Keith we here in our list need to make the sustainable biofuel project as an alternate to the big business corporate. we need here to integrate the projects BioD, Ethanol, Biogas and wood gas projects for rural industry.
More infomation is lacking in this field of integrated biofuel use for rural industry.
Yours truely
Pannirselvam
Brasil.
On 9/16/05, Keith Addison <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The Institute of Science in Society
Science Society Sustainability
http://www.i-sis.org.uk
This article can be found on the I-SIS website at
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/PFSFSNG.php
ISIS Press Release 14/09/05
Policies for Sustainable Food Systems, National and Global
Michael Meacher
Why our current agriculture and food production is not sustainable
There are five reasons why our current food system is not
sustainable. First, the increasingly mechanised agriculture depends
on oil, but the supply of oil is beginning to run out, or at least
half of the 2 trillion barrels of oil available has already been used
and oil demand from China, India and other major developing countries
which are industrialising fast is rising so sharply that production
cannot keep up with demand, and permanent shortages of oil will kick
in within a decade or less. The price of oil will escalate to
$100-$200+, and oil-driven food production will sharply decline.
Second, the growing shortage of water means that half a billion
people now already live in water-stressed areas, and the UN expects
this to rise 5-6 fold to half the world population by 2025. This will
lead to massive shifts of populations and water wars. Frankly, the
current use of water in agriculture is extravagant and utterly
unsustainable. For example, US prairie farmers and East Anglian
barley barons need 1 000 tonnes of water to produce 1 tonne of grain,
plus 1 000 energy units are used for every 1 energy unit of processed
food. That is just not sustainable.
Third, the intensification of climate change has led to a ten-fold
increase in the incidence and ferocity of climatic catastrophes in
the past 40 years. These include major-scale hurricanes, cyclones,
floods, as well as increasing drought, desertification,
inextinguishable forest fires, which are now rendering more and more
croplands unusable or infertile. Half a billion of the world
population now do not have croplands on which they can maintain
themselves. The latest UN report says one sixth of countries in the
world (up to 30 nations) now face food shortages because of climate
change. The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine estimates
160 000 now die every year from climate-change induced malnutrition,
dysentery and malaria.
Fourth, the loss of biodiversity from monocultures imposed by
industrialised farming, not least GM crops. A quarter of the world's
GM crops are grown in Argentina, where huge areas were cleared to
grow GM soya, especially Argentina's pampas, previously one of the
most organically productive areas in the world.
Fifth, long-distance transportation of food across the world is
incompatible with the requirement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
by 60 percent by 2050. Between 1968-88, world food production
increased 84 percent and the world population 91 percent, but world
food trade increased 184 percent ( i.e. doubled), yet planes and cars
are the fastest rising causes of greenhouse gas emissions. To put
that in household terms – a typical UK family of four emits per year
4 tonnes of CO2 from the house, 4 tonnes from the car, but 8 tonnes
from production, processing, packaging and distribution of the food
they eat.
So what should be done?
I have five proposals. First, we need a massive switch from highly
mechanised, pesticide-driven agriculture to low- input/organic
agriculture with energy saving up to 10- fold. How? The current food
system is linear in design, treating inputs like energy and raw
materials as infinitely available (which they are not) and the
environment as infinitely capable of absorbing waste (which it is
not). This is not sustainable. To change this, we need a tax system
that factors in the full cost of all these finite items and uses the
proceeds to subsidise organic, low input and localised agriculture
systems. In contrast, organic production systems are an example of
sustainable circular methods of food production in harmony with the
natural eco-system. Is this happening? Well, although sales of
organic food in the UK have quadrupled from £260 million in 1997 to
over £1 billion now, the one million acres now devoted to organic
production is still only 2-3% of agricultural land in the UK.
Second, developing a sustainable food system should become a major
Government policy based on setting targets for:
Sustainable food production
Import substitution
Fair trade
Local sourcing of food
These targets are to be achieved within specific timescales. The
Government's Organic Action Plan Group, which I chaired, did set a
target to increase the percentage of organic food consumed in the UK
which was produced in the UK from 30 percent to 70 percent by 2010,
but (as so often) the mechanisms to deliver it were delayed and weak
– the UK was until recently the only country in the EU15 which did
not offer post-conversion aid to new organic farmers. Moreover, none
of the other necessary objectives I have listed are currently subject
to targets, apart from agri-environmental schemes to encourage broad
and shallow adoption of very modest environmental standards.
