News Forum Archives: June 2004
Scientists urge shift to nonfood crops
By Jeremy Lovell, Reuters
ENN
June 22, 2004
LONDONFarmers of the world must shift quickly to growing plants for industrial uses such as oils and plastics to replace petrochemicals as the climate warms and crude supplies run out, British scientists said Monday.
“In the next 20 to 50 years we have to reverse our dependency on fossil fuels,” said Alison Smith of Britain’s John Innes plant research center. “We must breed for sustainability.”
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Organic Cacao — Sweet Success?
by Steven J. Barry
Tico Times
May 24, 2004
BRIBRI DE TALAMANCA – Most chocolate is sweet.
For a group of organic farmers in Talamanca, in Costa Rica’s southern Caribbean zone, cultivating cacao beans – from which chocolate is made – has brought them some sweet business.
Some 800 producers from the region have bound together to form a cooperative that is producing organic cacao of such high quality that manufacturers of fine chocolates in Italy have begun to prefer cacao produced here to beans produced in Africa – a much more easily accessible import location.
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Cities intensify climate problems
By David Suzuki
ENN
June 2, 2004
Living in cities, it’s easy to forget about our connection to the natural world. In human-created environments, surrounded by concrete and asphalt, we often feel isolated and insular, as though we are protected from the forces of nature.
In some ways, we are more protected, but in other ways our cities can actually make us more vulnerable. Consider climate change. A recent report from the Harvard Medical School looked at how human-induced changes to the Earth’s atmosphere would affect the health of people living in cities. And the conclusions weren’t comforting.
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