I have been informed that Typhoo is responding to Traidcrafts and the WIs Make it Fair campaign and become the first of the UKs big five tea producers to go Fairtrade.

Fantastic news in my opinion, hopefully its a 100% offering across their range rather than a specialist range, but in my opinion it would give it a real march on its rivals, and hopefully it will open up many many more people to Fairtrade. If this is true, then hopefully the other four of the big five (PG Tips, Tetleys, Twinnings and Yorkshire) will follow suit.

Ok fair enough PG Tips, Yorkshire and with their everyday tea, Twinings, have all began to start using Rainforest Alliance Certified (RFA) tea, PG Tips plan to be 100% RFA by the end of this year, and Twinings everyday brand will be 100% RFA by as late 2015!!!

RFA itself is ok, but it concentrates on the environmental side which is admirable, but neglects the workers, also while Fairtrade places the responsibility on the company making the final product, RFA places all the emphasis on the farmers, so they have to shell out the cash to get certified. Also some products that have the RFA seal are only 30% certified, which is the case with Galaxy chocolate, which also has palm oil in it, hardly good for the rain forest.

Anyway to sum up, if  Typhoo goes Fairtrade, then great, hopefully fewer people will buy Tetleys, sorry tastes  horrible and the owners Tata Tea are not at all interested in trade justice or ethical trade.

Watch this space.

Michael

Lately I have been thinking a lot about food, and more precisely sustainable and environmentally friendly food.

You see, I look at what we here in the developed world eat, and then I see images of children in the developing world starving, and like many people, I can’t accept that this is the way the world should be.

Now I am an admirer of Norman Borlaug, and his Green Revolution, though I imagine that if he had done his work today, it would certainly not be called that. Now his work led Mexico from being a net importer of grain in 1943, to self sufficiency in 1956 and finally to becoming a grain exported by 1964. The Green Revolution has a number of environmental issues though, substantial use of pesticides, loss of agricultural biodiversity, heavy use of water etc. But considering the rate of population growth this century, it clearly has helped to keep the world feed, and if we didn’t use these techniques, surly we would have seen many more famines that we have.

Now this leads me onto organic food, personally I like the idea of organic, personally I don’t like the term though, I prefer traditional agriculture, as for thousands of years it the only way we could grow crops. But yields is an issue, with some crops the yields can be as low as 50% compared with intensive farming methods, and I honestly do not think that we could feed the worlds current population if we went 100% organic. But environmentally speaking, organic is best, fewer pesticides, less water use and increased biodiversity.

Its clear that continued use of the techniques pioneered by Borlaug are not good, and the environment is suffering. So for my part I think the world needs to move towards more organic food production. But do I necessarily mean certified organic, no personally I think that if synthetic fertilizers are used that say contain only vitamins and minerals, that’s fine, I know its not with a lot of people, but that’s just my personal opinion. GMO is another matter altogether, I don’t understand the science to form any kind of opinion about it, though we have been altering crops for millennia with selective breeding, so I sometimes wonder if GMO is simply a more advanced version of that.

But I am a real hypocrite, I don’t always buy organic, and I don’t always buy local, I try, and I am getting better, but sometimes my budget just doesn’t stretch far enough, I wish it did though. And at the same time I am aware that I am thinking like a western elitist, as a friend from Pakistan says, I have never know the pains of hunger, and as he says from his point of view. He told me that he looks at me and my ilk and thinks we are simply rich idiots prancing around thinking we know whets best for the world and telling him if he has to starve to make sure our melons can be organic then tough.

Now I do think if I was in his shoes and was starving, I would be screaming at the top of my voice for farmers to farm as intensively as possible and use the finest GM crops science could manufacture, oh and use tractors galore and fly it to me on the fastest jet planes possible, cause I don’t care about carbon footprints, I am just starving to death!

So where am I going with all of this, well I really don’t know, this world has so many problems, most of them caused by man, we have grown simply too numerous for this world to handle and we need to start thinking about reversing population in order to ensure the world can sustain not only the human race, but the other wondrous plants and animals on earth.

But even if we don’t go down the organic route, how can we feed the ever growing world population without further damaging our environment, personally I don’t think we can, the world is at breaking point and we need as a matter of urgency to either bring population growth down to zero, or better still reverse it so its negative population growth.

So to sum up my thoughts on food:-

• I like the idea of organic food
• I am not sure if organic farming can feed the world
• Local is best
• For things that cannot be grown locally Fairtrade is best
• Synthetic fertilizers of vitamins and minerals are ok
• Population growth needs to go to zero or less to allow us to be able to feed the world.

None of it makes sense but then again, it something I can’t make sense of in my own mind anyway!

