Marketplace | Jon Miller Jonathan Miller has been executive director of Homelands Productions since 2005. en Bringing the climate fight to the table

There are more than 7 billion people living on the planet now, and it looks like there'll be another 2 billion of us by the middle of the century. In our series, "Food for 9 Billion," we've been asking what it's going to take to keep us all fed. Over the last year, we've looked at how to boost food production without destroying the environment, how to deal with water shortages and climate change, and how to get policies right on things like food prices and nutrition. We've also looked at the demand side -- like how to slow population growth and cut down on waste. Sometimes those questions can feel pretty remote -- especially at a time of year when it seems like all we do is eat. But we're part of the picture, too.

If you look at all the challenges facing food producers around the world, you could argue that the most daunting one is climate change. Higher temperatures, higher sea levels, crazy weather...

Well, it turns out our food system isn’t just challenged by climate change -- it’s also one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas. Most of it comes from the production end -- methane from cattle, nitrous oxide from fertilizer, CO2 from cutting down trees -- but several recent studies have concluded that we will never be truly food-secure unless we change the way we eat. Which is why I went to Baltimore.

There, I met up with Spike Gjerde, the chef of Woodberry Kitchen, which has received national praise for its seasonal, locally sourced food. We were also joined by Roni Neff, the research and policy director at the Center for a Livable Future at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and an expert in the connection between climate change and diet.

I decided to give both of them a challenge: to shop for and prepare a festive, not-so-expensive, not-so-hard-to-make, climate-friendly meal.

Follow our quest through Belvedere Market and Gjerde's new restaurant Artifact by listening to the audio above. And read Neff's steps for a climate-friendly diet here.


Mon, 17 Dec 2012 19:11:13 GMT
Greece's diet crisis: Greeks abandon traditional foods, and an obesity epidemic is the result

The U.N. estimates that more than 10 percent -- some 870 million people -- of the world's population is chronically malnourished. Yet the number of overweight people is even higher -- about 1.4 billion. Over the last 30 years, the global obesity rate has doubled.

To find out why, I traveled to the island of Crete, in southern Greece. I've been reporting around the world for more than 20 years, and I have to admit -- I've had tougher assignments.

I really like Greek food. The fresh vegetables, the olive oil, the herbs, the yogurt, the wine. And lucky me -- since the 1950s, study after study has shown that the Mediterranean diet, and especially the diet of Crete, makes you live longer, protects you from heart disease and cancer, and keeps you from getting too fat. Look at lists of the world's healthiest diets, and the one from Crete often ranks at the top.

Unfortunately, hardly anybody follows it anymore.

I met a 16-year-old I'll call Eleni with her mother in Chania, a port city of about 50,000 in western Crete. Eleni's grandparents lived in the countryside, but she and her parents grew up in town. Her favorite musician is Justin Bieber. Her favorite foods are hamburgers and pizza.

Eleni has struggled with her weight most of her life. She's been up to about 200 pounds. Schoolmates have taunted her. Her mother told me she tries to lose weight, but then she lapses.

"Sometime she eats a lot," she said. "And she eats everything. Whatever you can imagine. But other times she's okay. I don't know. That's the problem."

She thinks her daughter's weight issues have to do with lack of discipline and low self-esteem. But clearly there's something bigger going on. Today Greece has the one of the highest obesity rates in the world. The proportion of overweight children -- about 40 percent -- may be the highest, except for some Pacific islands. The problem's especially bad in Crete, home to what could be the world's healthiest diet. So what gives?

"It has to do with many factors," said Christina Makratzaki, a local dietitian who also battled obesity as a teenager. We met at a waterfront café full of European tourists.

"In the '50s and '60s, the people, they were poor, but they were healthy," she explained. "They were eating very good foods -- the olive oil, the olives, the green leafy vegetables that are our treasure. But they were enforced in a way because of their poverty to use these things."

Then people here got a little money -- from tourism, from agriculture -- and everything changed.

"Now, we have many choices," she said.

Like processed food from the supermarket and fast food on the street. And soda and doughnuts and ice cream. All of it cheaper to buy, easier to prepare -- and, especially for children, harder to resist -- than what grandma used to make. And then there's the marketing -- a relentless bombardment of ads aimed at kids for products like soft drinks and breakfast cereal and processed meat.

Before I left for Crete I spoke with Marion Nestle, a nutritionist at New York University whose books include "What to Eat" and "Why Calories Count." "World trade has opened up a world marketplace in food that's like nothing the world had never seen before," she said. She told me nearly every society is going through what Crete has gone through -- even in places where hunger is still endemic. It's known as "the nutrition transition."

"The nutrition transition happens very quickly," she said. "As soon as people get money, they start buying more meat and more processed foods. Well, that's fine if you don't eat too much of it. The problem is that we as humans, when we're confronted with large amounts of delicious food, we eat large amounts of food."

There is some disagreement among nutrition experts on the exact causes of obesity. Nestle believes it is mainly a question of "calories in and calories out" -- if we eat too much and exercise too little, we're bound to get fat. Others think the types of things we eat matter more than the amount; for instance, simple carbohydrates encourage us to eat more and retain more fat than other foods. (The traditional Cretan diet is high in fat, mostly from olive oil, yet people who adhere to it rarely became obese.) Some recent research suggests that changes in our intestinal bacteria may play an important role.

The word "diet" actually comes from the Greek -- it originally meant "way of life." And clearly obesity has to do with more than just what people eat.

It typically starts with the upper classes, who do less physical work and can afford to buy more fattening food. For a while, being plump is a sign of wealth and health. But then, in most places, there's a shift. People with money start to value thinness. At the same time, farmers move into the cities, women join the work force and have less time to cook, machines replace manual labor, kids watch more TV and packaged food becomes cheaper than fresh food. Pretty soon you have an epidemic, with the worst effects felt among those with lower incomes.

"Health officials and policy makers are realizing what the costs of obesity are likely to be not only to the individuals themselves but to the society," Nestle said. "The question is what to do about it. People are trying lots of different things, and more power to them. But nobody really has an answer."

The dietitian Christina Makratzaki showed me some of the things people are trying in Crete. A burger chain has started serving things like freshly squeezed juice and turkey wraps. The canteen at the local bus station is offering traditional Cretan dishes, bathed in olive oil. The association of school snack bar operators has told its members to cut out the sweets and sodas at the kiosks they rent, and most have complied.

But all those things are voluntary. To find out what the government's up to, Makratzaki and I dropped in on the mayor of Chania, Emmanouil Skoulakis. He is a doctor who served several terms as Greece's deputy minister of health.

It had been a rough week. On the day we met, the city's workers were on strike. The day before that it was the teachers. Skoulakis said the obesity crisis was of great personal interest to him -- that was why he was willing to see me.

He told me the city sponsors exercise programs and a local food festival, where people could talk with chefs and sample traditional cuisine. Last spring, it helped organize visits by 14 dietitians to some of the schools. But money is tight. Beyond rallying volunteers, he said, there's not much the government can do.

That's especially true now, with Greece in crisis. Unemployment is 25 percent and people are marching in the streets. I asked everyone I met if they thought the economic troubles may have a silver lining, sending people back to the old ways, eating fruits and vegetables and dessert just on Sundays. They all shook their heads. With junk food so much cheaper than fresh food, they say, the lighter people's wallets, the heavier they'll get.


Mon, 29 Oct 2012 18:25:34 GMT
Facing water shortages, Indian farmers dig in

Kai Ryssdal: There are, plus or minus, 7 billion people now living on this planet. By the middle of the century, the United Nations tells us it's gonna to be 9 billion. Among the many, many questions that raises is how we're gonna feed them all. The answer is complicated -- a mix of politics, culture, science, and traditions all affecting the global food supply.

Here's part of the science. The average person drinks a couple of quarts of water every day, but it takes more than a thousand times that to produce a day's worth of food. That's a problem everywhere, but especially in India, where scientists say nearly a third of that country's underground aquifers are already in critical condition and worry that the country is headed for a full-blown water crisis.

Today on our series "Food for 9 Billion," Jon Miller went to India to meet a man who's trying to do something about it.

Jon Miller: Rajendra Singh lives in a patch of forest hours from anywhere in the dry hills of eastern Rajasthan. It's dark when I get there. We eat dinner on the ground by an open fire, then he leads me to his office, lights a candle, settles on a mattress and tells me how he came to be famous as the "water man."

Rajendra Singh: When I came here I don't know about the water management, I don't know the water engineering. My background is in the medical science.

This was the 1980s, and Singh had recently finished a degree in traditional Indian medicine. Inspired by Gandhi, he decided to move to the poorest, driest, most godforsaken place in his area and build a health clinic and a school.

Singh: After seven month, one old man told me, Rajendra, we not need medicine and education. We need water. Without water we can't survive.

But Singh knew nothing about water. So he asked the old man what he should do. And the old man told him he should do what folks here used to do -- build a little dam to catch the rainwater that comes during the short, but intense annual monsoon.

Singh: So I start digging!

And kept digging -- for four years.

Singh: Some day 6 hours, some day 8 hours, some day 12 hours.

The water shortage back then was a sneak preview of the crisis India is facing today. For decades, the government had encouraged individual farmers to dig wells to tap into the groundwater. More than 20 million did. Food production went way up and the water level went way down. In dry places like this, it wasn't long before farmers couldn't reach it. Villages emptied out. The social fabric started to fray.

Singh: When I came here, just old women and old man and some child living here. Because no water.

Not that it never rained. It just all came at once, and most of it ran off. Rajendra Singh finally finished digging his pond just in time for the monsoon.

Singh: And my structure full with water.

Not only did the pond fill up, but the wells nearby started to fill. The dam wasn't just storing the water on the surface; it was sending it back into the ground, recharging the aquifer. It was just one pond, about three-and-a-half acres, but it was greening 500 acres around it. People from neighboring villages came to see.

Singh: So the wonderful thing is, in the fifth year, more than 30 villages start the work. The next year, in 200 villages.

Today, he says, more than 1,200 villages have built more than 10,000 rainwater harvesting structures over an area larger than the state of Delaware. Seven rivers that were dry most of the year are now flowing year-round. Farmers are back, there's plenty of food, and Rajendra Singh is the best-known figure in what's become a national grassroots rainwater harvesting movement.

Sound of gate

Singh: Come.

The next morning, Singh shows me around the rustic campus he's built as a sort of water education center. Peacocks and monkeys live in a forest that didn't used to be here. Singh is in his early 50s, with a broad face and a mostly-white beard. When he's excited, which is a lot, you can see the whites all around the irises of his eyes.

Singh: Yes, it is the completely arid area, no grasses. No tree! No moisture! But now, beautiful tree come up! Beautiful grasses coming up! Very healthy soil. And we are also healthy!

I can see the changes when I head out with Singh to look at projects. The valleys are green with fields of mustard in yellow flower. Villages are full of kids -- both human and goat. Around noon we stop at a stone and concrete dam almost 150 yards long, built by villagers with little outside help.

Singh: This work made by the community effort! No grant from the government. No grant from the World Bank or UN. Nothing!

Singh says rainwater harvesting is only part of the reason this area is back from the brink. He's also fought to keep out water-guzzling industries, like breweries and mines. He's convinced villagers to plant trees on the hillsides, and to change the way they manage their crops -- in some cases burying pots with holes in them to deliver water to plants drip by drip.

Singh: Water harvesting is not the solution, but water conservation and community-driven, decentralized water management is the solution for my country.

All of which makes perfect sense to Sanjay Pahuja, a water expert with the World Bank. He says rainwater harvesting has been great, especially for raising awareness. But the more urgent work is on reducing demand.

