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Big stores counting the cost of ban on GM food
Martin Hickman, The Independent
Britain’s food giants have privately warned that they are struggling to maintain their decade-long ban on genetic modification and called for the public to be educated about the increasing cost of avoiding GM, The Independent reveals today.
As major producers such as the US and Brazil switch to GM, supermarkets are now paying 10 to 20 per cent more for the dwindling supplies of conventional soya and maize, according to a report by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).
Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons, Marks & Spencer, Somerfield, Aldi and Co-op met civil servants to explain their problems in finding non-GM supplies…
(1 Sept 2009)
related: We Need an Honest Debate about GM
Climate tipping point defined for US crop yields
Shanta Barley, New Scientist
While news reports and disaster movies remind us about tipping points for Arctic melt and sea level rise, some things closer to home get less attention. Take food supply: new modelling studies show that there are climate tipping points here too, beyond which crop yields will collapse.
Wolfram Schlenker at Columbia University, New York, and Michael Roberts at North Carolina State University in Raleigh used a high-resolution dataset of weather patterns from 1950 to 2005 to discover how yields of three key US crops would respond to increasing temperatures.
“The single best predictor of a year’s yield is the amount of time temperatures exceed about 29 °C and the extent to which they do so,” they say.
“Below this, warmer temperatures are beneficial for yields, but the damaging effects above 29 °C are staggeringly large.”
…Overall, the results suggest that yields of maize, cotton and soybean drop by roughly 0.6 per cent for each “degree-day” spent above 29 °C….
(26 August 2009)
The promise and limits of local food
Brian Donohue, The Boston Globe
EATING LOCAL is all the rage. As someone who dropped out to become a community farmer in the 1970s, and still farms, I am delighted. As someone who later dropped back into academia to become an environmental historian, I have my doubts about how much we can grow in New England. Watching some of my best students head down the same path, I feel I owe their parents an explanation.
The idea that we should grow all our own food locally is easy to dismiss. By 1800, with barely a million people, New England was already importing grain. More and more arrived from the Midwest in the following decades to help feed booming mill cities, even as three-quarters of New England was rapidly cleared for meat, milk, and wool. Local farmland was pressed past the ecological limit, and by the end of the 19th century much of it was returning to forest.
Today New England’s population approaches 15 million, while only 7 percent of our land remains in agriculture. To come even close to feeding ourselves we would have to cut down a large part of our recovered forest – not something we want to repeat. But there are still good reasons to move toward more local food production. We need to determine which crops to grow here. What were we growing a century ago, when New England was already an urban, industrial society?…
(26 August 2009)
thanks to kalpa, who pointed out this article and the two following from her weekly Agricultural Economics News Update
Organic Farmers Seek Healthier Future
Linda Blake, The Wall Street Journal
The hills of northeastern Maharashtra are normally green and lush during the annual monsoon season. But this year’s spots of brown are a sign of a trouble.
..
In this region known as the suicide belt, the combination of poor rains, high production costs for farming, low crop yields and crippling debt can be fatal. Some 16,000 farmers commit suicide every year in India, according to India’s National Crime Records Bureau. About a quarter of them are in Vidarbha. In July alone, 36 people died here.
Farmers lead a life of severe poverty in India and have a very high suicide rate. Against that bleak backdrop, organic farming — with its higher margins and overall growth — is offering a better life for farmers in one region, WSJ’s Linda Blake reports.
But as laborers pluck weeds from fields of cotton, soybeans and pulses in this part of western India, Havantro Deshmukh believes he has the answer. Mr. Deshmukh made his farm organic nearly a decade ago. Since then, a consistent profit has helped him to “escape debt,” he says, and possible death.
Valued at $20 million, India’s organic farming sector is a sliver of the $26 billion global market. But with its promise of higher profit margins and lower production costs, organic farming provides an alternative to this debt spiral by eliminating a farmer’s dependence on expensive pesticides.
“No tension,” says Mr. Deshmukh with a toothy grin…
(25 August 2009)
U.S. farmers warm to community agriculture model
Scott Malone, Reuters
* More than 12,500 U.S. farms trying new model
* Farmers see more secure revenue stream
* Consumers like quality, connection to seasons
As he finished packing corn, tomatoes and blueberries into shopping bags at a Massachusetts farm, software engineer Alex Lian said his new shopping habits had changed his attitude to food.
“As a city person, I’ve never had this much connection to the seasons and eating things as they’re picked,” the 32-year-old said as he looked out over fields at Tangerini’s Spring Street Farm where his produce had been grown.
Tangerini’s is one of a growing number of mostly small-scale U.S. farm operations that have turned to community-supported agriculture as a new business model…
(27 August 2009)
