Biotech Company to Patent Fuel-Secreting Bacterium By MATTHEW L. WALD Published: September 13, 2010 Recommend Twitter Linkedin Sign In to E-Mail Print Reprints Share A biotech company plans to announce Tuesday that it has won a patent on a genetically altered bacterium that converts sunlight and carbon dioxide into ingredients of diesel fuel, a step that could provide a new pathway for making ethanol or a diesel replacement that skips several cumbersome and expensive steps in existing methods. Joule Unlimited The bacterium’s product, which it secretes like sweat, is a class of hydrocarbon molecules called alkanes that are chemically indistinguishable from the ones made in oil refineries. The organism can grow in bodies of water unfit for drinking or on land that is useless for farming, according to the company, Joule Unlimited of Cambridge, Mass. “We make very clean, sulfur-free hydrocarbons that drop directly into the existing infrastructure for the production of diesel fuel,” said William J. Sims, the chief executive of Joule. The object, he said, was not to be an alternative for fossil fuels, but “to become a viable replacement.” Joule said it was the first company to patent an organism that secretes hydrocarbon fuel made continuously, directly from sunlight. Other companies, including Amyris Biotechnologies of Emeryville, Calif., and LS9 of San Carlos, Calif., are working on organisms that will make fuel if fed sugar from corn or cellulosic sources, but Joule’s bacterium does not require any sugar. Another company, Aurora Algae of Alameda, Calif., said Monday that it had developed an algae-based platform for production of fuel, pharmaceuticals and other valuable chemicals. Development of a photosynthetic organism to make hydrocarbons is “an important step,” said Eric J. Toone, the deputy director for technology at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, a new agency within the Energy Department that makes grants for high-risk, high-reward projects. But Mr. Toone and others cautioned that there were other steps to be mastered before such a technology could be commercialized. The organism is a cyanobacterium, also known as blue-green algae, although it is technically not an algae. It produces the fuel using photosynthesis, the process that plants use to make sugars and other materials from water, carbon dioxide and sunlight. Alternative energy experts agree that photosynthesis is a promising avenue for biofuel research. The challenge is turning the resulting product into a fuel. Many companies are trying to develop an algae to do that job. But it requires energy to separate the algae from the water and then process the oil they make internally into a usable fuel. An organism that secretes the desired product directly avoids both problems. In a test in Leander, Tex., Joule’s bacteria strain produced ethanol. Different variants can also make polymers and other high-value chemicals that are ordinarily derived from petroleum, according to Joule. The system can run on the carbon dioxide in ordinary air but will do better using the exhaust from a power plant, once pollutants like sulfur and nitrogen oxides have been removed, according to the company. Joule said it would begin construction next year on a commercial plant, which it hopes will begin operations in 2012. The company predicts a yield of 15,000 gallons of diesel components per acre — far more fuel than an acre of corn grown for ethanol can produce. Mr. Sims says the pilot project covers a little less than five acres. Because the process is modular, he said, a full-scale factory would simply mean making multiple copies of a smaller setup. And with a small amount of refining, he said, the hydrocarbons can be converted to an ingredient of jet fuel. An independent expert, Matthew C. Posewitz, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines, said that making an organism that secreted hydrocarbons was “definitely one of the most active areas in the whole game right now.” He said that Joule did not yet have a proved process, but that it had strong research and development capabilities. “They have some extreme horsepower within that company,” he said.

Cambridge startup has tech to grow nutrients without farmland Boston Business Journal by Kyle Alspach Date: Wednesday, July 13, 2011, 1:45pm EDT - Last Modified: Wednesday, July 13, 2011, 2:38pm EDT One of the latest companies to come out of Flagship VentureLabs, Essentient Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., is working on an approach to producing nutrients for human consumption that doesn’t require arable land, Essentient CEO David Berry said in an interview. “This would change the way we think about nutrients, how people source nutrients at the end of the day,” said Berry, a partner at Cambridge-based Flagship Ventures . “We are not trying to change people’s way of living or anything along those lines. We are trying to offer a way to get nutrients independent from arable land.” Berry said the company isn’t ready to give further specifics about the approach, which has been developed since the founding of the company in early 2010 at VentureLabs. Berry previously served as CEO of Joule Unlimited Inc. and Theracrine Inc., two companies that also began in VentureLabs, the startup accelerator of Flagship Ventures. Berry compared the approach to starting Essentient to the founding of Joule, a company that says it has developed a process for producing renewable diesel and ethanol using sunlight, waste carbon dioxide, water and specialty microorganisms. Joule said in May that it had reached an agreement to have access to 1,200 acres in New Mexico for fuel production. The idea for Joule came simply out of a desire to produce renewable fuels without the need for biomass, and the technology was invented from there, Berry said. Likewise, Essentient began with the aim of finding a way to help solve the problem of global malnourishment while avoiding the problems associated with modern agriculture, he said. “Agriculture as it exists today uses 70 percent of world’s fresh water, and it still doesn’t provide baseline nutrition for the entire world,” Berry said. “We wondered if we could do something better.” Essentient currently has a staff of 15 and is located at 840 Memorial Dr. in Cambridge, Berry said. The company expects to hit key milestones in the third and fourth quarters, and will likely be ready to offer more details by the first quarter of 2012, he said. Essentient has received funding from Flagship but the specifics aren’t being disclosed. Flagship CEO Noubar Afeyan is serving as chairman of Essentient, and Flagship principal, Geoffrey von Maltzahn, is serving as vice president of corporate development. Clarification: An earlier online version of this story mischaracterized Essentient's product. The company is producing "nutrients," a spokeswoman said – not "food."

As with anything, it is possible to go over the limit to achieve short gains at the expense of sacrificing the future (for example: an athlete can ignore an injury to win a tournament, but do permanent damage to his body in the process). The same is true in agriculture.

To keep food cheap, the ESF has promoted the use of high-yielding, destructive farming techniques in arid regions which could not support them. This increases production initially, but then slowly turns the land into a desert where nothing will grow.

Treasury interference in US market corrupted corporate culture. Bankers started behaving like there was no tomorrow because they knew something was fundamentally wrong with the system. They started pursuing business practices which can only be described as "picking up pennies in front of a steamroller".

Most the world has adopted intensive farming techniques which is degrading farmland. I have already written about how disaster is Feared As Desertification Spreads.

…
What is desertification

1) Desertification is the degradation of dryland ecosystems through a combination of natural and human causes.

2) Desertification occurs when human beings try to take too many resources from land that can sustain very little human life. When too many people try to plant crops, graze cattle and harvest firewood in a fragile dryland ecosystem, they tip the balance of sustainability.

3) When we talk about desertification, we’re not only talking about the slow spread of existing deserts, but the creation of entirely new ones.

1930′s Dust Bowl is a perfect example of desertification

1) In the 1920s, when the United States entered an economic recession, farmers in Western states tried to raise profits by plowing and planting more acreage with new mechanized farming methods.

2) Within a decade, a massive drought hit the entire country. Strong winds swept across the Great Plains, stirring up loose topsoil that had been displaced by overplowing and overgrazing of cattle. The results were dozens of epic dust storms that swallowed whole cities in blinding black clouds. The semiarid soil of the plains, which had fed generations with its fertile soil, was now A LIFELESS DESERT KNOWN AS THE DUST BOWL.

Disaster Feared As Desertification Spreads

1) New deserts are growing at a rate of 20,000 square miles (51,800 square kilometers) a year.

2) Save for the Antarctica, desertification affects all continents.

3) Nearly half of the world’s total land mass is composed of dryland ecosystems (areas defined by low annual rainfall and high temperatures), and 10 to 20 percent of these regions are already degraded – unsuitable for human, animal or plant life.

