Craigsblog

I Want My No Claims Discount from the NHS

2012-01-05T14:09:00.000-08:00

I Want My No Claims Discount

In 1965 I had the misfortune to be quite low in cash and lying by a roadside in Delhi unable to walk because of the debilitating pain and exhaustion of hepatitis. The Holy Family Catholic hospital doctor told me I was in urgent need of hospitalisation, but their reception told me there were no beds. Maybe I should have tried a bit of baksheesh. So, half walking, half crawling, I ended up in Delhi General. After a day there I knew I had to move on, and fast. I ended up in Peshawar, then Kabul, where a diet of unleavened wholemeal naan and unsweetened tea finally brought success. Within 3 or 4 days I was back on my feet and functional. Since then I haven't messed with my health - when you look into the abyss and realise how fragile life can be, you take more care. I never wanted to find myself in such desperate straits again - helpless, hoping someone can save you and feeling sorry for your parents who might never know what happened to their beloved son.

Since 1967 I have dutifully paid, like every good citizen, my National Insurance contributions which, in today's money, amounts to about £400,000 over 44 years. During that time I have never cost the NHS one penny and haven't taken up one minute of a doctor's time with my health problems. That's partly down to luck, but I blame diet as the main factor.

The experience triggered my interest in macrobiotics and led to a career decision to spread the word about healthy diet. This was the foundation on which my brother Gregory and I built Whole Earth Foods and which led, indirectly, to the founding of Green & Black's.

I've been OK almost all of the time, despite setbacks, bereavements, financial anxieties and stress from business competition. Sometimes I thought I was going mad, but I had seen enough of the damage anti-depressants can cause to know that I would never go down that route.

When Beveridge mapped out the NHS in 1942 his budget projections confidently predicted a steep decline in healthcare costs through the 1950s as indoor sanitation, better nutrition, clean water and health education would all reduce disease and its treatment costs. Instead there has been a steady increase in sickness and chronic illness, triggered by obesity, environmental toxins, sedentary lifestyles and junk food. How disappointing it would have been for him. Sir Jack Drummond was the man who named Vitamin A and B and who mapped out Britain's healthy wartime diet that led to record levels of health, despite all the stress and strain of wartime life. Sir Jack was mysteriously murdered in 1953, or he would have been kicking ass at the DOH to make them do something about the Brits’ abysmal post-war dietary choices once they were free to choose.

If I was a careful driver I'd get an annual reduction in my insurance to reflect my clean claims history. Why not health? If a reduced level of claims reflects a saving in expenditure, what's wrong with the principle extending to National Insurance? Charging people higher contributions/premiums for being sick all the time might be going too far, but rewarding people for conscientiously looking after their health shouldn't be seen as reprehensible. I’d settle for a 'cashback' – or perhaps the money saved could be tagged on to my pension on retirement? Good national health policy should include carrots as well as sticks. The state offers no material incentive to look after one's health, just confusing exhortations. A no claims discount would address this. I'm sure Beveridge would approve.. And Sir Jack.

Is More Research Really Needed?

2012-01-05T13:56:00.000-08:00

Stop the presses! Amazing news from researchers!

The British Journal of Cancer recently published a report funded by Cancer Research UK . The report says that 40% of cancers arise from lifestyle factors including poor diet and obesity. Specifically: not enough fibre, not enough vegetables, too much meat and too much alcohol.

In 1966, full of the joys of discovering good health and vitality through macrobiotic diet, my girl friend and I visited the macrobiotic bookshop in New York. Irma Paul, the owner, sat behind the counter looking morose, not at all the happy image of macrobiotic (Greek for ‘long life’ or ‘big life’) that I expected. She allowed us to look at the books but said that we could not purchase anything. Her reason? The American Medical Association had recently urged the FBI to bust the bookshop for selling illegal books. The FBI took the books away and went over them with expert advisors from the AMA. The result? The bookshop closed a few days later and the books were taken away, condemned by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and burned. Reader’s Digest later ran a cover story calling macrobiotics ‘The Hippie Diet That’s Killing Our Kids”

What was the evil message that brought such a fate? Kiddie porn? Bomb-making instructions? No, much worse as far as the AMA was concerned: these books contained statements that too much meat, not enough fibre, not enough vegetables and too much meat and alcohol could lead to cancer. Exactly what the Britich Journal of Cancer article now states.

At the time the medical orthodoxy was that cancer was in the genes or just bad luck. Prof Max Parkin, a Cancer Research epidemiologist, commented on the new report: “Many people believe cancer is down to fate or ‘in the genes’ …it’s clear that 40% of cancers are caused by things we have the power to change.” I wonder where ‘many people’ got that wacky idea? Perhaps from listening to all the medical experts who told them for decades they couldn’t do anything to prevent cancer.

In the 1950s American magazines ran ads extolling the preference of doctors for Camel brand cigarettes. Oh dear. I wonder how many people took up smoking because of these role models? And died?

In the 50s Wilhelm Reich talked about the ‘Emotional Plague’ – a disease that parents gave to their children by beating them and abusing them, passing on sick behaviour from one generation to the next. He argued for sexual liberation and advocated condom use and economic independence for women. Several tons of his books were burned by the FDA and he died in prison in 1956. Now it’s illegal to beat kids, women are liberated and child abuse condemned.

So two pioneers of sensible thinking went to their graves bitter and disillusioned and didn’t live to see their ideas become accepted in the mainstream.

What about me? After discovering that the FBI, the AMA and the FDA were hysterically alarmed about macrobiotics, I figured it was at least as powerful as I had thought. I went to the newly-opened Paradox macrobiotic restaurant that evening and decided then and there that my future would lay in bringing awareness of the joys of healthy eating to as many people as possible. It fulfilled my do-goodism and my revolutionary instincts.

What about the authorities? The same governments that burned books and chucked their authors in jail now support education in sex and condom use and urge their citizens to eat more vegetables and wholegrains and to cut down on meat and booze.

Can you imagine any MPs or doctors nowadays plugging cigarettes or urging people to eat junk food and beat their kids?

Go Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior lll

2011-11-15T14:29:00.000-08:00

In 1977 Greenpeace organised a ‘Save the Whales’ rally in Kensington Gardens. Spike Milligan came over to rally the troops with a quirky but passionate speech. We sat on the grass to listen and many people ended up soiled by dogshit. This was just inside the park gates where dogs would dump as soon as they were let loose on the grass. In those days people never cleaned up their dog mess. What’s more dog food was usually made with whale meat. The irony of the moment was not lost on us and I couldn’t help thinking, darkly, that ‘what goes round comes round.’

A few months later in a debate against Jilly Cooper on LBC Radio I said that people should clean up after their dogs. The call-in hot lines nearly melted with outraged dog owners saying I should go back where I came from and generally questioning my sanity. Yet over time cleaning up after one’s dog became normal behaviour.

Greenpeace fought much tougher battles. They were trying to stop nuclear testing in the Pacific Ocean and whaling in the Atlantic. At the end of 1977 I went along to Surrey Docks to see a rust bucket trawler that Greenpeace had acquired which they planned to refurbish and rename the Rainbow Warrior. (I had the chance to go on the maiden voyage to Iceland to challenge whaling, but I had court appearances scheduled over Whole Earth jam illegally sweetened with apple juice).

The Rainbow Warrior was sunk in Auckland, New Zealand, on the orders of France’s President Mitterand in 1985. During ‘Opération Satanique’ French secret agents attached explosives to its hull to blow it up before it could lead a flotilla to oppose nuclear testing in Pacific island atolls. This act of terrorist sabotage killed Fernando Pereira, a photographer. The culprits were sentenced to 10 years for manslaughter but released when France threatened to block New Zealand’s agricultural exports to the EU.

Greenpeace converted another ship, Rainbow Warrior ll, and carried on being a pain in the bum for evildoers in the whaling, bombing and oil rig industry. It’s retired and is now a hospital ship in Bangladesh.

When Monsanto’s GM soybeans started flooding the market in 1996 the Soil Association lobbied hard to protect organic food and had desperate meetings with tin-eared ministers of agriculture and environment. While we talked Greenpeace took action. First they sailed up the Mississippi to block the export of soybeans at source. Later, led by Lord Peter Melchett, Greenpeace activists pulled up a GM maize crop in Norfolk, ‘decontaminating’ the field. Arrested and jailed, they were exonerated in court and set free. They had stopped the GM tide, protecting organic farming from extinction.

On November 10 we attended the launch of Rainbow Warrior lll near Tower Bridge. No rustbucket of a trawler this one but a brand new ship that will travel mostly by sail, with engines powering it for perhaps 10% of the time. Its €16 million cost was funded entirely by contributions from tens of thousands of supporters.

Damon Albarn re-formed The Good The Bad and The Queen and played on deck to spectators lining the shore at Butler’s Wharf. Michael Eavis (Glastonbury Festival, £400,000 a year contribution to Greenpeace) had driven the ship on the last leg of its trip. We toured the ship and learned about its revolutionary design – soon container ships could be using its advanced wind-capture principles to cut the emissions from seaborne trade.

Greenpeace has been on the front lines stopping the destructive greed that makes the world a worse place, thereby providing cover for organisations like the Soil Association, Garden Organic, Slow Food and Fairtrade that are working to build a better world. We all owe them a tremendous debt. Joining Greenpeace and supporting their work is the least we can do to repay their efforts.

Meat Free Mondays

2011-06-03T11:03:00.000-07:00

In mid June 2009 I went to the launch of Meat Free Mondays. Frontman Paul McCartney gave a straightforward and inspiring speech stating the obvious – meat eating is responsible for about one quarter of the world’s increase in greenhouse gas levels each year. If we all gave up meat just one day a week, this could make a significant difference to our headlong rush towards extinction on an overheated planet. Not particularly challenging you might think – one day a week without meat isn’t going to have anyone in the developed world turning up at the doctor’s with kwashiorkor or some other protein deficiency disease, is it? In fact, a little less protein might help with the obesity boom – could be win – win: we end up healthier and our grandchildren inherit a planet that is still habitable.

But the press took it badly. Even the Guardian, which I doggedly continue to read despite the increasingly snide and snotty articles against organic food, environment campaigners and alternative medicine they publish nowadays, couldn’t play it straight.

The Telegraph’s Liz Hunt said the idea made her want to ‘club a seal’ and vowed to eat bacon for breakfast, chicken for lunch and hamburger for dinner in order to express her revulsion at the concept.

Worst of all was the Grocer, quoting 2 anonymous ‘sources’ and one named one. One ‘source’ described the initiative as ‘crass’ and said ‘I think it’s bonkers.’ Then the Chairman of the NFU’s livestock board, Alistair MacKintosh pointed out that farmers were waiting for innovation and science to sort out the cow farts and burps, concluding ‘I’d rather listen to science than some hippified vegetarian.’

Errr... the science of global warming is pretty clear on this one:

- Cows emit methane, methane is a greenhouse gas 21 times worse than CO2.
- Sir David King, the former Government Chief Scientist says: ‘easting less meat will help the environment’ citing beef’s carbon footprint as 20 times higher than that of whole grains.
- The Chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change urges a meat-free day to help reduce emissions.

These hippies are everywhere!

With Hilary Benn, a vegetarian, the new Secretary of State at Defra and Jim Fitzpatrick, another veggie, the Minister for Food, Farming and Environment, let’s hope that the NFU’s legendary control over this important Ministry is balanced by rationality and that science, not subsidy, dictates future policy.

Meanwhile it’s all happening on the film front. ‘End of the Line’ documents the corruption of governments by big fish interests and shows how this is leading to the end of abundant fish in the oceans.

‘Food Inc’ shows how a handful of multinationals have seized control of our food supply and driven down safety standards for both workers and consumer health.

Former Soil Association trustee Tracy Worcester’s film ‘Pig Business’ will be screened on More4 on June 30 2009 at 10 p.m – giving an insight into how the same practices that brought you Swine Flu are now being replicated in Poland.

The industrial meat industry is killing us and liquidating any decent future for the planet. If Meat Free Mondays can mark the start of a reversal of this awful situation then it deserves everyone’s support.

Recently Greenpeace researched the double whammy source of greenhouse gas in the Amazon forest. Forest is cleared and burned – lots of CO2 into the atmosphere -then it’s stocked with methane-emitting cows that end up being sneaked past the controls that buyers like Tesco, Asda and M&S have established to prevent just this sort of thing. If reputable companies can’t control this what can a person do?

Well, cutting out meat one day of the week seems a reasonable start.

Subsidies - who really needs them?

2011-06-03T10:57:00.001-07:00

Subsidies

Every year the governments of the world back winners in Big War, Big Ag, Big Energy and Big Pharma. The total bill to taxpayers? A stonking $3500 billion! Yes, $3.5 trillion. How much of this do you get? Nothing. You just get to pay for it. Unless you’re Big.

You can't blame the poor despised bankers for this one, this is our elected representatives doing what they are told by unelected powers and their well-connected lobbyists.

How does it break down? Big Agriculture gets $350bn a year to degrade our soils with chemical fertilisers, kill off our wildlife and living soil with pesticides, herbicides and fungicides. Big War uses up $1500 bn a year on wars of aggression. Direct and indirect subsidies to Big Pharma cost $1000 bn. And Big Energy gets $550 bn - mostly subsidies to help struggling oil companies discover more oil.

See the pattern? Tax the little guys and subsidise the big and powerful. Then they 'optimise' taxation to make sure they pay as little tax as possible in a place like Britain.

How does it feel to know that the tax on the money you've diligently earned without any help from the government is being spent to help powerful competitors drive you out of business?

Then there's the non-governmental subsidies, harder to measure but with the same effect. Supermarkets subsidise industrialised bread to lure customers to their stores. This is ruinous for small bakers who have to make their profit from baked goods.

Ocado - a direct competitor of many readers, has managed to lose £300,000,000 over the past 10 years and managed to lose £25 million last year, but in so doing it undermines retailers that have to make a profit or go under. This is a subsidy from private equity to gain future profit but its impact is to drive honest traders out of business and clear the field for another monster. Their investors probably include your pension fund.

Every £1 of subsidy from the EU costs us £2. How so? The administration, policing, storage and fraud inherent in running the CAP swallows half the money that goes to farmers. It would be cheaper to give every food shopper a 'CAP tax back’ at the checkout and dismantle this unwieldy system. They claim subsidies help small farmers but the fact is that smallholdings and small farms began to disappear as soon as we joined the CAP.

