WELLINGTON (Reuters) - New Zealand set itself a goal on Monday to cut carbon emissions by between 10 and 20 percent by 2020, holding off setting a hard target until a broader global climate pact now under negotiation takes shape.

Business groups said it was a sensible range -- broadly in line with major emitters like Japan and the United States, as well as neighboring Australia -- but environmentalists said it was not tough enough to tackle climate change.

While New Zealand's emissions comprise less than 0.5 percent of mankind's greenhouse gas pollution, it is one of fewer than 40 rich nations bound by the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol to curb emissions and thus has an important role in helping shape the debate of a post-Kyoto deal due to be agreed at year's end in Copenhagen.

"This target is internationally credible and both environmentally and economically responsible," Climate Change Minister Nick Smith said in a statement.

"It is an ambitious but achievable goal," he said, adding the target would be achieved through domestic emission reductions, the storage of carbon in forests and the purchase of emission reductions from other countries.

New Zealand is also being closely watched since it is one of a handful of nations outside Europe trying to develop a national emissions trading scheme, a key measure in meeting its target and something it hopes to have in place by the end of this year.

A parliamentary committee that has been reviewing a package of laws on the proposed trading scheme is expected to release its report within a few weeks. A similar set of bills in Australia, which has said it could cut emissions by as much as 25 percent, has been stalled by political opposition.

"USEFUL FIRST STEP"

New Zealand faces a trickier task than most, with emissions already far above its current U.N. target and because about half of its greenhouse gas pollution comes from agriculture, which in turn provides about half its $29 billion in annual export earnings.

Emissions increased 24 percent from 1990 to 2008. Under Kyoto, its greenhouse gas emissions are supposed to show no increase from 1990 levels during the 2008-12 Kyoto period.

Smith made no mention of any concessions for agriculture, which is responsible for large amounts of methane emissions. Methane is about 20 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Poorer states want rich nations to agree to 2020 emissions cuts of 25-40 percent below 1990 levels. But most rich nations say this range is too tough to meet.

"The 2020 emissions targets announced today represented a useful first step in the current international negotiations for a post-2012 climate change agreement," said Jonathan Boston, director of the Institute of Policy Studies at Victoria University of Wellington.

But he said New Zealand and many other developed countries would need take responsibility for reductions in emissions by 2020 of more than 20 percent to try to avoid the worst of the impacts from global warming.

"It is to be hoped that the 10-20 percent target range is not the government's final position."

Greenpeace said the 10-20 percent range would mean New Zealand was not a constructive player at the Copenhagen meeting.

However, lobby group Business NZ said the target was a sensible balance, given New Zealand's unique status as a developed but agriculture-reliant economy.

($1 = NZ$1.49)

Our water quality and natural environment are crucial to our economic future, but business struggle to get their heads around these issues.

Our use of it goes far beyond the primary and tourism sectors. Many other businesses trade in some way on our natural resources or the image they conjure up in consumers' minds.

So we should care a lot about the environment and we should pursue strategies, corporate and national, that improve our income and environment.

But we aren't. Our track record on the environment is poor, as the recently released sustainability report from Statistics New Zealand shows.

And our debate about our economic future is desultory, focused largely on tax, regulation and other cost-saving measures, as shown by Don Brash's first speech as head of the government's 2025 Taskforce or by Business New Zealand's latest economic manifesto.

The Statistics NZ report deserves to be read widely and used as a tool to plot our progress on 85 measures. It offers abundant insights and builds on the agency's first effort in 2002 to quantify our economic, environmental and social sustainability and on a 2006 OECD working party on the subject.

We have made a lot of social gains. For example, labour productivity has risen since 1985 at an average rate of 2.2% a year; inflation-adjusted average disposable income has increased steadily since 1992; early childhood education, skills levels and education qualifications have also risen; life expectancy has improved, too, and the rate of deaths by assault fell from 1987 but has showed little change since 2000.

However, there are still significant gender and ethnic disparities on many of those economic and social measures and increased inequalities in, for example, income.

Our poorest performance, though, is in environmental measures. We've gone backwards on biodiversity with more species becoming threatened, next to no increase in native land cover and an increase in the proportion of fish stocks assessed as below target levels.

On water measures, the proportion of people drinking water that meets standards rose from 2001, but the water quality of rivers and streams has declined since 1989. Of the major lakes, 10 have deteriorated in quality and six have improved. Of groundwater sites monitored between 1995 and 2006, 39% had excessive nitrate levels.

On land measures, there was one positive the area of steep hill country pasture prone to erosion fell by 3.1% from 1997 to 2002. But excess nitrogen and phosphate levels in soil have increased and the area of land farmed has decreased with the biggest loss proportionately coming from our most versatile soils, which typically have been swallowed up by urbanisation. Only 80% of soils are within target ranges for health. The number of reported contaminated sites rose from 1238 in 2007 to 1895 in 2009.

We've gone backwards on energy: primary energy supply per person increased 5.9% from 1987 to 2001 though it has been decreasing since its peak in 2001; electricity from renewable sources fell from 80.5% in 1987 to 66.6% in 2007; our reliance on imported energy has risen since 1990 and our energy-related emissions of greenhouse gases have increased by 39% since 1990.

One measure, energy intensity, looks positive: since 1995 the amount of energy we've used to generate each unit of GDP has fallen. Likewise, our greenhouse gas intensity, the amount of gasses emitted for each unit of GDP, has fallen. But the report suggests this might have more to do with the fact that three-quarters of economic growth in 1990-2007 came from the service sector, which is low emission. Overall, our emissions still rose 22% in that period.

