Advantages of decay in food system

SOURCE:  Andy Kass (a_kass@yahoo.com)
SUBHEAD: Vietnam's low-tech food delivery takes advantage of decay and fermentation.

By Aaron Vansintjan on 20 February 2017 for Low Tech Magazine -
(http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2017/02/vietnams-low-tech-fermentation-food-system-takes-advantage-of-decay.html)


Image above: A stall selling homemade dưa chua in a Hanoi market. Photo by Aaron Vansintjan From original article.

The food system in the industrialized world is based on mass-production, global distribution, and constant refrigeration. It requires many resources and produces a lot of food waste.

In a tropical climate, everything decays faster. Bread gets soft and mushy, milk spoils, the walls get moldy just months after a layer of fresh paint. Food poisoning is a constant concern. The heat and moisture make for an ideal breeding ground for bacteria and fungi.

In this environment, you’d think people would be wary of any food product that smells funny. But in tropical Vietnam, food can get pretty pungent.

Take mắm tôm, a purplish paste made of fermented pureed shrimp. Cracking open a jar will result in a distinct smell of ‘there’s something wrong here’ with hints of marmite to whelm through the whole room. You have chao, a stinky fermented tofu, which was so rank that the smallest bite shot up my nose and incinerated my taste buds for an hour (‘Clears the palate!’ said the waiter encouragingly).

Consider rượu nếp, which is sticky rice mixed with yeast and left to ferment for several days ‘in a warm place’ — i.e. the counter.

The result is a funky-smelling desert—literally rice left to rot until it turns in to a sweet wine pudding. On the 5th of May of the lunar calendar, Vietnamese people will eat rượu nếp in the morning to celebrate ‘inner parasite killing day’. Bonus: day-drunk by the time you arrive at work.

We shouldn’t forget Vietnam’s world-famous fish sauce — nước mắm — made from diluted fermented fish, a flavour that many people around the world continue to find totally intolerable.

In Vietnam, putrefaction is accepted as a part of life, even encouraged. But fermentation in Vietnam isn’t just an odd quirk in a tropical diet.

To understand why fermentation is so integral to Vietnamese culture, you have to consider how it is embedded within people’s livelihoods, local agricultural systems, food safety practices, and a culture obsessed with gastronomy; where food is seen as a social glue.

And when you bring together all these different puzzle pieces, an enchanting picture emerges: one in which fermentation can be a fundamental component of a sustainable food system.

Unlike many high-tech proposals like ‘smart’ food recycling apps, highly efficient logistics systems, and food packaging innovations, fermentation is both low-tech and democratic—anyone can do it. What’s more, it has low energy inputs, brings people together, is hygienic and healthy, and can reduce food waste.

Rotting Food can be Safe and Healthy

At the entrance of a market in Hanoi, a woman with a dưa chua stand tells us that making ‘sour vegetables’ is easy: you just add salt to some cabbage and let it sit for a couple of days. As we talk, several customers come by, eager to scoop some brine and cabbage into a plastic bag. Worried that we’re discouraging her customers, she shoos us away. She isn’t lacking business.

Is fermentation really so effortless? The short answer is yes. Many recipes will call for two things: water and salt. At just a 1:50 ratio (2%) of salt to food, you can create an environment undesireable for all the bad bacteria and encourage all the good ones. Sauerkraut, kimchi, fish sauce, sriracha, and kosher dill pickles—are all made according to this principle.

Yet other types of fermentation are a bit more complicated. They call for sugar (e.g. wild fermented alcohol like ethiopian honey wine), yeast starters (rượu nếp, most wines and beers), special fungi (tempeh, miso), or some kind of combination of fungi, bacteria, salt, or sugar (kombucha).

Yet others are simpler: to make cooking vinegar, just let that bottle of bad wine sit for a couple of days, and to make sourdough, just mix water and flour and leave it on your counter.

All in all, fermentation is just controlled decay: your most important ingredient is time. This can sound like a bit too much, too fast. Take the woman I met at the entrance of the market. Her dưa chua, while in great demand, looks like wilted cabbage, soppy, floating in murky brine.

Some bubbles are forming on the edges of the plastic container—for the trained eye a sign of an active fermentation process, but for the uninitiated, an alarm bell.

There’s no use beating about the bush. That dưa chua is in fact rotting in a very similar way that a peat swamp is constantly rotting, belching large doses of methane into the world. What’s happening is an anaerobic fermentation—that is, without significant amounts of oxygen.