The Common Agricultural Policy is up for reform in 2013. They've been ‘reforming’ it ever since the 1970s. Because of our subsidies, farmers in other countries can only compete by exploiting slave labour, degrading soil, destroying rain forests and poisoning themselves and the environment with nasty chemicals. Activists campaign to support the forests and indigenous people and to ban slavery, but would freak out if we had to pay the real cost of food at the supermarket. The average dairy cow in Europe gets over £600 a year in subsidy - no wonder milk is cheaper than bottled water! (And there’s still surplus cheap milk to dump to Russia, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria)

Will the CAP be reformed? What happened last time, ten years ago? While negotiators from the UK attempted to inject some sanity into the discussions the heads of state of Germany and France excused themselves and stepped out of the room for half an hour. They returned and announced that there would be no reform of the CAP until 2013. And that was that. Since then they’ve instituted a 10% Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation that keeps the countryside full of rapeseed and pays for deforestation of the last habitats of orangutans to grow palm oil to burn in buses.

These people couldn’t reform a piece of plasticine.

Let's Have a Nation of Shopkeepers

2011-06-03T10:42:00.001-07:00

NPN March 2006

The other day I was thumbing through Pigot’s 1839 Directory of Sussex (as one does) when I found that in Hastings Old Town there were once 5 operating bakeries on High Street and 8 on neighbouring All Saints Street. Now only Judges Bakery our new enterprise, survives. The rest of the bread comes from factories and supermarkets. While I don’t lament the absence of competition it does seem sad that where there were once a baker’s dozen of jolly bakers, there is now just one. Those bakers were jolly because they were part of what Adam Smith and later Napoleon described as a ‘nation of shopkeepers.’ Why England in particular? Is it something to do with the individualistic and freedom-loving temperament of this culture? Or is it a natural human instinct to favour things local, fresh, privately-owned and directly answerable? Shumacher argued eloquently in ‘Small is Beautiful’ that this was so.

In early February I went to Syria to accompany a Soil Association inspector on a visit to an olive oil supplier. On the way back I did a bit of tourism and wandered for a day through the vast labyrinthine souks of Damascus. I found a bakery every few hundred yards, bakers and ovens in full view, churning out freshly-baked large flat breads seemingly endlessly. There were no supermarkets to be seen, anywhere. Thanks to the fertile oasis in which it sits and the mild climate, most of the produce is local and fresh. Specialist shops selling pickled vegetables, fish, meat, wooden utensils, household utensils, hardware, clothes, spices, sweets, pastries, preserved fruit, carpets, and all your other needs thrived amidst a total absence of department stores.

How did this small shopkeepers’ paradise survive in Syria when it the once-proud high street has suffered so much in Britain from centralised production, distribution and retailing? What difference does it make, anyway?

Jeffersonian democracy asserts that government should be small, military spending and taxes low and that small landowner or tradesperson should rule supreme. “40 acres and a mule” was given to liberated slaves in South Carolina to ensure they had the economic basis for a truly free future; Margaret Thatcher sought to create a ‘property-owning democracy’ by privatising state-owned industries and encouraging home ownership; the US Homestead Act of 1862 tempted people like my great grandparents with the offer of land ownership free to those who would work the land.

People with an economic stake in society such as the owners of a business are empowered, they can think what they like and say what they like and do what they like without fear of losing their income. They are answerable to nobody except their customers and as long as they provide what their customers want they can prosper. They are, in a word, free.

As corporations merge and acquire, as giant retailers systematically destroy the independent retail sector and as government’s share of the economy relentlessly increases, what are the implications for our freedom? A lot of people blame Tony Blair for being arrogant, taking a reluctant nation to war on false pretexts and running this country like a private fiefdom. But why not? If you could get away with it, you’d do it, too, if you were Prime Minister. The weakness of Parliament reflects the disempowerment of the people that is the result of the loss of individual freedom that comes from losing ownership and control of one’s own life.

But the appetite for freedom is there. Private equity capital encourages more and more managers to borrow and buy their businesses and there is a trend towards breaking up unwieldy corporations that is far more sophisticated than the ‘asset-stripping’ of yesteryear. The natural foods retail sector shows that it is possible for a small retailer of food to enjoy vibrant growth. The big stores face a challenge as rising oil prices make their whole business model look increasingly shaky, dependent as they are on car travel and long distance distribution. Big farmers are terminally dependent on subsidies already - with agrichemical prices and distribution costs soaring, fragmentation of big holdings is inevitable. Cheap oil enabled the pendulum to swing too far to the remote, unanswerable and huge. The pendulum is swinging back and gathering momentum. Can we anticipate that the erosion of human rights and democratic freedoms will also start to go the other way?

Trans Fats are crap fats

2011-06-03T10:40:00.001-07:00

Artificial fats are bad for you First published 2006 in NPN

People sometimes accuse the health food industry of scaremongering but they are rank amateurs compared to the slick, professional and well-organised tropical fats campaign that created national panic in the US in the 1980s. With full-page newspaper ads screaming “Stop the Poisoning of America”, the orchestrated campaign blamed palm and coconut oil for America’s heart disease epidemic. Within months every major American product had ‘no tropical fats’ on the front of the label and ‘hydrogenated fat’ on the ingredients list where natural fat had been. The American Soybean Association was pleased as punch – soya oil is the raw material for hydrogenated fat.
In Britain in the 80s health authorities and hospital dieticians encouraged people to give up butter and switch to high-polyunsaturate margarines. But to have high polyunsaturate levels you need high levels of hydrogenated fat. As a result there are millions of Britons who have heart disease (they’re the lucky ones, the rest are dead) because they followed this well-meaning but misguided advice.
So why do manufacturers use hydrogenated fat? If you’ve ever seen it you’d understand. It comes as fine sand-like granules that won’t melt when you hold them in your hand, but do melt at food processing temperatures. They set hard while a food product is still warm, giving structure and texture to foods as diverse as bread, biscuits, margarine and cakes. They provide a plasticky scaffolding that holds together other food ingredients, enabling more air and water to be added to a food.
In 1993 Whole Earth Superspread was launched and our ad prompted a complaint from the makers of Flora to the Advertising Standards Authority because we said hydrogenated fat was bad for you. While we argued and appealed the hydrogenated fat content of Flora fell from 21% right down to less than 1%.
The Interheart survey, described in 2004 by The Lancet as the most comprehensive and rigorous study ever of research into heart disease, concluded that salt, stress, dietary fat, sugar etc were all minor causes of heart disease. The two major ones, responsible for 80% of all heart disease, were smoking and an imbalance between Low Density Lipid and High Density Lipid cholesterol (the ratio should be 2:1). The issue is not how much cholesterol you have (the argument that has put millions onto anti-cholesterol drugs) but solely what the ratio is. Hydrogenated fat slows down the loss of LDL and accelerates the loss of healthy HDL cholesterol, so the ratio swings out to 3:1 or 4:1, where the LDL starts to clog up the arteries. The HDL cholesterol is slippery and lubricates the circulatory system. There are also links between hydrogenated fat consumption and obesity, diabetes and Alzheimer disease. Transfats (another name for hydrogenated fats) interfere with Omega 3 metabolism, underpinning the market for fish oil to rectify the deficiency.
The track record of the health food trade is unedifying. Many vegetarian and vegan products have historically depended on hydrogenated fat. Vegetarian and vegan margarines relied heavily on it. Hydrogenated fat is now rare in a health food shop. It has always been illegal in organic products.
Forget about government doing anything about transfats. It subsidises rapeseed and soya – the oils that are usually hydrogenated - to make them cheaper than natural fats. In the US the battle was finally won when a lawyer called Stephen Joseph sued McDonalds in 2003 for reneging on their promise to reduce transfats and was awarded an $8.5 million settlement. In the US transfats now have to be labelled on the nutrition information panels. Manufacturers are scrambling to replace hydrogenated fat with natural fats, aware that consumers now avoid products with the former.
In Denmark no food may contain more than 2% trans fats.
In Britain, thanks to consumer pressure, Marks & Spencer and Tesco have promised that by mid-2006 all their own-brand products will be free of transfats.
For 30 years hydrogenated fat has been promoted by major advertisers and the National Health Service, and subsidised to keep it cheaper than natural solid fats. The cost of cheap food has been higher health costs. The Danish example offers the only way forward – ban the stuff. Now.

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Bio-Fools

2011-06-03T10:39:00.001-07:00

Biofuels are causing environmental disaster. Let’s not be biofools, says Craig Sams

Last year the average price of a food basket rose by 12%. There are legitimate reasons for this including rising oil prices and more demand for meat. Another cause, which concerns me here, is biofuels - the so-called ‘green’ saviour.
The rush into biofuels is a scam to get rid of food surpluses by burning them. Instead of downsizing our cars, we are burning food for oil. Ethanol plants are taking one third of the entire US corn crop and turning it into alcohol for mixing with gasoline. It’s terribly inefficient, but the government gives ethanol plants a $1 gallon subsidy and charges less tax on biofuels at the service station. Many US states now require 15% ethanol to be added to gasoline at service station pumps. It’s another scam to waste taxpayers’ money on inefficient GM and industrial farming, this time under the guise of doing something to fight climate change.
The US and the EU are both promoting biofuels as an eco-solution. Don’t be fooled. Two recently published groups of US research found that farming biofuels actually increases greenhouse gas emissions.
Clearing carbon-rich peatland and rainforests to plant fuel crops releases even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The industrial manufacturing process only adds to biofuels’ carbon footprint. Grown on an industrial scale, biofuels end up accelerating climate change, not reducing it.
Worst of all, the fundamental principle is flawed.
If you put £1 million in the bank in July and then withdrew it in August and burned it, would you say you were £1 million better off? Of course not, but the crazy economics of biofuels do just that. When biofuels are burnt, carbon that has just been taken out of the atmosphere in the summer goes right back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, later in the autumn. How on earth is that doing something good for the planet?
If we really want to reduce greenhouse gases, then we need to put carbon into the soil and keep it there by farming organically. Carbon does far more good in the soil then it does harm in the air (as carbon dioxide). The soil on organic farms contains up to 6 times as much carbon (as humus) as on non-organic farms. Humus fertilises the soil naturally, retaining moisture and nutrients.
But instead of turning land into carbon-rich stores, the EU Commission is calling for energy-intensive, greenhouse gas-forming biofuels. It has recently made new targets: 10% biofuels by 2010 at a pump near you. This will exhaust what little carbon remains in our once humus-rich fertiles soils, all to keep agribusiness going.

If the US and EU paid farmers to turn their farms into carbon-capturing meadows and forests, we could add billions of tonnes of carbon to the soil carbon bank annually. But agribusiness doesn’t make money out of set-aside land – no market for chemicals, equipment or fertilisers - it makes money out of land relentlessly farmed to destruction. So we pay more for food as well as, through our taxes, for biofuels. And global warming gets worse.

This has terrible social consequences as well as environmental ones. Most of Europe’s palm oil bio-diesel is imported from Indonesia, destroying the orangutan’s habitat and precious rain forest and its human inhabitants. Ethanol from Brazil comes from sugar cane that replaces Brazilian rainforest. We are converting other people’s land and food into fuel for us. EU policies subsidise the theft of land from forest-dwelling people. Nobody, not even Parliament, ever asked for or voted for this.

Not in my name, please.

Belize - the birthplace of Fairtrade

2011-06-03T10:38:00.001-07:00

Belize, the birthplace of Fairtrade
By Craig Sams

November 2008, Belize. I am with a small group of journalists, taking them to meet the growers of organic cocoa beans. We go back 15 years - I first bought their cacao when Green & Black’s chocolate was just a baby.
When I first made contact with the Toledo Cacao Growers Association, the Maya Indians faced abject poverty after throwing in their lot with US chocolate giant Hershey. A classic old-development paradigm: the aid workers had encouraged the growers to sign up to intensive farming and the break-up of their communal reservation land. The private land deeds were used as collateral for bank loans to buy hybrid seeds and agrichemicals.
Then the aid workers left, Hershey pulled out and prices dropped from $1.75 a pound of beans to a catastrophic 55¢ a pound. The bank was readying to foreclose and confiscate farmers’ land. That’s when Josephine and I turned up, prepared to pay decently, with a five-year rolling contract and cash up-front for organic cocoa beans.
I blame the ‘kukuh’. That’s what turned me and Josephine on to the beauty of Belize Maya cocoa and led to Maya Gold, the first product in the UK to be certified Fairtrade. Now I am sitting with Eladio Pop and his wife after a dinner of tortilla, spicy stew and pumpkin, and it’s kukuh time again.
It’s all home-grown and homemade. After harvesting his cacao, Eladio ferments it, dries it, roasts it, winnows the husks and grinds them, then shapes the resulting paste into balls. He grates some, blending it with warm water, vanilla, ground allspice and honey or sugar to make kukuh. After several delicious calabash cups-full, we are bouncing off the walls.
Later I bump into an old friend, Cirila Cho when she is picking up a cheque for her home-made chocolate bars. A new grandmother, she’s now a businesswoman in her own right, with a small-scale grinding and conching set-up. Organic cocoa is good for women. After the men bring back the pods to the village, the women ferment the beans in boxes for five days. Then they sun-dry them, turn them as needed, and bring them in if it starts to rain. Controlling these operations gives women a share in the wealth, conferring domestic and community power.
The Maya-run cacao cooperative is doing well. I attend its AGM, where everyone gets a bar of ‘their’ chocolate, and hears the accountant report another profitable year. Asset-rich, the coop now has enough reserves in the bank for a disaster reserve fund (hurricanes and fire) and high school scholarships. The number of kids at secondary school has grown from 10% to over 70%, thanks to our paying fair-trade and organic prices.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs is speaking now, praising the farmers. Thanks to their vision, he says, Belize, the birthplace of fair trade, is a beacon to the world. It sounds grand but it wasn’t all plain sailing. Back in 1993, British and UN aid workers strongly advised the cacao growers against signing-up to produce for Green & Black’s Maya Gold. They especially counselled against going organic, predicting disease and crop failure. However, since we were offering three times the price and a return to traditional Maya farming practices without expensive chemicals, it was a no-brainer. Nevertheless I will always be grateful to Justino Peck, the then - and just re-elected - Chairman of the association, for listening to my scheme and trusting me to deliver.
I visit a three-generation farm, the Bols, Grandad Reyes, son Justiniano and grandson Justiniano Junior, where we eat ripe cacao fruit, with just the right au point balance of sweetness and acidity. We eat greedily, our sticky fingers pulling out the seeds, sucking off the pulp and spitting out the beans. This is a rare treat, a fruit that can never be commercialised – take an eco-cacao holiday in Belize and this pleasure can be yours!
You can’t produce organic cocoa beans on a big plantation paying slave wages. The only way is on small family farms paying a decent price to get the commitment and care required for a high-quality product. Shoppers often agonise: organic or fair-trade? Support organic farmers and you get both.

Roll on $200 a barrel oil prices

2011-06-03T10:37:00.001-07:00

Roll on $200 a barrel oil prices

Much as I hate what Gaddafi is up to and much as I dread any threat to the stability of the Saudi regime, I can’t help hoping that the oil price goes up and stays up.

There are a lot of reasons for this.