Business New Zealand said these declines in energy and carbon intensity showed businesses here were using resources efficiently. But unfortunately that's not true in an international context. Data from the International Energy Agency, an arm of the OECD, shows other countries have made better progress. So we are still a poor performer versus our competitors

Virtually all our businesses struggle to get their heads around these issues. Their low rating of sustainability as a business priority ranked them 15th in the 2008 World Competitiveness ranking by IMD, the Swiss business school.

Similarly, their answer to the question of whether "environmental laws do not hinder business" ranked them 44th. In other words, they see such laws as an impediment to business whereas top-ranking countries such as Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Switzerland saw such laws as a benefit to business.

The responses from businesses here come from a comprehensive survey administered by the NZ Institute of Management on behalf of IMD.

Thankfully, though, a few businesses and organisations are deeply engaged on the issues, seeking to lead by example toward the co-dependent goals of prosperity and sustainability.

The pipfruit industry and Zespri are two corporate examples. Both have recently published the carbon life-cycle analysis of their operations from orchards to consumers. This information gives them new insights into where they can achieve greater efficiency in energy and resources.

For example, changes in agrichemical spraying practices and orchard management would reduce greenhouse gases and save on average some $220/ha in operating costs. Prompted by its own life-cycle analysis, Zespri is working on a wide range of initiatives from orchards to consumers. Since shipping accounts for 41% of its total emissions, it is working with a German company on sea trials of kites to help power the ships. They take only 10-20 minutes to launch and recover, yet in optimum wind conditions they can cut fuel use by 50% or by 10-35% over a voyage.

The most comprehensive analysis so far of New Zealand's opportunities for achieving greater efficiency in energy, resource and emissions was published by the Greens last week. The paper builds up a picture, sector by sector, of measures the Greens reckon are affordable and achievable. They add up to a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.

Many of the measures deliver rapid savings that quickly repay the investment. Others would cost more but still less than buying carbon credits on the international market to meet our Kyoto obligations.

Other proposed actions are more controversial, such as reducing the intensity of dairy farming. The Greens argument is economic and environmental. At current low dairy prices farmers struggle to make a profit if they use large volumes of fertilisers, supplemental feed and other inputs to increase production.

If they farm less intensively they could reduce costs, output and emissions but increase profits. That's probably true but only if land prices fall. Any farmer trying to earn a return on high value land will probably have to keep farming intensively but seek efficiencies in other ways.

But rather than dismiss such ideas out of hand, as some farm and business leaders did, they should be contributing their own thinking to innovative responses to a better economic and environmental performance.

The government has yet to do so. Only recently has the cabinet finally got a paper that seeks, like the Greens, to identify, from the bottom up, actions that can improve the economy and the environment. Hopefully it will give the cabinet confidence to commit to a 2020 target for emission reductions that will stimulate economic growth.

If it does, it would be a sea-change in government thinking, one that hopefully might begin to focus business on its abundant environmental opportunities.

HOUSTON, Texas -- Some the biggest headaches for facility managers occur when the drive for energy savings bumps up against what building occupants consider are uncomfortable temperatures -- even when heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems are working properly, according to a new report from the International Facility Management Association.

Typically, complaints about office temperatures outdistance all others from employees, whose list of peeves can include noise, limited space and odors, according to IFMA. The organization conducted a survey of members this summer to see when most of the complaints about temperature occur and what facility managers do about them.

The results in the report "Temperature Wars: Savings vs. Comfort" [PDF], which was released last week, also provided an interesting look at what employees do when they feel the building's HVAC systems aren't up to snuff -- everything from donning lap blankets and fingerless gloves in the winter and to soaking their feet in mini kiddie pools under their desks during summer.

Noting that "facility managers go to great lengths to keep facilities comfortable for workers, as this comfort is directly tied to worker productivity," the report also acknowledged a growing trend among facility managers to adjust the thermostat to higher settings in the summer and lower settings in the winter to save on energy use and costs.

Facility managers said 34 percent of the temperature complaints they receive occur in the winter, 29 percent in the summer, 25 percent in spring and 12 percent in fall. The number of claims about it being too cold or too hot throughout a year usually run neck and neck. And while the types of complaints generally are in sync with the season (too cold in the winter, too hot in the summer), the temperature issues can also be influenced by the types of facilities: In summer, for example, office workers often complain about it being too chilly at their desks, and employees at educational facilities, call centers or industrial sites say it's too warm.

Facility managers said the steps they take to remedy the situations include:

• Spot-checking temperature, humidity or air flow in the complaint area, 90 percent
• Verifying that the HVAC system is working correctly, 87 percent
• Adjusting thermostats, 75 percent
• Checking or readjusting diffusers, 49 percent
• Encouraging people to wear layered clothing, 35 percent
• Installing data loggers to monitor temperatures, 31 percent
• Moving workers to other areas in the facility temporarily, 4 percent
• Taking other steps that range from moving diffusers or other equipment to asking employees to wait "as their desired comfort will most likely change shortly."

"We sometimes say we'll make an adjustment, but don't," the release quoted one respondent as saying. "This actually seems to work."

"Usually, a prompt response saying that we are handling it is key," said another. "Then, we follow up in a couple of hours to find out if the 'adjustments' made an improvement. Often, we haven't actually physically done anything to change the temperature."

• "We recently finished a complete test and balance of our system and banned personal heaters. We have also attempted to educate occupants with regard to system design and why some of their 'fixes' make the problem worse."

•"Some people tape cardboard to the diffusers to redirect the air away from them. They also tape ribbons to the diffusers to show us that there is air blowing from them."

• "Unfortunately, more employees dress for summer (i.e. sleeveless tops/dresses, sandals, etc.) and are ill-equipped for the interior temperature."

