Hybrid rice seeds
yielding hope
By Ma Zhiping in Haikou | Updated: 2019-04-15 09:55
Experts from around the world
drawn to Hainan to learn about agricultural sustainability
Technician from Yuan Longping High-Tech Agriculture Co show
local farmers in Bhaktapur near Kathmandu, the capital Nepal, how to use smart
paddy transplanters in June 2017. [Provided to China Daily]Under the scorching sun, fields displaying 31 major hybrid rice varieties grown in Belt and Road countries attracted more than 700 rice experts and businesspeople on Friday to the golden paddy-themed national park in Sanya, Hainan province.
They had gathered on the tropical
island in South China to attend the four-day International Rice Forum, which
ended on Saturday.
Sushil Raj Subedi, an official
with the Nepal Agricultural Research Council, was excited to see that Keyou 18,
a hybrid rice variety developed by Chinese scientists in Nepal, is growing well
in Sanya, known as China's "Silicon Valley of seeds".
At the Super Rice Research Base
of Yuan Longping, who is known as China's father of hybrid rice, Subedi felt
the heavy golden rice ears and bent his knees so he could touch the roots.
Standing up with a big, admiring smile, he said, "It is good."
Madhav Prasad Pandey, a professor
of genetics and plant breeding at Nepal Agriculture and Forestry University,
was impressed by the integration of agriculture and tourism at the 186-hectare
national park, where a total of 500 rice varieties are demonstrated. "It
is a smart idea to build such a grand national park, a live rice museum, to
showcase the rich varieties of rice and pass on the technological culture of
rice growing," he said.
Hybrid rice, which is produced by
crossbreeding different kinds of rice, was developed by Chinese scientists led
by Yuan in 1974. Two years later, China began the widespread growing of hybrid
rice, also known as super rice.
With current acreage amounting to
16 million hectares, or about 53 percent of China's rice acreage, and rice
output having grown from 6 metric tons per hectare in the 1970s to 15 metric
tons now, hybrid rice is known as the "fifth invention in the world".
The new variety has made solid contributions to helping feed Chinese - which
account for 21 percent of the global population - with only 7 percent of the
world's arable land.
Hybrid rice was first introduced
overseas to the United States in 1979. The crop is now grown in more than 30
countries and regions, with the total acreage surpassing 7 million hectares,
according to reports from the international rice forum.
Tu Shengbin, an expert on hybrid
rice with the Chengdu Biology Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of
Sciences, still remembers the hardships of the early days after arriving in
Lumbini in southern Nepal - electricity shortages and the terror caused by
black leeches covering his shirt, pants and socks during field instruction and
training.
"The local farmers turned a
blind eye to us when we first arrived in Nepal in 2001. But Chinese experts and
technicians are now the most respectable guests among local people, since
growing hybrid rice has helped improve their lives remarkably," said Tu.
The local rice yield was only between 2.5 and 3.5 metric tons per hectare, but
the new rice varieties pushed the output to 7.2 tons per hectare by 2014, he
added.
Bimala Shrestha, a farmer in
Bhaktapur near Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, said, "I don't know how to
express my joyful feeling." She has grown rice for about 20 years but had
to change the seeds every year for a higher yield. Income from rice growing was
tripled once she began growing hybrid rice in 2017, with support from Chinese
technicians under the China-Nepal Agriculture Technical Cooperation Project.
With good stress resistance, and
higher and more stable yields, hybrid rice seeds developed by centers in
southern China have been warmly welcomed in Southeast Asian and South Asian
countries, said Xie Zhenyu, an assistant research fellow at the Research
Institute of Tropical Crop Germ
Plasm of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.
Xie said the Philippines turned
out to be a prime location for experiments with new hybrid rice seeds. Within a
decade, Chinese and Philippine scientists have worked together to cultivate 15
new varieties of hybrid rice.
Hybrid rice varieties are grown
on more than 10 percent of the Philippines' arable land, which boosted the
country's output of rice by 2.4 million metric tons a year, according to
Philippine government statistics. The increase helped feed 15 million people,
or 14 percent of the country's population, supposing that per capita annual
rice consumption is 160 kilograms.
A farmer named Delima, who has
grown hybrid rice in the southern Philippines for more than 10 years, said,
"Seeing per hectare yield being increased from 8 tons to 11 tons, more of
my villagers have been convinced of the 'magic technology' of Chinese
scientists and turned to growing hybrid rice."
Tu, the hybrid rice expert at the
Chengdu Biology Research Institute, said, "We give the local people 'fish'
and teach them how to 'fish' as well."
Tu travels more than 100 days
each year, staying for research in Sanya for part of each winter and moving
between countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations the rest of the
time. He said more than 2,000 Chinese rice scientists from around the country,
especially those from Hunan, Guangdong, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces, are
likewise devoting themselves to promoting hybrid rice among overseas farmers -
showing them how to grow hybrid rice, how to produce hybrid seeds and how to process
the grains.
Hainan's tropical climate and
rich biological resources have made it an important national center for seed
propagation. Each winter, more than 7,000 domestic agricultural scientists and
workers are busy at the off-season breeding centers. Statistics from the Hainan
provincial off-season breeding administration show that 19,950 crop varieties,
or about 70 percent of the country's new crop varieties, have been cultivated
in the past 70 years in the tropical island province, which is building a
global animal and plant resources center as part of its free trade zone
development plan.
Wang Sheng, an official with the
Hainan provincial government, said arrangements have also been made to invite
experts and students from countries participating in the Belt and Road
Initiative to China. Since 2015, more than 2,000 foreign experts and students
from BRI countries such as Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Nepal, Vietnam,
Malaysia and Indonesia have visited Hainan to study agricultural technology,
including off-season breeding programs.
Men Pvnlork, a student from the
Cambodian Royal Agriculture University who attended a recent 20-day training
course in Hainan for more than 20 students from Cambodia, said: "We
learned a lot from professors from the Chinese Academy of Tropical Agriculture
Sciences. For instance, the skills and knowledge of insect prevention and
tropical plant tissue culture will be very helpful to our research back at
home."
Meanwhile, Chinese scientists are
thinking big. "To ensure sustainable development of agriculture in the
world, more efforts will be made to cope with local conditions in hybrid rice
research and development to help the crop 'go global' faster," said Xie
Fangming, vice-president of Yuan Longping High-Tech Agriculture Co Ltd. Xie,
the first of Yuan Longping's students to earn a master's degree, has been
heading the company's overseas research and development of hybrid rice.
To promote the crop worldwide,
Xie has shared the materials needed for development of hybrid rice free of
charge with global rice scientists.
At the international rice forum
in Sanya, a coastal resort city at the southern tip of Hainan island, Kenneth
Quinn, chairman of the World Food Prize Organization, emphasized the importance
of food production, saying that "agriculture plays a significant role in
promoting world peace and development".
Chantha Thippavo Ngphanh, the
vice-minister of agriculture and forestry of Laos, said Laos has rich land
resources and hopes for closer cooperation with Chinese research institutions
to get more advanced hybrid rice skills to increase paddy yield.
mazhiping@chinadaily.com.cn
‘PHL must shoot for 95% rice sufficiency’
April 14, 2019
A
farmer in Barangay San Mateo in Arayat, Pampanga, is plowing his rice field in
preparation for the second cropping season. Arayat’s fertile land allows
farmers to plant and harvest rice thrice a year. Former Agriculture Secretary
William D. Dar said the government must target 95-percent rice self-sufficiency
in view of the threat of climate change to food production.
The Philippines should target a
95-percent rice self-sufficiency rate to ensure that it will have adequate
supply of the staple and allow a “viable supply space” for cheap imports under
the new trade regime, a former agriculture chief said.
Former Agriculture Secretary
William D. Dar said the government should not be contented with a 93-percent
rice self-sufficiency ratio (SSR) as climate change is threatening the
country’s farm productivity.
“Should we maintain that level
and be complacent? No. We need that level to be better and improve the
productivity of farmers and even reach 95 percent because of climate change,”
Dar said in his speech during the Economic Journalists Association of the
Philippines-San Miguel Corp. seminar held in Baguio City on Saturday.
Dar said the country’s rice
supply would be more stable at 95-percent SSR as it would have to source only 5
percent from the world market.
At present the Philippines
purchases about 6 to 7 percent of its rice requirements from other countries.
This is equivalent to 2 million metric tons to 2.5 MMT, according to Dar.
He also said it is time for the
government to abandon its goal of attaining 100 percent rice SSR as it is “an
unachievable and ambitious target.”
Dar said previous administrations
have tried to achieve the feat “at all costs,” which have resulted in higher
rice prices at times due to the high cost of producing paddy.
The former agriculture chief, who
is also president of nongovernment organization InangLupa Movement Inc., said
the 95-percent rice SSR can be achieved in the remaining three years of the
Duterte administration. He said this will be made possible by the P10-billion
fund for the rice sector under the new rice trade liberalization law.
“Sustaining rice productivity
while liberalizing the industry to allow more imports to have lower inflation
is possible. They can go together,” he added.
Due to the expected influx of
rice imports under the new trade regime, the Department of Agriculture (DA)
said it will no longer pursue its 100-percent rice self-sufficiency target.
Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel F.
Piñol argued that the increase in imported rice supply will “depress” farm-gate
prices and discourage farmers from planting the staple.
“It would be foolish for us to
still target the 100-percent [self-sufficiency rate]. It will be foolish to
continue encouraging our farmers to reach that goal when we know that cheap imported
rice will be coming in,” Piñol said.
“We might just be contented with
where we are right now, which is at 93 percent. The inflow of imported rice may
affect prices and further dampen the buying price of palay,” he added.
The DA is targeting to produce 20
MMT this year, nearly 5 percent higher than the 19.06 MMT produced in 2018.
Customs beg FG to end import duty waiver
By
-
April 15, 2019
The Nigeria Customs Service (NCS)
has asked the Federal Government to discontinue the import duty waiver scheme
as it is taking a toll on its revenue collection.
Speaking at a forum in Lagos last
week, Assistant Comptroller General of Customs in charge of Zone A, Kaycee
Ekekeie, said the Federal Government was losing trillions of naira on a yearly
basis to the granting of import duty waivers to companies and non-governmental
organizations.
Some of the early beneficiaries
of waivers and concession include Dangote Industries Limited, Vasmani, Stallion
and other rice importers; the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Messrs Western
Metal Product Co. Limited, International Hotels, Mandarin Hotels, Le Meridian,
Grand Ikoyi Towers and Resort and Federal Palace Hotels.