Cheap oil is what drives industrial farming. 7 years ago in The Little Food Book I calculated that when the oil price hit $70 a barrel organic food would be cheaper than non-organic. That’s because it take twice as much fossil fuel for an industrial farmer to produce a calorie of food as it does for an organic farmer. Broadly speaking, an industrial farmer uses 12 calories of fossil fuel to produce one calorie of food. Then it takes more fossil fuel to convey the food to the supermarket distribution depot, then to the store, including refrigeration costs. An organic farmer uses 6 calories of fossil fuel to produce one calorie of food and is more likely to sell it at a farmer’s market or to local outlets.

Industrial farming replaces jobs with chemicals. Instead of people planting, weeding and composting chemicals do the job. Nitrate fertilisers are made using natural gas. Gas prices follow oil prices upwards – energy is energy. So nitrates are getting a lot more expensive, but still not expensive enough. They’re killing us by releasing nitrous oxide into the atmosphere, a greenhouse gas 310 times more harmful than carbon dioxide in causing global warming. Nitrates are responsible for the equivalent of 1 billion tonnes of CO2 every year, about 1/6 of the total excess emissions that are turning up the heat on dear old Planet Earth. And farmers need to use more and more as underlying soil fertility dies out, making a bad problem worse. At $200 barrel, even with the current extravagant level of subsidies, farmers would switch to organic in droves. If you can grow your own fertiliser by leaving fields fallow, composting and growing green manures, why pay for a bunch of horrendously expensive chemicals? The price of food will go up as the price of oil goes up, but the impact per calorie on organic food will be half that on industrial.

A lacto-ovo vegetarian consumes half the energy resources for the same nutrition as a non-vegetarian meat-eater. A vegan consumes just one quarter. An organic vegan will consume just 1/8 the fossil fuel inputs of a non-organic non-vegetarian.

The price of carbon offsets goes up with rising oil prices. Companies have to pay for EU carbon emission allowances. They are currently priced at around £12 per tonne. Sir Nicholas Stern, author of the last government’s report on climate change and of the book Blueprint for a Safer Planet, said the real price should be £70 per tonne. (Then he said “I was wrong – the real figure is £140 per tonne”). The higher the price of oil, the higher the price of carbon offsets and the more attractive it is to invest in energy-saving and renewables. A tonne of oil produces more than 3 tonnes of carbon dioxide, so just to offset the cost to the future of this planet, it should cost £140 times 3 or £420. A barrel is 1/5 tonne, so the carbon cost of a barrel should be priced in at about £80, or $120 per barrel. Then the producers need to make a small profit, too, after all it costs anything from $3 (Kuwait) to $9 (Texas) to extract a barrel of oil from the ground. They’ve got used to making $90/barrel profit, add that to the $120 carbon cost and you’re over $200.

When you see the taxis with their engines running queuing up outside railway stations, vans parked with their engines running and people whizzing along at inefficient speeds you can’t help wondering if they would be so wasteful if petrol cost 3 times as much.

Think of the jobs that high oil prices would bring, too. Every time an out of town supermarket opens local employment suffers. Yeah, yeah, I know they claim they are creating jobs but James Lowman of the Association of Convenience Stores did a check last year. Supermarkets created an extra 2.75 million extra square feet of store space and cut their staff levels by 426. So we are gutting the high streets of our towns and putting more people on the unemployment register and forcing people to drive to the supermarket to buy a week’s worth of food, 1/3 of which goes off and ends up being wasted.

When oil prices go up people will shop locally, on an ‘as needed’ basis. They’ll eat organic. They’ll eat less meat. They’ll walk more and drive less. They’ll pay lower insurance premiums as adverse climate events reduce the impact on insurers. They’ll breathe cleaner air as people switch to less polluting transportation. They’ll drink cleaner water as pesticides and

Just Gimme the Drugs,Man - a critique of Big Pharma

2011-06-03T10:36:00.000-07:00

NPN - Drugs and medicine

Every now and then I clear my spam filter of missives from American lawyers offering me the opportunity to cash in on a bonanza from a class action lawsuit against one of the big drug companies. Huge amounts of money are being made by suing Big Pharma for peddling drugs that don't work, that they knew didn't work and that have awful life-destroying side effects. Respected scientists and medical researchers are shown to have conspired to distort the results so that patented drugs with few beneficial effects were prescribed to millions of gullible patients who wrongly assumed that they could trust their doctor. Just go to www.legaltube.com/breaking-news-hot-list.aspx for all the latest opportunities to get redress.

I'd love to cash in but I haven't taken a prescription drug in more than 45 years, apart from a handful of aspirin and whatever local anaesthetic my dentist uses to numb my gums. I suppose knowing that the life expectancy of doctors is just 58 years and that they are the 3rd leading cause of death in the USA (225,000 deaths a year) is enough to make me wary. But you can’t blame them for dishing out drugs that are backed by peer-reviewed research and articles in prestigious medical journals.

The EU authorities have approved drugs that are submitted on the basis of obfuscation (not mentioning negative outcomes in trials) and on pure fabrication of data. Research data and methodology are distorted to achieve the desired result or you can just make a false assertion and hope to get away with it. All the evidence, in the EU and the US, is that a lot of drugs get approved that are worthless or dangerous.

There is a show at the Wellcome Museum called High Society. It shows a great 1895 ad in which Bayer heroin and aspirin are advertised side by side - heroin being their ‘heroic’ non-addictive replacement for morphine. Selling drugs can be a nasty business, whether they’re legal or illegal.

WikiLeaks revealed that Pfizer paid $75 million to settle claims in Nigeria over killing 11 children and leaving dozens disabled by trialling Trovan on kids with meningitis. Hernia sufferers who had the Kugel mesh patch ended up with all sorts of horrible bowel injuries. Denture creams can cause zinc poisoning. Drugs for diabetes and acne are linked with worsening rather than restoring health. GlaxoSmithKline paid out £475 million last October including £60 million to the whistleblower who alerted authorities to problems with their antidepressant manufacture. More than 13000 lawsuits have been filed against them over their anti-diabetic drug, Avandia, amid claims that at least 83000 heart attacks by 2007 arose from a drug that was known to cause heart attacks as long ago as 1999.

So what does the EU do to improve its control over these scandalous risks? It collaborates with drug companies to crack down on herbal medicines, Ayurvedic and Chinese Traditional Medicines that have been used with remarkably few if any negative side effects for hundreds of years.

Why not crack down on the drug company CEOs? Fines are not enough. They make a fortune out of selling drugs to state-controlled health services. They can easily take the occasional fine in their stride. If a customer of a dope dealer dies it’s front page news and the evildoer has his money confiscated and goes down for a 5 stretch. Why not chief execs?

The Alliance for Natural Health is doing its best to stop this nonsense. Give them money. Sadly, our own Government has no power in this arena - drugs, like agriculture, are controlled in Brussels by unelected Commissioners (in Russia they used to call them Commissars) who collude with drug companies to make sure that your health is under their control, not yours. Read Big Pharma by Jacky Law for an insider’s view into how the drugs business works.

From time to time I take home-grown drugs: comfrey, nettles, viola, hawthorn, wormwood, fennel, melissa lemon balm, to name just a few illicit or potentially illicit medications that help support my generally reliable good health. I grow them myself in my garden, organically. Soon I may face prison if I don’t cease and desist from what could become criminal activity. To the barricades, comrades!

Chocolate Wars (Financial Times book review)

2011-06-03T10:33:00.001-07:00

The FT asked me to review Chocolate Wars, by Deborah Cadbury

CHOCOLATE WARS

Deborah Cadbury

It wasn’t easy being Quaker. Banned from careers in government, the church or law and with their pacifism barring a military career, they were forced into commerce. Their high ethical standards meant they couldn't be involved with alcohol, gambling or making armaments. The grocery trade became a natural outlet for their energies.

All the great English chocolate dynasties: Cadbury, Fry and Rowntree, were Quakers. Their belief in the brotherhood of man led to paternalistic employment practices. They build garden towns for their employees with creches, sporting facilities and healthcare. Cameron's 'Big Society’ was second nature - they believed that cooperation and social provision were a necessary and natural adjunct to making money. They encouraged cooperation, volunteering and debt avoidance as fundamentals of behaviour - until competition from the State made their efforts redundant. Deborah Cadbury approvingly quotes Andrew Carnegie: "I can conceive of no greater mistake...than of trying to make charity do the work of justice." If the welfare state encourages dependency, the socially inclusive world of the chocolate industry encouraged self-reliance, hard work and abstemiousness. No pubs in Bournville and no tolerance for slackers in a tight-knit community, but generous provision for those who repaid the firm's confidence.

These straitlaced kindhearted pioneers built great chocolate empires and successfully fended off 100 years of assaults on the British market from Van Houten in Holland and Nestle, Suchard and Peter from Switzerland, while building market domination wherever the globe was coloured pink.
Chocolate Wars is much more than a story of a few family businesses - it covers the worldwide growth of the now near-universal addiction to chocolate from the rather unappealing greasy chocolate drinks that prevailed at the beginning of the Victorian age. The role of innovation, war and new technology on business development are all clearly and cleverly interleaved to make this book a gripping overview of the evolution from tiny beginnings to what is now a $500 billion industry.

The book dwells in detail on the ethical dilemma faced by the early Quaker chocolatiers when they discovered that their cocoa bean supply came from plantations that relied on slave labour and tells how the Ghana cocoa industry was fostered to provide a smallholder-owned alternative. Yes there is just a fleeting mention of Fairtrade and not a word about Green & Black’s, the pioneer brand in both the organic and Fairtrade categories and a Cadbury acquisition in 2005.

One question that is unanswered in the book was "Why Switzerland?" The chocolate making season is longer at cooler heights and latitudes - chocolate doesn't set at high temperatures. Swiss watchmakers are good at precision technology. Switzerland had the first structural dairy surpluses in Europe, providing cheap milk for processors. But the fact that non-Swiss companies house their European HQ in Switzerland points to another factor: taxation. The lamentation about job losses in Bristol (which Cadbury's had already irreversibly exported to Poland) overlooked the real loss; Cadbury's annual contribution from its global activities to HM Treasury.

What triggered Cadbury's loss of independence? Selling Hershey the US rights to the Cadbury brand in 1988 meant Cadbury could never become a truly global chocolate company. When Cadbury sought to take over Rowntree and become the world's largest chocolate company the Thatcher government blocked it with a referral to the Monopolies Commission, then allowed a Nestle takeover that handed the Swiss firm global dominion. The disposal of Schweppes soft drinks in 2007 reduced debt but made the company smaller, making it just about affordable for Kraft - they still had to make a $3 billion asset disposal to fund the purchase. It may be presumptuous to disagree with my fellow Omahan, Warren Buffett, but Kraft CEO Irene Rosenfeld saw a window of opportunity and seized the moment before it could close. For that Kraft’s shareholders can be eternally grateful - she got a great deal that will amplify their fortunes going forward. The hedge funds dealt the final hand, but the vulnerability was already there and she went straight for it.

Epigenetics - We control our future, not genes

2011-06-03T10:32:00.002-07:00

Your Kids Are What You Eat - (and your Grandkids)

If I had a penny for every Daily Mail headline that screams ‘New Hope for Cancer Cure’ and then goes on to say that some scientist discovered a gene that causes cancer, I’d be a very rich man. Little ever comes of this - all scientists did was discover a gene that they found in someone with cancer. When I hear people say diabetes is hereditary I want to scream. Even if every British diabetic in 1900 and their descendants had been confined to breeding farms and forced to produce a baby a year their hereditary diabetic offspring would represent a miniscule fraction of the 2.5 million diabetics, and rising, in the UK. Diabetes, like heart disease and cancer, largely comes from environmental causes like overeating, underexercising, eating denatured food and being surrounded by a sea of manmade chemicals. There may be some genetic history that delays disease onset in some people, but genes are not the cause of diseases of affluence.

Billions were spent mapping the human genome so that we could find cures for all our so-called hereditary diseases and in the end they found 25,000 genes, a humbling 5000 less than the 30,000 you’ll find in a mosquito. The genetic bonanza has failed to materialise but something useful did come of all that research - epigenetics

Epigenomes are the software that runs genes. Think of your genes as a computer, you never use the whole thing, but you activate different bits at different times. Epigenomes are the software that runs those bits - and you only use a few programmes at a time and then only a few bits of those programmes. They’ve just begun to count epigenomes and estimate they run into the millions. And they change all the time, depending on circumstances.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) argued that acquired characteristics could be inherited. But this Lamarckianism was replaced by Darwin’s theory of natural selection and the scientific world for 150 years accepted that genes were the be-all and end-all of our makeup. But epigenetics has brought Lamarck back to centre stage.

He argued that if a giraffe stretched its neck to reach leaves higher up the tree, its kids would inherit longer-necks. Harvard research studied rats in mazes that took 165 attempts to run it perfectly. After a few generations, their grandkids could get it right after 20 attempts. Just think, if you did the Times crossword every day for 10 years and then had babies your kids would inherit a heightened verbal ability (or maybe just talk in riddles and anagrams). If you overeat then your kids will be predisposed to obesity. If you smoke... don’t get me started.

If we eat a moderate diet of organic food, live in an unpolluted environment and in decent conditions and take plenty of exercise we have the potential to gift our children and grandchildren with unimaginable levels of health, happiness and longevity. Coué’s mantra: “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better” could apply to all of mankind and, indeed, the whole planet, plants, animals and microorganisms.

Instead of the disease-obsessed fatalism of traditional genetics, we can have free-will optimism. Instead of passively accepting that we are locked in a DNA-driven destiny we can improve our genes and create the future that we want.

The healthy living movement has always been driven by an intuitive acceptance of this. There is a responsibility here, too - we owe it to future generations to do right by them. We may have bankrupted their financial future, but we shouldn’t plunder their piggybank of health as well.
Epigenetics has proved that we can be masters of our own fates.

What’s stopping us?

Getting the Lead Out

2011-06-03T10:32:00.000-07:00

Natural Products News

Getting the lead out

Why were the Sixties so much fun? Could it be that we were all high on lead? Sure there was acid and grass and purple hearts, but what really got everyone loose as a goose was the lead. There is no level below which lead doesn’t have an effect. A little goes a long way. And it rots your brain, makes you prone to take risks and forgetful, while eating away at your kidneys and your liver. Kids get it worst: adults store it in their bones, but kids have it circulating in their bloodstream.

