Rice prices
to go down, sugar stable, trade dept says
Arianne Merez, ABS-CBN News
Various basic goods sell at lower prices at the Department of
Trade and Industry's recently-launched Suking Outlet in Quezon City on
September 18, 2018. Mark Demayo, ABS-CBN News/file
MANILA -- The price of rice should go down in May under a new
liberalized regime, but the price of sugar should remain stable due to
sufficient supply, a trade official said Wednesday.
The price of the staple grain should go down to P32 per kilo
from P39 while sugar prices should stay at P50 to P55 per kilo, Trade
Undersecretary Ruth Castello said.
President Rodrigo Duterte in February signed a law putting
tariffs on rice imports instead of quotas, a measure aimed at lowering prices
after inflation hovered at near 10-year highs in 2018.
Once rice prices go down, there might be no need for a suggested
retail price or SRP on the staple, Castello said.
Implementing rules of the Rice Tariffication Law were finalized
last April 7. Under the law, private traders can import grain freely as long as
they secure the needed permits and pay the right dues.
Castello said the price of sugar should not increase since the
country has enough supply
Some sugar traders may be manipulating prices, said Sugar
Regulatory Administration chief Hermenegildo Serafica.Data from the SRA showed
that the country had 1,152,422 metric tons as of sugar as of March 31 compared
to 800,587 metric tons as of April 1 last year.
The SRA report showed that the prevailing price of sugar is P45
per kilo as of Tuesday.
No choice but to invest in rice industry’
‘NO CHOICE BUT TO INVEST IN RICE
INDUSTRY’
(Second of three parts)
Last year, Sen. Cynthia Villar said the liberalization of rice imports was required by the World Trade Organization and resistance to it could result in trade sanctions for the Philippines, leaving the country with no other choice but to abolish quotas and pass the rice tarrification bill.
Last year, Sen. Cynthia Villar said the liberalization of rice imports was required by the World Trade Organization and resistance to it could result in trade sanctions for the Philippines, leaving the country with no other choice but to abolish quotas and pass the rice tarrification bill.
Villar, who heads the Senate
Committee on Food and Agriculture, was one of the legislators who actively
pushed Republic Act (RA) 11203 or the “Rice Tariffication Law.” Economists say
that with rice imports, prices of the staple would stabilize or be reduced,
tempering inflation and helping poor households purchase more food.
Farmers
thresh newly harvested rice in Bulacan. FILE PHOTO
Besides imposing tariffs ranging
from 35 to 50 percent on imported rice, one of the features of RA 11203 is the
creation of the Rice Competitiveness Enhancement Fund (RCEF).
RCEF will be funded by
collections from tariffs slapped on rice imports, with at least P10 billion
allocated annually from this year to 2024.
The P10 billion will be spent as
follows: P5 billion for farm mechanization primarily providing post-harvest
equipment for drying and milling palay (unmilled rice); P3 billion for the
production and distribution of high-yielding seeds; P1 billion for upgrading
the capabilities of rice farmers; and P1 billion for credit support.
Various government agencies will
be involved in developing and implementing the programs and project under RCEF
including the Philippine Center for Postharvest Development and Mechanization
(PhilMech), Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice), and Agricultural
Training Institute that are under the Department of Agriculture (DA); and the
Technical Education and Skills Development Authority.
Agri chief still optimistic
PhilMech documents showed it was
possible to reduce the average cost of producing palay in the Philippines by
P1.50 to P3. This is by addressing issues related to planting and harvesting,
two procedures that are still largely done by manual labor in most rice farms.
The agency intends to address the
issue with funding from RCEF by dispersing various types of farm equipment like
combine harvesters, mechanical transplanters, farm tractors and mechanical
threshers.
With a P1.50- to P3-reduction
through mechanization measures, the average cost of producing palay in the
Philippines could theoretically go down to P9.72 to P11.22 based on the current
average of P12.72. That range brings it closer to Thailand’s average palay
production cost of P8.86 per kilo but still far from Vietnam’s P6.22 per kilo.
“Properly used, the RCEF could
actually increase the productivity of Filipino rice farmers, because farm
mechanization alone will increase production efficiency and reduce post-harvest
losses estimated at 16 percent of total production,” Agriculture Secretary
Emmanuel Piñol said in a Facebook post commenting on the effects of RA 11203 on
the country’s rice industry.
“The P3 billion intended for
high-yielding seeds developed by IRRI (International Rice Research Institute)
and PhilRice are also expected to increase average farm yield by at least 2 MT
(metric tons) in 1 million hectares (of rice lands) for the first year of
implementation,” he added.
PhilRice has developed seeds that could yield as much as 6 to 8 MT of palay per hectare.
PhilRice has developed seeds that could yield as much as 6 to 8 MT of palay per hectare.
‘Don’t lower guard’
William Dar, a former Agriculture
secretary, said the country must maintain its rice-self sufficiency level at
the present 93 percent or higher.
He said only 5 percent of world
rice production was traded internationally and challenges like growing
population and extreme weather disturbances could affect even the top exporters
of rice, reducing available worldwide stocks of the staple.
The prospect of big countries
like China and India buying every available kilogram of rice in the world
market cannot be discounted, particularly if both countries experience shortfalls
in their own rice supplies, he added.
“Let’s not lower our guard. We
need to increase the productivity, sustainability and competitiveness of our
rice industry,” he said.
“Even if we have the money to buy
rice from the international market, we cannot do anything if there are no
stocks to buy from abroad,” Dar said.
Dar, who took the International
Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics from out of the doldrums
during his leadership of the institution from 2000 to 2014, also proposes that
rice farmers, who could no longer compete with imports, shift to high-value
crops that have export potential like coffee, cacao, rubber, cassava and
tropical fruits.
Dar also believes in the wider
application of technology in rice farms that could help push the current
average for palay production at 4 MT/ha to as much as 6-8 MT/ha.
Weedy Rice Retains On Evolving Roots That ‘Cheat’
Scientists have decoded how weedy rice, an aggressive variant of
rice, out-compete other crops and take over an entire field.
A team from Washington University in St. Louis and the Donald
Danforth Plant Science Center revealed that weedy rice has evolved “cheater” roots
that minimize below-the-ground contact with other plants and exploit the
nutrient-sharing quality of the soil in fields. The “cheater” roots give weedy
rice an unfair advantage over competing crops.
“We tend to think of competition occurring above ground because
that’s the part of the plant we see,” said Kenneth M. Olsen,” professor of
biology at Washington University and senior author of the study. “But that’s
only half the plant.”
Weedy Rice’s Cheater Roots
In the study published in the journal New Phytologist, the researchers demonstrated
how the weedy rice take root in a field and take over. The team focused on two
evolved types of weedy rice often found in the same fields in the southern
United States.
They used new imaging techniques, including a semi-automated
optical tomography approach, the team took photographs of the root system of
671 weedy rice plants, modeled the photos in 3-D, and created 360-degree models
of weedy rice roots.
They also used an algorithm to record 98 physical traits of the
root system, including depth and width, and genetic analysis to track the
history of the weeds.
They found that both types of weedy rice evolved similar traits,
but through different genetic mechanisms. The study proves that there is more
than one way to evolve a weed, both above the ground and below.
“In other words, it’s disconcertingly easy to evolve a weed from a
domesticated crop,” added Olsen. “This can occur multiple times independently
from different crop varieties.”
Below The
Ground Competition
The study is one of the first to study a plant’s root system,
including growth and interaction that affect how it competes for nutrients
found in the soil. Olsen explained that the “hidden half” of the plants is
sometimes more important for survival than the above-ground part. The root
system is responsible for essentials such as water and nutrients.
Especially for weedy rice, root growth is more important for
competition than above-ground growth.
CRI
develops new rice varieties to increase local production
Tuesday 9th
April, 2019
By
Kwabia Owusu-Mensah, GNA
Fumesua (Ash), April 09, GNA
– The Crop Research Institute (CRI), of the Council for Scientific and
Industrial Research (CSIR), at Fumesua near Kumasi is using science and
technology innovations to boost commercial production of local food crops,
especially rice in the country.
This
is part of CRI’s move to execute its mandate as a research hub for crops, in a
bid to position itself at the forefront of leveraging on scientific and
technological innovations, that would ensure phenomenal increase in the
cultivation of rice and other food staples in the country.
CRI
is doing this by increasing the accessibility and availability to farmers its
newly-improved quality, high yielding and disease resistant crop seeds.
The
goal is to support the Planting for Food and Jobs (PFJ) initiative and other
major agricultural interventions, being pursued by the government to improve
food security, as a catalyst for the Ghana Beyond Aid agenda.
To
demonstrate this, crop scientists and breeders from the Institute have for the
first time developed and released six new rice varieties to scale up the
commercial production of quality rice.
The
development of the varieties, four of which were from local crosses of the CRI,
is seen as an unprecedented and a major milestone for national crop research in
Ghana.
It
is aimed at boosting food security and a resultant reduction in rice
importation into the country.
The
2017 annual scientific report made available to the Ghana News Agency in Kumasi
indicated that the six new varieties were expected to respond to the industry
challenges of low production, low average yield and poor grain quality
and to “satisfy the strong demand for high-yielding jasmine and
conventional US long grain rice types, the most preferred rice choices in
Ghana.
“The
six new varieties, which have been accepted and approved by the National
Varietal Release Committee, are CRI-Dartey, CRI-Kantinka, CRI-Emopa,
CRI-Mpuntuo, CRI-Oboafo and CRI-Aunty Jane,” the report
indicated.
Ghana’s
rice import bill is said to be about $600 million, regardless of the country’s
potential to produce to meet local and international demands and according to
the report, besides maize, rice is the second most important cereal and major
staple in Ghana.
The
Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA) estimates that the annual per capita
consumption of rice is about 40kg per person and is expected to increase to
63kg by the end of 2019.
The
Institute believes that all the six varieties, suitable for lowland and
irrigated ecologies, with their potential for higher yields, tolerance to Rice
Yellow Mottle Virus Disease and Iron toxicity, will boost acceptability by
farmers as they have high raising, easy cooking and aromatic qualities.
GNA
Food-system collapse, sea-level rise, disease.
In his new book “Falter,” Bill McKibben asks, “Is it Too Late?”
Corn stalks ruined by heat and lack of rain in Nebraska, 2012.
"In the human game, the single most important question is probably 'What’s
for dinner?' writes McKibben. "And when the answer is 'Not much,' things
deteriorate fast."
Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images
Excerpted from “FALTER: Has the Human Game Begun
to Play Itself Out?” by Bill McKibben. Published by Henry Holt
and Company April 16th 2019. Copyright © 2019 by Bill McKibben. All rights
reserved.
Oh, it could get very bad.
In 2015, a study in the Journal of Mathematical
Biology pointed out that if the world’s
oceans kept warming, by 2100 they might become hot enough to “stop oxygen
production by phyto-plankton by disrupting the process of photosynthesis.”
Given that two-thirds of the Earth’s oxygen comes from phytoplankton, that
would “likely result in the mass mortality of animals and humans.”
A year later, above the Arctic Circle, in Siberia, a heat wave
thawed a reindeer carcass that had been trapped in the permafrost. The exposed
body released anthrax into nearby water and soil, infecting two thousand
reindeer grazing nearby, and they in turn infected some humans; a
twelve-year-old boy died. As it turns out, permafrost is a “very good preserver of
microbes and viruses, because it is cold, there is no oxygen, and it is dark”
— scientists have managed to revive an eight-million-year-old bacterium they
found beneath the surface of a glacier. Researchers believe there are fragments
of the Spanish flu virus, smallpox, and bubonic plague buried in Siberia and
Alaska.
Or consider this: as ice sheets melt, they take weight off land,
and that can trigger earthquakes — seismic activity is already increasing in
Greenland and Alaska. Meanwhile, the added weight of the new seawater starts to
bend the Earth’s crust. “That will give you a
massive increase in volcanic activity. It’ll activate faults to create
earthquakes, submarine landslides, tsunamis, the whole lot,”
explained the director of University College London’s Hazard Centre. Such
a landslide happened in Scandinavia about eight thousand years ago, as the last
Ice Age retreated and a Kentucky-size section of Norway’s continental shelf
gave way, “plummeting down to the abyssal plain and creating a series of
titanic waves that roared forth with a vengeance,” wiping all signs of life
from coastal Norway to Greenland and “drowning the Wales-sized landmass that
once connected Britain to the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany.” When the
waves hit the Shetlands, they were sixty-five feet high.
Midwestern Towns
Prepare to Navigate More Flooding (and a Climate-Denying President)
There’s even this: if we keep raising carbon dioxide levels, we
may not be able to think straight anymore. At a thousand parts per million
(which is within the realm of possibility for 2100), human cognitive ability
falls 21 percent. “The largest effects were seen for Crisis Response,
Information Usage, and Strategy,” a Harvard study reported, which is too bad,
as those skills are what we seem to need most.
I could, in other words, do my best to scare you silly. I’m not
opposed on principle — changing something as fundamental as the composition of
the atmosphere, and hence the heat balance of the planet, is certain to trigger
all manner of horror, and we shouldn’t shy away from it. The dramatic
uncertainty that lies ahead may be the most frightening development of all; the
physical world is going from backdrop to foreground. (It’s like the contrast
between politics in the old days, when you could forget about Washington for
weeks at a time, and politics in the Trump era, when the president is always
jumping out from behind a tree to yell at you.)
