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Science

The obesity crisis? Innovation, not nannying, will cut our calories

Britain’s obesity crisis is acute and urgent. The government’s decision to make tackling it the number one public health priority has an empirical basis. Britons are fatter than ever before, with excess body fat responsible for more deaths than smoking every year since 2014. But as sound as the public health concerns might be, when they are translated into policy, we find ourselves running into a world of problems.

A few years ago, Boris Johnson liked to talk about rolling back the “continuing creep of the nanny state”. He once promised to put an end to “sin taxes” on sugary drinks. He liked to talkabout Britain as a “land of liberty” and, for many, he represented a break with the past. Theresa May had denounced what she called the “libertarian right” upon her elevation to 10 Downing Street, opting instead for “a new centre-ground”. Boris, we were assured, would be something entirely different.

So how did we get here? We have somehow reached a point where the pillars of the Government’s anti-obesity strategy are the regressive sugar tax – which remains firmly in place – along with a draconian advertising ban on foods high in salt, sugar or fat. Plus a bizarre £100 million fund which, one way or another, will supposedly help people to drop the pounds and keep them off.

In between the old Boris and the new, the man himself slimmed down following his jarring bout of Covid-19. After he came out of hospital and recovered from coronavirus, the Prime Minister embarked on a personal slimming programme of his own, allowing him to make himself the poster boy of his Government’s anti-obesity drive.

“The reason I had such a nasty experience with the disease,” he said in October of last year, “is that although I was superficially in the pink of health when I caught it, I had a very common underlying condition. My friends, I was too fat. And I have since lost 26 pounds… And I’m going to continue that diet because you have got to search for the hero inside yourself in the hope that that individual is considerably slimmer.”

Metafictional interpretations of ‘90s song lyrics aside, Johnson’s point here is essentially correct. All the data bears out the fact that obesity has a substantial effect on the dangers posed by a coronavirus infection. But it is unclear why that should warrant an abandonment of principles of liberty in favour of gratuitous and often random state intervention in people’s lives. No nanny state told the PM how to cut his calories. So if Boris could lose weight on his own, why can’t the rest of us?

It’s not like there are no alternatives on the table, leaving costly and damaging policies like new taxes and ad bans as the only option. The menu of unintrusive and unobtrusive anti-obesity policies, free of cost to the taxpayer, is endless. Studies have shown how simple changes, like marking out a section on shopping trolleys for fruit and veg with yellow tape, or rebranding healthy foods to make them more appealing to children, can have an enormous positive effect over a short period of time.

Plus, Britain is home to some of the best scientists and research institutes in the world. Even in times of economic constraint, thanks to lockdown, innovation in the private sector is booming. It was recently discovered, for instance, that a diabetes drug called semaglutide can also function as a weight-loss “miracle cure”. Something as simple as sugar-free chewing gum can suppress appetites, cutting down on unhealthy snacking by a tenth, with very little effort. Why is the Government not enthused by this constant shower of scientific breakthroughs?

For whatever reason, ministers and officials are unwilling to explore the wealth of opportunities for cost-free nudge policies and innovative scientific investments. It is wedded to its model of centralised diet control and appears to hang on Jamie Oliver’s every word. Obesity is shaping up to be the next global health disaster and if we’re not careful – if we remain blinkered by these short-sighted policies – we might find ourselves as unprepared for the next pandemic as we were for the present one.

The Government must step up to the plate now and offer real solutions that work. That is our only hope of preventing the looming catastrophe.

Originally published here.

Sugar is the new tobacco. Here’s what we should do about it!

Whichever way you look at it, Britain is facing an obesity crisis. A study into long-term public health in England and Scotland published earlier this month reached the startling conclusion that obesity is causing more deaths than smoking, with nearly two thirds of British adults now overweight.

This past year has brought rising obesity levels into sharp focus because of the effect that being overweight seems to have on the fatality of Covid-19. According to research from the World Obesity Federation, nine out of ten deaths from coronavirus occurred in countries with high obesity levels, which might go some way towards explaining why the UK has seen a disproportionately high death toll.

This issue has not passed the Government by. Led by a man who was elected on a platform of halting ‘the continuing creep of the nanny state’, this Conservative Government has unveiled a raft of policies designed to ease the pressure on Britain’s weighing scales, including the sugar tax, a ‘junk food’ advertising ban and even a fund – with a £100m price tag – which is apparently designed to bribe people into losing weight.