This absence of oxygen and the high levels of salt creates an environment supportive to several bacteria that also find their home in our own digestive systems.

Those bubbles forming in the container are by-products of these bacteria: CO2 and methane. The bacteria also lower the pH and start breaking down raw food—essentially pre-digesting it for you.

And, once the pH goes down even lower, you’ve created a monster so voracious that no other fungus, bacteria, or parasite with bad intentions will dare to enter its domain. So yes, it’s rotting just like a stinky swamp, and that’s a good thing.


Image above: A woman sells nem chua — raw fermented pork—outside her house. Photo by Aaron Vansintjan From original article.

It’s a good thing especially in a climate like that of Vietnam. Every fermentation is a small victory against the constant war against heat and humidity, which destroys all edibles in its path.

Instead of eating raw cabbage and risking death by a thousand E. Coli, you can eat fermented cabbage and know, for a fact, that it won’t have you hunkering by the toilet bowl any time soon.

Not only that, but eating fermented food has significant health benefits. You might’ve noticed the new fad of ‘pro-biotic’—well all that really means is that the product contains some kind of active bacterial culture that looks like the flora in your own stomach.

That would include, not just Go-gurt, Yoplait, Chobani, and Danone, but also several kinds of cheese, pickles, beer, and just about any other fermented product.

Eat about a tablespoon of any of these at the end of every meal, and you inoculate your stomach with a fresh batch of microbes that help you digest—all the more necessary when we eat antibiotics in our meat and bland diets of white bread and peanut butter, and drink chlorine in most municipal water systems.

Further, products like fish sauce and shrimp paste provide many impoverished Vietnamese with micro-nutrients, B-12 vitamin, proteins, and omega 3 fatty acids—comprising a significant part of people’s nutritional requirements. For a country that still remembers hunger and starvation, this is no small fry.

After several months of studying Hanoi’s food system and the people who make their living off of it, Vân (my Vietnamese collaborator) and I are starting to see some patterns.

A Diverse Food System

In the same market we talk to a vegetable vendor. Real estate in the neighborhood is getting more expensive, rents are going up. She’s having a hard time making ends meet.

On her street many elderly have sold their farmland—which they used to grow vegetables and decorative flowers—and now, unemployed, they spend their time selling home-made fermented vegetables out of their front door.

In the same neighborhood, we meet Tuan, an elderly woman growing vegetables in the banks of a drained pond. She rarely goes to the market—she can grow much of her own food in this little patch. We ask her if she ever ferments her vegetables.

Of course, but she doesn’t sell them—they’re just for herself and her family.

After several months of studying Hanoi’s food system and the people who make their living off of it, Vân (my Vietnamese collaborator) and I are starting to see some patterns.

In Western countries, the food system is shaped a bit like an hourglass: industrial farmers send their food to a supplier, who then engages with a handful of supermarket companies, who then sell to consumers.

In Vietnam, on the other hand, it looks more like an intricate web: wholesale night markets, mobile street vendors, covered markets, food baskets organized by office workers with family connections to farmers, guerilla gardening on vacant land.

Food is grown, sold, and bought all over the place, and supermarkets are just a small (albeit growing) node in the complex latticework. Most people still get food at the market, but many also source their food from family connections.


Image above: From jugs a restaurant offers home brewed rượu men, Vietnamese rice wine. Photo by Aaron Vansintjan From original article.

In Vietnam, many people might have one ‘profession’, but when you ask a bit more questions it’ll turn out that they have half a dozen other jobs for ‘extra income’. There’s a generalized ‘hustle’: everyone is a bit of an entrepreneur.

After talking with Tuan for several hours, we learned that she has, throughout her long life, fished, grown vegetables, corn, and fruit trees, sold rice noodles, bread, ice cream, roses, and silk worms. Now, aged 68, she grows decorative peach trees and grows vegetables when she can.

With an economy just decades shy of a highly regulated communist regime where the only food you could get was through rations, and the memory of famine still fresh in people’s mind, this is entirely understandable: with a finger in every pot, you can just about manage to survive. These two factors, a highly distributed food system and diversified livelihoods, make for a fertile environment for fermentation practices. 

With easy access to wholesale produce, many can turn to small-scale fermentation to compliment their income—or, in the case of Tuan, to spend less on food at the market.

Preserving the Harvest, Bringing People Together

Vietnam hosts both the Red River delta and the Mekong delta—two of the most productive agricultural regions in the world. The heat and the vast water supply allow some areas of Vietnam to have three full growing seasons.

