Sure, you can find a happy African farmer singing the praises of the Green Revolution and of GMOs. You can probably find Indian farmers who love what Monsanto has done. But you can find millions of third world farmers who are very angry about these things--check out what Vandana Shiva has to say.
ETC has done excellent research into genetic technology and nanotech--too bad it doesn't get more widespread attention.
What struck me reading this piece is that there probably is the potantial for nanotechnology to solve some problems--IF it were used responsibly, with government assuring that only fully safe applications were allowed out of the lab into the field. IF approaches that cause excessive diversion of poor people's food into rich people's gas tanks, or that risk contamination of ecosystems in unknown ways, or deforestation, were strictly prevented no matter how much money they could make for the life sciences corporations. In other words, if pigs fly.

No-one doubts that fertiliser and modern seed varieties can improve yields over traditional African slash-and burn, rainfed cropping. We all saw what happened to Zimbabwe when the 'white' farmers with their modern, chemical-intensive (but often not as intensive as in the US) farming methods were kicked off the land (inflation there is now north of 120 million % and thousands are starving).

But to say there is not an even better way is ridiculous -- e.g. modern organic methods. Don't presume that the incredibly crude methods traditionally practised by many African farmers bear any resemblance to contemporary, sophisticated organic ways of doing things! It seems that many foreigners do...

Just a thought!

Whiskerfish (African, in Africa, for all my sins!)

Think about it: In a relatively free agricultural economy, you are only going to plant biofuel feedstock if it is more profitable than food.

If it is, food prices must go up, and more natural areas must be destroyed to make fields. These are major negatives.

The idea that African peasants will become rich by growing biofuel feedstocks presumes that they are poor because they currently cannot grow anything saleable on their land, and that they will be able to retain control their land if they manage to grow something profitable on it.

The reasons that many African peasants are not growing valuable crops is not because they -- for climatic reasons or whatever -- will not grow there. There are a host of complex factors at play: Lack of access to knowledge and capital, weird systems of land tenure, traditional superstition etc. etc. It's hard to see how biofuels will change this.

If biofuel crops are successful and profitable, then you can bet that more powerful people (poiticians, foreign investors, and the like) will soon rush in and take the land into their possession. Rural Africans will become near-slaves on plantations built on the land that was once theirs. Why do I say this? because it's already happening. From Mozambique to the Congo, from Angola to Tanzania, millions of acres are already being stolen. I've seen it for myself.

Some of the main drivers of rural poverty in Africa are political powerlessness, societal fragmentation and endemic corruption -- changing the crops people grow will do nothing to solve this.

99% of contemporary biofuels are just plain trouble. 1st-, 2nd- or 3rd-generation -- whatever.

Cheers

Whiskerfish

To go renewable electric with transportation energy.  The same old corporate citizens will guzzle the biosphere with the help of these franken-species of microorganisms.

If only a few invasive species escape the vat, it could be bio-suicide for the living planet.

Non dangerous algae and digestor bacteria feeding on the waste stream will do just fine.  Without more mega industrial tampering with life on earth.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

It's in their position paper, along with the weird cartoons, seemingly random charts, and citing of primarily editorials as "sources."

It's hard to like GMO algae.  But selectively bred algae ought to be ok.

That kind of exposes a possible loophole for GMO.  The insertion of toxin concentrating genes, found in some plants (like jimson weed), into microorganisms.  This would make it possible to have biodigestion/energy systems that extract toxic heavy metals, even tadioactive ones, from the waste stream.

Or even process contaminated soil and water, recycling it, rather than landfilling it, with those clay and plastic lined facilities that have to treat the waste water as contaminated run off.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

This is a huge and virtually unexplored topic, and will remain unexplored as long as the discussion is dominated by aggie profiteers and dogmatically anti-biomass-anything environmentalists bashing each other ad infinitum.

Using plants to remediate contaminated soils/neutralize toxins and then turning the plants into fuels or pellets for stoves--this is not a big potential cash cow but it's hard to see how it wouldn't be one of the few sources of fairly benign biofuels. No one's growing food on contaminated soils right now. And if they are, I wouldn't eat it.

Bioremediation could separate the toxic metals from the biomass and break down dangerous organic compounds like PCBs.  A biodigestor can break down biomass to whatever molecular level it is designed for.  Time and energy exchange do the dissassembley.

That mud with PCB in it that GE dumped in the Hudson River from it's transformer plant, it could be sucked up and biodigested using renewable energy, river current power.  

As the biomass is broken down, it would tend to concentrate the toxins.  Allowing special separation like the electromagnetic trash seperation of non-magnetic metals from trash, only on a micro scale.

A plusing DC current magnetizing the metal containing microorganisms, then magnets separating them from the rest of the sludge.

PCBs and other dangerous organic compounds can be broken down by the selection of the right microorganisms.

Could even radioactive metals, like the Plutonium and Uranium leaking into the Ohio, Colorado, and the Columbia Rivers (to name just a few),  be extracted economically from ground water using renewably powered bioreactors?  I think so.  

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

:)

Maybe instead of yakking away anonymously on Grist, I should be writing my own book...uh, anonymously...

"Using plants to remediate contaminated soils/neutralize toxins and then turning the plants into fuels or pellets for stoves"

What I'm advocating is using the energy from the biogas that the biodigester breaks the biomass down into.

It's fairly easy to separate gas from toxins and heavy metal, thus no toxic smoke!  In a solid oxide fuel cell/turbine cogeneration system, the gas will be turned into electricity at 70% efficiency.

The gas is an easy to store source of backup power for a renwable grid.  And waste stream biogas offsets GHG from other sources.  It's all good.  So does the organic fertilizer.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin