Julia Peculiar

Evolution

2009-10-04T02:43:00.001-07:00

Riz MC - Sour Times

2009-09-08T06:48:00.001-07:00

For all those worried about the war of perception

Prop 8 the musical

2009-01-31T18:16:00.001-08:00

"Prop 8 - The Musical" starring Jack Black, John C. Reilly, and many more... from Jack Black

Low

2008-12-05T04:25:00.001-08:00

Filipino prison dancers do Brittney Spears, Mike Jones

2008-12-05T04:17:00.001-08:00

Radio Gaga with Prisoners

2008-12-05T04:04:00.001-08:00

Thriller!!

2008-12-05T03:55:00.001-08:00

2008-12-05T03:47:00.001-08:00

Misconceptions of Obama fuel Republican campaign - 13 Oct 08

2008-10-29T01:47:00.001-07:00

What the general news stations won't show.

Seeding Deep Democracy - Vandana Shiva

2008-05-26T02:31:00.001-07:00

Vandana Shiva

2008-05-26T01:11:00.000-07:00

This fabulous indian ecofeminist has always been a hero of mine. Essentially, you could say that her politics is about seeing the whole effect of something and recognising the relationships people, people, places and actions. The following 4 parts is a speach that she gave in Germany. The first part is a tad slow going, but once she gets into it you will know what I mean.

Dr. Vandana Shiva - Part 1

2008-05-26T00:56:00.001-07:00

Dr. Vandana Shiva - Part 2

2008-05-26T00:55:00.001-07:00

Dr. Vandana Shiva - Part 3

2008-05-26T00:54:00.003-07:00

Dr. Vandana Shiva - Part 4

2008-05-26T00:54:00.001-07:00

Vandana Shiva, Interview

2008-05-26T00:15:00.001-07:00

Water

2008-05-25T23:56:00.000-07:00

What Vandana Shiva has to say

Chinese Circus pas de deux

2008-05-25T21:31:00.001-07:00

Butterfly Lovers - Chinese circus ballet

2008-05-25T21:22:00.001-07:00

chinese dancers

2008-05-25T21:21:00.001-07:00

Swan Lake by Chinese Circus

2008-05-25T20:51:00.001-07:00

The inefficiency of meat

2008-04-15T04:13:00.000-07:00

The Pleasures of the Flesh By George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian 15th April 2008

Never mind the economic crisis. Focus for a moment on a more urgent threat: the great food recession which is sweeping the world faster than the credit crunch.

You have probably seen the figures by now: the price of rice has risen by three-quarters in the past year, that of wheat by 130%(1). There are food crises in 37 countries. One hundred million people, according to the World Bank, could be pushed into deeper poverty by the high prices(2). But I bet you have missed the most telling statistic. At 2.1bn tonnes, last year’s global grain harvest broke all records(3). It beat the previous year’s by almost 5%. The crisis, in other words, has begun before world food supplies are hit by climate change. If hunger can strike now, what will happen if harvests decline?

There is plenty of food. It is just not reaching human stomachs. Of the 2.13bn tonnes likely to be consumed this year, only 1.01bn, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), will feed people(4).

I am sorely tempted to write another column about biofuels. From this morning all sellers of transport fuel in the United Kingdom will be obliged to mix it with ethanol or biodiesel made from crops. The World Bank points out that “the grain required to fill the tank of a sports utility vehicle with ethanol … could feed one person for a year”(5). Last year global stockpiles of cereals declined by around 53m tonnes(6); this gives you a rough idea of the size of the hunger gap. The production of biofuels this year will consume almost 100m tonnes(7), which suggests that they are directly responsible for the current crisis. In the Guardian yesterday the transport secretary Ruth Kelly promised that “if we need to adjust policy in the light of new evidence, we will.”(8) What new evidence does she require? In the midst of a global humanitarian crisis, we have just become legally obliged to use food as fuel. It is a crime against humanity in which every driver in this country has been forced to participate.

But I have been saying this for four years and I am boring myself. Of course we must demand that our governments scrap the rules which turn grain into the fastest food of all. But there is a bigger reason for global hunger, which is attracting less attention only because it has been there for longer. While 100m tonnes of food will be diverted this year to feed cars, 760m tonnes will be snatched from the mouths of humans to feed animals(9). This could cover the global food deficit 14 times. If you care about hunger, eat less meat.

