Côtes du Rhône: The modern side to the French wine industry (IHT)

NEW YORK: Côtes du Rhône - it is such a familiar wine, almost a synonym for a not-too-fancy French red. Yet few wines can match Côtes du Rhône in exemplifying the myriad changes that have transformed the French wine industry in the last 20 years.
In popular wine mythology, the French wine industry is static, unyielding to modernity. Depending on your point of view, that is either good or bad. In reality, the French have evolved quickly. They have recognized that the insular ways of the past no longer function in a globalized economy.
The Côtes du Rhône typifies what has happened in many French wine regions. Once its wines were the none-too-good tipples of bars and cafés, light and fruity if you were lucky, more likely tart and harsh. That sort of wine still exists in France, though a lot less of it than in generations past. Rarely do you find it in the United States. Once you could sell a lot of bad wine here if it was cheap enough. But now, there is too much competition among the good stuff.
The current generation of French winemakers understands this. Unlike their forbears, many have traveled widely, worked around the world and studied enology and viticulture at universities. How they use what they have learned accounts for much that has changed in Côtes du Rhône today.
In a tasting of 25 Côtes du Rhônes, the wine panel found a surprising number of plush, polished wines. Some were sleek and modern, so much so that they showed little trace of identity. They were fruity and well-made but not distinctive. Others were similarly well made yet displayed characteristic Rhône touches of earthiness and minerality. These tended to be our favorites. A few were clunky and overoaked; these we rejected.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/05/arts/trwine.php

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Religious violence in India also has economic undertones (IHT)

A defaced portrait of Jesus hung on the wall of a destroyed home in a village in Orissa state, where mob violence has killed at least 16 people since last week. (Parth Sanyal/Reuters)

The violence was prompted by the Aug. 23 murder in Orissa of Laxmanananda Saraswati, who had been associated with a Hindu radical group opposed to fellow Hindus' converting to Christianity. Although a letter left at the scene claimed that Maoist rebels carried out the attack, many Hindus blame Christians instead.
Non-Christians have long resented the conversions - the most recent Indian census, in 2001, states that 2.3 percent of the population is Christian - but tensions have increased as India's economy has taken off.
Christian missionaries in India have focused on indigenous and lower-caste groups, including untouchables, or Dalits. Despite laws dating almost to Indian independence in 1947, Dalits are often discriminated against or worse. They are sometimes denied basic amenities, such as clean water; relegated to hazardous jobs; and beaten, raped or killed because of their social status.
Conversion to Islam or Christianity does not erase caste identity completely, but Christianity and other non-Hindu religions offer a possible escape by providing schooling for anyone who wants to attend, including Dalits. Christian education often includes classes in English, which are crucial for anyone who wants to join India's service businesses, including hotels, or to break into even the lowest levels of the information technology industry fueling much of the country's growth.
"Across India today, the disenfranchised and repressed peoples, the tribes and the low castes are exiting the caste system" that is entrenched in the Hindu religion, said Joseph D'souza, the president of the All Indian Christian Council and an advocate for Dalit rights.
They are converting not only to Christianity, he said, but to Buddhism, Islam and Marxist atheism.
"People are in revolt" after 60 years of their rights being trampled, he said, adding, "It has nothing to do with any particular religion."
But the conversions occur as many in India's rural areas, including Kandhamal, see themselves as left behind economically. The area's 650,000 people subsist mainly by growing and selling rice, turmeric, ginger and forest products.

"The conflict is increasing because we are trying to educate the people and enlighten them," said Pastor Thomas Varghese, 56, in an interview in Raikia, where he has lived for 10 years. He said he ran about three kilometers, almost two miles, and spent a night in the jungle to save his life last week, after a mob that included nine people he recognized tried to kill him.
But Pramod Pradhan, a young Hindu farmer in Tiangia village, views the conversions differently, and echoed the feelings of many of the state's Hindus. "Christian missionaries lured Hindus to convert to Christianity. They bring a lot of money to do that."
Padma Charan Panda, an upper-caste Hindu and a turmeric trader who was watching a televised debate on the issue in Raikia, said "Christian traders exploit poor and illiterate" people.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/04/asia/india.php

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Swiss farmers keep tradition of charcoal-burning (IHT)