The problems with these policies are too numerous to count. Sin taxes hit the poor harder than anyone else, making the weekly shopping trip more expensive for families who are already struggling. The junk food ad ban is set to remove around 1.7 calories, or half a Smartie’s worth of energy intake, from children’s diets per day – according to the Government’s analysis of its own policy. And the state-funded version of Slimming World sounds like something that comes out of a pop-up book of policies. Yes, and ho!

It is unclear why Boris Johnson, who was able to lose weight after his brush with Covid without any of these new Government-sponsored initiatives in place, is now so firmly of the belief that the Government must crack down on unhealthy eating if we are to have any hope of slowing down the increase in obesity rates – especially when the private sector is doing most of the hard work voluntarily.

Tesco, for instance, recently bowed to external pressure by committing itself to increasing its sales of healthy foods to 65% of total sales by 2025. Time and time again, when there is an issue people care about, companies go out of their way to do their bit – even at the expense of their bottom line. We saw the same thing happen when the world woke up to the reality of climate change, with businesses eagerly signing up to costly net-zero plans.

Positive moves like this from incumbent giants are complemented by the wealth of innovation taking place around obesity. Semaglutide, a diabetes drug, was recently found to be extraordinarily effective in helping people lose weight. Even something as innocuous as sugar-free chewing gum might just represent part of the solution. Datasuggests that the mere act of idle chewing suppresses the appetite, resulting in a 10% reduction in the consumption of sweet and salty snacks.

Crucially, these remarkable steps towards a less obese Britain can take place at no cost to the taxpayer, free of the grip of Whitehall bureaucracy and at an astonishing pace. We have just lived through a year in which the Government pumped billions into a near-useless ‘test and trace’ system and repeatedly failed to clarify whether or not drinking coffee on a park bench is illegal. If there is one incontrovertible lesson we can surely take from that, it is that we should not leave such important tasks to the state.

Sugar is the new tobacco, so we need to be smart in how we tackle it. Sporadic, ill-thought-out Government interventions like banning Marmite adverts are not the answer. Private-sector innovation, not centralised policy, is Britain’s best hope of slimming down.

Originally published here

DelVal Communities Sue for Right to Ban Plastic Bags. But What Does the Science Say?

Earlier this month, a handful of Delaware Valley communities sued the state over their right to choose to ban the sale and use of plastic shopping bags. The issue raises questions about local authority vs. state power, one that got tangled up in the public policy over handling the threat of COVID-19.

Interestingly the question few people are asking is “What does the science say?” The answer is far more complicated than plastic bag opponents have acknowledged.

On March 3, Philadelphia, West Chester, Narberth, and Lower Merion filed suit claiming GOP state lawmakers violated the constitution when they inserted a ban on banning plastic bags, straws and other single-use plastic products into the budget last year. However, Philly’s efforts to ban the bags go back to well before December 2019, when the city council passed an anti-bag ordinance. Four previous attempts to ban plastic bag use in the city failed.

That ban was blocked, not only by state lawmakers, but by the coronavirus pandemic, which gave plastic shopping bags a second life.

Concerns about “surface contagion” made reusable cloth bags, carried in and out of homes and stores, a pathogen-carrying pariah. Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney announced on April 22 — Earth Day, ironically — the city was postponing the July 1, 2020 start date for its bag ban.

“This is not an announcement we want to make during Earth Week. We know the climate crisis and plastic pollution remain two very serious threats to our planet and society, even during the global pandemic,” the mayor said.

Politicians throughout the country took similar steps. New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, issued an executive order urging residents “to keep reusable bags at home given potential risks to baggers, grocers, and customers.” In New York, a state senator called for the state’s plastic bag prohibition to be suspended for similar reasons.

Meanwhile, in Harrisburg, lawmakers in 2020 extended a 2019 moratorium on plastic bag bans by placing it inside a budget bill (HB1083) just hours before a full vote by the General Assembly. The measure banned municipalities from imitating fees or restrictions on single-use plastics, such as bags and utensils.

The measure, in effect, prevented Philadelphia from implementing its 2019 plastic bag ban It also postponed bag bans in West Chester and Narberth, and stalled a similar ban from going forward in Lower Merion. Left unchallenged, this meant bag bans in all four municipalities could not be implemented until November 2021.

And so now they’re suing.

“In Philadelphia and across the commonwealth, local governments are increasingly concerned about the health and environmental effects of plastic bags,” Mayor Kenney said. “Yet, once again, we face a state legislature that is focused more on tying the hands of cities and towns than on solving the actual problems facing Pennsylvania.”

According to a WHYY report, the Commonwealth Court lawsuit challenges “the state’s ban on the bans, at least until July 1, 2021, or six months after Gov. Tom Wolf lifted the COVID-19 state of emergency. Under the current state of emergency, that would delay the implementation of the municipal bans at least until November of this year.”

