Editorial
In
August 1999 Nature & Society reported on the revolutionary business approach
taken by Interface, one of the world’s leading carpet manufacturers. Rather
than aiming to sell ever more of its product, the company decided to sell
a floor covering service. In its view customers did not want to own a
carpet as much as to possess the feel, the comfort, the colour, the ambience
of a good floor covering. To this end the company started a leasing service,
with a guarantee that it would replace worn carpet tiles as needed. This
could be done overnight, with no need for the major office disruptions
caused by complete replacement; areas of heavy traffic wear are not under
the furniture, and only about a fifth of the total would need replacement.
The company also investigated new materials to replace its petroleum-based
feedstock, and can now produce carpets from maize and other renewable
resources. The new carpet is a better product - it can even be hosed down
- and it is completely recyclable, so Interface has broken its connections
to the oil well and the rubbish tip.
Amory Lovins
recounted Interface’s story in a talk on Natural Capital on ABC’s Background
Briefing (28 Jan 01). Old style capitalism has been based on abundant
free goods and services being available from nature, but nature is in
difficulty, our profligate ways and huge numbers make too many demands
on it. Ecosystem services, the natural processes that clean the air and
water, cycle nutrients, maintain a balance in the atmosphere, pollinate
crops and generally keep the earth habitable, are worth considerably more
than the gross (economic) world product, but are in crisis now, as we
mine the soil, pollute the air and water and destroy biodiversity. A new
Natural Capitalism will see these natural resources as precious and limited.
It will treat nature with respect and care, husband it and factor it into
production costs.
People are
now the abundant resource, and business will recognise, just as Interface
has, that using less from nature while employing more people is efficient.
At present there is so much waste in the American and Australian economies
that we extract twenty times our own body weight in material per person
per day and waste 99 per cent of that. Power plants in the United States
throw away as heat roughly the same amount of energy as Japan uses in
total.
In Natural
Capitalism waste of any kind will be seen as unsaleable production and
no business will want to produce it. Carrier, a major air-conditioning
company is now leasing ‘comfort services’. It has teamed up with other
companies which make buildings comfortable, recognising that if they do
not do so the company could be rendered obsolete.
Technologies
available now to improve efficiencies are quite amazing. Retrofitting
existing buildings can improve energy and water use efficiencies three
or four fold. New buildings can be constructed to provide comfort while
using only a tenth of the energy formerly needed.
Companies
such as Interface and Carrier are leading the way to the new economy.
Their competitors are going to have to learn to reduce their inputs to
as little as three per cent of their current raw materials. Governments
and the commercial world will find that business-as-usual is no longer
desirable or sensible.
The drive
for efficiency has been a catch phrase for a long time, and is often used
as a justification for the globalisation of trade. It has been a key factor
in the restructuring of business and government services. But too often
efficiency has been seen only in terms of reducing the number of employees
and the wisdom of that has to be questioned.
Businesses,
government departments and agencies have been urged, or forced, to reduce
staff and reorganise in the quest for efficiency. Parts of their functions
have been outsourced, apparently because this cuts the number of people
on the pay roll. How efficient is this? If the work is still being done,
then someone else is being contracted to do it, so it is quite possible
the saving is illusory; the cost has simply been moved from one part of
the balance sheet to another. Or the work is not being done. If it was
not essential that is all right, but too often it was essential and lack
of inspection and maintenance, lack of technical skill, and loss of corporate
memory may have to be paid for several times over in the future. A reduction
in the number of teachers, nurses, maintenance workers and other essential
services is actually a public cost, leading to a run down in services
and a shortage in skilled personnel. The push for outsourcing computing
divisions in scientific research centres failed to take into account that
the computing skills were actually an integral part of their research
capacity, and their removal would result in higher costs combined with
poorer outcomes.