Sanjay Pahuja: You have a bucket with a big hole in it. You shouldn't be going around, running around the landscape trying to find more water to keep that bucket full. You fix the leak in the bucket.


Pahuja: If we look at the gap between supply and demand in 2050, 80 percent of that gap can be closed purely by these improvements -- which are going to increase water efficiency on the farms, without doing anything else.

For Pahuja, the biggest challenge is scaling up. Which doesn't necessarily mean thinking big. He says conditions can be dramatically different from place to place, so the key is to let communities take charge. But that takes coordination. With more than 600,000 villages, you can't count on charismatic personalities like Rajendra Singh to pop up wherever you need them.

Singh now spends most of his time trying to influence India's water policies. He says there has been progress; official attitudes are starting to change. In the meantime, work continues back home. Late in the day we walk a couple of miles up a dry valley, to the mouth of a steep box canyon. About a dozen men and women are clawing at the earth with picks, carrying metal bowls full of rocks on their heads, dumping the rocks on a pile.

The ground looks hopelessly parched, but a man named Harshaye, age 65, says they'll be farming here next year. And they'll have drinking water, and birds, and they'll build a temple so they can worship by the waterside. Singh beams with approval.

Singh: So this is the change. When I start, that time no hope, my dear. But now, not only hope -- confidence.

Rajendra Singh has learned a lot since he arrived here 27 years ago -- about water, about geology, about engineering, about politics. He's also learned that when you're facing long odds, confidence can be a very powerful tool.

In Rajasthan, India, I'm Jon Miller for Marketplace.


Mon, 07 May 2012 05:00:00 GMT
The future of food in a warming world

Kai Ryssdal: There are, the United Nations tells us, 7 billion people now living on this planet. By the middle of the century it's going to be 9 billion. Among the many, many questions that raises is how're we gonna feed them all. The answer is complicated. It's a mix of politics, cultures, science, and traditions that all affect the global food supply.

Today for our series, Food for 9 Billion, Jon Miller takes us to Bangladesh where climate change is threatening the very delicate balance between bumper crops and disaster.

Jon Miller: In case you hadn't heard, Bangladesh is one of the world's great food success stories. In the 1970s, famine killed more than a million people. But since then the country has made huge strides. It's still extremely poor. But incomes are up, malnutrition is down, and the population growth rate is about half what it was a generation ago. And it produces enough rice -- the staple food -- to feed just about everybody. Which is no small feat, since it's got half the population of the United States crammed into a space the size of Iowa. The question now is whether climate change will sweep those gains away.

People tell me if I want to see what Bangladesh is up against, I should head down to Gabura Island, in the Bay of Bengal. So I hire a car and ride for hours on narrow tree-lined roads through a world that's half land and half water -- with rice paddies and fish ponds and just plain pond ponds.

I stop at a concrete pier, step into a wooden boat, and chug about 15 minutes across a gray channel. On the island I find a motorcycle taxi, climb onto the back, and bump along on a built-up track through what used to be shimmering rice fields, but now is a wasteland of salt flats and mud.

That's where I find Mohammad Sekendar Ali, a small man with a thin white beard, standing in what's left of his rice paddy, hacking at the bank with a short-handled hoe. He cuts a wedge of earth and lifts it into a bowl he's fashioned out of a rice sack and sticks. When the bowl is full, his son, Salauddin, hoists it onto his head, walks about 30 yards to a tiny house and dumps the mud outside the door. Then he comes back for another load.

This is one way to prepare for climate change -- you build an earthen platform to raise your house a few feet off the ground. That way the next time a cyclone comes and the sea rises and breaks the embankments and floods your land with salt water, you might not lose everything you own. I ask Sekendar if he figures his family will be safe here now.

Mohammad Sekendar Ali speaks in Bengali

That, he says, depends on god. But also on some basic engineering. The trick is not to raise the house too high, because then the next storm will just blow it over.

