[Subjectivist]

And now for something disturbing on the food front,

Would you like wood chips with that?

Someday, restaurants will serve wood chips the same way they now serve mashed potatoes and grits. Also on the menu will be corn stems, husks and other unappetizing plant parts. And what’s more, diners will love the stuff.

That’s what Virginia Tech professor Y.H. Percival Zhang is promising the world.

Zhang, who studies biological systems engineering at the university’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, has developed a process that can transform wood chips, corn stems and other agricultural refuse into edible starches. And he hopes to do it someday in a facility that will look like a giant brewery.

Plants everywhere consist of cellulose—the substance that makes up plant cell walls and vegetable fibers like cotton. But in its raw form, cellulose is inedible. It’s too coarse, it’s not tasty, and humans can’t digest it properly. But cellulose and starch have the same chemical formula — they are polysaccharides, which means their molecules are chains of glucose units, or sugars. The only difference is in their chemical bonds.

“Both of them are made by sugars, but they use different linkages between the glucose units,” Zhang said in an interview.

Edible starches such as tapioca and potato consist of glucose units joined by alpha-1,4-glycosidic bonds and alpha-1,6-glycosidic bonds, a type of link between sugar molecules. When we digest those starches, our bodies produce an enzyme, amylase, which breaks the bonds and turns the starches into sugar.

Inedible cellulose consists of glucose units joined by different links, named beta 1,4-glycosidic bonds. These bonds can be broken down by a different enzyme, cellulase, but our bodies don’t produce it. “That’s why humans can’t eat cellulose,” Zhang said.

But here’s good news, bark lovers: Zhang has found the answer.

If the beta bonds are converted into alpha bonds, the coarse cellulose turns into a soft, powdery substance like corn starch – and Zhang and his team have developed a process that restructures the bonds to do just that. “Our idea was to use enzymes, which can break down beta 1,4 bonds,” Zhang said, “then link them again and form new bonds as the alpha ones.”

Zhang’s process essentially creates a giant stomach. He takes corn stover -- a mix of corn stalks, leaves and even weeds and grasses -- and stirs different types of enzymes into it.

“It’s similar to the human body, which also uses various enzymes, one after another, to break down foods,” he said. The resulting amylose looks and tastes just like a regular starch. “It tastes a little sweet,” Zhang said, adding that unfortunately, “there’s no ready recipe for cooking amylose.”

More at the link,
http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/03/ ... p=features

[Lore]

Global riot epidemic due to demise of cheap fossil fuels

From South America to South Asia, a new age of unrest is in full swing as industrial civilisation transitions to post-carbon reality

If anyone had hoped that the Arab Spring and Occupy protests a few years back were one-off episodes that would soon give way to more stability, they have another thing coming. The hope was that ongoing economic recovery would return to pre-crash levels of growth, alleviating the grievances fueling the fires of civil unrest, stoked by years of recession.

But this hasn't happened. And it won't.

Instead the post-2008 crash era, including 2013 and early 2014, has seen a persistence and proliferation of civil unrest on a scale that has never been seen before in human history. This month alone has seen riots kick-off in Venezuela, Bosnia, Ukraine, Iceland, and Thailand.

This is not a coincidence. The riots are of course rooted in common, regressive economic forces playing out across every continent of the planet - but those forces themselves are symptomatic of a deeper, protracted process of global system failure as we transition from the old industrial era of dirty fossil fuels, towards something else.

Even before the Arab Spring erupted in Tunisia in December 2010, analysts at the New England Complex Systems Institute warned of the danger of civil unrest due to escalating food prices. If the Food & Agricultural Organisation (FAO) food price index rises above 210, they warned, it could trigger riots across large areas of the world.

Hunger games

The pattern is clear. Food price spikes in 2008 coincided with the eruption of social unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Somalia, Cameroon, Mozambique, Sudan, Haiti, and India, among others.

In 2011, the price spikes preceded social unrest across the Middle East and North Africa - Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Libya, Uganda, Mauritania, Algeria, and so on.

Last year saw food prices reach their third highest year on record, corresponding to the latest outbreaks of street violence and protests in Argentina, Brazil, Bangladesh, China, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey and elsewhere.

