August 2012
Cargill tempts Aussie farmers to tap soybean rally →
agrimoney.com
For any sceptics of the power of high prices to stimulate crop production, Australia is providing another example, with record soybean values sparking an attempt to turn the country into a force in the oilseed.
Cargill, the US-based agribusiness, has opened a drive to encourage Australian farmers to improve on the less than 40,000 hectares of the oilseed they currently grow, leaving the nation reliant largely on imports, which reached 560,000 tonnes last year, for soymeal supplies.
The group’s Melbourne-based AWB business is offering growers a support package including a Aus$10-per-hectare rebate on – non-genetically modified- seed and some production insurance in a drive to gain domestic supplies to feed its three mills, one of which has a vegetable oils refining plant attached.
And the hopes of the programme succeeding rest in part on the elevated prices of soybeans, which on Thursday hit a record high for a spot contract of $17.80 ¾ a bushel, besides the benefits of adding another option to growers’ choice for crop rotation.
“Soybean prices are very high at the moment. That has not always been the case,” AWB spokesman Peter McBride told Agrimoney.com.
Read more at Agrimoney
“Most products in the mass and luxury markets are manufactured in harmful conditions that have deleterious effects on the environment and the people who work and live near the facilities. Fashion is not the only or even worse contributor to environmental racism, labor exploitation, and global warming. Commodities and services that pack a larger eco-punch, for example, are air travel, bottled water, and disposable razors. Yet fashion consumers are easy scapegoats. They’re already perceived as frivolous, wasteful, and stupid conspicuous consumers whose feminine vanity leads them to participate in irrational and irresponsible consumer practices that are the cause of All Of The World’s Problems. The gendered subtext that always lurks behind this finger wagging is why I’m turned off by fashion-shaming of all stripes and sizes… Seldom is this kind of moralizing and shaming lodged at consumers of luxury cars, personal technologies, homes, and vacation packages even as all these luxury items have adverse effects on the local environments and economies in which they’re produced… I have no truck with fashion-policing or morality-policing. I’m more interested in critiquing the structures of wealth and wage inequality and the systemic practices of financial companies that have resulted in the racial disparity in credit card debt that give shape to the differential meanings, possibilities, and relations to consumption for marginalized people.”
—Minh-Ha T. Pham in “A Pyre to Privilege, Not an Invitation to Gender Shaming” full article HERE (via moniquemallo)
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The Obama administration today gave Shell Oil the initial approval to begin controversial and dangerous oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean off Alaska, despite the fact that a critical oil-spill containment vessel is still awaiting certification in Bellingham, Wash. Until now, the Arctic Ocean has largely been off limits to offshore drilling. Shell Oil is expected to begin the initial phases of exploratory drilling in the Chukchi Sea as soon as it can get its drillship in place, in the heart of habitat critical to the survival of polar bears.
“By opening the Arctic to offshore oil drilling, President Obama has made a monumental mistake that puts human life, wildlife and the environment in terrible danger. The harsh and frozen conditions of the Arctic make drilling risky, and an oil spill would be impossible to clean up,” said Rebecca Noblin, Alaska director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Scariest of all, the Obama administration is allowing Shell to go forward without even having the promised oil-spill containment equipment in place.”
” —Obama gives away American resources to foreign company with record of human rights violations and appalling record of oil spills and pollution. Via CBD (via climateadaptation)
“I thought reaching into the pockets of U.S. smartphone users and annoying them into drone-consciousness could be an interesting way to surface the conversation a bit more.”
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Apple Rejects App That Tracks U.S. Drone Strikes.
Here’s an app that should be in every single American’s phone so that there is an awakening in the collective conscience of the country. Too bad Apple rejected it. Why? Because it lacks the basic guts to simply update you on American foreign policy in “third world” countries.
An update every single time a US drone strike kills someone in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan.
(via mehreenkasana)
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