h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"Coincidentally, this piece appeared in the Times today - http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article3746593.ece

Basically, he makes a call for more globalisation to combat food shortages."

He makes some very interesting points but falls down on a couple of issues. Firstly, he makes the howler of ignoring climate change (he makes a passing reference to "environmental romanticism" which is an attempt to trivialise it, although given that he is strongly pro-market and climate change doesn't easily fit into a market-led philosophy that's possibly understandable if not particularly intelligent) he also, similarly, dismisses concern about GM foods; whilst I don't like the closed-minded and luddite approach to GM this is still an issue that there needs to be more debate about and evidence for before it becomes part of our staple foodsources: it's not comparable with things like "organic" foods which are entirely a romantic, snobbish issue. I'm also a little concerned that he fails to appreciate that food isn't something produced entirely on demand, that increased consumption in the developed world will mean less food to go around generally; he ignores the commonsense fact that if people in the third world are going to have more to eat then people in the first world are going to have less.

Danish minister for climate & energy, Connie Hedegaard, has just today said to the press that Denmark might have to revise the biofuel target as "it's not looking sustainable" ...

There's been plenty of research on GM crops. Masses of it. Its time for people to stop being silly about it and embrace the attack of the mutant tomatoes.

There are two separate issues about GM crops IMO.

First off, they're a fantastic tool because GM is potentially much faster than cross-breeding, and drought-resistance can be transferred from completely different plants (in theory). A cereal that grows in the more uncertain climate we're going to face is a good thing.

The second issue is that firms who spend billions on GM research only do it for the returns they hope to make, which is perfectly reasonable. The trouble is that 3rd World farmers could be faced with buying seeds each year (with 'terminator' genes in them) at prices they can't afford. They may be growing more food, but possibly at no benefit to themselves, just to a multinational. I think intergovernmental research centres could get around this problem, but setting up them could take a while.

I've seen a couple of posts in this thread which have talked about biofuel production not being carbon neutral because of:

Transport costs
Production costs

And another post referring to an increase in water use due to a new plant being built....

Now, what everyone there seems to be ignoring is that - yes, biofuels take resources to produce, yes, they take resources to transport, yes, they need water in the production...

But, and this is the bit everyone's forgotten about conveniently...

So do 'conventional' fuels...

Most oil is being transported across half the globe before being refined...

A plant in Florida is using more water to make biofuel? My guess is a refinery somewhere else will be using less...

If 2.5% of all petrol sold at the pump is biofuel that means less oil being refined and transported across the world...

It might not be totally carbon neutral - but you can't ignore the fact that biofuel isn't an 'additional' source, it's a 'replacement'.

Hi Whisky, I'm well aware that other fuels also have transport costs, but coal mining doesn't lead to soaring food prices and deforestation (which increases CO2 emissions by itself). Biofuels do.

The water thingy is in Florida. I wonder how many crops could be grown with 400,000 litres per day in such a warm climate?

Using any set of resources means making a trade-off between various things. 97.5% of the fuel that's being used here will still be fossil fuels, so is that 2.5% really worth anything, when weighed against the consequences?

Personally, I don't think so. I think biofuels' benefits are tiny compared to their costs, and that's what the issue is.

>But, and this is the bit everyone's forgotten about conveniently...

So do 'conventional' fuels...<

The comparisons of fossil vs biofuel carbon footprint per litre are like for like. Both include the whole life cycle.

An important point Whisky - A famous study claimed that ethanol took more energy to make than was contained in the fuel itself. Hence it couldn't be made without oil or some other external form of energy.

However, when a different researcher performed the same analysis on oil/gasoline, it was even worse than ethanol! This casts some serious doubt on this argument - as you've pointed out.

I wish I could find the original article - C&E News...