But let’s try to occupy ourselves with the most likely
scenarios, because they are more than disturbing enough. Long before we get to
tidal waves or smallpox, long before we choke to death or stop thinking
clearly, we will need to concentrate on the most mundane and basic facts:
everyone needs to eat every day, and an awful lot of us live near the ocean.
FOOD SUPPLY first. We’ve had an amazing run since the end of
World War II, with crop yields growing fast enough to keep ahead of a
fast-rising population. It’s come at great human cost — displaced peasant
farmers fill many of the planet’s vast slums — but in terms of sheer volume,
the Green Revolution’s fertilizers, pesticides, and machinery managed to push
output sharply upward. That climb, however, now seems to be running into the
brute facts of heat and drought. There are studies to demonstrate the dire
effects of warming on coffee, cacao, chickpeas, and champagne, but it is
cereals that we really need to worry about, given that they supply most of the
planet’s calories: corn, wheat, and rice all evolved as crops in the climate of
the last ten thousand years, and though plant breeders can change them, there
are limits to those changes. You can move a person from Hanoi to Edmonton, and
she might decide to open a Vietnamese restaurant. But if you move a rice plant,
it will die.
A 2017 study in Australia, home to some of the world’s
highest-tech farming, found that “wheat productivity has flatlined as a direct
result of climate change.” After tripling between 1900 and
1990, wheat yields had stagnated since, as temperatures increased a degree and
rainfall declined by nearly a third. “The chance of that just being variable
climate without the underlying factor [of climate change] is less than one in a
hundred billion,” the researchers said, and it meant that despite all the
expensive new technology farmers kept introducing, “they have succeeded only in
standing still, not in moving forward.” Assuming the same trends continued,
yields would actually start to decline inside of two decades, they reported. In
June 2018, researchers found that a two-degree Celsius rise in temperature —
which, recall, is what the Paris accords are now aiming for — could cut U.S. corn yields by
18 percent. A four-degree increase — which is where our current
trajectory will take us — would cut the crop almost in half. The United States
is the world’s largest producer of corn, which in turn is the planet’s most
widely grown crop.
Corn is vulnerable because even a week of high temperatures at
the key moment can keep it from fertilizing. (“You only get one chance to
pollinate a quadrillion kernels of corn,” the head of a
commodity consulting firm explained.) But even the hardiest crops are
susceptible. Sorghum, for instance, which is a staple for half a billion
humans, is particularly hardy in dry conditions because it has big, fibrous
roots that reach far down into the earth. Even it has limits, though, and they
are being reached. Thirty years of data from the American Midwest show that
heat waves affect the “vapor pressure deficit,” the difference between the water
vapor in the sorghum leaf’s interior and that in the surrounding air. Hotter
weather means the sorghum releases more moisture into the atmosphere. Warm the
planet’s temperature by two degrees Celsius — which is, again, now the
world’s goal — and sorghum yields drop 17 percent. Warm it five degrees
Celsius (nine degrees Fahrenheit), and yields drop almost 60 percent.
It’s hard to imagine a topic duller than sorghum yields. It’s
the precise opposite of clickbait. But people have to eat; in the human game,
the single most important question is probably “What’s for dinner?” And when
the answer is “Not much,” things deteriorate fast. In 2010 a severe heat wave
hit Russia, and it wrecked the grain harvest, which led the Kremlin to ban
exports. The global price of wheat spiked, and that helped trigger the Arab
Spring — Egypt at the time was the largest wheat importer on the planet. That
experience set academics and insurers to work gaming out what the next food
shock might look like. In 2017 one team imagined a vigorous El Niño, with the
attendant floods and droughts — for a season, in their scenario, corn and soy
yields declined by 10 percent, and wheat and rice by 7 percent. The result was
chaos: “quadrupled commodity
prices, civil unrest, significant negative humanitarian consequences . . . Food
riots break out in urban areas across the Middle East, North Africa, and Latin
America. The euro weakens and the main European stock markets lose ten percent.”
At about the same time, a team of British researchers released a
study demonstrating that even if you can grow plenty of food, the
transportation system that distributes it runs through just fourteen major
choke-points, and those are vulnerable to — you guessed it — massive disruption
from climate change. For instance, U.S. rivers and canals carry a third of the
world’s corn and soy, and they’ve been frequently shut down or crimped by
flooding and drought in recent years. Brazil accounts for 17 percent of the
world’s grain exports, but heavy rainfall in 2017 stranded three thousand
trucks. “It’s the glide path to a
perfect storm,” said one of the report’s authors.
Five weeks after that, another report raised an even deeper question. What if you can
figure out how to grow plenty of food, and you can figure out how to guarantee
its distribution, but the food itself has lost much of its value? The paper, in
the journal Environmental Research, said that rising carbon dioxide levels, by speeding plant
growth, seem to have reduced the amount of protein in basic staple crops, a
finding so startling that, for many years, agronomists had overlooked hints
that it was happening. But it seems to be true: when researchers grow grain at
the carbon dioxide levels we expect for later this century, they find that
minerals such as calcium and iron drop by 8 percent, and protein by about the
same amount. In the developing world, where people rely on plants for their
protein, that means huge reductions in nutrition: India alone could lose 5
percent of the protein in its total diet, putting 53 million people at new risk
for protein deficiency. The loss of zinc, essential for maternal and infant
health, could endanger 138 million people around the world. In 2018, rice
researchers found “significantly less protein” when they grew eighteen
varieties of rice in high–carbon dioxide test plots. “The idea that food became
less nutritious was a surprise,” said one researcher. “It’s not
intuitive. But I think we should continue to expect surprises. We are
completely altering the biophysical conditions that underpin our food system.”
And not just ours. People don’t depend on goldenrod, for instance, but bees do.
When scientists looked at samples of goldenrod in the Smithsonian that dated
back to 1842, they found that the protein content of its pollen had “declined
by a third since the industrial revolution — and the change closely tracks with
the rise in carbon dioxide.”
Bees help crops, obviously, so that’s scary news. But in August
2018, a massive new study found something just as frightening: crop pests were
thriving in the new heat. “It gets better and better for them,” said one
University of Colorado researcher. Even if we hit the UN target of limiting
temperature rise to two degrees Celsius, pests should cut wheat yields by 46
percent, corn by 31 percent, and rice by 19 percent. “Warmer temperatures
accelerate the metabolism of insect pests like aphids and corn borers at a
predictable rate,” the researchers found. “That makes them
hungrier[,] and warmer temperatures also speed up their reproduction.” Even
fossilized plants from fifty million years ago make the point: “Plant damage
from insects correlated with rising and falling temperatures, reaching a
maximum during the warmest periods.”
JUST AS PEOPLE have gotten used to eating
a certain amount of food every day, they’ve gotten used to living in particular
places. For obvious reasons, many of these places are right by the ocean:
estuaries, where rivers meet the sea, are among the richest ecosystems on
Earth, and water makes for easy trade. From the earliest cities (Athens,
Corinth, Rhodes) to the biggest modern metropolises (Shanghai, New York,
Mumbai), proximity to saltwater meant wealth and power. And now it means
exquisite, likely fatal, vulnerability.
Throughout the Holocene (the ten-thousand-year period that began
as the last ice age ceased, the stretch that encompasses all recorded human
history), the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere stayed stable, and
therefore so did the sea level, and hence it took a while for people to worry
about sea level rise. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) predicted in 2003 that sea level should rise a mere half meter by the
end of the twenty-first century, most of that coming because warm water takes
up more space than cold, and while a half meter would be enough to cause
expense and trouble, it wouldn’t really interfere with settlement patterns. But
even as the IPCC scientists made that estimate, they cautioned that it didn’t
take into account the possible melt of the great ice sheets over Greenland and
Antarctica. And pretty much everything we’ve learned in the years since makes
scientists think that those ice sheets are horribly vulnerable.
Paleoclimatologists, for instance, have discovered that in the
distant past, sea levels often rose and fell with breathtaking speed. Fourteen
thousand years ago, as the Ice Age began to loosen its grip, huge amounts of
ice thawed in what researchers call meltwater pulse 1A, raising the sea level
by sixty feet. Thirteen feet of that may have come in a single century. Another
team found that millions of years ago, during the Pliocene, with carbon dioxide
levels about where they are now, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet seems to have
collapsed in as little as a hundred years. “The latest field data out
of West Antarctica is kind of an OMG thing,” a federal official
said in 2016 — and that was before the really epochal news in the early summer of 2018, when eighty-four
researchers from forty-four institutions pooled their data and concluded that
the frozen continent had lost three trillion tons of ice in the last three
decades, with the rate of melt tripling since 2012. As a result, scientists are now revising their
estimates steadily upward. Not half a meter of sea level rise, but a meter. Or
two meters. “Several meters in the next fifty to 150 years,” said James Hansen,
the planet’s premier climatologist, who added that such a rise would make
coastal cities “practically ungovernable.” As Jeff Goodell (who in 2017 wrote the most
comprehensive book to date on sea level rise) put it, such a rise would “create
generations of climate refugees that will make today’s Syrian war refugee
crisis look like a high school drama production.”
What’s really breathtaking is how ill-prepared we are for such
changes. Goodell spent months reporting in Miami Beach, which was literally
built on sand dredged up from the bottom of Biscayne Bay. He managed to track
down Florida’s biggest developer, Jorge Pérez, at a museum opening. Pérez was
not, he insisted, worried about the rising sea because “I believe that in
twenty or thirty years, someone is going to find a solution for this. If it is
a problem for Miami, it will also be a problem for New York and Boston — so
where are people going to go?” (He added, with Trump-level narcissism,
“Besides, by that time I’ll be dead, so what does it matter?”) To the extent
that we’re planning at all, it’s for the old, low predictions of a meter or
less. Venice, for instance, is spending $6 billion on a series of inflatable
booms to hold back storm tides. But they’re designed to stop sea level rise of
about a foot. New York City is building a “U-Barrier,” a berm to protect Lower
Manhattan from inundation in a storm the size of Hurricane Sandy. But as the
sea level rises, winds like Sandy’s will drive far more water into Manhattan,
so why not build it higher? “Because the cost goes up exponentially,” said the
architect. The cost is already starting to mount. Researchers showed in 2018
that Florida homes near the flood lines were selling at a 7 percent discount, a
figure growing over time because “sophisticated buyers” know what is coming.
Insurance companies are balking:
basements from “New York to Mumbai” may be uninsurable by 2020, the CEO of one
of Europe’s largest insurers said in 2018.
SOME OF the cost of climate change
can be measured in units we’re used to dealing with. Testimony submitted by
climate scientists to a federal court in 2017, for instance, said that if we
don’t take much stronger action now, future citizens would have to pay $535
trillion to cope with global warming. How is that possible? Take one small
county in Florida, which needs to raise 150 miles of road to prevent flooding
from even minimal sea level rise. That costs $7 million a mile, putting the
price tag at over $1 billion, in a county that has an annual road budget of $25
million. Or consider the numbers from Alaska, where officials are preparing to
move one coastal village with four hundred residents that’s threatened by
rising waters at a cost of up to $400 million — $1 million a person. Multiply
this by everyone everywhere, and you understand why the costs run so high.
A team of economists
predicted a 12 percent risk that global warming could reduce global economic
output by 50 percent by 2100 — that is to say, there’s a
one-in-eight chance of something eight times as bad as the Great Recession.
But some things can’t be measured, and the damage there seems
even greater. For instance, the median estimate, from the International Organization for
Migration, is that we may see two hundred million climate refugees by 2050.
(The high estimate is a billion.) Already “the likelihood of being uprooted
from one’s home has increased sixty percent compared with forty years ago.” The
U.S. military frets about that because masses of people on the march
destabilize entire regions. “Security will start to crumble pretty quickly,”
said Adm. Samuel Locklear, former chief of U.S. Pacific Command, explaining why
climate change was his single greatest worry.
The biggest worry for people losing their homes is . . . losing
their homes. So, let me tell you about a trip I took last summer, to the ice
shelf of Greenland. I was with a pair of veteran ice scientists and two young
poets — a woman named Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, from the Marshall Islands in the
Pacific, and another named Aka Niviana, who was born on this largest of all the
Earth’s islands, a massive sheet of ice that, when it melts, will raise the level
of the oceans more than twenty feet.
And it is melting. We landed at the World War II–era airstrip in
Narsarsuaq and proceeded by boat through the iceberg-clogged Tunulliarfik
Fjord, arriving eventually at the foot of the Qaterlait Glacier. We hauled gear
up the sloping, icy ramp of the glacier and made camp on an outcrop of red
granite bedrock nearly a kilometer inland. In fact, we made camp twice, because
the afternoon sun swelled the stream we’d chosen for a site, and soon the tents
were inundated. But after dinner, in the late Arctic sunlight, the two women
donned the traditional dress of their respective homelands and hiked farther up
the glacier, till they could see both the ocean and the high ice. And there
they performed a poem they’d composed, a cry from angry and engaged hearts
about the overwhelming fact of their lives.
