During the campaign and several times since, President Obama promised to do “everything possible” to increase the safety of America’s food supply.

In what must be considered a very small step, but a step nevertheless, the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that their top managers would walk side-by-side through barnyards and farm fields to help develop new food safety rules.

From defendingfoodsafety.com

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius says, “President Obama, like most Americans, wants immediate improvements in our food safety system.

“As such, we are pulling together all our best resources – state and federal – to improve the safety of our foods and to work with growers to protect and promote the health of our nation.”

Sebelius’ counterpart, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, says his agency is committed to working to ensure that Americans have access to safe, healthy, and nutritious food.

He adds that the tag-teaming of food safety is another example of an “innovative and aggressive effort to strengthen protections against unsafe food and food-borne illness.”

The White House has shuffled out the joined-at-the-hip Sebelius and Vilsack team more times in the past nine month than the Bush Administration ever did with his HHS and Ag secretaries, according to a friend at the OMB who actually tallies things like this.

But bliss at the worker bee level may not be as easy to generate.

FDA and USDA inspectors with whom I’ve worked over the years say relations between many middle managers in the food safety sections of both agencies has been so sour that it would curdle milk.

In part, some of the intramural angst comes from sparring over budgets (who gets more and why,) regulations (who can and should enforce food safety laws,) and blame-laying (who will Congress and the press dump on after the next massive outbreak of E. coli, salmonella or some other food-borne pathogen breaks loose.)

Leanne Skelton, who heads the Fresh Products Branch of the USDA’s Agriculture Marketing Service, has 22 years working with the fruit and vegetable industry.  She is being loaned to the FDA for six months as that agency attempts to develop new safety regulations for produce.

Through the initiative, FDA is gathering information and seeking feedback on safety rules from the fresh produce industry, including small and organic farmers.

Here is a link to Tuesday’s announcement.

If your neighbor had plenty of water but you hadn’t enough to keep your family, your livestock and your crops alive, would you fight for it? Would you go to war?

Lots of people – from multi-degreed behavioral psychologists to barroom philosophers – believe you would.

Prize winning illustration by A.Z. Ringman

To those whose wells are dry, it doesn’t matter whether the water shortage is caused by climate change or not. Politicians and government leaders can forever squabble about the cause, but those who are thirsty want water.

Environmentalists in Europe claim the credit for first coining the phrase “World Water War” in the late 90s.

But for almost half a century, the U.S. military has been planning for conflicts spawned by an acute shortage of water for drinking and farming.

A world water war is no longer a question of if, but rather when, explains a Marine colonel who studied the potential for H2O-triggered battles at the U.S. Army War College.

“It could be one rancher going after his neighbor to get water for his cattle; or Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska fighting over who owns the water from the Republican River; or Syria and Turkey fighting Iraq over the flow of the Euphrates,” said the Marine, who now works for a government agency and isn’t permitted to be quoted by name.

”These can be neighbor skirmishes or regional wars,” he told me.  “Where rivers separate traditional enemies like the Middle East or parts of Asia and Africa, a drought and just the mere perception that one side has more water than the other will spark a war.”

When I checked with him last week, he reminded me that genocide in Rwanda and the violence in Sudanese Darfur have been linked back to water conflicts. And Mexico is not sharing water with Texas from its Rio Conchos, as it promised.

People, not numbers

According to water experts at the United Nations, more than 45 percent of the world’s populations – more than 3 billion people – are already in need of more clean water.

They cite research from The World Bank that shows that more than 80 countries now have water shortages that threaten their health and economies.

These are not just statistics. They’re stories of people. In the last week alone, the media has reported:

In Kenya, “Children are starving, cattle are dropping dead, crops are withered, lakes are empty, and still the rains haven’t come. Kenya is on the verge of a catastrophe of Biblical proportions,” said the international environmental website Mongaby.

In Syria, an acute drought has driven an estimated 300,000 farmers, herders, and their families to abandon home for makeshift urban camps. Another 1.3 million people or more are in peril because of the absence of water, the Christian Science Monitor reported this week.

