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March 3, 2011
· Food prices hit record in February
· Plant clones may lead to tastier food
· Fresh Del Monte Produce posts loss in 4Q
· Solar collector doubles as greenhouse shade
· Changing times: Gauchos an endangered species
Food prices hit record in February
(Associated
Press)
Skyrocketing food prices have been among the triggers for
protests in
The Food and Agriculture Organization said in a statement that its food price index was up 2.2 percent last month, the highest record in real and nominal terms since the agency started monitoring prices two decades ago.
It was also the eighth consecutive month that food prices had risen, the Rome-based agency said. In January, the index had already registered a peak.
The increase was driven mostly by higher prices of cereals, meat and dairy products, the FAO said. Sugar was the only commodity of the groups being monitored whose price hadn't risen.
"Unexpected oil price spikes could further exacerbate an already precarious situation in food markets," said David Hallam, director of FAO's trade and market division. "This adds even more uncertainty concerning the price outlook just as plantings for crops in some of the major growing regions are about to start."
The index records changes monthly in international prices of a basket of food commodities, including cereal, oils and fats and sugar.
Plant clones may lead to tastier food
(The California Aggie) – A recent breakthrough in plant cloning techniques at UC Davis could help farmers grow tastier food. Scientists are developing a way to make plants produce perfect clones of themselves.
A current challenge in hybrid plant agriculture is getting future generations to retain favorable traits like fruit size or sweetness. Seeds from hybrids may contain different combinations of genes and will therefore produce offspring that contain different traits than their parents, the same way that humans are a mix of their mothers and fathers. When offspring are exact clones of their parents, it is known as true breeding.
In nature, there are certain plants that naturally create clone offspring through a process called apomixis. In apomixis, plants create seeds without fertilization. These seeds are exact clones of the mother plant.
A new method developed by UC Davis plant scientists and international collaborators from India and France will induce plants - that do not normally make clones - to produce seeds that are exact clones of the parent plant. This study was published on Feb. 18 in the journal Science.
The process that the researchers are going through is essentially an effort to artificially induce apomixis.
"We made mutations and altered genes in a commonly used laboratory plant. [The mutations] were induced with chemicals or by introducing new genetic material into the plant," said Simon Chan, assistant professor of plant biology at UC Davis and one of the authors of the study.
"The advantage of our strategy is that the processes we have manipulated are found in every plant: chromosome inheritance during cell division and meiosis," Chan said.
This means that once the method is perfected, it can be applied to any plant, including those that are important for agriculture. Once plants like corn and wheat can be grown from perfect clones, the growing process will be more efficient.
Chan collaborated with researchers Imran
Siddiq, from the Center for Cell and Molecular
Biology in
Ravi Maruthachalam, a
post-doctoral research fellow in Chan's lab, was originally part of Siddiq's team in
The cloning breakthrough did not come without challenges. An early step in the cloning process still requires crossing two parent plants, and the process of crossing is tricky and time consuming.
"We need to generate a system which upon self-pollination gives rise to clones. It may take some time to make it perfect," said Maruthachalam. "[So far], only one-third of the progeny were clones of the mother plant. To obtain full benefits, we need to improve the efficiency to 100 percent."
Another challenge was coordinating all of the experiments across three labs in three different countries.
The genetically modified crops that farmers grow are often unable to reproduce. This means that each season, farmers must buy new seeds from companies like Monsanto, who hold patents on many genetically modified crops. The UC Davis research project could give farmers an alternative to these patented strains.
"If it becomes a reality, then it will save time and effort needed to generate hybrid seeds," said Maruthachalam. "Farmers can save seeds from the desired hybrid and can propagate them indefinitely."
Fresh Del Monte Produce posts loss in 4Q
(businessweek.com) – Fresh Del Monte Produce Inc. reported a loss for its fourth quarter, partly dragged down by charges related to underperforming banana plantations.
The results fell short of Wall Street expectations, and its shares tumbles $2.44, or 8.5 percent, to $26.14 in morning trading.
The fruit and vegetable producer and distributor said Tuesday that its net loss was $9.6 million, or 16 cents per share, for the period ended Dec. 31. That compares with net income of $28.2 million, or 44 cents per share, a year earlier.