While meat consumption is booming in Asia and Latin America, in the United Kingdom it has scarcely changed since the government started gathering data in 1974. At just over 1kg per person per week(10), it’s still about 40% above the global average(11), though less than half the amount consumed in the United States(12). We eat less beef and more chicken than we did 30 years ago, which means a smaller total impact. Beef cattle eat about 8kg of grain or meal for every kilogramme of flesh they produce; a kilogramme of chicken needs just 2kg of feed. Even so, our consumption rate is plainly unsustainable.

In his magazine The Land, Simon Fairlie has updated the figures produced 30 years ago in Kenneth Mellanby’s book Can Britain Feed Itself? Fairlie found that a vegan diet grown by means of conventional agriculture would require only 3m hectares of arable land (around half the current total)(13). Even if we reduced our consumption of meat by half, a mixed farming system would need 4.4m hectares of arable fields and 6.4 million hectares of pasture. A vegan Britain could make a massive contribution to global food stocks.

But I cannot advocate a diet I am incapable of following. I tried it for about 18 months, lost two stone, went as white as bone and felt that I was losing my mind. I know a few healthy-looking vegans and I admire them immensely. But after almost every talk I give, I am pestered by swarms of vegans demanding that I adopt their lifestyle. I cannot help noticing that in most cases their skin has turned a fascinating pearl grey.

What level of meat-eating would be sustainable? One approach is to work out how great a cut would be needed to accommodate the growth in human numbers. The UN expects the population to rise to 9bn by 2050. These extra people will require another 325m tonnes of grain(14). Let us assume, perhaps generously, that politicians like Ms Kelly are able to “adjust policy in the light of new evidence” and stop turning food into fuel. Let us pretend that improvements in plant breeding can keep pace with the deficits caused by climate change. We would need to find an extra 225m tonnes of grain. This leaves 531m tonnes for livestock production, which suggests a sustainable consumption level for meat and milk some 30% below the current world rate. This means 420g of meat per person per week, or about 40% of the UK’s average consumption.

This estimate is complicated by several factors. If we eat less meat we must eat more plant protein, which means taking more land away from animals. On the other hand, some livestock is raised on pasture, so it doesn’t contribute to the grain deficit. Simon Fairlie estimates that if animals were kept only on land that’s unsuitable for arable farming, and given scraps and waste from food processing, the world could produce between a third and two thirds of its current milk and meat supply(15). But this system then runs into a different problem. The FAO calculates that animal keeping is responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions. The environmental impacts are especially grave in places where livestock graze freely(16). The only reasonable answer to the question of how much meat we should eat is as little as possible. Let’s reserve it - as most societies have done until recently - for special occasions.

For both environmental and humanitarian reasons, beef is out. Pigs and chickens feed more efficiently, but unless they are free range you encounter another ethical issue: the monstrous conditions in which they are kept. I would like to encourage people to start eating tilapia instead of meat. It’s a freshwater fish which can be raised entirely on vegetable matter and has the best conversion efficiency - about 1.6kg of feed for 1kg of meat - of any farmed animal(17). Until meat can be grown in flasks, this is about as close as we are likely to come to sustainable flesh-eating.

Re-reading this article, I see that there is something surreal about it. While half the world wonders whether it will eat at all, I am pondering which of our endless choices we should take. Here the price of food barely registers. Our shops are better stocked than ever before. We perceive the global food crisis dimly, if at all. It is hard to understand how two such different food economies could occupy the same planet, until you realise that they feed off each other.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Eg http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/7284196.stm

2. World Bank, 14th April 2008. Food Price Crisis Imperils 100 Million in Poor Countries, Zoellick Says. Press release. http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK:21729143~menuPK:51062075~pagePK:34370~piPK:34424~theSitePK:4607,00.html

3. Food and Agriculture Organisation, April 2008. Crop Prospects and Food Situation.
http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/ai465e/ai465e01.htm

4. ibid.