Mexico is enduring its worst drought in six decades. Crops are drying up in the fields and water is being rationed in the capital. Residents of poor neighborhoods have hijacked water trucks, and there are other signs of social tensions building, reported Elisabeth Malkin in the New York Times

And India, people are struggling to cope with the worst drought in 90 years. Farmers in some states are beginning to guard watered crops with shotguns. A family earlier this year in Madhya Pradesh was murdered in a riot that broke out because of a dispute over water, wrote Rick Westhead of the Toronto Star.

Selling the water

Hydrologists said whiz-bang, big-buck plans for diverting water to places in need of it appear every time a drought threatens water supplies.

In the 70s, Saudi Prince Mohammed al Faisal formed Iceberg Transport International. He planned to find huge icebergs off Antarctica, wrap them in cloth to slow their melting and use a fleet of  tugboats to tow them to the Arabian peninsula.

Ten years ago, Turkey hired a Norwegian firm to use five million-gallon water bags to export water from Turkey to Cyprus.

Also a decade ago, a Canadian businessman was given official blessing to use tankers to ship 160 million gallons a year of fresh water from Lake Superior to Asia.  Instant outrage on both sides of the Canadian border ended that business venture.

Ilustration provided by MIT

And, of course, let’s not forget that America’s own Texas billionaire, T. Boone Pickens, has entered the wonderful world of water big time.

According to Business Week, the oil man owns more water than any other individual in the U.S. and he wants to buy more.  His first project will be to run a pipeline pumping water from the Ogallala Aquifer under his ranch in the Texas panhandle 322 miles to Dallas.

The Ogallala already is overstressed. The aquifer, which stretches from South Dakota to Texas, is the source of survival for thousands of ranches and farms along the way.

Today, big-time investors have already plotted out the cost, grief and profit to collect water from melting glaciers. Their plans call for using pipelines or refitted oil tankers or filling nylon or rubber-like bladders that could be towed by tugboats from Alaska to where the money is and the water isn’t. Southern California or those who rely on the dwindling Colorado River are prime customers.

The Colorado River supplies water to nine American Indian tribes and seven states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, as well as Mexico.

Roughly 30 million people depend on the Colorado River for drinking and irrigation along its 1,450-mile path from its headwaters in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains to the Gulf of California

As the West warms, the Colorado River has a 50-50 chance of fully depleting all of its reservoir storage by mid-century unless there are meaningful changes in how water is handled, says a new University of Colorado at Boulder study.

Photo by Mahnesh Kumar, Johannesburg Times

Glacier melt

It used to take precise measurements to document the tiny shifts in the size of glaciers, the world’s ultimate fresh-water storage areas. Now tourists making repeat visits to Alaska, the Andes or even Glacier National Park in Montana can just look at photos they took last year and see how rapidly they’re melting.

Chinese and Indian climatologists say hundreds of lives are at risk because the Tibetan glaciers that feed the Ganges, Indus and other Asian rivers and provide water for the entire region are melting faster than anyplace else. This is happening, they say, because temperatures are rising four to five times faster in the Himalayan region than elsewhere.

On this side of the globe, the shrinking of tropical Andean glaciers could disrupt the water supply of about 40 million people by 2020, hydrologists predict. The cities of Quito, Lima, and La Paz are likely to be most affected.

Remember, this could be a public health disaster of the greatest magnitude. The World Health Organization says the effects of water shortage can be massive outbreaks of disease, malnutrition, crop failure and death.

It’s not just nature

While climate change possibly deserves much of the blame for the looming water crisis, humans are doing a pretty good job themselves of destroying or diverting needed water.

For example:

Private water wells and aquifers throughout the U.S. West are being contaminated and destroyed by energy companies “fracking” for gas.

Fracking is a process in which water, sand and a variety of undisclosed  but often highly toxic chemicals are pumped at high pressure into gas wells to force open rock formations and allow the escape of more gas. But it can also damage and contaminate nearby drinking water wells.

The Colorado Independent reported this weekend that more than 300 private water wells in Colorado have been destroyed by this technique, as well as another 700 in New Mexico. My quick check with environmental offices in other western states added more than 100 more potentially tainted water wells to the list, although officials said more research was needed to determine the extent of the damage.

Farmers in California’s San Joaquin Valley – a vital supplier to the world’s food basket – have seen their farmland wasted into powder-dry fields.  The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ordered that billions of gallons of water needed for irrigation and drinking water be diverted from the valley to protect the three-inch-long silver delta smelt, an endangered species.

