Over on Earth Island Journal, Sena Christian has an excellent, rigorously reported article about the tough economics of urban farming. She focuses on some of the more famous city farms of the Bay Area, where EIJ is based — City Slicker Farms, People’s Grocery — but she also discusses projects like Milwaukee’s Growing Power. And she finishes the piece with a farm I’d never heard of before: Greensgrow, in Philadelphia.

Acknowledging the limits of urban ag, Christian seeks to tease out its potential: particularly its economic upside. Limits are an important place to start on this topic. For all the hype urban farms have gotten of late, no one who works in the field expects cities to become anything close to self-sufficient with regard to food. Any realistic vision of “green cities” sees them as consumption hubs in a larger regional foodshed: dense population centers surrounded not by sprawling suburbs, but rather by diversified farms of a multiplicity of scales.

Urban plots can fill in gaps — putting into action the insight, proven in 19th century France and other places, that small spaces, fortified with lots of rich, composted food waste, can be highly productive. (Probably the greatest U.S. proponent of French-intensive, also called “biointensive,” gardening is John Jeavons.) Specifically, urban farms can turn food production into a source of jobs and fresh food in depressed areas that lack access to both.

Yet the task isn’t easy. Christian’s piece hangs on the following premise:

[U]rban farming’s potential to address the challenges of our food system remains unclear. Although popularity and trendiness can be big boons to business, these urban farms haven’t yet found a way to thrive in the market economy. Most rely heavily on volunteer labor and grant funding. They may be at the forefront of ecological sustainability, but economic sustainability eludes them. And that’s a problem because they are unlikely to fulfill their aspirations and make a meaningful dent in the problem of food insecurity if they are forever running on the treadmill of foundation funding.

These are extremely important points, and Christian does some valuable reporting to bolster them. It’s true, as she points out, that most of our most visible and effective urban farm projects were launched with foundation cash and still rely on it to operate. Probably the most celebrated project, Milwaukee’s Growing Power, has received “at least $1 million in grants” over the past five years, Christian reports.

But there’s some missing context here: all farms struggle mightily to “thrive in a market economy” — and relatively few actually do. The most obvious evidence to back up this point is commodity subsidies. If any farm type should be able to thrive in the free market, it would be the large corn and soy farms of the Midwest. They stand on one of the world’s greatest stores of topsoil; they are highly capitalized, with towering combines tricked out with GPS and other technology that allow a single farmer to cover thousands of acres. They have have access to high-tech seeds and bottomless amounts of fertilizer and pesticides. Agribusiness giants like ADM and Cargill have built up an elaborate infrastructure to buy their goods and ship them around the globe.

Yet over most of the past 20 years, corn and soy prices have hovered under the cost of production, making these farms reliant on billions of dollars in annual subsidies to stay solvent. They’ve turned marginally profitable over the past few years — not due to the magic of the free market, however, but because a government-mandated and -subsidized ethanol program has lifted corn and soy prices. Like urban farms, “economic sustainability eludes them.” They are wards not of the foundations, but rather of the state.

Another way to put the economic struggles of urban farms in a broader context is to look at USDA farm-income data. Time for a bracing dip into the Farm Household Economics and Well-Being page, kept up by the USDA’s Economic Research Service.

The nut from the ERS’s latest findings: In 2010, the average family farm is forecast to receive 10.3 percent of its household income from farm sources, with the rest from earned and unearned off-farm income. Farm income is forecast to average $8,338. The average off-farm income is forecast to be $72,428.

OK, so those extremely depressing numbers aggregate all farms: from hobby operations claiming farm status for a tax break to Midwestern mega-farms. So let’s drill down by farm size. (See chart.) For farms that bring in between $10,000 and $249,000 in gross sales, farm income represents a tiny fraction of farm families’ overall earnings (see green sliver in middle bar). This category encompasses the non-hobby, small- and mid-sized farms that supply the bulk of produce at farmers markets. After farm expenses, these farm families bring home about $60,000 in annual income, a very small slice of which comes from farm profits. These farms, too, are subsidized — not by the government, but rather by the off-farm income of farmers and their spouses.

