By naming the root cause behind food crises, we stand a chance at solving them

This is a guest post by Cary Fowler, executive director of the Rome-based Global Crop Diversity Trust and co-author of Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity.

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Southern Africa, 2030. A throng of emaciated people waits for food rations to arrive. The maize crop has failed, devastated by hot weather and drought. Yet again. A "food crisis?" Yes. That's what we'll call it in 22 years.

But not today. If we want to do something about future food crises, we should name them today, and name them properly. Problems unnamed or improperly named are problems left unsolved.

In many cases, what we call food crises are more precisely thought of as crop-diversity crises. That's what history's most famous "food crisis" -- the Irish potato famine -- really was.

A paper recently published Science -- abstract here -- by a group of scholars with whom the Crop Diversity Trust collaborates, predicts a drop in maize (corn) yields of 30 percent in southern Africa by 2030 as a result of climate change, unless new climate-ready varieties of maize are developed. A huge drop in production of the region's most important food crop will bring instant famine.

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Recent food safety struggles suggest the limits of regulation

It's been a bad week for food safety. First it was the peanut butter, then it was the high fructose corn syrup, and now it's deadly antibiotic-resistant staph bacteria (MRSA) in CAFO pigs (and their minders). And of course, as Bill Marler -- litigious scourge of the food industry -- reminds us, we're continuing to lose the fight against E. coli.

Much has been written about the efforts to track down the sources of contamination.  And invariably the companies involved quickly close the their doors (which is how we lost one of the largest ground beef distributors in the country virtually overnight and why the Peanut Corporation of America is no more). But what's truly worrisome is that in each case, the USDA and the FDA (who have joint responsibility for food safety) had information at hand about all of these problems.

In the case of the peanut butter outbreak, the plant in question had a long-documented history of health violations -- discovered, not by the FDA, but by local Georgia authorities to whom the FDA had contracted out inspection services. In essence, short of allowing self-regulation, the FDA managed to find an entity that enjoys even cozier relationships with industry than the FDA itself has. In theory, the Georgia Agriculture Department should have forwarded on reports of violations to federal officials. There's no word yet on where in the lines of communication the breakdown occurred.

Proposed renewable-energy bill is better than nothing

The following is a guest post from Tom Casten, chairman of Recycled Energy Development LLC.

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Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), chair of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, along with Rep. Todd Platts (R-Pa.), has introduced legislation calling for 25 percent of U.S. electricity to come from clean energy by 2025. What will such legislation do to electricity costs?

Most pundits assume the current system is optimal, and thus claim that any mandate to change this "best of all possible worlds" will raise the price of delivered electricity. It is hilarious to think the protected and regulated electric system is optimal, but depressing to realize no one is laughing. Consider two questions:

1. Do market forces drive electricity suppliers to lowest-delivered-cost solutions?
2. What is the delivered cost of clean energy from various generation options?

What market forces? All electricity distribution systems and many generation plants enjoy monopoly protection. Subsidies abound. Profits are guaranteed. Old plants can legally emit up to 100 times the pollution of a new plant. A century of rules reward and protect yesterday's approaches and the resulting vested interests.

Congressman Markey has never seen current generation as optimal, and now that he chairs the relevant subcommittee, he proposes to mandate cleaner and, in our view, cheaper electricity generation. Yes, we said cheaper. Anyone interested in some facts?

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Can Obama stop the nuclear bomb in the Senate stimulus plan? (Part 1)

A radioactive dirty bomb has been dropped on the Senate stimulus package. As WonkRoom reported:

On Wednesday, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted to increase nuclear loan guarantees by $50 billion in the economic recovery package (S. 336). This staggering sum "would more than double the current loan guarantee cap of $38 billion" for "clean energy" technology.

Yet this provision would not create a single job for many, many years, but would saddle the public with tens of millions of dollars more in toxic loans. As I noted in my 2008 report, "The Self-Limiting Future of Nuclear Power":

In August 2007, Tulsa World reported that American Electric Power Co. CEO Michael Morris was not planning to build any new nuclear power plants. He was quoted as saying, "I'm not convinced we'll see a new nuclear station before probably the 2020 timeline,"

Morris further noted, "Builders would also have to queue for certain parts."

Indeed, the nuclear industry is riddled with bottlenecks. For instance, Japan Steel Works is "the only plant in the world ... capable of producing the central part of a nuclear reactor's containment vessel in a single piece, reducing the risk of a radiation leak." And they have a backlog of a few years already.

The additional loans would probably not even result in a single new signed contract for a plant over the next two years, let alone produce a single job in Obama's first term -- other than maybe a few high-priced lawyers and lobbyists to twist the arms of state Public Utility Commissioners to shove the inevitable rate increase down the throats of consumers (see "Exclusive analysis, Part 1: The staggering cost of new nuclear power"). Turkey seems smarter than that (see "Turkey's only bidder for first nuclear plant offers a price of 21 cents per kilowatt-hour"). Are we?

Why are we still propping up an industry that can't survive without the taxpayer swallowing both the economic risk of an actual meltdown and the risk of the new nukes melting down financially -- all for a mature technology that has already received more than $100 billion in direct and indirect subsidies (see "Nuclear Pork -- Enough is Enough")?

Here is the proposed language for this nuclear bomb: