Category: Bio-temperance

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Rising food prices threaten on-farm biodiversity

Back in the 1990s the European Union, concerned about over-production of poor-quality cereals, introduced set-aside. Farmers were required to not grow food on a percentage of their land, currently 8%, and were paid to do so. The result was an increase in biodiversity; wildflowers, insects, birds, that sort of thing. Now, with rising food prices, there’s a proposal to reduce the area of set-aside to 0%, and conservationists are unhappy.

This is an old argument. Grow more food more intensively and you spare some “wild” habitat. I suppose the question is, how long will high food prices last? Until rain returns to Australia? Or until the world wakes up from its ethanol binge?

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Biofuels backlash

Despite the lack of recent posts on the topic, I haven’t lost interest in biofuels and the food vs fuel dimension of that tussle. But there has been so much blather out there that it has been hard to make any sense of it. Focus is needed, and that’s something we find it hard to do as we flit from topic to diverse topic. Fortunately, others are less easily distracted.

The Low-input High Diversity Biofuels blog — which seems to be based at Oklahoma State University in the US, is one such. As the name suggests, it is not exactly enamoured of the alternative High Input Low Diversity approach. Several recent postings give more details. There’s one pointing out that HILD may yet gain traction: “Despite the documented social and environmental costs of biofuels, the vested agricultural interests are politically too strong. The momentum for biofuels is far too great.” Others address the recent OECD report on biofuels, making biodiversity preservation part of biofuels policy and so on. One to watch.

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Decentralized biofuel distillation

A report in The Financial Express of India makes perplexing reading. It cites a report from CIAT, the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture, that advocates small-scale conversion of starchy crops such as sweet potato and cassava into ethanol for use as biofuel. Initial processing would be a village-level activity, resulting in 50% alcohol (by volume). This would be transported to a central distillery to make 99.5% alcohol. I see a couple of problems.

First, experience in, for example, the Kolli Hills of India shows that when poor rural farmers grow industrial feedstock (cassava for starch factories) they do not earn enough the replace the nutrition they used to grow and that is now displaced by the industrial crop.

Secondly, drunkeness. I’m serious. I’ve lost track of the number of diversification and income-generating projects in which the women have to be in charge because if the men get their hands on the additional cash they spend it on drink. So, let’s cut out the middle man and make drink the object of the exercise?