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December 17, 2010
· Cargill’s billion dollar shopping spree
· Farmers urge CDC to ‘consider the source’
· North America now largest organic market
· Calif. growers balk at proposed water rules
· NASA: How hard are we pushing the land?
Cargill’s billion dollar shopping spree
(StarTribune.com) – Cargill Inc. has gone on a $1 billion-plus holiday shopping spree, with the announcement Wednesday that it is acquiring a large Australian grain handling and trading operation as well as a major Indonesian ingredient producer.
The Minnetonka-based agribusiness giant is paying $800
million to the Canadian firm Agrium Inc. for the commodities business that
Agrium recently took over when it bought
In a separate deal, Cargill is spending $300 million for an 85 percent stake in PT Sorini Agro Asia Corporindo Tbk, one of the world's leading producers of sorbitol, an ingredient in food, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.
Agrium, a fertilizer producer and retailer of agricultural products
based in
But Agrium isn't in the grain trade, and Cargill, of course, is one of the planet's biggest grain companies.
AWB, which was founded in the late 1930s as the
government-run Australian Wheat Board, is
"This significantly expands our grain handling and
trading operations [in
Cargill, one of the world's largest privately held firms,
started its operations in
While the exact price of the transaction with Agrium wasn't disclosed, Agrium said in a press release that proceeds from the sale to Cargill, combined with "the release of working capital from AWB Harvest Finance," will amount to about $870 million. The working capital release essentially involves money owed to AWB by farmers.
In the Sorini deal, Cargill will
nab a controlling stake in a company that has seven ingredient factories in
Sorbitol is a sweetener often used in diet foods and sugar-free gum. It's also an ingredient in toothpaste and vitamin C capsules.
Sorini will become a subsidiary of Cargill, which already has a foothold in the starches and sweeteners trades. Cargill is the world's largest food additive and ingredient producer, according to a July report by Leatherhead Food Research.
The company already has extensive operations and over 8,000
employees in
Farmers urge CDC to ‘consider the source’
(Wire Services)
The CDC believes this figure is more accurate than what had previously been reported due to better data and improved reporting methods.
“While this report will be a helpful tool, it does not identify the sources of contamination of foodborne illness outbreaks,” says Marilyn Dolan, Executive Director of the Alliance for Food and Farming, a non-profit organization comprised of farmers and farm groups from throughout the U.S. “This is why the Alliance commissioned an independent analysis of CDC data to help guide farmers of fruits and vegetables in their efforts to reduce foodborne illness outbreaks traced back to the farm.”
The
“We believe it is important to analyze the CDC data by tracking the source of contamination because this seems to be a key to successfully reducing foodborne illnesses outbreaks associated with food,” Dolan explains. “By monitoring how and where the food was contaminated, the industry can work together to make progress to correct any problems that may exist in the food chain.”
Ed Beckman, President of California Tomato Farmers and an Alliance for Food and Farming Board member, wants to see that 2.2 percent number drop to zero someday.
“Industry needs to continue to work diligently to reduce foodborne illness outbreaks linked to the farm, however, it’s crucial for government agencies to provide information that accurately tracks how and where the foodborne illness originated. Farmers need this information as do restaurants and consumers if real improvements are to be made and measured,” Beckman says.
Beckman noted that Congress and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have recently been working to revamp the country’s food safety system with an increased focus on food safety on the farm.
“Farmers recognize that food safety begins on the farm, but if we hope to make an impact in reducing the number of people who get sick each year, all segments of the food chain must work to prevent illness,” Beckman said. “From the farming segment, we want to continue working cooperatively with CDC and FDA to improve food safety and protect public health and get that 2.2 percent number down to zero. “
To read the Alliance for Food and Farming report titled, Analysis of Produce Related Foodborne Illness Outbreaks and learn more about the source of foodborne illness outbreaks associated with produce, please visit http://www.foodandfarming.info/docs/313Microbial_Produce_Analysis_2010_with_chart.doc
About the
North America
now largest organic market
(Food
Navigator) – The North American organic food and beverage market has
overtaken
However, despite fast growth in the amount of organic
farmland in
Globally, the organic food and drink market has seen growth rates slow during the recession to just under five percent per annum, when it had previously had several years of double-digit growth. But Organic Monitor’s Global Organic Food & Drink Market report said that the sector is beginning to pick up.
“Healthy growth rates are resuming as 'mainstreaming' of organic products continues. A major driver of market growth in all geographic regions is increasing distribution in mainstream retailers,” said the market research organization.
The report found consumer perception that organic foods are expensive continues to hinder growth in the sector, despite a price differential as low as 15 percent for some product categories, it said. Nevertheless, higher prices for organic products restrict demand to wealthy consumers.