Since about a decade ago, the FAO food price index has more than doubled from 91.1 in 2000 to an average of 209.8 in 2013. As Prof Yaneer Bar-Yam, founding president of the Complex Systems Institute, told Vice magazine last week:

"Our analysis says that 210 on the FAO index is the boiling point and we have been hovering there for the past 18 months... In some of the cases the link is more explicit, in others, given that we are at the boiling point, anything will trigger unrest."

But Bar-Yam's analysis of the causes of the global food crisis don't go deep enough - he focuses on the impact of farmland being used for biofuels, and excessive financial speculation on food commodities. But these factors barely scratch the surface.

It's a gas

The recent cases illustrate not just an explicit link between civil unrest and an increasingly volatile global food system, but also the root of this problem in the increasing unsustainability of our chronic civilisational addiction to fossil fuels.

In Ukraine, previous food price shocks have impacted negatively on the country's grain exports, contributing to intensifying urban poverty in particular. Accelerating levels of domestic inflation are underestimated in official statistics - Ukrainians spend on average as much as 75% on household bills, and more than half their incomes on necessities such as food and non-alcoholic drinks, and as75% on household bills. Similarly, for most of last year, Venezuela suffered from ongoing food shortages driven by policy mismanagement along with 17 year record-high inflation due mostly to rising food prices.

While dependence on increasingly expensive food imports plays a role here, at the heart of both countries is a deepening energy crisis. Ukraine is a net energy importer, having peaked in oil and gas production way back in 1976. Despite excitement about domestic shale potential, Ukraine's oil production has declined by over 60% over the last twenty years driven by both geological challenges and dearth of investment.

Currently, about 80% of Ukraine's oil, and 80% of its gas, is imported from Russia. But over half of Ukraine's energy consumption is sustained by gas. Russian natural gas prices have nearly quadrupled since 2004. The rocketing energy prices underpin the inflation that is driving excruciating poverty rates for average Ukranians, exacerbating social, ethnic, political and class divisions.

Looming pandemic?

These local conditions are being exacerbated by global structural realities. Record high global food prices impinge on these local conditions and push them over the edge. But the food price hikes, in turn, are symptomatic of a range of overlapping problems. Global agriculture's excessive dependence on fossil fuel inputs means food prices are invariably linked to oil price spikes. Naturally, biofuels and food commodity speculation pushes prices up even further - elite financiers alone benefit from this while working people from middle to lower classes bear the brunt.

Of course, the elephant in the room is climate change. According to Japanese media, a leaked draft of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) second major report warned that while demand for food will rise by 14%, global crop production will drop by 2% per decade due to current levels of global warming, and wreak $1.45 trillion of economic damage by the end of the century. The scenario is based on a projected rise of 2.5 degrees Celsius.

This is likely to be a very conservative estimate. Considering that the current trajectory of industrial agriculture is already seeing yield plateaus in major food basket regions, the interaction of environmental, energy, and economic crises suggests that business-as-usual won't work.

The epidemic of global riots is symptomatic of global system failure - a civilisational form that has outlasted its usefulness. We need a new paradigm.

Unfortunately, simply taking to the streets isn't the answer. What is needed is a meaningful vision for civilisational transition - backed up with people power and ethical consistence.

It's time that governments, corporations and the public alike woke up to the fact that we are fast entering a new post-carbon era, and that the quicker we adapt to it, the far better our chances of successfully redefining a new form of civilisation - a new form of prosperity - that is capable of living in harmony with the Earth system.

But if we continue to make like ostriches, we'll only have ourselves to blame when the epidemic becomes a pandemic at our doorsteps.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... -venezuela

[dohboi]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/2 ... 19412.html

MORE HUNGER, DISEASE, DROUGHT, FLOODING, REFUGEES AND WAR

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/green/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/2 ... 19412.html

Climate Change Dangers Here Now, Will Worsen Many Human Ills, UN Panel Warns

If you think of climate change as a hazard for some far-off polar bears years from now, you're mistaken. That's the message from top climate scientists gathering in Japan this week to assess the impact of global warming.

In fact, they will say, the dangers of a warming Earth are immediate and very human.

"The polar bear is us," says Patricia Romero Lankao of the federally financed National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., referring to the first species to be listed as threatened by global warming due to melting sea ice.

She will be among the more than 60 scientists in Japan to finish writing a massive and authoritative report on the impacts of global warming. With representatives from about 100 governments at this week's meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, they'll wrap up a summary that tells world leaders how bad the problem is.