That means three harvests, and that means lots of food at peak times, and sometimes so much that you can’t eat it all. That’s another bonus of fermentation: if your food system is local, you’re bound to stick to seasonal consumption.

But by fermenting your harvest you can eat it slowly, over a long time period. It’s this principle that underlies much of fermentation culture in East Asia.

Take kim chi, a spicy fermented cabbage from Korea. Traditionally, the whole village would come together to chop, soak, salt, and spice the cabbage harvest every year. Then, these mass quantities of salted spicy cabbage were stored in large earthenware pots underground—where cooler temperatures lead to a more stable fermentation process.

As a result, you can have your cabbage all year. If you want a localized food system, you need to be able to store your food for long periods. Fermentation makes that possible.

Fermentation is also social. Fermenting large batches of summer’s bounty typically requires hours of chopping—the more the merrier. And chopping is the perfect time for sharing cooking tips, family news, and the latest gossip. In South Korea, now that kim chi production has been largely industrialized, people try to relive the social aspect of making it through massive kim chi parties in public spaces.

In a country like Vietnam, where a traditional food system still exists for a large part, fermentation remains embedded in social relations. Relatives and neighbors constantly gift each other fermented vegetables, and many dinners end with a batch of someone’s home brewed rice wine—rượu men. Fermentation lends itself well to a gift economy: there is pride in your own creation, but there is also no shame in re-gifting. And because of its low costs, anyone can take part in it.

Gastronomy, Tested with Time

It is a bit disingenuous to caricature Vietnam’s food culture as obsessed with rotting, and suggest that this is largely the result of a tropical climate. Rather, what we’re dealing here is difference in taste: what may seem strange and pungent to one culture is highly appreciated in another.

In fact, one of the greatest impressions I have of Vietnamese culture is its deep appreciation for gastronomy: subtle, complex flavors, considered textures, modest spicing and well-balanced contrasts define Vietnamese cuisine.

Fermentation is a crucial part of this culture: the art of fermentation requires paying attention to how flavours change as food transforms, understanding these chemical shifts and using them to achieve a desired affect.

It’s also clear that Vietnamese gastronomy is popular: it takes place in street food stalls, run by enterprising matriarchs, constantly experimenting with modern products and traditional flavors. It is cheap and, to ensure customer loyalty, it is surprisingly hygienic.

Street vendors rarely have fridges, nor do they have large cooking surfaces, dishwashing machines, or ovens. By and large, they make do with some knives, two bowls to wash fresh vegetables in, a large pot, a frying pan, coals or gas burners and — for products that may go bad during the day — fermentation. Having limited access to capital and consumer electronics, these vendors — most often women — ply their trade in a way that has stood the test of time.

They know the rules of hygiene and food safety, and, because they have to be careful with their money, they know exactly what kinds of food will go bad, and what kinds of food can be preserved.

In doing so, they practice a food culture that has been passed down through generations—to a time before fridges, a global food system powered by container shipping, factory trawlers, and produce delivered to far-off markets by airplane.

While modern technology has provided many benefits for our diets, there are many innovations from the past that have been abandoned as the global food system was transformed by the availability of cheap fuel. One such innovation was the fish sauce industry that flourished during Ancient Roman times.

For Romans, fermenting fish was a crucial aspect of a low-tech and seasonally-bound food system. In fact, it so happens that research now suggests Vietnamese fish sauce may actually have its origins in the Roman variant produced over 2,000 years ago.

Today, however, fermentation doesn’t fit so easily within the global food system. Harold McGee at Lucky Peach tells the story of how canned products were notoriously difficult to transport in the newly industrialized food system of the 19th century.

Apparently, until the 20th century, metal cans would regularly explode, sending shrapnel and preserved tuna flying through the decks of transport ships. This was due to heat-resistant bacteria, which continued fermenting the product long after it was heat-treated.

The solution was to subject the canned product to high temperatures over a long period of time, killing all remaining cultures, in turn changing their flavor. But in the case of fermented food, the problem has not gone away: if you want it to be actively fermenting, transporting it will risk explosions on the high seas. But heating stops the fermentation process, and kills its unique flavor.

It’s for this reason that products like kim chi, kombucha, and sauerkraut often have to be produced locally, despite increasing global demand. In some way, fermentation belies the industrial food system: the fact that it is alive means that it doesn’t quite fit in. You either have to kill it, thereby change it, or it will keep bubbling through the cracks.