Organic Monitor said it expects organic farmland to increase in developing countries, with demand remaining concentrated in affluent countries.
The US organic market has held up better than other regions, with sales of organic food more than tripling since 2000, from 1.2 percent of total food sales to 3.7 percent last year, to reach $24.8bn, according to Organic Trade Association figures. And the organic sector has continued to grow at a faster rate than the food industry as a whole. US organic food sales were up five percent last year, while general food sales grew by just two percent. Organic Monitor said that revenues are projected to approach $60m this year.
More information on its report is available at www.organicmonitor.com .
The market researcher is also planning a Sustainable Foods
Summit in
Calif.
(Monterey
County Herald) – Aiming to clean up some of the most toxic water in
Growers say the regulations are too burdensome, and countered last week with a proposal to have an industry-backed coalition tackle water quality problems.
Environmentalists say neither plan does enough to protect water supplies.
After more than two years in development, the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Board will consider adopting the new regulations in March.
Executive Officer Roger Briggs said board staff sought to create a plan that would be practical and hold people accountable.
"Things are getting worse," Briggs said. "We know if there's not some teeth behind it, it's too easy for people to blow it off."
Briggs pointed to preliminary results of a study of surface
water released last month. The results showed a greater percentage of water
samples from the
Statewide, 7 percent of samples were highly toxic, as
compared with 22 percent of samples on the
The study, which tested toxicity by looking at the survival
rate of aquatic creatures placed in samples, showed no to low toxicity in
samples from the
Water samples from the
on the
Samples taken from agricultural areas, as opposed to urban or undeveloped areas, also were more likely to be highly toxic.
The staff plan, a draft of which is open for public comment until Jan. 3, calls for reduction or elimination of agricultural pollutants and increasingly stringent monitoring programs depending on a farming operation's size, its pesticide use, the type of crops it grows and its proximity to impaired waterways.
Strawberry grower Tom Am Rhein, stressing that he spoke only for himself not for his industry, doesn't dispute that agriculture is responsible for some water quality problems, "some more serious than others." And he said they need to be fixed.
But Am Rhein argues the board staff's plan sets unattainable water quality goals, and is "so complex so as to be unenforceable."
"It wastes financial resources and delays implementation of real solutions," Am Rhein said.
The industry proposal calls for growers to enroll in water quality coalitions, which would survey farming practices, link growers with researchers to work on improving water quality, and focus on monitoring watersheds rather than individual growers.
"It's difficult to make conclusions by looking at one farm at one point in time," said Abby Taylor-Silva, spokeswoman for the Salinas-based Grower-Shipper Association of Central California.
Steve Shimek, executive director of the environmental advocacy group Monterey Coastkeeper, said cleaning up polluted water can't be a voluntary effort. Agricultural discharges must be regulated to keep toxins from pesticides and nitrates from fertilizers out of public water supplies, he said.
Shimek approves of putting the focus on the most significant dischargers, but said all farmers must clean up runoff. He worries the board's plan contains loopholes, singling out specific pesticides for special attention, for example. Growers could switch to less monitored chemicals, he said.
"We feel agriculture has every right to water, but they don't have a right to discharge their garbage into our water," he said. "The toxics and the nitrates have tremendous potential to impact human health if unregulated."
NASA: How hard are we pushing the land?
(NASA via redOrbit.com) – We may be becoming an ever more technologically advanced society, but we remain as dependent as ever -- if not more and more so -- on the natural world that surrounds us.
That is one takeaway from new NASA research that has found humans are using an increasing amount of the Earth's total land plant production each year for food, fiber, building and packaging materials and biofuels.
This remains a young data record, as one of the first global measurements tied to satellite data was published in 2004. That baseline-setting measurement was for the year 1995, when humans needed 20 percent of all plant growth for our various products. But the early returns are in, and despite uncertainties in the measurement, the signal is headed in a clear direction: up. From 1995 to 2005, global annual plant consumption rose from 20 percent to 25 percent of all plant production in those years.
As the human population continues to grow and more societies
develop modern economies, this rate of consumption is increasing both as a
whole and on a per capita basis globally, a NASA research group led by Marc Imhoff at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center,
The group has also used NASA satellite data to produce a multi-decadal record of plant production (from 1982 to 2007) that establishes a baseline of the Earth's productivity. But it is the consumption data, estimated from UN Food and Agriculture Organization country profiles, that reveals a snapshot of how much pressure human consumption is putting on the landscape. These new findings are being presented at the American Geophysical Union's Fall Meeting.