By Jonathan LynnReuters
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
ROMOOS, Switzerland: In the remote hills and valleys of central Switzerland, mountain farmers are still making charcoal to a centuries-old method.
Charcoal, formed by removing water and tar from wood, burns with almost the same intensity as coal, and was once the main fuel for medieval glassmakers and blacksmiths, and a source of energy for Switzerland as it industrialized in the 19th century, until imported coal became available.
Its controlled production can be traced back globally at least 3,500 years. Now mostly used by the world's poor, charcoal in Switzerland serves mainly to grill food, for instance in barbecues.
Charcoal-burning, once a major cause of deforestation in Europe, largely disappeared from Switzerland in the 20th century, but experienced a temporary revival during World War Two when neutral Switzerland was unable to import coal.
It was never interrupted in the Napf region, some 30 km (20 miles) east of the lakeside resort of Lucerne, where it dates back to the middle ages, when glassmakers practiced their craft in the 13th and 14th centuries.
But the back-breaking lonely work is far from being a quaint tradition revived for tourists. Also practiced in some remote parts of former East Germany like the Harz mountains, it is for smallholding farmers a vital source of income.
The little village of Romoos, whose name goes back to an ancient Germanic word for tree-trunk, is at the heart of the area of steep hills and valleys, where tractors crawl along the slopes as the farmers and their wives mow and rake rich mountain grass for winter hay.
In hollows in the woods, farmers build charcoal kilns, the shape and size of small igloos.
INTENSE HEAT
Willy Renggli, head of the charcoal burners' association, shows how a kiln is built up.
On a spider-web base of tree trunks, one-meter long logs are stacked up in two layers around a central shaft or flue.
The best wood for charcoal is beech, but pine and other timber will do.
The kiln is topped off with smaller pieces of timber, then covered with branches of fir needles, and finally coated with a thick paste of charcoal grindings, ash and water.
A typical kiln uses about 60 "Ster" of timber, Renggli says. A "Ster" is a Swiss measurement corresponding to one cubic meter (10 cubic feet) of wood, weighing about 600-700 kilos.
Each "Ster" of timber yields about 100 kilos of charcoal.
It takes two men about three weeks to build the kiln, which will then burn for 12-18 days.
The charcoal-burner will spend the entire time by the kiln, camping out under canvas while it burns, says Renggli, 51.
Every few hours he feeds the kiln with charcoal chips, letting in air by piercing the charcoal paste covering and regulating the heat by sealing it again.
Around 50 barrels of chips will be used up in a single kiln.
"I can sleep 2-3 hours at a time. But I sleep as well as I do when I'm in my white bed up there," he said pointing up the hill towards his flower-bedecked traditional farmhouse.
Once the kiln is burning it can generate a heat inside of up to 800 degrees Celsius (1,472 degrees Fahrenheit).
But the charcoal-burner can walk barefoot on the kiln if the charcoal paste has been applied properly.
"I need about 500 degrees to get the charcoal process going," Renggli said.
If the charcoal-burner neglects tending the kiln every few hours, or misjudges feeding or aerating it, the fire may go out -- or the charcoal itself will catch fire, burning out with an intolerable heat.
As a result, the work is best done by a single burner who can monitor his kiln precisely.
"The charcoal burner who lights the kiln must burn it through to the end," Renggli said.
The Swiss authorities have tried to get unemployed people to work as burners in shifts, but they only produced one third of the charcoal a professional would have done, he recalled.
The work, though tough, is a useful sideline, even if it brings in only about a quarter of the earnings he gets from his farm -- a 10 hectare smallholding producing milk from nine cows and seven goats.
In addition, to make ends meet, Renggli and his wife have joined the agrotourism trend, taking in guests who want to experience life on a farm, and he helps out as the local postman.
The craft of charcoal-burning is usually passed down generations although Renggli, one of a dozen active burners in Romoos, says he learnt it from his neighbours.
But his son has already built and fired some small kilns with 5 or 6 "Ster" of timber.
http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/09/03/europe/OUKWD-UK-SWISS-CHARCOAL.php




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Dwindling forests pose a severe threat to Kenya (IHT)

NAROK, Kenya: Joseph Nkolia, a Maasai goatherd, pointed dismissively at two shallow pools, the only water in a parched stream west of the Kenyan town of Narok.
"It rained yesterday and look at it," he said. "Two years ago it used to flow strongly through here. Now I often have to get a lorry to bring water from Narok for us and our animals, and it costs a lot." His flock went by without bothering to drink the scant brown water.
The stream is a tributary of the Ewaso Ngiro, one of 12 rivers fed from the Mau Complex, the biggest Kenyan forest and a vital water collection basin in the west of the country.
Destruction of the woodland by rampant illegal settlement, logging and charcoal burning threatens severe damage to the Kenyan economy with an impact on energy, tourism, agriculture and water supplies for cities and industry.
A familiar Kenyan saga of corruption, illegal land grabs and the use of state resources to buy votes has destroyed a quarter of the 400,000-hectare, or 988,000-acre, forest in the past decade, with an impact that may be felt as far away as Egypt.

