Category: Sustainable Settlement and Agriculture

The Generator is founded on the simple premise that we should leave the world in better condition than we found it. The news items in this category outline the attempts people have made to do this. They are mainly concerned with our food supply and settlement patterns. The impact that the human race has on the planet.

Aussies desert the bush

admin /19 April, 2008

The Land

Australians keep leaving the bush for the city – and rural communities are getting smaller and older, according to a new social atlas.

The Federal Government’s atlas paints a picture of rural communities in population decline.

Young people and families are heading to cities, regional towns and coastal boom towns, looking for jobs and education. The drought has exacerbated the drift, the atlas found.

But it’s not all bad news for the bush – rural people are closing the gap on education, they’re in work and hooked up to the internet, and they’re more likely to own their own home.

South Africa faces food riots

admin /12 April, 2008

Manuel calls for calm, while Vavi warns of looming crisis in South Africa. “Don’t panic,” Finance Minister Trevor Manuel urged yesterday as food riots spread around the world. While global financial leaders have declared an international food emergency, South African labour federation, Cosatu, planned country-wide protests against price collusion and rampant inflation in the country’s Continue Reading →

Europe’s small farms disappear

admin /5 April, 2008

Rafal Klimkiewicz for the IHT STRYSZOW, Poland: Depending on your point of view, Szczepan Master is either an incorrigible Luddite or a visionary. A small farmer, proud of his pure, high-quality products, he works his land the way Polish farmers have for centuries.

He keeps his livestock in a straw-floored "barn" that is part of his house, entered through a kitchen door. He slaughters his own pigs. His wife milks cows by hand. He rejects genetically modified seeds. Instead of spraying his crops, he turns his fields in winter, preferring a workhorse to a tractor, to let the frost kill off pests residing there.

While traditional farms like his could be dismissed as a nostalgic throwback, they are also increasingly seen as the future – if only they can survive.

Master’s way of farming – his way of life – has been badly threatened in the two years since Poland joined the European Union, a victim of sanitary laws and mandates to encourage efficiency and competition that favor mechanized commercial farms, farmers here say.

Rice prices soar as food shortages bite

admin /5 April, 2008

By Javier Blas in Nairobi and Roel Landingin in Manila – Financial Times

Rice prices rose more than 10 per cent on Friday to a fresh all-time high as African countries joined south-east Asian importers in the race to head off social unrest by securing supplies from the handful of exporters still selling the grain in the international market.

The rise in prices – 50 per cent in two weeks – threatens upheaval and has resulted in riots and soldiers overseeing supplies in some emerging countries, where the grain is a staple food for about 3bn people.

The increase also risks stoking further inflation in emerging countries, which have been suffering the impact of record oil prices and the rise in price of other agricultural commodities – including wheat, maize and vegetable oil – in the last year.

Insects on the menu as food costsoar

admin /5 April, 2008

Janet Raloff – Science News

BETTER THAN BEEF? This smorgasbord offers ant pupae and yellow bamboo caterpillars around a pile of ordinary scrambled eggs. Meyer-Rochow photographed this platter of appetizers during his foreign travels. He and other researchers have shown such bugs to be nutritious. Many researchers argue that their harvesting can also be better for the environment than is the production of conventional meat animals.
Meyer-Rochow

"Can Meat and Fish Consumption Be Sustainable?" That’s the provocative title of a press release just sent to us by the Worldwatch Institute, a small but venerable think tank that focuses on natural resource issues.

It’s also the theme of a chapter in Worldwatch’s 2008 State of the World report, its 25th annual book-length analysis of resource trends and economics. Here, its analysts take on the substantial—and often hidden—costs of producing animal protein to satisfy human hunger.

In 2006, "farmers produced an estimated 276 million tons of chicken, pork, beef, and other meat—four times as much as in 1961," Worldwatch has just reported. As for fish, some 140 million tons were hauled in globally during 2005, the most recent year for which data are available. "That was eight times as much as in 1950," note Brian Halweil and Danielle Nierenberg, the chapter’s authors.

Part of the growth in production reflects a growing demand, fueled by world population and increasing wealth that allows increased consumption of animal protein, even within formerly impoverished nations. For meat, it has doubled over the past 45 years; fish consumption quadrupled over a 55-year span.

Food prices soar 400% in Africa

admin /5 April, 2008

Bosire Bogonko / AFP / Getty Images

This photo taken February 12, 2008 shows Sudanese women carrying sacks of relief food in Boro Medina, in south Sudan, some of which is instead sold at local markets for meat and other staples.

By Edmund Sanders and Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times

KHARTOUM, SUDAN — For 15 years, he’s been a "grocer" for Africa’s destitute. But he’s never seen anything like this.

Pascal Joannes’ job is to find grains, beans and oils to fill a food basket for Sudan’s neediest people, from Darfur refugees to schoolchildren in the barren south. Lately Joannes has spent less time shopping and more time poring over commodity price lists, usually in disbelief.

"White beans at $1,160," the white-haired Belgian, 52, cries in despair over the price of a metric ton. "Complete madness! I bought them two years ago in Ethiopia for $235."

Joannes is head of procurement in Sudan for the World Food Program, the United Nations agency in charge of alleviating world hunger.

Meteoric food and fuel prices, a slumping dollar, the demand for biofuels and a string of poor harvests have combined to abruptly multiply WFP’s operating costs, even as needs increase. In other words, if the number of needy people stayed constant, it would take much more money to feed them. But the number of people needing help is surging dramatically. It is what WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran calls "a perfect storm" hitting the world’s hungry.

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