Others are members of the
diplomatic corps and companies fronting for top government functionaries, among
others.
Ekekesie noted that while Nigeria
is an import dependent economy, there could be other incentives for importers
but not outright waivers, which have over the years been subjected to abuse.
She said, “We are always sad with
the huge amount of money that goes into waivers every year. It runs into
trillions and we are very sad about it. Nigeria is an import-based economy and
all these waivers that are being granted are affecting our revenue. So we in
Customs will be very glad if all these waivers could stop. There could be other
incentives for investors but not outright waivers.
“Customs cannot stop waivers, we
are an implementing agency but we can advise government where it is hurting us
and the economy and we do that all the time.”
The Customs boss added that the
NCS would work with the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency
(NIMASA) to end issuance of waiver to foreign flagged vessels stating that any
ship that does not fly the Nigerian flag would not be allowed to operate on the
nation’s coastal water.
Ekekeie, who lauded the Federal
Government’s diversification drive, said Nigeria must continue to focus on
growing its local content to boost the economy.
“I wish we will be thinking home
in all aspects of our economy. We have started with agriculture, and we are
praying that we get it right so that the smuggling of rice will stop.
“So when we start thinking home,
we will generate employment, and then we have something we call our own other
than looking outside and borrowing technology here and there. We have people
who are very capable in the country and we have all it takes to make it work,”
she said.
German govt budgets 2m Euros for rice production in Nigeria
The Rice mill
As part of the efforts to boost rice production in Nigeria the
German Ministry of Cooperation has pledged 3 million Euros to fund the
implementation of the second phase of the Competitive African Rice Initiative
(CARI) project.
,The states are Kebbi, Kadunna and Jigawa
The first phase of the project ended in 2015.
The project aims to achieve its objective through the use of the
Multi-Action Partnership (MAP), a concept that allows for harmonization of
regional initiative and polices while enforcing coordination among other actors
in the rice value chain in different countries .
The Programme Director of the Competitive African Rice Initiative
(CARI) a programme of the of the German Cooperation in Nigeria, Jean-Bernard
Lalanne, said the funding which is in collaboration with the German Ministry
Cooperation and part from the Bill and Mellinda Gates Foundation in partnership
with the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (FMARD), is
expected to end by June 2021.
Lalanne stressed that CARI is working on business linkages in the
rice sector, to ensure that the producers are well connected with the market,
processors, rice miller, aggravators, input dealers
He added that the Multi-Action Partnership (MAP) is important in
finding synergies between various sectors, which can help in achieving a better
result in the rice sector. “And that is while the MAP4Africe has introduced a
platform for sub-Saharan countries working on the transformation of the rice
sector.
Speaking with stakeholders present at the event the North Central
Agro input Dealer Association President, Mr. Adekunle Raufu Lawal said that the
involvement of his association in the project for the past 5 years has helped
to reduce the importation and smuggling of rice into the country.
According to him, various strategies have been adopted to address
low sales and production of rice across the country.
Lawal noted that four countries have participated in the projects
namely Tanzania, Burkina Faso, Ghana and Nigeria inclusive.
This, he said created business deliberations and solutions to
various problems facing rice in the various countries.
He added that the solution to low production of rice in Nigeria is
for the government to increase import duty on rice by 70 per cent saying it will
discourage importers.
Budget veto impact on rice competitiveness fund studied
April 15, 2019 | 12:06 am
AGRICULTURE Secretary Emmanuel F.
Piñol said Sunday that the possible reenactment of the 2018 budget for the
entire year could affect disbursements from the Rice Competitiveness
Enhancement Fund (RCEF).
“I still have to determine its
implications on the RCEF,” Mr. Piñol told BusinessWorld in a
phone message.
The RCEF is a component of
Republic Act No. 11203, or the Rice Tariffication Law, and is funded by tariffs
generated by rice imports. The fund hopes to make the domestic rice industry
more competitive through farm mechanization, access to better seed, and more
financing and extension services, among other measures.
Senator Loren B. Legarda has
confirmed that RCEF has been allocated P10 bill in the 2019 General
Appropriations Bill, which is currently under study for signing by the Palace.
The Budget is under threat of
Presidential veto because of questions about the legality of alleged
“insertions” made by legislators after the Budget was ratified by the bicam
conference committee.
When asked about the RCEF,
Agriculture Undersecretary Ariel T. Cayanan said “RCEF…is over and above to
whatever budget we have on rice.” — Charmaine A. Tadalan
Rice
millers’ lament
•Time to get tough with our neighbours over smuggling
WE are not surprised at the finding by the Rice Processors
Association of Nigeria (RIPAN) that over 20 million bags of rice (approximately
one million metric tonnes) were smuggled into Nigeria between January and
March. According to RIPAN chairman, Mohammed Abubakar, investigations conducted
by the association in the last few months indicated that “all our international
borders have been converted to smugglers’ route and our markets are filled with
smuggled foreign rice.”
“Nigeria currently loses huge revenues, foreign exchange and
jobs to this menace. Nigeria rice processing companies are shutting down
because of their inability to gain market access. More painfully, millions of
small-holder farmers are stuck with their paddy because the millers can no
longer afford to buy from them”, he told newsmen in an interview in Abuja, last
week.
He did not spare officials of the Nigerian Customs Service (NCS)
at the borders, some of whom he accused of colluding with smugglers to
undermine the nation’s quest to attain self-sufficiency in rice production,
warning that the magnitude of loss to stakeholders would be too devastating to
cope with.
“The development, if left unchecked, could impact negatively on
the integrated rice processor’s capacity, which had increased from 800,000
metric tonnes in 2014 to 1.6 million metric tonnes in 2018″, he said.
We sympathise with the millers’ body. Indeed, the threat from
smuggling, given their exposure to other players in the rice value chain,
borders on an existential one. The issue, however isn’t that the problem of
smuggling, particularly of rice, is a recent phenomenon but the failure of the
Federal Government to recognise it for what it is – a serious act of economic
sabotage – and confront it accordingly. Surely, the Federal Government has a
surfeit of intelligence to stamp it out. For instance, only last
December, Heineken Lokpobiri, Minister of State for Agriculture had cause to
decry the abuse of the Economic Community of West African States protocol
allowing neighbouring countries to bring in rice into Nigeria.
According to Lokpobiri, “people from Thailand would go to Benin
Republic with their parboiled rice and then re-bag them as though they were
produced in Benin Republic and then smuggle them into Nigeria, thereby denying
the people of Benin the opportunity to grow rice and then benefit from the
Nigerian market”.
Earlier in 2018, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, acting on
intelligence on three shiploads of 120,000 metric tons of Thailand rice headed
for Nigeria via Benin Republic could not but raise the alarm. The preceding
Christmas, he spoke of some 500,000 metric tons of rice also denied entrance from
the same country.
Unfortunately, as if part of an incipient culture of denial, the
Federal Government continues to tout the decline in import of Thai rice from
644,131 metric tonnes in 2015, to 58,260 metric tonnes in 2016, and 23,192
metric tonnes in 2017 as achievement while pretending to be oblivious of the
corresponding figures from our other neighbours. For instance, rice imports
from Benin Republic rose geometrically from 805,765 metric tonnes in
2015, to 1,427,098 metric tonnes in 2016, and 1,811,164 metric tonnes in
2017. Cameroun also witnessed a surge in Thai rice imports from 449,297
metric tonnes in 2015, to 505,254 metric tonnes in 2016 to 744,508 metric
tonnes in 2017. In the circumstance, only the Federal Government still lives under
the illusion that those dramatic surges in imports are headed anywhere other
than Nigeria – sadly for an administration that has acquired a reputation for
aggressively pushing for self-sufficiency in the nation’s major staples which
the illegal trade directly undermines.
We agree with RIPAN that the time to tackle the menace of
rice smuggling is now; just as we shudder to think of the grave risk of the
failure to act on the initiatives and the linkages that they have spawned in
the rice value chain. While we agree that the customs management can do more to
curb corruption and indolence in the ranks of its men, the nature of the
problem is such that require engagement between the Nigerian government and our
ECOWAS neighbours. For far too long, our ECOWAS neighbours have taken
advantage of our good neighbourliness to undermine our economy; the rice issue
obviously provides one avenue for the Federal Government to demonstrate, for
once, a clear resolve to defend our national interest.
This Is How
Human Extinction Could Play Out
April 14,
2019
Food-system collapse, sea-level
rise, disease. In his new book Falter, Bill McKibben asks, “Is it Too Late?” –
The stubs of corn stalks that
were chopped down because heat and lack of rain ruined the crop, litter a field
in Nebraska. 2012 saw the highest recorded temperatures in American history.
Over the summer most of the mid-west experienced a tremendous drought, where
hot weather and the lack of rain destroyed crops and grazing land. In the high
plains of Western Nebraska’s cattle lands, this created ideal conditions for
wild fires, which spread across the land sparked by single bolts of lightning:
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.
By Bill McKibben –
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.
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.
Pot
calling the kettle black?
BY RABIA AHMED , (LAST UPDATED 2 DAYS AGO)
·
The Koh-i-Noor isn’t coming here any time soon
Information Minister Fawad
Chaudhry has demanded that Britain should apologise for the 1919 Jalianwala
Bagh massacre, and the 1943 Bengal famine. Oh, and as an addendum he has also
demanded that it return to Pakistan the Kohinoor Diamond taken in 1849.
It is not certain where the
Koh-i-Noor diamond first came from. It was probably mined in Golconda, present
day Andhra Pradesh.
Babar wrote about it in the Babar
Nama, saying it was acquired by Alauddin Khalji of Delhi from the
Kakatiya Dynasty of Southern India at the beginning of the 14thcentury. Babar himself acquired
it as tribute in 1526 following the Battle of Panipat.
The Koh-i-Noor was taken from the
Mughals by Nadir Shah of Persia when he invaded Delhi in 1739. he might have
been the first person to call it ‘Koh-i-Noor’, or ‘Mountain of Light’ in
Persian. When he died in 1747 and his empire collapsed, the gem went to his
grandson who gave it to Ahmad Shah Durrani of Afghanistan. One of Ahmad Shah’s
descendants Shuja Shah, the self-proclaimed King of Afghanistan, fled to the
Punjab in 1813, and lost the diamond to his host Ranjit Singh.
You wish members of the Pakistan
government would stop embarrassing its people each time they open their mouths.
You wish too that one’s leaders would do what they are supposed to do and stop
fishing for popular ra-rah by means of such asides which have nothing to do
with what they were elected for
In 1849 the Kingdom of Punjab was
taken over by the British. Article III of the Treaty of Lahore signed then
ceded the diamond to Queen Victoria, not as a personal gift to her, as the
Governor General Dalhousie had it presented by Ranjit Singh’s son to the East
India Company, which presented it to the Queen as a spoil of war. It– or rather
its segments, since it has since been cut into several pieces– can now be found
in the various crowns belonging to the Queens of England.
There are therefore many
claimants. India first demanded the British return it at the time of
Independence in 1947, and then again in 1953 and 2000. In 1976 Pakistan asked
for its return, and in 2000 the Taliban claimed it as Afghanistan’s legitimate
property.
The British Government rejected
all these claims, saying that the diamond was legally obtained by the British
under the terms of the last Treaty of Lahore. Which is what they will say again
in response to Fawad Chaudhry’s demands, if they bother to respond.
Yes, the British government ought
to have apologised for that shameful part of its history that is Jallianwala.
That they have not, will forever stand against them.
To ask for an apology for the
famine of Bengal though is nothing less than gross cheek and gall when the
demand comes from Pakistan, and if I were a citizen of Bangladesh, I would say
so. As a member of the human race, I do say so.
The famine of Bengal took the
lives of between two to three million Bengalis, due to starvation, malaria and
other diseases.
When the Japanese occupied Burma,
modern day Myanmar, the British were afraid that they would advance into India
via Bengal. To prevent this, the British ordered the stocks of paddy (unmilled
rice) and other food products to be destroyed along the coastal areas of the
Bengal. The British Army also confiscated or destroyed all boats large enough
for ten or more persons, belonging to the local people who relied on these
boats for fishing, and transport of commercial goods, seeds and other
equipment. Rice and fish are the staple diet of the people of Bengal who lost
both at this time. No recompense was provided and no food rations, and a famine
set in.
Pakistan was formed after that in
1948. The people of Bengal had a majority over the people in the Western wing,
yet the capital and the government was always in the hands of the West. Various
such things led to the separation of East Pakistan from the West and the birth
of Bangladesh, but not before what has been gross excesses committed by the
West against its eastern wing, although both sides suffered fatalities at the
hands of each other and neither is willing to accept the figures presented by
the other. The death of civilians killed in Bangladesh as a result of the war
has been called genocide, because they lie anywhere between 300,000 and
3,000,000. Between 200,000 and 400,000 Bangladeshi women are said to have been
raped.
According to the Pakistani
journalist Anthony Mascarenhas writing in 1971 for the British Sunday Times
(Mascarenhas was once the editor of Karachi’s Morning News): “I saw Hindus hunted
from village to village and door to door, shot off-hand. I have heard the
screams of men bludgeoned to death in the compound of the Circuit House in
Comilla. I have seen truckloads of other human targets and those who had the
humanity to try to help them hauled off ‘for disposal’ under the cover of
darkness and curfew.”
For this Pakistan is responsible.
Can Pakistan in all conscience point fingers at someone else for doing similar
things?
You wonder if the gentleman
making demands for an apology from Britain is aware of the history behind the
events he speaks of, and the events that took place afterwards? You wish
members of the Pakistan government would stop embarrassing its people each time
they open their mouths. You wish too that one’s leaders would do what they are
supposed to do and stop fishing for popular ra-rah by means of such asides
which have nothing to do with what they were elected for. There is the small
issue of increasing Press censorship that the Chaudhry is probably trying to
muffle under such rhetoric. His tactics might work since the public is easily
diverted by such macho calls for justice, but the events that took place in
Pakistan’s eastern wing will always be remembered by anyone with half a
conscience.
12:00 AM, April 14, 2019 / LAST MODIFIED: 12:08 PM, April 14, 2019
The Panta magic
Pahela Baishakh celebrations seem
incomplete without plates of Panta Bhaat, served with Bhorta or fish. For
decades, Bangalees, on their New Year, have been treating themselves to the
traditional delicacies.
Many find in the practice an air of
nostalgia, taking them back to a time when there was no electricity or
refrigeration in rural Bangalee households. A typical family of peasants would
save leftover rice from dinner by soaking it in water to have it as breakfast
the next morning.
But along with traditional values,
Panta Bhaat also has its nutritional benefits.
Recently, a study by the nutrition
department of Bangladesh Agriculture Research Council (Barc) said Panta Bhaat
has more nutrients than cooked rice and thus should be consumed throughout the
year.
The study analysed usual and
fermented rice of five varieties -- BRRI-28, Pari, Miniket, Aman and Balam --
and found the presence of micronutrients to be higher in soaked rice than in
cooked rice.
It said the amount of calcium,
iron, potassium and sodium increased many folds when rice is soaked in water
for a prolonged period.
For example, if Miniket rice is
fermented for eight to 12 hours, calcium sees a 351.94 percent increase while
iron increases by 11.66 percent and sodium by 47.53 percent, it said.
The study also said Panta Bhaat is
high in nutritional value and helps strengthen body immunity and remove anaemia
and iron deficiency.
“When normal rice is soaked for 8-12
hours in water, Phytic acid reacts with water and creates lactic acid which
increases the nutrient quality of rice,” states the report.
Talking to The Daily Star, Dr
Monirul Islam, director (nutrition) at the Barc, said, “Fermented food is full
of useful bacteria. According to scientists, there are around 10 trillion good
bacteria in half a cup of fermented food.”
In Bangladesh, people suffer from
calcium and iron deficiencies, he said, adding that consumption of proper
amounts of soaked rice can help solve the problem.
Monirul also said soaked rice helps
boost the human body's immune system. “Girls in their adolescence face iron
deficits. Fermented rice can minimise the problem.”
Having Panta Bhaat on a regular
basis could be useful as, according to the National Institute of Population
Research and Training (NIPORT) 2016, about 5.5 million children under 5 (36
percent of the total number of country's children) suffer from chronic
malnutrition (stunting or low height-for-age) and 14 percent are acutely malnourished.
Nutritionists said soaked rice
keeps the body light and energetic as it is easily digestible. The body also
feels less tired.
Prof Md Akhtaruzzaman of Dhaka
University's Institute of Nutrition and Food Science, said the nutritional
value increases in soaked rice as many vitamins and micronutrients are likely
to be added.
“In normal rice, iron, potassium,
calcium and sodium is less absorbable to the human body. But in fermented rice,
it is easily absorbable and the amount also increases,” he said.
Pakistan’s
water demand likely to grow by 40% in 30 years
BY AGENCIES
, (LAST UPDATED 2 DAYS AGO)
–World Bank report says water demand won’t be sustainable, even
by groundwater pumping
KARACHI: Water demand in Pakistan is projected to grow by at least 40 per
cent over the next 30 years, with demographic and economic growth the biggest
drivers.
In addition, climate change will
see further increases in water demand, chiefly from agriculture, in the absence
of attention to demand management. While agriculture continues to represent the
bulk of demand, much of the demand increase will come from other sectors of the
economy.
According to a new World Bank
report, in the absence of effective demand management, growth in water demand
will not be sustainable. Current withdrawal levels are already nearing 60 per
cent of renewable water supply, making a large increase in water demand
unsustainable. Future surges in demand are unlikely to be manageable even
through further unsustainable increases in groundwater pumping.
The demand management strategy
needs to focus on efficiency improvements that can increase consumption.
Importantly, to accommodate growth in other sectors, food security, gains in
value addition, and build resilience to ongoing climate change, it is critical
for agriculture to improve water management, encourage water productivity and
saving, and diversify crops toward higher value-added horticulture.
Agriculture, by far the largest
user of water, uses it inefficiently. Agriculture accounts for more than 90 per
cent of withdrawals and is heavily dependent on irrigation. More than 90 per
cent of agricultural production is concentrated on irrigated land.
Though agriculture contributes
around one-fifth of national GDP, less than half of this is from irrigated
cropping and the four major crops (wheat, rice, sugarcane and cotton) that
represent nearly 80 per cent of all water use generate less than 5 per cent of
GDP.
Over the past 50 years, the
agriculture sector’s growth rate has declined from an average of 4.5 per cent a
year to 2.5 per cent a year, led by a decline in productivity. Agriculture
productivity is characterized by little technical change and instead the
intensification of input use.
Water use is wasteful, with
governance issues that provide only weak incentives to save water. This results
in overall low economic productivity (around US$1 per cubic meter, one of the
lowest in the world) and concerns regarding environmental sustainability (for
example, contamination and salinization of groundwater aquifers, which pose the
greatest threat to long-term groundwater sustainability in Pakistan).
Irrigation water is underpriced
and the system badly managed. There is significant potential to improve water
productivity in the agriculture sector, achieving higher efficiency and
orienting water toward higher value uses.
Pakistan has lower water
productivity than peer countries. There are inadequacies in how areas are
assessed for water tariffs and abiana collection is uneven, inefficient and
inequitable. Irrigation service delivery by the public sector is generally
poor, with concerns over the equity and reliability of water distribution.
Farmers at the tail end of the
canals invariably do not receive their share of water due to the poor physical
state of the canals, water theft by farmers upstream and rent-seeking by
operators. Improved water management will need to be accompanied by improved
agricultural policies. Despite reforms in the past, the state continues to
intervene in agricultural markets, creating distortions that hold the sector
back.
The public sector intervenes
through administered prices and protective trade policies. The support is
concentrated in wheat (through domestic procurement, temporary import/export
control, and subsidized sales to select flour mills) and sugarcane (through
import tariffs, as well as support prices and export subsidies), while some
support remains for dairy products and vegetable oils.
In addition, input subsidies (on
fertilizers, electricity for water pumping, or implicitly, on canal irrigation
water) also influence farmers’ decisions. These interventions result in high
fiscal costs, distorted cropping decisions and imbalanced input use, with
implications for sustainability.
The support is highly regressive,
with most subsidies and benefits captured by large farmers and firms. For
continued economic growth, agriculture must produce more from less, and
reforming distortions in the agriculture sector will help move water toward
higher-value crops.
https://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2019/04/13/pakistans-water-demand-likely-to-grow-by-40-in-30-years/
Edible Archives Project Aims To
Revive Hundreds Of Vanishing Indian Rice Strains
·
Charukesi
Ramadurai
Some of the 20 different types of rice used during the three-month
festival Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India. Chefs served two varieties of rice
every day, along with multiple dishes of vegetables and meat or seafood. (Salam
Olattayil/for NPR)
Chef Anumitra Ghosh Dastidar fondly remembers her father's love for
rice — and his insistence on having specific kinds of rice — with each special
meat or fish dish cooked in their kitchen.