The Mau was broken into 22 blocks by human settlement over the past century but the real destruction began in 1997, when large plots were given away by the government of former President Daniel arap Moi to win votes in an election.
"My life will be completely ruined if I cannot get water for us and our livestock, our land will turn into a desert. We will all die," said another Maasai, Moses Mundati, standing on sunbaked ground that the Ewaso Ngiro once flowed across. As he spoke, people brought yellow containers to gather water from the narrowed river beside him.
But if the saga is familiar, the recent reaction is not.
Kenya's new coalition government set up a task force in July to reverse the destruction of the forest, which the United Nations Environment Program says could cost the tourism, tea and energy sectors alone at least $300 million.
"Such an extensive and ongoing destruction of a key natural asset for the country is nothing less than a national emergency," Prime Minister Raila Odinga said.
So drastic is the problem, the inauguration of the 60-megawatt Sondu Miriu hydroelectric project in western Kenya has been delayed because of inadequate water flow. The $260 million Japanese-financed project was designed to depend on water from the Mau and has only a small storage reservoir.
As high oil prices push Kenya to look for alternative energy, experts say water from the Mau, if it is preserved, could generate nearly 60 percent of current national capacity.
Lake Nakuru, center of a popular game park, and Lake Natron in Tanzania, breeding ground for the Rift Valley's famous flamingos, are both receding. "If we don't take action, in 10 years Lake Nakuru will be gone," said Francis Nkako, head of the local development authority.
The rivers fed by the forest's giant moisture reservoir and generation of rain also supply Lake Victoria, source of the Nile, and two other Kenyan lakes.
Revenue from tea, a leading export for Kenya, has declined while tourism, is also under threat, after already suffering a 23 percent drop because of a bloody post-election crisis earlier this year.
"This is destabilizing the environment to such an extent that it has a huge impact on economic development at a national level," said Christian Lambrechts, a forestry expert with the UN Environment Program. "It is basically a suicide process."
The government stance changed drastically this year when first the finance minister, John Michuki, and then Odinga, the prime minister, were flown over the forest. Officials say they were shocked by the huge scars in once densely wooded areas.
Officials say Odinga and President Mwai Kibaki - bitter rivals until their power-sharing deal ended the political crisis - are united on the issue. But saving the forest is likely to be painful: Lambrechts estimates there are 25,000 squatters in the forest.
"We are not going to go anywhere," said Nicodemus Yegon, one of thousands of people living in the southern Maasai Mau block who say they have title deeds to land in what officials say is protected forest. "When God descends, he will find us here."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/03/business/forest.php

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Setback at Tata plant reflects Indian divisions over land (IHT)

MUMBAI: The Tata Nano, an Indian creation soon to hit the market as the world's least-expensive car, accelerated head-on this week into the world's largest democracy.
Some farmers in eastern India who sold their land to make way for the Nano factory have since been agitating to get it back. With the protest swelling in recent days, Tata Motors decided this week to stop construction of the plant and shifted start-up production elsewhere. But it is not only a setback for the $2,250 car.
In a country where 740 million people - two-thirds of the population - live scattered through 660,000 villages, the closing of Tata's factory deals a cruel blow to a widespread hope among policy makers and business people: that India will find a peaceful way to wean these millions from their land and move them into productive alternative livelihoods.
"As each generation develops, the children of the rural economy must decide whether they want to continue to work on the farms," Ratan Tata, chairman of the Tata Group, said Wednesday in an interview by telephone, his first since it was announced Tuesday that operations in Singur, about an hour's drive from Calcutta, would be suspended.
To enthusiasts of a "new India," the choice of staying on the land or leaving is not a tough one. There is, after all, only so much value that can be wrung from a cow's udders or a cob of corn. Millions of village dwellers have already migrated to cities.

In the village of Jhajjar, outside New Delhi, in the northern state of Haryana, a company called Reliance Industries was trying to do the same thing: buy farmland and put it to industrial use.
But there, under a bright morning sky, a village elder sat in his front yard, offered his visitors spicy tea, explained his deep attachment to the soil and noted that he had shotguns in his house and would fire them at any Reliance land scout who came his way.
This dilemma does not belong to India. Every nation that has industrialized has had to reconcile these conflicting feelings. But in China, Russia, South Korea and elsewhere, fiat has helped to suppress naysayers.
As the United States urbanized a century ago, it did so in a politically insulated world where many Americans still could not vote, and no one had a television beaming potential new grievances into their home night after night. In present-day India, by contrast, "everyone has a veto," in the words of Aroun Shourie, a former cabinet minister.

But the dilemma is also acute here because land has meanings and resonances in India that it does not possess everywhere else.
At the poshest cocktail parties in Bangalore or Delhi, an Indian-looking interlocutor will inevitably be asked her "native place" - not the place you were born, the place you live now, or the place where your parents live. It is the village where your family last tilled the soil - even if they left in 1838.
Land is status. Throughout history, and in many parts still today, Dalits, known once as untouchables, have been confined to land on the outskirts of villages, on the theory that their nearness would pollute the others.
Without a sacred commitment to a particular patch of earth, the entire caste system could not have worked. No one would have been untouchable anymore if it was so easy to sell land and move to where no one knew you.
"They derive their identity from land," said Suhel Seth, a longtime adviser to the Tata Group and the managing partner of Counselage, a strategic branding firm in New Delhi. "It also ties them to a certain social acceptability. Their entire societal being relates to the land that they own."
And so, even where farmers consent to sell their land, he added, "you're creating a sense of displacement, and through that displacement you're creating a sense of insecurity. This is why land has become an emotional issue."
Tata says it has tried to help villagers succeed in a new world, training them, sending them to other plants to learn skills and making plans to employ them on the Nano.
But Arundhati Roy, the novelist and a frequent critic of India's economic policy, said that such efforts touched too few people.
"People have understood that clinging to even the tiniest of landholdings will offer them a better chance of survival and dignity than all the false promises of jobs and prosperity that the government and big companies make before evicting them," Roy added. "For these reasons, the battle for land in India is increasingly becoming a fight to the death."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/03/business/tata.php

