Tag Archives: education
USDA Offers Loan Guarantees To Boost Advanced Biofuels
By Agri-Pulse WASHINGTON, Oct. 21, 2013 – USDA says it will invest $181 million in loan guarantees to develop commercial-scale biorefineries or retrofit existing facilities with appropriate technology to develop advanced biofuels. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack says the funding will expand the number of commercial biorefineries in operation that produce advanced biofuels from non-food sources. Vilsack said the benefits of advanced biofuel production go beyond reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil. “These biorefineries are also creating lasting job opportunities in rural America and are boosting the rural economy as well,” he said. The Biorefinery Assistance Program was created through the 2008 Farm Bill and is administered by USDA Rural Development. It provides loan guarantees to viable commercial-scale facilities to develop new and emerging technologies for advanced biofuels. Eligible entities include Indian tribes, State or local governments, corporations, farmer co-ops, agricultural producer associations, higher education institutions, rural electric co-ops and public power entities. In making the announcement, the department cited a number of “success stories” from previous funding, including Sapphire Energy’s “Green Crude Farm” in Columbus, N.M., where, in 2011, USDA provided a $54.5 million loan guarantee to build a refined alga oil commercial facility. In continuous operation since May 2012, the plant is producing renewable algal oil that can be further refined to replace petroleum-derived diesel and jet fuel. According to the company, more than 600 jobs were created throughout the first phase of construction at the facility, and 30 full-time employees currently operate the plant. The company expects to produce 100 barrels of refined algal oil per day by 2015, and to be at commercial-scale production by 2018. After receiving additional equity from private investors, Sapphire was able to repay the remaining balance on its USDA-backed loan earlier this year, USDA said. Also in 2011, USDA issued a $12.8 million loan guarantee to Fremont Community Digester for construction of an anaerobic digester in Fremont, Mich. The digester, which began commercial operations late last year, is the largest commercial-scale anaerobic digester in the United States and has the capacity to process more than 100,000 tons of food waste annually to produce biogas and electricity. The operators of the facility say the biogas produced runs generators that total 2.85 megawatts in capacity. The electricity produced is sold to a local utility and is providing power for about 1,500 local homes. USDA officials say applications for biorefinery assistance are due by Jan. 30, 2014 USDA says since 2009, it has more than $684 million in assistance to support biofuels projects in eight states. Vilsack said today’s funding announcement underscores the importance of USDA farm energy programs and other farm bill provisions to rural areas. He called on Congress to quickly pass a new farm bill – the 2008 Farm Bill expired Sept. 30 ‑ that will “expand the rural economy.” Andy Olsen, a senior policy analyst with the Environmental Law and Policy Institute and an advocate of farm energy programs, says the Biorefinery Assistance Program “has helped accelerate introduction to the marketplace of new technologies for clean energy.” He said Congress needs to authorize and fund programs that have proven effective since they were first implemented in the 2003 and 2008 Farm Bills. “We need to continue this progress for the benefit of agriculture, rural communities and the entire country,” he said. For more news, go to www.agri-pulse.com Continue reading
Africa: There’s Hope for African Farmers
By Alex O Awiti, 15 October 2013 Africa accounts for 60 per cent of the world’s arable, uncultivated land, according to a report published by McKinsey Global Institute in 2010. The FAO has shown that cereal yields in Africa are currently less than 50 per cent of those in Asia or South America. Such low productivity is largely attributable to the current state of smallholder farming. It is estimated that about 75 per cent of all farmland in Africa is less than 4.94 acres in size. Nearly 70 per cent of the African population lives in rural areas where they depend exclusively on agriculture as farmers or labourers for their livelihoods. A large percentage of these are women. A World Bank report published in 2011 estimated that the global food price spikes in 2008 pushed 44 million people below the poverty line, most of them in developing countries. According to Oxfam International, poor people in developing countries spend 50-80 per cent of their income on food. More than 90 per cent of Africans who live on less than $1.25 (Sh105) a day also happen to own and live on small farms. As the green revolution in Asia showed, the potential of smallholder development can be realised. But conditions have changed. Now smallholders face higher transaction costs and have to cope with the fact that agricultural research is biased towards large-scale production. This raises newchallenges in small farm development. On the other hand, higher prices of staple foods present opportunities for farmers. India and China have similar proportions of small farms as Africa, but have achieved significantly higher productivity. Despite the success of smallholder farmers in Asia, who fuelled the green revolution, there is skepticism that East Africa’s smallholders can replicate this model and deliver agricultural transformation and improve livelihoods among rural smallholder farmer. It is argued that for agricultural growth to gain