The second issue is that firms who spend billions on GM research only do it for the returns they hope to make, which is perfectly reasonable. The trouble is that 3rd World farmers could be faced with buying seeds each year (with 'terminator' genes in them) at prices they can't afford. They may be growing more food, but possibly at no benefit to themselves, just to a multinational. I think intergovernmental research centres could get around this problem, but setting up them could take a while.


Wasn't there also the problem of genetics companies claiming the genomes of GM plants as IP meaning that only they'd have the right to farm them and effectively handing control of crop growth to corporations?

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Yeah, Monsanto or someone tried to patent Basmati rice. The fact that it had been grown in India for 5,000 years didn't seem to enter into it.

Nobody got anything to say on EU subsidies ? Pay farmers to produce nothing as the world starves ?

I'm not sure that's a problem with GM so much as genome sequencing. There were a number of companies who intended to patent bits of the human genome. I can't imagine they were successful since the whole thing is now publically available on the internet.

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I think that's been changed, or there are plans for it to change. Food prices are so high these days farmers might not even need the subsidy.

"Food prices are so high these days farmers might not even need the subsidy."

You really think all that extra money is finding its way back to the farmers?

If you do, I've got the exclusive rights to sell the eiffel tower - send me a cheque if you're interested....

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No, just some of it.

Well, first of all: A24145797

The *easy* way to make ethanol from plants is to use the proteins, which of course is what we would like to eat. Cellulosic ethanol uses what we would consider to be waste products like straw or wood waste. Given that the plants would have to be replanted (and that in the case of wood, some of the carbon would be sequestered as value added products for some time to come) the net carbon to the atmosphere would be close to zero. The two reasons plant protein is considered more practical is that it is cheaper to produce and that cellulosic ethanol would need GMO enzymes to break down the cell structure more efficiently. Until limitations on plant protein as a source of ethanol overcomes the price point of cellulosic ethanol or the price is driven up to match, ethanol producers will simply go for profit.

As far as biodiesel goes, it involves *waste* vegetable oils- I don't know all that much about it other than the fact that I don't mind automobile exhaust that smell like french fries.

Some of those farmers are being pushed closer to bankrupcy by the high prices, because they need corn to feed their pigs and chickens and cows.

High food costs are little to do with farmers and more to do with political decisions. Like red diesel now being 3 times the price it was, and farm vehicles like Landrovers being taxed at ridiculous levels because people use them for the school runs in Chelsea, or land being compulsarily purchased to build 'eco-villages' or English fishermen being told to keep their boats in harbour, whilst Portugal uses EU grants to build fish processing plants and buy new trawlers.

Good point McKay, I was thinking more about crop farmers, and not really in the UK either.

Thinking about McKay's point a bit more, some other things occured to me. First is that given the inefficiencies of feeding grain to animals in terms of calories, then it's good that the price of growing animals will reduce the supply of grain *to* animals, and increase the supply for people. I think this happens fairly regularly (if not very often) when grain prices spike. A more balanced way to rear livestock is to let them eat grass etc. on land we can't grow crops on. Which obviously doesn't get more expensive when crop prices rise.

So the market mechanism is giving clear price signals to farmers about the desirability of growing livestock while feeding them grain instead of grass. Good, it might stop a few million people dying of malnutrition.

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Politicians *can* and frequently do make things worse, but the fact is that we seem to be approaching limits for the production of food using current technologies, and cereal prices reflect this. The 'Green Revolution' of last century was based on using fertilisers as much as anything else, and they depend on oil either for their manufacture, or their extraction and distribution. So with oil prices at record levels, the price of pretty much all food is going to rise.

It was a while ago, but I worked on a farm with about 150 head of beef cows. For about 8 months of the year, the cows live primarily on grass topped up with hay occasionally. In the winter, (when the grass stops growing) they were brought indoors and fed sileage topped up with a little barley. I would say grain amounted to less than 2% of their annual intake.

As far as I know, this was a pretty average farm. But maybe it's an anomaly, because I can't for the life of me see where those figures for grain consumption for cattle come from.