Food & agriculture news - June 10
Articles posted:
1. Why
bees are important to your wallet
2. Research confirms biochar in soils boosts crop
yields
3. Feeding the
world
Why
bees are important to your wallet
Heather Scoffield, Globe &
Mail
Interest rates around the world are on the rise, in a bid to keep
inflation under control. This week alone, we saw the European Central Bank hike,
and the U.S. Federal Reserve rule out rate cuts. The Bank of Canada has said
interest rates may rise soon too.
It's a sign of things to come, says
Bank of Montreal's investment guru Don Coxe. He sees global interest rates
rising another 200 basis points in the next two years, mainly because of ...
bees.
Bees have been dying in huge numbers in Canada and the United
States since last fall, and the so-called die-back has spread to Europe. That's
sad if you're a bee, but it's also sad if you produce crops that depend on bee
pollination. Mr. Coxe calculates that $15-billion (U.S.) worth of American crops
are at risk. Alfalfa is in particular trouble, and alfalfa is a main component
of hay, which feeds livestock.
Already, dairy is feeling the squeeze from
soaring grain prices, which are swinging upwards not just because of ethanol
production but also because of rising demand from increasingly discerning Asian
palates. And a shortage of hay could prompt dairy and meat prices to
spike.
It all adds up to serious food inflation on the horizon, figures
Mr. Coxe, global portfolio strategist for BMO Nesbitt Burns Inc.
(9 June
2007)
Research
confirms biochar in soils boosts crop yields
Biopact
New
research confirms the huge and revolutionary potential of soils to reduce
greenhouse gases on a large scale, increase agricultural production while at the
same time delivering carbon-negative biofuels based on feedstocks that require
less fertilizer and water. Trials at Australia's New South Wales Department of
Primary IndustriesÂ’ (DPI) Wollongbar Agricultural Institute show that crops
grown on agrichar-improved soils received a major boost. The findings come at a
time when carbon-negative bioenergy is becoming one of the most widely debated
topics in the renewable energy and climate change community.
The
Australian trials of 'agrichar' or 'biochar' have doubled and, in one case,
tripled crop growth when applied at the rate of 10 tonnes per hectare. The
technique of storing agrichar in soils is now seen as a potential saviour to
restore fertility to depleted or nutrient-poor soils (especially in the
tropics), and as a revolutionary technique to mitigate climate change. Moreover,
agrichar storage in soils is a low-tech practice, meaning it can be implemented
on a vast scale in the developing world, relatively quickly.
(1 June
2007)
I usually find Biopact's articles on biofuels to be more boosterism
than critical journalism; however this article seems solid. A scholarly article
on the site is A
Biofuels Manifesto by John Mathews, professor of Strategic Management at
Macquarie University, Sydney.
-BA
Feeding
the world
Kiashu, Green with a Gun ("Permaculture, democracy
and a future for the world")
...The problem is not lack of food, it's
distribution. What we get is that in sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South Africa)
they get 1,500kcal a day, while in USA and Australia, we get 3,500kcal a day.
Taking away 500kcal of ours away would make up the caloric deficit for 350
million hungry Africans - which happens to pretty much the number going hungry.
And it'd still leave us with 3,000kcal daily, 50% more than we need, more than
enough to turn us into Homer Simpsons in a few years of watching TV.
Of
course there's also what we do with the food. About 2/3 the corn, and 1/3 the
wheat, and 1/2 the coarse grains go to feeding livestock, which we milk and skin
and eat. I'll not bother showing the calculations for this one, you can research
it yourself if you care, but it turns out that even with cows munching on a lot
of our corn and converting it very inefficiently into meat protein, there's
still plenty of food to go around. Again, it's distribution. The average
Australian or American eats 108kg of meat a year; the average sub-Saharan
African, 2kg.
Even without our sharing, most of these countries are quite
capable of feeding themselves. But dictatorships and civil wars get in the way.
It doesn't matter if Farmer Mtumbe experiences a real-world genetic scientist's
wet dream and grows a tonne a square metre in seven days, if the local
Qat-Crazed Militia are brassing him up, he won't hang around to harvest it and
it'll rot in his fields, or be stolen by the militia and used to pay for guns,
hookers and booze.
Genetically-modified organisms are not needed, because
boosting food production will not change problems of distribution, and civil
conflicts. Saying that if only there were more genetically-modified foods out
there, we'd have no hungry people, is like saying that if only Bill Gates had
more money, there'd be no more poor people. Genetic modification of food
is a solution in search of a problem, a complete waste of time and
effort.