A Low-tech Food System is Possible

Fermentation cultures in Vietnam give us a glimpse of what an alternative food system might look like, one that is both decentralized and doesn’t depend on high inputs of fossil fuel energy to preserve food, high waste, and high-tech. Why does this matter? Well, in a world facing climate change, we need a low-impact food system, and fast.

But there are other reasons: with increasing concern over the health side effects of common chemicals such as BPA, found in almost all cans and pasta sauce jars, people are looking to safer kinds of preservation, which aren’t killing them and their families slowly.

And with the rise of the local food and food sovereignty movements, many are realising that we need food systems that support everyone: from small farmers to low-income families.

Because of its low investment costs, fermentation lends itself well to supporting small businesses, allowing them to take advantage of seasonality while practicing a time-tested low-tech method of food preparation. Today, in response to increasing food insecurity, we are hearing increasing calls for a smarter, more efficient food system.

Proposals such as intensive hydroponic and vertical farming, big data-powered logistics systems, smart agriculture technologies, and food waste recycling apps clog the news.

But we already have a low-tech innovation that works very well. Fermentation, because it is accessible to everyone, because of its low energy requirements, and because it fits right in to a more sustainable food system, should not be abandoned in the search for global food security.


Image above: A fish sauce factory in Vietnam. Photo by Mui Ne info & events. From original article.

It’s easy to get the impression that we live in a world of scarcity, where there just isn’t enough food to go around, and food production all around the world is limited by technological backwardness. On the other hand, many of us are more and more concerned with the increasing problem of food waste in Western food systems.

We seem to live in a world of both scarcity and abundance at the same time.

Food fermentation is a strange thing: it inverts what many regard as waste and turns it into a social, living, edible object. As a friend of mine once said, if you have too many grapes, you make wine. If you have too much wine, you throw a party. If you still have too much wine, you make vinegar.

Fermentation turns scarcity and abundance on its head, belying easy categories of what is waste and what is too much.

Sustainability advocates worry a lot about making the ‘supply chain’ more ‘efficient’ — that is, increasing profits margins while making sure all food reaching consumers in a perfectly fresh state.

Instead, we could consider taking advantage of decay. This isn’t hard: you just have to add some salt and water. We’ve done it for thousands of years, and, if we follow the example of food cultures like those in Vietnam, we can do it again.
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Step closer to war with China

SUBHEAD: Furious China summons U.S. Ambassador to slam Obama decision to "Threaten Peace" with warship challenge.

By Tyler Durden on 27 October 2015 for Zero Hedge -
(http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-10-27/furious-china-slams-obama-decision-threaten-peace-warship-challenge)

[IB Publisher's note: It is true that this is an imperial expansion into the South China Sea bounded by Vietnam, the Philippines Malaysia, Brunei and of interest also to Japan. However America's is flexing its "Super Power" muscles against China in that part of the world is a bit of imperial stretch for the USA. We have already made claim to much of the Pacific Ocean with out weapons testing/exercise areas and national ocean "monuments" See (http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2014/10/a-new-colinization-of-pacific.html) and (http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/search/label/Strategic%20Islands). Isn't China entitled to some empire too?]


Image above: USS Lassen in 2001. From (www.navsource.org/archives/05/01082.htm).

Well, the US navy vessel Lassen sailed within 12-nautical miles of Subi Reef and surprisingly, World War III did not break out overnight.

Nine months of tension between Washington and Beijing over the latter’s land reclamation efforts in The South China Sea culminated on Monday with President Obama’s decision to send a guided missile destroyer to China’s man-made military outposts on a “freedom of navigation” exercise. As we put it on Monday evening:

"The ball is now squarely in China's court. The question now is whether Beijing will back down and concede that "sovereignty" somehow means something different with regard to the islands than it does with respect to the mainland or whether Xi will stick to his guns (no pun intended) and take a pot shot at a US destroyer."

In short, some feared that based on recent rhetoric out of Beijing (e.g. the PLA will “stand up and use force”) that China might actually fire upon the US-flagged vessel or at least move to surround it in what might mark the first step on the road to war.

Ultimately, that didn't happen as China apparently decided to take the high road for now and avoid an escalation that might have had far-reaching consequences.


Image above: Map of From (http://globalnation.inquirer.net/125704/ph-govt-makes-impassioned-plea-at-the-hague).

That said, Beijing isn't happy. Here's more from Bloomberg:

China said it will take “all necessary measures” to defend its territory after the U.S. sailed a warship through waters claimed by China in the disputed South China Sea, a move the government in Beijing called a threat to peace and stability in Asia.