She even has memories of him making long road trips from their home
in Kolkata, India, to other parts of the state of West Bengal to buy local
rice. What motivated him, she says, was not just his interest in food but also
nostalgia for his childhood.
Edible Archives was born partly from this
recollection, with chef Anurima Ghosh Dastidar as curator, along with chef
Prima Kurien and two food writers who were also invited to cook.
India is known to have cultivated thousands of varieties of rice,
and references to rice — also combined with vegetables and meat, an ancient
precursor to biryani, which came from Persia — have been found in Sangam
literature from the 5th century B.C. Even a century ago, communities across
India grew their own strains of rice, and consumed them according to the needs
of the season or the cuisine.
During the Green Revolution in the 1960s, when machinery replaced
manual work and "high-yield variety" seeds were promoted,
agricultural output increased dramatically, but a few hybrid rice strains took
over from hundreds of indigenous ones.
The Edible Archives Project aims to showcase the sheer range of
rice varieties grown in India, and throw the spotlight specifically on those
which have almost vanished from the country's foodscape or are grown only in
small communities.
Chef Anumitra Ghosh Dastidar scoops Kattuyanam (a red rice from
Tamil Nadu), into bowls at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. She is instrumental in
both rice research and cooking for the Edible Archives project. (Courtesy of
Edible Archives)
"We don't document anything in India, so
most of the old rice strains are gone, and the expert knowledge about them
too," says Jayanthi Somasundaram, whose Spirit of the Earth collective
sources and sells several varieties of organic heritage rice, including a few
for this project.
Edible Archives formally opened at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, an art festival that
ran from Dec. 12 through March 29 in the south Indian city of Kochi, currently
in its fourth edition. At the event, the chefs served two varieties of rice
every day, along with multiple dishes of vegetables and meat or seafood. All of
this was in what Dastidar calls "homestyle cooking" (as opposed to
what is passed off in restaurants, especially outside India, as classic Indian
cuisine, like butter chicken), using local vegetables such as drumstick (moringa in vegetable form) and gourds. Writer-chef
Priya Bala adds that the idea was also to present not just rice in all its
glory, but preserve the dwindling knowledge about cooking methods, as well as
revive lost recipes.
To spice things up, the chefs also played with fusion
presentations, such as a Korean marinated egg over the aromatic Tulaipanji rice
from West Bengal (a hit combination, as it turned out) and the Chicken Pepian,
a Guatemalan Maya dish paired with the white, sweetish Chini Atap rice, also
from the same Indian state, to complement the robust smokiness of the meat.
"Most importantly, the chefs also explained how pairing works, so as to
balance all flavors and fragrances," Somasundaram says.
In three months, the team cooked with nearly 40 rice varieties from
all over India, many of them not familiar to anyone outside the region of
cultivation — like the Bahurupi from the state of Odisha or the Kattuyanam from
Tamil Nadu. The rice of the day was described on a board at the venue, and on
the social media pages of Edible Archives.
Drawing from her own nostalgia, Dastidar says that most Indians
have "an archive of rice memories, which we wanted to bring
together." In the midst of all the cooking and eating, there was also a
two-day workshop called "Recipes of Rice and Remembrance" that
included talks, cooking demonstrations, reminiscences and even songs related to
rice.
Speaking of the latter, Bala points out that rice has found a place
in Indian culture and literature over the ages, from a Bengali lullaby asking
the angel aunties to come and put the baby to sleep, promising them delicious
food in return — including three types of rice — to devotional songs from the
state of Tamil Nadu that equate rice with prosperity.
Indeed, rice has been an important, exceptional part of Indian
rituals — from the ceremony during which a baby is first fed mashed rice as solid food, to the
turmeric-infused yellow rice showered as blessing at weddings, to the final
journey, where rice is an offering to the departed soul. Even the sick are
fed kanji or khichuri (loose
rice porridge, with or without lentils) as comfort food.
Dastidar has trained in Italian, Japanese and Thai cuisines, and
learned how chefs in those countries tend to focus on grains from their own
microregions. Much before the Edible Archives idea took shape, Dastidar was
experimenting with rice varieties; think Manipuri Black Rice Risotto (a
grain with starch content similar to Arborio) at New Delhi's popular restaurant
Diva, where she was sous chef for many years.
With this experience, she traveled across the country to source the
rice for Edible Archives — all of it was bought directly from small farmers or
through agriculture collectives and non-governmental organizations who worked
with cultivators. The exploratory phase included inputs from experts such as
Dr. Debal Deb, who has researched and grown 1,300 varieties of rice at his
farm Basudha in
Odisha, and organic farmer Syed Ghani Khan, who established a rice museum in
Karnataka that is home to more than 850 varieties.
One of the rice bowls served at the festival, this dish contains
Kattuyanam, along with roasted pumpkin, cauliflower, ridge gourd, mango, dal,
and cucumber salad and mustard microgreens. (Courtesy of Edible Archives)
Along with creating a record of cultural connotations and memories,
Edible Archives also shared nutritional information about the rice of the day,
trying to dispel the myth that rice is just a "bad carb." Case in
point are two varieties from Tamil Nadu, where rice is the staple: Kattuyanam
and Seeraga Samba, the former with a low glycemic index that makes it ideal for
diabetics, and the latter highly fibrous and rich in selenium to fight colon
and intestinal cancers. The chefs gleaned this information from scientific
articles and agricultural journals, as well as from Basudha's in-house
magazine.
In the future, Edible Archives plans to hold pop-up events across
the country and eventually abroad. There have already been a few in Indian
cities, and one in Paris coming up in June that will focus on cuisine from
India's seven northeast states, which are still largely under-explored in terms
of tourism, culture and cuisine. The chefs say they mean to keep the dialogue
going with talks and lectures "wherever food and culture meet."
As Bala puts it, "we need to continue the celebration of a
grain that is sustenance, comfort, nutrition and auspiciousness all at
once."
Charukesi Ramadurai is a freelance journalist
from India, writing about travel, food, art and culture for BBC Travel, The
Guardian, Forbes and National Geographic Traveller (India), among others.
Follow her on Twitter and Instagram: @charukesi
Bridging
the Yield Gaps: Role of Science and Extension functionaries
Tasneem Mubarak
Rice is the staple food for majority of the world population and
India is the leading rice producing country in terms of area and is the second
largest producer next to China. In Jammu and Kashmir it is the staple food for
the people of temperate Kashmir Valley and its cultivation extends from the
planes having altitude 1600 m above the mean sea level to hills up to 2300 m
above msl in the valley. Ever expanding population and shrinking land and other
natural resources plus crop diversification especially area expansion under
apple crop however demands a higher per unit area rice production with
judicious natural resource management.
Since rice is the staple food for the people of valley, so an ample attention has been and will be paid to crop improvement and extension strategies related to this crop. Development of new varieties with higher yield potential and other desirable characters has been very crucial in bridging the enormous gap between production at farmers’ filed and the actual potential.
The contribution made by the State Agriculture University SKUAST-Kashmir through Mountain Research Center for Field Crops (MRCFC) ,SKUAST-K and other Divisions in the development of varieties like recent series of Shalimar rice for different altitudes and filed situations and related package of practices is immense.
The bigger challenge however is transfer of technologies from research fields and labs to the farmers’ field and here comes the role of extension machinery meant for technology dissemination in the state. As evident from the recent data, both Directorate of Extension SKUAST-Kashmir through KVKs and Directorate of Agriculture through district Agriculture departments have done good work in terms of transfer of technologies in almost all the major field crops including rice. Frontline demonstration programmes coupled with quality seed availability and technical backstopping through extension system have played a key role in this regard. Recent data of year 2017-18 for instance reflects a quantum jump in production and productivity of rice in district Kulgam over the last 7 years. Rice production and productivity in the district was 798723 quintals (q) and 48.67 q/ha , respectively in 2010-11 which touched an overwhelming figure of 1077760 q and 67.36 q/ha in 2017-18. That means around 35% and 38.4% increase in production and productivity, which reflects a very positive development so far as new crop varieties and their popularization through different programme of state agricultural university and agriculture development department is concerned. It is pertinent to mention that the national average productivity of rice is 25.5q/ha only. This indicates that in district Kulgam productivity is much higher against the national average and it is for this reason that this part of valley was once known as rice bowel of Kashmir. One thing is quite clear from these figures that coordination among different agencies at district level is bringing fruits to the efforts. Science is doing its good job and so is the extension machinery but policies related to land use need to be implemented without further delay to avoid crisis in future. All stakeholders must join hands and overcome the obstacles together as a single family with a strong will and commitment to serve our farming community and side by side ensure self-sufficiency in food grain production. Unity has great power and can bring unimaginable changes in the world around us. Let us work together with more strong bonds and feel that enormous power of unity, bringing all-round prosperity in the society.
Since rice is the staple food for the people of valley, so an ample attention has been and will be paid to crop improvement and extension strategies related to this crop. Development of new varieties with higher yield potential and other desirable characters has been very crucial in bridging the enormous gap between production at farmers’ filed and the actual potential.
The contribution made by the State Agriculture University SKUAST-Kashmir through Mountain Research Center for Field Crops (MRCFC) ,SKUAST-K and other Divisions in the development of varieties like recent series of Shalimar rice for different altitudes and filed situations and related package of practices is immense.