The key message from leaked drafts and interviews with the authors and other scientists: The big risks and overall effects of global warming are far more immediate and local than scientists once thought. It's not just about melting ice, threatened animals and plants. It's about the human problems of hunger, disease, drought, flooding, refugees and war, becoming worse.

[dohboi]

Another report pointing in the same direction: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/ ... 031814.php

Future heat waves pose threat to global food supply

Heat waves could significantly reduce crop yields and threaten global food supply if climate change is not tackled and reversed.

This is according to a new study led by researchers at the University of East Anglia and published today, 20 March, in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters, which has, for the first time, estimated the global effects of extreme temperatures and elevated levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) on the production of maize, wheat and soybean.

Earlier studies have found that climate change is projected to reduce maize yields globally by the end of the century under a "business as usual" scenario for future emissions of greenhouse gases; however, this new study shows that the inclusion of the effects of heat waves, which have not been accounted for in previous modelling calculations, could double the losses of the crop.

Lead author of the study Delphine Deryng, from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia, said: "Instances of extreme temperatures, brought about by a large increase in global mean temperature, can be detrimental to crops at any stage of their development, but in particular around anthesis—the flowering period of the plant.

"At this stage, extreme temperatures can lead to [increased?] pollen sterility and reduced seed set, greatly reducing the crop yield."

[sparky]

.
Some news on the grains price front , Wheat prices have been up , around 7.00 a bushell last week
the traders are worried about the coming northern harvest
if the central plains don't get some rains , things could get messy
the Australian harvest is awaiting some good weather too
on top of this , completely unmentionned , a fair bit of the Ukrainian harvest is shipped through the Kerch straits
between Russia ansd Crimea , it's now completely under Russian control
should any stupidity take place , a trottling of those export could see the wheat prices get higher still
I'm not saying it would happen , just that it could
for the traders a risk has monetary value ,to be passed on the consumers as a price rise

[kiwichick]

the australian BOM is now forecasting an increased risk of an El Nino developing over the southern winter ( May- July)


that usually means hotter and dryer conditions for the south-east of Australia

and thats bad news for growing crops

still too early to press the panic button but the signs are not good

[dohboi]

I say it's never too early to press the panic button! Really, people generally only have two modes--complete and utter complacency, or total and utter panic. At least the latter gives some hope for some movement in some direction.

Meanwhile, a story today from the Guardian today shows that awareness is growing about the threat that GW already poses to global food production:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... mentpage=1

Climate change 'already affecting food supply' – UN

Report by climate change panel says global warming is fuelling not only natural disasters, but potentially famine – and war

[Lore]

You're correct, but panic and good judgement make poor partners. I fear any movement too late will be a helter skelter, knee jerk reaction.

[dohboi]

I have very little faith that any kind of reaction that is proportionate to the threat and well worked out and executed will ever be seen. But we are a blob of humanity sitting on the couch watching TV as the house is burning down around us. The level of panic at least to get us off the couch may eventually prove useful. If there is no bit of panic, there is no possibility that we will raise our collective derrieres from their current cushy locations.

[Graeme]

Food shortages could be most critical world issue by mid-century

The world is less than 40 years away from a food shortage that will have serious implications for people and governments, according to a top scientist at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

"For the first time in human history, food production will be limited on a global scale by the availability of land, water and energy," said Dr. Fred Davies, senior science advisor for the agency's bureau of food security. "Food issues could become as politically destabilizing by 2050 as energy issues are today."
Davies, who also is a Texas A&M AgriLife Regents Professor of Horticultural Sciences, addressed the North American Agricultural Journalists meeting in Washington, D.C. on the "monumental challenge of feeding the world."

He said the world population will increase 30 percent to 9 billion people by mid-century. That would call for a 70 percent increase in food to meet demand.

"But resource limitations will constrain global food systems," Davies added. "The increases currently projected for crop production from biotechnology, genetics, agronomics and horticulture will not be sufficient to meet food demand." Davies said the ability to discover ways to keep pace with food demand have been curtailed by cutbacks in spending on research.

sciencedaily

[Graeme]

Asda: 95% of our fresh produce is already at risk from climate change

95% of the entire fresh produce range sold by Asda is already at risk from climate change, according to a groundbreaking study by the supermarket giant. The report, which will be published in June, is the first attempt by a food retailer to put hard figures against the impacts global warming will have on the food it buys from across the world.