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Indian flood victims hunker down in camps (IHT)

JANKINAGAR, India: Soldiers and aid workers increased their efforts Wednesday to rescue hundreds of thousands of people still stranded after weeks of flooding in northern India, as those safe on dry land settled in at camps that were likely to house them for months.
The three refugee camps housing 7,000 people in Jankinagar town - one near a train station, the other two in schools - had an air of semipermanence Wednesday as women washed clothes and other people set up stalls to sell cigarettes.
In other parts of the flood-ravaged northern state of Bihar, thousands of soldiers and aid workers continued to try to save those still stranded on rooftops, trees and islands of dry land more than two weeks after monsoon rains caused the Kosi River to burst its banks and turn hundreds of square kilometers of Bihar into a giant lake.
Officials say more than half of the 1.2 million people stranded have been rescued. They have only confirmed 38 deaths, but it is widely believed the final toll will be significantly higher.

"How can I go back? The houses are gone, everything is gone," said Kakhrun Lal, 65, who watched four of his cows - his most valuable possessions - drown in the flooding. He sold the other two so his family could have a little money. But when that runs out, he will have nothing.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/03/asia/india.php

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Organic Growing Pains (Ireland; allotment)

When I was back off with the fairies on holiday I missed this comment on Farm Blogs from Peggy at Organic Growing Pains in Ireland (Peggy sorry). So let me make ammends and bring a bit more attention to her blog.

Here's what Peggy had to say.

Thanks for being interested in my blog. I did not consider it a farm or small holding but just enjoy being outdoors and showing my grandchildren how our food is grown as my parents and grandparents did before me.

Hopefully they will have respect for the land and all growing things and a curiosity for life and living.

Allotments are not big in Ireland but are becoming increasingly sought after as we become more worried about where our food is coming from and how it is grown.

We live in a country where farmer's wives go to the local supermarket to buy 'fresh' veg imported from around the globe rather than tend a patch on their own land.

I am amazed at the people from all over the world who grow their own in various plots big and small and willing to share their knowledge with the rest of us online.

Peggy has some recommendations that I hope to be posting soon.






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U.N. says North Korea needs millions in food aid (IHT)

BEIJING: North Korea needs $503 million (281 million pounds) in food aid between now and November 2009 to avoid famine, which could be hampered by China's unwillingness to grant food export licences, the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) said on Tuesday.
Tony Banbury, the WFP's regional director for Asia who has just spent a week in the reclusive country, said North Korea risked sliding back into famine if it did not get help now, with people already resorting to foraging to sustain themselves.
"We don't believe it's a famine. We are intent on making sure it doesn't turn into one. The operation will have a huge impact in preventing a worsening of the situation," he told a news conference in Beijing, referring to their new aid appeal.
North Korea, with a population of about 23 million, lost around 1 million people in a famine in the mid to late 1990s brought about by a mismanaged farm sector and floods.
Even with a good harvest, North Korea falls about 1 million tonnes, or 20 percent, short of its grain needs and relies heavily on aid from China, South Korea and United Nations agencies.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said in late March it expects North Korea to have a shortfall of about 1.66 million tonnes in cereals for the year ending in October 2008, the largest deficit in about seven years.
The WFP warned in July that North Korea was experiencing its worst levels of hunger in nearly a decade.
High global food prices are also making it harder for North Korea to buy food on the international market, as are China's restrictions on export licences for grains and flour in order to control domestic inflation.
"China's priority is feeding its own population," said Anthea Webb, the WFP's China director. "We acknowledge that they already send bilateral food aid from China to North Korea, and we appreciate that, but our own operation there has a tremendous need."
She added that the WFP had spoken to Chinese officials about the problem, and "they are considering it".


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Fish or foul (IHT)

CHEVY CHASE, Maryland:
When news of the great fish fraud broke recently, New York's elite restaurateurs rushed to defend their sushi.
Phony labels on the red snapper? Knock-off tuna? Not to worry. Top chefs can't be fooled, they insisted, nor can their customers. "It is impossible to mislead people who have knowledge," declared Eric Ripert, the chef at Le Bernardin.
Few statements could do more to gladden a con man's heart. In the art of the con, magicians and swindlers and forgers insist, the ideal victim is not an ignoramus but an expert. Any magician would rather take on a roomful of physicists than of 5-year-olds. "When you're certain you cannot be fooled," wrote the magician Teller, "you become easy to fool."

