Supreme Court forces the govt to act, to stop grains being wasted
So much so that it sent a Group of Ministers (GoM) into a huddle to immediately spell out what they intend to do. Since the Supreme Court wanted a definite answer by Monday Sept 5, the GoM has come out with the promise of revamping the rotten Public Distribution System (PDS) and has also promised to make an additional allocation of 2.5 million tonnes of grains at below the poverty line price to States. This will be done in the next six months.
I only hope that the Supreme Court keeps up the pressure to force the government to act. It is criminal to let grains rot while millions go to bed hungry. This can happen only in a democracy.
The nation is still not sure as to what to do to ensure household food security. I find the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC) still grappling with a way out while the Ministry for Food and Agriculture insisting that providing a monthly ration of 35 kg to 37.2 per cent of the population computed to be below the poverty line is the answer. The issue has got so polarised that the NAC goes on harping on the need to ensure a universal right to food just because it has taken a position which suits its constituency.
The Supreme Court has questioned the justification of a universal PDS. I agree. There is no need for a universal PDS as it would provide a license for the grain traders to make a killing. The Supreme Court would do well to consider the more plausible approach by raising the upper limit of the beneficiaries in the sense that instead of 37.2 per cent, it needs to include 55 per cent of the population (which means following the UNDP estimate of poverty in India) as beneficiaries. This will automatically include all those cases which are on the border line. At the same time, it will also ensure that the National Food Security Act is not a half-hearted attempt.
However, providing 35 kg of grain to the BPL population is simply nothing more than food entitlement. When we use the term Food Security, as in the proposed National Food Security Act, we surely have to look beyond entitlements. And that is where the NAC fails, and so does the Ministry for Food and Agriculture.
Unfortunately, the proposed National Food Security Act is a stand alone programme. It fails to go beyond the quota of ration each family needs to receive. It fails to integrate agriculture with food security. Unless we make a sincere attempt to make a historical correction about our perception of food security in the long-term I fear sooner than later the Supreme Court may have to step in again.
Perhaps one way of looking at food security is to follow what Chhatisgarh has done in the past four years. It is running a right-to-food programme that has impacted the lives of everyone involved: labourer, small farmer, large farmer, middlemen, mandis and the government. Food Security is just the starting point, says a full page report in the Economic Times (Sept 2, 2010).
M Rajshekhar reports under the title New Food Rules: "The myriad ways in which such a welfare programme touches lives and other aspects of the economy have shaped -- and accelerated -- several ongoing trends. These might well be replicated, in varying degrees, as and when the Centre rolls out a national food security programme on similar lines."
The problem is that since Chhatisgarh is a State under the BJP rule, and the Centre is in the hands of UPA-II government, the political configuration is not allowing due recognition for what appears to be a more practical way to ensure food security. I would have been delighted if the UPA-II had invited Chhatisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh to actually oversee the country's food security programme. I wonder when will democracy mature to a level when cutting across party lines we begin to respect merit and performance.
Chhatisgarh relies on what is called local production-local procurement-local distribution model. Chhatisgrah bypassed its mandis in paddy procurement, instead buying through cooperative societies and procurement centres at the village level. The mandis, though, are unaffected, as the societies have to pay a procurement tax, the revenues from which go to the mandis.
For four years now, Chhatisgarh has been giving 35 kg of grain -- comprising rice and wheat -- a month at heavily subsidised rates to 3.6 million of its 4.4 million households. The ultra-poor pay Re 1 per kg, while the poor pay Rs 2 per kg, against the market price of Rs 12-17 a kg. The ration card is the document that enables this subsidised transfer.
You can read the complete article:
New Food Rules
By M Rajshekhar
http://bit.ly/9BPa3e
Case on Point: Laptop Carrier Bags Solar Battery Charger
Since we’ve been on a bit of sun kick lately (hey, it’s August), here’s a solar-powered gadget that’s going to multi-task today. First, it’s going to thrill you with its ingenuity and get you thinking about how quickly personal solar-powered charging is coming along. It’s going make you think about all the times you looked down at your laptop, saw the “7 percent charged” note blinking on menu bar and thought, “Wouldn’t be nice if I could just plug this thing into something and keeping working?”
