Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

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Fishers Snagged: Not Farmed, Then Not Organic

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According to an article in yesterday’s New York Times the market for organic foods continues to grow with sales reaching US$13.8 billion in 2005 compared with US$3.6 billion in 1997.

But there’s not much ‘organic seafood’ about because of problems with definitions and also what fish eat.

Now I would have thought a wild Atlantic salmon would automatically qualify as organic. But according to the US Agriculture Department to be organic you need to be farmed: read the full story here including that: “Environmentalists rightly argue that many farm-raised fish live in cramped nets in conditions that can pollute the water, and that calling them organic is a perversion of the label. Those who catch and sell wild fish say that their products should be called organic and worry that if they are not, fish farmers will gain a huge leg up.”

All The Best To Richard Ness

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Last week the US President, George Bush, visited Indonesia to discuss amongst other things “investment”.

No doubt some radical environmentalists along with some Islamic fundamentalists don’t want foreign investment in Indonesia. Like the activists in the new documentary ‘Mine Your Own Business’ they would perhaps like the many Indonesians still living a subsistence existence to remain “happy peasants”.

Activists are also behind the campaign to jail Richard Ness.

There are miners who have done the wrong thing and impacted the Indonesian environment. Just last week, more deaths were reported from the mud flow in East Java associated with gas exploration by Santos.

But to quote Andrew Wilson, president director of Australia’s BHP Billiton-Indonesia, in the case of Richard Ness,

“This is Indonesia at its worst in terms of picking the wrong guy and saying: you are a criminal. You couldn’t get a person who has given more back to Indonesia. He’s community oriented. He looks for the long-term good rather than taking short cuts.”

Then last week, following the visit by George Bush, the US Ambassador B. Lynn Pascoe was reported in the Jakarta Post to have commented:

“A lack of legal certainty remained a major problem for Indonesia in attracting foreign investment, pointing to the prosecution of Newmont Minahasa Raya president director Richard Ness, an American, who is facing three years imprisonment if convicted in a North Sulawesi court of causing pollution, as setting a bad example.

“What we want is Indonesia to become a competitive place … one thing you don’t do … is bring court cases against somebody where you don’t have any evidence. This is exactly what has happened in the Ness case.”

I recently summarized the case against Richard Ness in a piece for On Line Opinion entitled ‘The Campaign To Stop Mining’:

“New York Times journalist Jane Perlez championed the case for the activists in a feature “Spurred by Illness, Indonesians Lash Out at US Mining Giant” in which she suggested the waters of Buyat Bay had been polluted by the gold mine with villagers developing “strange rashes and bumps”.

The article relied heavily on an interview with a member of a team of public health doctors flown in to investigate. Dr Jane Pangemanan was quoted claiming symptoms exhibited by the local villagers were consistent with mercury and arsenic poisoning.

Another key accusation in the New York Times article is that Newmont Mining was illegally and inappropriately disposing of the mines tailings into Buyat Bay and a police report showed mercury contamination.

…The same day the New York Times published its feature, the World Health Organisation published a detailed technical report (pdf 4.01MB) which concluded that Buyat Bay was not contaminated by mercury or cyanide and that levels of mercury among villagers were not high enough to cause poisoning and that the health effect of mercury and cyanide poisoning were not observed among Buyat Bay villagers.

This was the first of several reports, including a detailed report by Australia’s CSIRO and another by the Indonesian Ministry of Environment, which directly contradicted the Indonesian police report and found the bay to be unpolluted.

Of the six executives initially incarcerated, only the president of Newmont Mining in Indonesia, Richard Ness, was eventually charged. His son, Eric Ness, established a website dedicated to the trial, and in October last year reported that under cross examination, Dr Jane Pangemanan denied she ever told the New York Times that the illnesses observed in the villagers were caused by arsenic or mercury poisoning.”

On 10th November as part of the post trial phase the prosecution asked the court impose a three-year jail term on Richard Ness.

