" I heard it through the AgLine"

June 1, 2011

 

 

·        China’s lust for farmland makes Brazil uneasy

·        Medicine plants yield more than a cup of tea

·        3.6 million acres doused by recent floods

·        Plate icon to replace USDA food pyramid

·        Beekeepers work to revitalize their industry

 

 

China’s lust for farmland makes Brazil uneasy

 

(The New York Times) URUAÇU, Brazil — When the Chinese came looking for more soybeans here last year, they inquired about buying land — lots of it.

 

Officials in this farming area would not sell the hundreds of thousands of acres needed. Undeterred, the Chinese pursued a different strategy: providing credit to farmers and potentially tripling the soybeans grown here to feed chickens and hogs back in China.

 

“They need the soy more than anyone,” said Edimilson Santana, a farmer in the small town of Uruaçu. “This could be a new beginning for farmers here.”

 

The $7 billion agreement signed last month — to produce six million tons of soybeans a year — is one of several struck in recent weeks as China hurries to shore up its food security and offset its growing reliance on crops from the United States by pursuing vast tracts of Latin America’s agricultural heartland.

 

Even as Brazil, Argentina and other nations move to impose limits on farmland purchases by foreigners, the Chinese are seeking to more directly control production themselves, taking their nation’s fervor for agricultural self-sufficiency overseas.

 

“They are moving in,” said Carlo Lovatelli, president of the Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries. “They are looking for land, looking for reliable partners. But what they would like to do is run the show alone.”

 

While many welcome the investments, the aggressive push comes as Brazilian officials have begun questioning the “strategic partnership” with China encouraged by former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The Chinese have become so important to Brazil’s economy that it cannot do without them — and that is precisely what is making Brazil increasingly uneasy.

 

“One thing the world can be sure of: there is no going back,” Mr. da Silva said while visiting Beijing in 2009.

 

China has become Brazil’s biggest trading partner, buying ever increasing volumes of soybeans and iron ore, while investing billions in Brazil’s energy sector. The demand has helped fuel an economic boom here that has lifted more than 20 million Brazilians from extreme poverty and brought economic stability to a country accustomed to periodic crises.

 

Yet some experts say the partnership has devolved into a classic neo-colonial relationship in which China has the upper hand. Nearly 84 percent of Brazil’s exports to China last year were raw materials, up from 68 percent in 2000. But about 98 percent of China’s exports to Brazil are manufactured products — including the latest, low-priced cars for Brazil’s emerging middle class — that are beating down Brazil’s industrial sector.

 

“The relationship has been very unbalanced,” said Rubens Ricupero, a former Brazilian diplomat and finance minister. “There has been a clear lack of strategy on the Brazilian side.”

 

While visiting China last month, Brazil’s new president, Dilma Rousseff, emphasized the need to sell higher-value products to China, and she has edged closer to the United States. “It is not by accident that there is a sort of effort to revalue the relationship with the United States,” said Paulo Sotero, director of the Brazil Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “China exposes Brazil’s vulnerabilities more than any other country in the world.”

 

China’s moves to buy land have made officials nervous. Last August, Luís Inácio Adams, Brazil’s attorney general, reinterpreted a 1971 law, making it significantly harder for foreigners to buy land in Brazil. Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, followed suit last month, sending a law to Congress limiting the size and concentration of rural land foreigners could own.

 

Mr. Adams said his decision was not a direct result of land-buying by China, but he noted that huge “land grabs” in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, including China’s attempt to lease about three million acres in the Philippines, had alarmed Brazilian officials.

 

“Nothing is preventing investment from happening, but it will be regulated,” Mr. Adams said.

 

A World Bank study last year said that volatile food prices had brought a “rising tide” of large-scale farmland purchases in developing nations, and that China was among a small group of countries making most of the purchases.

 

Foreigners own an estimated 11 percent of productive land in Argentina, according to the Argentine Agriculture Federation. In Brazil, one government study estimated that foreigners owned land equivalent to about 20 percent of São Paulo State.

 

International investors have criticized the restrictions. At least $15 billion in farming and forestry projects in Brazil have been suspended since the government’s limits, according to Agroconsult, a Brazilian agricultural consultancy.

 

“The tightening of land purchases by foreigners is really a step backwards into a Jurassic mentality of counterproductive nationalism,” said Charles Tang, president of the Brazil-China Chamber of Commerce, saying that American farmers had bought sizable plots in Brazil in recent years, with little uproar.

 

Responding to the criticism, Brazil’s agriculture minister said this month that Brazil might start leasing farmland to foreigners, given the barriers to ownership.

 

China itself does not allow private ownership of farmland, and it cautioned local governments against granting large-scale or long-term leases to companies in a 2001 directive. China also bans foreign companies from buying mines and oil fields.

 

But as more of its people eat meat, China is expected to increase its soybean imports, mostly for animal feed, by more than 50 percent by 2020, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Last month, Chongqing Grains signed a $2.5 billion agreement to produce soybeans in the Brazilian state of Bahia. Last October, a Chinese group agreed to develop about 500,000 acres of farmland in Río Negro Province in Argentina.