• "Most of the complaints come from staff who are close to windows, so we ask them to keep their blinds closed if they are too hot or too cold."

• "We have people with lap blankets and fingerless gloves. Sad, isn't it?"

• "Stand alone AC units, large baseboard heaters, small wading pool under the desk to 'paddle' their feet … [I] have seen most things …"

• "[Some people] call my phone with tape recordings of the Weather Channel forecast for today."

Green, more than a color, is a catchall term used to describe an ecoconscious lifestyle, including everything from hybrid-fuel-powered cars to recycled consumer goods to solar electricity. The big-minded concept is to preserve the Earth's natural resources by reducing waste and pollution through innovative design and improved efficiency. In development circles, green has gone from a boutique idea to a mandatory part of architecture and construction.

"It's not just about energy savings," said Craig Willcut, president of United Construction, which opened new sustainable offices in Reno this year. "It's about providing a healthy environment for employees, as well as being socially responsible for our part of the environment."

Companies with green offices have an easier time recruiting and retaining employees, studies show. Healthy work settings, with plenty of daylight and fresh air, can reduce sick days. Today's Generation Y work force actively seeks social-minded employers that reduce their carbon footprints and improve the world around them.

"It's a popular thing with the younger generation," said Christopher Larson, spokesman for the Sustainable Development Committee of the Las Vegas chapter of NAIOP, a commercial real estate trade group. "They want to work for a company that is thinking sustainable because it's cool and the right thing to do."

Buildings are responsible for 40 percent of the Earth's global warming, observers say.

"Corporate responsibility is becoming unavoidable," said Rick Van Diepen, chairman of the Committee on the Environment for the Las Vegas chapter of the American Institute of Architects. "Employee productivity is being improved by 1 percent to 2 percent, conservatively, by working in a green building. That is a huge bottom-line savings."

Companies and municipalities, for example, are turning to four-day workweeks with 10-hour workdays. This schedule cuts driving, thereby cutting fossil fuel emissions, while decreasing consumption of water and electricity. Some businesses have started car pool and recycling programs for employees. Others use glues, carpets and paints free of volatile organic compounds.

"The utilization of green cleaning standards and green products are good for the environment, the tenants and often times, the bottom line," said Susan Wincn, president of the Building Owners and Managers Association of Nevada. "We work to provide education and best practices to reduce the use of natural resources, nonrenewable energy and waste production."

Some steps toward becoming green are as simple. Businesses can use drought-tolerant landscaping or low-flow plumbing fixtures to save water. Building with recycled wood, steel and glass is convenient, cheap and environmentally sound.

"Costs for building green are going down," said J.F. Finn III, a principal with Gensler of Nevada, executive architect for MGM Mirage's $8.5 billion CityCenter development. "Companies now have more experience building green, so there are greater efficiencies."

The country's hottest green building program today is called Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED. It's a rating system created by the U.S. Green Building Council in 2000 that grades project sustainability based on points awarded for water conservation, energy efficiency and environmental quality, among other things. The more points, the higher the rating, which goes from basic certification up to Silver, Gold and Platinum.

Companies increasingly use LEED certification as branding; it's now a part of corporate marketing and identity. LEED-certified buildings command higher rents, observers say. Operating costs account for 35 percent to 50 percent of office rents, yet energy bills can vary up to $1 per square foot among similar buildings just a few feet apart.

"It's clear that the building with the lowest operating costs will have more options when negotiating with tenants," said B. Alan Whitson, a national authority on facility design and management and CEO of Newport Beach, Calif.-based B. Alan Whitson Co. "Turning green can cut energy costs by 40 percent or more, and upgrading a building's lighting can add $6 per square foot to its value."

Although Nevada only has about two dozen LEED-certified projects thus far, 166 more developments are preregistered for future certification. All new federal and state buildings are required to be designed to Silver LEED standards. Assembly Bill 3, signed into law in 2005, also gives tax breaks for LEED-certified projects.

It runs around $2,500 to file the paperwork. Building costs, meanwhile, can add up to 2 percent of the project's overall cost. It's a negligible amount since most building projects have a 5 percent contingency factored into their budgets.

"If a project is approached with the right mindset early on, green buildings should not cost extra," said Deepika Padam, president of the Las Vegas chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council. "The LEED-certified level should become the future typical building."

Contact reporter Tony Illia at tonyillia@aol.com or 702-303-5699.

RICHMOND, Calif. -- Scientists, sailors, journalists and government officials set sail from San Francisco Bay yesterday to study the planet's largest known floating garbage dump, about 1,000 miles north of Hawaii.

The goal of the monthlong mission, dubbed Project Kaisei after a 151-foot brigantine ship purchased from Japanese sailors in 1991, is to chart the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch, learn about its mysterious vortex of discarded plastic and assess what might be done about it.

The venture is no working vacation for environmental advocates. Project Kaisei is at its core a commercial endeavor, funded in part by international recycling companies that see opportunity in a sea of debris thought to be twice the size of Texas.

In addition to funding from individual donors, Project Kaisei is backed by the Bureau of International Recycling, whose membership counts 77 companies from Austria, China, Cuba and Canada, to name just a few of the nations represented. Deutsche Bank AG is also a key funder.

Mary Crowley, co-founder of the project, said examining the dump's potential as recycled material is just as important as studying the decomposed and decomposing plastic, which largely originated in California and Japan before being trapped by currents of the North Pacific Gyre.

"The missing link is how can you capture the plastic, since it's spread out over such a large area," Crowley said from the ship's deck here several days before its departure. "The key realization here is that the plastics might have a value, a recycled value, which is a very exciting deal."

