Food

Is Organic Farming ‘Mainstream Agriculture In Waiting’?

Organic farming has huge potential. Not only does it have many benefits over conventional farming practices, but that with adjustments organic farming could yield as much produce. By Angela Singleton An independent report suggesting that organic farming has huge potential and could even be ‘mainstream agriculture in waiting’ has been welcomed by the Soil Association, the UK’s leading environmental charity campaigning for sustainable, organic farming and healthy food. Peter Melchett, policy director for the Soil Association, said: “Organic farming does not have all the answers to the challenges of climate change and diet-related ill-health and there is still a lot of work to do to improve organic systems. But the report shows the positive impact that organic farming could have.” The key findings include increased beef production by 68 per cent and lamb by 55 per cent; a fall in energy-intensive inputs: fertiliser inputs could be cut by 95 per cent and sprays by 98 per cent; and an estimated 73 per cent increase in farm employment. The survey also argues that organic farming has many benefits over conventional farming practices – water pollution and greenhouse gas emissions would reduce, spray use would be cut by 98 per cent and fertilisers by 95 per cent. With adjustments, organic farming could yield as much produce as conventional farming. The report – England and Wales under organic agriculture: how much food could be produced? – shows the positive impact that such farming could have. It was carried out by Philip Jones and Richard Crane at the University of Reading, and was funded by independent trust the HCD Memorial Fund, and the Soil Association. While the survey acknowledges that organic farming aims to be an optimal output system rather than a high output system, it suggests that, as consumers, we need to consider […]

The world of cheap produce and its consequences

By Bee Wilson If you want to make a roomful of people argue with each other, one of the fastest ways is to express any kind of opinion about “cheap food”. To some, it is perfectly obvious that cheap food is an evil that results in underpaid farmers, degraded land and tortured animals. To others, it is equally obvious that cheap food is the great safeguard that stands between poor people and hunger. To this second group, the attacks on cheap food look suspiciously like “And-where-do-you-shop?” snobbery from those who have never known the anxiety of feeding a family on benefits. But to the first group, most of the so-called cheap food in the world is not as cheap as it seems – the concept ignores the high external costs of industrial agriculture. As so often in heated debates, the two sides are arguing about different things. “Cheap food” has many faces, depending on whether you are a producer or a consumer and also whether you happen to have a shopping list in your hand. Food retailers know that it is an unusual customer who does not look favourably on low prices – or “everyday value” as the supermarket Tesco has it. The same was true in Victorian London, where anyone who wanted to buy a pound of strawberries or some onions or a nice fresh herring for the lowest price would get it from a street seller called a costermonger. The word costermonger derives from a kind of large round apple called a “custard” (not to be confused with the Asian fruit the custard apple), but by 1850, these humble pedlars were selling not just apples but almost any edible item that a Victorian could want, from oysters to gooseberries, and from bloaters (a kind of smoked herring) to […]

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Food waste

SINGAPORE: If you and your family made it a point to finish every morsel of your Chinese New Year meals, then you have all done exceptionally well. This is because every year, Singapore sees hundreds of thousands of tonnes of food going to waste. According to the National Environment Agency, the country wasted approximately 790,000 tonnes of food in 2014. During the Chinese New Year period, food waste increases by up to 20 per cent. As a small country with limited agricultural ability, Singapore is heavily reliant on imports for food. In 2014, Singapore spent US$10.6 billion (S$14.8 billion) importing 5.93 million tonnes of food. But out of that, 13 per cent of its imports, or US$1.4 billion worth of it, end up as waste. Since 2004, food wastage has increased almost 50 per cent, while food imports have been steadily increasing by 37 per cent over the same period. “As the country gets more affluent, society gets richer, more people have more income to buy food,” said Mr Eugene Tay, the founder of sustainability consultancy, Green Future Solutions, in an interview with Channel NewsAsia’s It Figures. “We can buy a lot of food imported from different countries. You buy more stuff, and you can’t finish it, and it expires and then it goes to waste.” In Singapore, food wastage has been traced to each and every step in the lifecycle of food production, from farm to dinner plates. At the root: The Farm Mr Alan Toh has been managing his farm, Yili Vegetation, for almost two decades. It is one of 200 small farms in Singapore. Along with his son, Mr Zheng Jie, he is part of Singapore’s agriculture industry, which occupies just 1 per cent of the island’s land space. With only four hectares of land to work […]

