October 7, 2013
For the benefit of a TV documentary, French journalist Benjamin Carle is attempting to live without the benefit of any product not made in France. It is his and the television company’s response to calls from French politicians to citizens of France to reject foreign made products and to buy only those made in France.… » read more
Posted by Brian Gardner
August 8, 2013
Much has been made of the apparent acquisition of large areas of land mainly in Africa, but also in Asia and South America by rich, but land-poor countries as well as international investors, in order to grow food and biofuel crops. According to the headlines, vast tracts of land have been gobbled up at peppercorn… » read more
Posted by Brian Gardner
July 23, 2013
The European Parliament’s somewhat frenzied concern about the possible indirect land use change (ILUC) resulting from EU biofuel policies is a splendid example of the phenomenon of unintended consequences. While acting on the basis of some pretty questionable science, the MEPs are constructing a new form of protectionism which is likely to damage the interests… » read more
Posted by Brian Gardner
June 24, 2010
Recent publication of projections of world food production by the OECD and FAO gave rise to a spate of predictable doom-laden headlines. Unsurprisingly, the tenuous lkinkage between biofuels and hunger figured large in most – as in: “EU biofuels target could starve millions of people”. Closer reading of the following stories however revealed that this… » read more
Posted by Brian Gardner
April 28, 2010
Whether or not organic farming can feed the future world is one of the big questions of agricultural and environmental politics. It is of major importance to the future development of European and developed world agriculture and of even greater importance for the food-short less developed countries. The question of how the agriculture industries of… » read more
Posted by Brian Gardner
March 8, 2010
The impact of biofuels on food supplies present and future is one of the latest worries of the environmental lobby. Once favoured a s a means of reducing finite fossil fuel dependency, it is now seen as snatching basic foods from the mouths of the poor to feed the fuel tanks of the affluent. The… » read more
Posted by Brian Gardner
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CAP Reform, Climate Change, Energy Supply, English, Environment, Food & Consumers, Sustainable Dev. |
March 2, 2010
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation has clearly had second thoughts on livestock production’s contribution to environmental degradation and climate change. In its report ‘Livestock’s Long Shadow’ published four years ago it uncompromisingly blamed the world’s beef, dairy, pig, poultry and sheep producers for making a major and too often unnecessary contribution to AGHG emissions… » read more
Posted by Brian Gardner
Commentary on European developments from the perspective of long term professional interest in European and international trade, agriculture and food policy, nurtured over three decades spent in Brussels observing and analysing the development of the CAP.