The ice of Niviana’s homeland was disappearing, and with it a
way of life. While we were on the ice sheet, researchers reported that “the
oldest and thickest sea ice” in the Arctic had melted, “opening waters north of
Greenland that are normally frozen even in summer.” Just up the coast from our
camp, a landslide triggered by melting ice had recently set off a hundred-foot
tsunami that killed four people in a remote village: it was, said scientists,
precisely the kind of event that will “become more frequent as the climate
warms.”
The effect, however, is likely to be even more immediate on
Jetnil-Kijiner’s home. The Marshalls are a meter or two above sea level, and
already the “king tides” wash through living rooms and unearth grave- yards.
The breadfruit trees and the banana palms are wilting as saltwater intrudes on
the small lens of fresh water that has supported life on the atolls for
millennia. Jetnil-Kijiner was literally standing on the ice that, as it melts,
will drown her home, leaving her and her countrymen with, as she put it, “only
a passport to call home.”
So, you can understand the quiet rage that flowed through the
poem the two women had written, a poem they now shouted into a chill wind on
this glacier that owed up to the great ice sheet, silhouetted against the
hemisphere’s starkest landscape. It was a fury that came from a long and bitter
history: the Marshalls were the site of the atom bomb tests after the war, and Bikini
Atoll remains uninhabitable, just as the United States left nuclear waste lying
around the ice when it abandoned the thirty bases it had built in Greenland.
The very same beasts
That now decide
Who should live
And who should die . . .
We demand that the world see beyond
SUVs, ACs, their pre-packaged convenience
Their oil-slicked dreams, beyond the belief
That tomorrow will never happen
That now decide
Who should live
And who should die . . .
We demand that the world see beyond
SUVs, ACs, their pre-packaged convenience
Their oil-slicked dreams, beyond the belief
That tomorrow will never happen
But, of course, climate change is different, the first crisis
that, though it affects the most vulnerable first and hardest, will eventually
come for us all.
Let me bring my home to yours
Let’s watch as Miami, New York,
Shanghai, Amsterdam, London
Rio de Janeiro and Osaka
Try to breathe underwater . . .
None of us is immune.
Let’s watch as Miami, New York,
Shanghai, Amsterdam, London
Rio de Janeiro and Osaka
Try to breathe underwater . . .
None of us is immune.
Science can tell us a good deal about this crisis. Jason Box, an
American glaciologist who organized the trip, has spent the last twenty-five
years journeying to Greenland. “We called this place where we are now the Eagle
Glacier because of its shape when we first came here five years ago,” Box said.
“But now the head and the wings of the bird have melted away. I don’t know what
we should call it now, but the eagle is dead.” He busied himself replacing the
batteries in his remote weather stations, scattered across the ice. They tell
one story, but his colleague Alun Hubbard, a Welsh scientist, conceded that
there were limits to what instruments could explain. “It’s just gobsmacking
looking at the trauma of the landscape,” he said. “I just couldn’t register the
scale of how the ice sheet had changed in my head.”
But artists can register scale. They can transpose the fact of melting ice to
inundated homes and bewildered lives, gauge it against long history and lost
future. Science and economics have no real way to value the fact that people
have lived for millennia in a certain rhythm, have eaten the food and sung the
songs of certain places that are now disappearing. This is a cost only art can
measure, and it makes sense that the units of that measurement are sadness and
fury — and also, remarkably, hope. The women’s poem, shouted into the chill
wind, ended like this:
Life in all forms demands
The same respect we all give to money . . .
So each and every one of us
Has to decide
If we
Will
Rise
The same respect we all give to money . . .
So each and every one of us
Has to decide
If we
Will
Rise
And so, we must — in fact, this book will end with a description
of what that rising might look like. But if, as now seems certain, the melt
continues, then the villages of the Marshalls and the ports of Greenland will
be overwhelmed. And we will all be a little poorer, because a way of being will
have been cut off. The puzzle of being human will have lost some of its oldest,
most artful pieces.
“The loss of Venice,” Jeff Goodell writes, wouldn’t be about
just the loss of present-day Venetians. “It’s the loss of the stones in the
narrow streets where Titian and Giorgione walked. It’s the loss of eleventh-
century mosaics in the basilica, and the unburied home of Marco Polo, and
palazzos along the Grand Canal. . . . The loss of Venice is about the loss of a
part of ourselves that reaches back in time and binds us together as civilized
people.”
We all have losses already. Where I live, it’s the seasons:
winter doesn’t reliably mean winter anymore, and so the way we’ve always
viscerally told time has begun to break down. In California, it’s the sense of
ease: the smell of the fire next time lingers in the eucalyptus groves. There
are many ways to be poorer, and we’re going to find out all of them.
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Fin24.com | Wandile
Sihlobo: Zimbabwe needs SA farming skills
April 10, 2019
Cross-border knowledge between
the South African and Zimbabwean farming sectors is critical for socioeconomic
stability in the Southern Africa region.The collapse of Zimbabwe’s agricultural
sector from the early 2000s is well and largely attributed to ill-conceived
land reform policies.
But I had hoped that the new
administration would use agriculture as one of the sectors to drive the
economy, as it makes up over of the country’s gross domestic product.
Improvement in system would be an essential part of the reform process. But the
approach to production would be to look at what agricultural products Zimbabwe
imports in large quantities and whether import substitution would be a
possibility in the near to medium term.
This would not only improve the
country’s trade balance but also bring much-needed job opportunities. In 2016
Zimbabwe spent $1.04bn on agricultural and food imports, up 5% from the
previous year. According to data from Trade Map, nearly a third of this import
bill was due to maize, with soya bean oil and rice accounting for 12% and 11%
of the overall import bill, respectively. The other notable products the
country imported included wheat, milk, palm oil, sugar, animal and vegetable
oils, pasta, bottled water and so on.
In the case of rice, Zimbabwe’s
reliance on imports is not a unique phenomenon, as South Africa also imports
all of its rice. The key reason is that South Africa and Zimbabwe are not
agro-ecologically endowed for rice production. But Zimbabwe could become
self-reliant in the case of other food products or commodities, such as maize,
wheat and soya beans, among others if favourable and stable policy conditions
were established.
After all, Zimbabwe was once
self-sufficient in the production of maize (not to be confused with being a
“bread basket”, as Zimbabwean politicians have in the past).
If we look at the country’s maize
data for the two decades prior to Robert Mugabe’s presidency, that is from
1960-1980, Zimbabwe’s maize production outpaced consumption by an average of 400,000
tons a year, making it a net exporter. This continued into the first half of
Mugabe’s rule, from 1980-2000, albeit with a gradually declining maize trade
balance. Wheat presented a somewhat similar trend, before the drastic decline
in production from 2001. Since then, the country has remained a net importer of
the commodity.
SA potential
The countries that have been key
suppliers to Zimbabwe in the recent past are South Africa, Zambia, Mauritius,
Mozambique, Malawi, Thailand, the UK, the US and China. In value terms, about
half of 2016’s $1bn imports originated in South Africa. I highlight this not
only because of its magnitude but to make the point that agro-ecologically
speaking, products that are produced in South Africa can generally also be produced
in Zimbabwe.
While Zimbabwe continues to its
land reform set-backs, the agriculture ministry under the leadership of Perence
Shiri should take advantage of South Africa’s agricultural capabilities. This
could be done by either collaboration in development projects or encouraging
and incentivising South African agribusinesses to open operations in Zimbabwe
and promote the transfer of skills between South Africa and Zimbabwean farmers.
I am mentioning this cognisant of the current foreign exchange liquidity
issues, but assuming that over time things will be resolved.
An improvement in the Zimbabwean
agricultural sector would not only boost its trade balance but also improve
livelihoods.
Data from the World Bank show
that Zimbabwe’s agricultural employment as a percentage of total employment was
at 67% in 2014. So an improvement in agricultural yields would have
far-reaching positive spin-offs.
Over time, the other industry the
Zimbabwean authorities need to think about is agro-processing. To this end,
there is a lot that can be learnt from South Africa and the technology it uses.
Cross-border knowledge sharing is
critical to Zimbabwe’s efforts to rebuild itself after decades of ill-conceived
policies. From a South African perspective, the success of Zimbabwe is critical
for regional economic and social stability.
Wandile Sihlobo, an agricultural economist, is head of agribusiness research at
the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa (Agbiz). Follow him on
Revised benchmark values: Importers
access actual figures on goods
Business News of Tuesday, 9 April 2019
Dr Bawumia announced the reduction
in import duties on April 3
Calculation and payment of new benchmark values on imports have
been made easier following the publication of detailed documents by the
valuation agencies at Ghana’s ports.The Vice President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia on
April 3, 2019 announced cabinet’s decision to slash the benchmark values by
fifty percent (50%) for all imports and thirty percent (30%) for vehicles.The document which is available to citibusinessnews.com, covers imports categorized into over seventy series.
The product categories range from cooking oil, canned tomatoes, ethanol, aluminium, frozen foods, rice, footwear, amongst others.
Following the announcement of the policy on Wednesday, the GRA commenced its implementation subsequently with a directive to the valuation agencies to adjust their valuation figures.
For example, an initial benchmark value on a carton of imported canned which ranged from 4 dollars seventy cents [$4.70] to fifteen dollars, fifty cents [$15.50] will now attract benchmark value of between 2 dollars, thirty-five cents [$2.35] and 7 dollars thirty-five cents [$7.35].
Again, importers of frozen products such as chicken have had their benchmark values slashed from sixty-one cents [$0.61] to thirty-one cents [$0.31].
Those products imported from Europe will attract the equivalent of 0.31 Euros, down from 0.61 Euros.
Meanwhile, an importer bringing in rice which used to fetch between $298 and $1290, will now be paying benchmark value of between $149 and $645 per metric tonne.In addition, benchmark values on a kilogram of imported paper fall between $0.36 and $0.42.
Rice
prices to go down, sugar stable, trade dept says
Arianne Merez, ABS-CBN News
·
Save
New! Save links
Various basic goods sell at lower prices at the
Department of Trade and Industry's recently-launched Suking Outlet in Quezon
City on September 18, 2018. Mark Demayo, ABS-CBN News/file
MANILA -- The price of rice should go down in May under a new
liberalized regime, but the price of sugar should remain stable due to
sufficient supply, a trade official said Wednesday.
The price of the staple grain should go down to P32 per kilo
from P39 while sugar prices should stay at P50 to P55 per kilo, Trade Undersecretary
Ruth Castello said.
President Rodrigo Duterte in February signed a law putting
tariffs on rice imports instead of quotas, a measure aimed at lowering prices
after inflation hovered at near 10-year highs in 2018.
Once rice prices go down, there might be no need for a suggested
retail price or SRP on the staple, Castello said.
Implementing rules of the Rice Tariffication Law were finalized
last April 7. Under the law, private traders can import grain freely as long as
they secure the needed permits and pay the right dues.
Castello said the price of sugar should not increase since the
country has enough supply
Some sugar traders may be manipulating prices, said Sugar
Regulatory Administration chief Hermenegildo Serafica.
Data from the SRA showed that the country had 1,152,422 metric
tons as of sugar as of March 31 compared to 800,587 metric tons as of April 1
last year.
The SRA report showed that the prevailing price of sugar is P45
per kilo as of Tuesday.
Food-system collapse, sea-level rise, disease.
In his new book “Falter,” Bill McKibben asks, “Is it Too Late?”
By
Corn stalks ruined by heat and lack of rain in Nebraska, 2012.
"In the human game, the single most important question is probably 'What’s
for dinner?' writes McKibben. "And when the answer is 'Not much,' things
deteriorate fast."
Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images
Excerpted from “FALTER: Has the Human Game Begun
to Play Itself Out?” by Bill McKibben. Published by Henry Holt
and Company April 16th 2019. Copyright © 2019 by Bill McKibben. All rights
reserved.
Oh, it could get very bad.
In 2015, a study in the Journal of Mathematical Biology pointed out that if the world’s oceans kept warming, by 2100
they might become hot enough to “stop oxygen production by phyto-plankton by
disrupting the process of photosynthesis.” Given that two-thirds of the Earth’s
oxygen comes from phytoplankton, that would “likely result in the mass
mortality of animals and humans.”
A year later, above the Arctic
Circle, in Siberia, a heat wave thawed a reindeer carcass that had been trapped
in the permafrost. The exposed body released anthrax into nearby water and
soil, infecting two thousand reindeer grazing nearby, and they in turn infected
some humans; a twelve-year-old boy died. As it turns out, permafrost is a “very good preserver of microbes
and viruses, because it is cold, there is no oxygen, and it is dark”
— scientists have managed to revive an eight-million-year-old bacterium they
found beneath the surface of a glacier. Researchers believe there are fragments
of the Spanish flu virus, smallpox, and bubonic plague buried in Siberia and
Alaska.
Or consider this: as ice sheets
melt, they take weight off land, and that can trigger earthquakes — seismic
activity is already increasing in Greenland and Alaska. Meanwhile, the added
weight of the new seawater starts to bend the Earth’s crust. “That will give you a
massive increase in volcanic activity. It’ll activate faults to create earthquakes,
submarine landslides, tsunamis, the whole lot,” explained the
director of University College London’s Hazard Centre. Such a landslide
happened in Scandinavia about eight thousand years ago, as the last Ice Age
retreated and a Kentucky-size section of Norway’s continental shelf gave way,
“plummeting down to the abyssal plain and creating a series of titanic waves
that roared forth with a vengeance,” wiping all signs of life from coastal
Norway to Greenland and “drowning the Wales-sized landmass that once connected
Britain to the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany.” When the waves hit the
Shetlands, they were sixty-five feet high.