Assessing the resource potential of Sal seeds in India

A study, by Dr Girish Chandra Pant of the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education, assessed the present and future resource potential of Sal seeds, existing market mechanisms and their role in livelihood generation for rural communities in India. The Sal tree, Shorea robusta, is an evergreen species native to India, Myanmar and Nepal. Sal seeds are an important non timber forest product and source of income for about 90,000 forest fringe villages with a combined population of 56 million. The Sal seed is prized mainly for its oil, which has significant potential for export markets due to its low price. During the months of May and June, many rural people in central, eastern and northern India collect the seeds in order to supplement their incomes until the agricultural season begins. “There is an urgent need to attract villagers to Sal seed collection work, fix the procurement rates at a level that allows at least a minimum wage to be collected by the collectors, assess the sustainable harvesting levels and practices to ensure timely processing of the seeds to preserve their quality, and increase awareness among collectors to avoid the use of unhygienic sacks and pesticides for storing kernels,” states Dr Pant. Based on his investigation of Sal seed collection activities at three sites in Uttarakhand state in northern India, the author recommends that clear-cut guidelines be set for estimating collection quantities so that planning for collection and marketing can be prepared accordingly. In addition, “the government should review the decision to ban Sal seed collection in Kumaun and allow the use of Sal fat in food items such as chocolates and ice creams,” he concludes. The current ban on collecting Sal seeds in Kumaun was imposed to improve the regeneration of Sal trees in this region. –gcpant10@yahoo.com; […]

Caution urged to resolve food crisis

The world has faced food crises twice since the latter half of the 20th century. The first one took place in 1973. The world end of term grain stock ratio, which had been on the decline for some years because of the worldwide grain failure, sank to a record-low of 15.4% in 1972. In the same year, the Soviet Union became a net-importer of grain due to the increase of livestock products consumed by the Soviet people. The 1973 crisis was caused by factors such as the bulk purchase of grain by the Soviet Union under the circumstances of poor harvest, and the U.S. placed an embargo on soybeans, albeit for a short period of time. The impact was so enormous that they named it the Reappearance of the Ghost of Malthus, and grain was referred to as the third strategic material behind nuclear weapons and oil. After that, however, countries including the European Community (EC) steered toward the enhancement of agricultural production, which considerably alleviated the condition of grain supply and demand. While protecting national borders by levying import surtaxes under the Common Agricultural Policy, the EC protected intraregional agriculture through generous support for farm product prices. As a result, they were plagued by excess produce in the 1980s. The EC implemented the raw milk quota system in 1984, and the U.S. also undertook the set-aside. The world grain market substantially shifted to the tone of excesses. The EC, which had failed to eliminate such excess, exported excess agricultural products to developing countries with export subsidies, and the U.S. used the said subsidies in defiance, causing a dumping battle with financial burdens. The agricultural negotiations in the Uruguay Round of GATT started in 1986 under the theme of removing the market distortion through agricultural protection by such developed countries, […]