The bigger challenge however is transfer of technologies from research fields and labs to the farmers’ field and here comes the role of extension machinery meant for technology dissemination in the state. As evident from the recent data, both Directorate of Extension SKUAST-Kashmir through KVKs and Directorate of Agriculture through district Agriculture departments have done good work in terms of transfer of technologies in almost all the major field crops including rice. Frontline demonstration programmes coupled with quality seed availability and technical backstopping through extension system have played a key role in this regard. Recent data of year 2017-18 for instance reflects a quantum jump in production and productivity of rice in district Kulgam over the last 7 years. Rice production and productivity in the district was 798723 quintals (q) and 48.67 q/ha , respectively in 2010-11 which touched an overwhelming figure of 1077760 q and 67.36 q/ha in 2017-18. That means around 35% and 38.4% increase in production and productivity, which reflects a very positive development so far as new crop varieties and their popularization through different programme of state agricultural university and agriculture development department is concerned. It is pertinent to mention that the national average productivity of rice is 25.5q/ha only. This indicates that in district Kulgam productivity is much higher against the national average and it is for this reason that this part of valley was once known as rice bowel of Kashmir. One thing is quite clear from these figures that coordination among different agencies at district level is bringing fruits to the efforts. Science is doing its good job and so is the extension machinery but policies related to land use need to be implemented without further delay to avoid crisis in future. All stakeholders must join hands and overcome the obstacles together as a single family with a strong will and commitment to serve our farming community and side by side ensure self-sufficiency in food grain production. Unity has great power and can bring unimaginable changes in the world around us. Let us work together with more strong bonds and feel that enormous power of unity, bringing all-round prosperity in the society.
—The author is a Senior Scientist & Head
KVK-Kulgam,SKUAST-Kashmir. He can be reached at:
drtasneem.mubarak@gmail.com
drtasneem.mubarak@gmail.com
Fans create Catriona’s
portrait in a rice field
Published April 14, 2019 2:46pm
Who says agriculture and arts can't go
together? Fans from Muñoz City, Nueva Ecija have proven that a rice field can
also be a good canvas for Miss Universe 2018 Catriona Gray's portrait.
According to a report in GMA News TV's
Balitanghali Weekend on Sunday, the Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice)
spearheaded the project, which started on March 14, 2019.
Fifty workers creatively planted the
combination of violet and green seedlings to produce the masterpiece.
Benjamin Sotto, one of the researchers of
PhilRice, said that the rice paddy art was made to inspire more people,
especially the youth, to venture into rice farming. — Dona
Magsino/BM, GMA News
all 4images
FROM the role of gut bacteria in
depression to how plant science can deliver food security in the face of
climate change, and the 'Angry Chef' taking on the food myths and identity
politics surrounding what we eat, this year's Edinburgh Science
Festival is putting nutrition front and centre of the debate.
The rise in veganism, calls for meat taxes, and a push to tackle
obesity with state-led interventions such as sugar levies on soft drinks and
restrictions on junk food offers have thrust our diet into the spotlight like
never before.
Like the rest of Europe, Scotland's high
streets have experienced an exponential rise in the number of fast food outlets
since the 1970s. Where takeaways might once have been limited to a fish supper
or portion of chips, consumers today can take their pick round-the-clock from
kebabs, burgers, pizzas, curries, burritos and foot-long sandwiches.
Ready meals high in salt, sugar and trans-fats have replaced
home cooking as the norm in many households. Supermarket shelves are so awash
with cheap crisps, cakes, confectionary and junk food that the Scottish Government -
fresh from its long legal fight on minimum alcohol pricing - has set about
becoming the first country in the world to ban multi-buy promotions on such
items.
The transformation in our food environment is not only impacting
waistlines but lifespans, with research in the Lancet last week reporting that
unhealthy diets are now responsible for an estimated 11 million deaths globally
each year - overtaking smoking for the first time.
Major studies this year have backed huge increases in the
recommended fibre intake at a time when most Scots still fall well short of
achieving their 'five-a-day'. The World Health Organisation, meanwhile, warned
that a global shift from meat-based to plant-based diets (red meat threshold
around one Sirloin steak per fortnight) would be vital not only for human
wellbeing, but preventing an environmental catastrophe.
Now the cutting edge new science of 'psychobiotics' - how gut
bacteria affect the brain - suggests that what we eat might also be influencing
everything from anxiety, depression and stress to age-related degeneration and
autism.
Evidence is already mounting that people with a lower diversity
of bacteria in their intestinal tract are more prone to weight gain, but the
psychological impact is only beginning to be explored.
Nothing is more important to the composition of our gut bacteria
- or the "microbiome" - than what we eat. A varied diet rich in
fibre, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and oily fish - a so-called Mediterranean diet
- appears to deliver an optimum mix, but the modern Scottish diet is far from
this ideal.
Genetics play only a minor role in microbiome composition -
possibly as little as five per cent - while other factors such as the decline
in breastfeeding rates and the increase in caesarean deliveries have both
contributed to a decline in microbiome diversity among recent generations less
likely to have been exposed to their mother's bacteria during birth or infancy.
The task for those studying psychobiotics is unravelling the
mechanism by which gut bacteria affect brain health, and proving that there is
a causative link between the changes in diet over recent decades and rising
rates of mental health problems.
Professor John Cryan, chair of anatomy and neuroscience at UniversityCollege Cork
and one of the world's leading experts in 'psychobiotics', first became
interested in the field around ten years ago when he was involved in
experiments that showed stressed animals experienced changes in their
microbiome.
He said: "It got us thinking that that could maybe be
relevant to how they actually deal with stress, so we did a whole slew of experiments
and proved that indeed that is the case.
"Then we wanted to see if we could reverse the changes, or
at least dampen down the stress response, by targeting microbes in the gut. In
animal experiments we would target them with specific bacterial strains or
'prebiotics' - the fibres and sugars which good bacteria use to grow and
thrive. It worked.
"More recently we moved into human studies and we were able
at some level to replicate the findings."
The team has also shown that individuals born by C-section are
more susceptible to stress, and have found evidence that middle-aged mice fed
prebiotics to boost their microbiome also experience reductions in neural
inflammation in the brain typically associated with ageing.
Reduced microbial diversity has repeatedly been found in the
guts of patients suffering depression, and a recent Belgian study found that
certain important bacteria were missing altogether. This was not explained by
antidepressants, which are known to disrupt gut flora over long term use.
"We need to go a bit further to show whether all depressed
people have this, or how we tackle it," said Cryan. "It's very hard
to get causation yet. There definitely is a diet-mental health relationship, I
think that's pretty much accepted, the question is how it works.
"Our thinking is that it creates vulnerabilities in the
microbiome that interferes with gut-brain signalling."
In obesity science, researchers have already been probing
whether the guts of overweight people can be 'reprogrammed' with bacteria
extracted from the stools of slim people found to have particularly diverse
microbiomes and high concentrations of certain microbes associated with calorie
burning.
Now a pilot study into autism in the US is testing whether
similar faecal transplants from healthy children can alleviate some of the
behavioural symptoms associated with the condition.
"It's highly emotive," said Cryan. "But what we
find is when you mess with the microbiome, you can mess with the social brain
and social behaviour. So there is hope - but it's just hope at the moment -
that microbiome research might one day be useful in helping with some of the
symptoms of autism.
"There's one pilot study using FMT [faecal microbiota
transplantation] in autism. It's a small study in Arizona of about 20 people,
published in the journal Microbiome. But it worked."
The question is, if altering the microbiome does deliver results
in relation to depression, anxiety, stress, autism and even ageing, then will
doctors be prescribing routine faecal transplants or prebiotic drinks in future?
Cryan, who delivered his talk, 'Good for your Guts', at the
Pleasance in Edinburgh last week, said: "There are ongoing trials into
faecal transplants in people with depression and bipolar illness. I don't know
whether we'll need something that radical, but I do think we'll see situations
where personalised approaches to not just nutrition but prebiotics and
probiotics are added onto current therapies, be it medication or psychotherapy.
"But we've got a lot to figure out yet because we don't
know what a 'normal' microbiome is. What I think is more likely is that someone
who is prone to depression could be able to examine their microbiome when
they're well, see what happens when they're ill, and try to reverse that or to
predict a flare-up. That's what happening now in some Crohn's disease
research."
As for the general population, what does psychobiotics tell us
we should be eating?
"This is what we're really trying to test now and get some
real evidence behind," said Cryan. "We know that diversity is really
important - we know that a Mediterranean style diet is really important. You
can't have enough fibre if you can tolerate it, plenty of vegetables, plenty of
Omega 3 from fish, some meat - but not too much.
"Try to avoid processed food as much as possible -
emulsifiers, sweeteners, these are all bad for the microbiome. We also know
that there is growing evidence of the influence of sleep on the microbiome.
Studies are looking at jetlag, for example.
"Having a pet, especially a dog, has also been shown to really
improve microbiome diversity."
What we eat as a planet has implications far beyond human
health. Climate change, freshwater shortages and a global population projected
to balloon from 7.2 billion today to 9.8 billion by 2050 will demand a dramatic
shift in what we farm, where and how.
"If we don't, we have a very, very serious problem in
feeding the growing population," said Professor Bill Davies, who will
deliver a lecture at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh on Thursday
entitled 'Sourcing Healthy Food as the World Changes'.
As an environmental biologist and director of the Centre for
Sustainable Agriculture at Lancaster University, Davies believes that science
offers some of the answers - but not all. Changes in diet will also be crucial,
he said.
"There doesn't seem to be any doubt that many people's
health would benefit if they ate less meat, and it's pretty clear that the
planet would benefit in terms of reduced greenhouse gas emissions," said
Davies. "But there are also lots of potential downsides. Britain looks
like Britain largely because of the kind of agriculture we practice here, and a
lot of the land which is used for the production of meat won't be so easy to do
anything else with."
Meat may have taken on pariah status in recent years, but it is
not the only foodstuff wrecking the environment. Rice, so ubiquitous in the
Asian diet, is also causing serious harm. Prof Davies is working directly with
Chinese farmers to find more sustainable ways to raise the crop.
He said: "In the last 50 years, the push for food in China
has been so great - from a position where probably 30-40 million Chinese died
from starvation in the 1960s, to a position where China is effectively
self-sufficient in food.
"But they've done that at the expense of the environment in
many of these areas. In the area where we work, in northwest China, the water
table which 50 years ago was a few tens of centimetres from the surface is now
a hundred metres or more below the surface.
"Rice is the thirstiest crop on the planet. One third of
the world's freshwater and half the freshwater in Asia is used to irrigate rice
crops - it's nuts. One sixth of all the methane produced by agriculture is
produced by growing rice, and rice is not even particularly good for you.
"But that's a great example of the kinds of environmental
and cultural problems we need to grapple with. Asking people in China to eat
less rice is probably a comparable challenge to persuading people in the UK to
only eat meat once a week.
"We can't just tell people not to eat it - but if we can
grow rice with less water, that's a start."
Davies' project in China is exploring 'alternate wetting and
drying irrigation', where the water supply on the paddy field is reduced during
certain phases of development.
Microsoft billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates is also
using his Foundation to fund research into whether rice can be genetically
modified to grow with less water.