Whatever
the resulting bottom line looked like in any of these cases they also
ignored the cost to the public purse of fewer people employed and therefore
paying taxes, and an increase in numbers of people needing social security
services of various kind. None of this seems very efficient when looked
at as a whole. And it is certainly not efficient to have numbers of people
depressed, suicidal or ill. Making people miserable has high financial
costs as well as social ones. If Lovins’ ideas on Natural Capital come
to fruition then it seems we shall all benefit socially, economically
and environmentally.
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Forthcoming
NSF meetings
18
April- 7.45 pm, Heysen Street, Weston, ACT
Sustainability
and Petroleum Supply - Brian Fleay
Brian
Fleay will give a brief up-date on world oil supply and the current
peaking of non-Persian Gulf Oil, but with an emphasis on post-peak
issues. He will focus on petroleum's connection with population, food
supply and associated land degradation issues such as dryland salinity.
An outline of imminent peaking of the North American natural gas supply
and its connection with the Californian electric power crisis will
be given. If time permits, he will comment of the relative importance
of Greenhouse in this context.
16 May
- 7.45 pm, Heysen
Street, Weston, ACT
Mother's
Milk and Markets - Julie Smith, Senior
Research Fellow with The Australia Institute, Breastfeeding Councillor
and mother of three.
Back to Top
Biosphere
2
Report by Derek Wrigley
Professor
Barry Osmond, recent Director of the ANU Research School of Biological
Sciences has been accorded a great honour in being appointed the new Director
of Biosphere 2 in Arizona. Readers may recall that the original Biosphere
2 was opened in 1991 and in 1996 it began to be operated as a Division
of the Columbia Earth Institute of Columbia University.
Around A$500,000,000
was spent on a huge glass building of varying configurations to house
a viable rainforest 40m high x 1600m2 in area, an ‘ocean’ with waves and
corals, savannah, organic vegetable gardens, grain crops and small livestock.
This housed and fed four women and four men for four years in a ‘sustainable’
closed environment, the only input being electricity, daylight and sunshine.
Imagine a Crystal Palace and Kew Gardens magically biomorphed into the
middle of the Arizona desert and you get some idea of the scale & architectural
texture of this experiment in natural inter-relationships.
In essence
it was a controlled experiment in biological systems research to study
large scale interactions in a closed environment. The closed system engineering
was, however, too successful. Biosphere 2 exchanged only 10% of its atmosphere
in two years, but the oxygen declined to 14% in 15 months. This undoing
was ascribed to the tonnes of rich organic soil which were imported for
the biological systems, but it proved to be too rich; the bacteria degraded
the soil carbon and consumed oxygen, to the detriment of all other living
matter—humans included. Oxygen deprivation sapped energy & mental agility.
The unsealed concrete also competed with the plants for carbon dioxide
from the soil and oxygen levels could not be maintained.
The glass
structure absorbed almost all the ultra-violet light to the detriment
of the health of all living systems; the air handling system was perhaps
too gentle in not mimicking the perturbations of nature — strong winds
and lashing rain which help to create resistive strengths in biological
structures.
From a social
point of view a crew of eight balanced humans developed weaknesses and
like all committees seemed to need the odd casting vote.
In view of
the energy supply problems currently being faced by the US west coast
it seems strange that the excellent slides revealed an absence of renewable
energy systems such as photovoltaic panels and wind turbines, as wind
and sun are abundant in that part of the world. With a shortage of electricity
there could be no water, no control systems, no computers — a Biosphere’s
Achilles heel? The developing energy problems in the US are a very important
lesson for us to learn and one of the energy policies of our Biocentre
is that we aim to generate all our own power on site and export our surplus
to the grid.
Biosphere
2 is a thriving educational centre, attracting enthusiastic students of
varying disciplines with US$15,000 to spend on a 16-week ecology course,
not to mention around 200,000 visitors every year, each paying US$10-25
entry fees.
For those
who wish to know more there is a book called Life under glass - the inside
story of Biosphere 2 by Alling & Nelson, Biosphere Press.