The alliance between a group of activists who want to see the trash heap cleared and the corporate recycling world is no accident. Doug Woodring, a technology entrepreneur and former Merrill Lynch financier turned co-founder of Project Kaisei, said the marriage of commercial interests and environmental is key to the research mission's success.

"Anything that we're promoting is going to come back to expanded recycling programs," Woodring said. "If we're right, everyone who's in the recycling business will benefit."

A black hole in the Pacific

A second ship launched from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego will aid the Kaisei over the next 30 days and focus on science. The 170-foot New Horizon, funded by a $600,000 grant from the University of California, left last week with a crew of 20 graduate students looking to measure the size of the patch and its effects on wildlife.

Both vessels intend to produce hard data and an eventual white paper on what is still a largely unexplored phenomenon. The crews will look at how decomposing plastic over the last few decades has mixed with phytoplankton and zooplankton and whether netting techniques might be used to clean it up.

The problem, Crowley said, is that much of the plastic has already broken down in a soupy mix that tends to move around as ocean currents and storms produce swells and wind over the course of a given year. Ultraviolet rays break the plastic into molecular strains that are impossible to detect with the naked eye or satellites.

Cleaning up the bigger piles of trash, which float in random clumps over long distances above and beneath the surface, is possible but may not solve the core issue. And sweeping thousands of miles of ocean for molecular litter would be expensive and possibly unrealistic.

So the focus may have to turn to clearing only the more recent accumulation, in the last three or four years, rather than the last 30, Crowley said.

"Even if we're able to clean that up, it would make a pretty big difference," Crowley insisted.

But the challenge is daunting. According to a 2006 report from the U.N. Environment Programme, every pound of plankton in the central Pacific Ocean is offset by about 6 pounds of litter. The report adds that every square mile of ocean is home to nearly 50,000 pieces of litter, much of which tends to harm or kill wildlife that either ingests the plastic or gets trapped in discarded netting, which is just as common in the Northern Gyre as discarded soda bottles.

Woodring says uncertainty about the scope of the problem is precisely what is driving the voyage and the subsequent white paper. And he stressed that making the cleanup into an economic, rather than just a moral, argument is essential to moving forward to actual commercial activity.

"We're trying to promote a way to put a value or a booty on this area," Woodring said. "As soon as there's value, it will get collected."

'Data gaps'

Holly Bamford, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's marine debris program, expressed support for the basic thrust of Project Kaisei, which she said should improve her agency's understanding of the garbage patch. But she added that NOAA, in the meantime, is focused on better-understood challenges like removing discarded fishing lines from islands and atolls.

From 1996 to 2006, she noted, NOAA cleared about 1.3 million pounds of derelict fishing nets from reefs and shores in Hawaii and surrounding islands. The beaches in the region tend to be magnets or junkyards in the ocean, attracting fishing line, plastics and other discarded items.

The fishing gear and nets are a very real threat to marine mammals that get snared in their webs, Bamford said. The smaller plastics' effect on the environment is less well-understood, assuming the researchers are able to find it.

"Their biggest challenge is going to first find where the debris is accumulating," she said. "It's extremely variable. It's spotty."

Moreover, if removal is warranted -- a big "if," in Bamford's view -- a cleanup operation would have to address how to collect smaller plastics that can bob on the ocean surface or collect beneath it like streamers or confetti. And it would have to cope with jurisdictional conflicts among international parties.

"We're at the very early stages of understanding this," Bamford said. "Before you engage a large removal expedition, you really have to understand the impact that it's having."

"There's just a lot of data gaps," she added. "This voyage does offer an opportunity to collect some new scientific information."

Ride of her life

To Crowley, the size, scope and uncertainty of the problem are not reasons to stay home or give up. She said the planned research into persistent organic pollutants in the sea, in particular, is a vital aim that could help advance science in that arena, eventually raising awareness in the mainstream about the consequences of consumption.

To that end, the project has booked two documentary filmmakers who will be shooting footage over the next month. And Crowley is optimistic that the project could result in initial cleanup operations within the next year, assuming her crew can grab enough media attention when it returns.

"This really is a problem of the commons," Crowley said. "People need to see that."

As for the trip itself, Crowley, an experienced sailor, said she expects to have the time of her life.

"I don't consider it dangerous in any way," she said. "But it's still probably the most exciting mission I've ever set out on."

Governments and investment funds are buying up farmland in Africa and Asia to grow food -- a profitable business, with a growing global population and rapidly rising prices. The high-stakes game of real-life Monopoly is leading to a modern colonialism to which many poor countries submit out of necessity.

Every crisis has its winners. A group of them is sitting in the Stuyvesant Room at the Marriott Hotel in New York. The conference room, where the shades are drawn and the lights are dimmed, is filled with men from Iowa, Sao Paulo and Sydney -- corn farmers, big landowners and fund managers. Each of them has paid $1,995 (€1,395) to attend Global AgInvesting 2009, the first investors' conference on the emerging worldwide market in farmland.

DPA

Farmers working a field in Malawi.

A man from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) gives the first presentation. Colorful graphs travel up and down his PowerPoint charts. Some are headed downward as the year 2050 approaches. They represent the farmland that is disappearing as a result of climate change, soil desolation, urbanization and the shortage of water. The other lines, which point sharply upward, represent demand for meat and biofuel, food prices and population growth. There is a growing gap between these two sets of lines. It represents hunger.

According to most prognoses, there could be 9.1 billion people living on earth in 2050, about two billion more than today. In the coming 20 years alone, worldwide demand for food is expected to rise by 50 percent. "These are pessimistic prospects," says the OECD man. He looks serious and even a little sad, as he describes the future of the world.