And there is also the exploding bottled water business, which is a $16 billion industry in the U.S. alone.

Touted as environmentally warm and cuddly, Fiji Water – the square bottled drink of the beautiful people – says it is “drawn from an artesian aquifer, located at the very edge of a primitive rainforest.”

Millions of the iconic plastic bottles are filled with water from a “huge volcanic chamber” in Viti Levu, the largest island of the vast South Pacific chain, and shipped throughout the world.

It is the best-selling imported water in the U.S. But nowhere on the billboards or in the slick magazine ads is there a mention of charges by human rights advocates that while the nation’s military-run dictatorship supports the export of the water, it does little or nothing to aid the third of the island nation’s population that cannot get safe drinking water.

Water wizard’s prediction

The Fiji enigma supports the comments of former Illinois Sen. Paul Simon, who told me a year or two before died in 2003 that he feared “we will see the day when the wealthy have safe drinking water and the poor have nothing.”

I’m not sure that Simon was thinking about sales of bottled water. But during the 22 years he served on Capitol Hill, he was often called the “water wizard” by some water-concerned environmentalists.

After air, water is the most crucial substance that there is for survival of humans and animals alike, he told me.

He predicted a water crisis with catastrophic ramifications and said that nothing meaningful can be done about it unless the public knows the danger and demands that its lawmakers do something about it.

“Like so many other things, water won’t become sexy enough to attract the needed attention of policy-makers, politicians and the media until bodies are stacking up,” the dedicated lawmaker told me.

“Then, it will be too late.”

The logo of urine farming fans

The study, published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, found that plants fertilized with urine produced four times more tomatoes than nonfertilized plants and as much as plants given traditional chemical fertilizer.

The researchers from the Department of Environmental Science at the University of Kuopio, Finland, said urine has been shown to work well on cucumber, corn, cabbage, and other crops, but tomatoes were selected for the study because it is commonly cultivated in home gardens and is an ingredient in many recipes.

The results suggest that urine can be used as a substitute for regular fertilizer to increase the yields of tomatoes without posing any microbial or chemical risks, the report says.

Urine for the study was collected from several private homes over the winter.  Taste testing by a panel of 20 individuals found all tomato samples were evaluated as being equally good.

Here is a link to the actual Finnish study and, if you’re really into this concept of gardening, this is a link to a UK website that will tell you all need to know about urine farming, including where to get urine-diverting toilets and urinals.

They say that sales they could always count on, are falling off.

But many shopper are more carefully weighing the presumed quality of organics with the cost.

“I want the best for my children but I know I can get this for half the price at the chain groceries. Four or five dollars make a difference these days,” said a woman I chatted with yesterday at Whole Foods who was holding a head of organic lettuce in one hand and tomatoes in the other.

I’m going to hit some farmer’s markets this weekend to talk to some producers but as one farmer told me recently, he’d spent so much money bringing his farm up to organic standards that even a drop of five or 10 percent in his sales can close him down.

If you want to read more on this, Katie Zezma wrote a really well-researched piece in today’s New York Times. Here’s a link to it.

The story explained that agri-business groups had urged the county to get rid of the guide. Washington Friends of Farms and Forests said failure to do so would end the very existence of local farmers.

And, as happens every time I write about pesticide residue in our food, my mailbox became clogged with opinions and suggestions from four continents. Really, four.

Some requests are anatomically impossible to comply with. Others are easy to address. For example, here is the link to the guide that the county says it’s rewriting. The data on which the card was based came from USDA analysis of more than 50,000 samples of food.

One thing that I could have stressed when talking about the card was that in most cases, even when residue from five or six different pesticides was found, the total amount of chemical present was usually infinitesimal.

Some of the mail came from people who said they were family farmers “already hanging on by their fingernails.”

I called a few of them to chat and their stories were similar: “Cards like this force people to buy organic.” Or, “we can’t compete with imported food because their labor costs are a fraction of ours and they can, and do, use all the pesticides they need.” Both true.

I also spoke to consumers who said they want to “buy local” because they trust American farmers, but they find that much of the non-organic food on the shelves come from many other countries. A thought repeated by several.