Richard Ness has responded with comment that,

“These ridiculous recommendations by the JPU make a complete mockery of the legal system. It seems like whoever wrote these charges never sat in the courtroom, or does not understand the substance of the overriding evidence that Buyat Bay is not polluted. For one, the prosecutors charged us for not filing environmental reports since 2002 while in fact, their own witness from the Ministry of Environment, Sigit Reliantoro, testified that he evaluated completed sets of reports up to 2004.

“With such unfair, unsubstantiated claims against innocent parties, this is yet another roadblock to the government’s efforts to attract much needed investments back to the country, investments that will create jobs and improve the quality of life. I have lived in this country for 30 years, love its people and have adopted many of its ways but this is a profound travesty and a disappointment to all who hope for a society based on the rule of law.”

It seemed incredible to me that the case is proceeding at all. Then again, as Phelim McAleer documents in ‘Mine Your Own Business’, unsubstantiated accusations from environmentalists can appear compelling. Their claims may be false, but they command the moral high ground. Yet sadly in the end, by hindering or stopping development and investment, they contribute to a vicious cycle that condemns the world’s poorest to a life of subsistence.

Richard Ness will be back in court next week on Tuesday 5 th December. The final judgment is likely to be handed down some time in January.

This trial is about more than the destiny of one man, it represents the struggle between development and poverty – the struggle between opportunity and radical environmentalism.

I have never met Richard Ness. But I have got to know him a little through this blog and through his son Eric who has a blog dedicated to his Dad’s trial.

Like many readers of this blog, Richard has a keen interest in the environment and like some of us is a collector of wildlife photographs.

On behalf of the many readers and contributors to this blog, I wish Richard Ness all the best for next Tuesday.

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“Using an old cream separator with local villagers to try see if we could increase the production of coconut oil,” Richard Ness, Buyat Bay in Indonesia.

Farming in Nigeria: A Note from Russell

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In the following note from Russell, which was originally posted as a comment on a thread about how biotechnology benefits American farmers, he tells us something about farming in Nigeria and how white farmers from Zimbabwe are being invited to settle in Nigeria:

“Several comments refer to the link between agricultural subsidies and the impoverishment of African farmers.

Here in Nigeria (which has 20 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s population) the two biggest causes of most farmers impoverishment in my opinion are a lack of access to capital, and a reluctance to embrace new technologies. These are two sides of the same coin as farmers have to be risk averse if they have no capital to risk on new approaches.

The cost of a bad yield here is starvation.

Much of the area farmed lies in the Guinea savannah and Sahel zones and rainfall varies in onset, duration and yield from year to year. Each year many farming communities go through a very lean period at the end of the dry season when last years stored crops run out. Off farm income is critical during this period.

Examination of farming practices demonstrates a risk minimisation strategy based upon a long history of subsistence farming within an unpredictable environment. A nice summary is given in Kathleen Bakers book “Indigenous Land Management in West Africa”.

Here in Nigeria the Banks are typically not interested in farmers as a market for loans as they perceive them (rightly) as high risk, and so it is virtually impossible for a farmer to get credit from a bank, and would farmers want credit, with interest rates ranging from 23-28 percednt?

A recent program instigated by the Kwara Sate governor which has invited Zimbabwean farmers to take up land in Kwara State has seen a small cohort of technologically saavy, capital rich white farmers take up the option of farming here.

Even these guys have not been able to get credit locally, but the most interesting aspect of their arrival has been the comments from local farmers over the high cropping densities and the monoculture plantings.

Local farmers consider the approach to be crazy, and from their capital poor perspective it is. However, it is also clear that many of the local farming practices are so deeply inculculated in the local culture that many potential forms of innovation are frowned upon. This may actually be a worthwhile risk minimisation strategy because if a farmer fails it is the other members of the family/clan/village who will have to help.

While there are wealthy landowners here who have the means to farm intensively on a much larger scale, the opportunity from cessation of EU and other subsidies might not have an immediate, or large impact on the greater mass of subsistence farmers without access to the capital required for them to enter the cotton market for example.

In fact the immediate effect of a rise in the price of cotton in this country where the wealthy have the power and influence and the poor have access to land which is not adequately protected by the land tenure system might be to push many subsistence farmers off the land and to lower the amount of land used for local food production.
Of course the economists would say this will create new opportunities, but a look at where the wealthy and powerful Nigerians invest their mostly stolen wealth (oil) reveals it goes overseas.