Philadelphia officials say they will enact the bag ban on July 1, regardless of state law. If that happens, the result could be Pennsylvania’s attorney general, Democrat Josh Shapiro, representing the state against the liberal stronghold of Philadelphia and over an issue Democrats have widely embraced.

Meanwhile, state Rep. John Hershey (R-Juniata County), who supports the state’s actions, said the bans would have a negative effect on the livelihoods of the families who live and work near the Novolex plastics plant in Milesburg.

This puts the “small-government” GOP in a fight against local governance, a principle Republicans tend to embrace.

Amid the complex politics, however, a larger issue remains largely ignored: Are plastic bag bans smart environmental policy?

If the goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the science is settled: No. Multiple studies have confirmed that, as Stanford Magazine put it,”single-use plastic bags have the smallest carbon footprint.” A report from the MIT Office of Sustainability concluded: “Based on greenhouse gas emissions of material production, the paper bag would require five uses in order to have a lower impact per use than the polyethylene bag, whereas the jute bag would require 19.”

And it’s not just in the U.S. David Clement of the Consumer Choice Center wrote for InsideSources: “When Denmark considered a ban on single-use plastic grocery bags, its studies found they were far superior in comparison to alternatives. The Danes came to that conclusion based on 15 environmental benchmarks, including climate change, toxicity, ozone depletion, resource depletion, and ecosystem impact. They calculated paper bags would need to be reused 43 times to have the same total impact as a plastic bag.”

But what about litter and plastic pollution in the water? Delaware Valley Journal recently reportedon a study from the nonprofit environmental advocacy group PennEnvironment Research and Policy Center that found samples from every one of the state’s 53 popular waterways contained microplastics.

But despite complaints about plastic bags fouling our streets and sewers, the definitive litter study—the 2009 Keep America Beautiful Survey—found all retail plastic bags (which includes sandwich bags, dry cleaning bags, etc) account for just 0.6 percent of visible litter nationwide.

And a recent study revealed the United States is responsible for about 1 percent of the plastic litter in the world’s oceans.

Jenn Kocher, a spokeswoman for Republican state Sen. Jake Corman, said the desire of local municipalities to enact bans on single-use plastic ought to be balanced with economic concerns, as well as the loss of jobs. Corman stated that “bans hurt the economy” and that “the employers that manufacture these bags provide family-sustaining jobs in communities throughout Pennsylvania.”

Originally published here

Carbon tariffs are policy mischief

It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which such tariffs don’t make life more expensive for ordinary Canadians

At their virtual summit last month, Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden talked about how Canada and the U.S. could be partners on future projects. Trudeau’s jab at Donald Trump — “U.S. leadership has been sorely missed” — made all the headlines but there was another important policy discussion that likely will have more important implications. Trudeau and Biden both hinted that Canadian-American climate co-operation could include “carbon adjustments” on goods imported from high-emitting countries.

Carbon adjustments, often referred to as carbon tariffs, are levies on goods from countries that do not maintain our level of environmental protection. Their main purpose is to avoid “carbon leakage,” in which companies move to countries that don’t impose costs on carbon.

No one knows how high a carbon tariff would be but it seems likely it would be imposed at the rate of our own federal carbon tax. A back-of-the-envelope approximation using the example of imports of Chinese and Indian steel shows that the impact would be significant. In 2019, Canada imported 612,000 metric tons of steel from India and China. The emissions associated with those imports are around 1,132,200 tonnes of carbon dioxide, using McKinsey’s estimate of 1.85 tons of carbon dioxide per metric ton of steel produced.

Chinese and Indian steel presumably wouldn’t have to pay the full weight of the carbon tax on every ton of CO2, because we exempt 80-90 per cent of emissions from our domestic industry, and, to be non-discriminatory, the adjustment rate would have to match how we treat domestic producers. That said, even with an exemption rate of 85 per cent a carbon tariff would be costly. At that rate, 169,830 tons of CO2 related to these imports would be subject to the tax, which is currently $40/ton. That gives a cost of more than $6.7 million. At the 2030 rate of $170/ton, it balloons to more than $28.8 million.

Apply this technique across a long list of other products from these and other high-emitters and the costs become substantial.

Beyond cost, however, there are also a number of logistical hurdles, which have been outlined in a report submitted to the European Round Table on Climate Change and Sustainable Development. The report favours carbon adjustments but advises that they be approached with caution. It highlights that the revenue from the adjustment can either be kept domestically or sent abroad. Neither option is problem-free.