“The behavior of the U.S. warship threatened China’s sovereignty and national interest, endangered the safety of the island’s staff and facilities, and harmed the regional peace and stability,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said in a statement today. “The Chinese side expressed its strong discontent and firm opposition.”

The comments came hours after the USS Lassen passed within 12-nautical miles of Subi Reef, an island built by China as a platform to assert its claim to almost 80 percent of one of the world’s busiest waterways. By passing so close to the man-made island, the U.S. is showing it doesn’t recognize that the feature qualifies for a 12-nautical mile territorial zone under international law.

The patrol marks the most direct attempt by the U.S. to challenge China’s territorial claims and comes weeks after President Barack Obama told President Xi Jinping at a Washington summit that the U.S. would enforce freedom of navigation and that China should refrain from militarizing the waterway. 

In a strongly-worded statement, Lu said the USS Lassen had “illegally” entered Chinese waters and that “relevant Chinese departments monitored, shadowed and warned the U.S. ship.” China has “indisputable” sovereignty over the Spratly Islands and surrounding waters, Lu said.

“What the U.S. is doing now will only damage the stability in the South China Sea, and send the wrong message to neighboring nations such as the Philippines and encourage them to take some risky behavior,” said Xu Liping, a professor of Southeast Asian studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government-linked institute.

Image above: Artificial islands, like this one planned to be built by China over Mabini Reef. From (http://www.philstar.com/headlines/2014/06/04/1330967/designs-chinas-planned-base-mabini-reef-surface).

While it's not entirely clear what professor Xu Liping means by "encourage the Philippines to take some risky behavior," it's worth noting that Washington's provocation is in some respects explicity designed to embolden America's regional allies. That is, this isn't going on in Washington's backyard.

This is simply the US responding to calls from its friends in the South Pacific to counter what they view as Chinese aggression by letting Beijing know that Big Brother isn't going to stand for any bullying from the PLA. That gambit appears to have paid off - for the time being.

As for what comes next, Malcolm Davis, an assistant professor in China-Western relations at Bond University on Australia’s Gold Coast tells Bloomberg China could move to set up a no-fly zone:

China may choose to respond without directly challenging U.S. ships with its Navy or coast guard. It could declare an Air Defense Identification Zone over the South China Sea, or speed up the militarization of the area by deploying extra forces, including combat aircraft, to the islands. 

“The ball would then be back in the U.S.’s court,” Davis said. “A Chinese attempt to enforce an ADIZ over the South China Sea would increase tensions with its neighbors, most notably Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia, and they would place increasing pressure on Washington not to back down.”

In other words, China doesn't need to fire on a US destroyer to ratchet up the pressure. Beijing can simply continue to do what it's done up until now; that is, militarize the region and essentially dare the US to take action beyond sailing by and waving.

We suspect we'll see plenty of new satellite images over the coming weeks and months which purport to show the extent to which the PLA is beefing up its defenses in the face of unnecessary (not to mention extremely petty) posturing on Washington's part.


Image above: Detail of map of Marine Monuments and US Military Range Complexes and major bases in the Pacific claimed by the United States of America. by Juan Wilson produced for Koohan Paik. Click to see entire map. From (http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-pacific-pivot.html).


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TPA approved for TPP

SUBHEAD: Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) vote approved by Senate after some hope was raised Tuesday.

By Michael McCauliff on 14 May 2015 for Huffington Post -
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/12/senate-democrats-trade-promotion-authority_n_7267600.html)


Image above: Title of "TPP & TPA"A stock photo of a handshake is much like our economy will be after TPP passes - empty and fake. From (http://www.i2coalition.com/trans-pacific-partnership-and-trade-promotion-authority-reading-list/).

The Senate passed a pair of trade protection measures Thursday, and voted shortly afterward to start debate on the fast-track bill that President Barack Obama needs to secure his massive and controversial free-trade initiatives with Asia and Europe.

One measure, which reauthorizes trade preferences for some African countries, faced little opposition, and passed by a vote of 96 to 1. But the second, a customs and trade enforcement package, was approved more narrowly, with 78 voting in favor and 20 opposed.

The package was opposed by the Obama administration and many Republicans because it contains a measure that would crack down on currency manipulation -- particularly by China, the prime offender, but also by several other members of Obama's proposed sweeping Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement with 11 Pacific Rim nations.

