This content was originally published by UVM University Communications as part of UVM Today. It was written by Joshua Brown. See original article by clicking here.

Over the next forty years — if we are to feed the planet’s burgeoning population — we must produce as much food as we did over the last eight thousand years.

Jason Clay of World Wildlife Fund speaks at UVM on 10/18 as our 2012 Aiken Lecturer

This is Jason Clay’s fundamental challenge to the world. And it’s the reason he thinks small-scale change in our food system won’t solve the problem.

“In Vermont and around the world,” he says, “business as usual and incremental change will not get us where we need to go.”

That’s why he’s a passionate conservationist who works closely with some of the largest corporations in the world — helping them re-imagine the ways they produce and purchase food.

“This increase in production is so dramatic,” Clay says, “that if we don’t find the right places and ways to grow food, the earth will be unrecognizable.”

Jason Clay will deliver the 2012 Aiken Lecture, “Feeding 9 Billion, Maintaining the Planet,” at the University of Vermont’s Ira Allen Chapel at 5 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 18.

The event is free and open to the public.

Seeking global standards

Jason Clay works for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) as the senior vice president for market transformation.

As one of the world’s leading experts on certification in the food system, Clay created one of the first ecolabels and helped develop standards for more than a dozen commodities, from soy to shrimp, that reduce the impacts of production.

“Right now, the single largest impact of humans on the planet is food and fiber production,” Clay says. “If we continue to expand production into natural habitat, there will be very little natural habitat left by 2050.”

His lecture will focus on understanding the most important of these impacts — as well as myths about food production. There are “key trends in population, income, consumption, urbanization and trade,” he says — worrisome trends — “that should give us pause.”

Clay’s goal is to create global standards for producing and using raw materials, particularly in terms of carbon and water. He has convened industry roundtables of retailers, buyers, producers and environmentalists to reduce the key impacts of growing many products including soy, cotton, sugarcane, salmon, mollusks, catfish and tilapia.

“We now have 10 to 25 percent of global production and buyers sitting at the table for each commodity,” he says.

These gatherings and his visionary ideas are changing the way corporations — as well as governments, foundations, researchers, and NGOs — address risks and opportunities.

“There is no silver bullet that will allow us to freeze the footprint of food,” Clay says. “Every use of resources has impacts, but we must define which impacts are acceptable.”

Rainforest Crunch

Clay’s favorite flavor of ice cream is Ben & Jerry’s Rainforest Crunch, which he helped create — with sustainably harvested ingredients— after meeting Ben Cohen at a fundraiser featuring the Grateful Dead.

“The issue is not what to think, but how to think,” Clay says.

Clay ran a family farm, taught at Harvard and Yale, worked at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and spent more than 25 years working with human rights and environmental organizations before joining WWF in 1999.

Clay studied at Harvard University and the London School of Economics, and received his doctorate. in anthropology from Cornell University. He founded the award-winning journal Cultural Survival Quarterly and is the author of more than 300 articles and many books including World Agriculture and the Environment.

In addition to his WWF role, Clay is the first-ever Food and Sustainability Fellow of the National Geographic Society.

Clay was honored with a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award this year.

UVM’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources will host Jason Clay’s visit to Vermont.

“No one has all the answers,” Clay says “but together we can solve this problem and leave our children a living planet.”

Guest blog post from Lynn Blevins, Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Vermont. Lynn is trained as a field epidemiologist through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS). She worked at CDC both in Atlanta and as an assignee to the Vermont Department of Health in the areas of Immunizations, Infectious Disease, Environmental Health and Emergency Preparedness. At UVM, she is both faculty at the College of Medicine and staff at UVM Extension’s Center for Sustainable Agriculture where her work focuses on on-farm produce safety.

Recently Vermont Law School’s new Center for Agriculture and Food Systems hosted local and national experts on legal and policy issues related to agriculture at their Conference on Agriculture and Food Systems.

The 16 speakers and 5 panelists challenged us to consider topics of critical importance to sustainable agriculture including water quality, public health, genetically modified organisms, animal agriculture, federal farm policy, and agriculture in Vermont.

I’ve boiled down my 15 pages of notes to yield one common theme. Existing policy limits our ability to make changes in the food system towards sustainability.

Water Pollution

The Clean Water Act has successfully controlled point-source water pollution, but there is a non-point source exemption for agriculture. States have largely been reluctant to regulate, resulting in agriculture, abandoned mines, and suburban development as the last great unregulated sources of water pollution in the United States.

Public Health

Regulatory agencies (mainly FDA) regard products as safe unless proven not to be safe. In other words, instead of being guided by the precautionary principle, which would require scientific inquiry to determine safety before use, safety is assumed until proven otherwise. Such is the case for ~80,000 chemicals on the market not tested for safety and the lack of standards for many substances, including arsenic, which is known to cause cancer, in foods.

