Today’s the big day for agriculture in Copenhagen. A lot is riding on it, because there hasn’t been much sign of interest at UNFCCC COP15 up to now in the subject of how agriculture is going to adapt to climate change. You can follow Cary Fowler’s Notes from Copenhagen on Facebook.
Nibbles: Hunger, Stereotypes
- Farm workers most food insecure. For shame.
- Forget the stereotype of the ignorant Farmer John, riding on a tractor spewing black fumes and chewing on a piece of straw. Whose stereotype would that be?
Waste promotes organic food?
David Zetland has an interesting take on that 40% of American food is wasted paper.
[I]t seems possible to switch all production to organics:
- We can have enough, even with 40 percent lower yields.
- Higher prices would reduce demand for food, and thus obesity. (They may cause people to switch to cheaper foods, but those tend to be better for you — rice vs meat — if you ignore the idea that steakhouse diners will switch to McDs.)
Of course, this will not happen through regulation or a wholesale change in people’s demand for food. It could happen if water or carbon use was taxed: that waste uses 25 percent of fresh water and 300 million bbl oil; that’s not even counting methane resulting from rot.
Nibbles: Monsanto, Carnival, Recycling, Kelp, Land lease, Pinole
- Monsanto under anti-trust investigation in US. h/t Our man in the policy maelstrom, Michael.
- Scientia Pro Publica, latest edition.
- From the SPP carnival, a recycled doormat saves edible marine biodiversity.
- Kelp farming in Maine. h/t Sadie Jane.
- “Is there such a thing as Agro-Imperialism?” we’ll let you know when we’ve read this long article. h/t Resilience Science
- This is the jerky of the plant kingdom. For those who don’t know, this is the jerky of the animal kingdom.
Law of unintended consequences, coconut edition
The late, great Garrett Hardin wanted society to move beyond literacy and numeracy to ecolacy, an ability to think ecologically. And he exemplified this with various stories that hinged on the consequences of small changes. Hardin’s key question: “And then what?” I think he’d have liked this one, which I heard on National Public Radio.
The government of Kiribati, a small island state in the Pacific, was concerned about overfishing. So it decided to subsidize the coconut oil industry, because if people earned more from coconut, they would fish less. Unfortunately, as the bumper sticker would have it, A bad day fishing is better than a good day working. In Kiribati, as elsewhere. After the coconut subsidies were introduced fishing increased by a third and the reef fish population dropped by almost a fifth.
Sheila Walsh, a graduate student at the Scrippps Institute of Oceanography, went out to Kiribati and discovered that “people earned more money making coconut oil, which meant they could work less to support themselves. And they spent their new leisure time fishing”.
Turns out that this is something that happens often in programmes to help fish stocks by persuading fisherfolk to do other things. People who fish like to fish, and that’s what they do. They like to be out on the water, according to lots of studies. Recognizing that, one potential solution incorporates ecolacy:
Walsh says she’s trying to help the government figure out how to fix the problem of overfishing, which they’d accidentally made worse. Maybe, she says, the government can create new jobs out on the water by hiring the fishermen to patrol newly created nature preserves.
Without their tackle on board, presumably.