In the 60s A Day In The Life would start with a pot of tea made from water that had been sitting in lead pipes all night long. All the time you’re inhaling house dust that contains particles of lead that have flaked off the walls, painted with lead-based paints. Then the paper hits the doormat and you read it, the lead in the print coming off as a greyish smudge on your fingers that is absorbed directly through the skin into the bloodstream. Then breakfast of baked beans on toast, from a tin that was soldered together at the seam with a lead/tin compound. Out on the street, take a deep breath of fresh air, nicely spiced with airborne lead from the tetraethyl lead that was in all petrol until the mid ‘90s. Then roast pheasant for lunch, with atomised lead particles from the shotgun that brought it down. Now lead’s been phased out – you can only get unleaded petrol, lead pipes have mostly been replaced with plastic or copper, newspapers no longer use lead-based ink, house paints are all lead-free and tinned foods now no longer use solder – all the cans are welded seams. When I first went to pack Whole Earth baked beans back in 1983 the canners were appalled that I was appalled at the lead solder on the cans. They warned me that having welded seam cans would cost me an extra 10p per dozen, expecting me to drop my resistance. We were the first baked beans to use lead-free cans but Heinz and the rest followed suit over the next decade. Or so. And swan populations are recovering as hunters and fishermen switch over to lead-free shot.

Of course there is still lead residue in the world’s soils in which we grow our food. Green & Black’s test every batch of cocoa beans to make sure there is no residue. Dagoba, in the US, had to recall all their chocolate 2 years ago when it was found to have high levels of lead residue. It broke the company and they sold to Hershey a few months later.

When General Motors and Standard Oil developed tetraethyl lead as a petrol additive in the 1920s there was an outcry. It was banned. Everyone knew it was a poison and the opposition was led by top professors from Harvard and Yale. But Standard Oil likened lead to a ‘Gift from God’ as it would make such a difference to automobile performance. They acted in cahoots with DuPont (“Better Living Through Chemistry”) and General Motors to put pressure on the politicians. The ban on leaded gasoline was lifted and the world got a lot more toxic. Then it was banned again in the 1980s. Rick Nevin, of the National Center for Healthy Housing, has shown that crime levels fall when unleaded petrol is introduced. All the claims of tough guy mayors and police chiefs to have cut crime rates are so much fluff, the real culprit was lead all along. Has lead been phased out around the world? No. In Mexico City cars pump 32 tons of lead into the atmosphere every day. The crime rate went up by 69 % from 2005 to 2009. Researchers said maybe it was criminals acting under the influence of drugs. I blame the lead

But all is not doom and gloom – it only took 60 years for common sense to prevail, so there’s hope for us all that it might do so again with our modern poisons.

John MIchell - a Head of our Times

2011-06-03T10:31:00.001-07:00

John died in 2010 and this was my memoriam in Natural Products News

John Michell – a head of our times

My first meeting with John Michell was on October 19 1967 after Mark Palmer phoned me from Glastonbury, where he, John Michell and a few other people were camped in a gypsy caravan in a field along the Wells Road or, like Brian Jones, staying in the nearby farmhouse. “You’ve got to come down, Craig” Mark said, “The UFOs are coming out every night, lots of them, over the Tor.” It wasn’t an invitation to be turned down lightly so I piled into my Thames van and headed down the A4 to Somerset. We got there in the late afternoon and John Michell was busy cooking up some curried vegetables with rice. He showed me how to add the spices to the oil before anything else, to diffuse the flavours so that they evenly coated and infused all the ingredients, an attention to the detail of form and function that was typical of his penetrative insight. As we sat outside enjoying the autumnal evening Mark shouted ‘There they are!’, pointing directly to the south. We looked skywards and saw lights moving across the sky. Any doubt about their being of military or aviation origin was dissipated when what was clearly an RAF jet fighter flew up towards the lights, at which point they disappeared beyond Glastonbury Tor and entered what seemed to be a cigar shaped vessel. There was a brief repeat appearance and it was over. John strained his eyes skywards but his vision was already deteriorating and he could barely make out the shapes. His first book: the Flying Saucer Vision, was being published at the beginning of the following week and he had a radio interview lined up. He would be able to say, if asked if he had seen flying saucers himself that he was in a field near Glastonbury only last week as they lifted over the Tor.

During the 1970s our family venture was the seminal magazine Seed – The Journal of Organic Living, which was variously published by my father Ken, my brother Gregory and myself. John was a frequent contributor and would drop into our All Saints Road office to share ideas and a cup of green tea. As macrobiotic health food nuts our yin-yang fanaticism was comfortably engaged by his willingness to both accept and question an idea at the same time. He accepted our philosophy but always retained a detachment that never veered into aloofness, he was genuinely interested and understanding but didn’t get passionate about the ideas we espoused. He was a warm personality but also the epitome of a particularly English type of ‘cool.’ Riding with him in his stylish old Sunbeam Talbot drophead coupe along the Westbourne Park Road could be unnerving as he peered squinting across the long bonnet when trying to traverse a tricky intersection.

He introduced me to the idea of ley lines, freely acknowledging the pioneering work of Alfred Watkins in this respect and his View over Atlantis brought the idea to a whole generation who learned to love the map of the English landscape for its natural energies, not for the roads and motorways that obscured its reality.

One of his greatest gifts, through one of his contributions to Seed Magazine, was to introduce me to the work of William Cobbett. In it he quoted Cobbett’s criticism of young people who ‘mope at the heels of some crafty, sleek-headed pretended saint, who, while he extracts the last penny from their pockets, bids them be contented with their misery and promises them, in exchange for their pence, everlasting glory in the world to come.’ He specifically targeted this quote at the tired young radicals of the 1970s who had the fire in their bellies extinguished by various yogis, Christian tribalists and other mercenary and mystic pacifiers. He also lighted on Cobbett’s “Paper against Gold” where Cobbett ‘exposed in simple language the trick by which the country had been persuaded to barter its real wealth, in labour and produce, for the illusory wealth of bankers’ promises and government paper.’ He must have smiled in his final year as the same recurring fraud was perpetrated again. John’s support for organic farming was in the lamentation: “Today less than half what is eaten in Britain is native produce and that proportion would be decimated were it not for the amounts of chemical fertiliser that must now be imported and applied to obtain any sort of harvest at all.’ In the same article: “ Cobbett conceived an ideal image of medieval England, a fair landscape, prosperous and populous, with its feasts, fairs and holidays, its profitable labour and refined craftsmanship, its equitable society giving health, happiness, security and plenty to all who wanted such things. This was the land he promised the people and he did more than any ten others would have done to keep his word and he could not/ and his failure has been the heritage of all subsequent generations.” John Michell made Cobbett’s vision the inspiration to a generation who believed that a New Jerusalem in England’s pleasant land could be achieved not by revolution, but by going out and creating an alternative society that would eventually replace the corrupt and rotten edifice of government fraud and bankers false promises. They headed for the hills of Wales and the West Country and grew organic vegetables, dreaming of Albion and founding the natural and organic foods industry and the environment movement.

This emerging change was seen to be evolutionary, but not in Darwin’s sense. In his Seed article “Towards Cosmogonic Sanity – The Demolition of Darwin” John envisaged that evolution was not a one way track, that human nature ‘has descended, not risen’ and that prophecy is about regeneration and reversion to type, not to apes but to ‘embodied spirits in union with the spirit of the Universe, citizens of the New Jerusalem.’

John was also a fierce defender of traditional measures and opposed the Napoleonic metres and grams. In Just Measure, which we published in 1976, he wrote: “The inch is the length of the first joint of the thumb, the foot stands up for itself, the yard is a stride or an outstretched arm, a furlong is the furthest distance a man is prepared to run to the pub, and a mile is the distance he is most likely to traverse on his way back. Man is the literal measure of his universe and, using such a system, he can relate naturally to it.’ He was not afraid to have a laugh while making a serious point and to illustrate the article he loaned us a beautiful etching which we captioned ‘Winchester Cathedral was built before architects adopted metrication.’

The constant theme running through John’s work was that the abolition of traditional ways sapped the independence of local society and the individual. He rejected the epithet ‘reactionary’ saying that such phrases are ‘born out of the assumption that the good of the centre takes precedence over the good of the individual…we look forward to the old criterion whereby the wealth of a nation is reckoned by the contentment, prosperity and independent spirit of its members rather than by the amount in labour and taxes that can be squeezed out of them to fuel the development of elite science, technology and culture, directed by and for the benefit of centralised authority.’ The greed of the State, exposed in the MPs expenses revelations, is insatiable. He believed ‘The Thing’ must somehow be starved.

Some commentators have slyly noted John’s frequent inhalation of cannabis as if that somehow diminished his intellect or the validity of his thinking. He would have argued the contrary, referring to the famous hand-written and illustrated manifesto of Dr. Bart Hughes, a Dutchman who wrote in 1962 that cannabis increased brain blood volume by about 40 ml above its normal 1700 ml and that LSD would increase it by 70-120 ml. Trepanation would bring a permanent relief of cranial pressure and allow brain blood volume to find an optimal level. John’s view was that the extra 1½ fluid oz (45 ml) that a good toke delivered was enough to elevate his already heightened intellect and eschewed any further resort to volumetric stimulation. Bart’s theory was based on the evolutionary assumption that our brain blood volume was restricted because, as apes, our heads and hearts were at the same level and that standing erect reduced the ability of the heart to fill the brain. John argued that we had always been erect and the lowered blood brain levels reflected our decline. Thus, pot was an instrument of regeneration that helped us rise back to our original pre-lapsarian state of consciousness. Who can argue with that without seeming frumpish and a boor?

From Green & Black's to Blackened Greens

2011-06-03T10:30:00.000-07:00

Here's the story of how I moved from dark chocolate to even darker materials - biochar

From Green & Black’s to Blackened Greens

Back in 1995 the Prince of Wales delivered the Lady Eve Balfour Memorial Lecture on the theme of ‘Counting the Cost of Industrial Agriculture.’ He argued that if you incorporate the externalised costs of non-organic farming, such as nitrate pollution, gender-bending herbicides in the water supply, biodiversity loss and the climate change cost of greenhouse gases (from nitrous oxides and soil carbon emissions) the real cost of non-organic food would nearly double.

A year later Dan Morrell of Future Forests (later to become the Carbon Neutral Company) encouraged me to go carbon neutral with Whole Earth’s organic wholegrain cornflakes. The whole life cycle carbon footprint of the cornflakes was calculated by independent experts who found that it was surprisingly low: because organic farmers increase rather than reduce the stored carbon in soil, this offset much of the other carbon cost of the cornflakes.

By now it was pretty obvious to me that the sooner we could get policymakers to force us to include the cost of greenhouse gas emissions in the cost of food the sooner we would all be eating organic food, because it would usually be cheaper.

Roll on 14 years to 2009 – the climate negotiations in Copenhagen have soil carbon and forest carbon on the agenda. Lord Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the Bank of England and author of the Stern Review that put the cost of every tonne of carbon we emit today at £140 for future generations (currently carbon markets value a tonne of carbon at £11) has said that any future climate agreement has to be ‘universal and equitable.’ In other words, no cheating, no get-outs, no let-outs, no sacred cows. That means that all countries and all activities, including agriculture, forestry and transportation must be included in the new climate regime that begins in 2012. Hitherto only Europe has complied and then only for the heavy industries that emit half of our greenhouse gases – farming and transport have been excluded. But no longer.

2 years ago I invited Dan Morrell to join me in a new venture: Carbon Gold. What do we do? For a start, we believe biofuels are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Every bit of biomass carbon is too precious to waste by burning it. At Carbon Gold we aim to capture woody material such as waste biomass, forestry co-products and tree prunings and convert it into charcoal. But we call it ‘biochar.’ Why? Because we don’t burn it, thereby putting the carbon back into the atmosphere as CO2. Once we’ve made the biochar we blend it with fertility-building clays and composts and add it to the soil. Biochar is a wonderful soil conditioner: it improves drainage but also prevents soil drying out; it reduces the leaching of nutrients from soil by rainfall; it provides 5-Star accommodation for beneficial soil fungi and bacteria, increasing their populations; it improves soil structure and aggregation; it helps suppress soil-borne diseases that are harmful to plants and biochar helps raise the pH of acid soils. Universities around the world are gearing up to do biochar research that will more precisely quantify its benefits. These vary depending on soil, climate and the amount of biochar applied to soil.

Meanwhile at Carbon Gold we are busily making biochar and selling the carbon credits from avoided emissions as well as selling the biochar as a soil improver. In Belize cacao farmers produce biochar that is blended with compost and used by banana growers to reduce their dependence on fungicides and irrigation. In East Sussex we are regenerating ancient chestnut coppice woodland and producing organic biochar which we use to produce “Gro-Char” peat-free compost which will be sold through garden centres. Garden Organic members will be trialling it in various applications during the 2010 season. In Mozambique we are partnering with a conservation organisation to help small farmers produce biochar, encouraging them to protect their forests and improve their soil fertility. On my own smallholding near Hastings there is a magnificent peach tree dripping with perfect fruit that had its base covered with biochar last February. The ones that didn’t get biochar haven’t done so well, peach leaf curl was worse for them. My biochar potatoes still show no signs of blight, while everyone else’s have suffered.

I feel like I’m still in the food business (and I have made a delicious risotto nero charbonara that delighted dinner guests recently), I’ve just moved my focus towards food security.

Treated like Animals

2011-06-03T10:28:00.001-07:00

NPN article

What is it about the meat industry? Vegans say meat is murder, what’s clear is that its production often defies morality.

A recently published inquiry by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (http://bit.ly/aKqz2U) has been pretty horrifying: women working in meat and poultry processing factories barred from going to the lavatory because it would slow down the production line. Result: urine and blood (if they’re menstruating) dripping down their legs. Angry managers pelt workers with frozen hamburgers and call them ‘you f***ing’ shit Polish.’

Press reports use terms like “Treated Like Animals.” I guess we take brutal and uncaring animal treatment for granted: cattle in Colorado feedlots up to their knees in their own shit, sick with e.Coli infections and salmonella. US poultry meat has to be washed with chlorine before it can safely be put on sale. I visited a chicken farm in West Virginia 18 months ago: the ammonia from fermenting chicken poop burned your eyes so badly that we could only stand in the shed full of 100,000 birds for a minute before we had to retreat to the fresh air outside. The country girl who assisted the manager commented that she had got used to the smell: her job entailed removing the dead birds every day. The corpses were then burned to generate heat that was helped heat the chicken barn – as recycling efforts go, probably a cut above grinding them up and feeding them to the survivors.

In the 19th Century a report from a Royal Navy vessel that intercepted a slave ship summarised conditions on that most horrendous of transatlantic voyages. “The sick, the dead and they dying were pulled up onto deck, shackled together, and thrown overboard.” The slaves were tethered in cubicles about 2 feet wide and 3 feet high for the entire voyage, which could last 4-12 weeks. The longer the trip the higher the death rate. Slave ships were ‘tight pack’ or ‘loose pack.’ ‘Tight pack’ profitably fitted more slaves into a ship, but the death rate was much higher: 10-20%. Modern pig and chicken factory farms go for ‘tight pack,’ raising the death rate to 5-14%, even with routine antibiotic use. Disease spreads in conditions where faeces cannot be cleared – even slaves above deck were chained in place for the entire voyage – otherwise they would jump overboard to escape the conditions.

