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livingontheland - [Livingontheland] Food & agriculture news - June 10

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  • From: "Douglas Willhite" <drwillhite@earthlink.net>
  • To: "Douglas & Hillary Willhite" <drwillhite@earthlink.net>
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Food & agriculture news - June 10
  • Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2007 09:07:19 -0700

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.



  • [Livingontheland] Food & agriculture news - June 10, Douglas Willhite, 06/10/2007

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