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There’s even this: if we keep
raising carbon dioxide levels, we may not be able to think straight anymore. At
a thousand parts per million (which is within the realm of possibility for
2100), human cognitive ability falls 21 percent. “The largest effects were seen
for Crisis Response, Information Usage, and Strategy,” a Harvard study
reported, which is too bad, as those skills are what we seem to need most.
I could, in other words, do my
best to scare you silly. I’m not opposed on principle — changing something as
fundamental as the composition of the atmosphere, and hence the heat balance of
the planet, is certain to trigger all manner of horror, and we shouldn’t shy
away from it. The dramatic uncertainty that lies ahead may be the most
frightening development of all; the physical world is going from backdrop to
foreground. (It’s like the contrast between politics in the old days, when you
could forget about Washington for weeks at a time, and politics in the Trump
era, when the president is always jumping out from behind a tree to yell at
you.)
But let’s try to occupy ourselves
with the most likely scenarios, because they are more than disturbing enough.
Long before we get to tidal waves or smallpox, long before we choke to death or
stop thinking clearly, we will need to concentrate on the most mundane and
basic facts: everyone needs to eat every day, and an awful lot of us live near
the ocean.
FOOD SUPPLY first. We’ve had an
amazing run since the end of World War II, with crop yields growing fast enough
to keep ahead of a fast-rising population. It’s come at great human cost —
displaced peasant farmers fill many of the planet’s vast slums — but in terms
of sheer volume, the Green Revolution’s fertilizers, pesticides, and machinery
managed to push output sharply upward. That climb, however, now seems to be
running into the brute facts of heat and drought. There are studies to
demonstrate the dire effects of warming on coffee, cacao, chickpeas, and champagne,
but it is cereals that we really need to worry about, given that they supply
most of the planet’s calories: corn, wheat, and rice all evolved as crops in
the climate of the last ten thousand years, and though plant breeders can
change them, there are limits to those changes. You can move a person from
Hanoi to Edmonton, and she might decide to open a Vietnamese restaurant. But if
you move a rice plant, it will die.
A 2017 study in Australia, home
to some of the world’s highest-tech farming, found that “wheat productivity has
flatlined as a direct result of climate change.” After tripling between 1900 and
1990, wheat yields had stagnated since, as temperatures increased a degree and
rainfall declined by nearly a third. “The chance of that just being variable
climate without the underlying factor [of climate change] is less than one in a
hundred billion,” the researchers said, and it meant that despite all the
expensive new technology farmers kept introducing, “they have succeeded only in
standing still, not in moving forward.” Assuming the same trends continued,
yields would actually start to decline inside of two decades, they reported. In
June 2018, researchers found that a two-degree Celsius rise in temperature —
which, recall, is what the Paris accords are now aiming for — could cut U.S. corn yields by
18 percent. A four-degree increase — which is where our current
trajectory will take us — would cut the crop almost in half. The United States
is the world’s largest producer of corn, which in turn is the planet’s most
widely grown crop.
Corn is vulnerable because even a
week of high temperatures at the key moment can keep it from fertilizing. (“You only get one chance to
pollinate a quadrillion kernels of corn,” the head of a
commodity consulting firm explained.) But even the hardiest crops are
susceptible. Sorghum, for instance, which is a staple for half a billion
humans, is particularly hardy in dry conditions because it has big, fibrous
roots that reach far down into the earth. Even it has limits, though, and they
are being reached. Thirty years of data from the American Midwest show that
heat waves affect the “vapor pressure deficit,” the difference between the
water vapor in the sorghum leaf’s interior and that in the surrounding air.
Hotter weather means the sorghum releases more moisture into the atmosphere.
Warm the planet’s temperature by two degrees Celsius — which is, again, now the
world’s goal — and sorghum yields drop 17 percent. Warm it five degrees
Celsius (nine degrees Fahrenheit), and yields drop almost 60 percent.
It’s hard to imagine a topic
duller than sorghum yields. It’s the precise opposite of clickbait. But people
have to eat; in the human game, the single most important question is probably
“What’s for dinner?” And when the answer is “Not much,” things deteriorate
fast. In 2010 a severe heat wave hit Russia, and it wrecked the grain harvest,
which led the Kremlin to ban exports. The global price of wheat spiked, and
that helped trigger the Arab Spring — Egypt at the time was the largest wheat
importer on the planet. That experience set academics and insurers to work
gaming out what the next food shock might look like. In 2017 one team imagined
a vigorous El Niño, with the attendant floods and droughts — for a season, in
their scenario, corn and soy yields declined by 10 percent, and wheat and rice
by 7 percent. The result was chaos: “quadrupled commodity
prices, civil unrest, significant negative humanitarian consequences . . . Food
riots break out in urban areas across the Middle East, North Africa, and Latin
America. The euro weakens and the main European stock markets lose ten percent.”
At about the same time, a team of
British researchers released a study demonstrating that even if you can grow
plenty of food, the transportation system that distributes it runs through just
fourteen major choke-points, and those are vulnerable to — you guessed it —
massive disruption from climate change. For instance, U.S. rivers and canals carry
a third of the world’s corn and soy, and they’ve been frequently shut down or
crimped by flooding and drought in recent years. Brazil accounts for 17 percent
of the world’s grain exports, but heavy rainfall in 2017 stranded three
thousand trucks. “It’s the glide path to a
perfect storm,” said one of the report’s authors.
Five weeks after that, another report raised an even
deeper question. What if you can figure out how to grow plenty of food, and you
can figure out how to guarantee its distribution, but the food itself has lost
much of its value? The paper, in the journal Environmental Research, said that rising carbon dioxide
levels, by speeding plant growth, seem to have reduced the amount of protein in
basic staple crops, a finding so startling that, for many years, agronomists
had overlooked hints that it was happening. But it seems to be true: when
researchers grow grain at the carbon dioxide levels we expect for later this
century, they find that minerals such as calcium and iron drop by 8 percent,
and protein by about the same amount. In the developing world, where people
rely on plants for their protein, that means huge reductions in nutrition:
India alone could lose 5 percent of the protein in its total diet, putting 53
million people at new risk for protein deficiency. The loss of zinc, essential
for maternal and infant health, could endanger 138 million people around the
world. In 2018, rice researchers found “significantly less protein” when they
grew eighteen varieties of rice in high–carbon dioxide test plots. “The idea that food became
less nutritious was a surprise,” said one researcher. “It’s not
intuitive. But I think we should continue to expect surprises. We are
completely altering the biophysical conditions that underpin our food system.”
And not just ours. People don’t depend on goldenrod, for instance, but bees do.
When scientists looked at samples of goldenrod in the Smithsonian that dated
back to 1842, they found that the protein content of its pollen had “declined
by a third since the industrial revolution — and the change closely tracks with
the rise in carbon dioxide.”
Bees help crops, obviously, so
that’s scary news. But in August 2018, a massive new study found something just
as frightening: crop pests were thriving in the new heat. “It gets better and
better for them,” said one University of Colorado researcher. Even if we hit
the UN target of limiting temperature rise to two degrees Celsius, pests should
cut wheat yields by 46 percent, corn by 31 percent, and rice by 19 percent. “Warmer temperatures
accelerate the metabolism of insect pests like aphids and corn borers at a
predictable rate,” the researchers found. “That makes them
hungrier[,] and warmer temperatures also speed up their reproduction.” Even
fossilized plants from fifty million years ago make the point: “Plant damage
from insects correlated with rising and falling temperatures, reaching a
maximum during the warmest periods.”
JUST AS PEOPLE have gotten used to eating a certain amount of food every
day, they’ve gotten used to living in particular places. For obvious reasons,
many of these places are right by the ocean: estuaries, where rivers meet the
sea, are among the richest ecosystems on Earth, and water makes for easy trade.
From the earliest cities (Athens, Corinth, Rhodes) to the biggest modern
metropolises (Shanghai, New York, Mumbai), proximity to saltwater meant wealth
and power. And now it means exquisite, likely fatal, vulnerability.
Throughout the Holocene (the
ten-thousand-year period that began as the last ice age ceased, the stretch
that encompasses all recorded human history), the carbon dioxide level in the
atmosphere stayed stable, and therefore so did the sea level, and hence it took
a while for people to worry about sea level rise. The United Nations’
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted in 2003 that sea
level should rise a mere half meter by the end of the twenty-first century, most
of that coming because warm water takes up more space than cold, and while a
half meter would be enough to cause expense and trouble, it wouldn’t really
interfere with settlement patterns. But even as the IPCC scientists made that
estimate, they cautioned that it didn’t take into account the possible melt of
the great ice sheets over Greenland and Antarctica. And pretty much everything
we’ve learned in the years since makes scientists think that those ice sheets
are horribly vulnerable.
Paleoclimatologists, for
instance, have discovered that in the distant past, sea levels often rose and
fell with breathtaking speed. Fourteen thousand years ago, as the Ice Age began
to loosen its grip, huge amounts of ice thawed in what researchers call
meltwater pulse 1A, raising the sea level by sixty feet. Thirteen feet of that
may have come in a single century. Another team found that millions of years
ago, during the Pliocene, with carbon dioxide levels about where they are now,
the West Antarctic Ice Sheet seems to have collapsed in as little as a hundred
years. “The latest field data out
of West Antarctica is kind of an OMG thing,” a federal official
said in 2016 — and that was before the really epochal news in the early summer of 2018, when eighty-four
researchers from forty-four institutions pooled their data and concluded that
the frozen continent had lost three trillion tons of ice in the last three
decades, with the rate of melt tripling since 2012. As a result, scientists are now revising their
estimates steadily upward. Not half a meter of sea level rise, but a meter. Or
two meters. “Several meters in the next fifty to 150 years,” said James Hansen,
the planet’s premier climatologist, who added that such a rise would make
coastal cities “practically ungovernable.” As Jeff Goodell (who in 2017 wrote the most
comprehensive book to date on sea level rise) put it, such a rise would “create
generations of climate refugees that will make today’s Syrian war refugee
crisis look like a high school drama production.”
What’s really breathtaking is how
ill-prepared we are for such changes. Goodell spent months reporting in Miami
Beach, which was literally built on sand dredged up from the bottom of Biscayne
Bay. He managed to track down Florida’s biggest developer, Jorge Pérez, at a
museum opening. Pérez was not, he insisted, worried about the rising sea
because “I believe that in twenty or thirty years, someone is going to find a
solution for this. If it is a problem for Miami, it will also be a problem for
New York and Boston — so where are people going to go?” (He added, with
Trump-level narcissism, “Besides, by that time I’ll be dead, so what does it
matter?”) To the extent that we’re planning at all, it’s for the old, low
predictions of a meter or less. Venice, for instance, is spending $6 billion on
a series of inflatable booms to hold back storm tides. But they’re designed to
stop sea level rise of about a foot. New York City is building a “U-Barrier,” a
berm to protect Lower Manhattan from inundation in a storm the size of
Hurricane Sandy. But as the sea level rises, winds like Sandy’s will drive far
more water into Manhattan, so why not build it higher? “Because the cost goes
up exponentially,” said the architect. The cost is already starting to mount.
Researchers showed in 2018 that Florida homes near the flood lines were selling
at a 7 percent discount, a figure growing over time because “sophisticated
buyers” know what is coming. Insurance companies are balking: basements
from “New York to Mumbai” may be uninsurable by 2020, the CEO of one of
Europe’s largest insurers said in 2018.
SOME OF the cost of climate change can be measured in units we’re
used to dealing with. Testimony submitted by climate scientists to a federal
court in 2017, for instance, said that if we don’t take much stronger action
now, future citizens would have to pay $535
trillion to cope with global warming. How is that possible? Take one small
county in Florida, which needs to raise 150 miles of road to prevent flooding
from even minimal sea level rise. That costs $7 million a mile, putting the
price tag at over $1 billion, in a county that has an annual road budget of $25
million. Or consider the numbers from Alaska, where officials are preparing to
move one coastal village with four hundred residents that’s threatened by
rising waters at a cost of up to $400 million — $1 million a person. Multiply
this by everyone everywhere, and you understand why the costs run so high.
A team of economists
predicted a 12 percent risk that global warming could reduce global economic
output by 50 percent by 2100 — that is to say, there’s a
one-in-eight chance of something eight times as bad as the Great Recession.
But some things can’t be measured,
and the damage there seems even greater. For instance, the median estimate, from the International Organization for
Migration, is that we may see two hundred million climate refugees by 2050.
(The high estimate is a billion.) Already “the likelihood of being uprooted
from one’s home has increased sixty percent compared with forty years ago.” The
U.S. military frets about that because masses of people on the march destabilize
entire regions. “Security will start to crumble pretty quickly,” said Adm.
Samuel Locklear, former chief of U.S. Pacific Command, explaining why climate
change was his single greatest worry.
The biggest worry for people
losing their homes is . . . losing their homes. So, let me tell you about a
trip I took last summer, to the ice shelf of Greenland. I was with a pair of
veteran ice scientists and two young poets — a woman named Kathy
Jetnil-Kijiner, from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, and another named Aka
Niviana, who was born on this largest of all the Earth’s islands, a massive
sheet of ice that, when it melts, will raise the level of the oceans more than
twenty feet.
