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Book review: German scientists developed fertilizer, then bombs and gases
Guy Gugliotta, Washington Post
The Alechemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler
By Thomas Hager
Harmony. 316 pp. $24.95
Somehow fertilizer seems an unlikely subject for a Faustian tale about pride, vanity and ambition. Yet here it is: Chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch won Nobel Prizes for their contributions to humanity as young men and reached the pinnacle of German science, only to be brought low by their own, very human failings.
Haber and Bosch invented industrially made fertilizer during the first decade of the 20th century, developing a method of synthesizing and mass-producing ammonia from hydrogen and atmospheric nitrogen, hence the title of Thomas Hager’s book, The Alchemy of Air. The need for such a process was urgent. Agricultural crops required nitrogen, but by the late 19th century the parched flatlands of Chile’s Atacama Desert were the world’s only major source of nitrates, and supplies were running out. With most arable land already cultivated and populations on the rise, a Malthusian nightmare loomed.
(14 December 2008)
Sainsbury’s pioneers food recycling process
James Thompson, The Independent
Sainsbury’s is to invest £9m over the next two years in establishing five food-recycling plants, as it bids to become the UK’s first retailer to entirely manage its own food waste.
The UK’s third largest grocer has signed a joint venture with Biogen- Greenfinch, a British specialist in food recycling, to construct the first site as part of Sainsbury’s plans to send no waste to landfill by the end of 2009 and save millions of pounds a year.
(15 December 2008)
Global grain rush under way as rich nations snap up farmland overseas
Laurie Goering and Alex Rodriguez, Chicago ribune
Wealthy countries try to fend off food shortages
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MOSCOW — Wearing flowing red robes and pitching his own trademark desert tent, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi paid a visit to Ukraine last month in search of a remarkable deal to help feed his oil-rich but soil-poor people.
Under a proposed agreement with Kiev, Libya would lease 247,000 acres of Ukraine’s rich black land to grow wheat. The harvest would then be shipped back to Libya, giving the desert nation a more secure supply of food in the face of predictions about higher food prices and potential shortages in decades to come. Ukraine, in turn, would get access to Libyan oil fields, helping free it from dependence on Russia for its energy needs.
Around the world, food-poor but cash-rich countries, spooked by last season’s high food prices, are racing to snap up rights to farmland in developing countries and breadbasket nations. They’re aiming to boost their own food security and cash in on what might prove one of the few sound investments left in a world in financial crisis.
South Korea’s Daewoo Logistics announced last month that it has signed a 99-year lease on 3.2 million acres of land in Madagascar, which it will use to produce corn and palm oil for shipment home. China, which already farms more than 100,000 acres of land in Australia, is buying or leasing huge swaths of farmland in the Philippines, Laos, Kazakhstan, Myanmar, Cameroon and Uganda, according to Grain, a sustainable-agriculture group based in Spain.
(14 December 2008)