5. World Bank, 2008. Biofuels: The Promise and the Risks. http://econ.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTRESEARCH/EXTWDRS/EXTWDR2008/0,,contentMDK:21501336~pagePK:64167689~piPK:64167673~theSitePK:2795143,00.html

6. Gerrit Buntrock, 6th December 2007. Cheap no more. The Economist.

7. Food and Agriculture Organisation, April 2008, ibid.

8. Ruth Kelly, 14th April 2008. Biofuels: a blueprint for the future? The Guardian.

9. Food and Agriculture Organisation, April 2008, ibid.

10. The British government gives a total meat purchase figure of 1042g/person/week for 2006.
http://statistics.defra.gov.uk/esg/publications/efs/datasets/UKHHcons.xls

11. There’s a discussion of global average figures here: http://envirostats.info/2007/09/18/0406/

12. See Food and Agriculture Organisation, 2006. Livestock’s Long Shadow. Figure 1.4, p9.
ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/010/a0701e/a0701e.pdf

13. Simon Fairlie, Winter 2007-8. Can Britain Feed Itself? The Land.

14. Based on the current population of 6.8bn consuming 1006mt of grain.

15. Simon Fairlie, forthcoming. Default livestock farming. The Land, Summer 2008.

16. Food and Agriculture Organisation, 2006. Livestock’s Long Shadow.
ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/010/a0701e/a0701e.pdf

17. The FAO (ibid) gives 1.6-1.8. On April 12th, I spoke to Francis Murray of the Institute of Aquaculture, University of Stirling, who suggested 1.5.

Passion and reason - Arundhati Roy

2008-03-26T02:39:00.000-07:00

"When people try to dismiss those who ask big questions as being emotional, it is a strategy to avoid debate. Why should we be scared of being angry? Why should we be scared of our feelings if they're based on facts? The whole framework of reason versus passion is ridiculous, because often passion is based on reason. Passion is not always unreasonable. Anger is based on reason. They're not two different things. I feel it's very important to defend that.”

Is boycotting Nestle still necessary??

2007-12-05T20:45:00.000-08:00

In the late 1970s there was an international boycot of Nestle products in protest of their marketing of baby formula to mothers who did not need it, causing widespread malnutrition and illnesses in the babies who received it.

In response to the widespread public concern, the WHO developed a code of infant formula marketing that was to be followed throughout the world, which prohibited direct advertising and the use of health professionals by the formula companies to promote their products. Nestle has repeatedly said that it conforms with the code.

Below is proof that it doesn't - not even close. 1st are 5 youtube films that comprise a short documentary by the UNICEF that details formula marketing and the cost to infants in the Philipines. Below that is an extract of an article from the Guardian that discusses the problems in Bangladesh.

Formula for Disaster (Part 1 of 5)

2007-12-05T20:43:00.001-08:00

Formula for Disaster (Part 2 of 5)

2007-12-05T20:42:00.005-08:00

Formula for Disaster (Part 3 of 5)

2007-12-05T20:42:00.003-08:00

Formula for Disaster (Part 4 of 5)

2007-12-05T20:42:00.001-08:00

Formula for Disaster (Part 5 of 5)

2007-12-05T20:41:00.001-08:00

Boycotting Nestle - Is it still necessary??

2007-12-05T19:49:00.000-08:00

Absolutely. Evidence from the third/majority world shows that they still aggressively market formula, against the WHO code which they themselves signed. Below is an extract from an article published in the Guardian

-------

Milking it [Extract]

Tuesday May 15, 2007
The Guardian

Down the road from the diarrhoea hospital is the whitewashed Sajida hospital, a private hospital like the one in which Eti was born. Giving birth in a private hospital in Bangladesh isn't just for the wealthy - having a baby here costs only a few pounds - but it is staff in hospitals such as this, say campaigners such as Dr Munir Ahmed of Save the Children in Dhaka, who are targeted by reps from the formula companies. Dr Khaliq Zaman is the paediatrician at the Sajida hospital: yes, he tells us, he receives frequent visits from milk manufacturers, including Nestlé, makers of Lactogen, one of the leading brands in Bangladesh.

"The reps are very aggressive - there are three or four companies, and they come in every two weeks or so," he says. "Their main aim is to recommend their product. Sometimes they bring gifts - Nestlé brought me a big cake at new year. Some companies give things like pens and notebooks, with their brand name on them. They try very hard - even though they know I am not interested, that I always recommend breastfeeding, still they come."

As we talk Zaman holds a pen with the name of a well-known brand of formula milk clearly imprinted on it: the pen isn't expensive, but the giving of all presents to health workers is prohibited under the code. So, too, is the direct promotion of their products to mothers: and yet, the evidence from Zaman is that Nestlé and other manufacturers are getting their message through to mothers none the less.