About six of the “farmers” with whom I chatted said they belonged to Ag groups like the “Friends of Farmers” mentioned above. When I asked them why their associations didn’t buy billboards or raise hell about imported food and the lack of government inspection, or why, at least they didn’t demand action from their congressional reps, to whom their groups or umbrella political action campaigns always donate, they replied “good question.”

Interestingly, two of the famers — one from Yakama and the other from Montana — both reminded me that people from the chemical companies that make pesticides sit on the boards of their associations and contribute a good bit of money to keep the groups going.

They also raised the obvious fact that the U.S. chemical companies sell pesticides that are banned in this country all over they world. Thus, looking too hard at what’s comiing back on imported produce would probably not get their support.

Nevertheless, I think I’ll look a bit closer at who’s watching the imports and I’m open to suggestions on where to look.

Bhimu Patil, director of Texas A&M’s Fruit and Vegetable Improvement Center in College Station, has reported that watermelon has ingredients that deliver Viagra-like effects to the body’s blood vessels and may even increase libido.

This is not a joke. Check out the Aggie’s announcement.

Bhimu Patil, director of Texas A&M’s Fruit and Vegetable Improvement Center, says watermelon may have Viagra-like effects. (Photo: Texas A&M University)

“The more we study watermelons, the more we realize just how amazing a fruit it is in providing natural enhancers to the human body,” said the scientist, who added, “We’ve always known that watermelon is good for you, but the list of its very important healthful benefits grows longer with each study.”

Beneficial ingredients in watermelon and other fruits and vegetables include lycopene, beta carotene and the rising star among its phyto-nutrients – citrulline – whose beneficial functions are now being unraveled.

“Among the ingredients is arginine which boosts nitric oxide, which relaxes blood vessels, the same basic effect that Viagra has, to treat erectile dysfunction and maybe even prevent,” reported Patil.

He admits that watermelon may not be as organ specific as Viagra, but said “it’s a great way to relax blood vessels without any drug side-effects.”

The scientist offers this advice for those Fourth of July watermelons: “They store much better uncut if you leave them at room temperature. Lycopene levels can be maintained even as it sits on your kitchen floor. But once you cut it, refrigerate. And enjoy.”

Graham Wiggins, president of New Zealand Kiwifruit Growers, said that research is being done on transforming about 15 million trays of waste Kiwifruit into fuel and other products was an exciting prospect.

According to the New Zealand Herald, Kiwifruit is already recognized as a mild laxative, blood thinner, meat tenderizer and dessert garnish. Wiggins says it could be destined for even greater things.

Currently, much of New Zealand’s kiwifruit that fails to make the export or local market grade becomes food for livestock.

“The world is moving quite quickly towards biofuels and what might be seen now as a small use [of reject fruit] could in the future become a money earner for the industry,” Wiggins told the newspaper.

Here’s a link to the full story.

The relentless rains, cold temperatures and record flood water mixed with what some experts called the “nation’s ill-conceived corn ethanol mandate” has formed what the Environmental Working Group has called “a perfect storm (that) is helping to push food and feed prices to record highs, while doing nothing to put a dent in soaring prices at the pump.”

Congress must revisit the entire issue of biofuels and its imact on the food supply. the report said.

EWG, a public-interest research organization released a report supporting these conclusions late today after extensive interviews with top agriculture economists and climatologists.

In Iowa, 1.13 million acres of corn, nearly 10 percent of the state’s total, already have been lost, and 4 million more are currently under water. Across the Midwest, millions more acres are likely to suffer significant yield loss because fields have been too wet to plant or are too wet to apply fertilizer or control weeds, according to the report.

When the Bush administration and Congress triggered the ethanol boom in 2005 with the Renewable Fuels Standard mandate and then raised the mandate five-fold in 2007, they ignored the impact this policy could have on food prices, relying entirely on good weather to make this roll-of-the dice decision a success.

“Our ethanol policy requires perfect weather, and not surprisingly, we aren’t getting it,” said EWG Senior Agriculture Analyst Michelle Perez.

This been an increase in applying for “allotments,” which are small plots of ground rented cheaply from local town councils where townsfolk can grow their own veggies like the Brits and Yanks both did with their victory gardens during “the big war.”

These small garden plots lost popularity after the war, Di says, “but now, with a (UK) health service that believes in preventative measures before serious health problems can kick in, there is a push for healthy eating, and allotments are experiencing a comeback.

Locally grown?