If the money is kept in Canada, one option would be to refund it to Canadian businesses — though giving Canadian firms revenue generated from taxing the sale of their competitors’ products seems unfair. In many cases it would also mean inflating the price of goods from developing countries like India to protect industry in the developed world.

If that’s a problem, the rebate could be returned to Canadians, preferably through a revenue-neutral rebate scheme like the one that in principle is used to recycle our domestic carbon tax — though problems with rollout mean it hasn’t been revenue-neutral yet. Moreover, the Parliamentary Budget Officer estimates that 40 per cent of Canadian families are paying more in carbon taxes than they receive in rebates.

Sending the rebate back to high-emission countries or to global climate funds to help with decarbonization, as suggested in the report to the European Roundtable, isn’t much more attractive. Sending tax revenue abroad won’t likely sit well with Canadians who have spent the last year worrying about the impact of the pandemic on their financial future. It would also run counter to the prime minister’s December pledge not to raise taxes to deal with the deficit.

Rather than taking a swipe at Trump’s leadership, Trudeau should instead have looked at Trump’s record on trade and how disastrous tariffs can be. Trump’s tariffs on imported washing machines, for example, caused a 12 per cent increase in prices, around $88/unit, which created $1.56 billion in extra costs for consumers. (Americans buy a lot of washing-machines!)

Supporters of tariffs would argue, as Trump did, that inflated prices are worth it to expand domestic industry and create jobs. Trump’s tariffs did create manufacturing jobs in the United States — approximately 1800 new positions. The problem is that those jobs came at an enormous cost to U.S. consumers: $811,000 per job created, which comes nowhere near passing a cost-benefit analysis. Carbon adjustments, no matter how well intended, are likely to involve similar numbers.

Carbon tariffs are hard to calculate and open to abuse by rent-seeking protectionists. It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which they don’t make life more expensive for ordinary Canadians. There has to be a better path towards carbon neutrality, one that doesn’t involve drastically raising the costs of importing.

David Clement is North American Affairs Manager with the Consumer Choice Center.

Originally published here.

The EU’s ‘Farm to Fork’ Strategy Is Ill-Conceived and Destructive

There is ongoing disagreement between the popularly elected European Parliament and the executives in the European Commission over approvals of “genetically modified” (GM) crops, which are made with modern molecular genetic engineering techniques. In December, members of the European Parliament objected to authorizations of no fewer than five new GM crops — one soybean and four corn (maize) varieties — developed for food and animal feedstock. These objections follow dozens of others that have been made over the previous five years. (These are the same varieties that are ubiquitous in many other countries, including the United States.) A European Commission spokesperson has suggested that a new approach will be necessary to authorize such “genetically modified organisms,” or GMOs, in order to align with the new Farm to Fork Strategy, an agricultural strategy recently embraced by Europe:

“We look forward to constructive cooperation with the co-legislators on all these measures, which we believe will enable the achievement of a sustainable food system, including GMOs on which the EU feed sector is presently highly dependent.”

The latter part of this quote is, in fact, incomplete: There is extensive reliance of the EU on imports of both food and feed, of which a significant portion is genetically engineered. In 2018, for example, the EU imported about 45 million tons a year of GM crops for food and livestock feed. More specifically, the livestock sector in the EU depends heavily on imports of soy. According to Commission figures, in 2019-2020 the EU imported 16.87 million tonnes of soymeal and 14.17 million tonnes of soybeans, most of which came from countries where GM crops are widely cultivated. For example, 90% originates from four countries in which around 90% of cultivated soybeans are GM.

For a GM crop to enter the EU marketplace (whether for cultivation or to be used in food or feed, or for other purposes), an authorization is required. Applications for authorization are first submitted to a Member State, which forwards them to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). In cooperation with Member States’ scientific bodies, EFSA assesses possible risks of the variety to human and animal health and the environment. Parliament itself plays no part in the authorization process, but it can oppose or demand rejection of a new GM crop based on any whim, prejudice, or the bleating of NGOs in their constituencies. They have chosen to ignore the sagacious observation of the 18th century Irish statesman and writer Edmund Burke that, in republics, “Your Representative owes you, not only his industry, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

GM crops have been shown repeatedly to pose no unique or systematic risks to human health or the environment. The policies articulated in Farm to Fork suggest a renewed interest by the EU in environmental sustainability but conveniently ignore that that is the essence of what GM crops can bring to the table. Numerous analyses, in particular those of economists Graham Brookes and Peter Barfoot, have demonstrated that the introduction of GM crops lessens the amount of chemical inputs, improves farm yields and farmer incomes, and reduces the need for tillage, thus reducing carbon emissions.  The indirect benefits from GM crops include empowering women farmers by removing the drudgery of weeding, and lowering the risk of cancer by lessening crop damage from insect pests whose predation can increase aflatoxin levels. Reducing crop damage in turn reduces food waste. GM crops can also improve farmers’ health by lessening the likelihood of pesticide poisoning, and GM biofortified crops can also provide nutritional benefits that are not found in conventional crops, a life-saving innovation for the rural poor in low- to middle-income countries.