Yes, the Voltaic Generator Solar Laptop Charger is a solar-powered carrying case powerful enough to charge a laptop. We first showed it to you a few month’s ago in a solar-powered gadget round-up, but here are some details on what’s in the bag:
The case does its thing with high-efficiency monocrystalline cells and a battery pack that stores and converts electricity generated by a 15-watt, 20-volt panel. It’s being billed as more of a “mobile office” deal, as the case will also charge cell phones and most other handheld electronics.
The Lilon (lithium ion) battery has a capacity similar to a typical small laptop battery and is stored inside the bag, so it’s good to go whenever you need it (as in, “Hello! Hello! Still there?! Damn!”). When the bags not in the sun (with direct sun, a full charge takes five hours), the battery can be juiced using an AC travel charger. An Indicator light inside the handle shows it working.
The bag itself (shell, webbing, mesh and lining) is comprised of fabrics made from recycled PET (soda bottles). It’s strong. It’s water-resistant. It has an aluminum frame and a silicon handle, and weighs in at 4.5 pounds, including the solar panel and battery. It’ll hold something as large as a 17-inch MacBook Pro and comes in four colors.
Cost for packing sunshine: about 500 bucks.
And now, this case is going to serve its second solar-related purpose of the day. Writing about the Voltaic Generator Solar Laptop Charger requires no more from me. Nope, no 1,000-word tome today on Darwin, global warming or the evils of The Man. I’m outta here. It’s gonna be a scorcher and I’m hitting the chaise lounge that’s screaming at me from my balcony. Lates.
Salmonella Outbreak Ought to Signal the End of Battery Cages
The Food and Drug Administration is investigating a salmonella outbreak that has sickened people in several states. And a nationwide recall is underway of 13 brands of eggs. The eggs have been linked to a farm in Iowa that is operated by the son of Turner, Maine egg farm baron Jack DeCoster. Animal rights groups are using the salmonella outbreak to renew their call for an end to the use of wire cages.
The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy and Poultry Farms on Humans and the Environment
As we talk about the largest egg recall in US history, at this point half a billion eggs, our guest is David Kirby. His book is Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy and Poultry Farms on Humans and the Environment.
After a Half Billion Bad Eggs Get Released, the FDA Reveals Filthy Conditions of Wright County Egg
There's nothing like a good salmonella outbreak to inspire FDA inspectors to deliver blunt, graphic reports from inside the industrial food system. When future historians marvel at the fetid, festering underbelly of our food culture, they will relish these post-facto dispatches from the bio-hazardous front.
New Research Study on Local Foods Vs. Conventional Foods Promises Real Data
Thomas Stern is an unabashed locavore, buying everything from beets and basil to lamb and legumes from nearby producers.
The Berry Healthiest: How Organic Strawberries 'Are More Nutritious'
Organic strawberries may cost more, but it's a price worth paying, scientists say. The fruit is both tastier and better for your health, research shows. The most detailed study of its kind has found that they contain higher levels of anti-cancer nutrients than fruit sprayed with chemical pesticides.
Growth Fiction: India and China in race to fake GDP
Well, I wasn't wrong.
The Economic Times (Sept 1, 2010) has pointed to certain discrepancies in the GDP data. Accordingly, the GDP data put out by the government have raised some serious credibility issues. Now, these are the gaps:
Divergence in Growth Numbers:
From the supply side, or as measured from output in agriculture industry and services, GDP grew at 8.8 per cent. But demand side growth, based on private and govt expenditure, investments and net exports, was 3.7 percent. The difference between the two is net direct taxes. Data suggests, taxes have fallen while subsidies have risen. This is at odds with improvement in govt finances.
Expenditure Numbers show a Dismal Picture
Private consumption growth has slumped to 0.3 per cent in Q1 from 2.6 per cent in Q4 of last fiscal. Growth in investments has plummeted to 3.7 per cent. Government consumption growth is negative. The data is at odds with strong anecdotal evidence of consumer demand. Car sales were up over 35 per cent in July.
I am sure there are a lot many people like me who cannot make a head and tail of what has been written above. Here is what Mridul Sagger, Chief Economist, Kotak Securities, has been quoted as saying: "This would erode the credibility of Indian statistical system, hitherto acknowledged as superior to that of China. GDP numbers for latter are always questioned, but that would pale in comparison to our Q1 numbers."
The Economic Times says: The robust 8.8 per cent growth figures was not corroborated by the 'demand side' of the equation based on transactions in the market place. The demand number -- calculated from private and government consumption, investment and net exports -- showed that the economy grew as low as 3.7 per cent during the first quarter of the current year. On an average, the divergence is well below 0.5 per cent though on a few occasions it has touched 2-3 per cent.