Against this background, which I suggest is a common feature of subsistence farmers everywhere in the savannah zones of the developing world, I am not sure I can agree with the sentiment that it is EU and US subsidies which keep the African farmer impoverished. Similarly, while I consider that GM foods can (and should) have a useful role in an African context, I am not sure that global acceptance of GM foods would also necessarily lead to a better world for African farmers.“

GM Crops Benefit US Farmers: New Report by Sujatha Sankula

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A new report entitled ‘Quantification of the Impacts on US Agriculture of Biotechnology-
Derived Crops Planted in 2005’ by the US National Centre for Food and Agricultural Policy begins with the key findings that:

“American growers continued to choose biotechnology-derived crops in 2005, the tenth year of their commercial planting, because they realized significant benefits from planting these crops. This report evaluated the reasons behind the adoption of biotechnology-derived crops on 123 million acres in the United States in their tenth year of commercial planting (2005) and analyzed the producer and crop production impacts that resulted from this widespread adoption.

American growers planted eight biotechnology-derived crops (alfalfa, canola, corn, cotton, papaya, soybean, squash, and sweet corn) in 2005. Planted acreage was mainly concentrated in 13 different applications (herbicide-resistant alfalfa, canola, corn, cotton, and soybean; virus-resistant squash and papaya; three applications of insect-resistant corn, two applications of insect-resistant cotton, and insect-resistant sweet corn). Though
the number of planted traits remained the same at three in 2005, similar to 2004, expanded acreage of 4 percent has led to overall increase in crop yield and farm income and further reduction in pesticide use.“

To read the executive summary (12 pages) click here: http://www.ncfap.org/whatwedo/pdf/2005biotechExecSummary.pdf

To read the full report (110 pages) click here: http://www.ncfap.org/whatwedo/pdf/2005biotechimpacts-finalversion.pdf

Wrong ‘Shot’ at Atlantic Conveyor Belt Speed?

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Last year Harry Bryden published a paper* in the journal Nature which indicated that there had been a 30 percent decline in the northward flow of warm water in the Atlantic Ocean. This was interpreted by many as another sign of climate change with potentially catastrophic consequences.

Also known as the ‘Atlantic Conveyor Belt’, this warm, north flowing current was made famous in the movie ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ where global warming, in particular the melting of polar ice caps, resulted in the ‘Atlantic conveyor’ stopping and North America freezing over.

Professor Bryden is part of an international monitoring program known as the Rapid Climate Change (RAPID) Program and since the Nature paper, they have collected some more data. This new data was discussed late last month with a meeting of scientists in Birmingham.

According to a new article** in the journal Science by Richard Kerr, 95 percent of the scientists at the Birmingham meeting concluded that there has been NO significant change in the overall flow of the North Atlantic conveyor and that the 30 percent finding was somewhat premature.

Importantly, more intensive monitoring has shown that variations in flow within as single year can be “as large as the changes seen from one snapshot to the next during the past few decades”.

This now appears to be the problem with Bryden’s findings as published by Nature: that is the initial findings was misleading because it just compared a 2004 snapshot with four earlier instantaneous surveys (snapshots) back to 1957.

But the popular press hasn’t caught on.

According to The Guardian, reporting on the Birmingham meeting: “Scientists have uncovered more evidence for a dramatic weakening in the vast ocean current that gives Britain its relatively balmy climate by dragging warm water northwards from the tropics. The slowdown, which climate modellers have predicted will follow global warming, has been confirmed by the most detailed study yet of ocean flow in the Atlantic.”

Gavin over at Real Climate, apparently attended the Birmingham meeting and at his blog asks how could the Guardian have got it so wwrong: “The Guardian story, which started scientists have uncovered more evidence for a dramatic weakening in the vast ocean current that gives Britain its relatively balmy climate was in complete opposition to the actual evidence presented … how could the reporting be so wrong?”