Here's how: on Zaman's desk, lots of small pads lie scattered: each contains sheets with information about formula milk, plus pictures of the relevant tin. The idea, he says, is that when a mother comes to him to ask for help with feeding, he will tear a page out of the pad and give it to her. The mother - who may be illiterate - will then take the piece of paper (which seems to all intents and purposes a flyer for the product concerned) to her local shop or pharmacy, and ask for that particular product either by pointing the picture out to the pharmacist or shopkeeper, or by simply searching the shelves for a tin identical to the one in the picture on their piece of paper. "I'd never give these pieces of paper out - when I've got a big enough bundle, I take them home and burn them," says Zaman. But that does not mean every other health worker would do the same.

At least three types of Nestlé formula are among the brands whose tear-off pads are on Zaman's desk.

Nestlé spokesman Robin Tickle denies that tear-off pads equate to promoting Lactogen. In fact, he says, the device is "essentially a safety measure. The pads are distributed as information to healthcare workers which ... is allowed under the code. Individual sheets of these are then indeed handed over to mothers, but only after the infant formula has been prescribed by a doctor." He does not accept that the code fails to distinguish between tear-off pads and other sorts of promotion, or that any piece of paper that features a picture of a product a company wants to sell is, arguably, de facto advertising.

The point, he says, is that doctors need - for safety reasons - to make clear to women whether they need Lactogen 1 (for younger babies) or Lactogen 2 (for older ones). So it isn't, then, simply a case of Nestlé exploiting a loophole in the international code? Absolutely not, says Tickle: Nestlé is, he says, one of the largest private distributors of information about the benefits of breastfeeding. And yet, as I tell him, I saw no evidence whatsoever of any Nestlé-sponsored pro-breastfeeding literature, despite spending two days touring hospitals, maternity wards and paediatric clinics: doesn't it seem odd that Nestlé is highly efficient at getting its tear-off slips into mothers' hands in Bangladesh (there were prescription pads in abundance in many of the places we visited), and yet fails, as far as I could tell, in getting them what they could really use, which is information on how to breastfeed? And anyway, campaigners question how realistic it is to think that a company such as Nestlé - which has huge amounts of money tied up in formula milk sales - is going to be committed to spreading the "breast is best" gospel.

"The Nestle leaflets with the picture of Lactogen violates the Code if given to mothers," says Costanza de Toma, author of the Save the Children report. "The truth is that formula manufacturers are clever - they look for grey areas in the code, and they exploit them." Given that the code does not allow them direct access to mothers, she alleges, the companies have become adept at channelling their efforts into getting health workers on side. In any country, but particularly in a country such as Bangladesh where antenatal education is minimal, and where access to other sources of information is limited, the messages new mothers get from doctors, nurses and midwives are crucial. Many of the women I met said it was precisely these people who had suggested a move to not just formula in general, but a specific make - often Lactogen.

Samsun Shahida Akhter Rita, 19, mother of 12-week-old Mim, told me she had gone to a doctor because she was worried about how much Mim was crying. "The doctor said to try Lactogen ... he said give breast milk as well, but try Lactogen." (Breastfeeding experts warn that - aside from the dangers of dirty water being used - giving even some formula milk undermines the breastfeeding process.)

Another young woman, 17-year-old Samsun Nahar Shenli, mother of 13-week-old Tanjila, told me she was advised to start bottlefeeding on the first day of her baby's life. "I talked to the doctor and he said to put her on a certain type of formula. He said the formula and breast milk were very similar, with the same vitamins." Since then, she says, four of her friends have had babies and when they've encountered problems with breastfeeding, she has passed on the word to them to try My Boy.

Even in the UK, formula companies exploit loopholes where they can. In 2006, when the government here launched a new scheme, Healthy Start, to replace the Welfare Food Scheme, two of the biggest producers of formula in Britain - Cow & Gate and Heinz - tried to use it as a marketing opportunity. "Cow & Gate produced adverts saying its baby milk was 'closest to breast milk', a claim which is disallowed under the code, until the Department of Health clamped down on them; and Heinz published a graph suggesting its formula was close to breast milk and better than competing brands. Both companies were not only violating the code, but also UK legislation," says De Toma.

