"David Fogarty" - Plants take in more CO2 than thought, study finds

Wed, Sep 28 2011

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/28/us-carbon-plants-idUSTRE78R43E20110928

By David Fogarty

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Scientists might be able to predict climate change with more accuracy after discovering that plants consume carbon dioxide 25 percent faster than previously thought.

The finding, by an international team of researchers, could help refine efforts to fight global warming just at a time when U.N. talks are struggling to agree on a broader climate pact that will be the focus of a major meeting in December in South Africa.

Scientists say climate change will cause more extreme droughts and floods and rising sea levels and that nations must curb carbon pollution blamed for heating up the globe. Better and more accurate climate science can help change energy policies.

Lisa Welp-Smith of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, California, and her team came up with a new method for measuring how much CO2 is absorbed and released by plants.

The team used oxygen isotope markers in CO2 and more than 30 years of data from a global network that analyses air samples to measure changes in greenhouse gases, pollution and other factors.

"What this (finding) means is that plants are working faster than we thought they did," said Colin Allison, an atmospheric chemist and one of the study's authors, told Reuters from Australia.

The study was published on Thursday in the journal Nature.

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"McGill University" - Feeding the world while protecting the planet

McGill University, October 12, 2011

http://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/news/item/?item_id=202006http://

The problem is stark: One billion people on earth don’t have enough food right now. It’s estimated that by 2050 there will be more than nine billion people living on the planet.

Meanwhile, current agricultural practices are amongst the biggest threats to the global environment. This means that if we don’t develop more sustainable practices, the planet will become even less able to feed its growing population than it is today.

But now a team of researchers from Canada, the U.S., Sweden and Germany has come up with a plan to double the world’s food production while reducing the environmental impacts of agriculture. Their findings were recently published in the journal Nature.

By combining information gathered from crop records and satellite images from around the world, they have been able to create new models of agricultural systems and their environmental impacts that are truly global in scope.

McGill geography professor Navin Ramankutty, one of the team leaders on the study, credits the collaboration between researchers for achieving such important results.  “Lots of other scholars and thinkers have proposed solutions to global food and environmental problems. But they were often fragmented, only looking at one aspect of the problem at one time. And they often lacked the specifics and numbers to back them up. This is the first time that such a wide range of data has been brought together under one common framework, and it has allowed us to see some clear patterns. This makes it easier to develop some concrete solutions for the problems facing us.”

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"Staff Writers" - Rethinking connection between soil as a carbon reservoir and global warming

by Staff Writers

http://www.seeddaily.com/reports/Rethinking_connection_between_soil_as_a_carbon_reservoir_and_global_warming_999.html
Zurich, Switzerland (SPX) Oct 11, 2011

Soils store three times as much carbon as plants and the atmosphere. Soil organic matter such as humus plays a key role in the global carbon cycle as it stores huge amounts of carbon and thus counters global warming.

Consequently, the Kyoto Protocol permits the signatory countries to count soils and forests against greenhouse gas emissions as so-called carbon sinks.

Exactly why some soil organic matter remains stable for thousands of years while other soil organic matter degrades quickly and releases carbon, however, is largely unknown. The explanatory models used thus far assume that the degradation rate depends on the molecular structures of the soil organic matter.

An international team of 14 researchers headed by Michael Schmidt, a professor of soil science and biogeography at the University of Zurich, has now revealed that numerous other factors affect the degradation rate of soil organic matter in an article published in Nature.

Soil environment determines degradation rate of humus

The degradation speed isn't determined by the molecular structure of the dead plant debris, but by the soil environment in which the degradation takes place," says Schmidt, summing up the new results.

For instance, the physical isolation of the molecules, whether the molecules in the soil are protected by mineral or physical structures and soil moisture influence the degradation rate of soil organic matter. Furthermore, the researchers are able to show that, contrary to the scientific consensus, there is no humic matter in the soil and this should therefore not be used for models.

New experiments and models needed

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"Edward Miller" - Speculation in Agricultural Commodities, Driving up the Price of Food Worldwide and plunging Millions into Hunger

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26941

By Edward Miller

Global Research, October 5, 2011

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has again delayed the introduction of position limits required under the Dodd-Frank Act. These limits are intended to prevent speculation in (among other things) agricultural commodities, speculation which, many critics argue, have driven up the price of food worldwide and plunged millions into hunger.

In late 2006, the price of food and other commodities began rising precipitately, continuing throughout 2007 and peaking in 2008. Millions were cast below the poverty line and food riots erupted across the developing world, from Haiti to Mozambique. While analysts initially framed the crisis in terms of market fundamentals (such as rising population, increased demand for resource-intensive food, declining stockpiles, biofuel and agricultural subsidies, and crop shortfalls from natural disasters), a growing number of experts have tied the massive spikes to financial intermediation. As economist Jayati Ghosh explains:

“It is now quite widely acknowledged that financial speculation was the major factor behind the sharp price rise of many primary commodities , including agricultural items over the past year ... Even recent research from the World Bank (Bafis and Haniotis 2010) recognizes the role played by the “financialisation of commodities” in the price surges and declines, and notes that price variability has overwhelmed price trends for important commodities.”

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"Robert Jensen" - Going Global with Perennial Polyculture Agriculture

Published on Thursday, September 29, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/09/29-0

by Robert Jensen

Wes Jackson spent the weekend at The Land Institute’s annual Prairie Festival talking up -- with his usual precision and passion -- the science and strategy behind plans to revolutionize the way we grow food using perennial polyculture grains

A leading figure in the sustainable agriculture movement, Jackson has been pursuing the science and tweaking the strategy for more than three decades, building an impressive body of knowledge with his colleagues at “The Land,” as it’s known to everyone there. (The group also has produced an impressive full-bodied bread that was on the dinner table during the festival, made from an intermediate wheatgrass grain they’ve developed and dubbed “Kernza.”)