4) Dryland regions are also home to billions of the world’s poorest, most marginalized populations. As these people are displaced by new deserts, they are forced into even more unstable regions, where the desertification process continues.

5) More than 70 percent of drylands in Africa, Asia and Latin America that are being used for agricultural purposes are already experiencing the effects of desertification.

6) Desertification was one the sources of the global food crisis of 2008. Degradation of available farmland contributes to less food production and higher prices for staple crops like rice, wheat and corn.

7) Desertification leads to famine, mass starvation and unprecedented human migration.

…
Desertification will created economic deserts

1) The UN is warning that parts of the world may have to be abandoned because severe water shortages will leave them uninhabitable

…
Lets first be clear about something: the desertification happening around the world isn’t the result of global warming (thought it is possible global warming is making it worse). The desertification we are seeing, in every case, is clearly the result of reckless and extensive overuse of drylands around the world.

Even if the world miraculously cuts carbon emissions to a fraction of their current level, desertification will continue as long as rampant farming and wasteful irrigation practices remain common in regions that do not support them.

Desertification means lower food production in the near future

Governments have two choices:

A) Do nothing and let food output slowly drops as agricultural land turns into sand dunes.
B) Restrain rampant farming, wasteful irrigation, and other harmful practices, stemming desertification at the cost of a drop in production

No matter what actions governments take, the only certainty is that global grain output will drop significantly.
…

The Treasury’s ESF is directly responsible for the destructive farming techniques wrecking havoc in the world today. Take, for example, ESF’s intervention (through the CIA) in Indian agriculture.

Appendix I: Ford Foundation – A Case Study of the Aims of Foreign Funding

"Someday someone must give the American people a full report of the work of the Ford Foundation in India. The several million dollars in total Ford expenditures in the country do not tell one-tenth of the story." – Chester Bowles (former US ambassador to India).
…
Ford and the CIA

The fact is that the US Central Intelligence Agency has long operated through a number of philanthropic foundations; most prominently Ford Foundation. …
…
The CIA’s infiltration of US foundations in general was massive. A 1976 Select Committee of the US Senate discovered that during 1963-66, of 700 grants each of over $10,000 given by 164 foundations, at least 108 were partially or wholly CIA-funded. According to Petras, "The ties between the top officials of the FF and the U.S. government are explicit and continuing. A review of recently funded projects reveals that the FF has never funded any major project that contravenes U.S. policy."
…

Ford Foundation intervention in Indian agriculture

Given the background of the Chinese revolution and the Telangana struggle, the US priority in India was to find ways to head off agrarian unrest. …

In 1959, a team led by a US department of agriculture economist produced the Ford Foundation’s Report on India’s Food Crisis and Steps to Meet It. In place of institutional change (ie redistribution of land and other rural assets) as the key-stone to agricultural development, this report stressed technological change (improved seeds, chemical fertilisers, and pesticides) in small, already irrigated, pockets. This was the ‘Green Revolution’ strategy. Ford even funded the Intensive Agricultural Development Programme (IADP) as a test case of the strategy, providing rich farmers in irrigated areas with subsidised inputs, generous credit, price incentives, and so on. The World Bank too put its weight behind this strategy.

Soon it was adopted by the Indian government, with far-reaching effects. Agricultural production of rice and wheat in the selected pockets grew immediately. …

The ‘Green Revolution’ strategy has lead to disaster in India. The Wall Street Journal reports that Green Revolution in India Wilts as Subsidies Backfire.

FEBRUARY 23, 2010
Green Revolution in India Wilts as Subsidies Backfire
By GEETA ANAND

SOHIAN, India—India’s Green Revolution is withering.

In the 1970s, India dramatically increased food production, finally allowing this giant country to feed itself. But government efforts to continue that miracle by encouraging farmers to use fertilizers have backfired, forcing the country to expand its reliance on imported food.

Popularized during the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, fertilizers helped boost crop yields and transformed India into a nation that could feed itself. But now their overuse is degrading the farmland.

India has been providing farmers with heavily subsidized fertilizer for more than three decades. The overuse of one type—urea—is so degrading the soil that yields on some crops are falling and import levels are rising. So are food prices, which jumped 19% last year. The country now produces less rice per hectare than its far poorer neighbors: Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

…
Farmers spread the rice-size urea granules by hand or from tractors. They pay so little for it that in some areas they use many times the amount recommended by scientists, throwing off the chemistry of the soil, according to multiple studies by Indian agricultural experts.

Like humans, plants need balanced diets to thrive. Too much urea oversaturates plants with nitrogen without replenishing other nutrients that are vitally important, including phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, magnesium and calcium.
…
As the soil’s fertility has declined, farmers under pressure to increase output have spread even more urea on their land.

Kamaljit Singh is a 55-year-old farmer in the town of Marauli Kalan in the state of Punjab, the breadbasket of India. He says farmers feel stuck. "The soil health is deteriorating, but we don’t know how to make it better," he says. "As the fertility of the soil is declining, more fertilizer is required."

…
[Before India’s “Green Revolution”]

In the early years after India gained independence in 1947, the country couldn’t even dream of feeding its population. Importing food wasn’t possible because India lacked the cash to pay. India relied on food donated by the U.S. government.

[India’s “Green Revolution” begins in 1967]

In 1967, then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imported 18,000 tons of hybrid wheat seeds from Mexico. The effect was miraculous. The wheat harvest that year was so bountiful that grain overflowed storage facilities.

Those seeds required chemical fertilizers to maximize yield. …
…
[India’s “Green Revolution” today]

In the northern state of Punjab, Bhupinder Singh, a turbaned, gray-bearded 55-year-old farmer, stood barefoot in his wheat field in December and pointed to the corner where he had just spread a 110-pound bag of urea.

"Without the urea, my crop looks sick," he said, picking up a few stalks of the young wheat crop and twirling them in his fingers. "THE SOIL IS GETTING WEAKER AND WEAKER OVER THE LAST 10 TO 15 YEARS. We need MORE AND MORE UREA TO GET THE SAME YIELD."

Mr. Singh farms 10 acres in Sohian, a town about 25 miles from the industrial city of Ludhiana. He said his yields of rice have fallen to three tons per acre, from 3.3 tons five years ago. By using twice as much urea, he’s been able to squeeze a little higher yield of wheat from the soil—two tons per acre, versus 1.7 tons five years ago.

He said both the wheat and rice harvests should be bigger, considering that he’s using so much more urea today than he did five years ago. ADDING UREA DOESN’T HAVE THE EFFECT IT DID IN THE PAST, he said, but it’s so cheap that it’s better than adding nothing at all.
…
"The future is not good here," he said, shaking his head.
…

Deteriorating soil health had lead to desertification in India. Caritas.org reports about desertification in India.

Desertification in India
…
Half the land in India is now affected by desertification and this impairs the ability of land to support life. It is particularly devastating because of its self-reinforcing nature.

The causes of desertification are extensive cultivation of one crop, use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, shifting cultivation without adequate period of recovery, industrial and mining activities, overgrazing, logging and illegal felling, forest fires and unsustainable water management.
…

Gentledude.blogspot.com reports about Desertification In South India.

Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Desertification In South India
…
Kannekal and Bommanahal are like any other village in South India 150 years ago. A fertile soil that yielded two crops a year, abundant rainfall, and plentiful of grass for the livestock. Centuries ago wars have been fought for the fertile lands. But Hagari, the river that flows by the villages had severe floods for a couple of years. And with the floods came sand. The sand dunes spread across the area pretty quickly, thanks to strong winds in the area. Thus started the process of desertification. Soon rainfall decreased in the area and the sand dunes started spreading quickly. The inhabitants of these villages continued with indiscriminate use of water and instead of taking steps to conserve water, used up even more water for irrigation using bore wells. This resulted in an even faster spreading of sand dunes. Now thousands of acres of land is covered by these sand dunes.