I suppose when we consider the cruelty that surrounded the slave trade we shouldn’t be surprised that similar evils infest the meat industry. The trust of an animal is a wonderful thing. As pets they have a therapeutic effect that defies medical explanation. Yet if someone were to take a puppy or a kitten, smother it in its own excrement for a month or so, torture it, starve it and throw it into a furnace while it was still alive they’s be excoriated on the cover of the Daily Mail.

A new dairy ‘farm’ in Lincolnshire is planned to house 8100 dairy cows in darkened stalls, modelled on American dairy production. It is estimated that half of US dairy cows suffer from mastitis and they also suffer leukaemia, milk fever and a bovine form of AIDS. ‘Downers’ – cows that collapse - are turned into ground beef before they can die and become unsuitable for consumption.

It’s not often that Human Rights Watch take up cudgels on behalf of American workers, but they have pointed out that meat industry workers have 3 times the injury rate of other industries, with workers being asphyxiated by fumes and having their legs cut off and their hands crushed.

When you look at the cruelty we inflict on animals is it any wonder that we treat abattoir workers so badly? When you look at the kindness that typifies organic animal rearing, is it any wonder that places like the exemplary biodynamic Laverstoke Farm build their own meat processing facilities, carefully designed to keep the animals calm right up to the final moment, rather than send them off to a slaughterhouse where the people, let alone the animals are treated like…well, slaves.

People somehow manage to get over their concerns about animal welfare when they buy non-organic meat in a shop or restaurant, but how easy is it to be a participant in the human degradation as well?

The 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse

2011-06-03T10:27:00.000-07:00

Sustainable Foods keynote speech Amsterdam and NPN article

In June I was invited to give the keynote speech at the Sustainable Foods Summit in Amsterdam. The conference programme was so advanced it made me blink in disbelief - here were a bunch of corporate executives and sustainability managers from the world's leading corporations all working to create real standards of sustainable growth and methods of measurement in order to comply with their corporate statements of principle. Stalwarts like Clearspring and Whole Foods were there, but the general tone was very mainstream. I spoke about taking an ethical brand mainstream later in the day but for my keynote I thought I'd give it to them with both barrels. Here’s my speech:

"Today I would like to take for my text the New Testament, Chapter 6: 1-8, the Book of Revelation of St. John the Evangelist (I'd give anything for a picture of the audience's horrified faces as they prepared for the worst). You may recall it: it's where Jesus opens the sealed scrolls and summons forth the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - War, Plague, Famine and their faithful follower, Death.

To understand sustainability we must recognise that the world's economy is still governed by legacy industries who have a massive vested interest in those 4 horsemen. Without them, or the fear of them, their shareholder value would collapse.

War enjoys annual capital expenditure of $1.5 trillion. with the US leading the field, devoting 5% of GDP to military spending. As you'd expect with any capital expenditure, the return on investment is many times the value of the outlay - the cost of death and destruction of property in target nations is massive. Of course the at-home social damage is pretty high too as soldiers return home with attitudes to violence that lead to high domestic cost due to healthcare, suicides, crime and psychological problems.

Plague enjoys good returns, too. The Avian Flu and Swine Flu panics exposed Big Pharma’s desperate quest for new disease threats. The side effects of medical intervention create a huge subsidiary industry and new diseases like diabetes, cancer, heart disease and high cholesterol create an opportunities for profit. Death from medical errors in the US run at 200,000 a year, while correct intervention claims many more.

Famine is perhaps most relevant to this conference. By destroying the natural fertility of the Earth with chemical fertilisers and killing off biodiversity with pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, GMOs and antibiotics agribusiness has created a global dependency on their chemicals to produce our food. 'Feed the world' is their mantra as they progressively starve the world. Now, except for organic farming, we are hooked on the drugs they sell to keep degraded land in production.

We have to kick these bad habits but they are entrenched in our socioeconomic system and their proprietors will not give up without a fight

So how can sustainability triumph? It must be in all arenas, we must bring peace and prosperity, to all. It can be done, because things have changed.

How have things changed?

Debt - Wars, drugs and agribusiness have bankrupted our economies. First rule of a parasite is: don't kill the host. If American taxpayers had to pay for war, medicine and farm subsidies they would never have happened. Instead the Chinese, and Arabs loaned the US the money so they could continue to buy cheap consumer goods and oil. Now that the debt is dragging down our economy we wrongly blame the bankers. The rot started because our governments subsidised war/drug/ag with borrowed money because they were too cowardly to pay for it out of increased taxation.

Transparency - the days of the smoke-filled room where a handful of powerful men decide the fate of the rest of us is ending. We know what’s going on.

There is no future if there is not a sustainable future. A handful of companies worldwide thrive on war, sickness and a famine. Our governments bow to them. Monsanto's control of the USDA is the most obvious but it's the same everywhere, from the EU to India to Africa and Latin America.

It is undeniable that peace brings more prosperity than war and avoids the burden of debt

That the creation of health is better value than the treatment of disease

That organic and sustainable farming gives better and more reliable yields than unsustainable petrochemical dependency

We're right - we know we're right - they know we're right.

But they won't give up without a fight

In Britain our new prime minister speaks about The Big Society - people doing it for themselves. The top down model is disintegrating everywhere. When people start doing it for themselves then different choices will be made. Companies that are ready for this seismic change will prosper. There can only be on future and by definition it must be sustainable.

Nuclear Power Option? Get rid of it.

2011-06-03T10:24:00.000-07:00

My Natural Products News Column May 2011

Had a chat with a Belarussian cabbie while in Tallinn Estonia to give a speech at a marketing conference. He had lived in Estonia for 25 years.
“Why'd you move to Estonia?”
"I worked in the MInistry of Commerce and so had access to confidential government papers. When I saw how bad the radiation contamination from Chernobyl really was I took my family and got the hell out." "Are your kids healthy?" "Yes, thank you, no thyroid cancer or other problems."

The nuclear industry will never tell you the truth. There were frozen Welsh lambs that were condemned for being too radioactive that had been frozen before Chernobyl blew up. It came from the Windscale (Sellafield) fire in 1957. We'd been eating radionucleides since the 50s in lamb and dairy products and nobody told us. It’s still there. Welsh hill sheep have to come down to less radioactive valley pastures for their final months of grazing to get their radioactivity below the maximum limit.

Imagine if you had some disease where you continuously excreted a toxic substance that would kill any living being. You then collected it and injected it into your Mum. That’s what we’re doing to our mother – Earth – so that we can advertise chewing gum all night in Piccadilly Circus.

The electricity that was billed as 'too cheap to meter' has turned out to be costing us the Earth. Fukushima isn’t over yet - a huge area of Japan will be uninhabitable for tens of thousands of years. If it had been Dungeness then all of Kent and Sussex would have had to be evacuated. The French have already banned eating or selling fish from the river Rhone because of radioactivity from a nuclear power station near Lyons. Now it’s leaking into the Mediterranean.

Sellafield disposed of 250 tonnes of Plutonium-239 onto the floor of the Irish Sea. Now it’s moving its way up the food chain through microorganisms to shellfish to fish. It’s turning up in farmed salmon. It has a ‘half life’ of 24,000 years. That means in 24,000 years it will ‘only’ be equivalent to 125 tonnes. In other words, it’s there forever.

Every year we create another 12,000 tonnes of HLW – High Level Waste – stuff that is toxic forever.

What can we do? If I ruled the world (not such a bad idea) I'd:

- Earmark 5% of global GDP to energy security. Real energy security
- Tax fossil fuels at their real cost of £140 tonne of CO2 emitted –
starting with the US, where 6% of the world's population use 30% of the world’s energy
- Insulate, insulate, insulate - it saves in air conditioning as well as heating
- Solar, wind, tidal, geothermal – just spend the money
- Never burn wood - turn it into biochar and sequester it in the soil
- Close every nuclear power station and ship the waste to Russia

Then pay the Russians to build 20,000 of their 25 tonne payload rockets – it costs $4000 a Kilogram to chuck this deadly crap into space. So the 500,000 tonnes of High Level Waste we now have on the planet would cost a mere $2 trillion to get rid of permanently.
What a bargain!
The IMF estimates the financial crash cost us $12 trillion and we’re still alive.
Let’s do it now, before the waste is irretrievably buried in underground storage. Sorry if there's life out there in space, but it's us or them.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, is as evil as nuclear power. Nothing else threatens everything that all living plants and creatures have struggled for since the miracle of life began on this planet. It was always just an excuse to build atom bombs.

If you had the choice: double your electricity bill or die a horrible lingering death watching the skin peel off the faces of your children? What would you choose?

Brussels

2009-07-20T10:06:00.000-07:00

Just came from a meeting in Brussels July 19 and 20 09

The reason? A jury of 4 people from the organic sector and 4 people who are designers foregathered to consider 1000 or so submissions for the new EU logo for organic food. (The 9th juror was Miguel Indurain the winner for the Tour de France 5 years running from 1991 to 1995)

The old logo was not widely adopted. Most countries and regions already had a national logo so didn't change to it. However, the EU Commission, during the negotiations for the revised organic regulations, decided to make it mandatory, displayed as well as existing marks of organic certification. From 2010 all organic packaging will be required to have it added on the label somewhere as a second reassurance that the product complies with the EU standard for organic food.

So we foregather, we 9 jurors, to consider designs submitted by art students for a logo to encompass all the products of this €22 billion industry. The brief was challenging: no words such as 'bio' or 'organic' - should show Europe in some way (most likely an artistic letter 'e' or a circlet of stars) - should be memorable. We turn a long list into a short list and then rank the logos. There are a lot of very clever designs, some rather trite, many that were not a logo - more a brand or a 'storyboard.' In the end we jurors settled on a ranked top 10.

Next step? Fix them up with refinements of the designs, then post them on the internet and let the public vote for them.

The organic movement and market has gotten so big that Directorate General Agri, the EU Commission's agriculture executive, seem to need to move from a bystander role to more central control. Requiring food products to bear the new mark will help imprint its authority on the rapidly growing organic market.

I met Elisabeth Mercier, the head of L'Agence Bio, the French multisector quango that is now promoting organic food and farming in France. Her organisation has brought order out of organised chaos in the French organic movement and marketplace. L'Agence Bio's profile has strong resonances with the Soil Association's role in the world of UK organic food and farming. France is showing rapid growth in organic farmiong, , helped by the way L'Agence Bio has brought together all the stakeholders for gatherings of mutual interest and benefit. We talked about the FFL Partnership, how independent schools will give it extra weight, how effective it is at creating the infrastructure that can underpin local food economies.

Poznan prattle

2008-12-07T22:35:00.000-08:00

Poznan 2008

Arrived Saturday 5th to be in the midst of a mad runaround

Dan and Debbie are rushing around to get the submission in by 6 p.m. We find out who the key player is and head for his office and meet a guard with a pistol on his hip. We blag and beg to get through security to the high temple: the UNFCCC office and found Martin ??? who is the controller/gatekeeper on this and he gave us the precise wording which Debbie then emailed to the UNFCCC but also printed out a copy and put it through the door of UNCCD, who are the official sponsors of the submission. They need to stamp it with their seal and then, as long as it gets to the UNFCCC by close of play on Monday, it's on the main agenda, not the NGO 'tail' agenda that future negotiations can look at but don't have to properly consider. Whew! But needs chasing on Monday as the UNCCD (United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, UNFCCC=United Nations Framework Committee on Climate Change - do keep up!)

We went for a cup of tea and met Margaret Leinen from Climos, who are working on seeding the sea in expanded trials for carbon sequestration. They put 20 Kgs of iron sulfite (via propwash of boad) per square Km of sea surface and say this sequesters 25 Tonnes of C which falls to the ocean bottom (not CO2, but definitely C)

I leave her talking to Jim Fournier while we go off to the press room and collar odd journalists. One is from a group of environmental journalists and we give him the story and a press release.

Then we restock the press release stand, which is a messy table, with more of our releases.

Then we visit Reuters to thank them for the article (not that good) they sent out on their wires and clarified that we are not looking for funding but are funded and on the way. He was more interested and we gave him 5 minutes of quality information.

Then we passed around the various displays, picking up literature on REDD

Then back to the restaurant where Jim, Lopa and Debbie are still talking to the Climos ocean seeding folks.

They head off to a party and Dan and I go to the REDD meeting at 1930 in the White Tailed Eagle room where a NZ researcher is setting out the economics of different approaches: free approach, restrictions on supply, restrictions on demand. Very technical but gives an insight into how the ‘market’ economics of climate change are influenced by how much people think governments are willing to pay. What’s clear is that everyone is committed in principle but nobody wants to pay the true cost of carbon (£70 a tonne, at least, according to Nick Stern, who since said it’s probably double that.)

After the lecture we talk to Linda Krueger, Director of Global Conservation Policy for the Wildlife Conservation Society (formerly known as Bronx Zoo) She knows about Golden Stream Corridor Reserve, her predecessor, Al Rabinowitz, is a jaguar expert, has written several books about them and other big cats. We invite her to dinner but she is going to the party at Tuba and says she might catch up with us later.

Then we go to the market square where we have arranged to meet the others for dinner. Dan has booked a table for 10 at the Baizanteicie, which means, the Pheasant. Nobody’s there so we stroll around the square, which is very Christmassy with ice sculptures, amber sellers, pretty gifty stuff. Geoffrey Lean calls me to say the article is in tomorrow’s Independent on Sunday. A huge ice sculpture collapses in front of us, I thank Geoffrey for slowing my pace with his call as otherwise I’d have had huge chunks of ice on my foot. He also thanks us for the invite to Poznan but says he’d be compromised if he accepted. We wait at the restaurant and down a couple of ice cold vodkas. Then everyone arrives and we have a full table of 10. Traditional but well presented Polish food, I have Poznan duck with red cabbage, dumplings and gravy. The borshe they serve is a clear, rich beet extract with cumin and dill spicing, very delicious and clean on the palate.

There are 2 journalists from a newsletter ready by environmentalists on the Hill, Debbie’s husband who is a political worker, former aide to a Delaware senator, a gy from NRDC and then Lopa, Jim, Dan, me and Debbie. I can’t really speak to the Wash DC guys as they are at the other end of the table and there’s a lot of background noise, much of it from us.

I leave them carousing and head back for some healing sleep.

In the morning I meet Lydia Olander of the Nicholas Institute at Duke University, one of the main links between academia and Washington policy and Brian Murray, who is their Director of Economic Analysis. I’ve been talking to Francisco Ascui who is at the U of Edinburgh, knows Richard Tipper, did some analysis work for Birdlife International that probably is why Richard set up independently with support from Stephen Rumsey (Birdlife’s treasurer). We are meeting Richard in January at his request so it’s good to get a bit of background, though the report is confidential, but touches on REDD etc. Francisco is the Principal Consultant at EcoSecurities, who are the world leaders in bringing home CDM projects through the methodology process and he feels we need help at IBI if we are to get there. He would like a meeting with Debbie and me (he met Debbie a few days ago) and would like to bring along his forestry expert. It’s nearly 1 pm so I have emailed Debbie and am going to head into town to take some pictures as there’s nothing happening at the conference today, Sunday and nobody’s quite sure how the rescheduling around the muslim holiday is going to work tomorrow.