But, perhaps ironically, my faith in Jackson’s vision deepens not when he speaks from the depth of his knowledge (or when people happily bite into the bread) but when he emphasizes the uncertainty of what he knows. More on that, after some background.

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"Alliance for Natural Health" - Whose Side Is the USDA Really On?

Alliance for Natural Health  On September 20, 2011

http://www.anh-usa.org/whose-side-is-usda-really-on/

Last week, USDA secretary Tom Vilsack gave a clear directive to his department’s new Advisory Committee on Biotechnology and 21st Century Agriculture (AC21): come up with a plan ^[2] to compensate organic and conventional farmers whose crops become contaminated because of genetically engineered foods.

This directive is clearly intended to sound like it will help farmers. But we think it is actually intended to help Monsanto. To see why we think this, a bit of background.

The committee is comprised of a broad spectrum of interested parties ^[3]: organic scientists and organic trade organizations, conventional farming industry reps (including makers of high-fructose corn syrup), DuPont, agriculture experts, genetic engineering companies, lawyers, and a few concerned individuals.

As we reported recently, courts have increasingly been siding against GE and biotech farming ^[4] when surrounding farms and products become contaminated. Bayer CropScience recently agreed to pay up to $750 million ^[5] to farmers in the Midwest to settle lawsuits over its contamination of the US rice supply.

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"Roger Knight" - A Short History of Glass-Steagall and the Result of Its Murder

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Death-of-Glass-Steagal-by-Rodger-Knight-110917-726.html.September 18, 2011

By Rodger Knight

Outside of agriculture, which had been experiencing an economic depression since the end of World War I, the American economy during the 1920s was robust, vibrant and it seemed as though it would grow forever.  The country had experienced an unprecedented industrial expansion starting with the Civil War and the demands for manufactured goods (and the technology to produce those goods on a grand scale) the war engendered. That expansion had continued through World War I and into the Roaring Twenties.  So great was the faith in the American economy that as late as 1928 Herbert Hoover remarked in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention:

"We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing from among us."

http://us.history.wisc.edu/...

The Twenties roared because people had money to spend, a compulsion to buy and an enthusiastic but intemperate faith in the future.  People had money to spend because the industrialist shared this unrestrained but ultimately insane belief that prosperity would not only last forever but that it would expand forever.  Profits were, indeed, high and business, in anticipation of even greater rewards, reinvested in new factories creating new jobs and the new jobs created new spending.  In the industrialized East, at least, the future could not have looked brighter.  Nowhere would this mentality be more clearly displayed than in the stock market; almost nowhere would it eventually prove to be more destructive.

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"Kristina Hubbard" - The President and Seed

Kristina Hubbard
Daily Yonder, 24 August 2011
http://www.dailyyonder.com/speak-your-piece-president-and-seed/2011/08/23/3490

*"The crops that we grow are the basis of our civilization," Todd Leake said. "If anything belongs in the public domain it is the crops we grow for food."

[image caption: President Barack Obama's administration has been investigating monopoly concentration in the seed business for over two years. But when the President spoke on the steps of the Seed Savers Exchange, an independent seed company, he didn't mention that inquiry once. Nor did he talk about business concentration in other areas of agriculture, despite hearings held by his Department of Justice all over rural America.]

Last week President Obama held a town hall meeting on the grounds of Iowa's Seed Savers Exchange, an organization dedicated to saving and sharing heirloom seeds.

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Dave Murphy: Politics, Farmers and Change -- The End of Rural America

Published on Friday, August 19, 2011 by The Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-murphy/family-farms_b_929955.html

by Dave Murphy

This week President Obama returned to Iowa, where he launched his successful bid to the White House, to speak about "jobs and economic security" in rural America. According to the White House, his bus tour is not a campaign trip, but veteran political observers would disagree. For farmers and rural advocates this tour is really about something much larger than electioneering or a new jobs program, it's about the survival of rural America.

While the plight of urban decay has been widely publicized in the mainstream press, similar issues facing our country cousins (myself included), lack of well paying jobs, rural brain drain, food deserts, poverty and lack of access to quality health care, have either been ignored or largely misunderstood by policy makers and the press. Today, more rural Americans are on food stamps and face bleaker economic prospects than their urban counterparts, despite the romantic image of small town life often portrayed by the media.

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The New Green Revolution: How Twenty-First-Century Science Can Feed the World

Countries can and must reorient their agricultural systems toward modes of production that are not only highly productive, but also highly sustainable.

by Olivier De Schutter and Gaëtan Vanloqueren

Some crises appear and disappear in global media while remaining acute in the lives of real people. Global food insecurity is this type of crisis. In January 2011 the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) warned that global food prices in December 2010 exceeded the 2008 peak during the so-called food price crisis that sparked “food riots” across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.¹ The UN also warned that the price increase would not stop overnight and that we were entering “danger territory.”² Although prices stabilized in the spring, global food prices in May 2011 remained higher than they were in June 2008. We will see more price spikes in the future, due to a growing discrepancy between supply and demand, the impacts of climate disruption on agricultural production, and the merger of the energy and food markets. The food crisis is here to stay.

Governments have pledged to reinvest massively in agriculture. After three decades of neglect, this is welcome news. However, as countries announce impressive figures on the scope of their reinvestment, we tend to forget that the most pressing issues today regarding agricultural reinvestment involve not only how much, but how.

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