My point is that teasing a living from the earth is extremely difficult. People make it work for all manner of reasons; maximizing personal income is rarely one of them. There’s a passage in Richard Manning’s 2004 book, Against the Grain, that puts it well:

A farm scholar once asked an agribusiness executive when his corporation would simply take over the farms. The exec said that it would be dumb for the corporation to do so, in that it is not free to exploit its employees to the degree that farmers are willing to exploit themselves.

On a happier note, farms produce more than food for consumers and money for farmers. To employ a phrase from economics, they are multifunctional: they produce food, yes, but also environmental goods like healthy soil (or damages like depleted soil and polluted waterways); open, pretty spaces for the public (or public nuisances, as in the case of factory-scale animal farms). The problem is that they only get paid for the food — and not nearly enough, many people now agree.

The farms profiled by Christian provide significant positive goods for which the market doesn’t compensate them: interesting, learning-oriented jobs for teens who would otherwise be consigned to the fast-food or narcotics trades; high-quality produce in low-income neighborhoods with limited food access; open public spaces in neighborhoods that lack parks; community organizing opportunities; a mechanism through which food expenditures can circulate within communities, building wealth; and more.

It makes sense that foundations are filling a void that markets can’t. And once urban farms have their farming systems down and sufficient infrastructure in place, I suspect many of them will some day be profitable, if not exactly lucrative. Christian reports that Philly’s Greensgrow now operates in the black, after years of foundation support. I suspect that Milwaukee’s highly productive Growing Power, if it dropped its educational efforts and just marketed food, could too.

But if we wait for the magic of the market to solve inner-city food problems, I fear we’ll be left hungry for change.

Illustration: EJP

via Grist

I think urban farming is one of the most hopeful developments to come down the street in a long time. First of all, it encourages the practical economic advantages and benefits of raising and consuming food locally. But its importance goes beyond that for me. I am sometimes asked why I spend my time writing about farming and gardening when, it is suggested, there are more important topics to which to apply my talents. That, in one sentence, indicates one of the most troublesome cultural problems that modern society faces today: the notion that food-getting is not an important enough subject to merit the close attention of all of us.

First of all, if you let big food business rule the roost in agriculture, you are going to get just what you pay taxes for: more big food business. For example, most people don’t even know that they are eating potatoes that have been genetically modified to kill potato bugs. If sometimes you get a notion that potatoes don’t taste as good as they used to, you just might be right. The potato bugs would surely agree with you.

But there’s something else that I think is important in this regard. The fact that our country has become divided into so-called red and blue states is an outcome directly traceable to the urban-rural division of our society. This is something of a simplification, but food producers and their social allies tend to vote red and food consumers and their social allies tend to vote blue. The division is thought to be between conservative and liberal philosophies, but it much more reflects the difference between rural and urban values. (There are plenty of urban conservatives and rural liberals.) This division is hopefully coming to an end but has a long way to go yet. We are doing a fairly good job of bringing the city to the countryside but a very poor job of bringing the country to the city-side. Both sides need each others’ viewpoints for good government and social interaction. A good way that we can heal the friction is to bring farming to the city. There is nothing that will cure an overly zealous wildlife lover quicker than to make a farmer or gardener out of her. On the other hand, there is nothing that will change the overly-isolationist view of life cherished by rural people quicker than bringing them into close contact with city life. The rural dweller may think that all those rules that cities make are silly, — until he is surrounded by suburbs.