And it is melting. We landed at
the World War II–era airstrip in Narsarsuaq and proceeded by boat through the
iceberg-clogged Tunulliarfik Fjord, arriving eventually at the foot of the
Qaterlait Glacier. We hauled gear up the sloping, icy ramp of the glacier and
made camp on an outcrop of red granite bedrock nearly a kilometer inland. In
fact, we made camp twice, because the afternoon sun swelled the stream we’d
chosen for a site, and soon the tents were inundated. But after dinner, in the
late Arctic sunlight, the two women donned the traditional dress of their
respective homelands and hiked farther up the glacier, till they could see both
the ocean and the high ice. And there they performed a poem they’d composed, a
cry from angry and engaged hearts about the overwhelming fact of their lives.
The ice of Niviana’s homeland was
disappearing, and with it a way of life. While we were on the ice sheet,
researchers reported that “the oldest and thickest sea ice” in the Arctic had
melted, “opening waters north of Greenland that are normally frozen even in
summer.” Just up the coast from our camp, a landslide triggered by melting ice
had recently set off a hundred-foot tsunami that killed four people in a remote
village: it was, said scientists, precisely the kind of event that will “become
more frequent as the climate warms.”
The effect, however, is likely to
be even more immediate on Jetnil-Kijiner’s home. The Marshalls are a meter or
two above sea level, and already the “king tides” wash through living rooms and
unearth grave- yards. The breadfruit trees and the banana palms are wilting as
saltwater intrudes on the small lens of fresh water that has supported life on
the atolls for millennia. Jetnil-Kijiner was literally standing on the ice
that, as it melts, will drown her home, leaving her and her countrymen with, as
she put it, “only a passport to call home.”
So, you can understand the quiet
rage that flowed through the poem the two women had written, a poem they now
shouted into a chill wind on this glacier that owed up to the great ice sheet,
silhouetted against the hemisphere’s starkest landscape. It was a fury that
came from a long and bitter history: the Marshalls were the site of the atom
bomb tests after the war, and Bikini Atoll remains uninhabitable, just as the
United States left nuclear waste lying around the ice when it abandoned the
thirty bases it had built in Greenland.
The very same beasts
That now decide
Who should live
And who should die . . .
We demand that the world see beyond
SUVs, ACs, their pre-packaged convenience
Their oil-slicked dreams, beyond the belief
That tomorrow will never happen
That now decide
Who should live
And who should die . . .
We demand that the world see beyond
SUVs, ACs, their pre-packaged convenience
Their oil-slicked dreams, beyond the belief
That tomorrow will never happen
But, of course, climate change is
different, the first crisis that, though it affects the most vulnerable first
and hardest, will eventually come for us all.
Let me bring my home to yours
Let’s watch as Miami, New York,
Shanghai, Amsterdam, London
Rio de Janeiro and Osaka
Try to breathe underwater . . .
None of us is immune.
Let’s watch as Miami, New York,
Shanghai, Amsterdam, London
Rio de Janeiro and Osaka
Try to breathe underwater . . .
None of us is immune.
Science can tell us a good deal
about this crisis. Jason Box, an American glaciologist who organized the trip,
has spent the last twenty-five years journeying to Greenland. “We called this
place where we are now the Eagle Glacier because of its shape when we first
came here five years ago,” Box said. “But now the head and the wings of the
bird have melted away. I don’t know what we should call it now, but the eagle is
dead.” He busied himself replacing the batteries in his remote weather
stations, scattered across the ice. They tell one story, but his colleague Alun
Hubbard, a Welsh scientist, conceded that there were limits to what instruments
could explain. “It’s just gobsmacking looking at the trauma of the landscape,”
he said. “I just couldn’t register the scale of how the ice sheet had changed
in my head.”
But artists can register scale. They can
transpose the fact of melting ice to inundated homes and bewildered lives,
gauge it against long history and lost future. Science and economics have no
real way to value the fact that people have lived for millennia in a certain
rhythm, have eaten the food and sung the songs of certain places that are now
disappearing. This is a cost only art can measure, and it makes sense that the
units of that measurement are sadness and fury — and also, remarkably, hope.
The women’s poem, shouted into the chill wind, ended like this:
Life in all forms demands
The same respect we all give to money . . .
So each and every one of us
Has to decide
If we
Will
Rise
The same respect we all give to money . . .
So each and every one of us
Has to decide
If we
Will
Rise
And so, we must — in fact, this
book will end with a description of what that rising might look like. But if,
as now seems certain, the melt continues, then the villages of the Marshalls
and the ports of Greenland will be overwhelmed. And we will all be a little
poorer, because a way of being will have been cut off. The puzzle of being
human will have lost some of its oldest, most artful pieces.
“The loss of Venice,” Jeff
Goodell writes, wouldn’t be about just the loss of present-day Venetians. “It’s
the loss of the stones in the narrow streets where Titian and Giorgione walked.
It’s the loss of eleventh- century mosaics in the basilica, and the unburied
home of Marco Polo, and palazzos along the Grand Canal. . . . The loss of
Venice is about the loss of a part of ourselves that reaches back in time and
binds us together as civilized people.”
We all have losses already. Where
I live, it’s the seasons: winter doesn’t reliably mean winter anymore, and so
the way we’ve always viscerally told time has begun to break down. In
California, it’s the sense of ease: the smell of the fire next time lingers in
the eucalyptus groves. There are many ways to be poorer, and we’re going to
find out all of them.
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The 9 Best Foods to
Eat Before Bed
Getting good sleep is incredibly
important for your overall health.
It may reduce your risk of
developing certain chronic illnesses, keep your brain and digestion healthy and
boost your immune system (1, 2, 3).
It's generally recommended to get
between 7 and 9 hours of uninterrupted sleep each night, though many people
struggle to get enough (4, 5).
There are many strategies you can
use to promote good sleep, including making changes to your diet, as some foods
have sleep-promoting properties (6).
Here are the 9 best foods you can
eat before bed to enhance your sleep quality.
1. Almonds
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Almonds are a type of tree nut
with many health benefits.
They are an excellent source of
many nutrients, as one ounce contains 14% of your daily needs for phosphorus,
32% for manganese and 17% for riboflavin (7).
Also, eating almonds regularly
has been associated with lower risks of a few chronic diseases, such as type 2
diabetes and heart disease. This is attributed to their content of healthy
monounsaturated fat, fiber and antioxidants (8, 9).
It has been claimed that almonds
may also help boost sleep quality.
This is because almonds, along
with several other types of nuts, are a source of the sleep-regulating hormone
melatonin (10).
Almonds are also an excellent
source of magnesium, providing 19% of your daily needs in only 1 ounce.
Consuming adequate amounts of magnesium may help improve sleep quality,
especially for those who have insomnia (11, 12, 13).
Magnesium’s role in promoting
sleep is thought to be due to its ability to reduce inflammation. Additionally,
it may help reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which is known to interrupt sleep (11, 14).
Yet despite this, research on
almonds and sleep is sparse.
One study examined the effects of
feeding rats 400 mg of almond extract. It found that the rats slept longer and
more deeply than they did without consuming almond extract (15).
The potential sleep-promoting
effects of almonds are promising, but more extensive human studies are needed.
If you want to eat almonds before
bed to determine if they impact your sleep quality, a 1-ounce (28-gram)
serving, or about a handful, should be adequate.
SUMMARY:Almonds are a source of melatonin and the sleep-promoting
mineral magnesium, two properties that make them a great food to eat before
bed.
2. Turkey
Turkey is delicious and
nutritious.
It is high in protein, providing
4 grams per ounce (28 grams). Protein is important for keeping your muscles
strong and regulating your appetite (16, 17).
Additionally, turkey is a good
source of a few vitamins and minerals. A 1-ounce (28-gram) serving contains 5%
of your daily needs for riboflavin, 5% for phosphorus and 9% for selenium (16).
Many people claim turkey is a
great food to eat before bed due to its ability to promote sleepiness, although
no studies have examined its role in sleep, specifically.
However, turkey does have a few
properties that explain why some people may become tired after eating it. Most
notably, it contains the amino acid tryptophan, which increases the production
of the sleep-regulating hormone melatonin (18, 19).
The protein in turkey may also
contribute to its ability to promote tiredness. There is evidence that
consuming moderate amounts of protein before bed is associated with better
sleep quality, including less waking up throughout the night (20).
More research is necessary to
confirm turkey’s potential role in improving sleep.
However, eating some turkey
before bed may be worth trying, especially if you have trouble falling asleep.
SUMMARY:Turkey may be a great food to eat before bed due to its high
content of protein and tryptophan, both of which may induce tiredness.
3. Chamomile Tea
Chamomile tea is a popular herbal
tea that may offer a variety of health benefits.
It is well known for its content
of flavones, a class of antioxidants that reduce inflammation that often leads
to chronic diseases, such as cancer and heart disease (21, 22, 23, 24).
There is also some evidence that
drinking chamomile tea may boost your immune system, reduce anxiety and
depression and improve skin health. In addition, chamomile tea has some unique
properties that may improve sleep quality (21).
Specifically, chamomile tea
contains apigenin, an antioxidant that binds to certain receptors in your brain
that may promote sleepiness and reduce insomnia (21, 25).
One study in 34 adults found
those who consumed 270 mg of chamomile extract twice daily for 28 days fell
asleep 15 minutes faster and experienced less nighttime wakening, compared to
those who did not consume the extract (26).
Another study found that women
who drank chamomile tea for two weeks reported improved sleep quality, compared
to non-tea drinkers.
Those who drank chamomile tea
also had fewer symptoms of depression, which is commonly associated with sleep
problems (27).
Drinking chamomile tea before
going to bed is certainly worth trying if you want to improve the quality of
your sleep.
SUMMARY:Chamomile tea contains antioxidants that may promote sleepiness,
and drinking it has been shown to improve overall sleep quality.
4. Kiwi
Kiwis are a low-calorie and very
nutritious fruit.
One medium kiwi contains only 50
calories and a significant amount of nutrients, including 117% of your daily
needs for vitamin C and 38% for vitamin K.
It also contains a decent amount
of folate and potassium, as well as several trace minerals (28).
Furthermore, eating kiwis may
benefit your digestive health, reduce inflammation and lower your cholesterol.
These effects are due to the high amount of fiber and carotenoid antioxidants
that they provide (29, 30).
According to studies on their
potential to improve sleep quality, kiwis may also be one of the best foods to
eat before bed (31).
In a four-week study, 24 adults
consumed two kiwifruits one hour before going to bed each night. At the end of
the study, participants fell asleep 42% more quickly than when they didn’t eat
anything before bedtime.
Additionally, their ability to
sleep through the night without waking improved by 5%, while their total sleep
time increased by 13% (32).
The sleep-promoting effects of
kiwis are thought to be due to their content of serotonin, a brain chemical
that helps regulate your sleep cycle (32, 33, 34, 35).
It has also been suggested that
the antioxidants in kiwis, such as vitamin C and carotenoids, may be partly
responsible for their sleep-promoting effects. This is thought to be due to
their role in reducing inflammation (32, 33, 36).
More scientific evidence is
needed to determine the effects that kiwis may have in improving sleep.
Nevertheless, eating 1–2 medium kiwis before bed may help you fall asleep
faster and stay asleep longer.
SUMMARY:Kiwis are rich in serotonin and antioxidants, both of which may
improve sleep quality when eaten before bed.
5. Tart Cherry Juice
Tart cherry juice has some
impressive health benefits.
First, it’s high in a few
important nutrients. An 8-ounce (240-ml) serving contains 62% of your daily
needs for vitamin A, 40% for vitamin C and 14% for manganese (37).
Additionally, it is a rich source
of antioxidants, including anthocyanins and flavonols. Antioxidants may protect
your cells from harmful inflammation that can lead to chronic diseases like
diabetes and heart disease (38, 39, 40).
Tart cherry juice is also known
to promote sleepiness, and it has even been studied for its role in relieving
insomnia. For these reasons, drinking tart cherry juice before bed may improve
your sleep quality (6, 18).
The sleep-promoting effects of
tart cherry juice are due to its high content of melatonin, which is a hormone that regulates your
internal clock and signals your body to prepare for sleep (6, 18, 41).
In two studies, adults with
insomnia who drank 8 ounces (237 ml) of tart cherry juice twice a day for two
weeks slept about an hour and a half longer and reported better sleep quality,
compared to when they did not drink the juice (42, 43).
Although these results are
promising, more extensive research is necessary to confirm the role tart cherry
juice has in improving sleep and preventing insomnia.
Nevertheless, drinking some tart
cherry juice before bed is certainly worth a try if you struggle with falling
or staying asleep at night.
SUMMARY:Due to its content of the sleep-promoting hormone melatonin,
tart cherry juice may help induce a good night’s sleep.
6. Fatty Fish
Fatty fish, such as salmon, tuna,
trout and mackerel, are incredibly healthy.
What makes them unique is their
exceptional vitamin D content. For example, a 3.5-ounce
(100-gram) serving of salmon contains 525–990 IU of vitamin D, which is over
50% of your daily needs (44).