The catch is that, when it comes to food, we all think of ourselves as experts. But we taste with both our tongues and our minds, and it's easy to lead minds astray.
Brownies taste better, for example, when served on china rather than on paper plates, research has shown. And we prefer wine with a pedigree, even if it's a phony one. Sometimes all it takes is an alluring name. Until a few decades ago, Patagonian toothfish was a trash fish not worth trying to give away. Renamed Chilean sea bass, it sold so fast that it nearly disappeared from the sea.
Expectations are everything. In one recent test, psychologists asked 32 volunteers to sample strawberry yogurt. To make sure the testers made their judgments purely on the basis of taste, the researchers said, they needed to turn out the lights. Then they gave their subjects chocolate yogurt. Nineteen of the 32 praised the strawberry flavor. One said that strawberry was her favorite flavor and she planned to switch to this new brand.
The volunteers knew the taste of strawberries perfectly well. That was the problem. The associations that came with the word "strawberry" overwhelmed the taste of chocolate. Every trickster's hope, says Jim Steinmeyer, who designs illusions for magicians, is "finding smart people who bring a lot to the table - cultural experience, shared expectations, preconceptions. The more they bring, the more there is to work with, and the easier it is to get the audience to make allowances - to reach the 'right' conclusion and unwittingly participate in the deception."
In the case of the fish forgery, discovered by a pair of high school students armed with DNA tests, a nice presentation and a lofty price tag probably helped restaurants palm off tilapia as white tuna.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/02/opinion/edolnick.php


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Ontario wrestles to revamp mining law (IHT)

LETTER FROM CANADA
Ontario wrestles to revamp mining law
SOUTH FRONTENAC, Ontario: When Peter Griesbach discovered someone had chopped down trees at his weekend house to make crude posts staking out a mining claim, he assumed he could rid his land of the uninvited prospector relatively quickly. He was wrong.
Indeed, seven years later Griesbach is still campaigning to change the provincial law that allows anyone who pays the equivalent of $26.50 to dig for pretty much any mineral on private property in much of rural Ontario.
Historically high mineral prices have set off a new wave of prospecting in Canada, and with it new battles over mineral laws, some of which date to the 19th century. Under the so-called free entry system, effective in much of Ontario, prospectors and miners have had relatively unfettered access to private land in many areas.
Now, after decades of promises to modify the law from successive governments, Griesbach and other landowners may finally find some measure of relief.
After a highly publicized clash between an Indian tribe and a mining company this year, which led to the jailing of one native leader, Ontario's government said it would alter the law by December. But change is so controversial that even the broad details of any modification will not be worked out for some time.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/02/america/letter.php


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Beyond carbon: Scientists worry about nitrogen's effects (IHT)

A woman clears away algae in Quindao, China, a buildup caused by

too much nitrogen in the Yellow Sea. (Nir Elias/Reuters)

Beyond carbon: Scientists worry about nitrogen's effects
Public discussion of complicated climate change is largely reduced to carbon: carbon emissions, carbon footprints, carbon trading. But other chemicals have large roles in the planet's health, and the one Giblin is looking for in Arctic mud, one that a growing number of other researchers are also concentrating on, is nitrogen.
In addition to having a role in climate change, nitrogen has a huge, probably more important biological impact through its presence in fertilizer. Peter Vitousek, a Stanford ecologist whose 1994 essay put nitrogen on the environmental map, co-authored a study this summer in the journal Nature that put greater attention on the nitrogen cycle and warned against ignoring it in favor of carbon benefits.
For example, Vitousek said in an interview, "There's a great danger in doing something like, oh, overfertilizing a cornfield to boost biofuel consumption, where the carbon benefits are far outweighed by the nitrogen damage."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/02/healthscience/02nitr.php




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Protests halt Tata plant for world's cheapest car (IHT)

A protest in front of the unfinished Tata Nano plant in Singur last week. (Prashanth Vishwanathan/Bloomberg News)

Protests halt Tata plant for world's cheapest car
MUMBAI, India: This country's project to build the world's cheapest car has driven into a quintessentially Indian ditch.
On Tuesday, the automaker Tata Motors said that political protests over land had compelled it to stop building the plant in eastern India for its much-awaited Nano model. The car was scheduled to go on sale next month for 100,000 rupees, or about $2,250, less than the cost of the optional surround sound system and DVD player on the Lexus LX 570 sport utility vehicle.
Late Tuesday, an executive with knowledge of Tata's deliberations said the company would still begin making Nanos in October, under a backup plan to shift production to other sites. For the first two months, Tata will produce 10,000 cars a month instead of the planned 40,000, said the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for the company.
The Nano has been dogged from the beginning by one of India's most wrenching problems: how to create space for industry by moving farmers off their land and compensating them adequately.
In a tale rich with incongruities, the Communist-run government of West Bengal State invited the Tata Group, a symbol of Indian capitalism, to set up its plant in an area called Singur. It acquired 1,000 acres from farmers on the company's behalf.
As the project advanced, some farmers who had sold their land demanded it back. The main state-level opposition party, the Trinamool Congress, led protests demanding that the land be returned. Most people sympathetic to Tata accused the opposition of inducing the farmers to protest, while Tata's critics said the farmers had legitimate grievances.
The issue simmered for months. But in recent days, protesters began surrounding the plant, blocking roads and preventing Tata workers from reaching the plant. "The existing environment of obstruction, intimidation and confrontation has begun to impact the ability of the company to convince several of its experienced managers to relocate and work in the plant," Tata said in a statement on Tuesday.
The halt to the plant has caused many Indian business people to warn of a chilling effect on investment in the country. It is also unclear how Tata will be able to keep the Nano's cost so low, since part of the affordable price reflects the company's savings on the land in Singur.
"It's a slap on the face for Brand India," said Suhel Seth, a longtime adviser to the Tata Group and the managing partner of Counselage, a strategic branding firm in New Delhi. "Which foreign company will want to come in when India's most respected group cannot set up industry in a state?"
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/03/asia/03tata.php





