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Gene Ellis

Monarch Migration Plunges to Lowest Level in Decades - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • But an equally alarming source of the decline, both Mr. Taylor and Mr. Vidal said, is the explosive increase in American farmland planted in soybean and corn genetically modified to tolerate herbicides. The American Midwest’s corn belt is a critical feeding ground for monarchs, which once found a ready source of milkweed growing between the rows of millions of acres of soybean and corn. But the ubiquitous use of herbicide-tolerant crops has enabled farmers to wipe out the milkweed, and with it much of the butterflies’ food supply.
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    unintended consequences of GM crops
Gene Ellis

A Disease Cuts Corn Yields - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • No one is certain why Goss’s wilt has become so rampant in recent years. But many plant pathologists suspect that the biggest factor is the hybrids chosen for genetic modification by major seed companies like Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta. “My theory is that there were a couple of hybrids planted that were selected because they had extremely high yield potentials,” said Dr. Robertson, whose research is financed by Monsanto and the Agriculture Department. “They also may have been highly susceptible to Goss’s wilt.”
  • About 90 percent of the corn grown in the United States comes from seeds that have been engineered in a laboratory, their DNA modified with genetic material not naturally found in corn species. Almost all American corn, for instance, is now engineered to resist the powerful herbicide glyphosate (often sold as Roundup), so farmers can kill weeds without killing their corn.
  • As farmers grow more corn to satisfy the demand for ethanol, they are rotating it less frequently with other crops.
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  • “One of the best management techniques for controlling Goss’s wilt is crop rotation — corn, then soy or another crop,” Mr. Anderson said.
  • nother possible factor is the growth of no-till farming, which leaves cornstalks, on which the bacteria can linger, to decay in the field after harvesting, rather than being plowed under.
Gene Ellis

German Study Finds GM Crops Good for Farmers and the Environment | Food Safety News - 0 views

  • German Study Finds GM Crops Good for Farmers and the Environment
Gene Ellis

Golden Rice - Lifesaver? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • making it the only variety in existence to produce beta carotene, the source of vitamin A. Its developers call it “Golden Rice.”
  • And they have motivated similar attacks on trials of other genetically modified crops in recent years: grapes designed to fight off a deadly virus in France, wheat designed to have a lower glycemic index in Australia, sugar beets in Oregon designed to tolerate a herbicide, to name a few.
  • Not owned by any company, Golden Rice is being developed by a nonprofit group called the International Rice Research Institute with the aim of providing a new source of vitamin A to people both in the Philippines, where most households get most of their calories from rice,
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  • “The genes they inserted to make the vitamin are not some weird manufactured material,” he wrote, “but are also found in squash, carrots and melons.” 
Gene Ellis

A Lonely Quest for Facts on Genetically Modified Crops - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • A Lonely Quest for Facts on Genetically Modified Crops
Gene Ellis

Statistics in Africa: Making Africa count | The Economist - 0 views

  • IN 2013 Nigeria’s GDP could increase by 40%, which would be impressive even by Africa’s recent bouncy growth standards. The rise will come not from a surge in economic activity but because the country is rejigging the way it calculates its accounts.
  • But the new figures may owe as much to political calculation as to hard-nosed statisticians
  • Nigeria’s real GDP is based on 1990 prices. It plans to update them to ones from 2008. Ghana did the same in 2010, revising its base year from 1996 to 2006. Its GDP shot up by 60%, propelling it overnight from being a poor to middle-income country, defined by the IMF as having a GDP per person of at least $1,026 a year.
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  • In 2005 its government brought in fertiliser subsidies. It reported a maize crop of 3.4m tonnes in 2006-7, up from 2.6m tonnes the year before. The aid lobby said this justified the subsidies and the budget support which enables them to be paid for.
  • But figures released in 2010, disputed by Malawi’s ministry of agriculture, suggest that the harvest was only 2.1m tonnes. If maize production had risen as much as claimed, Malawians should have have had a surplus of maize and prices should have dropped. That did not happen, says Mr Jerven.
Gene Ellis