But for the audience in the Stuyvesant Room, mostly men and a handful of women, all of this is good news and the mood is buoyant. How could it be any different? After all, hunger is their business. The combination of more people and less land makes food a safe investment, with annual returns of 20 to 30 percent, rare in the current economic climate.

These are not Wall Street experts, nor are they people who shoot money across the continents like billiard balls. On the contrary, these are extremely conservative investors who buy or lease land to grow wheat or raise cattle. But land is scarce and expensive in Europe and the United States. Solving the problem means developing new land, which is only available in Africa, Asia and South America. This combination of factors has triggered a high-stakes game of real-life Monopoly, in which investment funds, banks and governments are engaged in a race for access to the world's arable land.

'The Final Frontier for Finding Alpha'

Susan Payne, a red-haired British woman, is the CEO of the largest land fund in southern Africa, which currently includes 150,000 hectares (370,000 acres), mainly in South Africa, Zambia and Mozambique. Payne hopes to raise half a billion euros from investors. She talks about fighting hunger, but the headings on her PowerPoint slides, embellished with photos of soybean fields at sunset, tell a different story. One such heading refers to "Africa -- the last frontier for finding alpha." The word alpha signifies an investment for which the return is greater than the risk. Africa is alpha country.

That's because land, which is extremely fertile in some regions, is inexpensive on the impoverished continent. Payne's land fund pays $350-500 per hectare ($140-200 per acre) in Zambia, about a tenth the price of land in Argentina or the United States. For a small farmer in Africa, the average yield per hectare has remained unchanged in 40 years. With a little fertilizer and additional irrigation, yields could quadruple -- and so could profits.

These are perfect conditions for investors. Susan Payne sees it that way, and so do her investors. In fact, there has been so much demand for this type of investment that Payne recently had to establish a new sub-fund.

A great deal of capital is currently available. It is the second year of the global economic crisis, and investors are seeking sound and safe investments, which is why the audience in New York includes not only hedge fund managers and agriculture industry executives, but also the representatives of large pension funds and the chief financial officers of five universities, including Harvard.

Thousands of investment funds, from small to large, have recently begun applying the most basic formula in the world: Man must eat.

US investment management company BlackRock, for example, has established a $200 million agriculture fund, and has earmarked $30 million for the acquisition of farmland. Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment company, has acquired more than 100,000 hectares in Ukraine. Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs have invested their money in pig breeding operations and chicken farms in China, investments that include the legal rights to farmland.

Food is becoming the new oil. Worldwide grain reserves dropped to a historic low at the beginning of 2008, and the ensuing price explosion marked a turning point, just as the oil crisis did in the 1970s. There were bread riots around the world, and 25 countries, including some of the biggest grain exporters, imposed restrictions on food exports.

Then came the second crisis of 2008, the economic crisis. Two fears -- the fear of hunger and the fear of uncertainty -- converged, triggering what some are already calling a second generation of colonialism.

A Win-Win Situation?

What is different about this colonialism is that countries are readily allowing themselves to be conquered. The Ethiopian prime minister said that his government is "eager" to provide access to hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmland. The Turkish agriculture minister announced: "Choose and take what you want." In the midst of a war against the Taliban, the Pakistani government staged a road show in Dubai, seeking to entice sheikhs with tax breaks and exemptions from labor laws.

All these efforts have two hopes in common. One is the hope of poor nations to achieve the development and modernization of their ailing agricultural sectors. The other is the world's hope that foreign investors in Africa and Asia will be able to produce enough food for a planet soon to be populated by 9.1 billion people; that they will bring along all the things that poor countries have lacked until now, including technology, capital and knowledge, modern seed and fertilizer; and that these investors will be able to not only double crop yields but, in many parts of Africa, increase them tenfold. Previous estimates had in fact forecast a decline in production capacity by 3 to 4 percent in 2080, as compared with the year 2000.

If the investors are successful, they could achieve what development agencies have been unable to do in the past few decades: reduce the hunger that now afflicts more people than ever, namely one billion worldwide. In the best case scenario this could be a win-win situation with profit for the investors and development for the poor.

It is not just bankers and speculators, but also governments that are acquiring land in other countries, seeking to reduce their dependence on the world market and imports. China is home to 20 percent of the world's population, but it has only 9 percent of the world's arable land. Japan is the world's largest corn importer, and South Korea is the second-largest. The Persian Gulf States import 60 percent of their food, while their natural water reserves are sufficient to support only another 30 years of agriculture.

Modern-Day Land Grab

But what happens in a globalized world when colonies arise once again? What if, for example, Saudi Arabia acquires parts of Pakistan's Punjab region or Russian investors buy up half of Ukraine? And what happens when famine strikes these countries? Will the wealthy foreigners install electric fences around their fields and will armed guards escort crop shipments out of the country? Pakistan has already announced plans to deploy 100,000 members of its security forces to protect foreign-owned fields.

DER SPIEGEL

Trading Land

Because of the political sensitivity of the modern-day land grab, it is often only the country's head of state who knows the details. In some cases, however, provincial governors have already auctioned off land to the highest bidder, as in the case of Laos and Cambodia, where even the governments no longer know how much of their territory they still own.

No one is sure exactly how much land is at stake. The number cited by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) is 30 million hectares, but this estimate is impossible to verify. Even United Nations organizations has to resort to citing newspaper reports, while the World Bank is trying to convince countries to pay closer attention to the fine print on agreements.

Klaus Deininger, an economist specializing in land policy at the World Bank, estimates that 10 to 30 percent of available arable land could be up for grabs, although only a fraction of the potential number of lease and sale agreements have been signed. "There was a huge jump in 2008, when plans and applications in many countries more than doubled, in some cases tripled." In Mozambique, says Deininger, foreign demand is more than double the existing cultivated farmland, and the government has already allocated four million hectares to investors, half of them from abroad.