I ride into town on the tram with Bryan Murray and then wander round the square, buy some Christmas decorations for Jo that are very Polish rococo and then have Kleb, a slice of bread with lashings of fried onions and sliced dill pickles. They serve it with Kybasie too, but I pass on the sausage. A woman next to me is speaking to her husband in English and then to the server in Polish so I ask her to establish the origin of the Schmalzen (Yiddish: Schmaltz) and she says it should be goose but it’s probably pork. It’s lard. Flavoured with salt and fried onions. Too late, I down it, alienating myself from the world's Judaic, Muslim, Hindu, vegan and vegetarian populations at a stroke. When in Poland…

Then I stroll up the hill to the Poznan museum of Applied Arts – lots of ornate swords, arquebuses, blunderbusses, armour, armoires, tapestries, inlaid furniture, old leather and wood thrones, Polish chinoiserie, a range of cocktail dresses from the 1900s to the 1990’s including some 50’s ones ‘a la mode Chanel.’ I knew that East European cars were scaled down copies of Detroit's 50s monsters but hadn't realised before that the same was true of fashion, too.

Then I meet up with Debbie and Francisco at the Merkure Hotel. Francisco has brought along Till his forestry associate who also works at EcoSecurities. They explain the process to develop modules for approval by the Voluntary Carbon Standard VCS that comply with the CCB Climate Communities and Biodiversity standards that is the best you can get. They estimate a cost of $60,000 to $130,000 plus the cost of our auditor, who is a VCS approved one, the proposal goes to the VCS, who give it to another auditor, then it gets approved if it’s OK, which it will be if they do it, they say. The key is that it needs little funding as they know all the people from UN and government bodies and private foundations, who fund this sort of thing, and can help us to fast track to full funding - they want the work, need us as the hook but know where the money is, so it's potentially not much cost at all. Debbie takes copious notes and I realise that if we do this right, getting the rewards for abandoning bad practice (slash n burn, wood fire cooking, deforestation) and the rewards for good practice (Slash n char, biochar stoves, sustainable forest management) we could get a real lump of money for every tonne of C that we sequester, getting up to me dreamed-of double credits.

A very good and instructive meeting with a couple of real insiders, Debbie and I stay behind to digest, then I go off to the Sheraton to meet Tom Spencer and Icarus Moussitis, from the European Council, he’s their climate change guy. We have a beer and talk about the forthcoming events tomorrow that they’re doing, Durwood Zaelke will be doing an afternoon event with Tom and he is organising a group of 3 groups who wanted to do events and have been told they have to all squeeze into one 1 ½ hour slot, but they are compatible so it’s possibly a good thing. We’ll see, the speaking slots are very tight, 9 speakers in 60 minutes. Then we head off to dinner in the old town, with the group from tomorrow. There’s room for me and Icarus so we join them and I chat to Michiko Kainuma from the Climate Policy Assessment Research Section Center for Global Environmental Research (CGER)

Then Cornie from the Clear Air Initiative for Asian Cities tells me about the Partnership for Clean Indoor Air and their stoves, also about the Colorado State group, Bryan Wilson, who are working on this issue. These people may be able to give us an overview of what is happening with stoves. Everyone is a bit contrite because the 'clean air' stoves make for healthier households but actually are the main cause of the Himalayan snow melt and increased Asian soot - so a biochar stove could be a way that they can redeem themselves from the unintended consequences of the last big stove roll-out.

Then we leave and in the square a lovely tall brunette is singing arias. Her voice is trained, crystal clear, very relaxed and natural, standing a few feet away it vibrates every bone in your body. It turns out Icarus is also a singer, baritone, trained and used to sing in opera. We chat and it turns out that she’s from Belgium, he’s Cypriot but works at the Council offices in Brussels. “What brings you to Poznan?” he asks. “I’m a Greenpeace activist” she replies. “Were you at the demonstration outside the Council offices in Brussels in May? Did you get arrested?” Her face lights up, as do those of her three girlfriends. “Yes, they arrested us.” Icarus explained his job, said it took him several hours before he could get into his office, but assured them he supported their work and that it was a good demo.

They arrange to meet up tomorrow and sing some arias together.

Belize Breezes

2008-11-16T07:35:00.000-08:00

Arrived in Punta Gorda on Thursday Nov 13 and visited cacao farmers up country, with Neil, the Green & Black's supply chain manager and Lisa, our marketing manager and 4 journalists from the US and Canada.

The cacao crop at this time of year is fairly small, but is called 'Christmas cacao' because it generates extra cash in December to pay for presents. The varieties that are being developed and for grafting from budwood are starting to have an impact on yields, which is good news and farmers are getting a lot better at pruning, so the the ever present threat of monilia (a devastating disease) is diminished.

We visited the farm of Justino Peck, who is the outgoing chairman of the Toledo Cacao Growers Association and who was also chairman in 1993 when I visited to persuade the farmers to go organic, dangling a long term contract, cash in advance and a good price. Justino bought into my offer and brought the association along, for which I am always grateful. His trees were looking good, but in need of pruning on the top growth, something that our charcoal (more later) project will address.

We then went on to Uxbenha, where recent archaeological evidence indicates that cacao use and trade predates that found at any other site, confirming that the 'botanical epicentre' of cacao, i.e where it was first domesticated, is right here in the Maya Mountains. There were a few wild citrus trees and we gathered some cooling refreshing fruit before heading off to visit Eladio Pop in San Pedro village, overlooking the Columbia river. Eladio's wife served us with tortilla, rice, chicken caldo (spicy stew) and pumpkin and we then drank his homemade kukuh out of calabash cups. He grows the cacao, ferments it, dries it, roasts it, winnows the husks and then grinds it and shapes the resulting paste into balls which keep for months. When he wants kukuh he grates off some of the balls and blends it with warm water, vanilla, ground allspice and honey or sugar. All home grown (except the sugar). It was delicious and after several calabash cups full we were bouncing off the walls and ready to move on. Eladio is a 'new man' to the extent that he cooks at the weekend to give his wife a break and takes a keen interest in culinary matters as well as the growing of organic food.

Perhaps this is a good time to mention that I just got an email from Bob Bond, who keeps bees on our family woods and orchard at Fairlight, that 'our' honey won First at the National Honey Show. We and the bees are very very proud!

We bade Eladio and family goodbye and headed off for Lubantuun, where Justino and I did interviews on camera for Vivien, the Canadian journalist and we all learned about the history of the ruins. In 1987 I had written in the guest book "Get rid of these trees, they are eating into the ruins and will make them unrestoreable.' A lot of work has been done since then but the trees are growing back and some misguided government official has forbidden their removal as trees are a 'good thing.' That evening we have a convivial dinner at the Hickatee Cottages and restaurant, set in deep jungle and run by a lovely English couple, Kate and Ian. Kate is slight and delicate in appearance, but tough as nails and unmoved by any adversity, even the near failure of their electricity generation in the middle of her dinner preparation efforts.

I saw a guy barbecuing chicken for sale to passers by and inquired about where his charcoal came from. "Supaul's store just around the corner from Main Street." Supaul told me that there are charcoal makers at Boom Creek Village, a Spanish speaking community a few miles west of Punta Gorda, so plan to visit them on Monday to study their methodology.

Sunday morning: go for a long walk along the seafront up to the edge of town at Joe Taylor Creek, where there is a small landing. Walking back I sit on another wooden landing, feet dangling in the water to try to ease the itch of sandfly bites, lying back flat in the hazy sun listening to Andy Palacio and Ernest Ranglin. Oh yes. Then barefoot, trousers rolled up to the knee, walking back to town to Grace's Cafe for lunch of ginger ale, rice and stewed beans, with a double helping of lightly dressed cole slaw. Oh yes, indeed. Then I pass a house with turkeys in the back yard, only a few weeks till Christmas. I always like John Maynard Keynes' comment that turkeys, on the basis of previous evidence, think that the economy will always be growing, with everyone getting larger and fatter and with more food every day, then comes the crunch. One has jumped over the fence and I wake up its owner, who is snoozing on his porch, to warn about the break out.

On Sunday afternoon Lisel Alamilla, the executive director of the Ya'axche Conservation Trust picks me up with Bartolo Teul, her conservation officer and Elseno DuBon, a consultant who grows cacao and has helped the TCGA in the past, to have a look at their forest reserve location and to discuss how we can integrate biochar production with sustainable cacao growing, organic farming and permanent protection of the amazing biodiversity that they enjoy. There have been some pretty ugly scenes with illegal loggers crossing over from Guatemala - in their own country they'd be shot but they think they can get away with it because there's so few people in the reserve that they can take out logs without being noticed. Regular biochar harvesting activity will keep more people in the deep bush and this will provide early warning if anybody is trying to steal trees. They give me a slide show about their activities and it is clear they see cacao as a way of combining agroforestry with conservation and we discuss how best to overlay biochar production so that they can generate income for the farmers and for their great work. My late dad's friend, Dr. Adrian Wilson, is one of many generous sponsors but they are keen to become self sufficient as their reserve links to some much larger reserves that they have the opportunity to manage - of montane forest, tropical forest and riverbank land going right down to the mangroves at sea level, the Golden Stream watershed. On our way to the river crossing Bartolo laughs when I tell him that my first encounter with Golden Stream was August 1987, when it was in full flood. (They have since built a new bridge that is 10 feet higher). The old wooden bridge had 2 running boards for each vehicle wheel, set on cross boards and the river had flooded up several feet above the level of the boards. We waited through the night and by 4 am the waters had subsided enough for me to wade across the bridge bent over feeling through the stream to stay on the track of the running boards, my butt in the air and the vehicle with all our cameras and equipment (we were there to film the Deer Dance as part of a scheme to return the Crystal Skull to its home in Lubantuun) following me a few feet behind to make sure it also stayed on track. A sudden swift current tore off my plastic sandal and as we crossed the bridge I joked that I could see it stuck on a branch. Lisel suggested that when we came back on Friday with the full group that we could return by canoe down the river, meet a boat and thus see the whole flow of the landscape. Maybe I really will find my sandal. Then we could go round to John Spang and Tanya Russ' 1500 acres that are only accessible from the sea for a cup of tea and work out how to char the vast amounts of wood that were destroyed on their forest by Hurricane Iris, before it rots away completely. Not sure how you char rotten wood, I assume it gets damp. But they all liked the principle of char as carbon credit, safe household fuel and agricultural amendment, especially as some of the cacao farmers on their land are having trouble because of acid soil. There is clay everywhere, often so hard that people can't get a spade through it. They have a nursery where they raise 10,000 trees a year to give out to farmers, mostly cacao, balaam (a native variety with a white bean), mahogany, red cedar, mango and other native varieties. It's getting on for the dry season so they are anxious to get the remaining trees out of the nursery and into the ground while the wet weather lasts.

Monday November 18th

Go to TCGA to see if I can get a lift to Boom Creek from Alvaro Pop. Cirila Cho is waiting there to get a check for a delivery of her new chocolate bars. With a well designed wrapper and much smoother texture they are one of about 5 brands of chocolate that are aiming to capture the local market before going global. She used to make Brigadeiros, toffee like balls, now she makes a creditable dark chocolate bar. She is very smartly turned out in a beautifully embroidered white on black skirt and is very businesslike. Things are going well, she now has a proper grinding and conching set-up and is increasing sales, despite the competition. Her son is helping her in the business, Annemarie, her daughter, who used to be the TCGA compliance officer and has recently had a baby, so she's now a granny. She still winnows the roasted beans by hand, a tedious task, but having the grinder is pivotal to quality. I'm glad to see that she has progressed by leaps and bounds from her kitchen tabletop operation just a year and half ago.
Meeting with Santiago Sanchez at Boom Creek Village. He makes charcoal which he supplies to Supaul's store in Punta Gorda, who then sells it to the streetside barbecue chicken vendors and to the public. Santiago's house is stacked with bags of charcoal which he has prepared earlier and is waiting to sell and we sit down for a chate. I mention that I am interested in charcoal etc and then ask him if he has every tried it mixed with soil. His face lights up, he leaps up and beckons me to his charcoal pit, about 100 yards from his house. The pit is about 10 feet long and 5 feet wide, logs on either side, charcoal in the bottom, and rich black charcoaly earth on the sides. He calls it 'black soil' and I pick up a handful, it smells very neutral, less earthy than compost but it has a lovely texture, almost edible. So far Santiago has experimented with it on his cabbages ("They have much wider heads and are much greener, lots of big green leaves") and his peppers. The soil runs dark and deep and it seems like the carbon has percolated down, or been taken by worms, to a deeper level as I scoop out some from the sides from the very bottom of his pit and it is rich and black several inches in, though this could just be burnt earth. We go back to his house where he has a rusting old pickup truck carcass that his wife uses as a nursery. There are some rather sad looking plants in black plastic 'pots' and I ask if the soil in them is char-enriched as there is a pile of black soil on the truck bed. He shakes his head and points to the anaemic looking soil in the pots and says "I tell my wife to mix it in but she don't do it." As a fellow innovator I know how hard it is to get people to take your crazy ideas seriously. I buy 4 bags full of charcoal to take back as gifts for TCGA and YCT folks and we bid him goodbye, arranging to come back on Wednesday afternoon.
Pop in to see SHI (Sustainable Harvest International) director Nana Mensah who shows me their new solar poo drier and urine collector. Nana Mensah took up the biochar baton last year when I preached the gospel to him at the Cacao Fest. He sent his staffer Kenny Cal to a course in Honduras in May of this year where they learnt how to make biochar from corncobs. As corncobs are not thrown away but used as toilet paper charring is a good way to capture and sterilise otherwise pathogenic waste. As the Japanese keep urine to enrich charcoal and cool it down after processing, things are coming together. Kenny Cal now works for YCT. Then to TCGA office for a planning meeting for the next few days' guests. Neil has been summoned back to London and Lisa wonders if I can possibly go with the group and her to Maya Mopan on Wednesday...I tentatively agree. Then we go off at my suggestion, to Gomier's, whose rastafarian restaurant is the only place you can get at tofu based meal in Punta Gorda. I order a rice and vegetables with tofu/oat balls in curry, the best meal I've had all week. They have fish now, so the others don't suffer to much from lack of protein.
Chat on phone with William Kendall while lunching at Gomier's about proposed management changes.
Then I head back to the hotel where I bump into Terrell, the North Carolina environmental civil servant who muses about how he used to round up stray dogs as part of his job and how he could deal with the Punta Gorda lot in no time. We go off to the Sea View bar above the fish market where a drum and rap group are doing Garifuna versions of Blondie songs. I down a Belikin, we stroll over to visit Chet, there is a Rasta and a hippie on his porch but he's gone to bed and doesn't respond to my soft calling of 'Schmidtie' so we go back to the hotel and I get an early night. The toilet is oozing (clean) water so I stuff a dirty shirt around the base to delay the inevitable puddling of the bathroom floor (Tate's Hotel, in case you're interested). Before retiring I send an email to our board suggesting that Neil's return be postponed.