But I will finish with this question:- Did the Green Revolution solve the potential hunger crises caused by the human pollution explosion of the 20th century, or did it enable that growth to happen?

Sorry for rambling on!

Michael

I must admit to have a rather large problem when it comes to NIMBYs. NIMBYs, which stands for Not In My Back Yard, are people who oppose a development which is beneficial for the majority, but may potentially be a disadvantage to those living nearest to it.

At the moment in the north east of England, the big battle with the NIMBYs is over wind turbines, because the NIMBYs believe that they are inefficient, noisy, a health hazard and will devastate the natural beauty of the Northumbrian countryside.

Organisations like Wingates not Windfarms, have been set up to oppose these developments, and what is interesting is the fact that these residents associations have been able to hire professional consultants who have been able to delay and defeat many worthy wind-farm proposals. They have been supported by the pro-nuclear lobby and an anti-wind group, misleadingly called the Renewable Energy Foundation, founded by Noel Edmonds, and they pump a lot of money into opposition of wind-farms.

The UK has made a commitment to generate 30GW of its electricity by 2020, and currently we are standing at 4GW. But that took a lot of time to achieve, it was 14 years until 2005 when the UK generated just 1GW of wind energy, but 20 months late we were on 2GW, and 18 months to the 3rd GW.

Right now only 25% of applications to build wind farms are approved, and there are around 9GW worth of schemes stalled in the planning system, most of them held up by NIMBYs and thier professional consultants.

Last week the former deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, a key figure in the Kyoto agreement, blasted the NIMBYs as being far too concerned with keeping their chocolate box views, than with where their electricity comes from. He said:-

“It’s all very well arguing that a wind turbine might spoil the chocolate box view for a few homeowners. But did these same people campaign against the mobile phone masts that allow them to call locals to organize their protests? Did they moan about the pylons that bring electricity to their hamlets to power their computers that sent out emails to lobby the councils against wind farm applications? Of course they didn’t! They accepted them because they were necessary.”

Though I must point out that mobile phone masts are another NIBMY target and so most of them may have indeed protested against the masts!

Last March, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Milliband said that:-

“opposition to wind farms should become as socially unacceptable as failing to wear a seatbelt or driving past a zebra crossing.”

And I have to say I agree wholeheartedly with that statement, but its not just that fact that scheme after scheme is opposed and blocked, but the impact on the wider community that also matters. It has created an almost town vs, Country problem, with the majority of urbanites being pro-turbines, and its creating a bit of friction.

The NIMBYs are also impacting on the UK economy, in the summer, Vestas, the UKs only manufacturer of wind-turbine blades closed its plant on the Isle of Wright, and Vestas’ vice president Peter Kruse is placing the blame squarely on the shoulders of the NIMBYs:-

“You have some of the best onshore sites on the planet but they are strong, the faceless Nimbys”

And he was very supportive of the government who have worked very hard to try and encourage wind power.

“Don’t blame London, because your government is doing a lot, but if people do not want turbines locally then you can put as many incentives as you want on the table.”

When Vestas announced they were closing the factory, the workers staged an 18 day sit-in and called on the goverment to give a bail-out to the factory. But there has been another, deeper impact of all of this. The local council on the Isle of Wright, denied planning permission to projects on the island, which would have saved the plant and those jobs. So along with the local anti-wind-turbine group Thwart, the council and the NIMBYs are being blamed by the former factory workers for costing them their jobs, wow that must be an awkward situation.

How do people tolerate the horrid pylons which needlessly bestride the Northumbrian Hills, whose cables could be so easily buried, and yet they will object to something sleek and silent, of minimal environmental impact, which allows us to move away from dependency on fossil fuel and puts us in with a very small chance of having a planet worth passing down to our children and grandchildren.

Perhaps NIMBYS should remember the World War II poster in which grandchildren ask their grandfather what he did when the world faced crisis:-

“Oh – I opposed all opportunities to make the world a better place for you because I didn’t want to see a windmill from my window. You see – I’ve always been short sighted dear – I couldn’t see further than that.”

So a solution, that’s what I am all about after all, well in Denmark, there is little opposition to wind-farms, and they get 20% of their energy from wind-farms. But the vast majority are owned by local farmers of co-ops. In Portugal, developments are required to give a percentage to local governments, and many have sole their shares to make a bit of money to improve local services. So I am thinking, rather than companies like E.on, EDF and Scottish & Southern, going building the farms and then moving on, perhaps they should look to establish local companies to give people a say in how the farm is to be developed and run. I think if that was done, then perhaps the NIMBYs would go away, after all there is an old Danish proverb which says:-

“Your own pigs don’t smell”

Michael