Whose Agriculture Drives Disease?

By Alex Liebman, Ivette Perfecto, and Rob Wallace St Paul, October 5—A recent high-profile paper published in the journal Nature links zoonotic viruses, such as Ebola, HIV, and the SARS virus that causes COVID-19, with the fragmentation and destruction of forests. The authors show that with declining biodiversity, the remaining animals are more prolific disease [...]

A Factory Farm Fungus Among Us

Fungicide and pesticide production at Sapec Crop Protection, Portugal. By Alex Liebman and Rob Wallace St Paul, April 9—Eighty percent of U.S. antibiotics are used to promote livestock and poultry growth and protect the animals from the bacterial consequences of the manure-laden environments in which they are grown. That’s 34 million pounds of antibiotics a [...]

The Crop Beds Are Burning

Eganstown, March 7--I am in mourning. A younger, more optimistic me died last week. Not even 50, she was far too young. As I sat with the governments of the world at UN meetings in Rome, I couldn’t get Midnight Oil’s iconic 1987 song Beds Are Burning out of my head, the line "how can [...]

New Sulfoxaflor Insecticide Harms Bees

Minneapolis, September 15 – Several months ago, the European Union banned the three major neonicotinoid (neonic) insecticides, following years of accumulating and convincing evidence that they harm bees and other organisms. Global research with a European emphasis  and research focused on the U.S. meanwhile show that neonics rarely benefit crops in their most prevalent application [...]

The Power to End Hunger

It has become counterintuitive for people that the issue of hunger is almost never one of an absolute lack of food, whether we’re talking cascading harvest failures, war-induced famine, or workaday poverty. From poor and agriculturally de-developed Yemen suffering amidst a catastrophic U.S.-Saudi war, to India under colonial Britain’s Late Victorian Holocausts, if someone is [...]