"In good years, there was plenty - nough for seasonal feasts and for storage in anticipation of winter and hard times to come; in bad years, starvation cut down the poorest and the weakest - the very young, the old, and the sickly.

"Sometimes bad years followed one upon another, reducing the size of the population by several percent. This was the normal condition of life in pre-industrial societies, and it persisted for thousands of years.

"Today, in America, such a state of affairs is hard to imagine. Food is so cheap and plentiful that obesity is a far more widespread concern than hunger. The average mega-supermarket stocks an impressive array of exotic foods from across the globe, and even staples are typically trucked from hundreds of miles away.

"Many people in America did go hungry during the Great Depression, but those were times that only the elderly can recall. In the current regime, the desperately poor may experience chronic malnutrition and may miss meals, but for most the dilemma is finding time in the day’s hectic schedule to go to the grocery store or to cook.

"As a result, fast-food restaurants proliferate: the fare may not be particularly nutritious, but even an hour’s earnings at minimum wage will buy a meal or two. The average American family spent 20 percent of its income on food in 1950; today the figure is 10 percent..."

This article continues here...

He tried chickens and guineas, but they weren’t hard enough workers and the guineas were taken away by hawks. He contemplated sheep, too, but in the end, hard-working pigs, too big for any hawk or coyote to steal, were the best bet.

Now he has a group of pigs who shuffle through the orchards when the apples infected with beetles start to fall. They eat the apples and the eggs that would have spelled disaster for next year’s crop, and clear the ground and eat weeds in the process.

The pigs make short work of an apple orchard, eating every last contaminated apple.

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Supporters say the plan for the Tongass National Forest, a refuge for grizzly and black bears, wolves, eagles and wild salmon, will revive the state's timber industry.

The Bush administration plan for the forest, the largest in the US at nearly 17m acres, would open 3.4m acres to logging, road building and other development, including about 2.4m acres that are currently remote and without roads. About 663,000 acres are in areas considered most valuable for timber production.

The move, the latest in a long-running saga over the Tongass forest, effectively reverses the "Roadless Rule" protection given to the area by President Clinton.

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"Most people are unable to relate to the projections of increase in temperature or the impact of climate change on the economy, but if the climate change forecasts are linked to possible deaths, then countries will be forced to contemplate prevention plans," said Yvette Stevens, the former UN Assistant Emergency Relief Coordinator.

"We need a 'Stern review' of the human costs; people are not motivated by the impact of climate change on a country's gross domestic product (GDP)," added Stevens, who retired from the UN recently.

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In return for his signed permission to log thousands of hectares for exotic woods such as Afromosia (African teak) and sapele, the company promised to build Lamoko and other communities in the area three simple village schools and pharmacies.

In addition, the firm said it would give the chief 20 sacks of sugar, 200 bags of salt, some machetes and a few hoes. In all, it was estimated that the gifts would cost the company £10,000

Since February 2005, logging roads have been driven deep into the forests near Lamoko and the company has started extracting and exporting trees, but the villages have yet to see their schools and pharmacies.

"We asked them to provide wood for our coffins and they even refused that," said one man who asked to remain anonymous.

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Day 9 - I have three beautiful sproutlings. Two will die. One will live. Survival of the fittest.

Day 36 - The office corn has really taken off. Well over knee high. I've moved the office corn to my filing cabinet for better sun exposure. I rotate it 120 degrees (1/3 of a rotation) every day in hopes of keeping the foliage from becoming lopsided"...

Click for the continuing story...

In his study, Monty Kerley, a professor of ruminant nutrition at the College of Agriculture, is examining the effectiveness of glycerin as cattle feed. Through November, Kerley will monitor the growth habits of 60 calves from various breeds to determine if bio-leftovers provide a healthy main course to cattle.

The study has two main priorities: first, to determine if glycerin has a positive or negative effect on calves i.e. growth performance, and second, to assess its impact, if any, on meat quality.

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With them the world will lose vital genetic resources for resisting drought and pests, said the study's lead author, Andy Jarvis, an agricultural geographer based in Rome.