Food Ingredients in Cosmetics: Sustainability Implications

London – A wide range of food ingredients are making their way into cosmetic & personal care products. Organic Monitor finds the trend is driven by consumer demand for health & wellness products, however it brings sustainability implications. As shown at the Sustainable Cosmetics Summit Latin America (www.sustainablecosmeticssummit.com/Lamerica), the move towards food ingredients is partly driven by innovation: product developers and formulators are looking to the kitchen table for inspiration. With many consumers associating food ingredients with health benefits, such cosmetic products are usually marketed on these ingredients. The Body Shop has been a frontrunner in this respect, having imagery of agricultural ingredients on product packs and store shelves for decades. A large number of cosmetic products are now marketed on these ingredients. Some raw material firms are developing novel actives from food sources. One example is ReGeniStemT Red Rice, which is derived from Himalayan red rice material. Produced by Lonza, the natural active is marketed as having anti-ageing qualities. The UK company Oat Cosmetics specialises in producing similar actives from oats. Some ingredient companies are using food ingredients as feedstock for new cosmetic materials. DuPont Tate & Lyle was formed as a joint-venture between the chemical company DuPont and the sugar company Tate & Lyle. It uses corn sugar to make the monomer 1,3-propanediol as a petroleum alternative for cosmetic applications. Other companies, such as Colonial Chemicals and Wheatoleo, are using sugar chemistry to create new green surfactants. Food ingredients have had most success with natural cosmetics. Some brands, such as Yes to Inc have developed entire ranges based on a core food ingredient. After its initial success with Yes To Carrots, the Israeli company has developed ranges based on blueberries, cucumbers, tomatoes, cucumbers, grapefruit and coconuts. The late Horst Rachelbacher (founder of Aveda) used to promote his new […]

Urban agriculture: Growing food in our cities

City dwellers have been growing their own food for millennia, but the concept of urban agriculture been formally recognised in research and public policy since the mid 1990s. Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) has played a leading role in forging this new discipline and raising awareness of it. In issue 25 of Urban Agriculture Magazine – RUAF 10 years, IDRC program officer and urban agriculture (UA) specialist Luc Mougeot traces the achievements of this young field and the challenges its practitioners face. Taking the lead Before the 1990s, interest in unregulated ‘city farming’ had been largely confined to academic research, often conducted by individual scholars who approached UA primarily from the viewpoint of the informal economy. The rising costs of energy and food, water shortages, and worries about food safety shifted the perspective on city farming toward concerns like food security, eco-development, and self-reliance. Later still, it moved toward urban environmental management and sustainability issues such as waste recycling. In the early 1990s development assistance organisations began placing UA on their agendas. Mougeot traces this growing attention to the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro. UNCEDÕs Agenda 21 plan encouraged local governments to become involved in managing city environments. In the same year the United Nations Development Programme, as Mougeot puts it, “invited IDRC to take the lead on UA.” IDRC’s efforts accelerated to become a full program of work, highlighted by two phases of its ambitious Cities Feeding People research initiative carried out from 1996 to 2005. Bearing fruit Also during that decade, local governments worldwide began paying attention to UA and raising the issue in international forums, particularly the United Nations. One important side-effect of this shift was that the UN system became more receptive to implementing its own initiatives […]

If we want food to remain cheap we need to stop putting it in our cars

-Timothy A. Wise Coverage of the US drought and the run-up in corn, soybean, and wheat prices has been extensive and welcome. It has also been prone to the repetition of falsehoods and the perpetuation of myths about the causes of the food crisis – and the solutions. A recent Guardian article, “The era of cheap food may be over,” is a case in point. Specifically, it perpetuates the myth that the main driver of food price increases is demand for meat in fast-growing developing countries. This effectively downplays the full impact of biofuels and ignores two problems underlying price volatility: financial speculation and the lack of publicly held food reserves. Give Larry Elliott credit for posing the issue in terms of the difficult policy choices the world faces. He’s certainly right to pose the challenge. “The current assumption seems to be that the world can have a rising population, ever-higher per capita meat consumption, devote less land to food production to help hit climate change targets and eschew the advances in science that might increase yields” he writes. “This is the stuff of fantasy.” It sure is, but so his framing of the problem. First of all, the trend toward meat-based western diets is certainly worth resisting, for health and environmental reasons. But it’s been pretty clearly shown that rising demand for meat-based protein, particularly in India and China, is not the main cause of recent price increases. An FAO study documented conclusively that cereals demand rose more slowly since 2000 than it had in previous decades. So demand in India and China may have grown, but it did not create a “demand shock” that precipitated more recent price surges. What is the demand shock that has occurred since 2000? The dramatic expansion of biofuels production, under a range […]

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