Within 32 hours, the government made some correction. It has brought down the GDP to 8.5 per cent. But I am still not sure whether even that figure is a correct estimate. Let me explain why.
1. Growth is manufacturing has slowed down. The share of fixed capital formation in the GDP has slipped below 30 per cent.
2. Exports have slowed down, grew by 13.2 per cent in July as compared to 30 per cent in June.
3. Industrial output growth in June has also moderated. Other signs of slowing growth are the low cargo handling at major ports, and low freight movement by railways.
If Industry, manufacturing, exports, and agriculture (the figures are mere variation, and not reflective of growth) are not looking up, I wonder how can we say that the economy grew by 8.5 per cent. It is simply a fictitious figure.
If growth has to be measured in terms of the number of cars sold or the number of mobile phones sold, I think the entire system of calculating GDP needs to be revamped. A better way to compute growth would be to know how many more people have got employment, and how many more hungry mouths have been fed.
Moreover, treating annual variation in farm output (I don't know how you can measure agriculture growth every quarter??) as growth is grossly misleading. If in 2008-09, for instance, the production is low because of drought/floods, and therefore even if India achieves its normal projections in foodgrain output in 2009-2010, it cannot be construed as growth. This is merely an annual variation in production figures.
Economist must measure agriculture growth looking at the performance in production spread over at least 5 years. Anything less than that is simply not correct.
Credit Where It’s Due: Attributing Weather Events to the People Responsible
The weather this summer in the Bay Area has been nothing short of awful. And with me being what my friend calls a “High Priest of Ra,” it’s been posited that my missing a sacrifice or committing some other ungodly affront has resulted in this madness. We’re talking stretches of frigid weeks in July, a sunless, cold anti-summer, followed by sudden August temperature spikes reaching 104 degrees and literally melting the candles in my apartment. 104? I mean, this is San Francisco. Are you kidding me? Dear Lord, could it really be my fault? Do the weather gods care about us humans and what we do here on earth?
Evidently they do care. A lot. Human-induced global warming and our fossil fuel mission/vision of burn ‘em if we got ‘em has someone or something pissed off. Big.
We’ve all had the conversations that start with “How many hurricanes was it this year?” or “The summers have never been like this before!” or “When I was a kid we’d have snow days where we couldn’t even leave the house! What happened to those?”
Invariably, these openers are followed by, “Yeah, right, and there’s no global warming.” Indeed, for general weather phenomena like these, science has been emerging that shows connections between human activity and broad brush climatic change.
But take the conversation a step further to speak about a certain climatic event – the Russian heat wave, say, or Pakistan flooding – and it becomes more challenging to point to a particular culprit. While we all seem to instinctively know there’s a connection between specific weather events and what we’re up to on the ground, the science hasn’t been there to make absolute links, as in “that flood came from that weather pattern which came from those countries burning this much fossil fuel back in these years.” Capiche?
Scientists are beginning to capiche.
Earlier this month, white coats from all over the world gathered in Broomfield, Colorado, at a National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and International Group on Attribution of Climate-Related Events (ACE) workshop series on the “science, application, and communication of climate attribution information.” As defined by the NOAA, climate attribution is “a scientific process for establishing the principal causes or physical explanation for observed climate conditions and phenomena.” This includes attribution for variations “for which great public interest exists because they produce profound societal impacts.”
In other words, what’s behind the mega-weather headlines.
Not too long ago, our ability to address such questions would have been dismissed, says an article in New Scientist. “Many scientists at the time [a decade ago] said that you can never blame an individual weather event on climate change,” says Myles Allen of the University of Oxford.
But attempts to assign blame for such events goes back to 2004, when Allen and others “showed to a high level of confidence that human greenhouse gas emissions had at least doubled the risk of the European heatwave of 2003.” Their research approach required them to “run thousands of simulations of the climate as it is and as it would have been without human influences, then compare the number of times a given event occurs in each scenario.” Today, technological adavances will enable to such analyses to be much more accurate.
One of the worlshop’s attendees, Dr. Claudia Tebaldi, of Stanford’s Carnegie Institution, says that research already has been able to attribute causes of trends in continental scale temperatures, large area-averaged precipitation trends, ocean temperature trends, long-term changes in atmospheric humidity and more to, well, us.