"The survival of many species (is) likely to be seriously threatened even with the most conservative estimates regarding the magnitude of climate change," Jarvis said in a communique.

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While no one can pin point the exact reason as to why bees are declining so rapidly it is interesting to note that no organic bee keepers are reporting losses.

A recent report cites a statement from long time environmental activist and part-time organic bee keeper Sharon Labchuk from Prince Edward Island who states:

"I'm on an organic bee keeping list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic bee keeping world, including commercial bee keepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The problem with the big commercial guys is that they put pesticides in their hives to fumigate for varroa mites, and they feed antibiotics to the bees. They also haul the hives by truck all over the place to make more money with pollination services, which stresses the colonies".

Labchuk is adamant that it is the rigours of the commercial agricultural industry that are wiping out bee populations.

Why? Because honeybees don't just make honey; they pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest flowering crops the country has.

About one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent of that pollination, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

While not all scientists foresee a food crisis, noting that large-scale bee die-offs have happened before, this one seems particularly baffling and alarming.

But many Argentines are worried that diverting farmland for bio fuels - made from corn, sugar cane, palm oil and other agricultural products - will drive up food prices even higher.

In the United States, President Bush has announced a goal of slashing gasoline consumption by 20 percent by 2017, a move requiring 35 billion gallons of alternative fuels to replace fossil fuels.

Yet in Argentina, where a quarter of the 38 million people remain in poverty five years after an economic crisis, some fear that a growing demand for grains to make bio fuels will translate into higher food prices after two years of double-digit inflation.

"This idea of using grains to make energy instead of using them for food, now that's a problem," resident Pedro Marcote said. "Food prices keep going up and up."

Authorities should be careful about promoting bio fuel use, said Loek Boonkamp, head of the agricultural trade and markets division of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

He estimated this year that replacing just 10 percent of the world's current petroleum use with bio fuels would consume about 30 percent of all the grain, oilseed and sugar produced in the U.S., Canada, the European Union and Brazil.

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Reducing tropical deforestation by 50 percent over the next century would help prevent 500 billion tonnes of carbon from going into the atmosphere every year, the researchers said in a policy article published in the journal Science Express.

Such a reduction in emissions would account for 12 percent of the total reductions targeted by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the researchers said.

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Neil Rich, president and CEO of Riksch BioFuels of Crawfordsville, Iowa, testified before the Senate Agriculture Committee. “The construction of our bio diesel facility is the direct result of the successful programs from the 2002 Farm Bill,” said Rich of the plant that created 14 high-quality jobs in South Eastern Iowa to allow it to produce 10 million gallons of cleaner burning bio diesel annually.

“Bio diesel should be a significant part of the 2007 Farm Bill.”

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The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) said that continuing dry spells could cause problems for both farmers and wildlife.

A spokesman said: "Over the next two years we will be visiting farmers to learn about irrigation needs and to develop plans which will allocate water resources fairly."

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“The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

She explains in detail a number of things that have been worrying me. I never could see how bio diesel would make much of an inroad into replacing gasoline when most of our available farmland is already being used for food and cotton. Surely one would have to replace another.

Of course, it works, and will probably be an excellent product for use on farms to drive the farming machinery. I don't doubt that a lot of the growth will come from rural farming communities. But it should remain only a small part of the total energy solution. The future of transport is likely to be electric once battery technologies are sufficiently developed.

Anyway, as Alice Friedemann's article says:

"Ethanol is an agribusiness get-rich-quick scheme that will bankrupt our topsoil.

"Nineteenth century western farmers converted their corn into whiskey to make a profit. Archer Daniels Midland, a large grain processor, came up with the same scheme in the 20th century. But ethanol was a product in search of a market, so ADM spent three decades relentlessly lobbying for ethanol to be used in gasoline. Today ADM makes record profits from ethanol sales and government subsidies...

"..Fuels from biomass are not sustainable, are ecologically destructive, have a net energy loss, and there isn’t enough biomass in America to make significant amounts of energy because essential inputs like water, land, fossil fuels, and phosphate ores are limited.."

Read the complete essay

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