With the currency crackdown passed, lawmakers were willing to let debate start on granting Obama what is known as trade promotion authority, voting 65 to 33 to proceed. TPA would allow the president to "fast-track" passage of the TPP deal and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a similarly massive agreement with Europe.

Opponents of the currency provision say it could spark a new trade war with China, and the administration argues that a number of the Asian trade partners would likely pull out of the broader TPP deal if currency manipulation is addressed.

But in the view of most Democrats, and some Republicans, there should be no new free trade deals if the United States is not going to address the advantages other countries and their businesses get from keeping their currencies artificially low.

"Now is the time to think deeply and comprehensively about this country's trade policy," said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has taken the lead in fighting for the currency provision. "We have lost millions of jobs because of currency manipulation, which makes the imports of China about 33 percent cheaper."

While the White House opposes the measure -- and its future passage in the House of Representatives is far from certain -- Senate Democrats insisted that it be considered before they would debate giving Obama his fast track.

Democrats -- including staunch free-traders like Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden -- united to stall the fast-track bill earlier in the week by extracting a vote on the customs package. The package includes numerous other trade enforcement reforms, including bans on goods made with forced or child labor.

"I can't think of the last time the Senate spoke with such an emphatic voice on a trade issue," said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), the prime architect of the Democrats' mini-revolt. "The simple message [is] we cannot have trade promotion without trade enforcement ... We shouldn't be passing new agreements while doing nothing to enforce existing laws and support American companies dealing with unfair competition."

Wyden, who made the entire push for the trade bills possible by cutting deals with Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), insisted that the customs bill would ensure that the new trade deals are better than the failed pacts of the past.

"The NAFTA playbook, the playbook for trade in the 1990s, is gone, and it is a new day in trade policy," Wyden said before the votes. "The trade promotion act is not the trade policy of the 1990s, is not the North American Free Trade Agreement, and what we're going to do today is essentially starting with the question of how vigorous trade enforcement ought to be at the forefront of America's trade policy in 2015 and beyond."

With passage of the two measures on Thursday, the Senate was set to start debating the TPA bill that had been stalled earlier in the week. It was unclear how long that debate and amendment process would last, but fast-track backers were hoping to get it passed by June.

TPA faces an uncertain future in the House, where nearly all Democrats are opposed, as well as a strong contingent of Republicans.

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No fast track for TPP
SUBHEAD: Senate Democrats, lead by Elizabeth Warren, knock down Obama's trade bill.

By Jennifer Bendery on 12 May 2015 for Huffington Post -
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/12/senate-democrats-trade-promotion-authority_n_7267600.html)


Image above: Senator Elizabeth Warren says President Obama has deceived the American people on the purpose of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. From (https://www.popularresistance.org/desperate-obama-administration-deceives-on-fast-track-tpp/).

Senate Democrats dealt a stinging blow to President Barack Obama Tuesday by blocking legislation that would grant him authority to fast-track international trade deals.

Democrats, including several who favor Obama's trade agenda, banded together to prevent the Senate from considering legislation that grants the president so-called Trade Promotion Authority, which would bar Congress from amending or filibustering trade agreements negotiated by the administration.

Fifty-two senators voted to start debate on the bill, short of the 60 needed to overcome a Democratic filibuster. Forty-five senators voted against the plan.

The fast-track bill is seen as essential to passing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a secretive trade deal the Obama administration is negotiating with 11 other Asian-Pacific countries. Obama's rejection at the hands of his own party follows his bitter public feud with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) over his trade agenda. Republican leaders in the House and Senate support both TPA and TPP.

In the final hours before the vote, even Democrats who support the president’s trade agenda concluded that they could cut a better deal with Republicans by preventing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) from opening debate on the TPA bill. "We're telling everyone, 'Don't be a cheap date,'" said one Democratic aide who spoke anonymously to discuss strategy.

Tuesday's filibuster isn't the first setback for fast track. The TPA bill had been stalled in the Senate Finance Committee for months before Obama and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) cut a deal with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) that offered a handful of concessions in exchange for Democratic votes.

All of those concessions, however, were not attached to the TPA bill itself, but packaged into three other pieces of legislation that cleared the committee during the same hearing in late April.

On Tuesday, McConnell showed some willingness to vote on two of the bills together -- TPA and a bill on Trade Adjustment Assistance, a program that provides job training and financial aid to workers who lose their jobs from international trade.

"We can't debate any of the provisions senators want to consider if they vote to filibuster even getting on this bill," McConnell said.

