EcoRadio

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.

  • Developed countries ‘ demand for biofuels has been disastrous’

    Developed countries’ demand for biofuels has been ‘disastrous’


    Production of crops such as maize and palm oil fuelling poverty and environmental damage in poor countries, says Christian Aid





    biofuel

    A worker harvests oil-palm fruit in Malaysia. Photograph: EPA/Barbara Walton


    The production of biofuels is fuelling poverty, human rights abuses and damage to the environment, Christian Aid warned today.


    The charity said huge subsidies and targets in developed countries for boosting the production of fuels from plants such as maize and palm oil are exacerbating environmental and social problems in poor nations.


    And rather than being a “silver bullet” to tackle climate change, the carbon emissions of some of the fuels are higher than fossil fuels because of deforestation driven by the need for land for them to grow.


    According to a report, Growing Pains, by Christian Aid, industrial scale production of biofuels is worsening problems such as food price hikes in central America, forced displacement of small farmers for plantations and pollution of local water sources.


    But with 2.4 billion people worldwide currently without secure sources of energy for cooking and heating, Christian Aid believes the renewable fuels do have the potential to help the poor.


     


    The charity highlights schemes such as the growing of jatropha in Mali, where the plant is raised between food crops and the oil from the seeds is used to run village generators which can power appliances such as stoves and lights.


    The report argues that talking about “good” or “bad” biofuels is oversimplifying the situation, and the problem is not with the crop or fuel – but the policies surrounding them.


    Developed countries have poured subsidies into biofuel production – for example in the US where between 9.2 billion dollars and 11 billion dollars went to supporting maize-based ethanol in 2008 – when there are cheaper and more effective ways to cut emissions from transport, the report said.


    The charity said biofuels production needed a “new vision” – a switch from supplying significant quantities of transport fuel for industrial markets to helping poor people have access to clean energy.


    The report’s author Eliot Whittington, climate advocacy specialist for Christian Aid, said: “Vast sums of European and American taxpayers’ money are being used to prop up industries which are fuelling hunger, severe human rights abuses and environmental destruction — and failing to deliver the benefits claimed for them.”


    He said the current approach to biofuels had been “disastrous”.


     


    He added: “Christian Aid believes that the best approach to biofuels is to grow them on a small scale and process them locally to provide energy for people in the surrounding countryside. This can also increase rural people’s incomes and has the potential to actually increase soil fertility and moisture retention, without compromising people’s food security.”

  • Asia facing unprecedented food shortage, UN report says

    Asia facing unprecedented food shortage, UN report says


    Major investment in irrigation systems needed to feed population expected to grow by 1.5 billion over next 40 years


     





    A farmer ploughs his field as UN warns of Asia food crisis

    The UN has said that billions of dollars will be needed to improve irrigation in Asia. Photograph: Stringer/India/Reuters


    Asia faces an unprecedented food crisis and huge social unrest unless hundreds of billions of dollars are invested in better irrigation systems to grow crops for its burgeoning population, according to a UN report published today.


     


    India, China, Pakistan and other large countries avoided famines in the 1970s and 1980s only because they built giant state-sponsored irrigation systems and introduced better seeds and fertilisers. But the extra 1.5 billion people expected to live on the continent by 2050 will double Asia’s demand for food, says the report from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Bank-funded International Water Management Institute (IWMI).


    A combination of very little new land left for cultivation, an increasingly unpredictable climate and water supplies stretched to the limit means the only realistic option to feed people in the future will be better management of existing water supplies, according to the report.


    “There is no new land or water to develop so we have to make more use of what we have. Existing irrigation systems are often 50 to 70 years old. They are leaking and water is evaporating. We urgently need a new generation of irrigation. That is the only way we are going to feed everyone,” said Colin Chartres, who is the director general of IWMI.


    “If we don’t [invest] we will see food crises like the one in 2007 repeated over and again. That was an early warning. If nothing is done, you are going to get an increase in social unrest, migration and a fertile ground for terrorism,” he said.


    Since the demise of communism and the rise of the free market, farmers have increasingly opted to take irrigation into their own hands, mainly using cheap Chinese-made pumps.


    Tens of millions of smallholders have invested in their own pumps so that they can extract water from shallow aquifers whenever they choose. Governments have been unable to regulate this practice, which has led to major exploitation of water resources.


    Water tables in parts of India and China have dropped catastrophically in the last few years. “It’s a trend that will become more common. The consequence will be more farmer suicides, hardship and collapsing enterprises,” said Chartres.


    The food crisis is compounded by millions of wealthier people in developing countries turning away from traditional rice and cereal-based diets to western dairy and meat-based foods that require more water, says the report.


    “The agriculture of tomorrow will need a lot more water. Given that one litre of water is used to produce one calorie of food, the world will need up to 6,000 cubic kilometres of additional water every year to feed another 2.5 billion people 2,500 calories per day.