Red, Green, and Blue | Patriotism that loves our country, our land, and our planet - 0 views

  • What is ironic is that these vines represented about the least scary GMO crop imaginable.  They were engineered to be resistant to a disease called Fan Leaf Virus that is spread by nematodes that live in the soil.  Back before people understood this disease it was unintentionally spread to many grape-growing areas.  Once a given vineyard is contaminated with the nematodes and virus, grapes will only survive for a few years on that site before declining and dying.  Some of the best wine production areas around the world are seriously compromised this way, and there has been no lasting cure.
  • at was being tested in Colmar was a “rootstock.”  All grapes are cuttings of the desired variety (Gewurtztraminer, Cabernet, Chardonnay…) grafted on to a root that is resistant to various pests.  The Colmar roots would have also been resistant to the virus.  The top of the vine (all that is above ground) would be exactly like all the neighboring vineyards.  In theory the grapes wouldn’t die in a few years (that is what the researchers were hoping to demonstrate).
  • but this same irrationality is hindering efforts to provide things like virus resistant Cassava to poor farmers in Africa or virus resistant Papayas to people in Thailand. 
Gene Ellis

IRIN Africa | GUINEA: Winners and losers in Guinea's bauxite industry | Guine... - 0 views

  • GUINEA: Winners and losers in Guinea’s bauxite industry
  • “Rather than making people richer, mining has made them poorer,” said Akoumba Diallo, a mining sector researcher. “It polluted their environments so they can’t grow crops or let animals feed near mining sites. And it is hard to get water anywhere because it’s contaminated.” With mining contributing to 85 percent of the country’s external revenue, and the World Bank estimating investments of up to US$20 billion in bauxite mining in Guinea over the next decade, the government is currently rewriting and renegotiating its mining contracts - unchanged for 25 years - with 15 companies to ensure Guineans are more likely to benefit from the wealth they spawn.
  • Mining companies are legally obliged to pay taxes to owners of the land they mine,
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  • “We have been paying US$100,000 in annual taxes directly to the Kindia prefecture,” he told IRIN. “The distribution of the money rests with them according to the needs they have identified in Mambia.”
  • Seeing this for themselves, the CBK became concerned that the money was not being well spent, according to Cirra Dieng, communications officer at the CBK, and withdrew its payments in 2007 awaiting some explanation. They are still waiting.
  • The EITI has set up a monitoring committee made up of government representatives, mining companies and civil society to push mining companies to publish what they pay and the government to disclose what it receives at the state, prefecture and CRD level. So far it has done so for six mining companies, including the CBK.
Gene Ellis

Squash Seeds Show Andean Cultivation Is 10,000 Years Old, Twice as Old as Thought - New... - 0 views

  • Seeds of domesticated squash found by scientists on the western slopes of the Andes in northern Peru are almost 10,000 years old, about twice the age of previously discovered cultivated crops in the region, new, more precise dating techniques have revealed.
  • The excavations also yielded peanut hulls and cotton fibers — about 8,500 and 6,000 years old, respectively
  • Their research also turned up traces of other domesticated plants, including a grain, manioc and unidentified fruits, and stone hoes, furrowed garden plots and small-scale irrigation canals from approximately the same period of time.
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  • The article also noted that 10,000-year-old cultivated squash seeds had recently been reported in Mexico, along with evidence of domesticated corn there by 9,000 years ago. Scholars now think that plants were domesticated independently in at least 10 “centers of origin,” including, in addition to the Middle East, Mexico and Peru, places in Africa, southern India, China and New Guinea.
  • In the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, an arc from modern-day Israel through Syria and Turkey to Iraq, wheat and barley were domesticated by 10,000 years ago, and possibly rye by 13,000 years ago. Experts in ancient agriculture suspect that the transition from foraging to cultivation had started much earlier and was not as abrupt a transformation as indicated in the archaeological record.
  • The distribution of building structures, canals and furrowed fields, Dr. Dillehay said, indicated that the Andean culture was moving beyond cultivation limited to individual households toward an organized agricultural society.
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