 

In both cases, Chinese officials proposed buying large tracts of land before local officials steered them toward production agreements.

 

“We are never going to sell the land,” said Juan Manuel Accatino, the minister of production in Río Negro.

 

Brian Willott, an American farmer who came to Brazil in 2003, said Chinese interest in buying farms had not abated. “Everywhere you go to look at a farm they say, ‘We are considering selling to the Chinese,’ ” he said.

 

In Goiás State, nearly 70 percent of the soy grown went to the Chinese last year, and the Chinese are seeking to use about 20 million acres of pastureland that has not been cultivated for decades.

 

“For them, the faster the better,” said Antônio de Lima, Goiás’ agriculture minister.

 

Farmers here say they share Chinese officials’ goal of breaking the stranglehold of international trading companies like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland.

 

But Tan Lin, a manager at the Chinese company involved in Goiás, said he doubted Chinese companies were ready to replace them.

 

“I don’t see that the Chinese companies working here have that expertise yet,” Mr. Tan said. But “if you can do that, it is good, of course.”

 

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Medicine plants yield more than a cup of tea

 

(physorg.com) “Medicines from plants" – one thinks of herbal teas or valerian drops. However, that has nothing in common with what the researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME in Aachen, Germany, are doing. They use plants to produce biopharmaceuticals. Those are proteins that, unlike many other medications, cannot be chemically produced.

 

Biologically produced medications, such as recombinant insulin or therapeutic antibodies to fight cancer, have become indispensable. Plants are particularly suitable for producing complex active substances. The reason is that these substances can be produced inexpensively and on a large scale in plants. Compared to producing them in animal cells, plants have the advantage that they grow quickly, are easy to look after and can be protected well against damaging influences.

 

Precisely controlled raising of plants

 

Tobacco was the plant of choice. Dr. Jürgen Drossard explains the reason: "Tobacco has long been a very interesting plant for molecular biologists. It is easy to modify, meaning a foreign gene coding for the pharmaceutical protein can be introduced. In addition, a lot of biomass grows quickly and therefore a greater quantity of the desired proteins is also produced." The active substances must be absolutely safe. It is for this reason that the requirements both for growing the plants and for the processes and equipment for the preparations are particularly high. The researchers from Aachen passed the stringent tests of the supervisory and approval authorities for both. "The tobacco plants are protected from all external influences and grown under precisely controlled conditions. We practically grow them on sterile substrates. And fertilization with manure is absolutely out of the question, of course," says Dr. Thomas Rademacher.

 

But growing the plants only solved a part of the problem. Because, how does one get as much protein as possible from the leaves that are harvested? The team developed the equipment that is suitable for that itself, because current processes, coming from food technology, for example, work on an entirely different scale. The complete pulping process now takes place in a closed loop.

 

Biopharmaceuticals for clinical studies

 

Dr. Jürgen Drossard, Dr. Thomas Rademacher and Dr. Stefan Schillberg from the IME, in cooperation with Prof. Dr. Wiltrud Treffenfeldt from Dow AgroSciences and Dr. ctive substances in transgenic plants and plant suspension cells – economically and safely. They are being honored with the Prize for Human-Centered Technology for their achievements.

 

"We wanted to show that it can be done, that biopharmaceuticals can be produced that are suitable for clinical studies," says Dr. Stefan Schillberg of the IME. And this is exactly where the team is at with its development. The proteins that are produced in this manner are currently being tested with the objective that they be used in clinical studies. For example, the antibodies could be used to manufacture a vaginal gel with which women could protect themselves from an HIV infection. In a new project, the researchers are currently working on producing a malaria vaccine in plants.

 

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3.6 million acres doused by recent floods

 

(IowaFarmer.com) WASHINGTON, D.C. — After learning firsthand from state Farm Bureaus about recent flooding devastation in the South, the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates nearly 3.6 million acres of farmland has been affected by the natural disaster.

 

On a Farm Bureau nationwide call late last week, states also reported an estimated 40 percent of this year’s rice crop has been affected, according to a news release.

 

Arkansas topped the list with a million acres affected, including 300,000 acres of rice and 120,000 acres of wheat.

 

Illinois was estimated to have 500,000 acres of farmland under water, with Mississippi and Missouri coming in at 600,000 and 570,000 acres, respectively.

 

Tennessee reported 650,000 acres and Louisiana was pegged at 280,000 acres.

 

“There is no doubt about it, the effect of the flooding on farmers and ranchers is being felt deeply across the South,” said Farm Bureau Chief Economist Bob Young. “One is reminded of the ’93 or ’95 floods in terms of scale of affected area.” But, said Young, it’s critical the government acts quickly to rebuild the levees and allow producers to make plans for the future. “In many of these areas, agriculture is the major economic driver for the region,” said Young.

 

“While some may be able to get a crop in the ground this year, we need to also think about the long-term economic health of these farms and communities.”

