Rethink urged on biofuel targets
From next month, UK government policy demands inclusion of biofuels into fuel at the pumps. The Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation (RTFO) is to introduce 2.5% biofuels at the pumps from April 2008. But those calling for a halt on targets, including the EU targets for inclusion of 5.75% biofuels in road fuel by 2010 and…
Nutrigenomics On The Menu In Paris
Ahhh, Paris! City of food and fashion…But the latest trend to hit the food industry is certainly no fad. Personalised nutrition is the ‘new black’ in the world of food. No longer do we need to embarrass ourselves by appearing at the supermarket with a trolley full of identical shopping to our neighbour. Whether or…
Ug99: One Year On
An opportunity here, for me to recap on a post I wrote back in January ’07. Puccinia graminis strain Ug99 has once again hit the headlines and it isn’t good news. The situation in outline is that the Ug99 strain of black rust fungus readily attacks wheat plants, as it resists the most popular rust-resistance…
Mines a pint…
In the UK, alcohol abuse is a prime cause of morbidity & mortality, a burden on Accident & Emergency hospital admissions, and a major cause of antisocial behaviour. Last Friday (March 14) at the British Medical Association (BMA) Public Health Medicine annual conference in London, the Minister of State for Public Health, Dawn Primorolo, announced…
Death by CAP
How EU economists are ‘killing Europeans through CHD’ Surprisingly, it’s not the acronyms that are at the root of the World Health Organization’s damning accusation, it’s our old friends, saturated fats. The common agricultural policy (CAP) was put in place by the powers that be in Europe, not just to confuse any non-economist who has…
Slum tourism: Pro-poor, or simple voyeurism?
A New York Times article published on 9 March on the questions of slum tourism has been generating hundreds of comments on the paper’s website, and has been picked up by many bloggers and news sites. While slum tourism is now offered in an increasing number of places around the world, from Rio de Janeiro…
Algae for biofuels: solving the land-use problem
It’s becoming increasingly obvious that there isn’t enough suitable land space to grow crops for food and feed as well as for biofuel, and to retain the forests and other land uses that sequester carbon in huge quantities. As the Nature blog ‘The Great Beyond’ points out, two articles published in Science in February argue…
Coping with extinction: can plants cope with the loss of their dispersers?
In an era of widespread deforestation and habitat loss, we hear much about the problems that this causes for wildlife. The plights of orangutans, gorillas, lemurs and other charismatic species as they lose the forests on which they depend, and of apes and other wild animals as they are hunted in Africa for bushmeat, are…
‘Nano Inside’
Two words that are unlikely to appear in a supermarket near you any time soon. But not because nanotechnology has no application in food – far from it! The reason that the food industry is unlikely to be advertising the widespread applications of nanotechnology, according to Dr. Frans Kampers, of Wageningen University in the Netherlands,…
Organic biofuels?
While discussing biofuels with a colleague the other week, I wondered whether there was any demand for organically grown biofuels, as people interested in protecting the environment are likely to be interested both in biofuels and in organic agriculture. Not long afterwards I came across a record in CAB Abstracts for an article1 on the…