Lose Due To Climate Change

From a Guardian article with the same headline as my subhead above, here's the list of foods, followed by a few of the discussions. Click to read it all. Their list:

• Corn and the animals that eat it
• Coffee
• Chocolate
• Seafood
• Maple syrup
• Beans
• Cherries
• Wine grapes

And a few of the discussions:

Corn (and the animals that eat it)

Water shortages and warmer temperatures are bad news for corn: in fact, a global rise in temperatures of just 1C (1.8F) would slow the rate of growth by 7%. The impact of a disruption in corn production would extend far beyond the produce section at the supermarket. A great deal of US corn goes to feed livestock, so lower corn yields could mean higher meat prices, and fewer servings of meat per capita.

This isn’t merely speculation: Lobell claims that changes to this $1.7tn industry have already begun. According to a recent study (subscription required) that he co-authored, the world’s farmers have been much less productive in recent years than they would have were it not for climate change. Global corn production, in particular, has already been nearly 4% lower than it would have been if the climate were not warming. ...

Seafood

In addition to its impacts on land, climate change can also contribute to rising levels of CO2 in the ocean. This, in turn, leads to ocean acidification, which could threaten a whole range of edible ocean creatures. For example, the shells of young oysters and other calcifying organisms are likely to grow less and less sturdy over time, as the oceans’ acidity increases. The UK’s chief scientist, Sir Mark Walport, recently announced that, thanks to man-made CO2, the acidity of the oceans has increased by about 25% since the start of the industrial revolution.

Another problem is that, according to a recent study, most fish are slow to adapt to acidification, leading to a risk of species collapse. Some animals, like tropical fish and lobsters, are moving north in search of cooler habitats, but this migration causes other problems. Tropical fish, for example, are more susceptible to parasites in warmer water, further weakening their species. Meanwhile, lobsters tend to eat everything in sight, so their move puts the native habitats of a host of other species at risk. ...

Wine grapes

Thanks to warmer temperatures, wine grapes will likely soon be in higher demand – making wine more expensive. A 2013 study predicted that “major global geographic shifts” among wine growers – as well as fluctuations in temperature and moisture levels in Europe, Australia, North American, and South Africa – will essentially make the perfect wine grape a moving target. Australia will probably be hit the hardest, as 73% of the land there could be unsuitable for growing grapes by 2050. California’s loss is nearly as high at 70%.

Then there’s the question of “terroir”, or flavor based on geographical location. Wine grapes like heat, but not too much. In extreme temperatures, they can even go into a kind of thermal shock that can severely alter flavor. On the bright side, the grapes also retain more sugar in these circumstances, making the final product higher in alcohol, so the casual sipper won’t need to drink as much to feel the effects.

And don't forget, of course, California almonds, unless the state's growers continue to exercise their political power at the expense of the rest of the residents.

Almonds love their water

Then it's the coastal city-dwellers who might become scarce instead.

GP