As I have written before, India faces a bleak future.

The Chart below shows worldwide growth in fertilizer use. Notice India’s 54 percent increase in fertilizer use over the last ten years.

cid:image004.jpg@01CAEB66.26EFED10

Chart below shows India’s wheat output. The red bar highlights the last ten years (where India’s fertilizer use increase 54 percent). The green bar highlights the start of India’s “green revolution”.

cid:image005.png@01CAEB62.5EDD6350

…
Now look at what happened with India’s population since the Green Revolution began.

cid:image007.jpg@01CAEB66.26EFED10

Seems like India has two choices:

1) Switch to more sustainable farming methods and try to feed twice the population with pre-“green revolution” grain production levels.
2) Continue “green revolution” farming methods and watch deteriorating soil health and desertification slowly eat away at grain production.

Both of these choices involve a lot of people not having food any more. Seems India is somewhat screwed.

For more on this, try googling overshoot-and-collapse food economy…

——————————–

3) Boosting supply by exausting NONREPLENISHABLE resources

By tapping your savings, it is possible to live above your means, temporarily. In its quest for cheap food, The ESF has promoted the use of nonreplenishable resources (the world’s “savings”) to boost agricultural production. Two examples of this are the overpumping aquifers and the use natural gas (fossil fuel) to produce nitrogen fertilizer.

Like most ESF schemes, this is now reaching the breaking point. The Encyclopedia Of Earth reports about aquifer depletion.

Aquifer depletion
Last Updated: September 14, 2006

Scores of countries are overpumping aquifers as they struggle to satisfy their growing water needs, including each of the big three grain producers-China, India, and the United States. These three, along with a number of other countries where water tables are falling, are home to more than half the world’s people. (See Table at end of article.)

There are two types of aquifers: replenishable and nonreplenishable (or fossil) aquifers. Most of the aquifers in India and the shallow aquifer under the North China Plain are replenishable. When these are depleted, the maximum rate of pumping is automatically reduced to the rate of recharge.

For fossil aquifers—such as the vast U.S. Ogallala aquifer, the deep aquifer under the North China Plain, or the Saudi aquifer—DEPLETION BRINGS PUMPING TO AN END. Farmers who lose their irrigation water have the option of returning to lower-yield dryland farming if rainfall permits. In more arid regions, however, such as in the southwestern United States or the Middle East, THE LOSS OF IRRIGATION WATER MEANS THE END OF AGRICULTURE.

Falling water tables are already adversely affecting harvests in some countries, including China, the world’s largest grain producer. A groundwater survey released in Beijing in August 2001 revealed that the water table under the North China Plain, which produces over half of that country’s wheat and a third of its corn, is falling faster than earlier reported. Overpumping has largely depleted the shallow aquifer, forcing well drillers to turn to the region’s deep fossil aquifer, which is not replenishable.

The survey, conducted by the Geological Environmental Monitoring Institute (GEMI) in Beijing, reported that under Hebei Province in the heart of the North China Plain, the average level of the deep aquifer was dropping nearly 3 meters (10 feet) per year. Around some cities in the province, it was falling twice as fast. He Qingcheng, head of the GEMI groundwater monitoring team, notes that as the deep aquifer is depleted, the region is losing its last water reserve-its only safety cushion.

He Qingcheng’s concerns are mirrored in a World Bank report: "Anecdotal evidence suggests that deep wells [drilled] around Beijing now have to reach 1,000 meters [more than half a mile] to tap fresh water, adding dramatically to the cost of supply." In unusually strong language for a Bank report, it foresees "CATASTROPHIC CONSEQUENCES FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS" unless water use and supply can quickly be brought back into balance.

The U.S. embassy in Beijing reports that wheat farmers in some areas are now pumping from a depth of 300 meters, or nearly 1,000 feet. Pumping water from this far down raises pumping costs so high that farmers are often forced to abandon irrigation and return to less productive dryland farming.

Falling water tables, the conversion of cropland to nonfarm uses, and the loss of farm labor in provinces that are rapidly industrializing are combining to shrink China’s grain harvest. The wheat crop, grown mostly in semiarid northern China, is particularly vulnerable to water shortages. After peaking at 123 million tons in 1997, the harvest has fallen in five of the last eight years, coming in at 95 million tons in 2005, a drop of 23 percent.

The U.S. embassy also reports that the recent decline in rice production is partly a result of water shortages. After peaking at 140 million tons in 1997, the harvest dropped in four of the following eight years, falling to an estimated 127 million tons in 2005. Only corn, China’s third major grain, has thus far avoided a decline. This is because corn prices are favorable and because the crop is not as irrigation-dependent as wheat and rice are.

Overall, China’s grain production has fallen from its historical peak of 392 million tons in 1998 to an estimated 358 million tons in 2005. For perspective, this drop of 34 million tons exceeds the annual Canadian wheat harvest. China largely covered the drop-off in production by drawing down its once vast stocks until 2004, at which point it imported 7 million tons of grain.

A World Bank study indicates that China is overpumping three river basins in the north–the Hai, which flows through Beijing and Tianjin; the Yellow; and the Huai, the next river south of the Yellow. Since it takes 1,000 tons of water to produce one ton of grain, the shortfall in the Hai basin of nearly 40 billion tons of water per year (1 ton equals 1 cubic meter) means that when the aquifer is depleted, THE GRAIN HARVEST WILL DROP BY 40 MILLION TONS–enough to feed 120 million Chinese.

Of the leading grain producers, only China has thus far experienced a substantial decline in production. Even with a worldwide grain crunch and climbing grain prices providing an incentive to boost production, it will be difficult for China to regain earlier grain production levels, given the loss of irrigation water.

Serious though emerging water shortages are in China, they are even more serious in India simply because the margin between actual food consumption and survival is so precarious. In a survey of India’s water situation, Fred Pearce reported in the New Scientist that the 21 million wells drilled in this global epicenter of well-drilling are lowering water tables in most of the country. In North Gujarat, the water table is falling by 6 meters (20 feet) per year.

In Tamil Nadu, a state with more than 62 million people in southern India, wells are going dry almost everywhere. According to Kuppannan Palanisami of Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, falling water tables have dried up 95 percent of the wells owned by small farmers, reducing the irrigated area in the state by half over the last decade.

As water tables fall, well drillers are using modified oil-drilling technology to reach water, going as deep as 1,000 meters in some locations. In communities where underground water sources have dried up entirely, all agriculture is rain-fed and drinking water is trucked in. Tushaar Shah, who heads the International Water Management Institute’s groundwater station in Gujarat, says of India’s water situation: "When the balloon bursts, untold anarchy will be the lot of rural India."

At this point, the harvests of wheat and rice, India’s principal food grains, are still increasing. But within the next few years, [in 2011 (five years since article was written, it has already begun] the loss of irrigation water could override technological progress and start shrinking the harvest in some areas, as it is already doing in China.

In the United States, the USDA reports that in parts of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas–three leading grain-producing states–the underground water table has dropped by more than 30 meters (100 feet). As a result, wells have gone dry on thousands of farms in the southern Great Plains. Although this mining of underground water is taking a toll on U.S. grain production, irrigated land accounts for only one-fifth of the U.S. grain harvest, compared with close to three-fifths of the harvest in India and four-fifths in China.

Pakistan, a country with 158 million people that is growing by 3 million per year, is also mining its underground water. In the Pakistani part of the fertile Punjab plain, the drop in water tables appears to be similar to that in India. Observation wells near the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi show a fall in the water table between 1982 and 2000 that ranges from 1 to nearly 2 meters a year.