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Lost Recommendations at Farm Blogs from Around the World

• I am afraid that I have lost many of your recent emails, specifically any sent to me between 15th August 2008 and 26th August 2008. Obviously I am annoyed at my stupidity, but also offer my apologies for all those people who took the time to write to me at what is, for most people, a busy time of year.
• If you did write to me between the above dates, I can only apologise, and ask you to re-send your email to me.

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Morvenvale Farm (New South Wales - between Walgett and Collarenebri on the North Western Plains; 14000 acres; wheat, barley, chickpeas. fababeans)

I've been in touch with Dave Ricardo in Australia about his blogs Morvenvale Farm and his 'comic distraction' David's Farm.



Firstly, Dave was quite right to pick me up on my definition of farming (now changed accordingly) to include food and fibre.

"There are many cotton growers about my district," he wrote, "not to mention numerous sheep breeders well known for their fine merino wools."

Dave's blogs work off a platform he has developped for farmers called Farmnet , something I want to come back and post about in the near future in more detail.

"Farmnet," Dave writes, "is all about farm blogs and is based on the popular platform, Wordpress. I have modified many bits to suit farmers including themes, weather widgets, classifieds, and more. I believe its a basic right for anyone to start their own webpage or blog much like freedom of speech is a basic right, and it should be free. So, I have committed myself to building this collection or community of farm blogs. It's a hobby and very much a part time thing. I am farming about 25,000 acres this year having taken on alot of share farming. So that keeps me busy - often at the loss of family time (wife and four kids) and sometimes Farmnet is often like "whenever I get there." "

But for now, a little more information on Morvenvale

Morenvale looks like it could be a great site and blog if you want to get a handle on what a 25,000 acre grain farm is all about.

However, it's clear Dave allocates his time along the lines of farming and family first, Farmnet second, David's Farm third, and Morvenvale ?

Well, Morenvale isn't exactly being updated at the moment.






Dave hopes to keep the news page at Morvenvale updated "so folks can follow the stages of crop development over the season" and he "hopes to install a crop cam in the coming months also".

I personally wouldn't recommend it myself right now until all of the above happens. For now it's essentially a single home page, so it's very much under construction, but it looks like it has the potential to be a very interesting blog.


All the information there is about Morenvale can be found on this home page, but en bref, it's:

• a grain farm located between Walgett and Collarenebri on the North Western Plains of New South Wales, Australia, owned and operated by brothers, David and Peter Ricardo and families.


• they are zero till farmers cropping around 5600 Ha (14000 acres) on 475mm (19 inch) annual rainfall.


• they grow a mixture of crops in rotation. Wheat, barley, chickpeas and fababeans are their main crops with some canola too.

I hope Dave lets me know when Morenvale takes flight and when it does, I'll be sure to post again about this blog.

And as soon as I have a moment I will be posting about his project Farmnet .









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Lisa Kivirist at Greenoptions.com

I was recently interviewed for an article about farm blogging by Lisa Kirvist that is to run in Hobby Farm Home at some point in the near future. (It will be interesting to read her article when it is published, and after it comes out, I'll post on my answers to her questions.)

Lisa herself blogs at http://www.greenoptions.com/ and I thought I'd just quote here from Greenoptions.com who she is:

"Lisa Kivirist embodies the growing “ecopreneuring” movement: innovative entrepreneurs who successfully blend business with making the world a better place. Lisa is co-author, with her husband, John Ivanko, of Rural Renaissance: Renewing the Quest for the Good Life, capturing the American dream of farm living for contemporary times. Her latest release, ECOpreneuring: Putting Purpose and the Planet Before Profits is a compact, dynamic tool kit for a fresh approach to entrepreneurial thinking, blending passion for protecting and preserving the planet with small business pragmatics. As a W.K. Kellogg Food & Society Policy Fellow and Director of the Rural Women's Project, Lisa champions a voice for women farmers and rural ecopreneurs through media, speaking and advocacy work.
Lisa runs the award-winning Inn Serendipity Bed and Breakfast in southwest Wisconsin, completely powered by renewable energy and considered amongst the “Top Ten Eco-Destinations in North America.” Her culinary focus on local and seasonal cuisine – with most ingredients traveling less than 100 feet from her organic gardens to B&B plates – earned recognition in publications from Vegetarian Times to Country Woman and inspired her cookbook, Edible Earth: Savoring the Good Life with Vegetarian Recipes from Inn Serendipity. In addition to feature writing for publications such as Hobby Farm Home, Mother Earth News and Wisconsin Trails, Lisa is the lead writer for Renewing the Countryside, a non-profit organization showcasing rural entrepreneurial and agricultural success stories. Lisa also penned Kiss Off Corporate America: A Young Professional’s Guide to Independence.
Lisa shares her farm with her husband, their young son, a 10kw wind turbine and a colony of honeybees."

http://greenoptions.com/author/lisakivirist

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Bush Babe (Central Queensland; reasonable sized cattle operation)

I've been lucky enough to get an email from Bush Babe, which has to be one of my favourite blogs, not least of all because my wife is Australian and we try and keep a bit of the Aussie in our kids from here in rural France.