McConnell also said he would allow votes on the other bills with Democratic support, but moving them as separate bills would give Obama and Republican leaders opportunities to torpedo those provisions without taking down the TPA bill.

Most of the Democratic concessions from the Wyden-Hatch talks are included in a trade enforcement bill. Some of the most important include a ban on imports made with forced labor, which is opposed by some Republicans, and a provision to fight currency manipulation by foreign governments, which is opposed by Obama.

"Our special concern this afternoon is about a lack of commitment on trade enforcement," Wyden said Tuesday. He accused Republicans of "legislative malpractice" for separating the bills with strong Democratic support from the TPA legislation.

"All they have to do is put the enforcement part into this," Sen Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told HuffPost. "And there's a good reason that you want this enforced. You don't want child labor. You don't want people working 24 hours a day. I mean, this has to be part of the agreement. So to leave it out is a concern to us."

Speaking from the Senate floor, however, a visibly irritated Hatch said that separating the bills had been necessary. The currency manipulation provision authored by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) would ultimately undermine TPA, according to Hatch, and needed to be included in a separate bill, which could be dismembered, ignored or vetoed without touching TPA.

"Everybody knew that putting the Schumer amendment on the one bill would not be acceptable in the House and would not be acceptable to the president," Hatch said.

Earlier Tuesday, the White House downplayed the significance of the vote, but wouldn't say whether it supports Democrats' push to bundle the four bills.

"It is not unprecedented, to say the least, for the United States Senate to encounter procedural snafus," White House press secretary Josh Earnest said in his daily briefing. “We're pleased to see Democrats and Republicans both indicating a willingness to work through these procedural challenges."

Fast track authority is not necessarily dead. McConnell has the authority to bring the legislation back after cutting deals with Democrats, but it now faces an uphill battle in the Senate and an even tougher fight in the House, where a substantial bloc of Republicans and the overwhelming majority of Democrats don't back the measure.

McConnell wants the trade deal to pass, but will be able to relish a round of headlines focused on Democratic in-fighting in the short-term. "Maybe he wanted to kill it," Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) said of fast track.

The Democratic blockade of the measure intensifies a long-simmering conflict with the president, who has made securing trade deals a key element of his legacy and his final two years in office.
The president and backers of the effort say it will open more markets for U.S. goods, level the playing field for American manufacturers, and serve as a check on China's global advance.

And they argue the Obama administration has figured out how to solve the problems of the much-maligned North American Free Trade Agreement.

"Most people don't realize that we actually fixed a lot of what was wrong with NAFTA in the course of this," said Sen. Tom Carper (Del.), one of the few Democrats to stick with Obama on the vote. "We need to be negotiating in the present, in the present tense, and not the past."

But many Democrats and some Republicans fear the TPP in particular will facilitate currency manipulation by foreign competitors, erode labor and environmental standards at home and abroad, and shrink domestic jobs for the middle-class. The Obama administration treats the TPP negotiating texts as classified information, making it a crime for his trade critics to detail their concerns in public.

While Carper and Obama emphasize that TPP will include enforceable labor and environmental protections, both labor unions and environmental groups remain steadfastly opposed to the deal, citing lax enforcement of such trade safeguards under Obama's tenure.

Obama's feud with Warren has centered around the TPP's enforcement mechanism, known as Investor-State Dispute Settlement. The process allows foreign corporations to sue a country over laws or regulations that they believe unfairly threaten their investments. The cases are heard before an international tribunal with the power to levy financial penalties against nations.

While Obama has insisted that the process will not jeopardize U.S. standards, Warren and others worry it will curb future rulemaking, and indeed concerns that new rules would violate past trade agreements have become part of congressional debate in recent years.

The Obama administration has been in open war with Warren over this issue, with the president calling some of her concerns "pure speculation," "bunk" and "dishonest." Warren told The Washington Post on Monday she has yet to see a draft "that would do what the president says he has already accomplished."

Currency manipulation has been another major sticking point. In the past, a number of countries, including Japan, Malaysia and Singapore, which are all part of TPP, have kept the value of their currencies artificially low, which costs American jobs by making foreign goods cheaper. Two efforts to combat currency manipulation garnered bipartisan support in the Finance Committee.

The one authored by Brown and Schumer was approved as part of the trade enforcement bill, while another, authored by Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), was defeated.

Schumer predicted trouble for the administration if it didn't promise to protect the bill his amendment was attached to.