In the province of Baluchistan, water tables around the capital, Quetta, are falling by 3.5 meters per year. Richard Garstang, a water expert with the World Wildlife Fund and a participant in a study of Pakistan’s water situation, said in 2001 that "within 15 years Quetta will run out of water if the current consumption rate continues." [It is now 2011. About four years left]

The water shortage in Baluchistan is province-wide. Sardar Riaz A. Khan, former Director of Pakistan’s Arid Zone Research Institute in Quetta, reports that six basins have exhausted their groundwater supplies, leaving their irrigated lands barren. Khan expects that within 10-15 years virtually all the basins outside the canal-irrigated areas will have depleted their groundwater supplies, depriving the province of much of its grain harvest.

Future irrigation water cutbacks as a result of aquifer depletion will undoubtedly reduce Pakistan’s grain harvest. Countrywide, the harvest of wheat–the principal food staple–is continuing to grow, but more slowly than in the past.

Iran, a country of 70 million people, is overpumping its aquifers by an average of 5 billion tons of water per year, the water equivalent of one-third of its annual grain harvest. Under the small but agriculturally rich Chenaran Plain in northeastern Iran, the water table was falling by 2.8 meters a year in the late 1990s. New wells being drilled both for irrigation and to supply the nearby city of Mashad are responsible. Villages in eastern Iran are being abandoned as wells go dry, generating a flow of “water refugees.”

Saudi Arabia, a country of 25 million people, is as water-poor as it is oil-rich. Relying heavily on subsidies, it developed an extensive irrigated agriculture based largely on its deep fossil aquifer. After several years of using oil money to support wheat prices at five times the world market level, the government was forced to face fiscal reality and cut the subsidies. Its wheat harvest dropped from a high of 4.1 million tons in 1992 to 1.2 million tons in 2005, a drop of 71 percent. [Saudi Arabia is phasing out wheat production entirely by 2016]

Craig Smith writes in the New York Times, “From the air, the circular wheat fields of this arid land’s breadbasket look like forest green poker chips strewn across the brown desert. But they are outnumbered by the ghostly silhouettes of fields left to fade back into the sand, places where the kingdom’s gamble on agriculture has sucked precious aquifers dry.” Some Saudi farmers are now pumping water from wells that are 4,000 feet deep, nearly four-fifths of a mile (1 mile equals 1.61 kilometers).

A 1984 Saudi national survey reported fossil water reserves at 462 billion tons. Half of that, Smith reports, has probably disappeared by now. This suggests that irrigated agriculture could last for another decade or so and then will largely vanish [Saudi Arabia is phasing out wheat production by 2016], limited to the small area that can be irrigated with water from the shallow aquifers that are replenished by the kingdom’s sparse rainfall. It is a classic example of an overshoot-and-collapse food economy.

In neighboring Yemen, a nation of 21 million, the water table under most of the country is falling by roughly 2 meters a year as water use outstrips the sustainable yield of aquifers. In western Yemen’s Sana’a Basin, the estimated annual water extraction of 224 million tons exceeds the annual recharge of 42 million tons by a factor of five, dropping the water table 6 meters per year. World Bank projections indicate the Sana’a Basin-—site of the national capital, Sana’a, and home to 2 million people—-will be pumped dry by 2010.

In the search for water, the Yemeni government has drilled test wells in the basin that are 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) deep-—depths normally associated with the oil industry—-but they have failed to find water. Yemen must soon decide whether to bring water to Sana’a, possibly by pipeline from coastal desalting plants, if it can afford it, or to relocate the capital. Either alternative will be costly and potentially traumatic.

With its population growing at 3 percent a year and with water tables falling everywhere, Yemen is fast becoming a hydrological basket case. Aside from the effect of overpumping on the capital, World Bank official Christopher Ward observes that “groundwater is being mined at such a rate that parts of the rural economy could disappear within a generation.” [See Google Archive News results for Yemen water]

Israel, even though a pioneer in raising irrigation water productivity, is depleting both of its principal aquifers—-the coastal aquifer and the mountain aquifer that it shares with Palestinians. Israel’s population, whose growth is fueled by both natural increase and immigration, is outgrowing its water supply. Conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians over the allocation of water in the latter area are ongoing. Because of severe water shortages, Israel has banned the irrigation of wheat.

In Mexico-—home to a population of 107 million that is projected to reach 140 million by 2050—-the demand for water is outstripping supply. Mexico City’s water problems are well known and rural areas are also suffering. For example, in the agricultural state of Guanajuato, the water table is falling by 2 meters or more a year. At the national level, 51 percent of all the water extracted from underground is from aquifers that are being overpumped.

Since the overpumping of aquifers is occurring in many countries more or less simultaneously, the depletion of aquifers and the resulting harvest cutbacks could come AT ROUGHLY THE SAME TIME. And the accelerating depletion of aquifers means this day may come soon, creating potentially UNMANAGEABLE FOOD SCARCITY.

The New York Times reports about the shortages threaten farmers’ key tool: fertilizer.

April 30, 2008
Shortages Threaten Farmers’ Key Tool: Fertilizer
By KEITH BRADSHER and ANDREW MARTIN

… the widespread use of inexpensive chemical fertilizer, coupled with market reforms, helped power an agricultural explosion here that had already occurred in other parts of the world. Yields of rice and corn rose, and diets grew richer.

Now those gains are threatened in many countries by spot shortages and soaring prices for fertilizer, the most essential ingredient of modern agriculture.

Some kinds of fertilizer have nearly tripled in price in the last year, keeping farmers from buying all they need. That is one of many factors contributing to a rise in food prices that, according to the United Nations’ World Food Program, threatens to push tens of millions of poor people into malnutrition.

Protests over high food prices have erupted across the developing world, and the stability of governments from Senegal to the Philippines is threatened.

In the United States, farmers in Iowa eager to replenish nutrients in the soil have increased the age-old practice of spreading hog manure on fields. In India, the cost of subsidizing fertilizer for farmers has soared, leading to political dispute. And in Africa, plans to stave off hunger by increasing crop yields are suddenly in jeopardy.

The squeeze on the supply of fertilizer has been building for roughly five years. Rising demand for food and biofuels prompted farmers everywhere to plant more crops. As demand grew, the fertilizer mines and factories of the world proved unable to keep up.

Some dealers in the Midwest ran out of fertilizer last fall, and they continue to restrict sales this spring because of a limited supply.

“If you want 10,000 tons, they’ll sell you 5,000 today, maybe 3,000,” said W. Scott Tinsman Jr., a fertilizer dealer in Davenport, Iowa. “The rubber band is stretched really far.”

…
Agriculture and development experts say the world has few alternatives to its growing dependence on fertilizer. As population increases and a rising global middle class demands more food, fertilizer is among the most effective strategies to increase crop yields.

“Putting fertilizer on the ground on a one-acre plot can, in typical cases, raise an extra ton of output,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, the Columbia University economist who has focused on eradicating poverty. “That’s the difference between life and death.”

…
Fertilizer is plant food, a combination of nutrients added to soil to help plants grow. The three most important are nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. The latter two have long been available. But nitrogen in a form that plants can absorb is scarce, and the lack of it led to low crop yields for centuries.

That limitation ended in the early 20th century with the invention of a procedure, now primarily fueled by natural gas, that draws chemically inert nitrogen from the air and converts it into a usable form.

As the use of such fertilizer spread, it was accompanied by improved plant varieties and greater mechanization. From 1900 to 2000, worldwide food production jumped by 600 percent. Scientists said that increase was the fundamental reason world population was able to rise to about 6.7 billion today from 1.7 billion in 1900.

Vaclav Smil, a professor at the University of Manitoba, calculates that WITHOUT NITROGEN FERTILIZER, THERE WOULD BE INSUFFICIENT FOOD FOR 40 PERCENT OF THE WORLD’S POPULATION, at least based on today’s diets. [KEY POINT]

…
“This is a basic problem, to feed 6.6 billion people,” said Norman Borlaug, an American scientist who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his role in spreading intensive agricultural practices to poor countries. “Without chemical fertilizer, forget it. THE GAME IS OVER.”

