Month: June 2012

June 15, 2012 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Contract farming ‘exploitative’

Contract farming has put farmers at a disadvantage as they have to shoulder all the burdens of investment and losses, with lucrative profits going into the pockets of companies engaged in the system, a seminar has been told.

Paisit Panitkul, a law lecturer at Chiang Mai University, said his study showed that contract farming was unfair to farmers as produce was supplied directly to giant agribusiness firms.

This resulted in companies taking advantage of farmers, he told the seminar at Chulalongkorn University yesterday.

Contract farming is a forward agreement between farmers and processing or marketing firms to supply agricultural products, frequently at predetermined and seasonally optimal prices.

Mr Paisit said many small farmers had entered into contract farming in the hope of getting a stable income.

“Contract farming represents a form of disguised exploitation, with companies taking all benefits from selling seeds, livestock, animal feed and farm equipment. Everything generates huge profits for agribusiness firms,” Mr Paisit said.

Food security meant farmers faced exploitation by conditions set by companies, he added. He urged all agencies concerned, including consumers, to push for fair farming contracts.

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June 13, 2012 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Tainted-apple report sparks investigation

Farmers usually use the fruit bags to cover and protect growing fruit from the insecticides that growers spray on fruit trees. Putting pesticides in the bags is illegal.

Agricultural authorities opened the investigation after a newspaper reported that some farmers in Yantai, China’s major apple growing area, were illegally using pesticides in the bags.

Beijing News reported on Monday that individual growers use bags that are contaminated with hazardous chemicals inside.

“We haven’t come to any conclusion yet in the investigation,” said Yang Lijian, director of the pesticide inspection department of the Shandong Agriculture Bureau, when reached by China Daily on Tuesday.

However, Yang said the government pledged to end the use of apple bags contaminated with pesticide-like chemicals if they are found, and to close any workshops that made them.

According to Yang, an investigation of pesticide residue on the ripe fruit from local farmers in September 2011 revealed that some farmers were using bags with pesticide inside.

The Yantai government found in 2010 that some orchard workers applied diluted pesticides inside fruit bags. The pesticides included tuzet and asomate, which are prohibited from such usage.

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June 13, 2012 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

GM crops good for environment, study finds

Crops genetically modified to poison pests can deliver significant environmental benefits, according to a study spanning two decades and 1.5m square kilometres. The benefits extended to non-GM crops in neighbouring fields, researchers found.

Plants engineered to produce a bacterial toxin lethal to some insects but harmless to people were grown across more than 66m hectares around the world in 2011.

Bt cotton is one type and now makes up 95% of China’s vast plantations. Since its introduction in 1997, pesticide use has halved and the study showed this led to a doubling of natural insect predators such as ladybirds, lacewings and spiders. These killed pests not targeted by the Bt cotton, in cotton fields, but also in conventional corn, soybean and peanut fields.

“Insecticide use usually kills the natural enemies of pests and weakens the biocontrol services that they provide,” said Professor Kongming Wu at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing, who led the research team. “Transgenic crops reduce insecticide use and promote the population increase of natural enemies. Therefore, we think that this is a general principle.”

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June 12, 2012 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Food security: What crops will feed the world if we run out of farmland?

I Think, Therefore I Yam

When farmland is scarce, will we all eat roots and tubers?

Since Thomas Malthus, alarmists have been pointing out that the world has a finite amount of arable land, whereas its human population keeps growing. Common sense would seem to dictate that eventually there won’t be enough farmland to feed everyone, and catastrophic famine will ensue.

The incredible pace of technological innovation has staved off that eventuality for hundreds of years, seemingly making fools of Malthus and intellectual successors like Paul R. Ehrlich, who in his 1968 book The Population Bomb predicted mass starvation in the 1970s and 1980s. Instead, the green revolution brought high-yielding crop varieties, fertilizers, and pesticides to hungry countries such as Mexico and India, leading to a doubling of food production between 1950 and 2010 with only a 10 percent increase in the amount of farmland. And in the past decade, global population growth has slowed, a deeply encouraging sign (and one that neither Malthus nor Ehrlich envisioned).

Yet the world’s food future may be shakier than ever. It’s not because of the absolute number of people or even the amount of available farmland, but because of what those people eat and how that farmland is used. In short, there’s enough land to feed the world—but not enough to feed the world Big Macs.

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June 11, 2012 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Renee Blodgett: The Cowboy Culture of Maui’s Makawao

If you go to Hawaii and don’t watch people surf then you’ve missed a big part of the culture. Even in Makawao, the town full of cowboys, hippies and art that was my first stop on Maui, I found a little surf shop. Hawaiians will be Hawaiian.

That said, there’s something different about the little drive to Makawao, something authentic. You have to pass through the trendy town of Pa’ia, which is also has a hippy and artistic flavor to it, although its far more developed and crowded than Makawao to the south along Route 390.

They have some charming little restaurants and shops in Pa’ia, which is a great place to meet up with friends in one of the fudge, coffee or ice cream shops.

Cafe Des Amis in Pa’ia has a very hospitable staff and fabulous crepes. There was a cute 30-year-old (I asked) Australian working behind the counter when I was there the first time and when I asked if they were on Twitter, he said: “What’s that?”