Taking out asset impairment charges tied mostly to
underperforming banana plantations in the
Analysts polled by FactSet expected net income of 9 cents per share.
Revenue declined 6 percent to $816.7 million from $872.1
million, hurt by lower pineapple volume due to bad weather in
The results missed Wall Street's expectations for revenue of $878.1 million.
For the year, Fresh Del Monte Produce's net income fell 57 percent to $62.2 million, or $1.02 per share, compared with $143.9 million, or $2.26 per share, in the prior year. Annual revenue rose 1 percent to $3.55 billion from $3.5 billion.
Solar collector doubles as greenhouse shade
(Cnet.com) – Solyndra has found a second use for its solar collector as a shade for greenhouses.
The company on Monday said that that its solar collectors,
which are an array of solar cell-covered glass tubes, are being tested at
agriculture research centers in
A conventional flat solar panel would block essentially all light, but Solyndra's collectors allow for light to pass through the glass tubes, which are coated with thin-film solar cells. That provides a diffused light conducive to greenhouse plant growth and allows growers to use their available space for power production, the company said.
"We are pioneering this new agricultural solar solution in Italy, where extensive shaded agriculture operations combined with strong insolation and a favorable feed-in tariff are driving strong interest and demand," Clemens Jargon, the president of Solyndra in Europe, Middle East, and Africa, said in a statement.
Solyndra is one of several U.S.-based thin-film companies formed last decade to meet anticipated solar growth with cheaper solar technologies. Solyndra received a $535 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy and is said to have raised more than $1 billion in private capital.
These thin-film solar companies face stiff price competition from European and Chinese suppliers using traditional solar panel material. Solyndra last year had to cancel its plans for an initial public offering and closed down a more expensive production plant in reaction to falling global costs.
Changing times: Gauchos an endangered species
(AFP
via Yahoo! News) SAN ANTONIO DE ARECO,
"The classic gaucho is disappearing," Lisandro Floral, a 30-year-old who manages a farm of 3,800
hectares (9,400 acres) deep in the
Floral has forsaken the horse and the boleadoras -- the traditional rope and leather ball sling used by gauchos to capture running cattle or game -- in favor of a 4x4 equipped with a satellite positioning system.
Even on the smaller, more traditional ranching properties, signs of "real" gauchos, as painted romantically in the epic poem "Martin Fierro" by Jose Hernandez, are few and far between.
Floral wears the trademark bolero hat but has exchanged the gaucho's baggy bombachos for jeans and made-in-China sneakers.
More threatening to gaucho herders than attire or the advent of All-Terrain Vehicles are the combined advances of soybeans and intensive livestock farming.
Feed lots make gauchos expendable because cattle are confined and fed specific diets in preparation for slaughter, instead of being allowed to graze freely and eating grass.
Cattle penned in
Soybean has meanwhile become the driving force of the Argentine economy, occupying 18 million hectares (44 million acres) and bringing in six billion dollars (4.4 billion euro) to the country annually.
Most of
Soy farmers often evict local farmers and shepherds, many of whom have lived on the land for generations but have no ownership documents, and some think there will be a backlash.
"People will ask for meat from traditional livestock and not from feed lots," Pablo Arena, owner of a ranch near San Antonio de Areco, told AFP, adding they could charge more for what is becoming a rare commodity.
San Antonio de Areco provided the setting for "Don Segundo Sombra," a famous book by Ricardo Guiraldes that examines the gaucho way of life and its impact on the Argentine psyche.
Patricio Santos Ortega, director of tourism in San Antonio
de Areco, 112 kilometers (70 miles) northwest of
"The gaucho, the rebel character, is adapting to modern times: as if he has finally decided to give up," Santos Ortega told AFP.
If anywhere is capable of resisting the modern clamor for change, it would be San Antonio de Areco, which is home to a gaucho museum named after Guiraldes.
A nightclub that opened in the town soon went bankrupt because people preferred the traditional music taverns in which gauchos play guitars.
But tourists wanting to see the gauchos of old should really
travel far from their traditional
End Transmission