Tuesday November 18th

Meet the journalists at the TCGA depot where Ernestina Bol has brought in some cacao for weighing. They are slightly overfermented, an unusual problem, but still acceptable. Neil gets a phone call to say he should stay on, so I am off the hook on Lisa's trip to Maya Mopan, though I'll go there at some point. Neil explains to the journalists about pricing and Lisa is getting anxious about time, but it is important that they understand the relation between the high prices we pay, the consistency of quality supply and the benefits to all parties. You get what you pay for and the customer is the ultimate beneficiary of the principle. When the see the fair trade premium of $150 and the organic fair trade premium of $200 they are impressed, then Neil shows them the Green & Black's premium of $1000 and they begin to understand why it all makes such a big difference. He also explains that because we now buy daily and also will soon be buying in San Antonio more women bring in cacao and they use the money more wisely. He comments that in the old days the men would bring in a large amount of cacao, get a large check, cash it at the bank next door and then spend the money on drink, to which I quip "...and then squander the rest." We head off to San Antonio and visit the new buying centre. This will provide solar warmed and naturally ventilated drying for farmers, to take away the tedium of constantly needing to watch out for rain without accelerating this crucial stage in the flavour development process. A rusting old barrel oven from the San Antonio wood fired drier that dates back to the Peace Corps help in 1986 is there. It never worked properly, just made cacao that tasted like kippers. All my anxieties about driers were based on that but this is as good or better than sun drying.
Then we go up to see 3 generations of Bols: Reyes Bol, his son Justiniano and his grandson Justianano Bol Jr, or 'Junior.' If there's an 80:20 rule about cacao it's that the Bol family and the Chun family supply most of our cacao. Their plantation is beautifully placed and I pick some allspice leaves for us to sniff, then we eat fresh cacao fruit, some are absolutely au point with just right balance of sweetness and acidity, everyone is greedily and with sticky fingers pulling out the seeds, sucking off the pulp and spitting the pits. I slice one lengthwise to show the deep purple of a fresh unfermented bean as all they've seen is well fermented and don't know what unfermented looks like. Then we go back to Junior's place for a lunch of caldo, rice, tortilla and what looks like potato. It is slightly sweeter, but almost a spud, so I ask what it is and am told that it's yucca. I go into the kitchen area and ask Junior's wife if she has one and she points to a huge tuber, about 8 times the size of a potato, on the floor in the corner. Wow. I pick it up and dangle it in front of Darragh and Susan, who are from Dublin "Let's see a spud this size from Oireland then" I challenge. There is a huge poinsettia outside the house that is clustered with beautiful flowers. It's always amazing to see perennials and their potential when we see them either as annuals or just as house plants. Even more amazing to walk throught he bush with a machete, hacking away at plants that, if you were in the Kew Gardens Tropical House, would have you locked up for a 4 stretch.

Then we go off to see Luciano Cho, who has 100 year old trees that he inherited from his Dad and refuses to prune because his mother entrusted them with them and he can't bring himself to remove a single branch. They are big fat trees, thick mossy branches, not very much fruit. He has planted a lot of cacao in recent years and will be the biggest single producer within a year or two as the 5 and 6 year old trees start to bear serious amounts. He and I go off for a walk away from the group to look at his mahoganies, a few very heavily laden cacao trees, and a wild pear that is huge. He has little hot pepper plants that seem to pop up everywhere, scorching even when green. Back with the group I ask him what schooling he had "Six years, that's why I don't speak so good." The journalists assure him that he speaks English well, but he knows they're being kind. I ask how many kids he has in high school and he says 2 at the moment, each one cost him US$500 a year in tuition, uniforms and books but he is determined that all his kids graduate and that's what inspires him to grow such good cacao and in such quantity. He's on his land at 6 a.m and knocks off at 4 p.m and is a picture of health and happiness, a man rooted in his ancestral land, though in fact most of it is of uncertain tenure, the nightmare that threatens to haunt all these farmers unless the debate over land tenure is resolved one way or the other. The Maya Council want reservation land to be protected from any alienation ever, they don't want farmers to be able to sell land to outsiders so think it should be held in common, though prior use will be respected. Some farmers want ( and a handful have) the security of private ownership, but that opens the ever-present risk that the rising number of refugees from 'civilisation' will outbid the locals when the land is sold and that gradually the distinctive Maya character of the homeland will be diluted, divided, diffused and dissipated.
We drive back to Punta Gorda and regroup in the evening for dinner at Marion's Bay View. It's my last night with this group so I go off with Sue White from Sydney and we do a one to one interview. Then we all have dinner, lovely vegetarian options, I have dhal, rice and salad and rehydrate with lime juice drink. Mrs Ramclam has made a lovely filled pastry sheet with some kind of fruit nobody can identify. Turns out is the pulp left over from juicing star fruit that has been pureed and then made into baker's jam with sugar. Someone asks me about the Crystal Skull and I regale them with my stories of the Harmonic Convergence, Malcolm Electric Warrior, visiting Anna Mitchell-Hedges in Kitchener and sitting with the skull on my lap as she tells me about how Harriot Topsey came to visit her to talk about recovering the skull for Belize and how she had to pull out her .38 to keep him from just grabbing it and bolting.
Tomorrow is the big Settlement Day celebration, the day the Garifuna came ashore in Belize and we expected the town to be throbbing with drums but it was quiet, people seem to be saving themselves for tomorrow.

I have breakfast with Darragh and Susan, then go with them to Beya Suites to say goodbye to the other journalists. Then I walk back into town along the seafront.

John and Jessica arrive
Go to YCT office, meet Rachel Kerry, then to SHI, closed. then to Santiago Sanchez, see peppers growing in biochar, his pit, his collection area, people melting banana leaves for tamales,
then to dinne

Thursday 20 Late start, gather flock and head up to San Antonio to see the new centre. Then on to Uxbenka, where we see a stela with engravings and stand on top of hill and see centres in all directions, then with Justino to San Jose for lunch, Christina, Griselda, Justino Junior, Sandra. Then to Justino's cacao, pruning with machete, weighing, argy bargy then speak to shrimp farm nephew, then back to PG, stopping for a quick look at milpa/huamil but everyone's tired and nobody's paying attention. At dinner at Emery's we have jewfish, also known as 'Goliath grouper' that is apparently getting smaller due to overfishing. It is one of the world's most delicious fish so it's going to be struggle to control the fishermen. Then we walk back to Coral House Inn, grab a beer from the self service bar fridge and relax by the pool under a starry sky, Orion just above the horizon.

Friday November 21st 2008

Rice Mill – we set off en masse to the Big Falls rice mill, where there is a mountain of rice husks rotting away. Stephen knows a thing or two about rice mills, char and the use of heat to dry rice so we leave him and Niklaos there to investigate while we carry on, with Lisel aboard, to YCT. There we are given the presentation about their lands, their work and their potential and visit their nursery. They have a ‘keystone’ estate of only 15000 acres but it holds together 150,000 acres of Columbia River Forest Reserve, 90,000 acres of the Bladen Nature Reserve, the privately owned land of the Jungle Lodge on the southwest side of Golden Stream, who encouraged them to buy the northeast side to that it never turned into cattle pasture. My Dad's good friend Dr. Adrian Wilson helped them to buy that land through the Grass Valley Trust and it now protects both sides of the river all the way to the mangrove forests at the sea. The Golden Stream is teeming with tarpon as the runoff diminishes, though some citrus plantations still cause problems. We don't meet Bartolo Teul, who is coming to Cornell, but we do meet Auxebio Sho, their agroforestry extension officer, who comes with us on our journey. We go through the nursery and learn more about the trees they are planting - they have a great stand of mahogany in their field overlooking the Maya Mountains on the horizon. Then off to try to catch up with Stephen and Niklaos. I phone the rice mill but they've gone to town so we go down a narrow track to the water's edge, bid Elliot goodbye and head off in a couple of canoes downriver. On the way Jessica sees a toucan and their boat disturbs and iguana which plops into the water just ahead of our boat. We are with Rachel Kerry, the river biologist who maps the snail and other populations of the river to measure its health and I engage her in conversation saying: "Do you ever study the gut flora of snails? I was just reading an interesting paper on seasonal changes in the gut flora of striped bass in Chesapeake Bay, as one does while waiting for East Enders to come on, and noted the way their flora reflect the seasonal availability of food." We had an enjoyable conversation as we floated down the river with Arthur and then got out at Jungle Lodge, a huge complex of cabins on a raised wooden walkway and a restaurant and airstrip. It doesn't seem awfully busy, we're the only people in a huge area for dining indoors and out, but it's a nice place and we have a good dinner overlooking the river from the verandah of the restaurant. I get some bits of bread and watch the sunfish fight over morsels down below, while our waiting motorboat captain casts endlessly for tarpon. A few yards down the river an iguana hangs precariously from the fronds of a cohune palm.

We speed downriver in 2 motor dories, and then cut through some channels in the mangrove by way of short cut, then arrive at Tanya Russ and John Spang's landing. It's getting late but we have a quick look at the 'whole pod' cacao trees. Marco is finally convinced that I know what I'm talking about and begins to understand the validity of this method of planting. Tanya is gracious in the face of an onslaught of a dozen people and I shepherd them back onto the boat and we get back to Joe Taylor Creek and disembark as the sky turns pink and grey and blue with the setting sun. We don't have time to look at the thousands of large tree blowdowns still in their forest as a result of Hurricane Iris, which hit land directly over their place - when the hurricane hit they were sad but they had 1500 acres of very tall straight trees that they could saw and sell and then replant. Then they discovered that every tree had been twisted by tight powerful cyclones within the hurricane, sort of like twisting a towel, so when they cut them the boards had huge gaps and fell apart and were useless. A couple of decades of stewardship down the drain. But we thought we might be able to char them and recoup some of the loss. I promise to update her on how best to do this - tricky as they have no road acess so any kit will have to come in to be unloaded at their rickety wooden jetty.

Dinner at Hickatee with Lisel, Marco,. Neil LaCroix joins us. Very happy with all the outcomes – the TCGA is in good heart, production is rising, the journalists are all keen as mustard to get home and write up their stories, the film crew and photographers are coming next week, he didn’t have to go back to London on Wednesday which would have been a real setback and he reiterates his gratitude to me for intervening.

Saturday November 22 2008

Up to watch sunrise with Rick, he invites me to be a sponsor of the Rotary Club’s (newly formed, he is the Chairman) plan to refurbish the park in Punta Gorda. It’s the triangular shaped space where the Cacao Fest was held last year and where the Settlement Day celebrations were this week. They are going to put in a kids’ playground, repaint the clocktower (done, by a US artist and a local guy, great evocative murals of toucans, jungle, multiethnic faces etc) and put an arbor in front of the stage, in which gazebos can be erected. It’s a nice plan and for BZ$1000 I can have my and Jo’s names engraved in a stone plaque for posterity to wonder who the hell we were.

Then Elliot turns up in the van and Arthur and Marco and I head off to San Antonio for the AGM. Elliot will come back later for John and Jessica. On the way we pass two fishermen who are on the roadside, their small dugout dory tethered along the shore, skinning a massive jewfish – it is the largest of the grouper family and must weight a good 120 lbs, worth about $1000 BZ for these guys. We ask where they are planning to sell it and they say to Emery’s and Marion’s (which is where we are planning to eat that evening). Rachel from Blue Belize, who is the world’s leading whale shark expert and a grouper lover who exhorts fishermen not to keep the 30-40 pound young fish as they are the future breeding stock, has already been notified of the catch and has seen it. We bounce along and get to San Antonio just as Neil LaCroix has finished his speech in which he assures the farmers that Green & Black’s is there for the long term and that we are endowing scholarships for farmers’ kids to go to high school (cost is BZ$500 per year to cover tuition, uniform and books). There are 400 people, farmers and wives and kids and a real festival atmosphere but also real focus and attention on the agenda. We also missed the Agriculture Minister’s speech. The San Antonio Buying Centre isn’t quite complete, but it looks spanking new with fresh paint and roof and a big sign at the front describing it and with the names of various sponsors of its construction. Green & Black’s aren’t a sponsor but get pride of place at the bottom centre of the sign. There must be 20 buses parked up along the road that the TCGA has laid on to bring farmers from every village. 5 Hogs have been roasted and cooked up with red beans and rice to feed the farmers once the business of the AGM is completed. It started at 8 am, finishes after noon.

Justino Peck then speaks, acknowledging my presence in the audience, giving the history of the TCGA in brief detail and explaining how the new buying centre here and the one in Maya Mopan will relieve farmers of the burden and cost of taking their cacao all the way to Punta Gorda to sell. The drying units mean farmers can sell wet fermented beans to the association and they will be dried, without heat, but under cover with air circulation so that they are nice and clean and even and mould-free. It’s a big step forward in rising to the challenge of increased production that has come from the tree planting of the previous 4 years. Then the Minister for Foreign Affairs speaks, taking farmers through the sad history of how Hershey got them to buy seeds that weren’t that good, then dropped the price after the aid workers went home, then how Green & Black’s came in and how they have been struggling to keep up with demand ever since. He talks about fair trade and organic and tells the farmers that they have been a beacon to the rest of the world, that fair trade began with them and that it is now worth $3 billion worldwide. They have much to be proud of, he says, and all of Belize is proud of what they have achieved. During his speech someone starts serving orange juice so lots of people are getting up and walking to the side to get a cup but the majority are listening.

Then the accountant goes through the numbers: very profitable year, grants have been a help, new buying centres fully paid for, the association is asset rich and has BZ$ 460,000 in the bank. Wow! That’s $230,000 US, a lot of money by any measure for a cooperative of poor cacao farmers. He proposes more scholarships for high school kids and also a ‘Disaster Fund’ so that if a farmer is hit by hurricane, fire or other natural calamity the association can afford to help them to get back on their feet with new trees, grafting budwood etc.

Then Diego, who is Master of Ceremonies, urges the Minister to help the farmers build roads so that they can get closer to their farms without having to go up foot paths. The minister promises to consider it.

Then it is time to debate the big issues and elect the officers.

The scholarship proposals go through with total support, but one farmer proposes that, as San Antonio produces the most cacao, the scholarships should go to kids from there in preference to other villages. This is firmly slapped down by all – the scholarships will go to the brightest kids, regardless of how much their village produces, but they must be kids of cacao farmers. All agreed.