Along the way, there aren’t a lot of “big things” to see and do, but if you pay close enough attention, you’ll catch the smaller charming things you should take in, like the Hali’imaile General Store. There are sugar cane fields in all directions, all irrigated by water from the Hana coast.

Located on the mid-slopes of Maui’s Haleakala volcano, Makawao has one foot in its plantation past and another in its arts community. While this town is far from big, it is apparently the biggest little town in the region locally known as Upcountry Maui and is famous for its Hawaiian cowboys, or paniolo. While it may not feel quite as upcountry as it does further south along Route 377, it does cool off a little at night, although it was very hot and sunny when I was there.

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June 10, 2012 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Panel should be appointed to address deer problem

Before the problem gets any worse on Maui, Mayor Alan Arakawa should appoint a blue-ribbon axis deer panel to come up with a comprehensive plan on how the county can deal with the alarming increase of deer on Maui and the significant damage that is being done to our forests, farm vegetables, ecosystem and other vegetative life on the island.

The panel should include farmers, ranchers, hunters, environmentalists, government representatives and others who have been negatively impacted by these four-legged foreign invaders.

Because the problem is so widespread and a workable solution very difficult to achieve, the mayor is in the best position to bring together the necessary experienced people to come up with ideas on how we can deal with this growing menace.

Jimmy Gomes, operations manager at Ulupalakua Ranch, describes the problem (The Maui News, May 27) by stating that he’s seen a thousand at a time and has had to wait several minutes for a herd of deer to pass before he can ride through them on horseback. Gomes went on to say that gun club members and ranch employees have killed more than 1,000 deer on the ranch this year, but it hasn’t made a dent in their numbers.

Mr. Mayor, the county needs to take action now before it is too late.

William T. Kinaka
Wailuku

Panel should be appointed to address deer problem – Mauinews.com | News, Sports, Jobs, Visitor’s Information – The Maui News

June 10, 2012 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Invasive species ride tsunami debris to U.S. shore

When a floating dock the size of a boxcar washed up on a sandy beach in Oregon, beachcombers got excited because it was the largest piece of debris from last year’s tsunami in Japan to show up on the West Coast.

But scientists worried it represented a whole new way for invasive species of seaweed, crabs and other marine organisms to break the earth’s natural barriers and further muck up the West Coast’s marine environments. And more invasive species could be hitching rides on tsunami debris expected to arrive in the weeks and months to come.

“We know extinctions occur with invasions,” said John Chapman, assistant professor of fisheries and invasive species specialist at Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center. “This is like arrows shot into the dark. Some of them could hit a mark.”

Though the global economy has accelerated the process in recent decades by the sheer volume of ships, most from Asia, entering West Coast ports, the marine invasion has been in full swing since 1869, when the transcontinental railroad brought the first shipment of East Coast oysters packed in seaweed and mud to San Francisco, said Andrew Cohen, director of the Center for Research on Aquatic Bioinvasions in Richmond, Calif. For nearly a century before then, ships sailing up the coast carried barnacles and seaweeds.

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June 10, 2012 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Water plan to take effect by 2012

By the end of 2012, a water resource allocation plan for 25 rivers that flow through more than one province will be put into use, limiting the amount of water that can be taken from the rivers by each of the provinces.

“We are doing our best to accelerate the process,” said Chen Ming, deputy head of the Water Resources Department at the Ministry of Water Resources. “Hopefully, the plan will come out by August.”

Water plan to take effect by 2012

The water resource allocation plan is one of the moves the ministry has taken to promote the implementation of the most stringent regulations in Chinese water resource management.

Announced in January by the State Council, the regulation set four “must-complete” targets by 2030, including limiting the country’s annual total water consumption to less than 700 billion cubic meters.

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June 10, 2012 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

In Philippines, banana growers feel effect of South China Sea dispute

PANABO, Philippines — Dazzled by the opportunities offered by China’s vast and increasingly prosperous populace, Renante Flores Bangoy, the owner of a small banana plantation here in the southern Philippines, decided three years ago to stop selling to multinational fruit corporations and stake his future on Chinese appetites. Through a local exporter, he started shipping all his fruit to China.

Today, his estate on the tropical island of Mindanao is scattered with heaps of rotting bananas. For seven weeks now — ever since an aging U.S.-supplied Philippine warship squared off with Chinese vessels near a disputed shoal in the South China Sea — Bangoy has not been able to sell a single banana to China.

He is a victim of sudden Chinese restrictions on banana imports from the Philippines that China says have been imposed for health reasons but that Bangoy and other growers view as retaliation for a recent flare-up in contested waters around Scarborough Shoal.

“They just stopped buying,” Bangoy said. “It is a big disaster.”

His plight points to the volatile nationalist passions that lie just beneath the placid surface of Asia’s economic boom. It also underscores how quickly quarrels rooted in the distant past can disrupt the promise of a new era of shared prosperity and peace between rising China and its neighbors.

Scarborough Shoal, a cluster of coral reefs and islets, lies more than 500 miles from the Chinese mainland and 140 miles off the northern coast of the Philippines, well within a 200-nautical-mile “exclusive economic zone” provided for by the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. But China — which claims most of the South China Sea, including portions also claimed by the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan — insists that the shoal has been part of its territory

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