The most spectacular deals are not being made by private investors, however, but by governments and the funds and conglomerates they promote:

• The Sudanese government has leased 1.5 million hectares of prime farmland to the Gulf States, Egypt and South Korea for 99 years. Paradoxically, Sudan is also the world's largest recipient of foreign aid, with 5.6 million of its citizens dependent on food deliveries.
• Kuwait has leased 130,000 hectares of rice fields in Cambodia.
• Egypt plans to grow wheat and corn on 840,000 hectares in Uganda.
• The president of the Democratic Republic of Congo has offered to lease 10 million hectares to the South Africans.

Saudi Arabia is one of the biggest and most aggressive buyers of land. This spring, the king attended a ceremony where he took delivery of the first export rice harvest, produced exclusively for the kingdom in hunger-stricken Ethiopia. Saudi Arabia spends $800 million a year promoting foreign companies that cultivate "strategic field crops" like rice, wheat, barley and corn, which it then imports. Ironically, the country was the world's sixth-largest wheat exporter in the 1990s. But water is scarce and the desert nation aims to preserve its reserves. Exporting food also means exporting water.

Rich nations are exchanging money, oil and infrastructure for food, water and animal feed. At first glance, this seems to present a solution for many problems, says Jean-Philippe Audinet of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). In principle, he is pleased about the agricultural investments, and says he fought for them for years. "What was bad was the period when markets were being flooded with cheap food products."

But many of the countries where land is being snapped up -- Kazakhstan and Pakistan, for example -- suffer from water shortages. Sub-Saharan Africa has adequate natural water reserves, but the only country in the region currently producing a food surplus is South Africa. Most countries, on the other hand, are importers and, with rapidly growing populations, will likely be even more dependent on food imports in the future. Can such countries truly become important food producers?

Audinet, the IFAD expert, knows the risks. "The way these agreements are structured can harm the country and the farmers in the long term, robbing them of their most important asset: land." Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, warns: "Because the countries in Africa are competing for investors, they are undercutting each other." Some contracts, says De Schutter, are barely three pages long -- for hundreds of thousands of hectares of land. These types of agreements stipulate what products are to be cultivated, the location and the purchase or lease price, but they include no environmental standards. They also lack the necessary investment regulations and the stipulation that jobs must be created, says De Schutter.

Some agree to build schools and pave roads, but even when investors live up to their promises, the benefits to the host governments and local farmers are often short-lived. In the long term, however, they must suffer the consequences of over-fertilizing, deforestation, over-consumption of water, reduction of ecological diversity and the loss of local species. To boost harvests and achieve annual returns of 20 percent or more, the foreign large landowners must operate their farms on an industrial scale. And when the soil becomes depleted after a few years, many investors simply move on. Land is so cheap that they are not forced to value sustainable farming practices.

Rejecting the Old Model

Because of these risks Audinet and De Schutter, like most experts, favor contract farming instead of land acquisition. In other words, the foreign investors provide the technology and capital, while the local farmers own or lease the land and supply rice or wheat at fixed prices. This is the classic, tried-and-tested model, but it is not what the new investors want. They want control, ownership, high returns and, most of all, security -- objectives rarely compatible with the interests of thousands of small farmers.

Senegal has decided in favor of contract farming and against large-scale land sales, but it happens to be a stable democracy. This cannot be said of many of the countries where land acquisition is taking place.

"When food becomes scarce, the investor needs a weak state that does not force him to abide by any rules," says Philippe Heilberg, an American businessman. A state that permits grain exports despite famines at home, that is consumed by corruption or deeply in debt, ruled by a dictatorship, racked by civil war, or sends millions of workers abroad and is dependent on these workers receiving visas and jobs.

Heilberg has found such a nation: South Sudan, which is in fact a pre-nation, autonomous but not independent. The 44-year-old American, son of a coffee merchant and the founder of the investment firm Jarch Capital, is now the largest land leaseholder in South Sudan, where he leases 400,000 hectares of prime farmland in Mayom County.

The mere mention of the words South Sudan conjures up images of civil war, refugees and famine, not of a place where one would consider growing tomatoes. But Heilberg raves that his project will be more beneficial to people than the UN, and that he will create jobs and produce food. And he is adamant that Paulino Matip, from whom he has leased the land for 50 years, not be referred to as a warlord, but as a "former warlord" or "deputy army chief." Heilberg neglects to mention that the rebels led by Matip are suspected of having committed war crimes.

Instead of buying stocks, the former banker is now speculating on the political future of South Sudan, which he insists will be an independent country in 10 years, at which point land will be far more expensive than it is today.

Land acquisition is already a step further along in western Kenya, home to Erastas Dildo, 33, the kind of person the New York investors would probably characterize as a risk factor: a small farmer who owns three hectares of land. It is fertile land, where the corn turns bright green and grows two meters (6.5 feet) tall, where the cattle are as fat as hippos and the tomato plants bend under the weight of their tomatoes. The nearby Yala River flows into Lake Victoria. There are three small brick houses on the property. Erastas harvests his corn twice a year, and vegetables and tomatoes grow year-round. One hectare produces €3,600 worth of corn a year, a lot of money by Kenyan standards.

'They Drove Out 400 Families'

But things changed when Erastas was contacted by Dominion Farms, a US agricultural producer that established a colony in the Yala delta, where it has leased 3,600 hectares of land for 45 years, at the ludicrous rate of €12,000 a year. Dominion, which plans to grow rice, vegetables and corn on the land, wants to include Erastas Dildo's three hectares in its venture.