The rift between the views of the European Parliament and EU scientific agencies such as the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) shows no signs of healing. Bill Wirtz of the Consumer Choice Center predicts that trying to achieve the goals of the Farm to Fork strategy will have “dire impacts.” To address a legacy of environmental degradation, the EU proposes by 2030 to increase organic farming by 25% and reduce pesticide application on farmland by 50%. These plans fail to consider that pesticide use has sharply decreased over the past 50 years and that organic agriculture does not necessarily imply lower carbon emissions; often, the opposite is true.

Wirtz goes on to describe how slack compliance laws across the EU have made food fraud a viable business model. A significant proportion of this fraudulent organic food stems from international imports from countries, such as China, with a history of inferior quality and violation of food standards. However, he observes, increasing the surveillance and enforcement of food imports standards and rejecting those that are fraudulent could jeopardize current food security efforts, as well as the economy of the EU as a whole, given the EU’s substantial dependency on food imports.

The Farm to Fork initiative gets support from occasional specious articles in the “scientific” literature. An example is a paper published last December in Nature Communications, “Calculation of external climate costs for food highlights /inadequate pricing of animal products” by German researchers Pieper et al. The paper, which illustrates the hazards of meta-analyses on poorly selected articles, describes the use of life-cycle assessment and meta-analytical tools to determine the external climate-warming costs of animal meat, dairy and plant-based food products, made with conventional versus organic practices. The authors calculate that external greenhouse gas costs are highest for animal-based products, followed by conventional dairy products, and lowest for plant-based products, and they recommend that policy changes be made in order to make currently “distorted” food prices better reflect these environmental “costs.” They also claim that organic farming practices have a lower environmental impact than conventional, and for that matter, GM crops. They failed, however, to reference the immense body of work of Matin Qaim, Brookes and Barfoot, and many others, documenting the role that GM crops have played in furthering environmental sustainability by reducing carbon emissions and pesticide use, while increasing yield and farmers’ incomes. The omission of any reference to, or rebuttal of, that exemplary body of work is a flagrant flaw.

The paucity of GM versus organic crop data discussed in the paper is also deceptive. Anyone unfamiliar with the role of GM crops in agriculture would be left with the impression that organic crops are superior in terms of land use, deforestation, pesticide use and other environmental concerns. Yet many difficulties exist, especially, for pest management of organic crops, often resulting in lower yields and reduced product quality.

There is extensive and robust data suggesting that organic farming is not a viable strategy to reduce global GHG emissions. When the effects of land-use change are factored in, organic farming can result in higher global GHG emissions than conventional alternatives — which is even more pronounced if one includes the development and use of new breeding technologies, which are banned in organic farming.

Pieper et al claim — rather grandiosely, it seems to us — that their method of calculating the “true costs of food…could lead to an increase in the welfare of society as a whole by reducing current market imperfections and their resulting negative ecological and social impacts.” But that only works if we omit all the data on imported food and feed, turn a blind eye to the welfare of the poor, and disregard the impact of crop pests for which there is no good organic solution.

It is true that animal-based products have costs in terms of greenhouse gas emissions that are not reflected in the price, that plant-based products have varying external climate costs (as have all non-food products that we consume), and that adopting policies that internalizing those costs as much as possible would be the best practice. Conventional farming often has significantly higher yields, especially for food crops (as opposed to hay and silage), than farming with organic practices. The adoption of agroecological practices mandated by Farm-to-Fork policies would greatly reduce agricultural productivity in the EU, and could have devastating consequences for food-insecure Africa. Europe is the major trading partner for many African countries, and European NGOs and government aid organizations exert profound influence over Africa, often actively discouraging the use of superior modern farming approaches and technologies, claiming that adoption of these tools conflicts with the EU’s “Green Deal” initiative. Thus, there is a negative ripple effect on developing countries of anti-innovation, anti-technology policies by influential industrialized countries.