It has become common to say that food is everybody’s business. The only way I know to become convinced of that fact is to grow some food yourself or at least live right next to someone who does. Otherwise it is so easy, especially if you have plenty of money, to demand totally “organic” food: no pesticides, no hormones, no antibiotics, no chemical fertilizers, no manure, no nothing except pure undiluted water and air and leaf compost touched only by the wings of angelic organic growers. Try to grow some of that angelicly pure food yourself and you will quickly realize that whatever you get paid for it, it ain’t enough.

Try to raise livestock and chickens as lovingly as you would raise a child as so many non-husbandmen think we should. Then have a ram plant its horns or head into your rear end, dislocating a disc or two in your back. Rams and bulls and roosters are very effective educators of new farmers who think our time-honored rules of husbandry are too cruel. Go ahead. Don’t dock your lambs. You might get lucky. You might even be on the trail to a better practice. But after you have scraped the maggots out of the lamb’s hide and then watch it die anyway, come talk to me.

I like to tell the story of an editor friend of mine who worked on my books at Rodale Press back in the days when we were first trying to champion environmental ways of farming. I told her once that I had just that morning shot a groundhog that was ruining my garden. She was horrified. She could not believe that someone who appeared very civilized (in those days I could appear very civilized when I needed to) would do such a beastly thing. A couple years later, she succumbed to her own desire to farm environmentally. She and her husband bought a place in the country and began garden farming in earnest. About a year later, I met her again at a conference. She came up to me and said she wanted to apologize for the callous way she had treated me when I said I had killed a groundhog. She explained, after swearing me to secrecy:

“Last week I finally cornered the groundhog that was tearing up my plantings. It was in the tool shed. I killed it with a shovel, the only weapon handy.”

Illustration: Tonyç

via OrganicToBe

To live in the modern person is to be a purchaser of things. We all shop.

Many of us are paying more attention to the quality and impact of the things we buy. More and more of us are questioning how much we shop and whether we need so much stuff in the first place. But in the last few years, there’s a been a quiet revolution emerging in where and how we shop as well.

Right now, many of us in the developed world shop by driving to large chain stores — this is especially true in North America, but has become common elsewhere too. The problem is, this way of shopping adds an enormous ecological burden to all the good we buy: not only do we burn gas getting to the store and back, but the building and operation of that store and its parking lot have a huge impact; the supply chain that keeps huge stores stocked with masses of various kinds of goods adds more impacts; while the packaging and sales presentation of the goods we buy tops it all off with more energy and materials waste. From the lighting to the loading docks, the freezer cases to the shopping carts, conventional retail is unsustainable.

Retail today has other costs as well. Big chain stores are not generally known for their excellent labor practices, meaning that part of the savings we get by shopping in them comes from the mistreatment of the people who serve us while we’re there. The kinds of volumes that it takes to stock big box chain stores means that these stores will only buy things in huge orders, often from the lowest-cost big provider, which often means supporting sweat shop work conditions, factory farmed food or toxic knock-off products. Furthermore, because the backstories of the objects they sell is often so atrocious, big chain stores are often at the forefront of fighting transparency and labeling laws (Walmart’s latest effort may or may not be an exception to the trend).

Not all chains are as bad as this, of course, and certain leaders, like Marks and Spenser, have shown that even giant retail corporations can take seriously their ethical obligations and offer better products, with clearly labeled impacts, in more energy-efficient stores. But there are real limits to how much the model of big box, auto-dependent chain stores can be improved.

A better model is emerging. Innovative companies that are changing not only their stores themselves, but how the whole experience of shopping works and what it means. Think of it as bright green retail.

What are the main components of this better way of shopping?

*Webfronts: having stores which work as the physical showroom for a virtual store, which let you try clothes on, try tools out, and so on, and then order the thing online for later delivery, saving money and facilitating smaller storefronts, minimal stock costs and car-free shopping.

*Flexible spaces: sharing under-utilized spaces between multiple businesses, for instance, having two restaurants share one space by offering meals at different times of the day, which cuts down on their costs and maximizes the use of the facility, lowering its ecological impact.