One of the problems with the WHO code - apart from its many grey areas - is how it is policed. Many countries, Bangladesh and the UK included, have backed its requirements up with legislation. But, says Save the Children, WHO and Unicef could do more. "The WHO ... must be bolder in getting companies to comply," it says in today's report. "Unicef must ensure that compliance with the code becomes a measure of progress on countries' implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child."

Within Bangladesh, there is a feeling that if breastfeeding campaigners take their eye off the ball for even a moment, the formula companies will quickly gain ground. At the Institute of Public Health and Nutrition in Dhaka - the government body charged with implementing the curbs on formula manufacturers - director Professor Dr Fatima Parveen Chowdhury is looking askance at several tins of formula milk piled up on her desk. She frowns at the cartoon pictures on the cover - too attractive, she says; too tempting - and frets over the wording on the cans. "The code requires companies to put words on the can saying there is no substitute for breast milk, but on this can those words are too small, it's written in tiny letters that it's a breast-milk substitute, and it won't do," she says.

There are other problems, too: many companies that sell formula milk in Bangladesh have failed in their legal duty to register with her department, and that makes it difficult to keep track of what they're up to. "I talk to companies and in front of me they seem to be reasonable," Chowdhury says. "But I'm not convinced. We have to be watchful. They push their products in different ways. They are doing wrong things. They are very technical, very sly."

Or even, sometimes, outrageously flagrant. Public advertising by baby-milk manufacturers is explicitly banned in the WHO code and in Bangladeshi law, but Ahmed takes me to a doctor's waiting room in a Dhaka suburb whose walls are adorned with posters showing healthy-looking babies, and the names of baby-milk manufacturers (not Nestlé, in this case). Strangely, it seems to me, the babies in the posters are all Caucasian: but Ahmed has an explanation. "For many people here, what white people do is the right thing to do," he says. "So putting white people on posters like these sends out the message that it's the western way, the best way. It's one of the many subtle ways in which breastfeeding is undermined here."

So is breastfeeding declining in Bangladesh? It's difficult to tell, says Dr Swapn Roy, secretary general of the Bangladeshi Breastfeeding Foundation, because the statistics are not reliable. Around 95% of mothers are believed to start breastfeeding, but by one month the figure is down to maybe around 89%, and at six months (the age to which, under WHO recommendations, all babies should be wholly breastfed), the figure is maybe 25%, but could be as low as 16%. Anecdotally, many health professionals feel the tide is shifting against them, and if you cast around at hospital paediatric clinics, as I did last week, there is certainly no shortage of mothers who bottlefeed their babies.

No shortage of mothers, and no shortage of sad tales. Because bottlefeeding is more than a health tragedy in this country: it is an economic tragedy, too. Happi Akther, 35, talks to me as she waits to see a doctor about her nine-month-old son's flaky-skin problem: Nur has been bottlefed, she says, since he was about a month old. "I felt I didn't have enough milk," says Happi, whose two previous babies both died soon after birth. "What else could I do? No one had any other ideas." (In fact, breastfeeding experts believe at least 98% of women - even those on nutritionally deficient diets in developing countries such as Bangladesh - can make sufficient milk to feed their babies, given proper advice and support.) Nur has been fed on Lactogen from the outset, but his formula, she says, costs her and her husband Gias, who works in a mustard-dyeing factory, around 800 taka (£2) a week. And if that doesn't sound much, set it against the fact that Gias earns only £6 a week. "We can't afford it at all," says Happi, shaking her head. "The milk uses up all our money." All the mothers I spoke to - most of whom were non-working wives whose husbands worked in factories or did manual jobs - had similar stories. (Of the 10 women I interviewed in the clinics, only one said she had begun using formula because she needed to go back to work.)

For some families, the burden of buying formula milk is simply too much. "They can't afford to mix it at the required proportion, so to make it go further they use too little powder," says Dr Roy. "Or they resort to using ordinary powdered milk, which is a lot cheaper to buy than branded baby formula. The result is babies whose milk is little more than what you might call white water."

According to Save the Children's report, infant mortality in Bangladesh alone could be cut by almost a third - saving the lives of 314 children every day - if breastfeeding rates were improved. Globally, the organisation believes, 3,800 lives could be saved each day. Given that world leaders are committed to cutting infant mortality by two thirds by 2015 as one of the Millennium Development Goals, protecting and promoting breastfeeding is almost certainly the biggest single thing that could be done to better child survival rates.