This is a
unique and wonderful opportunity for Barry and Cornelia (whose research
on viruses will continue there). We wish them well and look forward to
more detailed updates on their return visits to Canberra. Our Biocentre
could learn a great deal from the Biosphere.
Their house
in Canberra is being retained — wise move!
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On
meaning
John Schooneveldt
At the October
forum I talked about some of the ideas developed in my recent PhD thesis.
No one it seems took any notes so the editor asked me to report on my
own talk.
I explained
that the thesis wrestles with some of the ideas that have long puzzled
me. I realised as a teacher in PNG in the 1960s that the stuff in the
syllabus was not very useful to my students and, on top of that, I had
no idea how the teaching process worked any way. I turned to psychology
and after a four-year degree I knew something about rats and pigeons and
paper and pencil psychometrics, but nothing about what goes on in human
minds. In the 1980s I thought that language might be a key to understanding
mental processes and after an MA in linguistics, I knew something about
language structure, but very little about meaning and nothing at all about
the role of language in human thinking. So I turned to biology in the
1990s and this thesis. Now all this searching may sound like some deep
mysterious quest after truth, but it wasn’t like that at all. I enjoy
thinking about these things. It’s a kind of hobby really, like stamp collecting.
I collect ideas.
I began my
talk by pointing to a common assumption underlying Western thought, and
arguably most human cultures: the idea that the universe is made up of
‘things’: bits and pieces of matter that can be given names. The way these
things are categorised and named might differ from culture to culture,
but their essential 'thinginess' is unquestioned. The fact that all the
languages of the world include a large number of words that can be described
as nouns offers evidence of the universality of this cultural assumption.
In my talk
I presented some of the evidence that cause me to question this assumption.
The talk speculated that it might be more realistic and useful to think
of the universe and the world around us, not in terms of 'things' but
rather 'processes' and, more specifically, the constant interaction or
juxtaposition of events or processes and the organisms that experience
them. Naming or labelling certain combinations of processes or events
as an entity or object may be a useful shorthand, but, if this view is
correct, the universal human experience of a fundamental 'thinginess'
may be illusory.
At an abstract
level there is nothing new here. The Greek philosopher, Hereclitus thought
of reality as a 'constant state of becoming' and more recently, the English
philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, expounded similar ideas. These have
been developing quietly as a minority philosophical position known as
'Process Philosophy'. What I argued in the talk was that there is a growing
body of hard empirical evidence that supports this way of thinking, not
just on the cutting edge of physics, where everything is in a ferment
and flux at present, but even in the biological sciences and psychology
where, I argue, perception, memory/learning and cognition can be best
explained in process terms.
Much of the
work with animals involves testing animals to see if they can memorize,
respond to and even reproduce words and signs of things. The great apes,
dolphins and parrots have been studied in this way, and this has made
us realise that these creatures are far more intelligent than many people
once believed. But this top down approach does not give us any insight
as to how an animal sees and thinks in its natural state. In my thesis
I proposed a bottom up approach that looks at how simpler organisms internalise
their experience of the world. I argued that starting at the bottom better
enables us to identify the stages in the evolution of perception, cognition
and consciousness than top down approaches. Now it so happens that a 'process'
approach works much better than a 'nominal' approach. Naming things perhaps
came much later in the evolution of mind. Deep down as Buckminster Fuller
has pointed out we are verbs!
Process thinking
is difficult. Many can accept that the universe is in a constant state
of flux or process through time as current physical theories suggest,
but only if we conceive that there are some sort of entities, items, particles,
objects or things which are experiencing the process. I argued against
his view and suggested that it is all process all the way down to the
very small, sub-atomic levels, and even smaller, if one can think in such
terms. Conversely, going in the other direction, it is process all the
way, to the very large cosmological processes and beyond.