Additionally, fatty fish are high
in healthy omega-3 fatty acids, specifically EPA and DHA, both
of which are known for reducing inflammation. Omega-3 fatty acids may also
protect against heart disease and boost brain health (45, 46, 47, 48).
The combination of omega-3 fatty
acids and vitamin D in fatty fish have the potential to enhance sleep quality,
as both have been shown to increase the production of serotonin, a
sleep-promoting brain chemical (49, 50, 51).
In one study, men who ate 300
grams of Atlantic salmon three times a week for six months fell asleep about 10
minutes faster than men who ate chicken, beef or pork (52).
This effect was thought to be due
to the vitamin D content of the salmon. Those in the fish group had higher
levels of vitamin D, which was linked to a significant improvement in sleep
quality (52).
Eating a few ounces of fatty fish
before bed may help you fall asleep faster and sleep more
deeply, but more studies are needed to make a definite conclusion about the
ability of fatty fish to improve sleep.
SUMMARY:Fatty fish are a great source of vitamin D and omega-3 fatty
acids, both of which have properties that may improve the quality of your
sleep.
7. Walnuts
Walnuts are a popular type of
tree nut.
They are abundant in many
nutrients, providing over 19 vitamins and minerals, in addition to 2 grams of
fiber, in a 1-ounce (28-gram) serving. Walnuts are particularly rich in
magnesium, phosphorus, copper and manganese (53).
Additionally, walnuts are a great
source of healthy fats, including omega-3 fatty acids and linoleic acid. They
also provide 4 grams of protein per ounce, which may be beneficial for reducing
appetite (53, 54, 55).
Walnuts may also boost heart
health. They have been studied for their ability to reduce high cholesterol
levels, which are a major risk factor for heart disease (9).
What’s more, eating walnuts has
been claimed to improve sleep quality, as they are one of the best food sources
of the sleep-regulating hormone melatonin (9, 56, 57).
The fatty acid makeup of walnuts
may also contribute to better sleep. They provide ALA, an omega-3 fatty acid
that’s converted to DHA in the body. DHA may increase production of serotonin,
a sleep-enhancing brain chemical (51, 58, 59).
Unfortunately, the claims about
walnuts improving sleep are not supported by much evidence. In fact, there have
not been any studies that focus specifically on walnut’s role in promoting
sleep.
Regardless, if you struggle with
sleep, eating some walnuts before bed may help. About a handful of walnuts is
an adequate portion.
SUMMARY:Walnuts have a few properties that may promote better sleep,
including their content of melatonin and healthy fats.
8. Passionflower Tea
Passionflower tea is another
herbal tea that has been used traditionally for many years to treat a number of
health ailments.
It is a rich source of flavonoid
antioxidants, which are known for their role in reducing inflammation, boosting
immune health and reducing heart disease risk (60, 61).
Additionally, passionflower tea
has been studied for its potential to reduce anxiety.
This is attributed to its content
of apigenin, an antioxidant that produces a calming effect by binding to
certain receptors in your brain (61).
There is also some evidence that
drinking passionflower tea increases the production of GABA, a brain chemical
that works to inhibit other brain chemicals that induce stress, such as
glutamate (62).
The calming properties of
passionflower tea may promote sleepiness, so it may be beneficial to drink it
before going to bed.
In a seven-day study, 41 adults
drank a cup of passionflower tea before bed. They rated their sleep quality
significantly better when they drank the tea, compared to when they did not
drink the tea (63).
More research is needed to
determine the ability of passionflower tea to promote sleep, but it is
certainly worth trying if you want to improve your sleep quality.
SUMMARY:Passionflower tea may influence sleep due to its content of the
antioxidant apigenin, as well as its ability to increase GABA production.
9. White Rice
White rice is a grain that is
widely consumed as a staple food in many countries.
The major difference between white and brown rice is that
white rice has had its bran and germ removed, which makes it lower in fiber,
nutrients and antioxidants.
Nevertheless, white rice still
contains a decent amount of a few vitamins and minerals. A 3.5-ounce (100-gram)
serving of white rice provides 14% of your daily needs for folate, 11% for
thiamin and 24% for manganese (64).
Also, white rice is high in
carbs, providing 28 grams in a 3.5-ounce (100-gram) serving. Its carb content
and lack of fiber contribute to its high glycemic index, which is a measure of
how quickly a food increases your blood sugar (65, 66).
It has been suggested that eating
foods with a high glycemic index, such as white rice, a few hours before bed
may help improve sleep quality (18, 67).
In one study, the sleep habits of
1,848 people were compared based on their intake of white rice, bread or
noodles. Higher rice intake was associated with better sleep, including longer
sleep duration (68).
It has also been reported that
white rice may be most effective at improving sleep if it is consumed at least
one hour before bedtime (18).
Despite the potential role that
eating white rice may have in promoting sleep, it is best consumed in
moderation due to its lack of fiber and nutrients.
SUMMARY:White rice may be beneficial to eat before bed due to its high
glycemic index, which may promote better sleep.
These bugs are
survivors’ Tick, Lyme expert Pfeiffer speaks at Rice Creek
·
OSWEGO — Investigative journalist
Mary Beth Pfeiffer this weekend led a talk at the Rice Creek Field Station about
Lyme disease and the dangers of getting bitten by a tick this spring season.
The award winning author in 2018
published her book, “Lyme: The First Epidemic of Climate Change,” and talked
during Saturday’s session about her research, myths of the disease, issues with
treatment, and how to take precautions.
According to Pfeiffer’s
investigations, rates of infection of Lyme disease are on the rise Oswego County and 50 percent of adult Nymph ticks
are infective in this area. It can take as few as sixteen hours to contract the
infection, she said.
Pfeiffer explained some of the
pitfalls in the mainstream medicine’s response to Lyme disease and issues with
getting accurately tested for the disease. In 2017, 10 to 20 percent of people
diagnosed with early-stage Lyme disease still experience symptoms fifteen years
later. The longer the waiting time, the higher the possibility of contracting
it chronically, Pfeiffer said.
“These bugs are survivors. By
disabling germinal centers, they shut off key mechanisms of the immune system
and send false signals through shedding proteins,” Pfeiffer said.
The antibody test is currently
the most commonly used form of identifying the disease, however it is not
specific and remains indirect. Although many trials have been conducted to
fabricate new treatments, there is a significant lack of funding, Pfeiffer
said, and independent researchers like her are attempting to make progress.
Going forward, Pfeiffer advised
her Rice Creek audience of some ways to be vigilant as temperatures warm and
ticks become more active. Wearing light colors, avoiding tall weeds, and
considering Permethrin-treated clothing can eliminate the chances of attracting
ticks, she said. Anyone developing a rash with a bull’s eye pattern on their
bodies should immediately seek medical attention.
International team
identifies cross-boundary solutions for wicked weeds
·
·
Apr
9, 2019 Updated 15 hrs ago
Kochia or tumbleweeds are a landscape-scale weed spread issue.
Kochia or tumbleweeds can spread across fields by the tumbling action and get
caught in fence lines. This is an example of landscape-scale weed spread
issues. (Photo by Muthu Bagavathiannan, Texas A&M AgriLife.)
·
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Weed species continue to spread
and management costs continue to mount, in spite of best management practices
and efforts by research and extension personnel who promote them to land
managers, said Muthu Bagavathiannan, Texas A&M AgriLife Research weed
scientist in the Texas A&M soil and crop sciences department, College
Station.
The issue is weeds aren’t just a
problem for the landowner where they grow, Bagavathiannan said. They are
collectively everyone’s problem because they don’t recognize property lines,
and that is how they must be managed.
Jointly with Sonia Graham, a
social scientist at the University of New South Wales, Australia, doing a research
fellowship at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain, Bagavathiannan led
a team of 15 researchers representing entities around the world in a study that
looks at weed control through a cross-boundary lens.
The team recently published their
findings, Considering Weed Management as a Social Dilemma Bridges Individual
and Collective Interests, in the journal Nature Plants. The article can be
found at rdcu.be/bvoa7.
The paper, they say, is a call to
action for scholars and practitioners to broaden their conceptualization and
approaches to weed management problems, beginning with evaluating the “public
good” characteristics of specific weed management challenges and applying
context-specific design principles to realize successful and sustainable weed
management.
“The public-goods lens highlights
the broader social vision required for successful weed management,” Graham
said. “Public goods like weed management are best achieved with the help of
many people living and working across landscapes. We need to make the most of
the diverse interests, knowledge and skill sets of those involved in managing
weeds.”
Agricultural and natural
landscapes worldwide are affected by weeds, but management techniques have
primarily been developed for individual landowners. The practices rarely look
at how control from a collective perspective would improve overall weed
management outcomes.
“We suggest that a major
limitation of current best management practices is an underappreciation for the
complex, multi-scale and collective nature of the weed problem,” he said. “We
believe practices will be more effective if they are complemented by
landscape-scale design principles that encourage cross-boundary coordination
and cooperation.”
Graham added that the team framed
the landscape-scale weed management issue as a social dilemma, where trade-offs
occur between individual and collective interests. Combining perspectives from
biologists and social scientists, the team applied a transdisciplinary systems
approach to four pressing landscape-scale weed management challenges:
Plant biosecurity—The protection
of plant resources from alien pests is a key policy and regulatory tool
governments use to limit intentional or accidental spread of weeds, locally and
globally. Plant biosecurity includes quarantine, inspection of freight at ports
and certified treatment schemes such as bulk fumigation of certain types of
cargo. Some governments fail to make these necessary investments to protect
global biodiversity.
Weed seed contamination—Weeds,
especially those closely related to crops, are common contaminants of crop
seeds and can spread through equipment sharing. For example, weedy rice is a
noxious weed that threatens global rice production. Due to its propensity for
seed shattering and long seed dormancy, weedy rice is an efficient invader that
can cause up to 80 percent yield loss in rice and substantially reduce
marketable grain quality.
Herbicide
susceptibility—Herbicide-resistant weeds are proliferating exponentially,
threatening farm productivity and profitability. At least 60 countries have
reported herbicide-resistant weeds, including about 500 species-herbicide group
combinations. Treating herbicide-resistant weeds costs around $4 billion
annually in the U.S. alone.
Weed biological control—Classic
weed biological control employs host-specific arthropods or pathogens from a
weed’s native environment to reduce weed populations in invaded systems. These
strategies can have high benefit-to-cost ratios due to long-lasting, low-input
costs, and provide management options where other tools are unavailable or
impractical.
Bagavathiannan said that across
these challenges, the public goods nature of weeds requires active
contributions and development of shared goals, and approaches must respect the
unique perspectives and diverse capacities of contributors.
“Achieving such an agreement
requires good working relationships, or at least shared values, where
contributors are willing to transparently demonstrate their efforts and
contribute shared resources to help those who are least able to contribute,” he
said.
Describing their findings, Graham
outlined four new principles for landscape-scale weed management: clearly
articulate shared goals and secure commitments from contributors; establish
good working relationships and shared values among contributors; make
individual contributions transparent; and generate pooled resources to support
weakest-link problems or address asymmetries in the public good.
“These principles emphasize the
importance of recognizing the cross-boundary nature of different weed
management challenges and embracing the appropriate cross-boundary solutions,”
said contributor Alexander Metcalf, a professor of human dimensions at the
University of Montana.
Slump in rice farm-gate prices due to import liberalization?
ABS-CBN News
MANILA - An official of the National Economic and Development
Authority (NEDA) said it was "too early to say" if the entry of
imported rice was causing a slump in rice farm-gate prices.
NEDA Assistant Secretary Mercy Sombilla said on Tuesday that
based on data from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), there were some
areas where farm-gate prices of rice had fallen to P13 or P14 per kilo.
Some farmers also complained that millers were no longer buying
their harvest amid the slump in prices.
But, on the average, Sombilla said, farm-gate prices were still
at a healthy level of P18.50 per kilo.
"We really don't know if it really is, it's too early to
say if it's really the law impacting this," Sombilla said referring to the
Rice Trade Liberalization law, which removes import quotas on rice and replaces
them with tariffs.
"We take the observation of farmers with concern, but we're
really trying to determine if that's the case, or if there's reluctance of
millers to be going to the farmers to buy their produce," Sombilla said.
Several farmers groups had been protesting the law, saying the entry of cheap
imported rice may kill the local rice industry.
The NEDA official, meanwhile, urged the National Food Authority
(NFA) to help farmers by buying harvests in areas where farm-gate prices were
slumping.
"We're trying to push NFA, this is the time the farmers
need them. You need to go to these places where they are experiencing these
kinds of problems and buy already because you need to beef up your buffer
stocks. Especially with PAGASA's projection of El Niño being extended beyond
May or June."
She said the NFA can still buy rice from local farmers at P20
per kilo.
The NEDA is also proposing to have a cash transfer program for
rice farmers, to protect them in case prices plunge to very low levels. - Report
from Bruce Rodriguez, ABS-CBN News
Tuesday 9th
April, 2019
CRI
develops new rice varieties to increase local production
By Kwabia Owusu-Mensah, GNA
Fumesua (Ash), April 09, GNA – The Crop
Research Institute (CRI), of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research
(CSIR), at Fumesua near Kumasi is using science and technology innovations to
boost commercial production of local food crops, especially rice in the
country.