traction, Africa’s agricultural and labour productivity will have to increase massively, requiring vast proportions of smallholder farmers to move out of the farm. High productivity of modern agriculture is associated with high technology, intense capital input and market linkages, and hence higher capacity to compete aggressively in factor markets, including land, labour and capital. However, these factors are not appropriate for the smallholder farm model. While there is a strong poverty-based case for trying to assist smallholder farmers, the agenda for African agricultural growth should be to introduce commercial agriculture on a competitive basis. Why is it that with all our research, technology and innovation, managerial capability and investment capacity, we are unable to make even a modest contribution to the pervasive problem of poverty, hunger and malnutrition in the smallholder farm families in sub Saharan Africa? We must learn from past successes and failures. Doing more of the same by refurbishing the solutions of the past – development aid, NGOs, training and visit, farmer field schools, international agricultural research organisations – is vital and has a critical role to play, but has not addressed the problem of low productivity, hunger and poverty. Paul Collier has argued that having the single most important sector of Africa’s economies almost exclusively managed by reluctant micro-entrepreneurs – smallholder farmers – is a recipefor continued divergence from global agricultural productivity. But in the logic of the timeless wisdom of CK Prahalad, we must stop thinking of smallholder farmers as victims or a burden and start recognising them as resilient and creative entrepreneurs and valueconscious consumers. What would be the defining characteristics of agriculture over the next half century if Africa were to converge on the performance of Asia and Latin America? I argue for a focus on small and medium-sized enterprises agribusiness. But harnessing Africa’s agricultural potential requires talented managers and entrepreneurs that can attract capital, apply technical expertise to develop profitable SME agribusinesses. Moreover, serving SME agribusiness will demand innovations in technology, services and business models. Africa’s large youth population provides a ready pool from which to develop talented entrepreneurs and managers who will drive the growth of agriculture. Those of us in the research, education, policy, development and business community can make this a reality by using our resources to build the capabilities of the African SME agribusiness sector to generate economic growth and achieve food and nutritional security. The writer is the director of East African Institute and associate professor at Aga Khan University. Continue reading
Russian official rules out Arafat polonium poisoning
Russian official rules out Arafat polonium poisoning (Reuters) / 15 October 2013 If confirmed, the findings would deal a blow to Palestinian suspicions that Arafat was assassinated by Israel – a theory fuelled by a Swiss lab report last year. The head of a Russian forensics agency said on Tuesday that samples from the body of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat had revealed no traces of radioactive polonium, a Russian news agency reported. However, the government scientific body later denied that it had made any official statement about the research, saying only that it had handed its results to the Russian Foreign Ministry. If confirmed, the findings would deal a blow to Palestinian suspicions that Arafat was assassinated by Israel – a theory fuelled by a Swiss lab report last year which found unusual amounts of the deadly isotope polonium on his clothes. A Palestinian medical team took samples from Arafat’s corpse in the West Bank last year and gave them to Swiss, French and Russian forensic teams in an attempt to determine whether he was murdered with the hard-to-trace radioactive poison. “He could not have been poisoned with polonium. The research conducted by Russian experts found no traces of this substance,” the Russian news agency Interfax quoted Vladimir Uiba, who heads the Federal Medico-Biological Agency (FMBA), as saying. Uiba said experts from the FMBA had conducted a detailed study of Arafat’s remains. The agency later sought to distance itself from the comments. “The FMBA of Russia has made no official statement about the results of research on the remains of Yasser Arafat,” the FMBA’s Press service said. It added that it had completed its tests and given the results to the authorities. The Russian Foreign Ministry declined immediate comment, but state-run news agency RIA cited a source in the ministry as saying it was up to the Palestinian authorities to release any information about the tests. Arafat died aged 75 of an unexplained ailment he developed while confined to his Ramallah headquarters by Israeli tanks at the height of an armed Palestinian uprising in 2004. Palestinians saw the veteran guerrilla as a hero of their national cause. Israel regarded him as a terrorist, though it denied responsibility for his death. A negative result from the samples may not totally preclude a poisoning, as experts warned last year that his partial exhumation might have occurred too late to detect polonium. The Lausanne-based hospital which first found the isotope on Arafat’s clothing said that eight years would be the limit to detecting it on his remains and questioned whether such a late examination would provide conclusive results. A spokesman for the hospital said at the time of the exhumation that findings might be reached by early this year. No explanation has been given for the lengthy delay in presenting the results. Continue reading