Well, if you read the report on the meeting at BBC News, it appears Professor Bryden is not part of the ’95 percent consensus’. He is still saying it is slowing, just revised down his estimate from 30 percent to 10 percent: “We concluded that there was some evidence of a small decrease but not as big as we reported in the Nature paper last year ….But we have had a decrease… in the order of 10% of the overturning circulation in the past 25 years.”

Maybe if the BBC reporter had asked Professor Bryden what the slowing has been over the past 50 years, he would have reply, not significant, no slowing? But instead the reporter let the Professor pick a 25 year interval?

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* Bryden, H.L., et al., 2005. Slowing of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation at 25ºN. Nature, 438, 655-657.

** Kerr, R. A., 2006. False Alarm: Atlantic Conveyor Belt Hasn’t Slowed Down After All, Science, 314, 1064, doi: 10.1126/science.314.5802.1064a

Thanks to Paul Biggs for sending in the link to the article by Richard Kerr and also comment that: “it is time that the Gulf Stream slow down, used by climate alarmists, was finally laid to rest. It has long been known that the Gulf Stream is primarily driven by westerley winds and the earth’s rotation.”

Why Greenpeace No-longer Battles Norwegian Whaler on the High Seas: A Note from George McCallum

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Hi Jennifer,

Since 1999 Greenpeace has not conducted an anti-whaling campaign at sea against Norwegian whalers.

According to Greenpeace, such campaigns are now considered “counter productive”.

One has to wonder then, why Greenpeace considers actions against Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean “productive”?

With this season’s Greenpeace anti-whaling campaign in the Southern Ocean almost upon us, I thought I´d look at a couple of the previous actions against Norweigan whalers.

In 1994 Greenpeace activists boarded Norweigan whaling ship the Senet and obstructed the vessel. Here’s a photograph of the Senet and Greenpeace’s Solo.

A Greenpeace activist cut loose a dying minke whale, before the whaling crew could deliver the coup de grace. Eva Egeberg, a veterinary surgeon and state inspector on board, commented, “What the activists actually achieved was to prolong the animal’s suffering”.

Greenpeace said that the cutting of the line to the minke whale was an individual action by one of the demonstrators and “not in accordance with the principles by which Greenpeace carry out their demonstrations”.

Greenpeace was sentenced in 1995 to pay 17,000 UK pounds (UKP) in damages and 11,000 UKP to cover the legal expenses of the whaling vessel skipper. The Senet continued whaling during the 1994 season and eventually took their full quota.

Whales saved = 0.

In 1999 Greenpeace conducts actions against the whaling vessels Vilduen and Kato.

During a coast guard chase of the Greenpeace rubber duckies, Greenpeace activist Mark Hardingham is seriously injured during a collision, resulting in serious breaks to one arm, a fractured pelvis and serious back injuries.

The Greenpeace ship MV Sirius is arrested by the Norwegian coast guard and towed into Stavanger harbour. A Norwegian court imposes a fine of US$35,000 dollars and a US$2000 fine for each of the activists in a rubber ducky attempting to cut loose a not yet dead minke whale next to the Kato. The whaler attempting to deliver a coup de grace to the dying Minke fires a number of shots into the head of the Minke, and a Greenpeace rubber ducky is struck by at least one of the shots.

Total value of fines and confiscations (three rubber duckies) was US$130,000. Greenpeace contest the judgements.

Kato skipper Ole Mindor Myklebust commented, “The Greenpeace inflatable then placed itself right into the side of our boat, with its bow close to the whale.

“Putting human safety first, I confirmed that nobody was close to the whale’s head. Nobody was sitting in the bow of the inflatable. I was only a few metres away from the animal when I fired three shots at it with the rifle. One bullet apparently made a hole in the bow of the Greenpeace boat because it was so close to the whale.
There is a very good reason for having a safety zone.

“This is a killing zone, not a playing zone. We are killing big animals, using heavy weaponry like explosive penthrite grenades and high-calibre rifles intended to kill Minke whales weighing up to 10 tonnes as quickly as possible.”

Whales saved = 0.

Will it take someone to be seriously injured or even worse killed in the Southern Ocean this winter before Greenpeace re-evaluates it position on battling the Japanese at sea?

Cheers, George McCallum

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Greenpeace Ship Esperanza at dock in Tromso, Norway