Moreover, the EU even now imports much of its food, which as described above, has significant implications for its trading partners and Europe’s future food security. The EU seems to have failed to consider that continuing on the Farm to Fork trajectory will require endlessly increasing food imports, increasing food prices and jeopardizing quality. Or maybe they have just chosen to embrace the fad of the moment and kick the can down la rueAprès moi, le déluge.

Originally published here.

The Marlins Park Saga, Illegal Fishing, And Are Plastic Bans Good For The Environment?

Miami’s tough relationship with the Miami Marlins. Why illegal fishing is having devastating effects on marine life. Do plastic bans actually work in favor of the environment?

The Marlins Park Saga

If you’ve lived in Miami at some point in the past decade or two, you’re probably familiar with the controversy surrounding Marlins Park. Essentially, it was paid for with more than $600 million taxpayer dollars.

The city agreed to pay for it — as long as the team’s then-owner shared in any profits he made from selling the team.

“In 2008, Jeffrey Loria, the former owner of the Marlins, threatened to leave Miami if they didn’t get a new stadium. The Major League Baseball president at the time, Bob Dupuy, put an ultimatum to [Miami-Dade] County saying, ‘If you guys don’t help finance a new stadium, you can kiss baseball in South Florida goodbye,’” said WLRN reporter Danny Rivero on Sundial.

When Loria sold the team in 2017 for $1.2 billion, he refused to share the money promised, claiming he lost money in the sale.

“He said because of that, he didn’t owe the county or the city any money on this. That is what led to the lawsuit with the county and the city saying, ‘Hold on. Like, there’s no way that that math adds up. Like, we’re clearly owed something.’ The taxpayers are owed something from this huge profit,” Rivero said.

This week a settlement was reached on that lawsuit filed by the county, but commissioners decided to delay voting on the proposed $4.2 million from settling the suit.

Illegal Fishing

When you take a bite out of spicy tuna roll, or purchase salmon from your local supermarket, do you know if that fish was obtained illegally?

It’s nearly impossible to pinpoint just how much of that fish is coming from illegal sources, experts say. Marine ecosystems have been devastated by these unregulated markets and the practice of overfishing.

“Fish is the principal source of protein in the world. Lots of populations throughout the world only depend on fish and fish to survive. One of the most devastating impacts that illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing has is that it takes away the only source of protein that many coastal communities have throughout the world,” said former Costa Rican president Luis Guillermo Solís on Sundial.

Solís is currently interim chair of the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University. He was part of the university’s annual State of the World Conference this week, where he presented on the illegal fishing market.

He added that as a consumer, insisting that stores identify the source of the fish they’re selling, is a step in the right direction.

“Fishing has been determined as of the highest national security importance. This is very important in the Western Hemisphere. It’s going to be fundamental because it will allow for greater degrees of collaboration between our countries,” Solís said.

Are Plastic Bans Good For The Environment?

Plastic pollution contributes to a lot of our environmental hardships. It harms wildlife, the ocean and it contributes to the climate crisis by emitting greenhouse gases.

But plastic is also practical, durable and cheap.

Florida has a state-level preemption that blocks local governments from banning single-use plastics.

“We need to ask companies to reduce the amount of plastic they are putting into the supply chain and find alternative ways to package and deliver their products,” said Catherine Uden, the South Florida campaign organizer for Oceana. “Often consumers are not even given a choice when they go to the stores.”

In January, state lawmakers Linda Stewart and Mike Grieco introduced a bill to change that preemption to allow local plastic bans. Some argue, though, that these bans are not the solution.

“There are legitimate and environmentally conscious reasons for why we use plastic,” said David Clement, with the Consumer Choice Center advocacy group.

“The differences between a glass container for something like baby food and a plastic container. It’s about 33 percent better for the environment to have that product be in plastic because it’s lighter. It’s easier to get to your grocery shelf. It costs less in terms of fuel and emissions,” Clement said.

Clement recently penned an op-ed in the Miami Herald saying that extending the lifespan of plastics by building better infrastructure for recycling would be a better option.

Recycling, as it is now, has not been effective — less than 10 percent all plastic waste has been recycled.

“It’s like going into your house and seeing your sink overflowing and instead of turning off the tap, then just grabbing them up and trying to mop up the floor,” said local advocate Andrew Otazo. He spends his time cleaning up plastic trash from South Florida’s waterways.

Originally published here.

Red meat is not the enemy

Targeting meat misses the point.

The leaked EU Beating Cancer Plan layed out that Brussels wants to crack down on red meat, in an effort to reduce cancer in Europe. The European Commission considered dropping marketing subsidies for red and processed meat because of health concerns, but later reverted as it faced backlash. We now know that the Commission was testing the waters.