Although restricted in Europe, the total acreage of farmland
worldwide used to grow GM crops has overtaken non-GM for the first time this
year.
Davies believes this sort of biotechnology - which has already
shown success in making some plants pest-resistant, thereby cutting the need
for pesticides - will be crucial to delivering substantially higher crop yields
in future.
He said: "The kind of thing people are working on now is to
make plants more productive. To manipulate the biochemistry within the plant to
discover what's limiting its yield. For example, why is the record yield for
wheat in the UK 16 tonnes per hectare - why can't we produce 30 tonnes?
"The chances are within the next 10 years the people
working on this will overcome those limitations and there will be much more
productive crops available that would allow us to grow the same amount of food
on a reduced area of land."
While gut science and biotechnology advance, nutrition will
almost certainly continue to be fertile territory for what 'Angry Chef' Anthony
Warner dubs "pseudo-scientific food charlatanry".
Warner has made it his mission to debunk food myths and
so-called 'miracle' diets which he says are stripping the joy out of eating and
ladling on guilt instead.
As a chef with a background in science who has spent years
working in restaurants, hotels and developing recipes for major brands, he said
he decided to create his online 'Angry Chef' persona to rebut the "bad
science".
"I was at a food industry event and people were speaking
about 'clean eating'," said Warner. "There was this Instagram-style
influencer with half a million followers or something. Everyone seemed kind of
enamoured by her, but I was thinking 'she's got no idea, from a scientific
point of view, what's she talking about'.
"Her recipes might look quite nice, but she was actually
communicating some quite dangerous stuff."
He has since gone on to pen the bestselling books, 'Bad Science
and the Truth about Healthy Eating' and 'The Truth about Fat: Why Obesity is
not that Simple', and will bring his common sense and science message to
Edinburgh next week.
Warner believes that the whole discourse around food has fallen
victim not only to expert-shunning and 'alternative facts', but social media's
polarising identity politics.
He said: "One of the issues with food now is that it's very
much become part of our identity, almost in a way that's replaced some sort of
religious signalling. If you look at people's online profiles, terms like
'vegan', 'paleo', 'low carb', it's one of the first things people think defines
them.
"What you ate for dinner - or more so what you didn't have
- is so tied into people's sense of self that when you challenge people's
rhetoric and suggest that it's not actually based on fact, it's like you are
attacking their identity and it can make people very upset.
"I know several dieticians and registered nutritionists who
have been abused in a very organised way on Twitter by people with massive
50-60-70,000 followings, organising mass pile-ons - almost exclusively onto
women - for expressing opinions that are usually very sensible and based on
science. It's awful."
The difficulty for those trying to fight pseudoscience with
facts, however, is that nutrition science is inherently complex.
"It's very difficult to do proper experiments - hard
science - when it comes to food and diet," said Warner. "If you want
to check whether beetroot improves a certain health condition for example, you
can't use a placebo beetroot the way you would with a drug.
"And you can't really do long-term experiments because you
can't be expected to change someone's diet permanently over the long term to
see how it affects them.
"The problem is, people want definitive answers. They want
to be told 'sugar is toxic' or 'gluten is bad for you'.
"In the 1980s it was all 'fat is bad, you must avoid fat'.
Now we've shifted and it's all about avoiding sugar and carbohydrates. The
problem isn't one or the other, it's the oversimplification.
"But if you're selling simple answers and simple solutions
to people that will supposedly transform their health, that's a really
attractive message.
"The uncertainty and nuance of actual science,
unfortunately, is less compelling."
ICGEB’s novel yeast strain increases ethanol production
APRIL 13, 2019 19:19 IST
The bacterial strain displayed negligible reduction in growth even
in the presence of all three fermentation inhibitors at 40 degree C, say Naveen
Gaur (left) and Ajay Kumar Pandey.
The strain produces ethanol by fermenting rice and wheat straw
Compared with currently available
strains, a robust yeast strain (Saccharomyces cerevisiae NGY10)
that can produce up to 15.5% more ethanol when glucose or lignocellulose
biomass — rice and wheat straw — is fermented has been isolated by researchers
from the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology,
DBT-ICGEB Centre for Advanced Bioenergy Research, Delhi.
In India, ethanol production is
mostly by fermenting molasses to meet the annual target of 5% blending of
petrol with ethanol. But with India setting a target of blending petrol with
10% of biofuel by 2022, other sources such as rice and wheat straw have to be
considered. Fermenting lignocellulose efficiently to generate more ethanol than
what is currently possible is therefore necessary. To that end, the strain
isolated by ICGEB becomes important.
The team led by Dr. Naseem A.
Gaur from the Yeast Biofuel Group at ICGEB isolated 500 yeast-like colonies
from different natural habitats — distillery waste, dairy waste, hot springs,
sewage and algal bloom. After screening, 25 yeast-like colonies were chosen and
an additional nine yeast strains from the National Culture collection of
Industrial Microorganisms (NCIM), Pune, were included for evaluation. Of these,
one strain was found to suitable for fermenting rice and wheat straw. The
results were published in the journal Biotechnology for Biofuels.
Lignocellulose is comprised of
lignin, cellulose and hemicellulose. While cellulose is rich in hexose or C6
(glucose) sugar, hemicellulose, which accounts for about 30% of the
composition, is made mostly (more than 90%) of pentose or C5 (xylose and
arabinose).
Three challenges
Ethanol production by fermenting
lignocellulose biomass faces three challenges. During the fermentation process,
the temperature increases from about 30 degree C to 40 degree C. Since the
commercially available yeast strains are good at fermenting at 30 degree C, the
fermentor has to be cooled down when the temperature increases. This increases
the cost of ethanol production. Second, lignocellulose biomass (rice and wheat
straw) contains a mixture of hexose and pentose sugars.
Though yeast can ferment glucose
(hexose sugar), it cannot ferment pentose sugar (xylose and arabinose) that
make up 30% of the composition. Finally, the pretreatment of lignocellulose (to
breakdown the recalcitrant structure of the biomass) results in the production
of three main inhibitors (furfural, 5-HMF and acetic acid). These inhibitors
reduce the fermentation performance of yeast, leading to reduced ethanol
production.
Functional superiority
Unlike currently available,
commercially used yeast strains, the strain (NGY10) isolated by the ICGEB team
has been found to be thermotolerant and can continue to ferment the biomass
even when the temperature increases to 40 degree C. “The strain (NGY10)
displayed a negligible reduction in the growth even in the presence of all
three fermentation inhibitors at 40 degree C. And it produced more ethanol than
currently available industrial yeast strains,” says Dr. Gaur. “But the NGY10
strain was not able to ferment the pentose sugar (xylose and arabinose).”
“Our strain showed better
efficiency than the industrial strains now available in producing ethanol from
lignocellulose. Also, the NGY10 isolate produced 11.1 % and 15.49 % more
ethanol compared with the industrial yeast (Angel yeast) when glucose and
pretreated lignocellulose were fermented, respectively,” says Ajay Kumar Pandey
from ICGEB and first author of the paper.
Engineering the strain
The NGY10 strain can be
metabolically engineered so it can ferment both hexose and pentose sugars
leading to increased production of ethanol using lignocellulose.
This will increase the quantity
of ethanol produced from lignocellulose biomass but also reduce the cost of
ethanol production.
“We have almost engineered the
strain to make it capable of fermenting both pentose and hexose sugars,” Dr.
Gaur says. “The productivity and ethanol yield from pentose sugars after
metabolic engineering are encouraging and comparable with yield obtained with
glucose (hexose sugar) fermentation.”
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Highlights of
China's science news
Source:
Xinhua| 2019-04-13 16:38:56|Editor: Li Xia
BEIJING, April 13 (Xinhua) -- The following are the highlights
of China's science news from the past week:
FIRST BLACK HOLE IMAGE
-- Chinese astronomers have made contributions to a global
effort to capture the first-ever image of a supermassive black hole at the
heart of the distant galaxy M87.
The image of the black hole, based on observations through the
Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio
telescopes forged through international collaboration, was unveiled in
coordinated press conferences across the globe at around 9:00 p.m. (Beijing
time) Wednesday.
LUNAR ROVER
-- The lander and the rover of the Chang'e-4 probe switched to
dormant mode for the lunar night Friday, with the rover traveling an
accumulated 178.9 meters on the far side of the moon.
The rover Yutu-2, or Jade Rabbit-2, is expected to awaken again
on April 28, and the lander to awaken the following day, according to the Lunar
Exploration and Space Program Center of the China National Space
Administration.
WATER SAVING IRRIGATION
-- Chinese researchers have disclosed that over 94 percent of
the country's rice fields are suitable for water saving irrigation (WSI).
Soil structure deterioration and low soil fertility made 5.81
percent of the rice fields unsuitable for WSI.
BREAST CANCER DEVELOPMENT
-- Chinese researchers have revealed the mechanism of how
chronic stress promotes breast cancer development, shedding light on future
clinical treatment for cancer.
PLANT IMMUNE SYSTEMS
-- Chinese researchers have discovered a "death
switch" in plant immunes system that can activate cell death to limit the
spreading of microbial pathogens and provide plants with resistance.
DRINKING INCREASES RISK
-- Moderate drinking has been associated with reduced
cardiovascular risk in many studies, however, new research has shown that even
moderate alcohol consumption increases the chances of having a stroke.
Indigenous rice millers groan as
smuggling intensifies
| Published Date Apr 14, 2019 2:44 AM
A locally fabricated rice milling machines by engineer Iliyasu
Nazifi
In recent times, the Nigerian agricultural sector experienced
series of intervention from government and some foreign donors. This improved
agricultural activities along various crop value chains.
Daily Trust gathered that with the Federal Government’s policy
on rice importation, rice production in Nigeria improved reasonably along its
value chain. Rice production increased from once in a year to thrice in a year,
which made small and medium rice milling centres spring up across various
rice-producing states. 
In Kano State, from 2015 to 2018, no fewer than 200 medium and
small scale rice milling centres emerged, thereby complementing the existing seven
mega rice mills in the state. In the last three years, rice production received
the boost it had never received in the history of agriculture in Nigeria.
It is a common scenario in places like Kura, Gezawa, Bunkure,
Garun Malam and Tudun Wada local government areas of Kano State to see a
cluster of small scale rice millers doing business. A visit to these centres
revealed that many of the millers have been experiencing reduction in what they
mill as patronage has reduced.
