Warmest since records began: 2009

By dana.bucur Comment Closed
Author: MATT CAWOOD Via: Farm Weekly - online NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has placed 2009 as the warmest year in the Southern Hemisphere since records began 130 years ago, and the past decade as the warmest globally. Globally, 2009 tied with 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007 as the second warmest year on record after 2005, according to the GISS analysis of planetary temperatures. The decade from January 2000 to December 2009 was clearly the warmest since modern instrumentation was introduced in 1880. "There's substantial year-to-year variability of global temperature caused by the tropical El Nino-La Nina cycle", said GISS director James Hansen. "But when we average temperature over five or ten years to minimize that variability, we find that global warming is continuing unabated." Over the past three decades, according to the GISS analysis, the global average temperature has increased 0.2 degrees Celsius a decade. The Australian Bureau of Meterology (BoM) is waiting on the results of a similar analysis by the UK Met...
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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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Peak phosphorous: mankind’s latest threat

By dana.bucur Comment Closed
Author: MATT CAWOOD Source: http://fw.farmonline.com.au SOME believe that dwindling supplies of potable water is humanity's great resource challenge; others think it is the imminent prospect of "peak oil". But an equally important milestone in modern history will be an inevitable tightening of global supplies of phosphorus. Phosphorus has underpinned the leaps made in agricultural productivity since World War II, and the world's economies and population levels have become dependent on a continous supply of the element. Unlike nitrogen, which can by synthesised from the air, or the use of renewable energy to substitute for fossil fuels, there is no substitute for phosphorus. All the world's phosphate fertilisers come from mined phosphate rock, making it a finite resource. Various analyses suggest "peak phosphorus" - the point at which supply falls behind demand - will occur around 2040, with all currently known reserves potentially exhausted within 50 to 100 years. However, University of Technology Sydney researchers Dana Cordell and Stuart White warn that for most countries, a phosphorus squeeze...
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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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Live export demand defies rising prices – Australia

By dana.bucur Comment Closed
Author: TRAVIS KING DESPITE the sharp rise in sheep export prices over the past eight months, demand for Australian sheep in the Middle East is holding strong. And this demand is not expected to drop off according to Livecorp livestock services manager Peter Dundon. Mr Dundon, who is based in Bahrain, said if Australian producers were debating whether they should be sticking with sheep or not, he would strongly suggest they do. "While there is some resistance to the higher prices, importers are still keen to source Australian sheep simply because of the food security issue," Mr Dundon said. "While the fact that there are higher prices has seen some importers look to northern Africa to source sheep, no one can guarantee supply like Australia can. "Bahrain demands 2500 sheep per day and Australia supplies 95 per cent of that market. "If the trade to Bahrain stopped tomorrow, a whole lot of people would not have access to fresh meat. "Somalia is probably our biggest competitor and are...
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Just how fast is the climate changing?

By dana.bucur Comment Closed
Author: MATTHEW CAWOOD Source: Farmonline CLIMATE change has a speed: about 420 metres per year. That's the average rate at which temperature zones will shift across global landscapes during this century, according to research led by the Carnegie Institute in the United States. It is also an estimate of how quickly plants and animals will need to move to stay within current climatic zones, and an indication of the pressure on agriculture to adapt as seasonal conditions shift. Recently published in the scientific journal Nature, the research attempts to predict "temperature velocities" as a way of expressing how climate change will influence plants and animals adapted to certain climatic zones. Such work is not entirely new, according to Professor Barry Brook, who occupies the Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change at Adelaide University, but it does provide a useful picture of how climate change may advance across landscapes - including farmland. Unlike plants and animals, which must move or evolve to survive climate shifts, agriculture...
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Information the key to grains success in 2010

By dana.bucur Comment Closed
Author: Gregor Heard Source: http://fw.farmonline.com.au WITH a deregulated grains market, farmers are increasingly realising the vital importance of sound market intelligence when making marketing decisions. If the first year of deregulation was the year of on-farm storage, the 2009 season saw a huge increase in the number of brokers and analysts providing that crucial information to growers. The trend is only likely to increase, as farmers seek to find a marketing edge by assessing the micro and macro trends emerging within the market. From supply and demand balance sheets within key domestic use regions of Australia, to a snapshot of the international situation, many farmers have decided it is worth the price of hiring an expert in these areas. Contacts are also crucial, and middlemen, linking up producers with reliable domestic end-use customers, are also regarded as being worth their cut. The other major growth area in 2009 was specialised marketing products, from Elders Toepfer’s on-farm storage accreditation program, to GrainCorp’s initiative to link warehoused grain with...
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December 2009 Romania – Thank you to all of you

By dana.bucur Comment Closed
My dear readers Thank you for joining me this year. 2010 is a critical year for the future of Romanian agribusiness but the European one as well. The foreign investments built up on a strong and unitary foundation of laws and regulation - encouraging the agribusiness initiatives - may be the milestone for the good of our country and for the regional market. In 2010 I shall organise a few original events therefore I would like to keep in touch with all of you and as far as possible to comply with my invitations. I wish you a serene year-end and for the New Year all your aspirations to become true. Splendid Winter Holidays and Merry Christmas! To all of you all the best! Warmly Dana Bucur Business expert - agriculture and green fields...
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