The thing about living beyond your means by tapping your savings is that it is very painful when those savings run out.

The Food Issue
FEATURE PRINT | TEXT SIZE | EMAIL | SINGLE PAGE
More Than 1 Billion People Are Hungry in the World
But what if the experts are wrong?
BY ABHIJIT BANERJEE, ESTHER DUFLO | MAY/JUNE 2011

For many in the West, poverty is almost synonymous with hunger. Indeed, the announcement by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in 2009 that more than 1 billion people are suffering from hunger grabbed headlines in a way that any number of World Bank estimates of how many poor people live on less than a dollar a day never did.
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But is it really true? Are there really more than a billion people going to bed hungry each night? Our research on this question has taken us to rural villages and teeming urban slums around the world, collecting data and speaking with poor people about what they eat and what else they buy, from Morocco to Kenya, Indonesia to India. We've also tapped into a wealth of insights from our academic colleagues. What we've found is that the story of hunger, and of poverty more broadly, is far more complex than any one statistic or grand theory; it is a world where those without enough to eat may save up to buy a TV instead, where more money doesn't necessarily translate into more food, and where making rice cheaper can sometimes even lead people to buy less rice.

But unfortunately, this is not always the world as the experts view it. All too many of them still promote sweeping, ideological solutions to problems that defy one-size-fits-all answers, arguing over foreign aid, for example, while the facts on the ground bear little resemblance to the fierce policy battles they wage.

Jeffrey Sachs, an advisor to the United Nations and director of Columbia University's Earth Institute, is one such expert. In books and countless speeches and television appearances, he has argued that poor countries are poor because they are hot, infertile, malaria-infested, and often landlocked; these factors, however, make it hard for them to be productive without an initial large investment to help them deal with such endemic problems. But they cannot pay for the investments precisely because they are poor -- they are in what economists call a "poverty trap." Until something is done about these problems, neither free markets nor democracy will do very much for them.

But then there are others, equally vocal, who believe that all of Sachs's answers are wrong. William Easterly, who battles Sachs from New York University at the other end of Manhattan, has become one of the most influential aid critics in his books, The Elusive Quest for Growth and The White Man's Burden. Dambisa Moyo, an economist who worked at Goldman Sachs and the World Bank, has joined her voice to Easterly's with her recent book, Dead Aid. Both argue that aid does more bad than good. It prevents people from searching for their own solutions, while corrupting and undermining local institutions and creating a self-perpetuating lobby of aid agencies. The best bet for poor countries, they argue, is to rely on one simple idea: When markets are free and the incentives are right, people can find ways to solve their problems. They do not need handouts from foreigners or their own governments. In this sense, the aid pessimists are actually quite optimistic about the way the world works. According to Easterly, there is no such thing as a poverty trap.

This debate cannot be solved in the abstract. To find out whether there are in fact poverty traps, and, if so, where they are and how to help the poor get out of them, we need to better understand the concrete problems they face. Some aid programs help more than others, but which ones? Finding out required us to step out of the office and look more carefully at the world. In 2003, we founded what became the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, or J-PAL. A key part of our mission is to research by using randomized control trials -- similar to experiments used in medicine to test the effectiveness of a drug -- to understand what works and what doesn't in the real-world fight against poverty. In practical terms, that meant we'd have to start understanding how the poor really live their lives.

Take, for example, Pak Solhin, who lives in a small village in West Java, Indonesia. He once explained to us exactly how a poverty trap worked. His parents used to have a bit of land, but they also had 13 children and had to build so many houses for each of them and their families that there was no land left for cultivation. Pak Solhin had been working as a casual agricultural worker, which paid up to 10,000 rupiah per day (about $2) for work in the fields. A recent hike in fertilizer and fuel prices, however, had forced farmers to economize. The local farmers decided not to cut wages, Pak Solhin told us, but to stop hiring workers instead. As a result, in the two months before we met him in 2008, he had not found a single day of agricultural labor. He was too weak for the most physical work, too inexperienced for more skilled labor, and, at 40, too old to be an apprentice. No one would hire him.

Pak Solhin, his wife, and their three children took drastic steps to survive. His wife left for Jakarta, some 80 miles away, where she found a job as a maid. But she did not earn enough to feed the children. The oldest son, a good student, dropped out of school at 12 and started as an apprentice on a construction site. The two younger children were sent to live with their grandparents. Pak Solhin himself survived on the roughly 9 pounds of subsidized rice he got every week from the government and on fish he caught at a nearby lake. His brother fed him once in a while. In the week before we last spoke with him, he had eaten two meals a day for four days, and just one for the other three.

Pak Solhin appeared to be out of options, and he clearly attributed his problem to a lack of food. As he saw it, farmers weren't interested in hiring him because they feared they couldn't pay him enough to avoid starvation; and if he was starving, he would be useless in the field. What he described was the classic nutrition-based poverty trap, as it is known in the academic world. The idea is simple: The human body needs a certain number of calories just to survive. So when someone is very poor, all the food he or she can afford is barely enough to allow for going through the motions of living and earning the meager income used to buy that food. But as people get richer, they can buy more food and that extra food goes into building strength, allowing people to produce much more than they need to eat merely to stay alive. This creates a link between income today and income tomorrow: The very poor earn less than they need to be able to do significant work, but those who have enough to eat can work even more. There's the poverty trap: The poor get poorer, and the rich get richer and eat even better, and get stronger and even richer, and the gap keeps increasing.

But though Pak Solhin's explanation of how someone might get trapped in starvation was perfectly logical, there was something vaguely troubling about his narrative. We met him not in war-infested Sudan or in a flooded area of Bangladesh, but in a village in prosperous Java, where, even after the increase in food prices in 2007 and 2008, there was clearly plenty of food available and a basic meal did not cost much. He was still eating enough to survive; why wouldn't someone be willing to offer him the extra bit of nutrition that would make him productive in return for a full day's work? More generally, although a hunger-based poverty trap is certainly a logical possibility, is it really relevant for most poor people today? What's the best way, if any, for the world to help?

THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY has certainly bought into the idea that poverty traps exist -- and that they are the reason that millions are starving. The first U.N. Millennium Development Goal, for instance, is to "eradicate extreme poverty and hunger." In many countries, the definition of poverty itself has been connected to food; the thresholds for determining that someone was poor were originally calculated as the budget necessary to buy a certain number of calories, plus some other indispensable purchases, such as housing. A "poor" person has essentially been classified as someone without enough to eat.

So it is no surprise that government efforts to help the poor are largely based on the idea that the poor desperately need food and that quantity is what matters. Food subsidies are ubiquitous in the Middle East: Egypt spent $3.8 billion on food subsidies in the 2008 fiscal year, some 2 percent of its GDP. Indonesia distributes subsidized rice. Many states in India have a similar program. In the state of Orissa, for example, the poor are entitled to 55 pounds of rice a month at about 1 rupee per pound, less than 20 percent of the market price. Currently, the Indian Parliament is debating a Right to Food Act, which would allow people to sue the government if they are starving. Delivering such food aid is a logistical nightmare. In India it is estimated that more than half of the wheat and one-third of the rice gets "lost" along the way. To support direct food aid in this circumstance, one would have to be quite convinced that what the poor need more than anything is more grain.

But what if the poor are not, in general, eating too little food? What if, instead, they are eating the wrong kinds of food, depriving them of nutrients needed to be successful, healthy adults? What if the poor aren't starving, but choosing to spend their money on other priorities? Development experts and policymakers would have to completely reimagine the way they think about hunger. And governments and aid agencies would need to stop pouring money into failed programs and focus instead on finding new ways to truly improve the lives of the world's poorest.

