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National Geographic on Our Good Earth: The future rests on the soil beneath our feet
Charles C. Mann, National Geographic
… This year food shortages, caused in part by the diminishing quantity and quality of the world’s soil (see “Dirt Poor”), have led to riots in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. By 2030, when today’s toddlers have toddlers of their own, 8.3 billion people will walk the Earth; to feed them, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates, farmers will have to grow almost 30 percent more grain than they do now. Connoisseurs of human fecklessness will appreciate that even as humankind is ratchetting up its demands on soil, we are destroying it faster than ever before. “Taking the long view, we are running out of dirt,” says David R. Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Journalists sometimes describe unsexy subjects as MEGO: My eyes glaze over. Alas, soil degradation is the essence of MEGO. Nonetheless, the stakes-and the opportunities-could hardly be higher, says Rattan Lal, a prominent soil scientist at Ohio State University. Researchers and ordinary farmers around the world are finding that even devastated soils can be restored. The payoff, Lal says, is the chance not only to fight hunger but also to attack problems like water scarcity and even global warming. Indeed, some researchers believe that global warming can be slowed significantly by using vast stores of carbon to reengineer the world’s bad soils. “Political stability, environmental quality, hunger, and poverty all have the same root,” Lal says. “In the long run, the solution to each is restoring the most basic of all resources, the soil.”
(September 2008 issue)
Long article on a subject that’s even more fundamental than peak oil. Some gorgeous photographs are also online – look on the left side of the article. -BA
Let them Eat Rats
Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved
I think what disturbs me about this Reuters news piece even more than the Let them Eat Mud story that I posted about mud cake consumption in Haiti, is that the government in Bihar, India, is actively promoting it.
Just to be clear. It’s official government policy for people to eat rats. (The full story here and below.)
It’s a useful case to ruminate over. What is it, after all, that’s so appalling here? Clearly the idea of eating vermin is, by definition, distasteful, but what a culture decides is edible, and what is pestilent, isn’t written in our DNA. As we used to chorus in Sociology 101: “it’s a social construct”. Some think pork is as dirty as rat. Some think that by renaming pigeons as ‘squab’, they’ll taste better.
That people are eating rodents isn’t the only thing that should turn our stomachs, though. The Bihari government endorsement of rat-eating is simultaneously a sign of defeat. They’ve given up on fighting poverty so that people can afford to eat. Given up on trying to protect the grain harvests with decent infrastructure. Given up, almost, on their people.
In a time of scarce resources and rising hunger, rat-eating becomes a handy technical fix. After all, what is rat-eating but a technology to increase nutrition and eliminate the use of pesticides and the need for secure grain storage?
(20 August 2008)
Commentary on a story from Reuters: Food crisis? Try rats, says Bihar govt.
Food, Fuel and Water Crises Converging
Thalif Deen, IPS
A spectre is haunting the cities and villages of most developing nations, warns a senior official of a World Bank-affiliated organisation.
“It’s the spectre of a food, fuel and water crisis,” says Lars Thunell, executive vice president of the Washington-based International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank group.
“I believe we are at a tipping point,” he said, because the scarcity of water poses a threat to the food supply just when the agricultural sector is stepping up production in response to riots over food prices, growing hunger, and rising malnutrition.
Speaking at the conclusion of the weeklong Stockholm International Water Conference Friday, Thunell said the growing demand for water is outpacing supply.
(22 August 2008)
Tackling the global fertilizer crisis
Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, American Chronicle
Worldwide fertilizer crisis is getting worse, with no sign of dramatic resolution to this crisis or downwards trend of the price of fertilizer. Even several months back, price of each ton of Urea was below US$ 400, but now, anywhere in the world, it is above US$ 600 [of course FOB price]. Various large stock holders are offering Urea to potential customers at the rate of US$ 700-720 per ton, while there are some fake suppliers, who wish to cash the letter of credit and disappear.
… Here we have some very recent news from the South Asian nations on how fertilizer crisis is creating series of serious problems:
The huge difference of urea prices above $600 per tonne in Pakistan and other regional countries are responsible for massive smuggling, hoarding and shortage of urea in the country.
In local market, the sale price of urea is below $200 per tonne while in regional countries including India, Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asian Republics its value is $800 per tonne. The attractive price for urea in other countries helps in flourishing the smuggling of the commodity. Taking advantage of illegal export of the commodity, the dealers start hoarding of the commodity further aggravating the situation.
… Now let us see, what is happening in Bangladesh.
Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury is an award winning anti Jihadist Muslim journalism in Bangladesh. He is the editor of Weekly Blitz. …
(24 August 2008)
TVA fertilizer technology used worldwide — but few new products since 1970s
Dr. Thomas Hargrove, IFDC (press release)
About 75% of fertilizers and fertilizer technology used around the world today were developed or improved during the 1950s to 1970s by scientists and engineers at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in the United States, says John Shields, a former TVA official. Shields is now Interim Director of the Research and Market Development Division of IFDC, an International Center for Soil Fertility and Agricultural Development, based in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
“An investment of $41 million in fertilizer research through 1981 returned an incredible $57 billion to U.S. agriculture,” Shields says. “That doesn’t include benefits of the technology to the rest of the world.”
But inadequate public funding caused closure of the TVA fertilizer research program in the early 1990s. Today, publicly funded fertilizer research and development has essentially ceased-and so has the flow of new and more efficient fertilizers and fertilizer manufacturing technologies.
Dr. Amit Roy, IFDC President and CEO, says, “TVA’s fertilizer program is recognized as one of the most effective research and development programs of any U.S. agency. Its benefits to the world far outweigh the public investment that the United States made in fertilizer research and development.
“It’s time to launch a radical initiative to develop a new generation of energy-efficient fertilizers to help avert hunger and famine.”
TVA Achievements
TVA developed high-analysis fertilizers with high nutrient content as well as more efficient manufacturing processes. The fertilizers include urea, diammonium phosphate (DAP), triple superphosphate (TSP), sulfur-coated urea, and liquid fertilizers. TVA improved the manufacturing processes for ammonium nitrate and other products that help commercial producers provide efficient fertilizers to farmers worldwide. TVA’s ammonium-granulation and bulk-blending technologies improve the efficiency of the manufacture of many mixed fertilizer grades. TVA generated most of the fluid fertilizer and dry bulk-blending technology used in the United States today.
(25 August 2008)
This is a press release.
