Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Eating roo could cut gas emissions
Mathew Murphy, The Age
“SKIPPY” could soon be on the menu for the climate change-conscious if they take note of a report showing a switch from beef to kangaroo could help cut greenhouse gases.
A report by the director of the sustainability centre at the University of NSW, Mark Diesendorf, says a 30 per cent reduction in Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 is achievable but would need both energy efficiency and renewable energy measures, and a change of diet.
According to the report, Paths to a Low Carbon Future, slicing beef consumption by 20 per cent, while “politically challenging”, would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 15 million tonnes on 1990 levels.
“Beef consumption is chosen in this measure because it is responsible for the biggest share of livestock-related methane emissions,” it says. “This measure could be reduced by shifting to kangaroo meat and/or lower-meat diets.”
(11 October 2007)
Noted by Emily Gertz of WorldChanging and Big Gav of Peak Energy.
How Malawi went from a nation of famine to a nation of feast
Stephanie Nolen, The Globe and Mail
… A record harvest, a massive surplus of the staple crop, would be good news anywhere in the developing world. But it’s particularly gratifying in Malawi, a country that has been plagued with critical food shortages several times in the past decade. In 2002, an estimated 1,500 people starved to death in the worst food shortage since independence. In 2005, the United Nations World Food Program scrambled to supply emergency rations to more than five million people, nearly half the country.
This year, Malawi is itself supplying the WFP, selling 400,000 tonnes of maize for use in emergency operations in neighbouring Zimbabwe.
The key question is, What happened? How did Malawi go from famine-plagued to food exporter?
While steady rains have undoubtedly helped, that’s not the whole answer. Over the past couple of years, Malawi has broken with an orthodoxy long advocated by Canada and other Western donor nations: The impoverished country has gone back to subsidizing poor farmers. Condemned by donors as an impediment to the development of a sustainable agricultural sector, the subsidies have been a raging success.
“What is different [this year] is the access to inputs,” explained Patrick Kabambe, permanent secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security. “People are so poor they use recycled seed and no fertilizer. They can’t meet their needs that way and they grow no surplus. People sink deeper and deeper into poverty. It’s a vicious cycle. We had to do something.”
(12 October 2007)
A conversation with Michael Pollan
Tom Philpott, Grist
… No writer has galvanized this new national conversation on food more than Michael Pollan, from his muckraking articles on the meat industry for The New York Times Magazine earlier this decade to the publication last year of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. On a recent day when he was reviewing the galleys of his latest book, due out in January, I rang up Pollan at his Berkeley, Calif., home to talk … about food.
Q: So tell me a little bit about what you’ve been working on recently.
A: The new book is called In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. It’s a book that really grew out of questions I heard from readers after Omnivore’s Dilemma, which was basically so how do you apply all this? Now that you’ve looked into the heart of the food system and been into the belly of the beast, how should I eat, and what should I buy, and if I’m concerned about health, what should I be eating? I decided I would see what kind of very practical answers I could give people.
I spent a lot of time looking at the science of nutrition, and learned pretty quickly there’s less there than meets the eye, and that the scientists really haven’t figured out that much about food. Letting them tell us how to eat is probably not a very good idea, and indeed the culture — which is to say tradition and our ancestors — has more to teach us about how to eat well than science does. That was kind of surprising to me.
It really comes down to seven words: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” What is food? How do you know whether you’re getting food or a food-like product? The interesting thing that I learned was that if you’re really concerned about your health, the best decisions for your health turn out to be the best decisions for the farmer and the best decisions for the environment — and that there is no contradiction there.
(12 October 2007)
The original has a scary photo of Michael Pollan. -BA
Wheat Prices Surge to Daily Maximum
Lauren Villagran, Associated Press
Wheat futures surged Thursday as investors bet the USDA will cut its estimates for worldwide supply of the grain due to a rash of poor harvests this year and robust demand.
…The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Friday will post its latest figures on world supply of farm products at a time demand is running at the highest level in years because of strong global economic growth and an increasing use of biofuels.
Wheat supplies are of special concern given that Australia’s harvest this fall, which is expected to be meager, will do little to replenish dwindling world stockpiles. One wheat crop after another this year has suffered either too much rain or too little, and inventories are headed for the lowest in more than two decades. Analysts expect the USDA to pare back its forecast for world wheat supplies.
(12 October 2007)
Contributor Norman Church writes:
I wonder about price increases in other agriculural resources that can be turned into oil and the effect not only on prices generally but the costs of food particularly if agriculural supplies are diverted from food supply to energy supply.