While it’s generally good news when a government institution drops subsidies, the reasons for it do matter. The idea that red meat constitutes a public health risk is not a new one, nor are calls to tax or sometimes even restrict the consumption of it directly. 

The essential claim is that processed meat is a danger to public health, as it is associated with an increased risk of cancer. The “associated with” is quite an important keyword here, especially since it is being repeated so often. Everything you consume is essentially carcinogenic, and can therefore be linked to different cancers. The question is how dangerous it is exactly. 

A study by Dr. Marco Springmann and James Martin, both Fellows at the Oxford Martin School bases claims on is a 2011 meta-analysis from the Paris Institute of Technology for Life, Food and Environmental Sciences, which says this:

“The preventability of colorectal cancer in the United Kingdom through reduced consumption of red meat, increased fruit and vegetables, increased physical activity, limited alcohol consumption and weight control was estimated to be 31.5 per cent of colorectal cancer in men and 18.4 per cent in women.”

You may have noticed here that reducing red meat consumption is just one out of five key characteristics that people would have to follow in order to cut down their risk of colorectal cancer by up to a third (for men). If you narrow it down only to red meat consumption, you find a possible risk reduction in the UK of five per cent, provided the person was eating more than 80g of red meat per day. So yes, certain people can reduce their risk of certain cancers to a certain degree if they limit their consumption of red meat.

However, this is only true if people reduce their consumption of red meat without offsetting it with any other consumption.

It seems that there is an unfortunate disinterest of public health advocates for the occurrence of unintended consequences. If you limit access to one product, people are likely to find alternative routes to consume that product elsewhere. Take the example of Denmark’s fat tax, introduced in the same year that the Paris meta-analysis was published. In October 2011, Denmark’s leading coalition introduced a tax on fattening foods and beverages, such as butter, milk, cheese, meat, pizza, and oil, as long as they contain more than 2.3 per cent saturated fat. After fifteen months, the same parliamentary majority repealed the tax, as the Danes recognised the measure to be a failure.

The EU’s Beating Cancer Plan initial draft was ready to open a Pandora’s Box, and it only hastily closed again after an excess of criticism. Cutting subsidies is not bad in itself, but the belief that all red meat is a human health hazard can lead to deeper paternalistic policies that are not based on evidence. It is true that we should all consume products in moderation — including red meat — and should increase our willingness to exercise. That said, it is not for legislators to tilt the scales on our diets, and decide which products are good for us, and which are not. It is for consumers to plan and execute their diets, in a conscious way.

Originally published here.

Video: ‘Science over unjustified cautiousness:’ Why UK should abandon Europe’s biotech crop rules

Many groups, including the Consumer Choice Center, have endorsed genetic technologies, and there is good reason to expect the UK government to finally choose science over unjustified cautiousness inherent to EU regulations.

“Boris Johnson has repeatedly mentioned his willingness to liberate the UK’s “extraordinary bioscience sector from anti-genetic modification rules.” Such a policy would be a huge win for consumers and farmers, and at the same time it would also signal a momentous drift away from the European Union’s unjustified cautiousness towards these new technologies,” said Maria Chaplia, Research Manager at the Consumer Choice Center.

We at the Consumer Choice Center call on the UK government to take the path of more consumer choice and more science …. What are the benefits of enabling genetic engineering in the UK?

  • Approving GM pest-resistant crops could save about £60 million ($79 million) a year in pesticide use in the UK
  • More trade opportunities, including a trade deal with the US.
  • Improved agricultural performance with less labour and energy input and less cost input.
  • Reduced usage of pesticides and herbicides.

Originally published here.

Understanding “hazard” and “risk”

A lot of the Brussels conversation over the precautionary principle is misguided.

By 2030, the European Union’s “Farm to Fork” strategy aims to reduce the use of pesticides significantly. The EU deals in percentages of the total use of chemical substances it wants to cut, whether or not their scientific safety assessment was in any shape or form negative. This in essence makes it a political ambition, not an evidence-based policy.

When reading articles, blog posts, or policy papers related to the use of pesticides, we often hear the word “hazard”. “Highly-hazardous” chemicals or substances are in the focus of many environmental groups, who demand that the EU cleans up its act on the alleged ‘poison’ in our food. Theirs is a misunderstanding of the scientific meaning of “hazard” and “risk”

Risk-based regulation manages exposure to hazards. For instance, the sun is a hazard when going to the beach, yet sunlight enables the body’s production of vitamin D and some exposure to it is essential to human health. As with everything else, it is the amount of exposure that matters. A hazard-based regulatory approach to sunlight would shut us all indoors and ban all beach excursions, rather than caution beach-goers to limit their exposure by applying sunscreen. The end result would be to harm, not protect human health. 