Space does
not allow the evidence to be summarized here. The key argument rests on
the way organisms subjectively experience the world in which they live,
and the way this subjective experience must have evolved into more and
more complex experiential patterns. This complexity is inside us and to
varying degrees in every motile organism that exercises choice in its
interaction with its environment. It is the subjective experience of external
events (not things) corresponding to physiological processes involved
in perception and memory that is the key. Rather than look at these from
the outside as neurological processes, I suggest that they should be looked
at from the inside as subjective experience of those neurological processes.
The Western
tradition has had a lot of problems with subjectivity and its related
ideas of mind, meaning and purpose. Increasingly over the last few hundred
years the West has avoided the problem through reductionism. I say ‘avoided’
the problem advisedly, for the problem is not solved, nor does it go away.
In essence it has been ignored by science and while the humanities have
dealt with these important aspects of the human experience through literature
and the arts, they lack the rigor and verifiability that is central to
science. Reductionism involves progressively reducing the context of a
phenomenon until only one or two aspects are left to be manipulated or
observed. This has been a highly productive process, generating enormous
amounts of knowledge, but it has come at a price. It has reduced our understanding
of the world to machine-like simplification that is systematically destroying
the natural world of which we are a part and on which we depend.
A process
approach promises to give us a better set of tools for understanding the
richness of human and animal experience. The experience of listening to
Bach is rather richer than we might ever imagine by watching a pattern
of neurons firing in some organism’s brain.
Back to Top
Electricity
from biomass
Some
thoughts from Frank Fisher, Associate Professor and Director, Graduate
School of Environmental Science, School of Geography and Environmental
Science, Monash University
The following
submission was sent to ALP parliamentarians, on request from various green
groups seeking to stop woodchipping for power generation.
I am concerned
that you do all in your power to find life-affirming energy sources which
are the essence of what is meant by renewable energy. In the current matter,
this means opposing the use of biomass, especially from old growth forests,
as an energy source and especially as a source of electricity.
The reasons
for this stance are:
1) until
we commercialise direct conversion of biofuels such as alcohol, methane
etc., to electricity in relatively benign technologies such as fuel cells,
the use of presently available conversion techniques are a wasteful, dirty
obscenity:
-
wasteful,
because some 70% of the energy available in fuels has to be discarded
in the old-fashioned thermo-dynamic transfers current electricity
generation techniques require,
-
dirty,
because wood is in principle a difficult fuel to burn cleanly and
-
obscene,
because the land used to generate the biomass could be used1
directly to generate:
a) commercial
crops that humans could feed from directly as in cereals or livestock
crops or, where this is not possible,
b) indigenous crops of the native flora and fauna that originally stocked
that land (i.e. national parks), thereby contributing to the maintenance
of what remains of our indigenous wildlife. This applies especially
to so-called old growth forests.
2) the concept
renewable is demeaned or trivialised by turning forest into biomass.
This applies especially to indigenous trees when transformed to a resource
rather than retaining them as parts of living ecosystems that are integral
parts of wider habitats.
In this connection
note that dead trees and litter give the illusion of being
waste or being redundant to life’s processes. This is not
so. They are habitat for other organisms that form parts of the living
trees’ (and our!) habitats.
3) once a
dedicated technological system, with all its investments, is created upon
the new resource (biomass), supply of the resource has to be maintained
to supply the requirements of investment. Thus the imperative becomes
cast into the (local and wider) community’s continuing economic priorities
even though the resource may have run out or/and the insights that
identified it and generated the industry, may be obsolete.
4) while
the transition to renewable energy forms is to be encouraged, we should
do all in our power to ensure that the renewables only replace and do
not just add to our energy production capacity generating a new set of
earth consuming demands. Note that renewables themselves do have environmental
consequences!
An enlightened
(twenty first century) strategy would recognise that the first energy
priority must be to reduce per capita energy use across the board and
that the potential to do this by social institutional change and technical
efficiency improve-ments represent better investment-dollar efficiencies
than any renewables. This has already been well-demonstrated. It is most
notably the case in the Scandinavian countries where lifestyle improvements
(in all dimensions) persist while per-capita energy use steadily declines.
The implication
is that energy conserving institutional changes actually constitute an
energy resource!