This is part of CRI’s move to execute its mandate
as a research hub for crops, in a bid to position itself at the forefront of
leveraging on scientific and technological innovations, that would ensure
phenomenal increase in the cultivation of rice and other food staples in the
country.
CRI is doing
this by increasing the accessibility and availability to farmers its
newly-improved quality, high yielding and disease resistant crop seeds.
The goal is
to support the Planting for Food and Jobs (PFJ) initiative and other major
agricultural interventions, being pursued by the government to improve food
security, as a catalyst for the Ghana Beyond Aid agenda.
To
demonstrate this, crop scientists and breeders from the Institute have for the
first time developed and released six new rice varieties to scale up the
commercial production of quality rice.
The
development of the varieties, four of which were from local crosses of the CRI,
is seen as an unprecedented and a major milestone for national crop research in
Ghana.
It is
aimed at boosting food security and a resultant reduction in rice importation
into the country.
The
2017 annual scientific report made available to the Ghana News Agency in Kumasi
indicated that the six new varieties were expected to respond to the industry
challenges of low production, low average yield and poor grain quality
and to “satisfy the strong demand for high-yielding jasmine and
conventional US long grain rice types, the most preferred rice choices in
Ghana.
“The six new
varieties, which have been accepted and approved by the National Varietal
Release Committee, are CRI-Dartey, CRI-Kantinka, CRI-Emopa, CRI-Mpuntuo,
CRI-Oboafo and CRI-Aunty Jane,” the report indicated.
Ghana’s rice
import bill is said to be about $600 million, regardless of the country’s
potential to produce to meet local and international demands and according to
the report, besides maize, rice is the second most important cereal and major
staple in Ghana.
The Ministry
of Food and Agriculture (MOFA) estimates that the annual per capita consumption
of rice is about 40kg per person and is expected to increase to 63kg by the end
of 2019.
The
Institute believes that all the six varieties, suitable for lowland and
irrigated ecologies, with their potential for higher yields, tolerance to Rice
Yellow Mottle Virus Disease and Iron toxicity, will boost acceptability by
farmers as they have high raising, easy cooking and aromatic qualities.
GNA
More USA Rice Success at Wanis Trade Day
By Sarah
Moran
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM --
Wanis, the largest U.K. wholesaler catering to the growing Afro-Caribbean
market, hosted another popular 'Trade Day' event here last month, and USA Rice
was keen to participate in the historically successful promotion.
"Trade Day happens twice each year in spring and autumn, and is very popular with the more than 3,000 Wanis customers who range from individuals to shops and foodservice operations," said Eszter Somogyi, USA Rice director for Europe, Middle East, and Africa. "Wanis is a $92 million per year business and their Trade Days are a great way for products to get exposure and increase direct sales."
Two participating U.S. rice brands, Peacock Easy Cook Rice from S&B Herba Foods and Wanis' own Tropical Sun USA Easy Cook Rice, were on display, touted by crowd favorite Chef Gayle Love who cooked a variety of Caribbean dishes for shoppers using U.S.-grown rice. Sales were supported by secondary placements and Point of Sale materials featuring the participating brands.
"Trade Day happens twice each year in spring and autumn, and is very popular with the more than 3,000 Wanis customers who range from individuals to shops and foodservice operations," said Eszter Somogyi, USA Rice director for Europe, Middle East, and Africa. "Wanis is a $92 million per year business and their Trade Days are a great way for products to get exposure and increase direct sales."
Two participating U.S. rice brands, Peacock Easy Cook Rice from S&B Herba Foods and Wanis' own Tropical Sun USA Easy Cook Rice, were on display, touted by crowd favorite Chef Gayle Love who cooked a variety of Caribbean dishes for shoppers using U.S.-grown rice. Sales were supported by secondary placements and Point of Sale materials featuring the participating brands.
"Wanis customers really responded to this U.S. rice promotion," said Somogyi. "Chef Love is a natural spokesperson for U.S. rice as shoppers can see for themselves the quality and consistency of U.S. rice by sampling his delicious dishes."
USA Rice has plans to participate in upcoming Wanis Trade Days to help drive sales of U.S. rice to more new customers.
|
WASDE
Report Released
WASHINGTON, DC -- The
outlook for 2018/19 U.S. rice this month is for reduced exports, unchanged
domestic and residual use, and higher ending stocks. All rice exports
are lowered 4 million cwt to 94 million. Long grain exports are reduced
by 1 million cwt to 67 million on lower than-expected milled exports.
Medium and short grain exports are decreased by 3 million cwt to 27 million
on a slow sales pace to several export markets. Total domestic and
residual use is unchanged at 135 million cwt. Long grain use is raised
1 million cwt but this increase is completely offset by an equivalent
reduction in medium and short grain. These revisions are based on the
latest NASS Rice Stocks report. Projected all rice ending stocks are
raised 4 million cwt to 53.6 million. This is 82 percent higher than
last year and would be the first time stocks have reached 50 million cwt
since 1986/87. The projected 2018/19 all rice season-average farm price
is reduced by $0.10 per cwt at the midpoint to $12.10 with the range narrowed
to $11.80 to $12.40. All of the reduction is due to a decrease in the
projected California medium and short grain price.
Global 2018/19 rice supplies are decreased by 400,000 tons to 663.8 million with lower carrying stocks and production. Global production is down as reductions for Indonesia, Pakistan, and the Philippines are not completely offset by higher production for Sri Lanka. World 2018/19 consumption is raised 400,000 tons to 492.4 million on higher expected use in Pakistan and Sri Lanka more than offsetting reduced use in Laos and Mexico. Global 2018/19 trade is lowered marginally to 47.3 million tons as reduced exports by Pakistan, the EU, and the United States are not completely offset by higher exports from Cambodia, Peru, and Uruguay. Projected world ending stocks are adjusted lower this month to 171.4 million tons but remain record large. Go here to read the full report. |
|
Arkansas rice
production bounced back in 2018
Prevented
planting in 2019 will likely impact overall Arkansas rice acreage this year.
High temperatures
reduce rice, sorghum yield in Karnataka
A recent study reveals that during kharif and rabi seasons the
state is exposed to a high number of days when mercury climbs above 33 degrees
Celsius
By Shagun Kapil
Last
Updated: Tuesday 09 April 2019
Exposure to extreme heat is
consistently and significantly reducing crop yield in Karnataka, according to
a recent study. There
are a significant number of extreme degree days (EDD) in a cropping season,
when the daily temperature is above the critical threshold, suggested data
analysed by experts from Tata Institute of Social Sciences and Indian
Statistical Institute.
North Karnataka, in particular,
is exposed to a higher number of days hotter than the threshold, found the
study that considered rice, sorghum, finger millet, and pigeon pea.
The study commissioned by
Karnataka Agricultural Price Commission to investigate the impact of exposure
to high temperature on crop yields, divided Karnataka into three meteorological
sub-divisions — north interior, south and coastal.
In the case of rice in kharif
season, a per cent increase in EDD above 33 degrees Celsius decrease rice yield
by 5 per cent, says Madhura Swaminathan, professor, Economic Analysis Unit,
Indian Statistical Institute, and one of the co-authors of the study. When it
comes to sorghum, while rainfall and GDD (growing degree days) had a positive
impact on crop yield in both rabi and kharif seasons, EDD had a negative impact
of 1.89 per cent in rabi and 3.16 per in kharif season.
“Exposure to an extreme
temperature that exceeds the critical threshold of the crop has a strong
negative effect on yield. This study is perhaps the first of its kind in
southern India and for crops other than wheat. It focuses on climate and
climate variability, and clearly shows that exposure to extreme heat is the
most important effect of climate change on agriculture that can be currently
observed in Karnataka,” the paper said.
In case of pigeon pea and finger
millet, only EDD was negative and significant. Also, the negative impact of EDD
was much stronger than the positive effects of seasonal rainfall. While
extreme temperatures resulted in yield decrease of 5.72 per cent in finger
millet, the negative impact for pigeon pea was 4.43 per cent.
“Long-term data on annual average
temperatures indicates a statistically significant increasing trend, with a
range of 0.6 to 0.7 degree Celsius per century for different subdivisions of
the state. A rising trend in temperatures in Karnataka points to the
possibility of warmer growing seasons and greater likelihood of extreme
temperatures in the future. These are matters of serious concern for
agricultural productivity in the region,” it said.
Nagpur
Foodgrain Prices Open- April 10, 2019
APRIL 10, 2019 / 1:34 PM Nagpur Foodgrain Prices – APMC/Open
Market-April 10, 2018 Nagpur, April 10 (Reuters) – Gram and tuar prices
reported higher in the auction of Nagpur Agriculture Produce and Marketing
Committee (APMC) on increased buying support from local traders amid weak
supply from producing regions. Good rise on NCDEX in gram and fresh hike in
Madhya Pradesh pulses also boosted sentiment. About 5,800 bags of gram and
1,300 bags of tuar reported for auction, according to sources.
GRAM
* Desi gram recovered marginally in open market on good seasonal
demand from local
traders.
TUAR
* Tuar varieties ruled steady in open market here on subdued demand
from local
traders amid ample stock in ready position.
* Major rice varieties firmed up in open market on increased demand
from local
traders amid weak supply from producing belts.
* In Akola, Tuar New – 5,300-5,400, Tuar dal (clean) – 7,800-8,100,
Udid Mogar (clean)
– 6,500-7,500, Moong Mogar (clean) 7,800-8,400, Gram – 4,400-4,550,
Gram Super best
– 5,600-5,900 * Wheat and other foodgrain items moved in a narrow
range in
scattered deals and settled at last levels in weak trading activity.
Nagpur foodgrains APMC auction/open-market prices in rupees for 100
kg
FOODGRAINS Available prices Previous close
Gram Auction 3,800-4,200 3,800-4,150
Gram Pink Auction n.a. 2,100-2,600
Tuar Auction 4,500-5,160 4,500-5,100
Moong Auction n.a. 3,950-4,200
Udid Auction n.a. 4,300-4,500
Masoor Auction 2,200-2,500 2,600-2,800
Wheat Lokwan Auction 1,700-1,850 1,700-1,840
Wheat Sharbati Auction n.a. 2,900-3,000
Gram Super Best Bold 5,800-6,000 5,800-6,000
Gram Super Best n.a. n.a.
Gram Medium Best 5,500-5,700 5,500-5,700
Gram Dal Medium n.a. n.a
Gram Mill Quality 4,300-4,400 4,300-4,400
Desi gram Raw 4,200-4,300 4,150-4,250
Gram Kabuli 8,300-10,000 8,300-10,000
Tuar Fataka Best-New 8,100-8,300 8,100-8,300
Tuar Fataka Medium-New 7,700-7,900 7,700-7,900
Tuar Dal Best Phod-New 7,300-7,500 7,300-7,500
Tuar Dal Medium phod-New 7,000-7,200 7,000-7,200
Tuar Gavarani New 5,350-5,450 5,350-5,450
Tuar Karnataka 5,500-5,650 5,500-5,650
Masoor dal best 5,300-5,500 5,300-5,500
Masoor dal medium 5,000-5,200 5,000-5,200
Masoor n.a. n.a.
Moong Mogar bold (New) 8,000-8,800 8,000-8,800
Moong Mogar Medium 6,500-7,200 6,500-7,200
Moong dal Chilka New 6,500-7,800 6,500-7,800
Moong Mill quality n.a. n.a.
Moong Chamki best 8,000-9,000 8,000-9,000
Udid Mogar best (100 INR/KG) (New) 7,000-7,800 7,000-7,800
Udid Mogar Medium (100 INR/KG) 5,500-6,500 5,500-6,500
Udid Dal Black (100 INR/KG) 4,000-4,200 4,000-4,200
Batri dal (100 INR/KG) 5,600-5,700 5,600-5,700
Lakhodi dal (100 INR/kg) 4,550-4,850 4,550-4,850
Watana Dal (100 INR/KG) 5,300-5,500 5,300-5,500
Watana Green Best (100 INR/KG) 6,600-6,800 6,600-6,800
Wheat 308 (100 INR/KG) 2,100-2,200 2,100-2,200
Wheat Mill quality (100 INR/KG) 2,000-2,050 2,000-2,050
Wheat Filter (100 INR/KG) 2,500-2,600 2,500-2,600
Wheat Lokwan best (100 INR/KG) 2,500-2,600 2,500-2,600
Wheat Lokwan medium (100 INR/KG) 2,200-2,400 2,200-2,400
Lokwan Hath Binar (100 INR/KG) n.a. n.a.
