International
Surprise! Farmers Grow Hearty Crops to Survive War
Published November 07, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
Subsistence farmers in African war zones keep themselves alive in dangerous circumstances by leaning on intuition and age-old farming logic that goes like this: when in tough conditions, reuse whatever field you've got, grow the hardiest plants and when fleeing, take the hardiest seeds with you. Doing this allows farmers to create the crops best adapted to their needs; a surprise stroke of agricultural genius that apparently leaves scientists reeling.
A new study reports the unexpected emergence of hybrid rice in West African countries like Gambia, Ghana, Senegal and Togo, whose African and Asian rice varieties (Oryza glaberrima Steud and Oryza sativa L.) have only previously been interbred in a lab and there produced sterile offspring, according to SciDevNet.
The authors of the study, which appears in this month's issue of PLoS ONE, report that these two species of rice are interbreeding in the fields in part because of disruptions caused by war.
Global Warming's Evil Twin: Agricultural Land Use
Published November 06, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
The world is stuck on the tracks and there are trains coming in both directions. One headlight represents climate change. The other light is us, a booming global population that needs more and more food every year. One train demands that we preserve our forests, the other that we slash and burn them. One demands that we decrease pollution, the other that we add more and more fossil fuels to our soil.
At least unless we change things -- a lot of things -- very drastically. We are already yanking on the brake of the climate train, though not nearly hard enough. The other train, though, is barreling forward unfettered. Few of us realize the train is being driven by a madman. Few of us realize the massive crisis our global society's inattention to agricultural priorities promises to become unless something is done.
The problem, according to a new essay by Jonathan Foley, professor and director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, is that we will need to double or even triple our agricultural output over the next several decades unless we want a whole heck of a lot of starving people on our hands. But we have to do that without completely destroying our environment.
Brouhaha Over Meat’s Impact on Climate
Published October 29, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
The discussion of reducing meat consumption as a means of fighting climate change is ruffling some high-profile feathers in several places. This attention is good news for those of us concerned with sustainable food: clearly the message is gaining widespread traction if people in positions of power are up in arms.
UK’s Times newspaper reported a couple days ago that Lord Stern of Brentford, I. G. Patel Professor of Economics and Chair of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, recommended cutting back on meat intake as an effective method of mitigating climate change.
“Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases,” he told the Times. “It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”
Not surprisingly, industry leaders and their allies were outraged.
Bill Gates Enchanted by the GMO Idol
Published October 27, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
I wrote last week about the Gates Foundation's efforts to help improve agricultural systems in the developing world. Gates's conclusion: the Foundation's investment should empower poor farmers to grow more crops and get them to market, which will help them pull themselves out of poverty.
Sounds like a plan, right? Not so fast, says alert reader and fellow blogger Greg Plotkin, who pointed out an important thread underlying the story: "Gates is hoping to prompt a second Green Revolution and has shown very little concern about the potential negative impacts that [genetically modified (GM)] crops could bring."
This is a crucial point to bring to light, not least because the architect of the Gates Foundation's plans, Rajiv Shah, is now a part of the Obama Adminstration. In April, he became Under Secretary of Research, Education and Economics and Chief Scientist at the USDA, a position in which he can work to entrench this particular "green revolution" agenda into national policy priorities.
Border Patrol Plans To Erode the Rio Grande's Banks
Published July 07, 2009 @ 09:52PM PT
Anyway, that's what the headline of this story should read, though the editors chose the following instead:
Border Agents to Dump Agent Orange-Like Chemical to Kill All Plant Life Among U.S.-Mexico Border
From the article:
(NaturalNews) The Border Patrol has temporarily postponed -- but refused to cancel -- plans to use helicopters to spray herbicide along the banks of the Rio Grande between the cities of Laredo, Texas and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, in order to kill a fast-growing river cane that provides cover for undocumented migrants, smugglers and other border crossers. ...
What happens when you completely defoliate river banks, perhaps with something like a broad-spectrum herbicide, is that the banks themselves start rapidly eroding, which silts up the river, which increases the chance that a freak storm, or one of the Gulf of Mexico's occasional hurricanes, will overrun those banks.
Now granted, we are talking about a river that's so extensively drawn down for irrigation that it doesn't reach the Gulf of Mexico all the time. But sometimes, even on the Texas/Mexico border, it does rain.
As to the particular herbicide planned for use, imazapyr, both Mexico and the European Union consider it more toxic than does the US EPA. The EU has gone so far as to ban it.
I wonder when we'll hear the Border Patrol planning to do something this stupid along the Canadian border. Oh wait, right, that'll be never.
Can't we just take it as a compliment that people want to come to our country looking for new opportunities? We should be flattered. Especially if they're looking for work, because every country needs good workers and hardly anyone can better prove their chutzpah than someone who's willing to come to a whole other nation where the customs are different and they stick out in a crowd.
No sense to be made of any of it.
World According to Monsanto, pt 9, Contamination
Published July 02, 2009 @ 08:30AM PT
A traditional Mexican corn farmer speaks in this portion of the "World According to Monsanto" documentary about the transgenic corn conquest of the ancient home of corn and the center of its greatest biodiversity: "... If they succeed, we'll be dependent on multinationals. We'll be forced to buy the fertilizer and insecticides they sell, because without them, their corn won't grow. Whereas the local corn grows very well without fertilizer or herbicide. Look at it, it's very beautiful. ..."
Now that NAFTA has made import controls on artificially cheap US corn difficult, and as much US corn contains transgenic traits, it's been impossible to keep contamination of this wind-pollinated plant at bay. Even in fields where farmers have been saving their own seed and sharing only with neighbors who do the same for centuries.
The Fertilizer Divide
Published July 01, 2009 @ 12:19PM PT
While plant breeding has done its part, and irrigation a lion's share, in bringing global crop productivity up over this last century, synthetic and mineral fertilizers sealed the deal.
Plants need more than nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (N-P-K), but an abundance of those three key, limiting nutrients will get them growing well, usually even if there are micronutrient deficiencies. So the prominent N-P-K listings on fertilizer bags are generally most crucial, and arguably the most critical of these is nitrogen.
While the Green Revolution is attributed in large part to hybrid crop varieties, these do poorly when not supplied with the abundant irrigation and nutrient resources provided through the industrial agriculture system. As much as the biotech industry claims to be overcoming these input requirements, they have yet to do so, and hope is not a plan.
Industrial agriculture uses fertilizer synthesized from natural gas, which is running into price and availability constraints similar to that found with other fossil fuels. Further, using nitrogen fertilizer in excess of what can be absorbed by plants and organisms residing in the soil are a significant source of water pollution and the formation of nitrous oxides, which are powerful greenhouse gases.
Now, a new study has quantified the global fertilizer use divide, with the not-too-surprising findings that industrialized countries use too much and African agriculture may be in need of a lot more. From the press release:
