UK food system emissions higher than thought

By dana.bucur Comment Closed
Author: Matt Cawood Via: farm Weekly THE business of growing, supply and consuming food in the United Kingdom creates about 30 per cent of the nation's greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new report. Joint contributors to the study, "How Low Can We Go", the Food Climate Research Network (FCRN) and WWF, say that driving down this emissions profile will need to go further than just technological solutions, but also address how and what the UK population eats. Two-thirds of UK emissions are related to the food supply chain, the study found, with the remaining third due to land-use changes like deforestation.  The authors considered all food-related emissions sources, including those generated from food imports into the UK. About three-quarters of land-use change emissions were considered to come from the production of beef and sheepmeat, mostly overseas. For the UK food industry to play a meaningful role in the UK's desire to cut total emissons by 80 per cent by 2050, the report's authors argue that...
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Greece – the sick country of EU

By dana.bucur Comment Closed
A very interesting article written by Mr Ionut Popescu for the published edition of Capital. Below a short translation. 'So, after the Greek experience, some people’s willingness that Romania should get faster into the euro area by relaxing the required conditions, has proven to be just a dream. Since the introduction of the euro, no country has had problems as big as Greece currently has. It circulated scenarios unimaginable a year or two ago: Greece to come out of the euro area, incapacity to pay and alike. Something like this is unlikely to happen. The Greeks seem to have bet wrong: they thought that the fraternal countries of Europe, which through their veins ‘flows’ euro also, will jump immediately to help them stay calm on the beach. European finance ministers have given the Greeks a short answer: do not even think! You must solve yourselves the problems. But in what situation is Greece? The budget deficit rose last year to 12.7% of...
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“Eastern Europe” Wrongly labelled

By dana.bucur Comment Closed
Jan 7th 2010 From The Economist print edition The economic downturn has made it harder to speak sensibly of a region called “eastern Europe” IT WAS never a very coherent idea and it is becoming a damaging one. “Eastern Europe” is a geographical oddity that includes the Czech Republic (in the middle of the continent) but not Greece or Cyprus (supposedly “western” Europe but in the far south-east). It makes little sense historically either: it includes countries (like Ukraine) that were under the heel of the Soviet empire for decades and those (Albania, say) that only brushed it. Some of those countries had harsh planned economies; others had their own version of “goulash communism” (Hungary) or “self-managed socialism” (Yugoslavia). Already unreliable in 1989, the label has stretched to meaninglessness as those countries’ fortunes have diverged since the collapse of communism. The nearly 30 states that once, either under their own names or as part of somewhere else, bore the label “communist” now have more...
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