"Unless the administration says they won't veto it, they're going to lose a lot of votes on TPA, on the regular trade bill," Schumer told HuffPost earlier this month.

Unlike other Democratic demands, several Republicans support efforts to combat currency manipulation, as do many corporations, particularly in the steel and auto industries. Obama has warned that a poorly written currency provision could hamper the Federal Reserve's ability to conduct monetary policy, but many economists believe it would be simple to craft effective language that would give the Fed plenty of leeway.

The Schumer-Brown bill would require the U.S. Department of Commerce to consider the effects of currency manipulation on trade complaints brought by U.S. companies. Those calculations would be included in international trade cases.

"If you represent a state like mine and you see what's happened in the last 25 years, you have to be very skeptical of arguments that seem to say, 'Just go away, your concerns are unwarranted, we're gonna fix all the problems of the past,'” said Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.). "It's just a basic disagreement."


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Monsanto to re-invade Vietnam

SOURCE: Katherine Muzik PHD (kmuzik@gmail.com)
SUBHEAD: Monsanto, the producer of “Agent Orange” brings GMO agriculture to Vietnam.

By Staff on 14 April 2015 for Global Research News -
(http://www.globalresearch.ca/monsanto-the-producer-of-agent-orange-brings-gmo-agriculture-to-vietnam/5442817)


Image above: An illustration of Monsanto style farming by David Dees.  From (http://transitionvoice.com/2012/08/a-gmo-is-a-gmo-is-a-gmo/).

“A dangerous march away from national sovereignty for Vietnam and its farmers”- Jeffrey Smith

In November last year, Brian Leung, a Southeast Asia-based journalist, observed:


“Vietnam continues to roll out the red carpet for foreign biotech giants, including the infamous Monsanto, to sell the controversial genetically modified (GM) corn varieties in the country. Jeffrey Smith and other critics say that by welcoming Monsanto, Vietnam has been too nice to the main manufacturer of Agent Orange, the toxic defoliant used during the Vietnam War that left a devastating legacy still claiming victims today”.

Just Means, an online publisher of news about corporate social responsibility, sustainability, energy, health, education, technology and innovation, added an update:

"Monsanto sees a large potential in Vietnam as a main market for the company, and plans to increase its investments in the country in the future. Juan Ferreira, vice president of Monsanto said that the country has a combination of good soil, good governance, and appetite for investment, which paves the way for the entry of advanced technologies."

There has been no mention of GMOs by name – but plenty of enabling activity. Monsanto VP Ferreira also said that with advanced technologies, it is possible to develop agriculture sustainably by using the same or less water and nitrogen and achieve greater yields.

The technologies were not named. No reference was made to the Vietnamese government’s 2006 plan (see Leung) to develop GM crops as part of a “major program for the development and application of biotechnology in agriculture and rural development.”

In August 2014, it was announced that cultivation of the country’s first GM crops will be underway by 2015 and 30-50% of farmland covered with genetically modified organisms by 2020. The country’s agriculture ministry approved the imports of four corn varieties engineered for food and animal feed processing: MON 89034 and NK 603, products of DeKalb Vietnam (a subsidiary of U.S. multinational Monsanto), and GA 21 and MIR 162 from the Swiss firm Syngenta.

The Vietnamese environment ministry has to date issued bio-safety certificates for Monsanto’s MON 89034 and NK 603 corn varieties and Syngenta’s GA 21, meaning farmers can start commercially cultivating the crops. The ministry is considering issuing a similar certificate for the other variety, MR 162.

Would Vietnam be throwing away its great advantage as a non-GMO producer?There has been a surge in consumer rejection of GMOs in the U.S., with food companies scrambling to secure non-GMO supplies, according to the New York Times. Last year, China rejected 887,000 tons of U.S. corn because it contained Syngenta’s GM maize MIR 162 – the very same variety that has just been licensed for use in Vietnam.

Could these terraced fields in Mu Cang Chai, in the northeastern region of Vietnam be bull-dozed for agri-business or other forms of maldevelopment?

GMOs in their current state have nothing to offer the cause of feeding the hungry, alleviating poverty, and creating sustainable agriculture, according to theInternational Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development exhaustive analysis of agriculture and sustainability report

The IAASTD report, concludes that the high costs of seeds and chemicals, uncertain yields, and the potential to undermine local food security make biotechnology a poor choice for the developing world.

It is feared that introducing Monsanto’s modified corn and the toxic weed killer Roundup  could have tragic consequences, as did their product Agent Orange.

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