1
Note these italicised words. Each one carries an interpretive punch. In
this case it is that of nature being seen as a resource to be “used”;
in the next, “feed” we are again speaking of nature as a “feedstock” and
“renewable” does the same again. In each case nature is de-natured or
rendered down to an essentially discardable tool for the political economic
machine. Which is not to say that we ought not live from/in nature, only
that our terminology might retain respect for living as nature while we
seek to satisfy ourselves through it – where it or nature is recognised
to be our extended selves.
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And
then there was ...
Jenny
Wanless
In the beginning,
Bryan Furnass suggested NSF should run a conference on food — all aspects
of food and nutrition — and the environment — what are the impacts of
agriculture, fisheries and the rest on the world's systems? Bryan put
a lot of effort and thought into organising such a conference, to bring
together all manner of aspects that are usually not thought of. Most conferences
focus on nutrition and human health, or what are humans doing to the environment
or how can we have sustainable agriculture. The conference proposed by
Bryan sounded really interesting.
Next there
was the hard slog of seeking sponsors and speakers, and wondering whether
anyone would come. Which led to the thought — do people need to come?
Why not hold an internet conference? After all, we should be trying to
reduce greenhouse gases from transport, so we should not encourage people
to travel. Let us use the Internet and see how that works. Thus, Food
— for healthy people and a healthy planet was born.
How will
it work?
Registered participants will be able to contribute to a bulletin-board
style discussion and exchange of information with experts on the issues
of nutritional health and the environment. Keynote contributors will be
experts in the fields of medicine, nutrition, public health, and the environmental,
agricultural and horticultural sciences. Their papers will be put on a
special NSFconference website and grouped according to themes. The six
themes are: Biological background of nutrition, Nutrition, health and
disease, Food and animals, Choices in food consumption, Food, population
and resources, and Sustainable food production.
So that is
the conference. It provides the opportunity for all our members, wherever
they live, to participate (at a very low cost in carbon dioxide emissions
and money). So please get involved. Email your interest, provide us with
suitable contacts and help make this pioneering effort a great success.
Back to Top
The
right amount
Alan AtKisson
Alan
AtKisson is the author of Believing Cassandra: An Optimist Looks at
a Pessimist's World. He is president of AtKisson and Associates Inc.,
a consulting firm focused on accelerating sustainable development. He
is also a Senior Fellow with the independent policy institute, Redefining
Progress, and formerly its program and executive director. Mr AtKisson
is a member of the board of directors of the Centre for a New American
Dream.
My friend
in Sweden has two towels. Actually she has three, but the third she uses
for travel. When the bathroom towels are dirty she washes them. When they
wear out she buys two more — and very good ones, so they'll last
a long time.
"Why
do I need more than two?" she says. "Dar ar lagom."
What she
says in Swedish does not quite translate to "This is enough".
The word "lagom" — pronounced melodically, the "la"
in a falling tone, the "gom" (rhymes with home) a shorter syllable
that's right back up where the "la" started — means something
like, "exactly the right amount."
What a delight
to learn this word! When it comes to thinking about responses to over-consumption
and consumerism, we are stuck, in English, with far less pleasing words.
"Enough" sounds to most American ears as though it had the word
"barely" just in front of it. For some reason, "enough"
never sounds like ... enough. "Balance" sounds difficult; I'm
always losing mine. "Sufficiency" carries the whiff of technical
economic jargon. Even "simplicity", the current fad-word-of-the-moment
in some marketing circles, tends to appeal only to those folk with either
a moral commitment or a serious case of overwhelm.
We need a
concept for thinking about how much, in terms of stuff, is the right amount
— and the Swedes have given us a word for it.
The concept
of "lagom" can be applied to everything from cake to carbon
dioxide emissions. What is "lagom" for chocolate cake? For me,
it is usually a little bit more than "enough". But what's "lagom"
for CO2? Only as much as the ecosystems of the earth can reabsorb, and
no more. "Lagom" allows for more than enough — but it still
sets limits.