Asda, which is owned by Walmart, brought in consultants PwC to map its entire global fresh produce supply chain against the models being used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Chris Brown, Asda's senior director for sustainable business, said the study shows the impacts are already being felt and will get progressively worse as time goes on.

theguardian

[AgentR11]

40 years Graeme? It is right now. Today. All over the world. Such is peak oil.

I think when they are talking about food shortage and 40yr out via climate change, they are talking about something much more dire than we have right now, which is basically a financial and logistical problem coupled with occasional use of hunger as a weapon of war. 40 yrs out, the total global count of calories grown could easily end up below the total global count of calories required for baseline human requirements. A much more dangerous beast.

[Graeme]

Our alarming food future, explained in 7 charts

As I put it in a post at the time, the legislation was simply not ready for climate change. How not ready? A just-released, wide-ranging new federal report called the National Climate Assessment has answers. A collaborative project led by 13 federal agencies and five years in the making, the assessment is available for browsing on a very user-friendly website. Here’s what I gleaned on the challenges to agriculture posed by climate change:

Iowa is hemorrhaging soil. A while back, I wrote about Iowa’s quiet soil crisis. When heavy rains strike bare corn and soy fields in the spring, huge amounts of topsoil wash away. Known as “gully erosion,” this kind of soil loss currently isn’t counted in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s rosy erosion numbers, which hold that Iowa’s soils are holding steady. But Richard Cruse, an agronomist and the director of Iowa State University’s Iowa Water Center, has found Iowa’s soils are currently disappearing at a rate as much as 16 times faster than the natural regeneration. According to the National Assessment, days of heavy rain have increased steadily in Iowa over the past two decades, and will continue doing so.

grist

[Graeme]

The Real 'Gold' Always Will Be the...

UN Food and Agricultural Organization announced that the dry weather in Brazil and the violence in the Black Sea Region, caused a 5.2 percent surge in cereal prices, bringing the average to 205.8 points. In March the Index rose to its highest value since August 2013, it remained well below, 14.4 percent, its March 2013. Rice prices were generally stable.

This announcement makes me think that one of the fundamental problem of this world is food. I believe that the food problem becomes a dramatic one.

For the first time, the idea of hungry population appears in the report "The Limits of Growth" -- 1972 (commissioned by the Club of Rome) and has had a significant impact on the conception of environmental issues.

In the XIX sec. we are already one billion on the globe. The population growth is accelerated and now we are over seven billions on the planet and in the next two decades we will be 9 billion. Now we are at the limit, we eat everything that we produce, no surplus, no reserve. In the last period of time we can see that the world's grain reserve decreased, some specialists in the field say that they fell by a third and the food prices have doubled. From 2008-2009 we can observe a real rush, planetary, for agricultural land. It is like Golden Rush? Let's hope is not.

huffingtonpost

[Graeme]

Couldn't resist sharing this positive news (hard to find much that is these days):

101 Facts That Should Make You Hopeful About the Future of Food

Food Tank is featuring 101 bright spots in the food system that we hope will inspire eaters, businesses, researchers, scientists, funders, donors and policy makers to create—and support—a more sustainable food system.

1. Biologist Roger Leakey’s book, Tree of Life, highlights the ability of trees to help feed the planet. Through agroforestry—growing trees along with crops—communities can increase crop productivity and overcome global hunger and poverty, contributing to the livelihoods of more than 1.6 billion people.

2. According to Solar Cookers International, solar ovens help reduce toxic emissions and reduce greenhouse gases, improving both human and environmental health. Solar Cooker at CantinaWest provides resources to find solar cooking classes in 18 states.

3-5. Chefs like Jose Andres, Barton Seaver and Dan Barber are making headlines for their innovative visions of sustainable food production:

Seaver has evolved from a seven-time restaurateur to an emerging explorer for National Geographic. His restaurant, Hook, was named one of the top eco-friendly restaurants in America for their sustainable fishing practices, by Bon Appetit. Seaver is also the co-author of Foods for Health, which will be released in September.

Andres, who owns ten restaurants, heads the Think Food Group, empowering healthy food advocates around the globe.