Consider India, one of the great puzzles in this age of food crises. The standard media story about the country, at least when it comes to food, is about the rapid rise of obesity and diabetes as the urban upper-middle class gets richer. Yet the real story of nutrition in India over the last quarter-century, as Princeton professor Angus Deaton and Jean Drèze, a professor at Allahabad University and a special advisor to the Indian government, have shown, is not that Indians are becoming fatter: It is that they are in fact eating less and less. Despite the country's rapid economic growth, per capita calorie consumption in India has declined; moreover, the consumption of all other nutrients except fat also appears to have gone down among all groups, even the poorest. Today, more than three-quarters of the population live in households whose per capita calorie consumption is less than 2,100 calories in urban areas and 2,400 in rural areas -- numbers that are often cited as "minimum requirements" in India for those engaged in manual labor. Richer people still eat more than poorer people. But at all levels of income, the share of the budget devoted to food has declined and people consume fewer calories.

What is going on? The change is not driven by declining incomes; by all accounts, Indians are making more money than ever before. Nor is it because of rising food prices -- between the early 1980s and 2005, food prices declined relative to the prices of other things, both in rural and urban India. Although food prices have increased again since 2005, Indians began eating less precisely when the price of food was going down.

So the poor, even those whom the FAO would classify as hungry on the basis of what they eat, do not seem to want to eat much more even when they can. Indeed, they seem to be eating less. What could explain this? Well, to start, let's assume that the poor know what they are doing. After all, they are the ones who eat and work. If they could be tremendously more productive and earn much more by eating more, then they probably would. So could it be that eating more doesn't actually make us particularly more productive, and as a result, there is no nutrition-based poverty trap?

One reason the poverty trap might not exist is that most people have enough to eat. We live in a world today that is theoretically capable of feeding every person on the planet. In 1996, the FAO estimated that world food production was enough to provide at least 2,700 calories per person per day. Starvation still exists, but only as a result of the way food gets shared among us. There is no absolute scarcity. Using price data from the Philippines, we calculated the cost of the cheapest diet sufficient to give 2,400 calories. It would cost only about 21 cents a day, very affordable even for the very poor (the worldwide poverty line is set at roughly a dollar per day). The catch is, it would involve eating only bananas and eggs, something no one would like to do day in, day out. But so long as people are prepared to eat bananas and eggs when they need to, we should find very few people stuck in poverty because they do not get enough to eat. Indian surveys bear this out: The percentage of people who say they do not have enough food has dropped dramatically over time, from 17 percent in 1983 to 2 percent in 2004. So, perhaps people eat less because they are less hungry.

And perhaps they are really less hungry, despite eating fewer calories. It could be that because of improvements in water and sanitation, they are leaking fewer calories in bouts of diarrhea and other ailments. Or maybe they are less hungry because of the decline of heavy physical work. With the availability of drinking water in villages, women do not need to carry heavy loads for long distances; improvements in transportation have reduced the need to travel on foot; in even the poorest villages, flour is now milled using a motorized mill, instead of women grinding it by hand. Using the average calorie requirements calculated by the Indian Council of Medical Research, Deaton and Drèze note that the decline in calorie consumption over the last quarter-century could be entirely explained by a modest decrease in the number of people engaged in heavy physical work.

Beyond India, one hidden assumption in our description of the poverty trap is that the poor eat as much as they can. If there is any chance that by eating a bit more the poor could start doing meaningful work and get out of the poverty trap zone, then they should eat as much as possible. Yet most people living on less than a dollar a day do not seem to act as if they are starving. If they were, surely they would put every available penny into buying more calories. But they do not. In an 18-country data set we assembled on the lives of the poor, food represents 36 to 79 percent of consumption among the rural extremely poor, and 53 to 74 percent among their urban counterparts.

It is not because they spend all the rest on other necessities. In Udaipur, India, for example, we find that the typical poor household could spend up to 30 percent more on food, if it completely cut expenditures on alcohol, tobacco, and festivals. The poor seem to have many choices, and they don't choose to spend as much as they can on food. Equally remarkable is that even the money that people do spend on food is not spent to maximize the intake of calories or micronutrients. Studies have shown that when very poor people get a chance to spend a little bit more on food, they don't put everything into getting more calories. Instead, they buy better-tasting, more expensive calories.

In one study conducted in two regions of China, researchers offered randomly selected poor households a large subsidy on the price of the basic staple (wheat noodles in one region, rice in the other). We usually expect that when the price of something goes down, people buy more of it. The opposite happened. Households that received subsidies for rice or wheat consumed less of those two foods and ate more shrimp and meat, even though their staples now cost less. Overall, the caloric intake of those who received the subsidy did not increase (and may even have decreased), despite the fact that their purchasing power had increased. Nor did the nutritional content improve in any other sense. The likely reason is that because the rice and wheat noodles were cheap but not particularly tasty, feeling richer might actually have made them consume less of those staples. This reasoning suggests that at least among these very poor urban households, getting more calories was not a priority: Getting better-tasting ones was.

All told, many poor people might eat fewer calories than we -- or the FAO -- think is appropriate. But this does not seem to be because they have no other choice; rather, they are not hungry enough to seize every opportunity to eat more. So perhaps there aren't a billion "hungry" people in the world after all.

NONE OF THIS IS TO SAY that the logic of the hunger-based poverty trap is flawed. The idea that better nutrition would propel someone on the path to prosperity was almost surely very important at some point in history, and it may still be today. Nobel Prize-winning economic historian Robert Fogel calculated that in Europe during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, food production did not provide enough calories to sustain a full working population. This could explain why there were large numbers of beggars -- they were literally incapable of any work. The pressure of just getting enough food to survive seems to have driven some people to take rather extreme steps. There was an epidemic of witch killing in Europe during the Little Ice Age (from the mid-1500s to 1800), when crop failures were common and fish was less abundant. Even today, Tanzania experiences a rash of such killings whenever there is a drought -- a convenient way to get rid of an unproductive mouth to feed at times when resources are very tight. Families, it seems, suddenly discover that an older woman living with them (usually a grandmother) is a witch, after which she gets chased away or killed by others in the village.

But the world we live in today is for the most part too rich for the occasional lack of food to be a big part of the story of the persistence of poverty on a large scale. This is of course different during natural or man-made disasters, or in famines that kill and weaken millions. As Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has shown, most recent famines have been caused not because food wasn't available but because of bad governance -- institutional failures that led to poor distribution of the available food, or even hoarding and storage in the face of starvation elsewhere. As Sen put it, "No substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press."

Should we let it rest there, then? Can we assume that the poor, though they may be eating little, do eat as much as they need to?

That also does not seem plausible. While Indians may prefer to buy things other than food as they get richer, they and their children are certainly not well nourished by any objective standard. Anemia is rampant; body-mass indices are some of the lowest in the world; almost half of children under 5 are much too short for their age, and one-fifth are so skinny that they are considered to be "wasted."

And this is not without consequences. There is a lot of evidence that children suffering from malnutrition generally grow into less successful adults. In Kenya, children who were given deworming pills in school for two years went to school longer and earned, as young adults, 20 percent more than children in comparable schools who received deworming for just one year. Worms contribute to anemia and general malnutrition, essentially because they compete with the child for nutrients. And the negative impact of undernutrition starts before birth. In Tanzania, to cite just one example, children born to mothers who received sufficient amounts of iodine during pregnancy completed between one-third and one-half of a year more schooling than their siblings who were in utero when their mothers weren't being treated. It is a substantial increase, given that most of these children will complete only four or five years of schooling in total. In fact, the study concludes that if every mother took iodine capsules, there would be a 7.5 percent increase in the total educational attainment of children in Central and Southern Africa. This, in turn, could measurably affect lifetime productivity.