What if our
society were organised around the concept of "lagom"? Not that
Sweden is organised that way; although my friend is hardly an extremist,
she is a more enthusiastic lagom-ist than many of her fellow Swedes (imagine
the Vikings taking only "lagom" when they plundered!). And most
Americans have trouble just pronouncing it. But I have developed a small
fascination with this word, because it has an attractive quality that
"enough", "sufficient" or even "simple"
often lack.
Most people
in the world do not want enough. They want more. They certainly want more
than the bare minimum, and research suggests they want more than those
around them. This desire for more seems to be deeply wired in the human
organism. We developed over a millennia in hostile environments, both
natural and social. To have more than we need has always been our first
defence against the vagaries of an uncertain future. Hoarding is the first
act of those who believe themselves to be in the path of a storm (or a
marauding army of plundering Vikings for that matter).
So while
there will always be those of us who love the idea of "enough-ness"
and "voluntary simplicity", it seems likely that such concepts
will never quite be ... well ... enough to transform the masses of humanity
(or the marauding army of corporations vying to fill their houses with
stuff, in a kind of reverse-plunder operation).
But it does
seem possible to promote a sensible Swedish sense of "lagom"
worldwide — if we can find other good words for it — because
it speaks more to what people actually want. Let's admit that it's very
nice to have good shoes. No one can be faulted for wanting them. But does
a person really need fifteen pairs? No. But is one pair enough? Perhaps
not. "Lagom" acknowledges that people have varying needs at
different times.
They want
nice things, and comfort, and security. They want more than the bare minimum
and they might even need it. If their desire for more than enough is accepted,
even supported, perhaps they might be willing to consider how much is
too much.
Clearly,
here in America, we are far beyond the limits of "lagom". Once
in a while I make a point of wandering into a Costco or a Sam's Club —
huge retail warehouses full of consumer goods, on sale cheap. The spaces
are large enough to house a submarine assembly plant. You can buy everything
from taco shells to trampolines to model wooden boats, by the crate. The
shopping carts are as big as a small car. Walking around the aisles of
one of these stores allows me to indulge in several radically different
feelings: raw consumer lust, great moral outrage, and aching environmental
angst.
But when
I took my same Swedish friend to see one of these places, her response
was more practical. "I suppose people can save quite a lot of money
here," she noted. "And it's much better to buy some things in
large quantities" (not towels). "But perhaps it's just very
tempting to take too much in such a place." Nobody really needs too
much, and in fact, most people don't really want it. But nobody wants
too little. Perhaps our vision for a sustainable world should include
not just enough for all but "lagom" for all, with fewer temptations
to take too much.
And while
I could write a great deal more about this lovely new addition to my vocabulary,
perhaps this page, too, is "lagom".
Back to Top
Money
talks
Earthbeat,
Radio National 24 Feb 2001
One of the
features of the investment scene of the last few years has been the growth
of ethical investment. It started with people who did not want to invest
in the gambling, alcohol, armaments or tobacco industries. Latterly it
has grown from screening out companies such as these, or environmentally
damaging ones like native forest logging to support positive initiatives
such as renewable energy, sustainable forestry, small businesses and unlisted
companies. Such socially responsible investment (SRI) is articulating
the concerns of people who do not want any part in socially or environmentally
destructive activities, and who want the power of money to be harnessed
for change for the better.
Australian
Ethical Investment (AEI) started over a dozen years ago and now manages
$(A)120,000,000 of shareholders’ funds. AEI uses both negative and positive
screens. It is also just beginning to extend its scope into socially responsible
venture capital, to support enterprises in a way not generally available
to the public.
Two years
ago AEI entered the superannuation field, so contributors can choose a
fund that uses their contributions to create a better future. Because
most workers have superannuation, even if they have no other investment,
superfunds can play a big role in SRI. By law now, big pension funds in
Britain and Germany have to state their policies on SRI.