    “This is almost twice what we use today and is not sustainable,” said Chartres.


    The report urges countries to repair and modernise irrigation systems and use better drip-fed farming. The UN expects the world to have an extra 2.5 billion mouths to feed within 40 years, most of them in developing countries. Africa’s population could double, Asia’s could grow by nearly 30% and Pakistan’s by 85%.

  • Food prices to surge under emissions trading scheme


    Food prices to surge under emissions trading scheme








     




    Blair Speedy and Glenn Milne | August 17, 2009


    Article from:  The Australian


    SHOPPERS face a jump in grocery prices of up to 7 per cent under Labor’s scheme to reduce carbon emissions, prompting calls for the Rudd government to come up with a compensation package to help low- and middle-income families.


    Big retailers have warned the government that the proposed emissions trading scheme would add between 4 and 7 per cent to shopping bills in what would be a de facto tax on food.


    Although the government has revealed plans to compensate households for increased energy prices when the ETS is expected to be introduced in 2011, it has yet to announce how it will cover the rise in grocery prices.


    Reserve Bank assistant governor Philip Lowe last week told the House of Representatives economics committee that the ETS would add 0.4 percentage points to the Consumer Price Index measure of inflation in its first year of operation.


    However, the Food and Grocery Council believes the increase in grocery prices would be much higher, about 5 per cent.


     


    As food and grocery shopping is estimated to take up to 20 per cent of the weekly household budget, the council’s chief executive, Kate Carnell, says the price rise will amount to a GST on food – the area the Howard government exempted from the tax after a prolonged campaign by Labor and the Australian Democrats.


    Large retailers are understood to have also done modelling showing similar results, including a rise in food prices of as much as 7 per cent should Australia adopt the 25 per cent target on emissions reductions by 2020.


    Large retailers, while privately concerned, are believed to be hesitant to voice their objections to the ETS for fear of tarnishing their reputation among environmentally conscious consumers.


    Australian Retailers Association executive director Russell Zimmerman said the ETS would lead to a sharp increase in grocery shelf prices as costs increased at every stage of the production and distribution process.


    “It’s going to be a high cost to the consumer – the food manufacturer gets an ETS charge, then there’s delivery, and the retailers use refrigeration and lighting, and the cost of that is all going to be handed on,” Mr Zimmerman said. “Retail is a very competitive business. There’s not a lot of margin in grocery retailing, so these costs can’t be absorbed.”


    The ARA has set out its concerns in a submission to the government’s green paper on carbon reduction but Mr Zimmerman said he had little hope the government would shield consumers from higher costs.


    “The government has said it will cost consumers $1 a day, but that fails to accurately calculate the retail price impact on consumers, and there’s no real handle on what it’s going to cost consumers in the end,” he said.


    Retailers’ anxiety is matched in the US, amid growing fears about the impact of carbon trading plans. US agriculture companies including grain giant Cargill, meat processor Tyson Foods and food-maker General Mills, have expressed concern they will bear an unfair proportion of the costs resulting from carbon-reduction legislation and warned this would lead to higher food prices.


    Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce has warned that the ETS, once in place, would raise the retail price of a leg of lamb to almost $100.


    The revelations on food prices come as a split emerges in the business community over the ETS. The peak group, the Business Council of Australia, is divided over its position on the plan to reduce carbon emissions.


    The BCA is torn, with finance sector elements backing the ETS and the mining industry vehemently opposed. The split has led to the circulation of an anti-ETS paper from within the BCA that concludes 67 of its 109 members will not have a carbon permit liability under the government’s proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.


    The overwhelming majority of the 67 are in the finance, legal or legal services sector, which the analysis says are expected to make huge profits out of the ETS.


    The paper’s author, who does not wish to be named, concludes: “While the BCA is held up as the voice of industry on the carbon scheme, the vast bulk of its members have no skin in the game. That is, they won’t have to buy permits. In fact, the bankers and finance consultants like KPMG stand to make a fortune out of it.”


    The paper’s author also names at least 12 senior Labor figures – seven of them frontbenchers, including three cabinet ministers – who they say have expressed doubts about the government’s ETS privately to either BCA member companies or their industry group representatives.




    Story Tools

  • Scientists create new super vegetables

    Scientists create new super vegetables


    Posted 1 hour 25 minutes ago



    The broccoli will be wrapped in plastic in shops to retain the anti-oxidants.

    The broccoli will be wrapped in plastic in shops to retain the anti-oxidants. (supplied)




    Victorian scientists have developed a new range of vegetables that have 40 per cent more anti-oxidants.


    Anti-oxidants have been proven to reduce the risk of a range of diseases such as heart disease and some types of cancer.


