The Great Lakes Zephyr - Wind Energy & Hydrogen Journal

Clarke survives devastation

AP

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka -- Sri Lanka's best-known resident, science-fiction writer and visionary Arthur C. Clarke, said yesterday he and his family were safe, but regretted the lack of a warning system in his adopted home of Sri Lanka. Sunday's massive earthquake and tsunami killed at least 22,799 people in the South Asian nation and injured another 8,815, according to official tolls. Some 4,059 remained missing and nearly one million people were homeless.

"I am enormously relieved that my family and household have escaped the ravages of the sea that suddenly invaded most parts of coastal Sri Lanka, leaving a trail of destruction," said Clarke, the author of 2001: A. Space Odyssey.

Originally from Somerset, England, Clarke came to Sri Lanka, a small island country of 19 million people off India's southern tip, for underwater diving in 1954. Two years later he made the tropical island his home.

"There is much to be done in both short and long terms for Sri Lanka to raise its head from this blow from the seas," said Clarke in an e-mail to friends seen by The Associated Press.

"Among other things, the country needs to improve its technical and communications facilities so that effective early warnings can help minimize losses in future disasters."

Clarke, 87, said that in his first book on Sri Lanka, The Reefs of Taprobane written in 1957, there was a reference to a "tidal wave reaching the Galle harbour," although it was not part of the plot. Galle, in southern Sri Lanka, is the country's second-largest town. It was badly hit by Sunday's disaster.

Clarke predicted space travel before rockets were even tested and foretold computers wreaking havoc with modern life when modems and PCs were not household words.

His 2001: A. Space Odyssey, loved by dreamers and scientists since it appeared as a novel and a movie in 1968, was just one of scores of fiction and non-fiction works produced in a career that began in 1959. In 1997, he produced another bestseller with the sequel to 2001 - 3001: The Final Odyssey.

Clarke said Sunday's tsunami damaged a diving school he runs and his two beach bungalows, but he reported no personal human loss.

"Many others were not so fortunate," he said.

http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/EdmontonSun/Entertainment/2004/12/31/802764-sun.html


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Earth Policy News - The Soybean Factor

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 15, 2004

The following is a section from Chapter 3, Moving Up the Food Chain
Efficiently, from "Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an
Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures" by Lester R. Brown,
which will be published February 3, 2005.

For a complete Table of Contents
http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/Out/Contents.htm

THE SOYBEAN FACTOR
When we think of soybeans in our daily diet, it is typically as tofu,
veggie burgers, or other meat substitutes. But most of the world's
fast-growing soybean harvest is consumed indirectly in the beef, pork,
poultry, milk, eggs, and farmed fish that we eat. Although not a visible
part of our diets, the incorporation of soybean meal into feed rations has
revolutionized the world feed industry, greatly increasing the efficiency
with which grain is converted into animal protein.

In 2004, the world's farmers produced 223 million tons of soybeans, 1 ton
for every 9 tons of grain they produced. Of this, some 15 million tons
were consumed as tofu or meat substitutes. The remaining 208 million tons
were crushed in order to extract 33 million tons of soybean oil,
separating it from the more highly valued meal. Soybean oil dominates the
world vegetable oil economy, supplying much of the oil used for cooking
and to dress salads. Soybean oil production exceeds that of all the other
table oils combined--olive, safflower, canola, sunflower, and palm oil.

The 143 million tons of soybean meal that remains after the oil is
extracted is fed to cattle, pigs, chicken, and fish, enriching their diets
with high-quality protein. Experience in feeding shows that combining
soybean meal with grain, in roughly one part meal to four parts grain,
dramatically boosts the efficiency with which grain is converted into
animal protein, sometimes nearly doubling it.

The world's three largest meat producers--China, the United States, and
Brazil--now all rely heavily on soybean meal as a protein supplement in
feed rations. The United States has long used soybean meal to upgrade
livestock and poultry feed. As early as 1964, 8 percent of feed rations
consisted of soybean meal. Over most of the last decade, the meal content
of U.S. feeds has fluctuated between 17 and 19 percent.

For Brazil, the shift to soybean meal as a protein supplement began in the
late 1980s. From 1986 to 1997, the soymeal share of feed rations jumped
from 2 percent to 21 percent. In China, the realization that feed use
efficiency could be dramatically boosted with soymeal was translated into
reality some six years later. Between 1991 and 2002, the soymeal component
of feed jumped from 2 percent to 20 percent. For fish, whose protein
demands are particularly high, China incorporated some 5 million tons of
soymeal into the 16 million tons of grain-based fish feed used in 2003.

The experience of these three countries simply indicates that the same
principles of animal nutrition apply everywhere. The ratio of soybean meal
to corn in the feed mix varies somewhat according to the price
relationship between the two. Where corn is cheap, as in the United
States, the corn share of the feed mix tends to be slightly higher. In
Brazil, which has an economic advantage in soybean production, the soy
component is higher.

As world grain production was tripling from 1950 to 2004, soybean
production was expanding thirteenfold. The growth in this protein source,
most of it consumed indirectly in various animal products, is a surrogate
for rising affluence, one that measures movement up the food chain.

The soybean was domesticated in central China some 5,000 years ago and
made its way to the United States in 1804, when Thomas Jefferson was
President. For a century and a half the soybean was grown mostly as a
curiosity crop in home gardens. Most farmers outside of China did not even
know what a soybean looked like. But after World War II, production
exploded as the consumption of livestock and poultry products climbed in
North America and Europe.

By 1978, the area planted to soybeans in the United States had eclipsed
that planted to wheat. In some recent years, the U.S. harvested area of
soybeans has exceeded that of corn, making it the country's most widely
planted crop. In the United States, where soybean production is now five
times that in China, the soybean has found an ecological and economic
niche far larger than in its country of origin.

U.S. soybeans are grown mostly in the Corn Belt, often in rotation with
corn. The soybean, a nitrogen-fixing legume, and corn, which has a
ravenous appetite for nitrogen, fit together nicely on the same piece of
land in alternate years. In fact, if the Corn Belt were being named today,
it would be called the Corn/Soybean Belt.

Another chapter in the soybean saga has been unfolding over the past three
decades in Latin America. After the collapse in 1972 of the Peruvian
anchovy fishery--which accounted for a fifth of the world fish catch and
supplied much of the protein meal used in livestock and poultry foods at
that time--some countries in Latin America saw an opportunity to produce
soybeans. As a result, both Brazil and Argentina began to expand soybean
production, slowly at first and then, during the 1990s, at breakneck
speed. As of 2004, soybean production exceeds that of all grains combined
in both countries. Brazil now exports more soybeans than the United States
does. And within the next few years Brazil is likely to overtake the
United States in production as well.

While production was increasing thirteenfold over the last half-century,
soybean yields have almost tripled, which means that the area in soybeans
has increased some fourfold. In contrast to grains, where the growth in
output has come largely from raising yields, growth in the harvest of the
land-hungry soybean has come more from area expansion.

As a result, in a world with limited cropland resources, the soybean has
been expanding partly at the expense of grain. Nonetheless, this expansion
so greatly increases the efficiency of grain used for feed that it reduces
the cropland area used to produce feedgrains and soybeans together.

# # #

Lester R. Brown is President and Founder of the Earth Policy Institute, a
nonprofit environmental research organization focused on providing a
vision of an environmentally sustainable economy--an eco-economy--and a
road map of how to get from here to there.

For more on OUTGROWING THE EARTH:
http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/Out/Contents.htm

Order your copy today and get free shipping (U.S. and Canada only)
or call (202).496-9290 x 13

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