*Microcommerce: direct purchases from a producer (whether at a farmer’s market or an online service like the craft site Etsy) means more of your money goes to supporting that producer, rather than middlemen and brokers. Increasingly, there are even stores and markets designed to mix the webfront model with microcommerce, offering sample products from small-scale producers, like São Paulo’s Endossa.

*Backstories and display transparency: backstory management has become a big trend, provoking leading companies to explore new ways to not only try to track everything that went into their products but where and how they were made. Increasingly, these backstories are being built into the brand identity of the product itself, and detailed information about their origins and performance is being made available online (sometimes without a company’s permission). When companies actively engage in transparency, though, they also gain another benefit: they can offer their customers participatory retail experiences, allowing them to pick the precise origins and characteristics of the products they will by, down to the farmer that grew their coffee, or the worker who assembled their laptop.

*Delivery: the shipment of good from producer to store, and store to customer has been undergoing a rapid shift, with a move toward low-impact shipping and home delivery from centralized locations, both of which save enormous amounts of energy. Even bigger savings are to be had through dematerialized delivery (Netflix streaming a movie to your TV instead of you picking up a DVD at the video store) and decentralized manufacturing (having a neighborhood fabber where you can go to pick up a printed-out version of the product you’ve ordered online).

*Dropshops and reverse supply chains: as producer responsibility and zero waste laws become more common, “reverse” supply chains — systems for taking back products, breaking them down, recycling and/or salvaging their parts and then getting them to the appropriate manufacturer for reuse — become needed parts of the commercial system. Some leading thinkers have begun to imagine that returning used products may become a major part of the shopping experience, that special stores may even emerge to facilitate consumer returns (I like to think of them as “drop shops”) by offering a cafe setting, public information on the future fate of the returns dropped off in that store, and affirmation of the consumer’s effort. This would make a chore more pleasurable while building further brand loyalty in shoppers who can look forward to enjoying returning a product almost as much as they enjoyed buying it. Perhaps they’ll even shop for the replacement while they’re there.

No single one of these innovations will suddenly reverse the massive damage mega-scale retail is doing to the planet (and our communities), but taken together, they offer the outline of something pretty exciting: a smarter way of connecting to better stuff, with a smaller impact on the planet.

Illustration: Darwinbell

via World Changing

Diplomatic Standards is an attempt at organizing the chaos of the current organic industry on a global scale and openly. We are an active community that believes that you should understand the importance of having an unclouded source of sustenance. You and I, together with anyone that believes in the quality of the food they eat, now have the opportunity to ensure that outcome.

We would like to issue a call out to anyone and any organization to come and actively participate and collaboratively work to implement a new global standard and enforcement apparatus that can ensure safety and compliance. Diplomatic Standard is a direct response to a current global organic industry that is full of ambiguity, fraud, turmoil and that maintains a closed system.

Where Diplomatic Standards fits

It is of no secret that current national standards were created as deliberate pure marketing efforts to expose the organic concept to consumers. Pressured by the major firms in the agricultural industry, many governments had since setup numerous apparatus towards the effort of promoting organic goods to farmers and consumers alike. It was also within the judgment of the consumer that these governmental frameworks would protect, enforce and uphold the true idea behind the term organic as it was understood and believed to be.

Regrettably, during the course of this remarkable growth of the industry globally, the organic image has unnecessarily immensely deteriorate and has prompted a need for a new approach. The idea of Diplomatic Standards is to use current technology to form a global, bottom-up, open standard where all parties can truly collaborate in reaching consensus and whose primary mission is for transparency and decentralization. Diplomatic Standards is positioned to place itself as the third choice within a two system framework that is currently composed of either conventional or organic foods.

Where within any system, the fundamental conflict exists where vendors by nature compete to capture the largest market share possible whereby raising costs vs. the market at large which seeks lower costs and freedom, Diplomatic Standards’ goal is to remove this conflict by empowering the individual with universal access to the standard’s process – made possible through modern technology.