Many of those spoken to attributed the reduction being
experienced to the availability of foreign rice in the market at a very cheap
price.
Malam Hudu Badamasi Bunkure, who is a rice merchant at the
Zangon Buhari Rice Milling Centre in Bunkure Local Government Area, said he
used to buy 70 bags of milled rice weekly from the centre and send it to the
city, adding that in the last three months, demand for the local rice had
reduced to 25 bags per week due to what he termed “unfavourable competition
atmosphere with foreign rice.”
Malam Bunkure further said, “No doubt, if these things are
allowed to continue the way they are going now, definitely we will all have to
look for something else, but not rice anymore. Imagine, from 70 bags to 25 bags
in three months; this is indeed alarming. We were made to understand that now,
in the cities, our rice costs more when compared to the foreign, which is being
smuggled into the country; and people go for the cheaper one.
“To be honest, we were so happy, but it is like our happiness is
now turning into a nightmare. All that which the government has done will now
be worthless and useless. Perhaps they want us all to turn into smugglers to
make a living.”
The Chief Executive Office of Golden Star Rice Mill, Engr.
Iliyasu Nazifi, said rice production across the value chain received a lot of
intervention from the Federal Government, adding that as a result of the
encouragement given to the sector, many people had ventured into it and had
been enjoying the proceeds.
Engr. Nazafi further said the success recorded in the last three
years recently suffered a setback as a result of some setbacks due to the
activities of rice smugglers that had struck back with full force with the
assistance of some personnel of the authorities concerned who had compromised
at the expense of Nigerian citizens.
“No doubt about the fact that we are so optimistic on the
attainment of food security in the nation, we have seen how the Federal
Government has contributed in promoting agro activities, and also, we have seen
the huge investment being committed by cooperate organisations and individuals
in the sector, especially in rice. But, as I speak to you now, many small and
medium scale rice milling companies are at the verge of folding up because of
the high number of foreign rice being smuggled into the country. Go into the
markets and you will understand what I am talking about,” he said.
Nazifi further revealed that rice smugglers had been having a
swell time recently as indices showed that some compromising personnel in the
Nigerian Customs Service (NCS) have not been doing their job as expected.
Another rice miller, Alhaji Abba Dantata, told our reporter that
he had to cut down 50 per cent of his work force to be able to manage and move
in the business, and that it was disheartening to see how foreign rice was
being smuggled into the country freely without anything being done by the
authorities concerned, which he said made the market flooded with foreign rice
to an extent that the locally milled rice could not compete with the foreign.
“From January, 2019, to this moment, only God knows how many
tonnes of foreign rice have successfully entered our markets. From our records,
we were told that 50 trucks laden with foreign rice get into the country daily
through smuggling from Abeokuta and other land boarders. That is why foreign
rice now floods our markets to the extent that the local one has to remain
aside because it cannot compete with the foreign.
“This is a bad omen and a threat to all that which the Federal
Government has done in the agricultural sector. Many small and medium rice
milling companies have closed down and many more will close down also if
necessary action is not taken to address the issue. This will in due course
affect the mega rice mills,” Dantata lamented.
He further called on stakeholders to as a matter of urgency draw
the attention of the customs to brace up and double its effort in addressing
the smuggling menace to save the country and Nigerians from drowning back to
square one.
Assessment details impact of pests and pathogens
STATE COLLEGE — Pests and
diseases are taking a substantial bite out of the world’s five major food crops
– in some cases, up to 40 percent – according to a recently released
publication, one of the first to inventory the impact on a global scale.
“Declining crop health affects everyone – farmers, consumers and
communities – by reducing food supplies, driving up costs, and sometimes even
causing the misuse of pesticides and herbicides,” said Paul Esker, assistant professor of epidemiology and
field crop pathology in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences.
“This is a crucial problem at a time when food production must
be increased to sustain a growing global population, one that is predicted to
exceed 9 billion people by 2050.”
However, precise figures on the
degree of losses across crops, agroecosystems and regions have been hard to
come by in recent years, due to the complexity of agricultural systems and the
sheer number and diversity of diseases and pests. Esker said the last attempt
at data collection was done 15 years ago and made inferences on loss based on
pesticide use, among other factors.
“Having quantitative, standardized information is vital when
scientists and policymakers are setting research priorities,” he said. “Having a full understanding of the problem is needed to develop
sustainable solutions.”
To bridge this information gap,
Esker, a faculty member in the college’s Department of Plant Pathology and
Environmental Microbiology, in 2016 collaborated with an international team of
crop-health scientists to begin a “deep dive” into the effect of pests and pathogens on wheat, rice,
maize, soybean and potato – crops that together represent about half of the
calories consumed by humans.
Esker and his colleagues, who
published their findings recently in the journal Nature Ecology &
Evolution, developed a simple online questionnaire that was distributed to
crop-health experts around the globe, asking them to provide numerical
assessments and observations of their crops.
Responses were received from 219
respondents in 67 countries. These countries collectively are responsible for
about 84 percent of the global production of the five crops.
After poring over almost 1,000
responses, the scientists determined that pathogens and pests are causing wheat
losses of 10-28 percent, rice losses of 25-41 percent, maize losses of 20-41
percent, soybean losses of 11-32 percent, and potato losses of 8-21 percent.
The data enabled the team to
identify 137 pests and pathogens that harm crops and to rank them by level of
damage caused. For example, the scientists found that leaf rust, Fusarium head
blight/scab, tritici blotch, stripe rust, spot blotch, tan spot, aphids and
powdery mildew caused losses higher than 1 percent globally in wheat. Among the
biggest menaces to rice were sheath blight, stem borers, blast, brown spot,
bacterial blight, leaf folder and brown plant hopper.
As expected, the results showed
differences in impacts among regions and pests and pathogens. An insect such as
the fall armyworm, which thrives in warm temperatures, is a threat to maize
growers in tropical regions, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, but is virtually
unknown to growers in cooler, northern climates.
Not surprisingly, crop losses in
food insecurity “hot spots” – regions that are food-deficient with fast-growing
populations such as South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa – were more significant
than those in North America. Esker attributed that to a combination of factors,
including inadequate storage facilities, limited use of integrated pest
management techniques, lack of resources and technology, and the absence of
extension education programs.
The researchers hope their
assessment will be a catalyst for targeted management programs to counteract
the destruction. “We can see more clearly the key players and problems and can
work toward long-term solutions, with the understanding that one size doesn’t
fit all – what might work in one region might not work in another,” Esker said.
“This study is not a silver bullet, per se, but should serve as
the foundation to sharpen and increase research priorities in plant breeding
and pest management.”
To share their results, the
scientists launched a website, globalcrophealth.org, that features a summary of
survey responses by crop and country.
Joining Esker on the study were
Serge Savary and Laetitia Willocquet, French National Institute for
Agricultural Research, Toulouse, France; Neil McRoberts, University of
California, Davis; Sarah Pethybridge, epidemiologist, Cornell University; and
Andy Nelson, University of Twente, The Netherlands.
The International Society for
Plant Pathology, the participating universities and North Carolina State
University, which hosted the inaugural meeting of the research group, supported
this work.
——
This article was submitted by the
Penn State College of Agriculture.
LCCI for boosting trade between Pakistan S
Africa
LAHORE - LCCI Vice
President Faheem-ur-Rehman Saigal has stressed the need of taking measures for
increasing the volume of bilateral trade between Pakistan and South Africa.
Talking to a delegation led by Chairman
Pakistan Southern Africa Business Forum, Johannesburg Muhammad Rafiq Memon at
Lahore Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) on Friday, he said that South
Africa could boost its exports to Pakistan by focusing items like chemicals,
gold, diamonds, platinum, metals and minerals, machinery and raw material of
steel products. LCCI Vice President said that besides increasing export of
traditional products, like surgical equipment, rice, sports goods, Pakistan
could supply engineering goods, sanitary goods, machine tools, auto-parts to
South Africa.
South Africa is the main shopping centre of
seven neighboring countries. Even textile products’ export could increase
because of greater demand in South African market.
Faheem-ur-Rehman Saigal said that there was a
scope for joint ventures between the two countries. “There are ample opportunities
for Pakistani businessmen to invest in information technology, mining,
agriculture and other sectors. He said that exchange of trade delegations
between the two countries and holding of single country exhibitions could help
increasing bilateral trade. He also called for creating a strong linkage
between the chambers of the two countries for this purpose and for exchange of
trade related information. Muhammad Rafiq Memon said that South African
businessmen were keen to build partnership with Pakistan and would like to
increase interaction between the two governments and business communities. He
said that both Pakistan and South Africa could increase economic cooperation in
various sectors.
Kirinyaga deputy governor,
Woman Rep clash over toxic rice
April 13, 2019
Kirinyaga Deputy Governor Peter Ndambiri and County Woman
Representative in the National Assembly Wangui Ngirichi on Friday publicly
differed over the toxic rice impounded in Mwea constituency last week.
Ndambiri said Ngirichi sneaked in the rice, which had been
condemned as unfit for human consumption, into the county.
He absolved himself from blame and accused the politician of
politicising the matter. Last week, a contingent of police officers led by Mwea
East Sub-County Deputy Commissioner Edwin Chambali raided an abandoned house in
Kimbimbi and impounded 1,080 bags of rice labelled as imported from Pakistan.
On Wednesday Ngirichi claimed Ndambiri had been arrested after
police established that he was the owner of the consignment.
She claimed the deputy governor and his wife had won a tender to
supply rice to the county hospital. Ndambiri dismissed the allegations as petty
politics aimed at mudslinging his name.
Furniture, Textile Help Boost
Export Together If Govt Supports: PFC
Pakistan Furniture Council (PFC) Chief Executive Mian Kashif
Ashfaq Friday lauding the economic policies of Prime Minister Imran Khan urged
for chalking out an aggressive export policy that gives more relaxation and
friendly environment to exporters especially in textile and furniture sector
ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - APP - 12th Apr, 2019
) :Pakistan Furniture Council (PFC) Chief Executive
Mian Kashif Ashfaq Friday lauding the economic policies of Prime Minister Imran Khan urged for chalking out an aggressive
export policy that gives more relaxation and friendly environment to exporters
especially in textile and furniture sector.
He expressed these views while
talking to media during his visit to
TEXPO, 2019 exhibition as guest of
honour being held here at Expo Center today," said a press release.
