Hello John, welcome
Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2005 05:00:20 +0900
From: Keith Addison
>ok, so is pimentel now using current data or not? if the answer is
no, then
>the question becomes "is this chick legit?"
She's just fooled by the "current data" bit, like everyone else is.
It is not current data, see the message I posted yesterday:
<http://sustainablelists.org/pipermail/biofuel_sustainablelists.org/
200>http://sustainablelists.org/pipermail/biofuel_sustainablelists.org
/200
5-July/001738.html
[Biofuel] Cornell on ethanol, biodiesel, & hydrogen energy efficiencies
<http://snipurl.com/ghth>http://snipurl.com/ghth
>the blurb about corn syrup is
>pretty over the top.
Not really, the stuff is a disaster. HFCS certainly has much to do
with the rising plague of obesity, and worse. "... introduced into
the food system in the early 1980s", not quite accurate, as others
are saying about corn as food, and it was really the trading system
that it was introduced to, worldwide. This was just after sugar
farmers among others in many 3rd World countries had been pushed by
the World Bank et al into capital-intensive methods on the a! ssurance
of US market prices for sugar of around 25c, which dropped to 6c when
HFCS got a foothold. Exit several 3rd World rural econonies, with
resultant famines in some cases.
Indeed HFCS has little merit and is a problem. While it sure has
put a crimp on the profits of sugar industry, that isn't all bad.
Indeed not:
http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/msg26612.html
[biofuel] Big Sugar
On the other hand, it's just an even worse part of the sugar industry now.
As you mention the World Bank pushed a sugar intensive farming
practice into many underdevolped countres and now those farms are in
some economic jeopardy. In the case of at least Trinidad and
Tobago the large blocks of WB and IMF money didn't go to small time
individual farmers but rather large corporate intrests which then
bought up much of the farmland. This mass purchasing (at 3rd world
pricing to be sure) resulted in the displacement of many of these
single skilled people to city life and little prospect. This has
resulted in a huge shift in economy for these citizens and thus
aren't directly affected by HFCS as such as they are no longer
involved.
Even so they were lucky to have had that option, not everyone was so
lucky. Have you seen this? The sugar disaster in the Philippines (and
other disasters):
http://journeytoforever.org/keith_phsoil.html
Nutrient Starved Soils Lead To Nutrient Starved People
Now a Philippines government site says this:
"Negros Occidental's economy was pivoted practically around one
commodity, "Sugar" which made it the country's premier sugar
producer. However, when the world sugar prices plummeted during the
early 1980's, the economy of Negros Occidental was devastated. From
that experience, Negrenses learned to diversify their economy. Large
tracts of sugar plantation were converted into more profitable
ventures such as prawn and fish ponds, farms nurturing high value
crops and floral species, as well as livestock fattening projects.
Sugar still remains as the main agricultural produce of the province
with about 56% of its land area planted to sugar cane..."
http://www.nscb.gov.ph/ru6/negros.htm
negros
Still talking about money rather than food.
The biggest problem to these farms as such is actually overproduction!
The Negros sugar farms had some of the worst soil problems I've seen,
virtually all the organic matter was gone, it was extremely acid, it
was dead, nothing would grow there, nor even decay - half-burnt
stubble from a year previous still lay there fresh as yesterday.
Non rotation of sugar crop has left staggering amounts of land
unusable (I believe it's a problem of nutrient depletion as well as
nematoad).
Non-rotation and over-fertililisation (chemical). Nematode damage of
sugar crops is a function of soil fertility. Some nematodes are
beneficial to sugar crops but become pests when the soil turns too
acid.
Corn still requires crop rotation but it isn't as often nor as vital
as sugar. My family has some farmland which it leases out and
typically goest with a 2-4 year rotation between soy and corn
(dependant on pricing to some extent). This rotation is to
guarantee the longterm production of the land and not so much to
capatilize on market trends.
There are many good and easy ways of doing that, and doing it at a
profit. Someone should tell the World Bank, eh? Well, I think they
did but nobody listened (except maybe some of the speech-writers).
It becomes harder and harder to escape the grasp of HFCS but at
least through awareness people can learn to try and avoid it.
It's happening, avoiding HFCS and much else. Local food, "slow food",
or grow your own, if you haven't got any land do container farming or
city farming, if you can't even do that join a coop.
Then again if I'm going to have a sweetener addative I'll choose
HFCS over aspertame, saccarine, and the like...
Glycerine's good, and stevia.
but this is a matter of lesser of evils. This is one product on the
long list of useless addatives one can try to avoid (MSG really
comes to mind)
Last count I heard there were more than 5,000 food additives in
general use, and the average consumer was eating the equivalent of 13
aspirin-sized tablets of them each day. Nothing is known of the
synergistic effects. I had a long list of the additives being used in
the EU, with descriptions and so on, published by Britain's Soil
Association, not happy reading. I still have it somewhere.
Thanks for the list, I've enjoyed much of what I've read so far.
Good! I'm sure you're most welcome.
Best wishes
Keith
John
You should perhaps have a look at what Surgeon-Captain Cleave has to
say about refined carbohydrates, and this was before the rise of HFCS:
<http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library.html#cleave>http://journeyt
oforever.org/farm_library.html#cleave
Best wishes
Keith
_______________________________________________
Biofuel mailing list
Biofuel@sustainablelists.org
http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org
Biofuel at Journey to Forever:
http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html
Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages):
http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