An executive chef, Barber is the co-owner of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, and the author of his forthcoming book, The Third Plate, written to inspire Americans to think sustainably about food and agriculture.

6. The EAT Forum, held in Stockholm this year, brought together leading scientists, business leaders, and political minds through a series of lectures and information sharing.

7. The James Beard Food Conference aims to break down the silos that exist among public health practitioners, foodies, farmers and chefs in New York City, Oct. 27-28, 2014.

8. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), raised bed “keyhole” gardens improve the nutrition of at risk communities in AIDS/HIV affected regions of Africa. These vegetable beds use compost and recycled waste water to grow crops, even in dry months.

ecowatch

[dohboi]

Along the same lines: http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014- ... -practices

Seeking the Whole Story: New metrics needed to evaluate agricultural practices

Farming produces multiple products. The most obvious are food, feed, fiber and raw materials for conversion into other food and non-food products (such as energy, materials, etc.). Done right, farming also contributes to better soil health and water quality, wildlife habitat, recreational opportunities and carbon storage. Unfortunately, less desired products are often produced as well, such as pollution to ground and surface water and air, with detrimental impacts to human and animal health.

Yet, despite the clear reality of these multifunctional outcomes of agriculture and the important roles these products play in our environment, society and economy (for better or worse), we lack the means to assess them accurately. To truly measure the value and sustainability of local food and farming systems, we need indicators that are multidimensional and cross-disciplinary, and that fully capture the range of outcomes contributing to the success of the system.

There is growing support within the U.S. and around the world for less chemical-intensive, more ecological approaches to agriculture—including systems that produce healthy food for local markets. These systems have the potential to provide a whole host of benefits—from environmental to social to health—that are currently neither assessed nor valued under most current scientific research and public policy regimes. There is some evidence this is changing. Both the USDA’s Food Atlas and the state of Vermont’s Farm to Table Strategic Plan for 2020 are using a wider range of indicators to measure the food system. But these are the exceptions, not the rule.

[Graeme]

The World's Largest LED Hydroponic Farm Used to Be a Sony Factory

As climate change begins posing new challenges to conventional outdoor food production methods, hydroponic farming has made quick gains in popularity thanks to its space- and energy-saving design. This enormous indoor lettuce farm for example—the largest of its kind in the world—produces 10,000 heads a day in less space than a single American football field and could signal a sea change in how we get our greens.

This 25,000 square foot (roughly half a football field) indoor farm actually used to be a Sony semiconductor plant in Japan's Miyagi Prefecture. That is, until plant physiologist Shigeharu Shimamura set about converting it into the world's largest indoor farm illuminated by LED.

Using LED bulbs developed by GE, designed to produce the optimal wavelength of light that plants crave, Shimamura is able to accelerate plant growth by 250 percent. "What we need to do is not just setting up more days and nights," he said in a press release. "We want to achieve the best combination of photosynthesis during the day and breathing at night by controlling the lighting and the environment."

gizmodo

[dohboi]

Expect more news like this:

Drought conditions that continued through spring, followed by a late freeze in April and untimely rains in June have produced the poorest Oklahoma wheat crop in nearly a half century, Oklahoma agriculture officials said.

http://newsok.com/article/5005482

[Graeme]

How to feed 3 billion extra people — without trashing the planet

One of the daunting challenges of the coming century will be figuring out how to grow enough food for everyone on the planet. And all without destroying the planet.

That's harder than it sounds. The global population is expected to swell from 7 billion today to 9.6 billion in 2050. On top of that, countries like China and India are getting richer and eating more meat — a particularly resource-intensive type of food.

Then there's the environment to consider. Farms have become a major source of nitrogen pollution. Around the world, freshwater aquifers are dwindling. And, perhaps most crucially, countries like Brazil are trying to cut back on deforestation — which in turn makes it harder to find new cropland.

That means the world's farmers will somehow have to squeeze vastly more productivity out of existing farmland and reduce their environmental footprint. So far, they're not on track: one recent study suggested that crop yields haven't been rising fast enough to meet future food demands.

So how can countries change this? That's the subject of a new study in Science, led by Paul West of the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment. The authors identify just a few improvements to farms in a handful of countries that could help feed billions more.

"We were surprised that changes in just a few countries — and to a few crops — could make such a big difference," West says.

vox