Monday, August 25, 2008
Beyond the capability of mere mortals
The capacity for the great and the good of the tranzie world to get together and blather – usually at our expense – seems unending.
One of their latest gab-fests is "World Water Week", celebrated by the egregious Euractiv. It publishes an article which has scientists and experts from around the world warning that "global food wastage must be halved by 2025 to meet the challenges of feeding the rapidly-growing population and preserving global water supplies."
The event was also reported by AFP two days ago, not that I noticed, and it seems to have been ignored completely by the MSM. However, that report did usefully remind us that "as much as half the water used to grow food world-wide is lost due to waste," since "roughly fifty percent of the food that farmers grow is lost or wasted."
The outcome of the deliberations was that, "Weak policy, poor management, increasing waste and exploding water demands are pushing the planet towards the tipping point of global water crisis," with the meeting calling on governments "to place an effective water-saving strategy, requiring that food wastage be minimised, firmly on the political agenda."
All good stuff, of course, but what is missing entirely is a recognition that current policy initiatives, such as the EU's pesticide directive are set to make the situation immeasurably worse.
Despite this, the emphasis on waste is no bad thing. Far too often, the bulk of effort is directed at increasing production, heedless of the fact that, globally, half of that which is produced is then lost. Without devoting any more acreage to food production, the amount of produce that could be brought to market could be doubled if more attention was paid to disease and pest control, better storage and better distribution.
As much attention, though, needs to be given to perverse policy initiatives - for which the EU is justly famous - which actually create more problems than they solve. But then resolving these would require forcing the EU to act rationally, which is probably beyond the capability of mere mortals. Solving the world food crisis – or any other crisis for that matter – is child's play by comparison.
COMMENT THREADA perfect storm
One of the (many) stories sitting on my files to do was an article picked up from the front page ofThe Yorkshire Post on Saturday, developing our own report last Thursdayon the dire state of the UK wheat harvest.
Coincidentally, the story was picked up yesterday by the Mail on Sundayand thence by Watts up with that.
This invaluable blog, quite rightly, got excited by the headline to theMail which proclaimed, "Awful August has delayed this year's harvest but global warming is not to blame" – a distinct contrast to The Daily Telegraph piece in early July which did indeed seek to pin the wet weather on global warming.
But, while we can rejoice in sense returning to at least one newspaper, behind both the stories of a bad harvest lies a disturbing picture that could have serious consequences for British arable farming – and thus the rest of us – amounting almost to a perfect storm.
The particular problem, as we pointed out in our last piece, is not so much quantity but quality, especially with the wheat crop which has deteriorated severely as a result of the bad weather.
As The Yorkshire Post reports, this means that much of the crop will be fit only for animal feed. Yorkshire farmers alone could take a "hit" of £10 million as their produce is downgraded.
If that gives temporary relief to hard-pressed livestock farmers, who have seen feed prices escalate to record levels, it is bad news for consumers as high protein wheat for bread-making will have to be imported in some quantity, at a premium of £20 per metric ton.
However, the problem for farmers may be even worse than the headlines suggest, as events elsewhere in the world take shape. Here, the situation in the Ukraine is of special interest. The region, on the one hand has enjoyed a record harvest, up to 43 million tons from 29.3 million last year, with expectations of exporting a surplus of 17.5 million tons during the coming year. On the other hand, the crop has suffered what is described as "insect-related" problems, which is forcing about 70 percent of it to be used for animal feed.
This surplus on the world market is expected to drive down prices of feed wheat, creating an abysmal situation for British farmers. At a time when input costs – from diesel and fertiliser to labour – are all rising, they are now reconciled to prices which are unlikely to cover the costs of producing the harvest.
Small wonder, the YP is retailing sentiment from farmers that many of them will drop out of wheat next season. Some experts are saying this could lead to a shortage next year.
It is here, of course, that an agricultural support system could make the difference. Where prices have been driven below the cost of production, there is a classic role for farming subsidies, if for no other reason than to ensure the availability of supplies in the following season and to take the edge of shortage-induced price increases.
However, now that the EU – which has sole competence over our agriculture policy – has opted out of production support and is looking to cut subsidies over the next budgetary period, farmers are on their own. They are looking at reduced prices, increased costs and less state support.