The first data point that jumps out from the research is the increase in demand for plants, from '95 to '05, from 20 percent to 25 percent. Imhoff said that scientists think this is a significant rise for that period of time, but that part of the challenge of this research is determining the limits of ecosystems' production and the impacts of a rising consumption rate.
"The question is, 'How hard are we pushing the land?'" Imhoff said. "People are wary about that percentage creeping up. Most people consider that a high number, although we're still doing research."
A Look at the Numbers
Perhaps the most significant fact about this data, as it concerns future trends, is that both total consumption due to population growth and per capita consumption are rising. It is, Imhoff said, non-linear growth.
While plant production itself varies from year to year,
mostly depending on weather, the demand trends are holding steady on the
increase. Depending on region, some of the increase is due simply to population
growth -- more people consume more food, more paper, more
wood for burning. This has been seen in places like
Already there are great discrepancies in how different
regions of the world consume plants for products. The average North American
consumes about six tons of plant-based carbon each year, while the average
South Asian consumes just a little more than one ton of plant-based carbon each
year, Imhoff said. Some of the differences driving
this gap could be more material used for product packaging and a greater
reliance on a meat-based diet, which requires intensive plant agriculture to
feed livestock, in
An illustrative example of the impact of population growth combined with increased personal consumption habits: If, in several decades, each person on the planet consumes at the current rates of North Americans, we will require more than 50 percent of Earth's plant production each year, Imhoff said.
"We've always looked at population and consumption as separate issues," Imhoff said. Right now, we are increasing both total population and per capita consumption. What we're realizing is the biosphere doesn't care whether you have a lot of people consuming a little or a few people consuming a lot. It’s the total rate that matters. And that rate is increasing."
Implications for consumption at that level do not constitute a "doomsday" scenario, Imhoff said. Too much remains unknown about how the climate could change, how agricultural practices could change and simply how the planet's ecosystems would respond to that level of impact. But the trend does point toward a future of a far more managed planet.
"We've gone from 20 percent demand to about 25 percent demand in 10 years," Imhoff said. "People worry about that percentage. If, in future scenarios, it's going to go up to something like 50 percent, we're looking at a very high demand for land management at all levels on the landscape globally. We would be heading toward a place where the planet would be very carefully managed, from end to end."
As more wild, natural ecosystems would be replaced by managed, monoculture, intensive agricultural systems, the planet would likely lose biodiversity. And as the population grows and becomes more dependent on those managed systems and a long-range food and product distribution network, many populations would become more at risk to perturbations to those systems, such as drought. Already, some densely populated urban areas consume more than 30,000 times the nearby regional plant production.
Maps of Green
The foundation for all this research is an accurate accounting of the global plant production each year. The research team gathers this data from NASA satellite sensors. The record, which can act as a baseline going forward, now stretches from 1982 to 2007 and is provided for the earlier years from Advanced Very High-Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) sensors and in more recent years from Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments.
In itself, these maps of plant production -- called net primary production, or NPP, in the science literature -- provide insights into how weather, climate patterns and in some cases government policy affect plant growth, said Ramakrishna Nemani, a research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., who has worked on the mapping.
Annual variations in precipitation and weather are readily
apparent in the data, which essentially captures the greenness of different
grassland, forest and other landscapes as a measure of their productivity. This
measure is combined with relevant weather data, such as sunlight and
precipitation, to create an index of global vegetation growth. But, Nemani said, decadal, climate-driven variations also appear
in the data, although these remain less well understood. In some cases human
decisions make their mark, such as changes to irrigation policy in
The satellite data also reveals the extent and severity of the impacts of droughts, heat and cold waves, and how fast the ecosystems recover.
"We're still figuring out how the biosphere behaves at interannual to decadal time scales," Nemani said. "That's where NASA comes in, providing consistent, repeatable global observations year after year."
Our Place
Goddard scientist Robert Wolfe uses the "spaceship Earth" idea to compare this research to another NASA role: Figuring out the essential needs and impacts of humans in a spacecraft. How much food and other products are needed? What happens to the waste? Where will the energy supply come from?
These are all questions addressed by this research as our "spaceship Earth" hurtles through space, Wolfe said.
"The human population is big enough now that it can have a substantial impact on Earth," Wolfe said. "These analyses are really helping in that area. And I think what we've done over the last ten or fifteen years is really improve the data we have from space."
A number of variables could change the current plant consumption trend: agricultural advances such as genetic engineering, climate change, or, less likely, drastic changes in consumption habits. For now the team's goal is to continue to observe the Earth's production and human demand for it as closely as possible.
Patrick Lynch, NASA's
Earth Science News Team
End Transmission