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June 16, 2011
· Sustainable ag can help conquer hunger UN
· E-Verify bill gives agriculture extra time
· Massive insect genome program launched
· Using nanotechnology to boost food safety
· Stop demonizing African ag investments
Sustainable ag can help conquer hunger UN
(Los
Angeles Times) Industrial-style farming, often known as the "green
revolution," has been widely credited with saving perhaps 1 billion people
from starvation by boosting the yield of grain crops in
But the green revolution, which relies on intensive use of water, fertilizer, pesticides and energy, has come at a cost, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization says. The FAO tally of such costs include anemic soils, depleted water supplies, diminished biodiversity, resilient pests, super weeds and polluted air, water and soil.
Now the U.N. agency, tasked with solving world hunger, has
thrown its support behind wider use of "sustainable agriculture" in
the developing world. It has issued a new primer, "Save and Grow," specifically targeting the 2.5 billion people
who scratch out a living on small farms throughout Asia, Africa and
The big idea? That humanity cannot just rely on intensified ag practices that require ever more powerful pesticides, fertilizers and genetically designed seeds to feed the world's burgeoning population. Experts predict farmers will need to double production to feed a global population that will add more than 2 billion more people by midcentury.
"In order to grow, agriculture must learn to save," the FAO reports. That means preserving soil's natural fertility by minimizing ploughing, and recycling crop waste to enrich the earth. It means smarter, integrated way of managing pests, rotating crops, and greater precision in the use of fertilizer and drip irrigation, the book authors say.
Some studies show that farmers can get bumper crops if they follow these practices and, at the same time, save water, energy and other costs.
To be sure, the developing world's farmers get mixed messages about how to coax more from their small plots of land. It remains to be seen how far the FAO's new advice can reach into the most remote places.
Yet "Save and Grow,"
available in six languages, already has lined up the endorsement of a key
agricultural scientist in
M.S. Swaminathan, who joined with
American agronomist Norman Borlag to bring the green
revolution to
E-Verify bill gives agriculture extra time
(Associated
Press)
The Legal Workforce Act would give the agriculture industry, where labor, industry and government officials say the vast majority of workers are illegal, three years to screen all new hires to make sure they are eligible to work in the U.S. The remaining employers would have two years to comply.
"We recognize that the agriculture industry is a special situation and we need to treat them differently," the bill's sponsor, Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said.
Farmers have complained that the requirement would decimate their work force, and that Americans are unwilling to take the back-breaking, low-paying jobs picking crops by hand.
Smith introduced the bill Tuesday, about three weeks after
the Supreme Court upheld an employer sanction law in
Smith's bill would apply only to new hires. It also would
pre-empt any state laws and end the use of paper I-9 forms that businesses
currently use to show that they've verified that their workers are legally
eligible to hold a job in the
E-Verify long has been considered among the only immigration-related bills likely to pass a divided Congress this year, but some had worried that making the system's use mandatory could destroy the agriculture industry.
Smith said he doesn't consider the bill a piece of immigration legislation, rather a jobs bill that eventually would move the nearly 8 million illegal workers out of the American workforce.
Agriculture industry officials have said the current system to hire legal immigrant workers the H-2A visa program is too cumbersome, time consuming and costly to use effectively.
"It has never been a great program or easy to work with," said Cathleen Enright, vice president of federal government affairs for the Western Growers Association. "It's an unbelievably crushing program."
She and others, including Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat from an agriculture-rich industry, have said they fear a mandatory E-Verify program would cripple the industry.
But Smith insisted that postponing full implementation for agriculture businesses for three years would give the industry plenty of time to legalize its workforce and avoid economic calamity.
"We give them a three year phase in," Smith said, adding that other industries would be phased into the program in six month intervals over two years. "But more importantly than that, we do not require them to check current employees that return to work. That allows them to build on their current workforce and every year transition into a more legal workforce."
Massive insect genome program launched
(Entomological Society of America via EurekaAlert.org) Its been called "the Manhattan Project of Entomology," an undertaking that has the potential to revolutionize the way we think about insects.
The i5k Initiative, also known as the 5,000 Insect Genome Project, was recently launched with a letter to Science (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6023/1386.citation) from ten signers known as the i5k Ad Hoc Launch Group. Now the latest issue of American Entomologist features an interview (http://entsoc.org/PDF/2011/AE-15k.pdf) with four of the signers about the project's origins, purpose, and goals.
The Initiative aims to sequence the genomes of 5,000 insects and other arthropods over the next five years in order to "improve our lives by contributing to a better understanding of insect biology and transforming our ability to manage arthropods that threaten our health, food supply, and economic security."
"We hope that generating this data will lead to better models for insecticide resistance, better models for developing new pesticides, better models for understanding transmission of disease, or for control of agricultural pests," said Daniel Lawson, a coordinator at the European Bioinformatics Institute. "Moving into the genetics era revolutionizes what you can do, what you can try to assay in your species, what you can infer from your experiments."