Illustration: Darwinbell

When purchasing fruits and vegetables, I believe, for most, freshness is of priority. However, buyers may not have a keen eye for discerning a particular fruit’s freshness nor even its edibility – considering that vendors do wax-coat their apples, brush and fluff their pears so that they appear to be fresh. Peas and other greens are dipped in dye for a ‘greener’ look – not to mention the practice of having ground meat warped in plastic bags made for that specific purpose of diminishing the grayish look of dated meat. The truth is, trust of vendors is neither necessarily an affordable nor a worthy practice.

This is where the concept of the Fresh Code comes in. Conceived from the folks at Yanko Design, this bar code diminishes gradually based on the freshness of a particular item. It intelligently displays through a graph the freshness level of the item as time passes until it reaches ‘0′ indicating that item should be thrown away.

Beneficial to any supermarkets, another purpose might include lessening all together the vendors effort at managing products saleability through this improved visualization of freshness. I for one would find its implementation very useful, which would include alleviating doubts of my veggie freshness through a similar achievable standardized concept.

If a ‘natural and organic’ supermarket such as Whole Foods sells the same junk as everyone else, then what’s the point?

Not long ago I made one of my periodic forays to Whole Foods, the all-natural-groceries conglomerate. My assignment was to buy a Christmas ham from a pig that had not suffered unduly, and that was relatively free of chemicals and antibiotics.

I was somewhere between the Amy’s organic soups and the own-label cans of vegetables when I came upon an unexpected sight: bottles of Heinz regular ketchup that, like much of the industrial food that comprises the American diet, is sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

As you may know, HFCS is among the laboratory-created synthetic foods targeted for elimination by activists, most notably the journalist Michael Pollan in his influential book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Though scientific opinion differs on whether HFCS is any worse for you than regular sugar, there’s little doubt that its cheap ubiquity – a consequence of misguided government farming subsidies – has contributed significantly to our epidemics of obesity and type-two diabetes.

Thus I considered it a breach of faith that Whole Foods would carry such a product. Shopping there means you’re going to pay more and drive farther than if you simply stocked up at the nearest supermarket. In return, it doesn’t seem too much to ask that you be spared from having to worry about ingredients such as HFCS. So it was with a perverse sense of anticipation that I started reading Nick Paumgarten’s 9,100-word profile of Whole Foods founder and chief executive John Mackey in the current issue of the New Yorker.

As Paumgarten observes, Mackey has stepped in it several times in recent years, engaging in embarrassing (and legally dubious) internet sock puppetry with regard to his acquisition of Wild Oats, a rival chain, and writing a commentary for the Wall Street Journal in opposition to government healthcare reform. The latter enraged his largely liberal customer base, engendering brief calls for a boycott.

What makes the New Yorker article valuable, though, is the way Paumgarten captures Mackey’s “crazy uncle” and “right-wing hippie” personae and places them in the context of his radical libertarianism. In the course of talking (and talking, and talking), Mackey reveals an important contradiction that illustrates why Whole Foods simply isn’t as good as it should be. On the one hand, Mackey, now a vegan, is absolutely committed to healthy food. On the other, his naive belief in individual responsibility informs not just his contempt for government but, in a sense, for his own company as well.

Consider, for instance, Mackey’s much-criticized statement that “We sell a bunch of junk.” In fact, Whole Foods sells meat, which Mackey eschews, as well as nutritionally empty snacks. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Meat, candy and potato chips have been with us for a long time, and, in their unadulterated, pre-industrial incarnations, were considerably less toxic than they are today.

But Mackey’s libertarianism means that the consumer must always beware, even at Whole Foods. As Paumgarten writes of Mackey:

His belief in the power of the individual is such that blame falls on individuals, too. In his view, it tends to be the fault of the unhealthy or fat person that he or she is unhealthy or fat. People just need to eat better….