Perversely, the cut in support will not filter back into reduced EU contributions or lower taxes as the EU has siphoned off some of the subsidies to pay for its vanity project, the Galileo satellite navigation system, while it is also proposing to hand upwards of $1 billion to developing countries to promote farming there – reducing, incidentally, export opportunities for British farmers.
The net result of all this is that British consumers will still be paying huge sums for an agricultural support system, but one that no longer functions, while also paying inflated costs for their bread and other wheat-containing foods, costs which are set to go up even further next year.
Somehow, this is not quite what either farmers or consumers expected when we first joined the EEC but, as the implications of yet another failed policy sink in, one wonders whether the farmers will finally see the light and round against the EU, which is now doing nothing but add to their woes.
COMMENT THREADSunday, August 24, 2008
Not only coal
As the celebrations over the success of "team GB" intensify, Michael Sheriden of The Sunday Times gives us another insight into the dark side of the Chinese Olympic "experience".
Thousands of farmers, he writes, face ruin because their water has been cut off to guarantee supplies to the Olympics in Beijing, and officials are now trying to cover up a grotesque scandal of blunders, lies and repression.
Thus, while in the capital, foreign dignitaries have gushed over the millions of flowers in bloom and lush, well-watered greens around its famous sights, just 90 minutes south by train, peasants are hacking at the dry earth as their crops wilt, their money runs out and the work of generations gives way to despair, debt and, in a few cases, suicide.
This entirely man-made (or Chinese government-made) disaster is affecting about 31,000 people around Baoding, a city to the south of the capital. Many are said to have lost their homes or land.
In fact, Sheriden is late to the story. We reported in May that areas were being deprived of water to feed the Olympics. But the news agency Reuterswas even further ahead of the game, running the story in January. It can still be found archived on The Daily Star (Kuwait edition) website.
Then the agency reported that "dusty villages far from China's capital are paying their own price for the government's plan to stage a postcardÙ€perfect Olympic Games, enduring shrunken crops, drained wells and contention over lost land and homes."
China, at that time, was rushing to finish canals to pump 300 million cubic metres of "emergency" water to Beijing for its "green" Games, ensuring a lush, sparkling host city would greet the world in August. Works included 300 miles of channels (pictured) and pipes cut into Hebei province, to take water from farming country already beset by drought and environmental strains.
Thus, as we noted earlier, Chinese provinces are not only going short of coal and electricity - to say nothing of food – to feed the Olympics (something picked up by American Thinker after Obama's facile comments) but water as well.
Therefore, for those who believe that China has put on such a wonderful display, there are probably at least 30,000 Chinese who think otherwise – not that they matter when it comes to the huge ambitions of the IOC and its fellow travellers.
But for those who also believe that China is a great and growing economic power, the fact that it decided to deprive its own hinterland of water in order to stage the Games says something about its fragility. A nation that cannot even keep both its farmers and its swimming pools supplied with water is not one in which there can be any great long-term confidence.
COMMENT THREADJoining up the dots …
Of all the terrible things happening in this world, it would be easy to forgive the view that the slow-motion disaster of our waste policy was one of the least important.
However, in the grown up world, there are connections between different policies, not least in terms of the expenditure implications. And where – as is the case – the massive cost of this disaster is draining wealth from the productive economy and adding to the burden of taxation, that has all sorts of implications for expenditure elsewhere.
To put it bluntly – and at its most simplistic – if we are spending billions unnecessarily on waste disposal, which indeed we are, then that money cannot be used to buy more armoured vehicles for our troops in Afghanistan, more day care for elderly people or drugs to treat cancer patients. The money can only be spent once.
So it is that what is happening to Britain's waste is important, something we pointed up in our piece in January 2006 and many times since in the forlorn but continued hope that somewhere, grown-up politicians might take up the issue and actually do something about it.
Traditionally, those grown-up politicians are mostly found in the House of Lords, in theory a repository of wisdom and common sense, where issues of the day are dissected and examined, from which sensible solutions are proposed. But no more.
If there was ever a good example of the decay in the fabric of our body politic, it is, as Booker points out today in his column, last week's report from the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee on Waste Reduction.