 

Without the levees in place to protect homes and farms however, it may be hard to make those investments, added Young.

 

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Plate icon to replace USDA food pyramid

 

(CNN) -- The U.S. Department of Agriculture is planning to swap in a plate icon for the food pyramid this week, an individual familiar with the new guidelines told CNN over the weekend.

 

The new image, expected to be unveiled Thursday, is meant to help remind Americans to make healthy food choices.

 

"We presume that it will be divided into sections that will show you how much of different types of foods you should be eating," said Elizabeth Cohen, CNN senior medical correspondent, about the plate image.

 

The USDA said in a statement this week that the new food icon would be "part of a comprehensive nutrition communication initiative that provides consumers with easy-to-understand recommendations, a new website with expanded information, and other tools and resources."

 

It did not say then what the new icon would be.

 

The Food Guide Pyramid was introduced in 1992 and replaced in 2005 by MyPyramid.

 

"The pyramid, to put it gently, is not considered a great public health success," said Cohen. "It was confusing and divided into lots of intricate sections."

 

The original version is the widely recognized pyramid that shows a hierarchy of food groups. Grains, vegetables and fruits were represented at the base of the pyramid, suggesting they should be eaten often. Foods to be consumed in some moderation, like fats, dairy products and meats, were toward the top of the icon.

 

The 2005 version had vertical, rather than horizontal, blocks representing the various food groups. It also had a figure stepping up the side of the pyramid, reminding consumers of the need to exercise.

 

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Beekeepers work to revitalize their industry

 

(Discovery News) – Chemical pesticides, viruses, mites and many other problems have unleashed "the perfect storm" against honeybee populations worldwide. But beekeepers are fighting back in a valiant attempt to stave off the disastrous bee population decline.

 

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, honey-producing colonies have experienced a population drop of more than 60 percent in the past 60 years. The United Kingdom's honeybee population has halved in recent years, with declines also reported in the Middle East, Asia and other parts of Europe.

 

Aside from ecosystem issues, the problem warrants human attention because 70 percent of the crop species that feed 90 percent of all people in the world require bees for pollination.

 

"Loss of genetic diversity resulting from convenient-but-unhealthy breeding practices, weakened immune system strength combined with exposure to unfamiliar diseases and pests, which are the result of vastly speeded up global trade, plus the slow deterioration of generation after generation of bees' repeated exposure to non-lethal doses of pesticides has created what many researchers call 'the perfect storm' of combined impacts," North Carolina-based beekeeping activist N'ann Harp told Discovery News.

 

"What we are witnessing in essence is the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back," added Harp, who is the founder of Friends of Honeybees.

 

She is helping to launch the international initiative Buzz for Bees that hopes to better inform the public about the problems and to raise funds for bee research. Harp also made headlines recently after assisting in the safe relocation of an enormous honeybee colony that had established itself within a barn on the historic Biltmore Estate in Asheville, N.C.

 

Harp believes one of the greatest challenges facing U.S. agriculture is the long-standing tradition of moving hundreds of thousands of hives by trailer tractor around the country on an annual basis for pollination duties following crop blooms.

 

"Bees get on and off the trucks like tourists on tour buses," she said. "Those who may be sick spread disease to the local bees. They also pick up new viruses or pests they may not have had when they arrived and spread them at the next stop-over."

 

This damaging cycle ramped into crisis mode in recent years, contributing to what's known as Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD. While multiple factors appear to be involved, a deadly bee virus may be key.

 

"The virus causing CCD came to us when U.S. beekeepers were importing Australian packaged bees to meet the high pollination demand of the almond growers here in California," Helene Marshall of Marshall's Farm Natural Honey told Discovery News.

 

As of Dec. 21, 2010, the USDA, by Federal Order, removed Australia from the list of approved regions for the importation of adult honeybees. It's too early to tell, but many experts are hopeful that the ban will help to curb CCD.

 

Silvia Canas, director of the Spanish beekeeping organization Vida Apicola, is also concerned about pesticide usage, while Maureen Maxwell of BeesOnline expressed worry over aggressive mites from China that wound up in the widespread Australian and New Zealand honeybees and are still circulating.

 

Marshall said she has "run out of ways" to control the mites. "Beekeepers should breed from their strongest queens to create genetically superior bees," she advises.

 

Marshall is trying to do just that and has even partnered with San Francisco's landmark Fairmont Hotel, which now has honeybee hives in its culinary garden. Beekeeping is also taking place at other Fairmont hotels in Dallas, Toronto, Vancouver, China, Kenya and St. Andrews, Canada.

 

"It is wonderful that even in urban area backyards, businesses and hotels, such as our own San Francisco Fairmont, bees are now welcomed," Marshall said. "The presence of the bees in public places has definitely created more awareness to city and country dwellers alike."

 

"After all," Marshall said, "even though our honeybees are not native to the U.S. (they're native to South and South East Asia), they lived in San Francisco before we did!"

 

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