The Dominion representatives offered to pay him about 10 cents per square meter. Erastas turned them down, and now they are making life difficult for the farmer. Their most effective weapon is a dam they have built. When Erastas tried to harvest his corn last year, it was under water. "They are playing with the water level to get rid of us," he says. And when that doesn't work, says Erastas, Dominion sends in bulldozers, thugs and sometimes even the police.

DER SPIEGEL

Scarcity of Land

Under its contract, Dominion has agreed to renovate "at least one school and one medical facility" in each of the two local districts. "They drove out 400 families instead," says Gondi Olima of the organization Friends of the Yala Swamp. According to Olima, at first the Dominion venture created new jobs, as day laborers were hired to clear the site with machetes, but then the company brought in more and more equipment. "Now they have so many machines that workers are no longer needed," says Olima.

Dominion Farms denies the farmers' accusations and points out that it has already built eight classrooms, donated gateposts and awarded educational scholarships to 16 children, as well as providing beds and electricity for a hospital ward.

Perhaps Erastas and his family will be forced to make way for the development soon, as is already happening in many other places. The World Bank estimates that only 2 to 10 percent of the land in Africa is formally owned or leased, and most of that is in cities. A family may have lived on or occupied a piece of land for decades, but it often has no proof of ownership.

Hunt for Land Continues

Nevertheless, the land is almost never left unused. The poor, in particular, live off the land, where they collect fruits, herbs or firewood and graze their livestock. According to a joint study by several UN organizations, land grabs are often justified by defining the land as "fallow." As a result, according to the report, land grabs have the potential to dispossess farmers on a large scale. In many countries, there may be enough arable land available for everyone, but the quality is not uniform -- and the investors want the best land. That, as it happens, is the land where farmers usually live.

Because more than 50 percent of Africans are small farmers, large-scale land acquisition could be disastrous for the population. Those who lose their fields lose everything. The fact that the large investors can substantially improve harvests with their modern agricultural technology is of little use to Africans who, once they have lost their land and livelihoods, cannot afford to buy the new farms' products.

The World Bank and others are now developing a code of conduct for investors. A declaration of intent had been planned for the July G-8 summit in L'Aquila, Italy, but the heads of state in attendance could not agree on binding standards.

And so the hunt for land continues. Dominion has secured another 3,200 hectares, and Philippe Heilberg is in the process of leasing an additional 600,000 hectares in South Sudan. Back in New York, in the Stuyvesant Room, one of the speakers is reciting numbers to illustrate how fast the global population is growing: By 154 people per minute, 9,240 per hour or 221,760 per day. And each one of them wants to eat.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan/i>

 

For people who are looking for ways to reduce their "carbon footprint," here's one radical idea that could have a big long-term impact, some scientists say: Have fewer kids.

A study by statisticians at Oregon State University concluded that in the United States, the carbon legacy and greenhouse gas impact of an extra child is almost 20 times more important than some of the other environment-friendly practices people might employ during their entire lives — things like driving a high mileage car, recycling, or using energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs.

"In discussions about climate change, we tend to focus on the carbon emissions of an individual over his or her lifetime," said study team member Paul Murtaugh. "Those are important issues and it's essential that they should be considered. But an added challenge facing us is continuing population growth and increasing global consumption of resources."

Reproductive choices haven't gained as much attention in the consideration of human impact to the Earth, Murtaugh said. When an individual produces a child – and that child potentially produces more descendants in the future — the effect on the environment can be many times the impact produced by a person during their lifetime.

A child's impact

Under current conditions in the United States, for instance, each child ultimately adds about 9,441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average parent – about 5.7 times the lifetime emissions for which, on average, a person is responsible.

The impact doesn't only come through increased emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases — larger populations also generate more waste and tax water supplies.

Other offbeat environmental impacts have been in the news recently:

• One 2007 study found that divorce squanders resources, because people who once shared resources such as energy now use twice as much under two roofs.
• The current obesity epidemic may also be hurting the climate, because food production is a major contributor to global warming.
  

The impact of having children differs between countries. While some developing nations have much higher populations and rates of population growth than the United States, their overall impact on the global carbon equation is often reduced by shorter life spans and less consumption. The long-term impact of a child born to a family in China is less than one-fifth the impact of a child born in the United States, the study found.

However, as the developing world increases both its population and consumption levels, this equation may even out.

"China and India right now are steadily increasing their carbon emissions and industrial development, and other developing nations may also continue to increase as they seek higher standards of living," Murtaugh said.

Not advocating law

The researchers note that they are not advocating government controls or intervention on population issues, but say they simply want to make people aware of the environmental consequences of their reproductive choices.

"Many people are unaware of the power of exponential population growth," Murtaugh said. "Future growth amplifies the consequences of people's reproductive choices today, the same way that compound interest amplifies a bank balance."

Murtaugh's findings are detailed in a 2009 issue of the journal Global Environmental Change.

Sol Jacobs
Tadiran Batteries

One of the first frontiers of automated remote monitoring technology, the Automatic Meter Reader (AMR) market is finally coming of age. From one million units shipped in 1994, the market has grown steadily, with approximately 7 million units expected to be installed in 2002, for a total of approximately 40 million units in the field.

Understanding the AMR Market
Several forces are working together to revolutionize utility meter technology: Utility market deregulation; and rapid advances in wireless technology. Deregulation has brought new players into the marketplace, companies willing to make substantial investments in expanding product capabilities and services through drive-by and fixed network AMR systems. Utilities are increasingly looking to AMR devices as a means of recruiting new customers, retaining old customers, providing better service at lower cost, as well as supplying a variety of value added services to their commercial customers.