Bush Babe

Bush Babe is a "crazily busy woman at the moment as we are preparing stud bulls for a number of sales so I am organising Genestar testing, EBVs, scanning and feeding regimes (as well as my normal roles)!!!"

Black Brangus bull

Let's start with her 'property' (Aussie speak for farm) which is "a reasonable sized cattle operation here in central Queensland".

By 'reasonable sized' you can take that to mean 'quite a few thousand acres' of Granite and scrub country.

The property runs "beef cattle - mostly Brangus and Brangus-cross cattle. We have a Brangus stud as well as a commercial herd. We muster by horseback only (no motorbikes or helicopters)."






Bush Babe blogs "not just about things cattle, but also about being a mum, returning to the land after living in the city for a couple of decades, about being a wife and a daughter and a photographer."

"While we face many challenges here (drought, prices, distance, costs) and I do touch on them occasionally," wrote Bush Babe, "I tend to focus on the people part and the joy I find in living here again (after being a city chick for a couple of decades). My passion is finding the connections with people from all different walks of life... and hopefully tapping into a little empathy for rural life as a whole."

So, like many of the bloggers on Farm Blogs from Around the World, she is not purely a farm blog.

"Do I still count??" asked Bush Babe.

The answer to that is yes, very much so.

I look forward to hearing Bush Babe's recommendations for some good Aussie farm blogs, 'pure' or not, when things are a little less crazy.

PHOTOS BY KIND PERMISSON OF BUSH BABE 2008;

COPYRIGHT BUSH BABE 2008

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Nightlife: Chronicles of Less Urban Living (Idaho; 5 acres; small-scale organic farming)

I recently recommended NightLife: Chronicles of Less Urban Living and I have had an email from Tamara with a bit more info.

Yukon Golds

Tamara and her partner have 8 horses (7 are part of a restoration project for the rare Barb horse), 2 sheep (Suffolk/Rambouillet) and 15 chickens (Black Australorps, Rhode Island Reds, White Leghorns, Aracaunas, and a White Crested Polish).

They're part-time, small-scale organic farmers with real jobs in 'The Shop' (what I call anywhere outside the countryside). They have a five acre holding in Idaho, U.S.A.

As for crops they produce entirely organically raised, heirloom varieties: Summer and winter squash, tomatoes, melons, peas, beans, corn, potatoes, raspberries, chichiquilite huckleberry, rhubarb, culinary herbs, and miscellaneous other vegetables in smaller quantities.

The blog isn't all about recipes, by any means, but it has some great ones, and I do like bloggers who make the connection between the produce they grow and the food they prepare.

Stuffed dates and almonds skewers

Zucchini Egg Salad

ALL PHOTOS BY KIND PERMISSION OF NIGHTLIFE 2008

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Jeremy Irons, Actor

What does the actor Jeremy Irons have to do with Farm Blogs from Around the World?

Well, to be completely honest: not a lot.

Jeremy Irons is an well-known stage and screen actor, perhaps best known internationally for his roles in The French Lieutenant's Woman , "Brideshead Revisited", Betrayal , Die Hard: With a Vengeance , Stealing Beauty ,Lolita ,The Time Machine , The Merchant of Venice , Kingdom of Heaven , Casanova and Eragon

He wrote to me about my book about my family's time downsizing from Paris to a small cottage on a struggling farm in the English Cotswolds.

I'll have to ask you to forgive me for blowing my own trumpet - or rather letting Mr. Irons do so, but I can't really tell anyone this but I feel I need to tell someone!

"I read A Place in My Country with utter unalloyed delight. A glorious book."
Jeremy Irons, Actor

I'm hoping that my book will be available in the United States of America before Christmas.

Sorry for sharing this with you but I feel better now! Authors need morale boosts, that's for sure.
















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Countryfarm-lifestyles

At Farm Blogs from Around the World I'm not in the business of accepting advertising or doing permanent links to commercial sites.

However, one or two do catch my eye that I think are at least worth posting about, and this is one of them.

www.countryfarm-lifestyles is a new site, currently run by an expatriate couple living in Abu Dhabi, but who have bought a small farm in Tuscany, in the Casentino Valley.

According to their founders, www.countryfarm-lifestyles "developed out of a need to unite farmers across the Internet and to give them a niche to advertise."

Country Living and Farm Lifestyles is a farm directory listing farm food, farm accommodation and farm services from farmers worldwide. Advertising rates are 12 GBP a year.