“Using sophisticated computer modeling and high quality observations,” she writes, “we are able to say with great confidence that in these changing aspects of our climate system, the fingerprint of human causes is already evident.”
Now the the goal is use new methods to get even more specific regarding particular events and their causes. And while forecasting is of primary importance, right now there’s a lot of buzz around the legal implications of pointing accurate fingers. For example, can one country sue another for activity that can be proven to be responsible for something as devastating as a flood, heat wave or famine?
In 2005, Katrina victims filed a lawsuit against some oil companies, saying their activity in the Gulf contributed to the power of the hurricane. The case was recently dismissed due to a legal glitch, but you get the idea. Big implications here.
Connecting weather events with their causes is going to be a huge undertaking in upcoming years. As climate changes have increasingly profound effects on the lives of millions, people are going to want to know the whys and whos and hows and, hopefully, how to predict and prevent catastrophes going forward. And leaving it up to the gods just ain’t going to cut it. (Sorry, oh dear and powerful Ra. Can I have some more summer please? Just a little? What do you want? A dead goat?)
Image: crowt59
Strict Quality Assurance Program has Virtually Wiped Out Salmonella in California Henhouses
Amid a rolling landscape of browning chaparral and battered trailers, Alan and Ryan Armstrong's metal hen houses line up like military barracks. Keeping their 450,000 birds safe - and Salmonella enteritidis out of their hen houses - is a daily battle.
Cow Country: The Rise of the CAFO in Idaho
On a cool June day, Dean Dimond looked out from his back porch at a field of green wheat bending in the wind. Dimond lives on and farms a patch of land in the Magic Valley just north of Jerome. A mile or so beyond is Minidoka, site of the former Japanese internment camp where the National Park Service is building a memorial.
Miami Commissioner Marc Sarnoff Proposes Jail for Feeding Homeless Under the Guise of Food Safety
Miami Commissioner Marc Sarnoff has created regulations around giving food to the homeless that few could meet and that would apply a fine and imprisonment to anyone trying to do so in the old fashioned way: “Here is a little something to tide you over. We wish you the best.” Try to be generous again, and the fine goes up and the jail sentence gets longer.
Geothermal: Getting Energy from the Earth
The heat in the upper six miles of the earth's crust contains 50,000 times as much energy as found in all the world's oil and gas reserves combined. Despite this abundance, only 10,700 megawatts of geothermal electricity generating capacity have been harnessed worldwide.
What Created the Populist Explosion and How Democrats Can Avoid the Shrapnel in November
To say that the American people are angry is an understatement. The political brain of Americans today reflects a volatile mixture of fear and fury, and when you mix those together, you get an explosion. The only question at this point is how to mitigate the damage when the bomb detonates in November.
Silver Nanoparticles Stop Sperm Stem Cell Growth
A new study has identified exactly how silver nanoparticles cause male reproductive cells to stop growing.
California Rejects Ban on Plastic Shopping Bags
California lawmakers have rejected a bill seeking to ban plastic shopping bags after a contentious debate over whether the state was going too far in trying to regulate personal choice.
New Lab Results Raise Questions About Gulf Seafood's Safety
A Boston lab hired by the United Commercial Fishermen's Association to analyze coastal fishing waters says findings suggest the government's claim that Gulf of Mexico seafood is safe to eat may be premature.
A Recent Article on the Egg Recall that Completely Misses the Point
A recent article from US News and World Report begins with the subtitle "Shopping for organic or local farm stand eggs may not help you avoid salmonella poisoning." The article goes on to ask the question "Are organic eggs less likely to carry salmonella? What about those sold on farm stands?" You can imagine where this is leading.
Food Safety Bill Would be Bad for Local and Organic Farms
Anational egg recall, local Umpqua milk contamination: When will it end? Isn't it about time the Senate followed the House and passed The Food Modernization and Safety Act (S 510)?
Study: Home Pesticides Linked to Childhood Cancer
As if links to Parkinson's disease, diabetes and obesity, cancer, low sperm counts and other reproductive health problems, and childhood developmental problems and diseases were not enough ... or that pesticide residue is common on foods, or that that children are even more susceptible than previously thought, or that pesticides stick around in the home for decades after being used, or that the EPA is slow to remove known toxic pesticides from the market, and doesn't require chemical makers to even list toxic "inert" ingredients ... now there's another reason to avoid using pesticides around the home.
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