But the formula companies, despite the international code, continue to undermine campaigners' efforts. Throughout the west as well as in the developing world, the amounts spent on "breast is best" campaigns are dwarfed by the amounts food manufacturers spend on promoting their products: in the UK, for example, Save the Children reckons that for every £1 spent in 2006-7 on breastfeeding promotion, £10 was spent by manufacturers on advertising and promoting baby milk and foods. If companies such as Nestlé genuinely wanted to do what Tickle says they want to do, which is support breastfeeding, there is a simple way forward: convert its efficient, and effective, network of sales reps into an equally efficient and effective network of breastfeeding advisors. With the right support, there is no doubt that babies such as Eti Khuman and Nur Akther would be breastfed, along with all the other babies whose mothers I spoke to in Bangladesh, because all were very clear about one thing, which is that breastfeeding would be preferable to the expense of formula and the dangers of diarrhoea.

When being green kills

2007-12-05T19:35:00.000-08:00

Hi all,

Below is an article by George Monbiot from his website (which I recommend).
---------------
An Agricultural Crime Against Humanity
Posted November 6, 2007

Biofuels could kill more people than the Iraq war.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 6th November 2007

It doesn’t get madder than this. Swaziland is in the grip of a famine and receiving emergency food aid. Forty per cent of its people are facing acute food shortages. So what has the government decided to export? Biofuel made from one of its staple crops, cassava(1). The government has allocated several thousand hectares of farmland to ethanol production in the county of Lavumisa, which happens to be the place worst hit by drought(2). It would surely be quicker and more humane to refine the Swazi people and put them in our tanks. Doubtless a team of development consultants is already doing the sums.

This is one of many examples of a trade described last month by Jean Ziegler, the UN’s special rapporteur, as “a crime against humanity”(3). Ziegler took up the call first made by this column for a five-year moratorium on all government targets and incentives for biofuel(4): the trade should be frozen until second-generation fuels - made from wood or straw or waste - become commercially available. Otherwise the superior purchasing power of drivers in the rich world means that they will snatch food from people’s mouths. Run your car on virgin biofuel and other people will starve.

Even the International Monetary Fund, always ready to immolate the poor on the altar of business, now warns that using food to produce biofuels “might further strain already tight supplies of arable land and water all over the world, thereby pushing food prices up even further.”(5) This week the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation will announce the lowest global food reserves in 25 years, threatening what it calls “a very serious crisis”(6). Even when the price of food was low, 850 million people went hungry because they could not afford to buy it. With every increment in the price of flour or grain, several million more are pushed below the breadline.

The cost of rice has risen by 20% over the past year, maize by 50%, wheat by 100%(7). Biofuels aren’t entirely to blame - by taking land out of food production they exacerbate the effects of bad harvests and rising demand - but almost all the major agencies are now warning against expansion. And almost all the major governments are ignoring them.

They turn away because biofuels offer a means of avoiding hard political choices. They create the impression that governments can cut carbon emissions and - as Ruth Kelly, the British transport secretary, announced last week(8) - keep expanding the transport networks. New figures show that British drivers puttered past the 500 billion kilometre mark for the first time last year(9). But it doesn’t matter: we just have to change the fuel we use. No one has to be confronted. The demands of the motoring lobby and the business groups clamouring for new infrastructure can be met. The people being pushed off their land remain unheard.

In principle, burning biofuels merely releases the carbon they accumulated when they were growing. Even when you take into account the energy costs of harvesting, refining and transporting the fuel, they produce less net carbon than petroleum products. The law the British government passed a fortnight ago - by 2010, 5% of our road transport fuel must come from crops(10) - will, it claims, save between 700,000 and 800,000 tonnes of carbon a year(11). It derives this figure by framing the question carefully. If you count only the immediate carbon costs of planting and processing biofuels, they appear to reduce greenhouse gases. When you look at the total impacts, you find that they cause more warming than petroleum.

A recent study by the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen shows that the official estimates have ignored the contribution of nitrogen fertilisers. They generate a greenhouse gas - nitrous oxide - which is 296 times as powerful as CO2. These emissions alone ensure that ethanol from maize causes between 0.9 and 1.5 times as much warming as petrol, while rapeseed oil (the source of over 80% of the world’s biodiesel) generates 1-1.7 times the impact of diesel(12). This is before you account for the changes in land use.