MP Sharbati Best (100 INR/KG) 3,400-4,000 3,400-4,000
MP Sharbati Medium (100 INR/KG) 2,800-3,200 2,800-3,200
Rice Parmal (100 INR/KG) 2,100-2,200 2,100-2,200
Rice BPT best (100 INR/KG) 3,200-3,850 3,400-3,600
Rice BPT medium (100 INR/KG) 2,700-3,000 2,500-3,000
Rice BPT new (100 INR/KG) 2,900-3,200 2,900-3,200
Rice Luchai (100 INR/KG) 2,900-3,000 2,900-3,000
Rice Swarna best (100 INR/KG) 2,600-2,800 2,600-2,800
Rice Swarna medium (100 INR/KG) 2,500-2,600 2,500-2,600
Rice HMT best (100 INR/KG) 4,200-4,600 4,100-4,400
Rice HMT medium (100 INR/KG) 3,700-4,000 3,500-3,900
Rice HMT New (100 INR/KG) 3,600-3,800 3,600-3,800
Rice Shriram best(100 INR/KG) 5,500-5,700 5,400-5,600
Rice Shriram med (100 INR/KG) 4,800-5,200 4,600-5,000
Rice Shriram New (100 INR/KG) 4,200-4,400 4,200-4,400
Rice Basmati best (100 INR/KG) 8,500-13,500 8,500-13,500
Rice Basmati Medium (100 INR/KG) 5,000-7,000 5,000-7,000
Rice Chinnor best 100 INR/KG) 6,600-6,900 6,500-6,800
Rice Chinnor medium (100 INR/KG) 6,300-6,500 6,200-6,400
Rice Chinnor New (100 INR/KG) 4,700-5,000 4,700-5,000
Jowar Gavarani (100 INR/KG) 2,350-2,550 2,350-2,550
Jowar CH-5 (100 INR/KG) 2,050-2,250 2,050-2,250 WEATHER (NAGPUR)
Maximum temp. 44.1 degree Celsius, minimum temp. 23.1 degree Celsius Rainfall :
Nil FORECAST: Partly cloudy sky. Maximum and minimum temperature likely to be
around 44 degree Celsius and 23 degree Celsius. Note: n.a.—not available (For
oils, transport costs are excluded from plant delivery prices, but included in
market prices) ATTN : Soyabean mandi, wholesale foodgrain market of Nagpur APMC
and oil market in Vidarbha will be closed tomorrow, Thursday, on the occasion
Lok Sabha election here.
Tenured N.F.A. employees to challenge
constitutionality of rice trade liberalization law
April 9, 2019
A man carries a sack of commercial rice in a store in Parañaque
City as the market starts feeling the possible impact of the new law, which
liberalizes the importation, exportation and trading of rice. The rice
tariffication law has been signed, but tenured employees of the National Food
Authority (NFA) are questioning its inclusion of provisions that overhaul the
agency, displacing hundreds.
By Jasper Emmanuel Y. Arcalas
& Cai U. Ordinario
TENURED employees of the National
Food Authority (NFA) will soon file a petition before the Supreme Court
challenging the constitutionality of the new rice trade liberalization law,
which could cause thousands of NFA workers to lose their jobs.
NFA Employees Association (NFAEA)
Central Office President Maximo M. Torda told the BusinessMirror the group will
file the petition by May.
Torda said the NFAEA will
question the legislative history of the law, which started at first as a rice
tariffication bill. The bill sought to convert the country’s quantitative
restriction (QR) on rice imports into ordinary customs duties.
He said the initial bill had
evolved into a measure that affected government safeguards against imports and
included the deregulation of the food agency.
“The rice trade liberalization
law eventually removed all the effective safeguard measures for controlling and
supervising the country’s food security,” Torda said in an interview.
“From the simple objective of
removing the QR, it evolved into an encompassing law which resulted in major
changes, such as the revamp and reorganization of the NFA that would now lead
to thousands of layoffs,” he added.
Torda said NFAEA’s Supreme Court
case is only part of a series of legal challenges that will be made by various
rice-industry stakeholders against the new law in the coming weeks.
“Our petitions would have
different bases and reasons. We want to be apolitical,” Torda said. “Our
petition is more of protecting our agency and our employees. We want to protect
what is left of the NFA, with our security of tenure being only secondary.”
Election ban
Torda said that no NFA employee
could be displaced until June due to the election ban. This, he said, will give
the NFA more time to discuss the reorganization and restructuring of the grains
agency to fulfill its new mandate under the new law.
“Things are still complicated.
There are still a lot of gray areas even in the signed implementing rules and
regulations [IRR], particularly the reorganization of the NFA,” he said.
Torda cited the commissioning of
an independent study that would outline the NFA’s buffer-stocking role under the
new trade regime as the basis for the agency’s reorganization.
This, he said, would allow the
NFA to determine how many workers will be displaced. “We think that study would
be the basis of a concrete plan for the NFA reorganization. It’s just sad that [the
national government] is rushing things and wants to railroad everything.”
Torda said some 1,000 employees
will be affected by the NFA reorganization mandated by the new law, higher than
the initial estimate of 400 made by government officials.
The 400 NFA employees that may be
displaced are from the industry services department and security services and
investigation department, which are directly involved in the NFA’s previous
regulatory functions of licensing importers and retailers and monitoring the
country’s rice trade.
‘Not true’
The National Economic and
Development Authority (Neda) said the reorganization of the NFA will affect
less than 500 employees.
Neda Regional Development Office
Assistant Secretary Mercedita A. Sombilla told the BusinessMirror these
employees are involved in the importation and licensing functions of the NFA.
The importation and licensing
function of the NFA has been repealed under Republic Act 11203. Under the new
law, the NFA’s functions have been limited to buffer stocking.
“Only 400 plus employees will be
affected, those involved in licensing and importation as these are the only
functions that were changed in the new law,” Sombilla said. “Their number will
not even reach 500,” she added, disputing claims by NFA employees that over a
thousand will be affected by the reorganization.
Sombilla said the number was
based on a survey of employees who wanted to avail themselves of the
“retirement package” to be offered by the government. This means the number
includes both the affected employees and those who want to leave NFA. The
survey was done prior to the signing of the law’s IRR.
Under the IRR, NFA employees will
receive up to 1.5 times their monthly basic salaries (MBS), depending on their
years of service.
Initially, Sombilla said this was
not the computation offered by the Department of Budget and Management (DBM).
She said determining the compensation package was one of the reasons the IRR
was not signed immediately after the law was passed.
“I went to DBM to haggle. I asked
if they can add to the compensation package since the NFA is considered a
state-owned corporation. So finally, after four to five days that the DOF
[Department of Finance], Treasury and DBM debated, they finally came up with a
rate which is 1.25 and 1.5,” Sombilla said.
Under Rule 3.4.1.2, the package
of employees who are in their first 20 years of service will be equivalent to
their MBS multiplied by their years of service.
However, those who have reached
20 years and one day to 30 years of employment will receive a package that is
equivalent to 1.25 times their MBS for every year of service.
Those who stayed longer at 30
years and one day or more, will receive 1.5 times their MBS for every year or
service.
Egypt’s strategic rice reserves at
six months after latest purchase - ministry
by Reuters
Monday, 8 April 2019 16:54 GMT
Rice rebounds in
2018 after 2017 flooding woes
by April 8, 2019 6:40 pm
After a brutal 2017 in which
spring flooding cost Arkansas growers an estimated $175 million in lost
production and damaged acreage, rice growers saw higher production in 2018 than
in any of the three previous years, according to an April 4 report from the
U.S. Department of Agriculture.
In the report, produced by the
USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, rice growers harvested more
acres, and yield and production throughout the state were higher. Most of the
largest increases in yield, percentagewise, were seen in eastern Arkansas
counties that suffered flooding losses most acutely in 2017.
Phillips County, which suffered
between $400,000 and $1 million in crop loss in 2017, saw its rice production
more than double from 1 million hundredweight to about 2.13 million
hundredweight. Increases of similar proportions were reported in Lawrence, St.
Francis, Ashley and Desha counties, according to the report.
While the county-by-county
acreage estimates provided in the NASS report often differ from estimates
provided by the Farm Service Agency, also part of the USDA, the statewide
numbers are typically very similar.
Jarrod Hardke, extension rice
agronomist for the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture, said
that while the higher production numbers are welcome, the higher rice acreage
in 2018 wasn’t necessarily a surprise, as it followed the natural cycle of
shifting acreage, crop rotation and prospective planting in response to
relative commodity prices.
Hardke said with the window for
much of the state’s planned early planted rice closing for 2019, shifts in
acreage are an open question.
“Until a week ago, I’d maintained
my expectation that we’ll remain close to flat, at 1.4 million acres of rice,”
Hardke said. “But we’ve seen what’s happened with this spring. After a week of
dry weather, we saw rains again over the weekend, with more pointed our way.
1.4 million acres is still the target, but if this pattern doesn’t give, we’ll
possibly head down toward 1.2 million acres. At this point, we’re staring at a
downward trend, but we have a while to go yet before we start losing rice
acres.”
PM Imran to sign FTA 2nd phase with China in last week of April:
Envoy
Last Updated On 09 April,2019 11:25
pm
China would continue its efforts to expand regional
trade in SAARC countries
FAISALABAD (APP) – Chinese
Ambassador to Pakistan Yao Jing said Tuesday that Prime Minister Imran Khan
would visit China in last week of April to sign the second phase of Free Trade
Agreement (FTA) which would help Pakistani products to get free access to 95
percent Chinese markets.
Addressing the businessmen at
Faisalabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry (FCCI) Complex, he said that in the
second phase of FTA, both countries would extend their cooperation in
agriculture, manpower, health and education sectors as well as elimination of
poverty. In this connection, a roadmap would be discussed to enhance
cooperation in social sector, besides evolving framework for assistance in
agro-industrial sector, he disclosed.
He said that FTA would also help
in removing hurdles in bilateral trade between the two countries by providing
95 percent market access to Pakistani products, whereas, Chinese exports would
get 68 percent market access in Pakistan.
The Chinese envoy further said
that during the visit, Trade Development Authority of Pakistan (TDAP) would
arrange a B2B Forum on April 28 in China. During the event, businessmen of the
two countries would negotiate feasible projects along with technology transfer,
he said.
Yao Jing mentioned previous visit
of PM Imran Khan to China in November last and said that China would import
rice, sugar and yarn from Pakistan to increase its import volume. Though
Pakistan has a huge quantity of surplus wheat yet its sale in Chinese markets
was very low. Therefore, China will procure 300,000 ton rice and in this
connection, negotiation has already been started, he added.
Regarding cooperation in
industrial sector, the Chinese Ambassador said that Chinese companies had
reservations over taxation policy of Pakistan, however, these companies would
be convinced and provided incentives for investment in Pakistani industry in
order to enhance its production capacity up to demand of the day.
Commenting ASEAN like investment
and incentives in Pakistan, Chinese Ambassador told that this region is
traditionally, historically and culturally very close to China. Moreover, a
sizable number of Chinese are also living in this region. Hence, they prefer to
invest in this region because of their natural affiliation. He told that this
regional bloc is consisting of 10 countries.
He said that China had made
serious efforts to promote regional trade among SAARC Countries but could not
succeed due to the complex regional situation. However, China would continue
its efforts to expand regional trade in SAARC countries, he added.
About the production of manmade
fiber in Pakistan, he said that Chinese government will encourage its investors
to setup manmade fiber plant in Pakistan but government will not compel
anybody.
Regarding visas, he said that
this task is being entrusted to Gerry’s. He said the company had its offices in
Karachi, Islamabad and Lahore while he would recommend its branch in Faisalabad
to facilitate the business community of this city.
The Chinese envoy also termed
Punjab as a growth engine of national economy and said that development of
Pakistan was directly linked with the progress and prosperity of Punjab
province.
Earlier, Federal Parliamentary
Secretary for Railways Mian Farrukh Habib welcomed the Chinese Ambassador and
termed Pakistan and China as iron brothers. He said that technicalities between
Pakistan and China regarding Free Trade Agreement (FTA) had been signed today
which would open new avenues of cooperation between the two countries.
He said that he wanted to
transform Faisalabad as an international city of this region. He proposed that
Faisalabad and a Chinese city may be declared as sister cities to promote
socio-economic and cultural links between the two metropolises.
He also stressed the need for
launching joint ventures with Chinese collaboration and said that it would help
Pakistan to promote a culture of environment friendly and green industries in
this city.
He termed the CPEC (China
Pakistan Economic Corridor) as the flagship of Chinese ‘One Belt-One Road’
project and said that its scope would be further expanded by including
agriculture and other sectors in it.
Farrukh Habib also proposed a
Pak-Chinese Textile Research center in Faisalabad.President FCCI Syed Zia
Alumdar Hussain, Former President FCCI Mian Javed Iqbal, Shahid Nazir, Khurram
Mukthar Engineer Rizwan Ashraf, Kashif Zia, Engineer Ahmad Hasan and Haleem
Akhtar also addressed the function.
Chinese Consul General Mr. Long
Dingbin, Attache Mr. Chen Yongpei, Attaché Mr. Liu Zhan Embassy of China were
also present on the occasion. Federal Parliamentary Secretary for Railways Mian
Farrukh Habib and Shahid Nazir presented FCCI shields to Chinese Ambassadors
Mr. Yao Jing and Chinese Consul General Mr. Long Dingbin respectively.
Chinese Envoy Mr. Yao Jing also
presented giveaways to FCCI President Syed Zia Alumdar Hussain while Vice
President FCCI Engineer Ehtisham Javed presented memento to Federal
Parliamentary Secretary Mian Farrukh Habib.
Pakistan’s Trade Deficit dips 14-23bn in 9 month
Workers unload rice sacks at a wholesale market in Karachi.
Pakistan government’s battle against bloated trade deficit is finally bearing
fruit as it shrank by 14% to $23.45bn in the first nine months of the current
fiscal year from $27.29bn in the corresponding period last year.