The same logic of hazard-based regulation is all too often applied in crop protection regulation, where it creates equally absurd inconsistencies. For instance, if wine was sprayed on vineyards as a pesticide, it would have to be banned under EU law, as alcohol is a known and quite potent carcinogen at high levels of consumption. All this is rationalized through an inconsistent and distorted application of the precautionary principle. In essence, hazard-based regulation advocates would endorse outlawing all crop protection methods that cannot be proven completely safe at any level, no matter how unrealistic — a standard which, if applied consistently, would outlaw every organic food, every life-saving drug, and indeed every natural and synthetic substance. 

By ignoring the importance of the equation Risk = Hazard x Exposure, hazard-based regulation does not follow a scientifically sound policy-making approach.

As risk-management expert David Zaruk writes on his blog The Risk-Monger:

“So why then are there individuals in Brussels who think that a regulator’s job is to remove all hazards, regardless of our ability to control exposure to the hazard, regardless of the limited exposure levels, regardless of the lost benefits? For these lobbyists (often activists for environmental-health NGOs), a hazard is considered as identical to a risk (regardless of exposure) and the regulatory goal (for them) is to remove all hazards. They support the approach known as: Hazard-based regulation.

Hazard-based regulation implies that the only way to manage risks is to remove the hazard. If synthetic pesticides are hazardous, remove them. If we cannot be certain that a chemical has no effect on our endocrine system (at any dose), then deny authorisation.”

This concept of differentiating hazard and risk in the scientific and regulatory language is also supported by EFSA — the European Food Safety Authority, which advises the European Union on things such as chemical approvals.

Understanding hazard and risk is essential when addressing all questions as they relate to the precautionary principle. Artificial intelligence is prone to fall victim to a similar level of over-regulation the advocates of extreme caution get their way. Instead, the European Union should choose the road to innovation. Evidence-based policy-making is about assessing risks, but it is also about managing risks for the sake of allowing for innovation while ironing out problems as they appear. 

We cannot allow ourselves to fall behind in the global race for innovative technology because we are too afraid of changes.

Originally published here.

AFRICA: a charter on agroecology is born

The International Agroecological Movement For Africa, (I am Africa) aims to revolutionise African agriculture on a sustainable and environmentally friendly basis. This desire, which was started on the fringes of the “One Planet Summit 2021”, is governed by a charter that is open for signature by other companies willing to invest in future-oriented agro-ecological sectors in Africa.

This is the agricultural version of the third edition of the “One Planet Summit”. On the side-lines of this international summit on climate change, held on January11th, 2021 by videoconference, more than 100 African and European operators from across the agricultural value chain launched the International Agroecological Movement For Africa, (Iam Africa). The initiative is governed by a charter in which the signatories commit themselves to investing in agro-ecology in Africa. “The objective of the signatories is to participate in the promotion of a strategy that combines social, environmental and economic development for the prosperitý but also for the preservation of the biodiversitý and more generally of the continent’s stabilitý,” says Karim Ait Talb, co-founder of the initiative and deputy managing director of the Advens/Geocoton group.

The provisions of the charter give a large part of the project implementation to local companies and organisations. And the collaboration between the latter and European structures should encourage technology transfers and the appropriation of the know-how necessary for the sustainable establishment of the agricultural and livestock production sectors envisaged by this charter.

The Sahel region will be a priority

Iam Africa intends to deploy particularly in the Sahel region, considered to be one of the epicentres of global warming in the world. The signatories of the charter are indeed convinced that the establishment of an agro-livestock value chain encouraging the deployment of agro-ecological practices, and the creation of dignified and sustainable jobs, will constitute an important response for the adaptation of the populations of the region and the mitigation of the effects of climate change, particularly with regard to migration flows and security challenges. The intensification in the Sahel of projects carried out in the framework of Iam Africa should also contribute to the realisation of the Great Green Wall initiative by 2030.

However, it would be prudent for Iam Africa members to adapt the vision of their charter to local realities. For some experts warn against the popularisation of agro-ecology in developing countries. Its lack of mechanisation, GMOs and the use of synthetic fertilisers is a blow to agricultural production. A recent study by pro-agroecology activists showed that applying these principles to Europe would reduce agricultural productivity by an average of 35%. For Bill Wirtz, a public policy analyst for the Consumer Choice Center, if such a scenario were to occur in Africa, it would be a disaster for a continent where 20 per cent of the population suffers from hunger (2017), according to a UN report.

Originally published here.

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