A paper published in Science three months ago suggests that protecting uncultivated land saves, over 30 years, between two and nine times the carbon emissions you might avoid by ploughing it and planting biofuels(13). Last year the research group LMC International estimated that if the British and European target of a 5% contribution from biofuels were to be adopted by the rest of the world, the global acreage of cultivated land would expand by 15%(14). That means the end of most tropical forests. It might also cause runaway climate change.

The British government says it will strive to ensure that “only the most sustainable biofuels” will be used in the UK(15). It has no means of enforcing this aim - it admits that if it tried to impose a binding standard it would break world trade rules(16). But even if “sustainability” could be enforced, what exactly does it mean? You could, for example, ban palm oil from new plantations. This is the most destructive kind of biofuel, driving deforestation in Malaysia and Indonesia. But the ban would change nothing. As Carl Bek-Nielsen, vice chairman of Malaysia’s United Plantations Bhd, remarked, “even if it is another oil that goes into biodiesel, that other oil then needs to be replaced. Either way, there’s going to be a vacuum and palm oil can fill that vacuum.”(17) The knock-on effects cause the destruction you are trying to avoid. The only sustainable biofuel is recycled waste oil, but the available volumes are tiny(18).

At this point the biofuels industry starts shouting “jatropha!” It is not yet a swear word, but it soon will be. Jatropha is a tough weed with oily seeds that grows in the tropics. This summer Bob Geldof, who never misses an opportunity to promote simplistic solutions to complex problems, arrived in Swaziland in the role of “special adviser” to a biofuels firm. Because it can grow on marginal land, jatropha, he claimed, is a “life-changing” plant, which will offer jobs, cash crops and economic power to African smallholders(19).

Yes, it can grow on poor land and be cultivated by smallholders. But it can also grow on fertile land and be cultivated by largeholders. If there is one blindingly obvious fact about biofuel it’s that it is not a smallholder crop. It is an internationally-traded commodity which travels well and can be stored indefinitely, with no premium for local or organic produce. Already the Indian government is planning 14m hectares of jatropha plantations(20). In August the first riots took place among the peasant farmers being driven off the land to make way for them(21).

If the governments promoting biofuels do not reverse their policies, the humanitarian impact will be greater than that of the Iraq war. Millions will be displaced, hundreds of millions more could go hungry. This crime against humanity is a complex one, but that neither lessens nor excuses it. If people starve because of biofuels, Ruth Kelly and her peers will have killed them. Like all such crimes it is perpetrated by cowards, attacking the weak to avoid confronting the strong.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. IRIN Africa, 25th October 2007. Swaziland: Food or biofuel seems to be the question. http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=74987

2. Energy Current, 29th October 2007. Swaziland joins biofuel drive despite mounting food crisis. http://www.energycurrent.com/index.php?id=3&storyid=6359

3. Grant Ferrett, 27th October 2007. Biofuels ‘crime against humanity’. BBC Online.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7065061.stm

4. George Monbiot, 27th March 2007. A Lethal Solution. The Guardian.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/03/27/a-lethal-solution/

5. Valerie Mercer-Blackman, Hossein Samiei, and Kevin Cheng, 17th October 2007. Biofuel Demand Pushes Up Food Prices. IMF Research Department.
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/survey/so/2007/RES1017A.htm

6. Jacques Diouf, quoted by John Vidal, 3rd November 2007. Global food crisis looms as climate change and fuel shortages bite. The Guardian.

7. John Vidal, 3rd November 2007. Global food crisis looms as climate change and fuel shortages bite. The Guardian.

8. Department for Transport, October 2007. Towards a Sustainable Transport System:
Supporting Economic Growth in a Low Carbon World. http://www.dft.gov.uk/about/strategy/transportstrategy/pdfsustaintranssystem.pdf

9. Department for Transport, 2007. Transport Statistics Great Britain 2007. Table 7.1. Road traffic by type of vehicle: 1949-2006
http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/statistics/datatablespublications/tsgb/2007edition/sectionsevenroadsandtraffic.pdf

10. HM Government, 2007. The Renewable Transport Fuel Obligations Order 2007. http://www.opsi.gov.uk/SI/si2007/draft/20078818.htm

11. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, October 2007. Biofuels - risks and opportunities, p4. http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roads/environment/rtfo/289579

12. PJ Crutzen, AR Mosier, KA Smith and W Winiwarter, 1 August 2007. N2O release from agro-biofuel production negates global warming reduction by replacing fossil fuels. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions 7, pp11191–11205. http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/7/11191/2007/acpd-7-11191-2007.pdf

13. Renton Righelato and Dominick V. Spracklen, 17th August 2007. Carbon Mitigation by Biofuels or by Saving and Restoring Forests? Science Vol 317, p902. doi 10.1126/science.1141361.

