News: ‘Food & Agriculture’ Archive
‘Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds.’
via U.S. Farmers Cope With Roundup-Resistant Weeds – NYTimes.com.
‘(Reuters) – The dairy sector accounts for 4 percent of global man-made greenhouse gas emissions, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization said in a report.’
via Dairy sector adds 4 percent to man-made emissions: FAO | Reuters.
‘Genetically engineered crops have provided “substantial” environmental and economic benefits to American farmers, but overuse of the technology is threatening to erode the gains, a national science advisory organization said Tuesday in a report.’
via Study Finds Benefits in Modified Crops but Warns of Overuse – NYTimes.com.
‘Since grazing animals eat mostly cellulose-rich roughage while their feedlot counterparts eat mostly simple sugars whose digestion requires no rumination, the grazing animals emit two to four times as much methane, a greenhouse gas roughly 30 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.’
via Grass-fed beef packs a punch to environment | Analysis & Opinion | Reuters.
‘Two billion people worldwide do their cooking on open fires, producing sooty pollution that shortens millions of lives and exacerbates global warming. If widely adopted, a new generation of inexpensive, durable cook stoves could go a long way toward alleviating this problem.’
via World’s Pall of Black Carbon Can Be Eased With New Stoves by Jon R. Luoma: Yale Environment 360.
‘In light of the strong evidence that growing corn, soybeans, and other food crops to produce ethanol takes a heavy toll on the environment and is hurting the world’s poor through higher food prices, consider this astonishing fact: This year, more than a third of the U.S.’s record corn harvest of 335 million metric tons will be used to produce corn ethanol. What’s more, within five years fully 50 percent of the U.S. corn crop is expected to wind up as biofuels.’
via The Case Against Biofuels: Probing Ethanol’s Hidden Costs by C. Ford Runge: Yale Environment 360.
‘The European Union’s promotion of plant-based biofuels will raise EU farm incomes and agricultural commodity prices, but could create food shortages for the world’s poorest consumers, draft EU reports show’
‘Livestock should be taxed to reduce the contribution made by their flatulence to greenhouse gas emissions, the United Nations said yesterday in a report that will give anti-livestock campaigners fresh ammunition.’
‘WASHINGTON Reuters – Arctic ice melting could cost global agriculture, real estate and insurance anywhere from $2.4 trillion to $24 trillion by 2050 in damage from rising sea levels, floods and heat waves, according to a report released on Friday.’
via Arctic melt to cost up to $24 trillion by 2050: report | Reuters.
San Francisco, Feb. 2, 2010
Panelist A.G. Kawamura, California Secretary of Food and Agriculture spoke at Climate One at the Commonwealth Club’s “After Copenhagen, What Happened? What Now?”. There were so many panelists reporting on their experiences at the COP 15 that each was only allotted two minutes for their statement.
Partial excerpts:
“..for us, Copenhagen was a groundbreaking opportunity to really introduce the very realistic and very sobering proposition that if you have unpredictable weather that means unpredictable harvest”
“…when you recognize that in the underdeveloped world that almost half the products that are grown never make it on the plate, when you recognize that in the developed world, that almost thirty to forty percent of the products that are on the plate get thrown away, these are some huge issues that we have to deal with.”
Report by James George