“Freezing, pickling or bottling the excess, means you save a lot of money through the year and when you pick your own and bring it home to cook, you know it’s chock full of vitamins and minerals due to its freshness” said the foodie from across the Atlantic.

“The ‘old’ ways are worth taking a look at occasionally,” said Mrs. Rayburn.

If you have no time, space or interest in growing your own, there are at least 4,000 farmers’ markets now operating across the country.

Greeenlightmagazine.com says two of the best farmers markets in the country are in the Pacific Northwest. Here’s their descriptions:

Portland Farmers Market, Oregon – Troll the stalls for Dungeness crab, farmed abalone, wild mushrooms, and organic cranberries, and the acclaimed breads and pastry from Pearl Bakery, made with sustainably grown ingredients, including Pacific Northwest wheat and dairy. Afterward, drop the kids off for a cooking class, while you stop by the “Taste the Place” booth to learn about “underappreciated produce” and what to do with it.

Seattle “U-District” Market – Seattle’s largest neighborhood market is “farmers only,” meaning it’s limited to food products. It hosts more than 50 regional growers who gather to sell everything from free-range eggs and hard cider, to hazelnuts, wild huckleberries and mushrooms, to grass-fed goat meat.

There is wide agreement that if you shop at a market where the food is actually grown by local farmers and not just unpacked by them, the quality is premium, but so are the prices.

Well, maybe not any more.

According to the Market Free News, earlier this year economic students at Seattle University tallied prices over a two-week period at two groceries � Whole Foods and QVC � and at the farmers market in Seattle’s University District. To the surprise of many, the prices for the locally produced produces from the farmers cost less than at the two chain stories. For example, a pound of fruits and veggies at the farmers market was $2.37, at Whole Foods $2.59 and at QVC, $2.97.

But just keep your eyes open for the rare shifty farmer from Wenatchee unpacking boxes that say “Grown in Guatemala.”

Here’s one point that’s indisputable. It is difficult for consumers to know whether the food they’re buying was genetically modified, especially in this country. Most of the industrialized countries demand that GMO products be labeled as such. But not the U.S.

The Pew Research Foundation reported that more than 90 percent of American shoppers want food labeled as to its contents, including GMO. Unless I missed it, there was nothing in the farm bill that finally passed last week that will give us a clue to the presence of GM ingredients.

GMO By Rediscover Biology

Monsanto, which has a chokehold on the world’s use of genetically modified seeds, is now using its extensive network of lawyers and lobbyists to pressure state agriculture agencies not to allow milk producers to label dairy products as not coming from cows fed with GM food or bovine growth hormone.

To learn more about Monsanto, check out this link to Don Barlett and Jim Steele’s very well done and balanced investigative report in this month’s Vanity Fair.

As with almost everything controversial, all the opinions on GMO have to be weighed by considering the source of the information. The Institute for Responsible Technology makes no pretense about its concern over the danger of using genetically modified substances in our food.

The institute, founded in 2003 by Jeffery Smith, the author of “Seeds of Deception,” says many consumers in the U.S. mistakenly believe that the FDA approves GM foods through rigorous, in-depth, long-term studies. In reality, the agency has absolutely no safety testing requirements.

Smith says it’s easy to understand the FDA’s industry-friendly policy on regulation of GMOs when you see the revolving door between agency regulators and the companies they regulate.

The FDA has claimed it was not aware of any information showing that GM crops were different “in any meaningful or uniform way” from non-GMO crops and therefore didn’t require testing. But Smith says that 44,000 internal FDA documents made public by a lawsuit show that this was not true.

But getting back to the original question of how to identify GMO-tainted food, the institute has released a four-page guide on what to watch out for, including a lengthy list of food items containing GM ingredients.

The guide and other GMO information can be found at the institute’s Web site at this link.

As expected, Monsanto says its processes are safe and beneficial and it “helps farmers grow food more efficiently and in a more sustainable manner. We do this through science and the development of agricultural technology. Our products have changed the way food is grown, to the benefit of both farmers and consumers,” its Web site states.

For the rest of the story, or at least Monsanto’s side of the GMO issue, this link will take you to a long list of stories that the worldwide chemical company has presented on its position.

Good luck sorting through all of this.

Wouldn’t shopping be an easier and possibly safer chore if all food were properly labeled?