     


    The so-called “booster broccoli” is the first in a group of vegetables being developed by scientists at Victoria’s Department of Primary Industries (DPI).


    DPI leading scientist Dr Rod Jones says the new broccoli is not the result of genetic engineering.


    “All we’ve done is gone back and minded nature’s natural diversity,” he said.


    He said they formed partnerships with large companies and tested all of their varieties of broccoli and selected the one out of 400 tested with the highest anti-oxidant content.


    Now they have started to breed that variety.


    “It’s a premium branded product so the returns to growers should be higher,” he said.


    “It’s also about improving the health of our population in general by getting people to eat vegetables that we know are very good for them.”


    So far more than $20-million has been invested in the project.


    There are another 15 products in commercial testing including tomatoes, capsicum and lettuce.


    “So once those lines come through, plus all the other ones we’re looking at, cauliflower, onion, carrot, I don’t think it will take too long for the investment to be recouped,” he said.


    Dr Jones says the booster broccoli actually tastes good too.


    “It tastes sweeter than most other broccoli varieties because it’s high in sugar.”


    He said Australian conditions are perfect for growing the new varieties because when the plants are stressed by a lack of water, the anti-oxidant level goes up.


    He is confident they can eventually create a range of vegetables that have an even higher anti-oxidant content.


    Tags: rural, agricultural-crops, vegetables, australia, vic, melbourne-3000

  • Debunking the meat/climate change myth

    A farmer speaks


    Debunking the meat/climate change myth 40 (GRIST)




    Editor’s note: Eliot Coleman is one of the most revered and influential small-scale farmers in the United States, famous for growing delicious vegetables through the Maine winter with little use of fossil fuel. Eliot sent me the following letter as a response to my recent piece on the greenhouse-gas foorprint of industrial meat. At question is a 2007 report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization called “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” which claimed that 18 percent of global human-induced greenhouse gas emissions stem from meat production.
    —Tom Philpott




    —————————-


    cow pastureThe problem is CAFOs, not cows.I am dismayed that so many people have been so easily fooled on the meat eating and climate change issue following the UN report.  The culprit is not meat eating but rather the excesses of corporate/industrial agriculture.  The UN report shows either great ignorance or possibly the influence of the fossil fuel lobby with the intent of confusing the public.  It is obviously to someone’s benefit to make meat eating and livestock raising an easily attacked straw man (with the enthusiastic help of vegetarian groups) in order to cover up the singular contribution of the only new sources of carbon—burning the stored carbon in fossil fuels and to a small extent making cement (both of which release carbon from long term storage)—as the reason for increased greenhouse gasses in the modern era.  (Just for ridiculous comparison, human beings, each exhaling about 1kg of CO2 per day, are responsible for 33% more CO2 per year than fossil fuel transportation.  Maybe we should get rid of us.)


    If I butcher a steer for my food, and that steer has been raised on grass on my farm, I am not responsible for any increased CO2.  The pasture-raised animal eating grass in my field is not producing CO2, merely recycling it (short term carbon cycle) as grazing animals (and human beings) have since they evolved.  It is not meat eating that is responsible for increased greenhouse gasses; it is the corn/ soybean/ chemical fertilizer/ feedlot/ transportation system under which industrial animals are raised. When I think about the challenge of feeding northern New England, where I live, from our own resources, I cannot imagine being able to do that successfully without ruminant livestock able to convert the pasture grasses into food.  It would not be either easy or wise to grow arable crops on the stony and/or hilly land that has served us for so long as productive pasture.  By comparison with my grass fed steer, the soybeans cultivated for a vegetarian’s dinner, if done with motorized equipment, are responsible for increased CO2.


    But, what about the methane in all that cattle flatulence?  Excess flatulence is also a function of an unnatural diet. If cattle flatulence on a natural grazing diet were a problem, heat would have been trapped a 1000 years ago when, for example, there were 70 million buffalo in North America not to mention innumerable deer, antelope, moose, elk, caribou, and so on all eating vegetation and in turn being eaten by native Americans, wolves, mountain lions, etc.  Did the methane from their digestion and the nitrous oxide from their manure cause temperatures to rise then?  Or could there be other contributing factors today resulting from industrial agriculture, factors that change natural processes, which are not being taken into account?  It has long been known that when grasslands are chemically fertilized their productivity is increased but their plant diversity is diminished.  A recent study in the journal Rangelands (Vol. 31, #1, pp. 45 – 49) documents how that the diminished diversity from sowing only two or three grasses and legumes in modern pastures results in diminished availability of numerous secondary nutritional compounds, for example tannins from the minor pasture forbs, which are known to greatly reduce methane emissions. Could not the artificial fertilization of pastures greatly increase the NO2 from manure?  Might not the increased phosphorus, nowhere near as abundant in natural systems, have modified digestibility?  I am sure that future research will document other contributing factors of industrial agricultural practices on animal emissions.  The fact is clear.  It is not the livestock; it is the way they are raised.  But what about clearing the Brazilian rain forest?  Well, the bulk of that is for soybeans and if we stopped feeding grain to cattle much of the acreage presently growing grain in the Midwest could become pasture again and we wouldn’t need Brazilian land.  (US livestock presently consume 5 times as much grain as the US population does directly.)  And long term pasture, like the Great Plains once was, stores an enormous amount of carbon in the soil.


