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Zombie seed.
4 June 2008 .
It's about a year since I heard about 'zombie' seeds, a development from 'terminator' seeds with, I felt, a sinister added twist.
(The idea of both of these is to prevent GM contamination. Terminator seeds produce a next generation of seed which is sterile; having yielded a crop, there is no risk that their genes can mix with those of other crops. Zombie seeds have a genetically built in 'lock'. Farmers buy seed this year; if, next year, they want to plant with seed from this year's crop, as most would, they can - but they must pay to buy the chemical 'key' to 'switch on' the seed... otherwise it simply won't grow.... What you might call the DRM/Microsoft concept of marketing.)
In wealthy countries, the farmers can presumably, on the whole, look after themselves when assessing the benefits or otherwise of these types of seed. It is, in any case, unlikely that their governments will allow any sort of monopoly pressure to be applied.
There's been a deal of worry that the same isn't quite true in large parts of the third world, which is a sphere in which zombie seeds seem to make their more sinister, economic (ie profit-making) sense.
The industry is pushing for a "technical fix for a problem its technology created in the first place," (Jim Thomas, ETC Group - a biotech watchdog group based in Ottawa.) Thomas and others suspect that firms want to control the seed supply. It's also been suggested that zombie seeds are a means by the industry to bypass the 2000 moratorium on terminator technology by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (along with bans in countries such as India and Brazil).
[I apologise for drawing a picture here, since you probably know what's going on... but it seems to me so important an issue, and potentially so appalling an example of the big companies acting in their own self-interests, that I want to be sure there's no doubt: The seed-producers have tremendous economic muscle in some of the poorest countries; it's not hard, by marketing 'virtues' of the new seed, or simply by having a monopoly (or, equally regrettably, by manipulation), to pressure farmers looking for seed in those countries into buying their zombie product. (In fact, I suspect that we may find that substantive profits will come not from the sale of the seed, but from the sale of the chemicals required in subsequent years. There may even be a fairly low initial price and plaudits from the gullible because of it.) However, once the farmers are locked in, all the producer need do is keep the price of the chemicals just low enough to prevent 'the frogs jumping out of the (increasingly) hot water'. Poor farmers can't easily transfer from one strain to another, since seed is expensive - they rely on producing their own once they've purchased their initial stock: once fooled into buying zombie by low seed prices, they'll be locked, unable to produce more next year's seed without paying for the key, unable to move back to a normally self-replicating seed because they can't afford it. The alternative explanation, that the seed companies aren't actually that concerned to sell the chemical key - that all they want to do is make sure that farmers buy new seed every year - is just too cynical to contemplate.]
If large numbers of the poorest farmers come, one way or another, become committed to zombie seed, they will become addicted to the supplying company. The threat to older (more secure and often more sustainable) methods of farming will be wiped out. But the producers shareholders will be happy.
'GM crops' 'Zombie seed'
The Pork Barrel.
12 May 2008 .
The sow herd in Britain has worse than halved in the past decade, largely because prices paid to farmers by supermarkets no longer meet the costs of production; spokesmen for the farmers are predicting a shortage of British pork within the next two or three months. At the same time the international market is hardening (qv), so that it will be difficult to make up the shortfall.
The price of British pork meat sold in the supermarkets has apparently increased by about 30 pence per kilo this year, which seems consistent... except that just 1.5 pence of that increase is filtering back to the farmers.
Haven't we recently heard exactly the same about eggs? And Milk? And etc?
This item just for the record... I want to see how this year pans out, foodwise.
'sow herd' pork shortage
Business as usual.
15 April 2008 .
My local supermarkets appear to be competing, this week, on bread. Price cuts are in the order of 25%.
With an acknowledged food crisis, cereal prices soaring, food-riots in the streets of many world cities, pretty immediate threats of an extra 100,000,000 facing starvation this year and our own food future beginning to look a bit shaky... I'm not sure whether cutting the price of bread in this way is perverse, weird, or simply rather repellent. What messages are these powerful companies trying to give us? That there's nothing really to worry about? Prices can go down as well as up? It'll going to be business as usual?
The strength of the human species is supposed to be that it can adapt. Hmmmm.
(Totally in passing: I wonder if any of the cheaper bread will be thrown away uneaten...)
Supermarket bread 'food crisis' 'food riot' starvation
When twits there be on telly screen, then crops shall be all ripe and... green.
11 March 2008 .
On the BBC news this morning, an item about farmers planting more wheat: 'we're in for a bumper crop,' a newsreader said.
Apart from tempting Fate, if you believe in such things: has the Beeb become so urbanised that they assume that an increase in planting since last year somehow guarantees a harvest larger than last year's? Ey, boy, even in Peoples' Republic of Islington, us'n knows better than tharr.
Also a reference to how prices on the supermarket shelves have risen; 'and they won't be what they were any time soon.'
They're never going to be what they were. Prat.
"We are sleepwalking into a crisis." (Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at the University of Leeds.)
09 March 2008 .
Richard Branson receiving plaudits all round for flying a passenger jet across the North Sea powered by biofuels, and for pledging 3 billion for the development of those fuels...
...right at the beginning of a world-wide and potentially catastrophic food crisis,
There's no evidence that the government has the remotest grasp of the scale of the crisis we're facing. Perhaps we still believe that our leaders know what's best... ignoring the dog's dinner they've made of crisis after crisis (foot-and mouth for one) or the crises they've actually created (oh, foot and mouth again...) which actually pall in comparison to what may be coming. For Pete's sake, they've even been sanctioned by the EU (at enormous cost to the UK taxpayer) because they made a mess of simple subsidy payments, a pure accountancy exercise which every other country seems to have managed okay. Britain is only 60% self-sufficient in food, which itself is actually a historical high, and we're not going to increase output by that much without very serious government intervention - which we're not getting - and every acre devoted to flying our airoplanes is going to be an acre less food
And as food and fuel compete for land and water, the price of food is going to become more closely linked to the price of oil by the day (and guess which direction that price is set to go).
As you read through previous blogs, you may feel that I'm beginning to get a bee in my bonnet: the prospect of hunger can do that to a chap.
*A (partial) correction: I know in the back of my mind how bad drought has been in recent years in Australia, but I tend to think in terms of meat there, rather than grain. As I wrote this item, I had not realised how devastated grain production has been there, nor how much it's affected prices. Ta to a very brief anonymous email for that.
I feel a bit shown up... but I'm not pretending on this blog to be doing anything more than reflecting the feelings of one ordinary citizen, and part of being an ordinary citizen often is not knowing all the facts.
Sadly, I'm not sure that understanding about Australia affects my thesis that much, since drought there's been getting worse for years and, it seems, isn't likely to go away.
Supermarket Shelves.
06 March 2008 .
I've seen two slots on TV news today about the growing food crisis. Both were rather bland, both showed lines of bulging supermarket shelves... and both said 'nobody's talking about empty shelves'.
On the contrary, that's precisely what some people are beginning to talk about.
The Price Of Food.
04 March 2008 .
The fast escalating international prices of foods, particularly of cereals (where some prices have risen by as much as 25% in a month), is creating growing concern as world stocks fall to record lows, levels of starvation among the poorest rise and international agencies have to cut back on food aid. The particular worry is that while we've been in this situation before, it hasn't happened when recent harvests have been so good.
The pressures on food stocks are caused in large part by rising demand from the growing middle classes in countries such as China and by the growing production of biofuels. The latter of these means that food prices are becoming increasingly linked to oil prices which themselves are set to rise pretty inexorably in the medium and long terms. (And there are another billion souls in China who might be on the verge of demanding a middle-class standard of diet.) While prices have risen in supermarkets here in the UK, the coming Autumn may see the crisis come home to roost in a much more forceful way if there are any problems with this year's harvest - and with changing weather patterns, we're told that that is a distinct possibility.
The problem is recognised, and solutions are being sought with increasing determination.
But the great tabu remains...the word overpopulation is not spoken, certainly not in the media here. Malthus remains deeply unfashionable - 'wrong' is the word people use.
The question I would like to put is this: If Malthus were right, how would the early signs of his crisis manifest themselves? Might the answer be, by rising prices and people starving in a time of comparative plenty? So perhaps the root of real, current problems are not being recognised - or certainly not publicly acknowledged.
Meanwhile, it all rather vitiates the efforts to safe the lives of infants in parts of, for example, Africa; '10 million 5-year-olds could have been saved from death by malaria'. To what purpose? To die of poverty and starvation a few years down the line? Certainly, so long as our cars and aeroplanes need their oil.
Fishing Quotas.
20 November 2007 .
Our fishing fleets are throwing vast amounts of catch back into the sea - dead - because of fishing quotas (as much, sometimes as 60% of a catch, as one prawn-fisher reported; cod, which he isn't allowed to take).
Cod may have almost disappeared a few years ago, they said, but there are plenty now - and the whole system of quotas is therefore irrelevant. I mention this only because of an item on BBC TV news earlier this evening. The item worried me because it seemed to be very one-sided.
1) I didn't see a (balanced) discussion of why cod are beginning to recover - precisely because the fishermen were reined in, mainly by the quota system.
2) Nor did I see any discussion (by which I mean, criticism) about a prawn fisherman who claimed to have had to throw back his catch because it was all cod and no prawns.