Battery manufacturers, under continual pressure to respond to the changing needs of AMR manufacturers, are currently adapting lithium battery technology to deliver longer life through lower self-discharge as well as expanding temperature ranges. At the same time, battery manufacturers must find new ways to increase capacity to handle the unique demands of high current pulse AMR devices.

Matching the Right Battery To the Application
Of the approximately 40 million AMR units currently installed, the majority utilize lithium thionyl chloride batteries. Lithium batteries are typically preferred for utility AMR applications due to their inherent long life, high energy density and extended temperature ranges. Long life is critical -- as battery failure leads to additional service calls, which can negatively impact utility profitability. Also, in remote applications, including in-ground pits and other hard-to-reach places where battery replacement is difficult or impossible, longer life lithium technologies are essential.

In reality, each application is different in terms of energy usage, size and environmental considerations. The following product illustrates typical performance requirement issues for AMR devices.

Hexagram STAR Meter Transmitter Units
In 1997, Hexagram introduced the STAR Fixed Network Automatic Meter Reading System, which employs sophisticated RF technology to eliminate the need for meter readers and site visits. STAR fixed network Meter Transmitter Units (MTUs) work with gas, electric and water meters mounted outdoors, in basements, as well as in pits. The MTU contains a narrow band UHF transmitter with a range of several miles. Each day the MTU transmits the meter-reading data which is collected by an inexpensive network of receivers and forwarded to the utility.

Lithium thionyl chloride battery technology is well suited for this application. Hexagram has used over two million lithium thionyl chloride batteries in its utility products. Many of these devices have been operating for over 15 years without a battery change. This attests to the excellent reliability and service life provided by these batteries, as the service life offered by lithium thionyl chloride can last up to 20 years. Reliability is another major advantage, as lithium thionyl chloride batteries can operate in severe environmental conditions (-40°C to 85°C).

Pushing Current Technology To the Limit
In instances where the AMR device generates high current pulses at periodic intervals, with little or no background current between signal transmissions, standard lithium batteries may not be able to deliver higher performance without sacrificing product life -- as battery failure can disrupt the billing process, resulting in expensive service calls.

Of all the available lithium batteries chemistries, bobbin-type Li/SOCL2 cells offer the advantages of higher energy density and voltage, excellent temperature characteristics and low self-discharge rates. However, bobbin-type cells have two major obstacles with regard to high pulse applications: passivation after storage at elevated temperatures, and low current due to its low rate design.

To address these problems, engineers at Tadiran began experimenting with a hybrid battery which utilizes lithium thionyl chloride chemistry in tandem with a hybrid layer capacitor (HLC). Now marketed as PlusesPlus batteries, these hybrid cells can supply pulses measured in AMPs, whereas standard lithium thionyl chloride cells can only supply mili-amps. This hybrid cell offers all the major benefits associated with thionyl chloride bobbin cells as compared to other lithium technologies. These benefits include higher capacity, lower self-discharge (less than 2 percent per year), lower ESR (equivalent serial resistance), no passivation effect and a broader temperature range (-40°C to 85°C).

The Hybrid Layer Capacitor is charged by the battery and powers the pulses via its very low output impedance. The HLC is recharged by the battery in advance of the next pulse to eliminate passivation effects. Combining the HLC with a lithium battery also allows end-of-life measurements. Monitoring the battery + HLC's open circuit voltage allows available capacity to be accurately measured, since capacitance of the battery pack is a function of the open circuit voltage.

Neptune R900 Meter Interface Units
Several AMR manufacturers have adapted this new hybrid lithium battery technology, including Neptune Technology Group, Inc. The company manufactures the R900 meter interface unit (MIU), a compact electronic device that collects data from networked encoded registers, then transmits that data using frequency-hopping spread-spectrum technology to ensure data security as well as reading accuracy and reliability.

Unique to the Neptune R900 MIU is its ability to read both Neptune's ProRead or ARB encoder registers and the Invensys ECR II encoder registers without the need for programming. The R900 is available in single or dual port options. The data transmitted by the R900 is captured by either a DAP handheld computer for walk-by meter reading or by Neptune's EZDrive Drive-By Data Collector for drive-by meter reading. The meter reading data is transferred from the field to the utility's billing system via Neptune's EZRouteMAPS route management software.

In designing a system capable of multiple data transmissions per day, Neptune required a battery that wouldn't compromise battery life expectancy for increased power. Extending the time between battery replacements was critical to Neptune, since longer life translates into reduced field service.

According to Kent Murray, vice president of marketing at Neptune, "For our future higher powered RF MIUs, Neptune has selected the Tadiran PulsesPlus hybrid lithium battery because of the increased available capacity to handle multiple high powered daily transmissions. According to our design engineers an operating life of approximately 15 years should be feasible using the PulsesPlus in our newest high powered units. Competing battery technologies only permitted a 5-7 year lifespan."

The concept of combining lithium batteries with hybrid layer capacitors is rapidly gaining acceptance in other high current pulse applications was well, including GPS tracking devices, automotive emergency roadside assistance systems, oceanographic and deep-sea devices, security systems, as well as military and aerospace equipment.

As the current wave of deregulation continues and AMR/utility meter device manufacturers strive to make their technologies increasingly feature-rich, they must work closely with battery manufacturers to ensure that emerging battery technologies can keep pace with rapid product advancements

Sol Jacobs is vice president and general manager of Tadiran Batteries, a manufacturer of Lithium Thionyl Chloride cells, including PulsesPlus batteries. Tadiran also manufactures primary batteries in a variety of configurations, including cylindrical, coin-sized cells and packs.