Third, the very large external/environmental costs of transportation
must be internalised. Transporting agricultural products in the UK
(mainly big heavy goods vehicles) emits 1.1mt CO2 per year, and
transporting beverages and other foodstuffs emits 3 mt CO2 per year.
So, transporting crops and food together accounts for one fortieth of
all the UK's CO2 emissions per year. That is not sustainable and
indeed, at the start of the foot and mouth outbreak, one of the
reasons why disease took hold so quickly was huge transportation of
animals across the country every day for marketing. We have what is
euphemistically called a 'cheap food' policy in this country – it is
no such thing: it takes no account for example of costs of water
purification after agriculture and pesticide run-off, nor of damage
to the environment from long-distance transportation and exacerbating
climate change. At the very least, we should require all food
products to be labelled to indicate the environmental impact of
distribution, and organic and other assurance schemes should take the
lead by introducing the proximity principle into certification. But
what is fundamentally needed is a revolution in environmental and
social accounting, so that a flat-rate VAT is supplemented by a tax
surcharge on over- exploitation of natural resources and on
long-distance transport of certain agricultural products (those which
can be cultivated locally under EU rules).
Fourth, sustainable food system should promote human health and
certainly not harm it. There is now increasingly convincing evidence
that industrialised farming systems do the reverse. Here are two
pieces of evidence:
Latest Government figures, just released, reveal continuing massive
increases in the use of pesticides – the area of crops sprayed with
pesticides increased by another 1 million hectares in the last two
years; altogether over the last decade the use of pesticides in the
UK has increased by over 30 percent. Evidence linking pesticides and
brain diseases like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and motor neurone
disease is now compelling – the Association of Clinical Pathologist
reviewed the issue in depth in 2001 and concluded "there is an
apparent consistency of epidemiological reports link Parkinson's
Disease with pesticide exposure" and the most recent finding is that
farmers exposed to pesticides are 43 percent more likely to develop
Parkinson's Disease. This urgently needs to be followed up by the
Government.
But why is this not followed up by the Government? Might the fact
that DEFRA's Pesticide Safety Directorate depends for 60 percent of
its revenue on agro-chemical industries have something to do with it?
Fifth, globally, what is making so much of the world's food systems
unsustainable is climate change. Drying out of croplands and the
growth of continental and Indonesian fires on a rising scale and the
rising frequency and ferocity of storms, cyclones, flooding and
rising sea level, increasingly put at risk feeding of up to 9 billion
people on this planet by 2050. Climate change will only be reversed
by fundamental changes in the world economy, national societies and
our individual way of life, but the minimum requirement is already
clear.
Massive switch out of fossil fuels to renewables, on a far bigger
scale than any country (including the UK) has yet envisaged, that is
what is now urgently needed, not a revival of nuclear power. A system
of contraction and convergence negotiated between the industrialised
North of the world and the developing South, which requires the North
to contract greenhouse gas emissions by over 60 percent by 2050 while
allowing the South to industrialise cleanly, and overall keeping
global greenhouse gas emissions within a level which scientists
believe safe. A huge uplift in energy efficiency is needed to end the
current prodigious waste. US power stations discard more waste heat
than they generate; only one seventh of the energy from cars reaches
the wheels; only one quarters of the energy from ovens reaches the
food.
Sustainable food systems should be at the heart of global policy, not
(as now) another device for exercise of imperial power by the
strongest nations. The pressure for reform could hardly be stronger.
If we do not learn lessons of what is facing us, our planet Earth
will apply those lessons itself, but at a price which at worst could
cast considerable doubt on the survival of our own species.
This article was a speech delivered at Sustainable World
International Conference 14 July 2005, Westminster, London.
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--
Pagandai V Pannirselvam
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte - UFRN
Departamento de Engenharia Química - DEQ
Centro de Tecnologia - CT
Programa de Pós Graduação em Engenharia Química - PPGEQ
Grupo de Pesquisa em Engenharia de Custos - GPEC
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CEP 59.072-970 , Natal/RN - Brasil
Residence :
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Telefone(fone ) ( 84 ) 3215-37690 Ramal210
32171557
Telefone(fax) ( 84 ) 3215-3770
residencia 32171557
Cellular 84 88145083
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