Genetically Engineered Crops

The regulation (or lack thereof) of genetically engineered (GE) foods is a prime example of regulations not meeting needs of the general public (the eaters). As biotechnology advanced in the 1980s, regulations for GE foods were pieced together from unrelated existing regulations (that’s right, no new regulations for GE crops). It gets complicated, but in short the following agencies are involved:

EPA – Regulates crops with an inserted gene from the bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis because the gene produces a toxin that acts as a pesticide (EPA regulates pesticides). EPA has imposed some planting restrictions.

FDA – Regulates food safety and has the power to regulate the labeling of GE foods, but is sticking to their opinion that no labeling is required because there is “no material difference” between GE food and non-GE foods. I would argue otherwise – that there is a material difference – an inserted gene and perhaps even a toxin. This seems so obvious, but again, it is being considered safe unless proven to not be safe.

USDA – GE crops are regulated under the Plant Protection Act, which concerns itself with plant pests and noxious weeds. However, GE plants are considered similar to their conventional counterparts (the fact that they are GE is not considered), which results in deregulation without Environmental Impact Statements and unlimited planting without monitoring (except, for private industry, which chooses to monitor quite closely to protect their patent rights). If you think you’ve read that incorrectly because it doesn’t make any logical sense, let me assure you that you have not. These plants are not being evaluated on characteristics related to GE, such as the increased herbicide use that accompanies GE crops, weeds’ resistance to the herbicide glyphosate, and the genetic contamination of organic and wild crops.

Grower agreements for GE seeds shift liability to farmers, thus preventing the organic community from going after the biotech company when crops are contaminated. In fact, the opposite is true – biotech companies go after organic growers when the organic crops are contaminated on the basis of patent infringement. Again, if you think you’ve mis-read that because it isn’t logical, let me assure you that you understood it correctly. The organic community has tried, without success, to use the judicial branch of government to prevent biotech companies from claiming patent infringement when unwanted GE pollen contaminates their fields. Legislative attempts at the state level, including here in VT, have not been successful due to law suit threats from biotech companies. Now we see California will take a different approach by bringing the question of labeling directly to the people through a ballot initiative.

One speaker referred to the regulation of GE crops as “The Grand Contortion” and “legal fiction that worked”. The lack of effective regulations around GE crops has resulted in the biotech companies essentially regulating themselves, gaining the upper hand over those who grow organic food and those who claim the right to know what is in their food through labeling, and causing yet-to-be fully determined environmental effects.

Animal Agriculture

There are no federal regulations on the treatment of farm animals, although they account for 98% of the animals humans interact with (by comparison, there are greater protections for domestic pets, circus animals, and zoo animals).  State anti-cruelty laws apply to farm animals, but are often ineffectively applied. Ironically, the anti-cruelty laws were created for farm animals, but they currently benefit the least from those laws.

The “Common Farming Exemption” exempts practices that might seem cruel to the average person as long as it is common. This provides the food animal production industry the power to determine what is cruel. Let me just say that most of us learned in kindergarten that two wrongs don’t make a right. Can’t we live by those rules?

Regulation of farm animals welfare in the US pales in comparison to that the EU, perhaps because we are uncomfortable talking about how our industrial food animals are raised or because we don’t see what goes on behind the concrete walls of a Confined Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO). Areas which need our attention include lack of space, procedures performed without anesthesia, an inability to carry out natural instincts, and overbreeding resulting in abnormal and uncomfortable body confirmation. If we, the public, cannot talk about this, how will it be regulated or voted on by ballot initiative?

The argument is often made that a sustainable animal agriculture system cannot produce the same amount of meat as the industrial system.  Might one (healthy) solution be to eat less meat, and when we do to channel our food dollar to ethical and sustainable productions?

Federal Policy

No agricultural policy conference would be complete without a discussion of the farm bill. Sticking with the (my) theme of the conference of policy limiting change, we now have a Farm Bill that has expired without a new farm bill to replace it. The Senate successful passed a bill with many reforms including replacing direct payments with crop insurance, and more investment into organics, local foods, and fruits and vegetables (referred to as “specialty crops” because they are not a commodity crop like corn, wheat, rice, soybean, or cotton).  While the Senate version had many improvements over prior Farm Bills, the House version was less sympathetic to sustainable agriculture systems. Congress was unable to pass a Farm Bill prior to the conclusion of the last session.

I came away from the conference disappointed, yet hopeful. Disappointed – that the existing policies do not meet our needs for a healthy food system. Hopeful – that it will improve through meaningful legislation and, when that’s not possible, ballot initiatives.