It matters less to him that our food system, for a dozen reasons, … has been rigged to deliver unhealthy food at artificially low cost to a misguided public. People have the power and the means to choose rice and beans over Big Macs, and when they fail to do so they bring ruin on themselves, and on everyone else.

The trouble with this type of thinking is that, at its end point, it’s our own fault if we buy ketchup loaded with high-fructose corn syrup – even if we got it at Whole Foods. After all, there was a shelf full of Heinz organic ketchup next to the regular variety. If you choose the cheap stuff, what concern is it of Mackey’s? Whole Foods is a store that sells “a bunch of junk”, not a shrine.

Except that Mackey misconceives an important part of his business. At a time when even Walmart is carrying organic foods, the niche Whole Foods ought to fill is that of the trusted guide. If I have to walk the aisles of Whole Foods with the same label-reading skepticism that I bring to supermarket shopping, well, I might as well go to the local supermarket. It carries more natural and organic foods than it used to, it’s closer to our house and it’s a lot cheaper.

Besides, as Paumgarten writes, Mackey’s libertarianism ignores larger social and cultural forces. My wife and I would love to do better than Whole Foods – to buy most of our food from local farmers, and to leave the industrial-food system altogether. We’ve tried. But unless we are willing and able to devote a lot more time and money to the enterprise, the best we can manage is to buy produce from farmers markets during the growing season and milk from a nearby dairy.

For us, a place like Whole Foods should be an important way station between industrial food and something better. Mackey seems to understand that, but his blind exaltation of the individual misses some pretty important caveats.

Individuals live in a social setting, turning over some tasks so that they can specialise in others. I don’t want to perform my own surgery or maintain my own roads. And I don’t want to come home from the grocery store with unhealthy food only to be told it’s my own damn fault.

Especially if I bought it at Whole Foods.

via The Guardian by Dan Kennedy on 12/29/09

Illustration: Lyza

In an unusual yet stimulating proposition, The L.A Times recently covered an interesting tale of Hantz Farms buying abandoned properties in the city of Detroit with the plans of turning these plots into large scale commercial agriculture use.

Officials at Hantz Farms imagine the current trend of local food consumption must continue to grow in order to make this venture a successful investment. The idea has also gathered some support due to the hope that it might help in revitalizing the city which was hit terribly hard by the economic crisis with an almost 50% of the population either unemployed or underemployed.

In addition, aesthetically this would also allow for the redevelopment of the over one-third of the city’s 376,000 either vacant or abandoned parcels while supplying an alternative to the idea of Vertical Farms, which has yet to date neither supportive nor contradictory data for the theory.

However, no endeavour is lack of hurdles – the city must rethink its zoning laws, make plans in case of soil contamination, propertax mundanes and answer the question of who would bare the cost of parcel preperation.

Illustration: cuellar

Oxymoronic as it may sound, I can imagine plans are seriously being drawn by a major cigarette company to introduce a new line of ‘organic’ cigarettes brand in order to partake in the rapidly growing ‘green’ market and capture some ‘green’ conscious smokers.

The Organic Foods Production Act which was passed in 1992, permitted the creation of the current program in the U.S. had been classified by the USDA as a marketing initiative, not a food-safety, nutrition or an agriculture program. As with any marketing effort, the program boosted the organic industry to be $23 billion in 2007 ( €16.2 billion). Currently, the big players in the industry are starting to take notice. With that in mind, they are bringing along with them all their gimmicks and schemes in order to capture one old deity as they maintain their sacrosanct missions: market share.

The effects are already being noticed. In 2008 alone, 98 percent of green-labeled goods were found guilty of greenwashing – a term coined by Jay Westerveld in an 1986 essay attacking the hotel industry’s double standard of towel re-use in promoting green while the practice also saves them heaps of money. As more and more loopholes are discovered in the laughable American organic label and more powerful actors follow the cash; lobbying to attain their desired lax standards and watching the USDA’s list of allowable non-organic ingredients grow to cover new products, consumers find themselves buying and eating the same products found in the conventional aisles.