14. AFP, 17th October 2007. IMF concerned by impact of biofuels on food prices. http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5h0RVoVwPFlD8MXLYyQbxHamr9NYw

15. Lord Bassam of Brighton, 29th March 2007. Parliamentary answer. Column WA310. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200607/ldhansrd/text/70329w0004.htm

16. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, October 2007. Biofuels - risks and opportunities, p5. http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roads/environment/rtfo/289579

17. Benjamin Low, 24th February 2006. CPO Prices Seen Up In 06 As Biodiesel Fuels Demand
http://sg.biz.yahoo.com/060224/15/3yy2x.html

18. You can see the calculations here: http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/11/23/feeding-cars-not-people/

19. Helene Le Roux, 27th July 2007. Singer, songwriter and activist promotes green energy in Africa. Engineering News Online. http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article.php?a_id=112872

20. John Vidal, ibid.

21. Mark Olden, 25th October 2007. Observations on: biofuels. New Statesman.
www.newstatesman.com/200710250020

Election watch!

2007-10-14T23:48:00.000-07:00

The best would have to be from the chaser's war on everything.

Click on the following link and then go to election watch.

Enjoy!

http://abc.net.au/tv/chaser/war/

Russell Peters Accents Clip

2007-10-12T07:51:00.001-07:00

Russell Peters - Beating Your Kids

2007-10-12T07:48:00.003-07:00

For all interns who have ever enjoyed anaesthetics

2007-10-12T07:21:00.001-07:00

These songs are fabulous!

AMATEUR TRANSPLANTS: Anaesthetists Hymn LIVE

2007-10-12T07:19:00.003-07:00

For anaethetists....

The Amateur Transplants - Eternal Clerking

2007-10-12T07:19:00.001-07:00

For interns.....

The Drugs Song - Amateur Transplants

2007-10-12T07:17:00.001-07:00

For medical students....

Moving house

2007-04-12T02:07:00.000-07:00

There is nothing quite like moving to make you feel like living in a tree. Whether you have a lot of stuff, not much stuff, or a lot of stuff having thought that you don't have much, there is always the disconnectedness which comes from having to find a new place. Imagine if we lived in a tree. Tree frogs rock.

If I hadn't had my mum helping me I would have ended up in the tree - a problem for my two dogs. She did the endless number of small jobs that would have hung around my neck like strangler vines for which I am very grateful!

Having said all of that I can now say that I have moved a little closer to work. I can now ride my bike, turn off the fans and aircon and reduce my environmental impact - although a tree would have been better from that point of view... And a big thankyou to my brother, father and Helen for helping too! You can come and stay on a branch anytime!

Uniting around pain and beer

2007-02-19T06:57:00.000-08:00

A belated entry - it is only a year late.

Northern NSW has a rather redneck reputation, so finding a peaceful enclave of multiculturalism in the 45 degree heat was something of a surprise.

In a place where there is no running water or electricity is a community clustered around some opal mines. They are all individually mined, and the miners speak more than 50 languages. The place where they all come to meet is of course, the pub. Welcome to the Club in the Scrub, one of a string of pubs where the beer is somehow kept cold. Close to one of the best maintained ANZAC memorials in NSW, the pubs have white boards for people to write up their names, service numbers and country. It doesn't matter where you served. Australian, Japanese, Russian all have their place - all you need is an understanding of the horrors of war.

People will unite around the most difficult of topics, but the point is, in a place where they can be themselves, they can unite.

Bienvenue!

2007-02-19T06:03:00.000-08:00

Hi all! Welcome to my blog spot - otherwise known as my personal attempt to keep you all up-to-date with my life while managing to sleep......... ;)

PS. These ants are edible! and can be found all around Townsville.

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