Then the issue of land tenure. There is a big debate going on where the village leadership have called on the government to recognise the ownership of the land in Toledo by the communities and for communal land ownership, based on ownership by the village but use decided on the basis of whether a farmer is actually using the land actively or not. The alternative is ‘lease land’ where a farmer leases the land and after 20 years has an option to buy it at a discounted rate. Many farmers want lease land as, with cacao, once you’ve planted trees, you want to be sure that you can pass them on to your kids and be secure in ownership. However other farmers who don’t’ grow cacao or on a smaller scale prefer the old system. This is difficult If a farmer owns land they can use it as collateral for a loan, if they can’t repay for any reason, the bank repossesses and the land can be sold to anyone, Maya or otherwise. It is the ‘alienation of native reservation land’ that so vexed the US Congress that they voted in1932 to prohibit it in all cases. By then it was too late for many reservations, including the Winnebago Sioux in Nebraska – I was born on a farm that my great grandparents bought from a trader who had carved out hunks of reservation land to repay debts for, probably, whiskey sold on credit. It was disgraceful, but the title was legal. And no going back. The Indians used to hang out on the slopes on the south side of Emerson, disgruntled and landless, begging occasionally, gradually finding barbed wire hampering their progress across their not-ancestral (they came from Wisconsin) lands. In the end, after animated debate and an organised chant of ‘lease land, lease land’ the vote is heavily in favour of lease land. As the ministry has been refusing to issue leases until the court case over communal lands is resolved, it’s a hollow victory, but farmers continue to put in applications pending resolution of the debate in the Belize Supreme Court. This whole debate is rooted in the decision in the 1990s by the Minister of Natural Resources to give a logging contract to a Taiwanese company called Atlantic Industries that mobilised a massivle local protest. I contacted the Indian law Center in Washington DC, who fight cases using funds from rich Canadian and US tribes, on behalf of their poorer cousins. I met their lawyer in Belize in 1997 and one thing led to another and a landmark decision granting communal land rights to 3 villages in the Toledo District in November 2007. Now all the villages want the same and the Maya are divided.

Then on to the election of officers. Cayetano Ico gets the mike and announces that last year he was elected to the Committee (4 elected officers, 5 appointees ) but went to the meeting and was told he had to go out, which he did. ½ hour later he was told he wasn’t on the committee and should go home. Justino Peck then explained that Cayetano had abandoned his cacao so was no longer a grower, had been nominated by a non member of the TCGA and was therefore deemed ineligible. The matter was left to smoulder.

Justino and 2 other candidates were nominated, Justino with103 bominations, the other with 12 and the last on on the day. Diego called for a show of hands but there was a call from the floor for a secret ballot as people could put up their hands twice, Then papers were handed out where, to cover the illiterate farmers, each candidate was a number : Gregorio Choco 1, Justino Peck 2, the other guy 3. The votes were cast but then there was an objection that some farmers may have cast 2 or more votes. So the voting was resumed with a long queue before a station 1 large box for votes. The votes were cast and nobody came around twice. As Maya women are easily intimidated and the earlier shouting of 'lease land' showed how mob rule can prevail, it was a good result and women were voting in large numbers where few had raised hands on the first round.

Justino won handily and everyone ate a lot of pork caldo with rice and beans.

There were a few large bottles of rum around that were looking dangerously low, the rum must have gone somewhere, so I gathered up John, Jessica, Arthur and Marco and we headed off to Lubaantun to see the ruins. Santiago Coc was in great form we had a great tour, exchanged anecdotes about Anna Mitchell Hedges, who had been there 11 years before. Jessica felt obliged to distribute her wealth equally among all the handicraft sellers who lined our way, we then drove back to San Pedro where I popped in to see Leonardo Akal, leader of the Toledo Maya Cultural Council, strong advocate and leader of the movement for communal land rights, but he was not at home and I just left my card and a note to say I was sorry I missed him. Back in Punta Gorda it had started to rain, we chilled for a few hours, then off to Marion’s Bay View where we thought we’d be eating jewfish. No such luck, nothing but snook, which was very good but we were disappointed as we’d seen the giant monster and had been looking forward all day to eating it. Cassava pudding for dessert somewhat compensated for our dismay. Early night as we had a 0645 plane to catch in the morning.

Sunday November 23, 2008

It’s 0637 and John and Jessica are still not ready to go. I go up to chivvy them along and Jessica is still getting a few things sorted. I grab a suitcase to start moving them along. Rick has already warned that Maya Island Air are sticklers for punctuality, that Tropic Air would wait but Maya go whether or not you’re there. Jessica is mad at me, in a friendly way, for rushing them and, as it turns out, we get to the airfield by 0643, which is OK, we all check in and Jessica takes farewell shots of Elliot, our wonderful driver and others. Then we fly direct to Belize City, high over the mountains and the various nature reserves, forest reserves, privated protected reserves and other wooded land that we want to slowly and sustainably turn into charcoal. We pass over a large Mennonite community, a few token trees, mostly pasture, all livestock, cows, pigs chickens. Bloody Germans, and as I am the descendant of German Lutheran farmers who share the same attitude I feel qualififed to comment. At Belize City we check our bags through to Ithaca and go up the restaurant and ‘waving gallery’ to have some breakfast. I’ve brought along one of Justino’s cacao pods that I pre-cut around the edges. Justino pulls it open along the cut lines and we all feast on the sweet beans and Marco offers some to the waitress, who, it turns out, is from Barranco and for whom cacao seeds are a known treat. She is delighted to share in our after breakfast snack. I hadn’t realise that John and Jessica hadn’t tasted cocao fruit pulp before. Justino then shows us how to eat the placenta, which is also tasty, the stringy thing that holds all the seeds in a bunch as you lift them out of the pod. I ask the waitress if she knew Andy Palacio and she says that his family lives just across the street from hers. Barranco had a few cacao growers but the soil isn’t good for cacao. The Garifuna eat yams, cassava and seafood so this isn’t a big problem for them as these crops grow well on the poor soils of Barranco. In the departure lounge the shop has a display of Green & Black's but no reference to the fact that it contains Belizean cacao, just stuffed onto a Cadbury's display rack, grabbing prime space from Dairy Milk and Bournville.

At Houston we part company with Jessica. She has been a real trouper and her presence and uninhibited female energy had leavened what would otherwise have been a bunch of men and all work and no play. We got a lot done in the past 3 days, understand things a lot better, have gotten to know each other better and we are all, John, myself, Arthur, Marco, Justino and Bartolo Teul from YCT, looking forward to the course. Niclaos knows most of it already, but he has been a mine of information, though he needs to be asked before he comes out with it. That’s fine, scientists should be on tap, not on top, as Churchill once said.

The flight to Newark is uneventful, arriving half an hour early. Then we make the connection to Ithaca, arriving at 10:20, the bags come off the carousel, except for John's and mine. We go to a desk where a woman struggles to work the computer, calls a guy out from the back who is clearly pissed off that we have interrupted his nap, who sorts it out, snaps at her and disappears into the US Air back office. Then to the Statler Hotel where they have an emergency razor/toothbrush/deodorant kit. I advise John to keep his undershirt on to avoid BO tomorrow.

Monday November 24th

We all meet for breakfast, Jerry, Teri, Craig and Richard are here, too, so we all head off to Cornell's ag school building, which looks like Treblinka, no windows, forbidding brick 10 storey edifice, for the char course. Stephen's is more complex than I'd expected for an introductory course and the audience are intimidated by all the science. John then comments "I've got a degree in physics and I don't know what he's talking about so don't worry if you don't." This relieves the anxiety. Stephen also dwells on explosions, crop failures from the wrong kind of char and other downside aspects without really extolling the positives at any point. I tell him at the break that he's scaring the pants off the Belize group and he comments in a later session that he is just trying to make people aware that there is a right way and a wrong way of doing things and this course is about the right way. We then do a workshop outlining a project plan, our group does Belize, of course and Arthur is nominated as our rapporteur. Before we report we go to a Cornell-owned farm out in the boondocks where we see a lot of woodburning stoves that are being trialled with different kinds of biofuels made from pelletised switchgrass and other biomass as well as just burning wheat grains. I hold my tongue. Then we go across to see a demonstration of a cookstove that converts biomass into a stream of gas for cooking and leaves a residue of charcoal. It isn't working and the student demonstrating it has eventually put more starter material in than actually pyrolysis material. The wind is blowing through the barn, smoke in everyone's face, snow howling down from the hills beyond, Jerry and I go into the other barn to warm up in front of burning grass pellets. Then we do the presentations and Arthur does a very clear explanation of the range of possibilities, putting the rice mill on the back burner for his talk as it is a very different project, but connects to the rest.
Back at the hotel everyone is tired and we regroup at 7 for a very jolly dinner in the Statler's Tuscan style restaurant before retiring, tired little bunnies. Justino is most unwell, but I'm flagging too.

Tuesday November 25th

After 2 weeks of getting up at 4:30 or 5 each morning and being at full attention all day until nearly midnight I finally run out of steam. Really tired but soldier on as the interesting nub of the course is this morning: our chance to design a reactor. Stephen has given us designs with deliberate flaws and our task is to modify them and to improve on the design. We do a great job and John O’Donnell does our presentation but I have to leave before he’s finished as we have a conference call booked for me, Johannes, Debbie, Dan and Jerry for 2 pm. We dial through on Skype, usual echoes and poor comprehension, redial to his land line from Skype and we’re away. The strategy unfolds and Dan will be there from the 4th to the 6th. I may go on the 9th or 10th, if needed. Then I decide to go back to the hotel and lie down in a darkened room. I feel better but don’t join the crew who go out for a Thai dinner, instead eat with Stephen (who’s also reached the end of his tether physically) Niklaos and John O’D. I explain my ‘rags and famine’ approach to biochar – if we just grew biomass for one year and turned it all into char and didn’t eat food or buy new clothes we could remove 60 Gigatonnes of C, that’s 200 Gigatonnes of C02 from the atmosphere in a single year. It’s unfeasible but the calculation helps to put the scale of the task in perspective and we realise it’s not that daunting, we could do it in 10 years with a 10% reduction in food and clothing usage, 20 years with a 5% Reduction. And that’s not counting benefits from solar, wind , insulation etc. We then work out how to utilise the dead forests of British Columbia that are now dying due to a beetle that’s moving northwards in response to global warming. I’m in bed by 9 pm and sleep fitfully until 6 – the longest, if not the best, night’s sleep I’ve had in weeks.

We foregather in the hotel lobby at 7 and the cars are there to take us to Ithaca airport. Jerry comes down and some of the cars leave but no sign of John. I check at the desk and he’s on his way. Jerry and I wait in the lobby rather than sit in steaming cars in gently falling snow. Damn it’s cold here. Eventually we’re all at the airport – they have framed the famous timeline map of the history of civilisation, starting with Adam and Eve and going through to the present. John looks for the Greeks and finds them well represented, I look for Sheba and she’s not there in the time column that includes Solomon. The Arabs get short shrift, too, with the line ‘Ferdinand and Isabella rescued Spain from the Arabs in 1492”

Then onto a 15 seater Jetstream, snack trays from Wegmans, unimpressive pastries and bagels, a little tea and coffee facility, - it’s only an hour to Winchester VA. At Winchester some Homeland Security crew are playing around with empty suitcases, putting little ones inside big ones. Bartolo goes off to the toilet, comes back and his bag has disappeared. He follows the uniformed guys into the room where they’re taking the suitcases and recovers his bag. He emerges but soon a large angry guy appears shouting at him “We’re doing important work training dogs here and you shouldn’t have left your luggage unattended. Do you understand me!??” Bartolo listens to this rant patiently then responds: “But my bag wasn’t empty.” It was the obvious point – how could they have not noticed that one of the bags they were lifting was much heavier than any of the others? It reflected badly on their competence and the guy in uniform then launched into a loud, aggressive and threatening rant against Bartolo saying “When you come into this country you should look after your bags and never leave them unattended, you hear me?” At a small private airport where we are the only people and we've come off an internal flight in a plane with no toilets this isn't quite as relevant as having a fit over someone leaving a bag unattended at JFK but this guy clearly has an inflated sense of the global importance of whatever he is doing here at Winchester VA. Bartolo calmly walks away towards the door with me and this guy keep ranting “Are you walking away from me while I’m talking to you? Are you?” as he follows us out to where our cars are waiting. I should have asked if I could speak to his commanding officer but he was in full spate and the best thing was just to get away from him as soon as possible. This was a small private airport that has no security, the only luggage of the occasional private plane that lands, it’s obvious these guys should have taken more care and not blame their incompetence on the victim. Sadly, Obama being President won’t change this situation. We apologise on behalf of the USA to Bartolo for this scandalously unprofessional behaviour and head off to Josh Frye’s chicken farm at Wardensville in West Virginia. When we get there we huddle in the kitchen and eat chicken noodle soup cooked up by a real country girl in her forties called Jackie. Arthur and I chat to Josh and the subject of moonshine comes up and I quote the old line from White Lightning: “G Men, T men Revenooers too, looking for the place where he made his brew, They just kept on lookin, Poppa kept on cooking: White Lightning.” Josh laughs - it's probably as close as West Virginia gets to having a national anthem.

Then Jackie asks me if I like chocolate and I explain my particularly fondness for it. She has some moonshine filled cherries coated in chocolate back at her place and I say I have a bar of chocolate with rum soaked raisins and candied orange peel out in the car. I get one from the car and give her a bar and she promises to go and get the cherry bombs later. When everyone's arrived we go and look at the gasifier. The engineers who put it in are there and they say they can make char, but the boss says that at first when someone asked him if he could make biochar he said ‘Sure, what’s biochar?” The chicken poop is mixed with woodchips from a local tree surgeon and also the 75 or so dead birds every day, out of a 96,000 flock, that don’t make it to maturity every day. All end up as grey dust with a byproduct of a lot of heat, which heats the chicken units. There are 3, each with 32000 birds. The heat is drier than propane and this helps reduce ammonia formation and means chickens reach maturity 8% quicker, in 37 days instead of 40. Apparently KFC like these birds as the flesh is more open and cooks more quickly. Maybe that ‘s why they’re called Yum Brands.

We see the whole process and Stephen has lots of ideas for making it work better.

Then we take a peek at the chickens. The ammonia makes the eyes water, I can only look into the long shed full of 32000 birds for a few seconds before I have to withdraw, the chicks are just 2 weeks old, ready for a change of feed – they start as chicks, then growers, then finishers. The chicks and the feed are supplied by Greenfields, who also buy and slaughter the birds. The outsourced farmers get paid on a formula that compares their efficiency to each other, so they are competing to be most efficient. If things go wrong it’s the farmer’s problem, they still have to pay for the feed, chicks and bank loan to put up the unit. Jackie is blithe about the ammonia, saying she can work there all day without a mask or eye protection. I guess you can get used to most things.

She had brought back my cherries and Josh insists she puts them out for everyone to try but there are still plenty left for me to bring back.

We pile into the cars, drive to Washington Dulles, say our fond farewells and head off to Miami, San Francisco and London.