Under the original organics law, 5 percent of a USDA-certified organic product can consist of non-organic substances, provided they are approved by the National Organic Standards Board. That list has grown from 77 to 245 substances since it was created in 2002. Companies must appeal to the board every five years to keep a substance on the list, explaining why an organic alternative has not been found.

The goal was to shrink the list over time, but only one item has been removed so far. The original law’s mandate for annual pesticide testing was also never implemented — the agency left that optional.

It is even true that pesticides were once allowed to be used by farmers on food that are to be sold as organic when the pesticides in questioned, after a ‘reasonable review’, did not contain any chemicals found in the ban list of the National Organic Program. Now it is just common knowledge for anyone in the industry that pesticide testing is hardly ever carried out.

Deputies of the NOP know and have clearly communicated that their mission is to ‘grow the industry’ as quickly as possible. Easiest, quickest and best possible way one can imagine is to incrementally relax the standard and ‘wash’ the meaning out of what organic is meant to be. Organic cigarettes may just be the beginning.

Update: Apparently there is such a thing as organic cigarettes.

Illustration: Bukutgirl

This question must definitely be rephrased. It is not a matter of whether or not sustainable farms can feed the world, it is rather more of a question of how soon and how can we implement this goal. The notion of choice is a long gone experiment.

Arguments against this issue point to a list of factors that indicates industrial farming as the only way the world can be fed with a substantial growing population – including the listing of massive-scale farming methods as key elements in curbing climate change.

I am very much a proponent of biodiversity and any idea that undermines the Earth’s variation of life forms under a given regional ecosystem is to me unequivocally irrational and just plain uttermost self detrimental. Massive-scale farming as it is done today has proven time and time again to be of dire consequences for the surrounding wild life in any locale.

Thousands of reports and experiments can attest to one how crucial the biodiversity of our planet is to us and to everyone of it’s inhabitants. Today, how industrial farming treats the planet must undergone a complete repair as it is very much so broken. The 2008 World Bank and UN International Assessment on Knowledge, Science and Technology concluded that a fundamental overhaul of the current food and farming system is needed to get us out of both the food and fuel crises. Findings of the report acknowledges that ecological methods should be the aptly choice for the future.

Let us take an anecdotal evidence of industry scale transformation: Mosanto, the leading producer of genetically modified seeds, which sells 90% of the world’s GE seeds, recorded a loss of $ 213 million last quarter. Foreseen results like these in essence has led Mosanto to years ago strategically posed itself desperately as the key to hinder starvation in developing nations with its claim of godlike high yield seeds.

I think we’re cathing on.

Illustration: Chaval Brasil

The idea is simple. Create a platform where one can track where all the materials and parts in a good come from. A product of a research project at MIT labs, it is in essence trying to achieve a paradigm shift in product design, manufacturing and traceability. Sourcemap introduces a new dimension in product procurement and in the supply chain of the materials that a product may compose of.

No more it is nearly simply asking what the overall costs may be in acquiring the materials of a good, it has now become a joint effort in assessing a good’s life-cycle’s sustainability, exposing the external costs and our apparent prolongation of the tragedy of the commons. Transparency and social conscious are here the ultimate aim of Sourcemap, linked with an apparent immeasurable breadth of underlying calculations and open databases; It hopes to “impart environmental literacy, foster collective simulation and build solution paths where no path currently exists.”

Supply chains (as with many other social issues) have numerous metrics for success, especially determined by when and where they are established. Some of the metrics useful to determine whether a supply chain is appropriate are local interest, environmental factors, human rights – none of which can be quantified in absolute terms. When there is no single solution, it is fundamental for designers to provide the tools to initiate discussions about the variables that matter.

We also would like to note that its marketing aspect for all types of endeavours and consumer products are also none but few.