So pick your poison: wind or flood. That's the sort of choice people are having to make in Bangladesh these days. Because almost everything that climate change is expected to bring is already here. Stronger and more frequent storms. Erratic rainfall. Salty soils that make it impossible to grow crops.

And the scariest thing is looming on the horizon. If the sea level rises as much as many scientists expect it to -- about three feet over the next 90 years -- one-sixth of Bangladesh could go under water, and 15 million people will have to leave. Most of them will be farmers. They won't be producing food, and they'll need to eat.

Minister Hasan Mahmud: Food security is the biggest challenge for us, ensuring food security for the people. There is tremendous, tremendous threat posed by climate change.

That's Hasan Mahmud, a former environmental activist who's now the country's environment minister. I'm lucky to catch him in his office in Dhaka. He's been traveling the world raising the alarm -- and trying to raise money.

Mahmud: Global community has been talking a lot. But delivery is very little.

Bangladesh has a detailed plan for how to adapt to climate change. It says it needs $10 billion right away to pay for things like shoring up seawalls and building cyclone shelters. Then billions more every year after that. So far, it's raised a few hundred million.

Mahmud: We have been trying to help ourself. But we cannot tackle the total scenario. And we are not responsible for this scenario. So we need the assistance from the global community.

Over at the U.S. embassy, David Yanggen of the U.S. Agency for International Development says the United States has boosted aid for Bangladesh significantly -- although not as much as the government here would like. Some of it's for straight-up disaster preparedness. But a lot of it's to help farmers cope with the changing climate, like supporting research into rice varieties that can tolerate flooding or salt.

David Yanggen: The other thing that we're really trying to do here is diversify away from an agricultural economy so dependent on rice. So we're very much trying to promote fish farming as well as horticulture. The more we can diversify, the more they will be resilient to these type of climatic shocks.

John Duxbury: I think in many ways Bangladesh is a laboratory for climate change.

John Duxbury is an agriculture specialist at Cornell who's been working in Bangladesh since the 1990s.

Duxbury: If we can succeed in Bangladesh we can succeed in many other parts of the world in addressing climate change for agriculture.

Duxbury says a good place to start is by getting more out of what's already there. For instance, his research group found that just adding lime to soils in northern Bangladesh -- where most of the country's food comes from -- can increase crop yields by more than a third.

Duxbury: There's many techniques, some of which are fairly simple, which we can currently apply to increasing food production. Liming is one, shifting to crops that use less water. The environment is one that can be highly productive for agriculture.

Of course that environment is changing. So people have started planting vegetable gardens on rafts that float when there's a flood. Others are converting rice fields into ponds for fish or shrimp, although that's rarely an option for the poorest farmers.

Duxbury: More than sort of one great big solution, I think there's gonna be lots of little solutions to specific problems in specific places.

No one I talk to can say whether all those little solutions will be enough. In fact most are pretty pessimistic, especially about the rising sea level. The consensus is that the best way to deal with climate change is to keep it from happening in the first place. But Bangladesh has little power to do that. So people here do their best to adapt.

One afternoon I visit a village in the south. Last year a storm surge crashed through an old concrete barrier. The villagers demanded a new one. The government said it would design it if the community did the work. And so here they are, hundreds of them, in bare feet or flip flops, carrying sand bags, helping out on a makeshift pile driver. There may not be much money here. But in the most crowded country in the world, there are plenty of people willing to pitch in.

For Marketplace, I'm Jon Miller in southern Bangladesh.


Mon, 27 Feb 2012 06:00:00 GMT
The scientific challenge



We start at dinner.



Woman: Hello, come in!


Man: Magnifico!

Ryssdal: Wow, what is that?

Woman: It's goat stew. Try some!


Man: Have a hamburger. It's delicious.


















People speaking Spanish: Esta bien. Buenos días. Pasenle!






Fernando Castillo: Que es lo que más le interesería?

Farmer: Primero las plagas.















In Texcoco, Mexico, I'm Jon Miller for Marketplace.


Mon, 14 Nov 2011 06:00:00 GMT