    My interest in this subject comes not just because I am a farmer and a meat eater, but also because something seems not to make sense here as if the data from the research has failed to take some other human mediated influence into account.  But even more significantly, if we humans were not burning fossil fuels and thus not releasing long-term carbon from storage and if we were not using some 90 megatons of nitrogen fertilizer per year, would we even be discussing this issue?


    If those people concerned about rising levels of greenhouse gasses, instead of condemning meat eating, were condemning the enormous output of greenhouse gasses due to fossil fuel and fertilizer use by a greedy and biologically irresponsible agriculture, I would cheer that as a truthful statement even if they weren’t perceptive enough to continue on and mention that the only “new” carbon, the carbon that is responsible for rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere, is not biogenic from livestock but rather anthropogenic from our releasing the carbon in long term storage (coal, oil, natural gas.)  Targeting livestock as a smoke screen in the climate change controversy is a very mistaken path to take since it results in hiding our inability to deal with the real causes.  When people are fooled into ignorantly condemning the straw man of meat eating, who I suspect has been set up for them by the fossil fuel industry, I am appalled by how easily human beings allow themselves to be deluded by their corporate masters.


  • Wikipedia-style website to record every species on earth

    Wikipedia-style website to record every species on Earth


    Coming soon to a screen near you: The Encyclopedia of Life – a user-generated database of all living things




    dolphins, rampant

    Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) will have their own webpage. Photograph: Getty Images


    A complete list of all the species on the planet is, for many biologists and conservationists, the natural history equivalent of the Holy Grail. So the recently-launched EoL (it stands for ‘Encyclopedia of Life’), which aims to create not just a list, but an individual web-page, for every single one of the world’s plant and animal species, is bound to cause a buzz.


    Make no mistake, this will be a truly Herculean task. There may only be about 5,000 species of mammals, 8,000 species of reptiles, and 10,000 or so species of birds. But once we get to groups like flowering plants (about 250,000 species, and that’s not including hybrids), insects (over 1m species described, with perhaps another 5m new ones waiting to be discovered), let alone micro-organisms such as viruses and bacteria, it’s easy to see why EoL might seem little optimistic.


     


    So how does EoL work? Well, like its forerunner Wikipedia, EoL is a self-perpetuating encyclopedia, written by and refereed by anyone who wants to contribute. In practice, the contributors are likely to be mainly professional scientists or talented amateur naturalists – in some cases the leading experts on a species or group. Others can add text, images and even video clips to each entry, with the ultimate goal of making information about all the world’s organisms freely available.


    Accuracy will be ensured (hopefully, at least) by an expert team of curators, who will weed out any inaccuracies and clarify any confusions. Like Wikipedia, there will be no charge for anyone wishing to access the information, so writers must be willing to share their knowledge with anyone else under a ‘creative commons licence‘. Original sources will also be credited where possible.


    So far, so good. But anyone familiar with recent controversies in biological science – and in particular taxonomy, classification and nomenclature – will immediately be aware of problems beyond the sheer workload involved. Broadly, these break down into three areas of potential confusion:


    • What is a species? Although we know that the African elephant and Indian elephant are different species, and likewise the house sparrow is a different species from the tree sparrow, many divisions between species are not so clear-cut. Scientists may lump two previously separate species together (like the Bullock’s and Baltimore orioles of the US), or split one apart (as in bean and pink-footed geese). And when it comes to the differences between closely related plants and their many hybrids, things can get really confusing.


    • What is its name? Brits call divers “divers”, Americans call them loons; likewise “skua” (UK) and “jaeger” (US). In Africa things get even more confusing, while many species of insect and plant don’t have an English name at all. And what about the non English-speaking world? OK, we could use scientific names, but even these change, as has recently happened with the classification of such common and widespread species as the tits.


    • How many species are there? I’ve already touched on this – but when you realise that the 2m species currently identified represent as little as 2% of all the species on Earth, it’s easy to see why EoL may turn out to be a bit like painting the Forth Bridge – just when you think it’s finished, up pops some other obscure organism begging for entry to the club.


    Despite these caveats, though, I think the founders of EoL do deserve praise and support. And as one representative of our own species, the poet Robert Browning, wrote:



    Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
    Or what’s a heaven for?