He said it was good omen that the textile industry exports was
likely to cross US $ 15 billion mark
and this would likely be a record achievement of textile exports in
such a short span of time.
He demanded a fast track
establishment of Integrated Textile and
Apparel Parks enabling plug and play facilities for local and foreign
investors.
Mian Kashif said currently,
the textile sector was the
country's largest industry in
terms of exports, exporting US $ 14 billion worth
of goods annually. The second largest segment is rice, which generates US $
2 billion through exports,
but Pakistan's furniture exports stand
at a meager US $ 51 million.
He said if the government extended
its support to furniture companies, the volume of export could touch the figure
of US $ 5 billion for the next five
years.
He urged the government for
focus on skill development programmes for the export-oriented industries with a
view to promoting the country's value-added sectors.
He said liberal visa regime
would help the textile and
furniture industry to introduce their
innovative and latest designs to foreigners visiting Pakistan and
exhibitions in this regard would be very fruitful.
He said the variety and traditional
expertise of woodworkers and craftsmen has a huge potential for exports,
and could cater not only to local market but
also to the wealthy looking for unique furniture items at international market,"
he added.
Mian Kashif said there is a need to
devise a comprehensive strategy to promote the industry on
commercial basis which would not only support the manufactures but also increase
our export across the world.
He said good working environment
would enhance the capacity of our workers enabling them to compete
internationally. He further said foreign companies have shown keen interest
in Pakistani market.
He urged the Pakistani businessmen
to start joint ventures with their foreign counterparts.
Apr 13, 2019, 7:51 AM; last updated: Apr 13, 2019, 10:24 AM
(IST)
Karnal to have
Centre of Excellence for basmati
Illustration: Sandeep Joshi
Vijay C Roy
Tribune News Service
Chandigarh, April 12
After Israel, Philippines-based International
Rice Research Institute (IRRI) will assist the Haryana government in setting up
a Centre of Excellence (CoE) for basmati in Karnal, offering farmers a
competitive edge.
The Centre would
endeavour to build capacity among farming community while leveraging technology
and innovation to improve productivity and quality. It will focus on
introducing efficiencies across the supply chain.
This will be the third CoE to be established in
the state after the centre for vegetables in Karnal and centre for fruits in
Sirsa under Indo-Israel project. Proper implementation and adaptation of
Israeli technologies have already benefitted thousands of farmers in the state,
resulting in rise in their incomes.
The CoE will be
set up by the Agriculture Department. Earlier, the two centres were established
by the Horticulture Department.
“The basmati
farmers in the state are confronting with issues such as contamination,
pesticides and presence of heavy metals. The centre will assist the farmers
with latest technology which will not only ensure better productivity but also
ensure quality. Recently, we had a meeting with IRRI officials and they have
agreed in-principle to set up the centre at Karnal,” said Dr Suresh Gehlawat,
additional director, Department of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Haryana.
The proposed
centre is likely to be spread over 20 acres and will have fields for conducting
research, labs, administrative buildings and other infrastructure. The Haryana
government will provide land and other infrastructure whereas the IRRI would
deploy technology to facilitate farmers.
According to
Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA)
data, in Haryana total area under basmati cultivation was 6.34 lakh hectares
and production was 21.38 lakh tonnes in 2018.
However, this
year the area under cultivation is likely to increase by 10-20% due to robust
demand in domestic and international markets.
Haryana has the
largest area under basmati in the country and together with Punjab it accounts
for more than 75-80% of basmati exports from the country.
According to
agriculture officials, the objective behind development of the centre is to
improve the quality of basmati with minimum use of chemicals.
Mizzou hosting native plant sale
Saturday
The University of Missouri
College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources’ Bradford Research Center
will host a Native Plant Sale from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday.
Informative booths and plant and
shrub vendors will be at the event at 4968 Rangeline Road. MU Professor Kevin
Rice and research specialist Terry Woods will also hold discussions about
attracting pollinating insects and collecting milkweed.
The event is free and open to the public. Fifteen
percent of proceeds will be used to benefit the Missouri Prairie Foundation.
Where does Malaysia’s
paddy and rice industry stand?
·
Saturday, 13 Apr 2019
Malaysia has been importing about
30%-40% of its rice consumption annually for the last 30 years.
And according to some studies,
the country will likely continue to be a net rice importer in the years to
come.
The question is, does Malaysia’s
inability to achieve 100% self-sufficiency level (SSL) in rice production by
2020 (as targeted just five years ago by the then Barisan Nasional-led
government) signify a failure for the heavily subsidised industry?
According to Khazanah Research Institute (KRI), it does not.
“Statistical trends, geography
and consumer preferences for premium rice means that Malaysia is likely to
continue being a net importer,” the think tank explains.
“Considering this, the nation may
be in a better position not to target 100% SSL, but with domestic rice produced
sustainably, responsibly, safely and where farmers earn a sustainable income,”
it adds.
In its recently published “The
Status of the Paddy and Rice Industry in Malaysia” report, KRI finds that
despite the significant public resources allocated to the industry, paddy
farming is still perceived to be uneconomical.
In addition, paddy farmers are
still associated with poverty; and Malaysia is still a net importer of rice
with SSL hovering around 60%–70%.
It states that it is high time
for the country to review its agricultural strategies, as the country has the
potential to cultivate paddy responsibly, productively and still achieve better
income for the farmers.
While it is unrealistic to expect
Malaysia to be a net exporter of rice, KRI notes, it is sensible for the
country to aim at achieving a balance of being a net importer, but with local
farmers producing high quality grains and adhering to good agricultural
practices.
Are we richer or
poorer?
18SHARES
image: https://www.philstar.com/images/authors/1804834.jpg
This being the season of fasting, it’s useful to know how much
food a person needs to meet the basic nutrient requirements in our country.
As suggested by the Food and Nutrition Research Institute, each
person needs at least 2,100 kilocalories (or 2.1 million calories) a day.
According to the FNRI, the basic nutrient needs can be met through a menu like
this one: an egg, coffee with milk, and rice for breakfast; fried fish, rice or
corn, malunggay leaves, monggo or mung beans and a banana for lunch; boiled
pork or chicken, more rice/corn, and bread for supper.
Can an individual afford all of that on P48.91 a day? Probably
not. But if the amounts are pooled for a family of five, then the basic
nutrient needs could be met, according to government statisticians.
Food accounts for about 70 percent of the components in
assessing poverty incidence. The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), using
actual consumer prices and the basic nutrient needs set by the FNRI, determined
that a family of five needs P7,337 a month to meet the requirement. That
amounts to P48.91 as the daily food threshold per individual family member.
A household that meets the food requirement may be able to
afford the other basic needs of living: clothing, shelter, cooking gas,
transportation, utilities particularly water and electricity, education (now
free all the way to college). For all of these needs plus the nutrient
requirements, a family of five that can afford to spend P10,481 a month is
above the poverty threshold, as defined by the PSA.
The food and poverty thresholds are 10.9 higher than in 2015.
Those who are subsisting barely above the thresholds are still considered poor,
the PSA stresses.
But in terms of poverty incidence, the figures are lower for
individuals, at 21 percent in the first six months of 2018 from 27.6 percent
during the same period in 2015. The figures are even better for families, falling
from 22.2 percent to 16.1 percent during the same period, according to the PSA.
The proportion of families whose incomes fall below the food
threshold – or the subsistence incidence – was placed at 6.2 percent, from 9.9
percent in 2015.
Meanwhile, the ranks of the “food poor” also fell from about 2.2
million families in 2015 to 1.5 million in the first semester of 2018.
The PSA report, released last Wednesday, has reaped an unusual
amount of criticism, and has been likened to Ripley’s Believe It or Not.
*
* *
On the day the report came out, PSA deputy statistician Josie
Perez faced “The Chiefs” on Cignal TV’s One News to explain their methodology
and vouch for the reliability of their data. She stressed that their figures
have solid basis: “May basehan yan.”
Their previous studies on poverty incidence, Perez told us, used
a sample size of 48,000. But this was useful only for determining poverty
incidence at the regional level, so for 2018, the sample size was increased to
180,000 to include the provincial level.
The study was conducted as rice prices were surging. But
Bernadette Balamban, of the PSA’s Poverty and Human Development Statistics
division, told us that they use the cheapest varieties for the national
reference food bundle, and at the time, rice priced at P27 per kilo was still
available. The food figures are then compared with per capita income.
Siling labuyo or bird’s eye chili, a staple for many Bicolanos,
spiked to an eye-watering P1,000 a kilo when the fuel excise tax pushed up the cost
of transporting produce last year. But siling labuyo is not among the basic
nutrient needs in the food bundle. And the impact of the fuel tax on inflation
and purchasing power was not part of the PSA study.
Perez said the PSA also does not consider if a person is too
poor to support a habit such as smoking or drinking. The PSA report is not
based on self-rated poverty.
Growth in the construction and manufacturing sectors, which
created jobs and raised family incomes, was cited by the National Economic and
Development Authority for the decline in poverty incidence.
The PSA officials refused to predict the final poverty figures
for 2018, saying they weren’t in the business of forecasting. But they noted
that while the poverty threshold was highest in Metro Manila, the region also
accounted for the lowest poverty incidence.
Even poverty incidence in the Autonomous Region in Muslim
Mindanao, traditionally among the worst nationwide, was down to 55.4 percent in
the first semester of 2018, according to the PSA. That’s still more than half
of the entire region, which is now part of the new Bangsamoro ARMM, so
residents must be as mystified by the poverty figures as the rest of the
country.
*
* *
Noel Felongco of the National Anti-Poverty Commission told The
Chiefs that so far, the government is on track to achieving President Duterte’s
target of bringing the poverty incidence down to 14 percent by the end of his
term.
Felongco, of course, is not among those skeptical of the PSA
figures, which he attributes to social protection and job generation programs
such as Build Build Build. He admitted that inflation remains a concern for
poverty alleviation.
Organized workers have slammed the PSA report, saying it was
meant to blunt calls for wage increases amid rising consumer prices.
The PSA report has earned flak not just because of the rosy
figures that cover only the first semester of 2018, but also because of the
timing of the release. This is, after all, not just the season of fasting, but
also of election campaigning, when any good news on the economic front can
boost the chances of administration bets.
Perez and Balamban don’t look like the types who would
manipulate statistics for partisan considerations, and they have promised to
release a fact sheet on the PSA’s methodology.
Still, we’ll just have to wait for the full-year report on
poverty to come out, for a more accurate assessment of this problem.
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