According to Gene E. Robinson, a professor at the
As the costs of genomic sequencing continue to fall due to technological improvements, it will soon become feasible to cheaply sequence the genomes of 5,000 insects of medical and agricultural importance, and then to mine the genomes for data which could lead to better insect control and management products and techniques.
"For example, we could mine data for cytochrome p450 detox genes. Those genes are involved with detoxifying chemicals that are inside insects, so if we know about those genes from one insect to another, we can use that information to actually kill the insects," said Kevin J. Hackett, a national program leader at the USDA Agricultural Research Service. "Or if you take beneficial insects like honey bees, which do not have as many detoxifying genes and are more susceptible to chemicals, that kind of information could be used to help protect bees."
The leaders of the i5k Initiative invite entomologists around the world to sign up and to create wiki pages at http://arthropodgenomes.org/wiki/i5K in order to recommend which insect genomes should be sequenced in the future, report which insect genomes are already being sequenced, and to start conversations with other scientists who are working on similar projects.
"We're trying to find out who's working on what
insects, and if they feel that having genomic information about their insects
would help," said Susan J. Brown, a professor at
"We want this to be a broad-based, inclusive effort," said Dr. Robinson. "We want all people to be involved, we want all insects of agricultural importance, all insects of medical importance, and so forth. Workshops will be organized and held, and there will be opportunities for further input, interactions, and the ability to shape the project."
###
To find out more, read the interview in American Entomologist at http://entsoc.org/PDF/2011/AE-15k.pdf
, and to participate, visit the i5k wiki website at http://arthropodgenomes.org/wiki/i5K
Using nanotechnology to boost food safety
(Food
Online) Food scientists are hoping to utilize nanotechnology to improve
food nutrition, quality, safety and taste, according to panelists Tuesday at
the
Nanotechnology is the understanding and control of miniscule atoms and molecules called nanoparticles. A nanoparticle is between 1 and 1,000 nanometers; a single nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. The science is currently being used in engineering, manufacturing, medicine, and most notably, in the delivery of cancer fighting drugs to hard-to-reach tumors.
Food scientists hope to harness nanotechnology to improve
food design, processing, protection and convenience, said Cristina Sabliov, associate professor in the Biological and
Engineering Department at
Specifically, Sabliov has been studying the use of nanotechnology to improve the delivery and absorption of vitamin E in the human body. Her recent research involves extracting vitamin E from rice, and successfully delivering the nutrient via a nanoparticle more directly into the body and improving absorption.
Nanotechnology cannot be used in food production until safety concerns are "disproved and tackled," said Sabliov. "Once delivery systems are perfected, and safety is ensured," nanotechnology can be used to deliver nutrients, and even medication.
Stop demonizing African ag investments
(allAfrica.com)
But these investments have been criticised as a new form of colonialism at best and downright land-grabbing at worst.
A new report from the US-based Oakland Institute says that
in 2009 alone, foreign investors leased or bought an area nearly the size of
It is true that many of the land deals are not structured to benefit local communities. But it is wrong to claim that such investments will only help promote food exports at the expense of local needs.
Such claims ignore
For example, in early 2011, the Saudi Star Agricultural
Development, a food firm owned by billionaire Sheikh Mohammed al-Amoudi, announced plans to invest $2.5 billion in
Ethiopia-based firms will lease idle arable land in the
lowlands of the country. This is part of
Critics argue that
Leasing now, they argue, amounts to allowing foreign investors to engage in land-grabbing that will disposes future generations of the ability to feed themselves.
But as I argue in my recent book, The New Harvest:
Agricultural Innovation in
Nearly 60 per cent of the world's available arable land is
in
What is needed is a vision among African leaders that would help the continent to contribute to global food needs while fostering local prosperity.
Efforts to achieve this have already been started through
foreign investments in agriculture.
So far, only 15 million is cultivated. Bringing three million hectares of land into cultivation in the coming four years is a modest step in the country's effort to foster economic transformation and does not represent misguided land allocation.
To take advantage of the opportunities
For example, only seven per cent of African agriculture is
irrigated - 3.6 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa - compared to 47 per cent in
south
In the past, each African country struggled to feed itself. Today, these countries will find it easier to expand agriculture through regional integration, trade and specialisation.
The country is learning from other African countries that have turned their agriculture around in very few years.
For example, this year, the country created the Ethiopia Agricultural Transformation Agency along the lines of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation.
The country is expanding higher education and will create nine new universities next year.
Universities are just one option to build technical competence. Adding vocational education to high schools located in agricultural areas is another tool.
This will make education more practical and relevant to young people. Emerging fields such as genomics could be introduced at this early age to inspire young people to become part of the global knowledge revolution.
Vocational schools can help to build competence in areas
such as food processing. Up to 40 per cent of the food produced in
Improvements are needed in processing, storage and transportation. Critics are right to demand greater transparency, ethical practices and improved performance standards.
But they are wrong to demonise all
the deals as "land grabs" without offering better alternatives on how
To call for a blanket moratorium on investment is tantamount
to asking
Prof Juma teaches at
End Transmission