The first
big financial institution in Australia to get involved in ethical investment
is Westpac, with its recently launched Ecofund. This uses criteria based
on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, which operates on a ‘best of sector’
approach. This does not screen out any sector of the market, but looks
for the best environmental performer in each sector. The expectation is
that other companies will improve their performance to try to get on the
index.
Next month
AMP expects to launch three SRI products. They have employed a consultant
from the UK business Henderson Global Investment, well known in the SRI
field. They will screen out sectors such as armaments and tobacco, considering
that businesses that cause death are not really sustainable.
SRI funds
are growing in many countries. In the USA SRI funds are worth trillions
of dollars and are growing twice as fast as the general market. In Japan
the emphasis is on the environment, not social issues, but the new ecofunds
are growing spectacularly. They seem to have inspired many first time
investors, especially women.
The public
can now even choose to put their money in the bank to work for SRI. Last
year Bendigo Bank (Victoria) teamed up with Community Aid Abroad to launch
an ethical fund. It raised forty million dollars (Australian) in just
eight months. Profits are being used to support Australian community groups
which have had difficulty getting finance.
Yet another
way in which investors can influence social and environmental outcomes
is by shareholder activism. Green shareholders successfully pressured
Boral to get out of its Tasmanian forestry business.
Information
on ethical investment can be found on the on-line Ethical Investment Magazine.
Its editor, Paddy Manning is launching a bigger magazine in the newsagents
in May.
Back to Top
Working
with Nature
New
Scientist 3 Feb 2001
The biggest
movement in Third World farming today is low-tech not high-tech, and it
is yielding rich rewards.
In a dramatic
turn-around farmers in Africa are finding that planting weeds amongst
their crops can lead to increased yields with less work. Stem borer insects
often destroy a third of the region’s maize, and the weed Striga
wrecks about ten billion dollars worth of maize per year, threatening
the livelihood of a hundred million Africans. Ziadin Khan, working at
the Mbita Point research station, Lake Victoria, Kenya, found that planting
napier grass, a local weed, among the maize, worked wonders. The stemborers
prefer the napier grass, but it produces a sweet sticky substance which
traps and kills them. Where Striga is a problem it can be kept
out by planting another weed Desmodium between the rows. It is
not known why Striga will not grow near Desmodium, but the
latter’s presence saves women from one of their most time consuming jobs.
Jules Pretty
from the University of Essex analysed more than 200 such projects on four
million farms in fifty two countries and found average crop increases
of 73 per cent. For example in Mexico when one hectare is planted with
maize, squash and beans it produces as much food as 1.73 hectares planted
with maize alone.
On Madagascar
a local Catholic priest found that he could raise rice yields from three
to ten tonnes per hectare. His method involves transplanting the seedlings
at an earlier stage and in smaller numbers so more survive, and keeping
the paddies unflooded for much of the growing season. On Madagascar 20,000
farmers have followed his lead and the method has shown increased yields
in tests in China, Indonesia and Cambodia.
The collapse
of the Soviet Union in 1990 cut off supplies of grain, tractors and agrochemicals
to Cuba, resulting in a halving of the calorie intake of Cubans. Now they
are well fed again, with teams of oxen instead of tractors, and farmers
using organic methods to grow mixed crops of maize, beans and cassava.
Actually
one of the most widely adopted techniques around the words has been to
stop ploughing. Although ploughing aerates the soil, and helps to rot
weeds and crop residues, it also can damage soil fertility and cause erosion.
A third of Argentinian farmers have stopped ploughing and now plant winter
crops to stop weeds, or they spray with a biodegradable herbicide. This
has reduced costs and produced richer soils, higher grain yields and increased
income.
A side benefit
is that unploughed land absorbs up to a tonne of carbon per hectare each
year, whereas ploughing releases carbon dioxide as plants rot. The major
benefit of all these initiatives though, is to farming communities, where
people are becoming better fed. Most of the increased produce is eaten
by those who grow it.
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