Better nutrition matters for adults, too. In another study, in Indonesia, researchers tested the effects of boosting people's intake of iron, a key nutrient that prevents anemia. They found that iron supplements made men able to work harder and significantly boosted income. A year's supply of iron-fortified fish sauce cost the equivalent of $6, and for a self-employed male, the yearly gain in earnings was nearly $40 -- an excellent investment.

If the gains are so obvious, why don't the poor eat better? Eating well doesn't have to be prohibitively expensive. Most mothers could surely afford iodized salt, which is now standard in many parts of the world, or one dose of iodine every two years (at 51 cents per dose). Poor households could easily get a lot more calories and other nutrients by spending less on expensive grains (like rice and wheat), sugar, and processed foods, and more on leafy vegetables and coarse grains. But in Kenya, when the NGO that was running the deworming program asked parents in some schools to pay a few cents for deworming their children, almost all refused, thus depriving their children of hundreds of dollars of extra earnings over their lifetime.

Why? And why did anemic Indonesian workers not buy iron-fortified fish sauce on their own? One answer is that they don't believe it will matter -- their employers may not realize that they are more productive now. (In fact, in Indonesia, earnings improved only for the self-employed workers.) But this does not explain why all pregnant women in India aren't using only iodine-fortified salt, which is now available in every village. Another possibility is that people may not realize the value of feeding themselves and their children better -- not everyone has the right information, even in the United States. Moreover, people tend to be suspicious of outsiders who tell them that they should change their diet. When rice prices went up sharply in 1966 and 1967, the chief minister of West Bengal suggested that eating less rice and more vegetables would be both good for people's health and easier on their budgets. This set off a flurry of outrage, and the chief minister was greeted by protesters bearing garlands of vegetables wherever he went.

It is simply not very easy to learn about the value of many of these nutrients based on personal experience. Iodine might make your children smarter, but the difference is not huge, and in most cases you will not find out either way for many years. Iron, even if it makes people stronger, does not suddenly turn you into a superhero. The $40 extra a year the self-employed man earned may not even have been apparent to him, given the many ups and downs of his weekly income.

So it shouldn't surprise us that the poor choose their foods not mainly for their cheap prices and nutritional value, but for how good they taste. George Orwell, in his masterful description of the life of poor British workers in The Road to Wigan Pier, observes:

The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea and potatoes -- an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't.… When you are unemployed … you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit "tasty." There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you.

The poor often resist the wonderful plans we think up for them because they do not share our faith that those plans work, or work as well as we claim. We shouldn't forget, too, that other things may be more important in their lives than food. Poor people in the developing world spend large amounts on weddings, dowries, and christenings. Part of the reason is probably that they don't want to lose face, when the social custom is to spend a lot on those occasions. In South Africa, poor families often spend so lavishly on funerals that they skimp on food for months afterward.

And don't underestimate the power of factors like boredom. Life can be quite dull in a village. There is no movie theater, no concert hall. And not a lot of work, either. In rural Morocco, Oucha Mbarbk and his two neighbors told us they had worked about 70 days in agriculture and about 30 days in construction that year. Otherwise, they took care of their cattle and waited for jobs to materialize. All three men lived in small houses without water or sanitation. They struggled to find enough money to give their children a good education. But they each had a television, a parabolic antenna, a DVD player, and a cell phone.

This is something that Orwell captured as well, when he described how poor families survived the Depression:

Instead of raging against their destiny they have made things tolerable by reducing their standards.

But they don't necessarily lower their standards by cutting out luxuries and concentrating on necessities; more often it is the other way around -- the more natural way, if you come to think of it. Hence the fact that in a decade of unparalleled depression, the consumption of all cheap luxuries has increased.

These "indulgences" are not the impulsive purchases of people who are not thinking hard about what they are doing. Oucha Mbarbk did not buy his TV on credit -- he saved up over many months to scrape enough money together, just as the mother in India starts saving for her young daughter's wedding by buying a small piece of jewelry here and a stainless-steel bucket there.

We often see the world of the poor as a land of missed opportunities and wonder why they don't invest in what would really make their lives better. But the poor may well be more skeptical about supposed opportunities and the possibility of any radical change in their lives. They often behave as if they think that any change that is significant enough to be worth sacrificing for will simply take too long. This could explain why they focus on the here and now, on living their lives as pleasantly as possible and celebrating when occasion demands it.

We asked Oucha Mbarbk what he would do if he had more money. He said he would buy more food. Then we asked him what he would do if he had even more money. He said he would buy better-tasting food. We were starting to feel very bad for him and his family, when we noticed the TV and other high-tech gadgets. Why had he bought all these things if he felt the family did not have enough to eat? He laughed, and said, "Oh, but television is more important than food!"

http://seawaterfoundation.org/gsi/news.html

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/10/business/fi-seafarm10/2
Letting the sea cultivate the land

Los Angeles Times Articles
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Letting the sea cultivate the land
COLUMN ONE
Scientist Carl Hodges thinks big: Why not harness rising oceans to grow a desert food crop that could also one day overtake oil as a fuel?
July 10, 2008|Marla Dickerson | Times Staff Writer

Tastiota, Mexico

A few miles inland from the Sea of Cortez, amid cracked earth and mesquite and sun-bleached cactus, neat rows of emerald plants are sprouting from the desert floor.

The crop is salicornia. It is nourished by seawater flowing from a man-made canal. And if you believe the American who is farming it, this incongruous swath of green has the potential to feed the world, fuel our vehicles and slow global warming.

He is Carl Hodges, a Tucson-based atmospheric physicist who has spent most of his 71 years figuring out how humans can feed themselves in places where good soil and fresh water are in short supply.

The founding director of the University of Arizona's highly regarded Environmental Research Lab, his work has attracted an eclectic band of admirers. They include heads of state, corporate chieftains and Hollywood stars, among them Martin Sheen and the late Marlon Brando.

Hodges' knack for making things grow in odd environments has been on display at the Land Pavilion in the Epcot theme park at Walt Disney World in Florida and the Biosphere 2 project in Arizona.

Here in the northern Mexican state of Sonora, he's thinking much bigger.

The Earth's ice sheets are melting fast. Scientists predict that rising seas could swallow some low-lying areas, displacing millions of people.

Hodges sees opportunity. Why not divert the flow inland to create wealth and jobs instead of catastrophe?

He wants to channel the ocean into man-made "rivers" to nourish commercial aquaculture operations, mangrove forests and crops that produce food and fuel. This greening of desert coastlines, he said, could add millions of acres of productive farmland and sequester vast quantities of carbon dioxide, the primary culprit in global warming. Hodges contends that it could also neutralize sea-level rise, in part by using exhausted freshwater aquifers as gigantic natural storage tanks for ocean water.

Analyzing recent projections of ice melt occurring in the Antarctic and Greenland, Hodges calculates that diverting the equivalent of three Mississippi Rivers inland would do the trick. He figures that would require 50 good-sized seawater farms that could be built within a decade if the world gets cracking.

"The only way we can stop [sea-level rise] is if people believe we can," said Hodges, whose outsize intellect is exceeded only by his self-assurance. "This is the big idea" that humanity has been waiting for, he believes.

With his trademark floppy hat, an iPhone wired perpetually to his head and a propensity to assign environmental reading homework to complete strangers, Hodges might be dismissed by some as an eccentric who has spent too much time in the Mexican sun.

"When I first met Carl, I thought he was a philosopher," said actor Sheen, a longtime friend.

Still, experts including Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center, say seawater agriculture could prove to be an important weapon in the fight against climate change.

Hodges has already built such a farm in Africa. Political upheaval there shut much of it down in 2003. That's why he's determined to construct a showcase project in North America to demonstrate what's possible.

All he needs now is $35 million. That's where salicornia comes in.

