Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
How the Government could easily fix our food chain
Kirtana Chandrasekara, the ecologist
Many people are surprised to find out that the meat and dairy industry produces more climate-changing emissions than all the planes, cars and lorries on the planet – and that a hidden chain of destruction links animals in British factory farms to rainforest destruction in South America.
Animals in British and European factory farms are pumped full of high-protein feed to grow quickly and produce high yields. The protein in animal feed is provided by soy, most of which is shipped in from industrial GM plantations created by cutting down rainforest in South America. This releases vast quantities of climate-changing gases, destroys trees, plants and animals and drives out communities that have lived on the land for centuries.
The huge soy plantations needed just to feed factory farms in Europe every year cover almost 10 million hectares in South America – and demand is growing fast.
In the UK, factory farming is almost wholly dependent on the availability of this cheap soy feed – but at the expense of UK citizens and farmers.
Earlier this year new research from Friends of the Earth revealed that families in England are paying more than £700 million each year to fund the factory farming system through agricultural subsidies, despite the fact it is wiping out rainforests and making climate change worse….
(13 Oct 2009)
A Harvest of Golf Courses From Vietnam’s Farmland
Seth Mydans, The New York Times
It may be the most capitalist enterprise in Communist Vietnam — by the rich and for the rich: a proliferation of golf courses that is displacing thousands of farmers and devouring the rice fields the country depends on.
Until last year, according to experts who have done the calculations, licenses for new courses were being issued at an average of one a week, for a total of more than 140 projects around the country.
Promoters created the idea of a “Ho Chi Minh Golf Trail,” a series of eight courses whose label is as good a sign as any of where Vietnam seems to be headed — its heroic wartime past redefined as a sales pitch.
If all those projects were completed, the number of courses would approach that of golf-mad South Korea, where there are close to 200. It would still fall well short of China, which has more than 300, and would be nowhere near the number in the United States, which has about 16,000 courses, or even Florida, with 1,260.
For a country that had only two courses at the end of the war in 1975 and that according to some estimates has only 5,000 golfers today, however, the increase in projects over the past four years has been explosive.
But a backlash emerged within the news media and among academics and government officials over the social and environmental costs…
(19 Oct 2009)
Farm subsidy system ‘in a mess’
BBC news
The EU farm subsidies system is a “masterclass of misadministration” in most of the UK, the head of the Commons Public Accounts Committee has said.
Edward Leigh MP was responding to a National Audit Office report condemning the high cost to the taxpayer.
Farming minister Jim Fitzpatrick has disputed figures showing average claim processing costs were £285 in Scotland, but £1,743 in England.
He said “real progress” had been made but conceded serious problems existed.
The EU’s Single Payment Scheme provides grants to farmers for maintaining their land.
When asked if he could find anyone who thought the system worked well, Mr Fitzpatrick told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I think that would be a difficult thing to produce… the answer, I suspect, is a straightforward no.”…
(15 Oct 2009)
French farmers protest over price fall
Reuters
Thousands of farmers staged protests across France and blocked traffic for about two hours on a section of the Champs Elysees avenue in Paris to demand the government help them combat a plunge in food prices.
France’s main farmers’ union, FNSEA, estimated about 50,000 farmers with 7,000 tractors turned out around the country.
Depressed prices in the dairy sector have sparked protests across Europe this year, including a delivery boycott last month.
Farmers say a price squeeze is affecting agriculture as a whole.
French farmgate prices plunged 15% year-on-year in August, according to the latest data published by national statistics office INSEE, with prices of grain, fruit and vegetables pressured by abundant harvests.
FNSEA is calling for a 1.4 billion Euro ($2.8 billion) aid package including tax breaks and direct aid to struggling farms…
(17 Oct 2009)