There was a time, writes Booker, when, if a Lords committee had been asked to investigate a massive policy failure, a scandal which continues to make daily headlines in the press, it might have made some effort to ask why things had gone so horrendously wrong. But, he says, when twelve peers last week reported on the shambles engulfing the way that Britain disposes of its rubbish, the result was 127 pages of such anodyne verbiage that no one ploughing through it would have any idea that we have a national crisis on our hands.
However, in the comments to his piece on the Telegraph website, Booker is taken to task for making such a broad-brush criticisms when the report ostensibly confines itself to one aspect of the waste policy, namely "waste reduction". But that the inquiry and report have been so tightly framed itself tells a story.
The point, of course, is that their Lordships themselves decide the scope of their own inquiries and, in this event, have focused on one small part of the issue without dealing with the larger problem.
But, from any reading of their report, what immediately becomes apparent is that many of the problems they isolate derive from the framing of the waste policy as a whole. They are a consequence of the broader policy and cannot be addressed without reviewing that policy. In that context, their Lordships are fiddling while Rome burns.
Specifically in terms of their inquiry, industry witnesses constantly refer to the tightness of the definition of waste within the meaning of the EU's waste framework directive. This means that millions of tons of materials which industry could rightly consider as by-products or raw materials becomes defined as waste. By this means – effectively by bureaucratic diktat these materials enter the waste stream, when any more rational policy would have excluded them.
A classic example it the treatment of pulverised fuel ash – the residue from coal burning in our power stations. Some 8 million tons of this is produced each year and it is widely used as a partial cement substitute in the manufacture of breeze blocks, with many other applications in the construction industry.
Yet, despite such uses – a fine example of one industry's waste becoming the raw material for another – it is caught in the EU's definition of waste, with its incumbent costs and bureaucracy.
As a result, contracts for producing grouting material, involving at least 500,000 tons, have been lost as manufacturers have turned to virgin material, the use of which avoids the mind-numbing paperwork and additional costs in dealing with the waste legislation.
Another example was cited by Booker in his column in March 2004. This involved Ross Donovan, the engineer who had developed a heating system fuelled by the used cardboard packaging that businesses generate in such quantities. More than £300,000 was put into proving its effectiveness, and at every step Mr Donovan consulted the Environment Agency to ensure that it complied fully with EU rules on waste and incineration.
Then at the last minute the agency took another look at the legislation and ruled that Mr Donovan's cardboard was not an "energy source" after all, but "waste", and he would have to fit his furnaces with costly monitoring equipment which would make them unviable. Yet the same fuel obtained directly from a packaging manufacturer would not be "waste", and the rules would not apply.
Once again, solely by bureaucratic diktat, material which would otherwise have had an economic use had been defined as "waste", thereby needlessly entering the waste stream.
Yet another example we gave recently, where the burden of bureaucratic controls had rendered the widespread use of anaerobic digesters uneconomic, thereby again causing - by now – millions on tons of material to enter the waste stream when it could have been used to generate heat or electricity, and produce high volumes of peat substitute for use by gardeners.
This is but one aspect which is glossed over by the Lords, a single facet of the waste policy which, if addressed, would have more impact than the whole of the recommendations they actually made.
Dealing with a report of 127 pages, however, we cannot in the space of one post, even begin to do justice to its fatuity – and, if we did, no one would read it. Nor indeed did the media read the report when it was published last week, relying instead – as usual – on the pre-digested press release which told them what to think.
Thus did the Lords get away with, as Booker puts it, babbling on about the need for "waste prevention to be integrated into sustainable business models", while they welcomed "the establishment of the Centre of Expertise for Sustainable Procurement".
Even their suggestion that the government should lower VAT rates to "promote the development of sustainable products" passed by the media without critical comment. They don't even seem to know, Booker remarks, that VAT rates cannot be lowered without permission from our real government in Brussels - the one which set all this disaster in train in the first place.
Between our legislators and our gifted media, it seems there is no chance of us ever learning of the extent to which the EU has destroyed our systems of governance, nor what its depredations are costing us. And, if they are not prepared to do the job, who will?
COMMENT THREAD
Monday, 25 August 2008
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