A so-called halophyte, or salt-loving plant, the briny succulent thrives in hellish heat and pitiful soil on little more than a regular dousing of ocean water. Several countries are experimenting with salicornia and other saltwater-tolerant species as sources of food. Known in some restaurants as sea asparagus, salicornia can be eaten fresh or steamed, squeezed into cooking oil or ground into high-protein meal.

Hodges, who now heads the nonprofit Seawater Foundation, plugged salicornia for years as the plant to help end world hunger. Do-gooders applauded. The private sector yawned.

Then oil prices exploded. Hodges saw his shot to lift his fleshy, leafless shrub from obscurity.

That's because salicornia has another nifty quality: It can be converted into biofuel. And, unlike grain-based ethanol, it doesn't need rain or prime farmland, and it doesn't distort global food markets. NASA has estimated that halophytes planted over an area the size of the Sahara Desert could supply more than 90% of the world's energy needs.

Last year, Hodges formed a for-profit company called Global Seawater Inc. to produce salicornia biofuel in liquid and solid versions. He lugs samples of it around in a suitcase like some environmental traveling salesman.

The enterprise recently planted 1,000 acres of salicornia here in rural Sonora, where Hodges has been doing preparatory research for decades. That crop will provide seed for a major venture planned 50 miles north in the coastal city of Bahia de Kino. Global Seawater is attempting to lease or buy 12,000 acres there for what it envisions will be the world's largest seawater farm.

The plan is to cut an ocean canal into the desert to nourish commercial ponds of shrimp and fish. Instead of dumping the effluent back into the ocean, the company would channel it further inland to fertilize fields of salicornia for biofuel. The seawater's next stop would be man-made wetlands. These mangrove forests could be "sold" to polluters to meet emissions cuts mandated by the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

"Nothing is wasted," Hodges said.

Global Seawater already has a small refinery to process salicornia oil into biodiesel fuel, which Hodges believes can be produced for at least one-third less than the current market price of crude oil. Leftover plant material would be converted into solid biofuel "logs" that he said burned cleaner than coal or wood.

NASA is interested in testing fuel from Hodges' halophyte. So are cement makers and other heavy industries. Retired executives from some major corporations are so encouraged by the potential that they are helping Global Seawater raise capital and focus on generating returns for investors.

Fernando Canales Clariond, former Mexican secretary of the economy and member of one of the nation's most powerful industrial families, recently joined the board. "The world doesn't move because of idealism," he said. "It moves because of economic incentives."

Fellow board member Anthony Simon, former president of marketing for Unilever Bestfoods, put it more bluntly. "Carl is a wonderful scientist," he said of Hodges. But he "is a lousy businessman."

Hodges has sold assets and maxed out credit cards over the years to keep his seawater dreams afloat. But it's not for the prospect of a big payday. A lifetime of studying the Earth's ecosystems has convinced him that the planet is in peril. He's determined to help get things back in balance.

Driving through the sun-scorched Sonora countryside, he pointed to abandoned grain silos and crumbling concrete irrigation channels, tombstones of failed efforts at conventional farming.

"It's a dust bowl," Hodges said. "We're going to making it bloom again . . . with a new kind of agriculture."

Some environmentalists are dubious. Wheat and cotton flourished here until farmers pumped aquifers nearly dry. Shrimp aquaculture operations have fouled the Sea of Cortez with waste.

Channeling millions of gallons of seawater inland could have similar unintended consequences for fragile deserts, said biologist Exequiel Ezcurra, former head of Mexico's National Ecology Institute. "We have had catastrophes in the past, so we have reason to be concerned," he said.

Hodges says his project has met all environmental requirements posed by Mexico. The biggest catastrophe, he said, would be to do nothing in the face of climate change.

"My father once told me, 'Carl, there is a special place in hell reserved for fence sitters.' "

The son of a horse trainer, Hodges grew up around racetracks. His dad once traded their Phoenix home for some thoroughbreds, moving the family briefly into a shed.

A stomach for risk-taking landed the young scientist in the top spot at the Environmental Research Lab in 1967 at the age of 30. There he decided that farming must be adapted to utilize saltwater, which accounts for 97% of the world's water supply.

His team's work on shrimp cultivation fueled the explosion in Mexico's aquaculture industry. The leader of Abu Dhabi sent his lab $3.6 million on a handshake to build a saltwater greenhouse system for growing vegetables in that arid emirate. Brando took a shine to Hodges after meeting him at an environmental gathering in the late 1970s. The reclusive star hosted the wonky scientist several times at his private island retreat of Tetiaroa in the South Pacific, an area especially vulnerable to sea-level rise.

"Marlon understood global warming," Hodges said. "He thought we were running out of time."

Hodges' model for the Mexico project is a seawater farm he designed for the government of Eritrea, an impoverished, bone-dry East African nation perched on the Red Sea. Opened in 1999, the farm consisted of ocean-fed ponds of shrimp and fish, whose waste was used to irrigate 250 acres of salicornia that the Eritreans converted into animal feed. A 150-acre mangrove wetland provided habitat for wildlife.

Political upheaval crippled the operation. But at its peak the farm generated hundreds of jobs and turned famine-prone Eritrea into a modest exporter of shrimp. Video footage of the endeavor shows a lush oasis of green in the desert.

"It was a miracle," said Tekie Teclemariam Anday, an Eritrean marine biologist who now works with Hodges in Mexico. "People viewed him like a messiah."

Whether Hodges' Big Idea wins a wider group of converts remains to be seen.

NASA's Bushnell says seawater agriculture has enormous potential. He praised Hodges' science as "superb." Still, he said algae might ultimately prove to be the best plant-based biofuel because it can produce much more fuel per acre.

Hodges is "a pioneer," Bushnell said. "But first-movers generally aren't the successful ones at the end."

Hodges contends that all manner of renewables are needed to wean the planet from its oil addiction. Still, his talk of stopping sea-level rise and reinventing agriculture is so audacious that some of his own backers have cautioned him to tone it down.

But longtime friend Sheen says Hodges isn't likely to. "We have to be outrageous in our efforts to solve" climate change, the actor said. "Carl is on a mission to save the world."

--

marla.dickerson@latimes.com

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June 03, 2011
Salt loving plants in India
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A pilot project to see if cash crops can be grown in the salty ground of India's coastal areas was launched in 2010. The area in Tamil Nadu state will house dozens of species of halophytes - or salt-loving plants - that can be used for producing cash crops.

Halophytes can be used to produce edible oils, medicines, vegetables, and cattle and fish feed. Halophytes can be found throughout the coastal areas of India.

Saline water plants can also be used to produce fine chemicals, biofuels and even building materials. Field studies conducted in the US and East Africa have suggested that halophytes such as sea asparagus can be grown as commercial crops.



Halophytes at wikipedia.

A halophyte is a plant that grows where it is affected by salinity in the root area or by salt spray, such as in saline semi-deserts, mangrove swamps, marshes and sloughs, and seashores. An example of a halophyte is the salt marsh grass Spartina alterniflora (smooth cordgrass). Relatively few plant species are halophytes - perhaps only 2% of all plant species. The large majority of plant species are "glycophytes", and are damaged fairly easily by salinity.

One quantitative measure of salt tolerance is the "total dissolved solids" in irrigation water that a plant can tolerate. Sea water typically contains 40 grams per litre (g/l) of dissolved salts (mostly sodium chloride). Beans and rice can tolerate about 1-3 g/l, and are considered glycophytes (as are most crop plants). At the other extreme, Salicornia bigelovii (dwarf glasswort) grows well at 70 g/l of dissolved solids, and is a promising halophyte for use as a crop. Plants such as barley (Hordeum vulgare) and the date palm (Phoenix dactylifera) can tolerate about 5 g/l, and can be considered as marginal halophytes

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