As to their farm in Italy, it is a new acquisition so they can change their lifestyles (having been on the ex-pat circuit for 15 years now), and they have just spent a month there this summer "trying to clear the land of 5 years of brambles, acacia and a myriad of other plants that all seemed to come armed with thorns of all descriptions."

I'm looking forward to reading a blog about their life there when they move there full-time. For now, a taste of what to expect.

















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Supermarkets rapped over unhealthy food (IHT)

LONDON: Major supermarkets were criticised by a consumer watchdog on Monday for nearly doubling the number of in-store promotions for unhealthy foods during the last two years.A National Consumer Council report found 54 percent of in-store promotions advertised sugary and fatty foods, while only one in eight of the retailers plugged fruit and vegetables."The volume of in-house promotions for fatty and sugary foods the supermarkets are all offering is staggering," said the report's author Lucy Yates."We expected to see evidence of big improvements since our last investigation, but we've been sadly disappointed."Overall Britain's third largest supermarket chain Sainsbury's came top of the survey for a second time in a row, doing well on customer information and labelling and nutrition, with the Co-operative Group in second place.
Britain's largest retailer Tesco was in joint fifth place, while Morrisons was bottom for the fourth consecutive time.
http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/09/01/business/OUKBS-UK-BRITAIN-SUPERMARKETS.php



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Trying to sell luxury goods amid stark poverty (IHT)

NEW DELHI: An old woman missing her top front teeth holds a tot in rumpled clothes - who is sporting a Fendi bib. At retail, the bib sells for about $100.
A family of three squeezes onto a motorbike for their daily commute, the mother riding helmetless and sidesaddle in the traditional Indian way - except that she has a Hermès Birkin bag prominently displayed on her wrist. It costs over $10,000, if you can find one.
Elsewhere, a toothless, barefoot man holds a Burberry umbrella costing about $200.
Welcome to the new India - at least as Vogue sees it.
The August edition of Vogue India presented a 16-page vision of supple handbags, bejeweled clutches and status-symbol umbrellas, modeled not by runway stars or the wealthiest smidgen of Indian society who can actually afford these baubles but by so-called "regular" Indian people. Perhaps not surprisingly, not everyone in India was amused.

The editorial spread was "not just tacky but downright distasteful," said Kanika Gahlaut, a columnist for The Mail Today, who dubbed it an "example of vulgarity." There is nothing "fun or funny" about putting a poor person in a mud hut in clothing designed by Alexander McQueen, she said by telephone.
"There are farmer suicides here, for God's sake," she said, referring to thousands of Indian farmers who have killed themselves in the past decade after debts piled up.
Nearly half of India's population - about 455 million people - live on less than $1.25 a day, according to World Bank figures released last week.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/01/business/vogue.php

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Senegalese farm shows benefits of targeted aid (IHT)

DJILAKH, Senegal: Less than a year ago, the land around this small village was parched bush pasture studded with thick-trunked, knobby baobab trees.
But over the last six months, ground pockmarked with anthills that lay hard and idle during the nine-month dry season has blossomed through irrigation into a small but thriving commercial farm, thanks to an aid project financed by Spain.
Trained and assisted by Spanish agriculture experts, 100 peasant farmers and their families have become international exporters of melons to supermarkets in Spain and Britain in a commercial arrangement with a private Spanish farm company.
"Now there's money in the village," said Amy Diouf, her baby son strapped to her back, as she stood in fields crossed with plastic irrigation tubes that drip-feed moisture to crops planted at Djilakh farm, which is southeast of Dakar, the capital.
International aid experts meeting this week in Accra, Ghana, will debate how best the billions of dollars of foreign aid pledged to help the developing world should be handled to have a direct impact on the poor, like African peasant farmers.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/01/business/melon.php

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A land rush in rural Russia (IHT)

PODLESNY, Russia: The fields around this little farming enclave are among the most fertile on earth. But like tens of million of acres of land in this country, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they literally went to seed.
Now that may be changing. A decade after capitalism transformed Russian industry, an agricultural revolution is stirring in the countryside, shaking up village life and sweeping aside the collective farms that resisted earlier reform efforts and remain the dominant form of agriculture.
The transformation is being driven by soaring global food prices (the price of wheat alone rose 77 percent last year) and a new change allowing foreigners to own agricultural land. Together, they have created a land rush in rural Russia.
"Where else do you have such an abundance of land?" Samir Suleymanov, the World Bank's director for Russia, asked during an interview.
As a result, the business of buying and overhauling collective farms is suddenly and improbably very profitable, attracting hedge fund managers, Russian oligarchs, Swedish portfolio investors and even a descendant of White Russian émigré nobility.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/31/business/food.php







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Abondance Cows

Our neighbours,who are farmers and cheese makers, have a herd of Abondance cows.

This breed originally come from the French Alps, and take their name from the town of Abondance near the Swiss border.

We happened to visit there on a brief holiday to the Alps in August. It was pouring rain that day, but for the dairy farmers out there, you might find these photos and this breed interesting - well known for its hardiness, and its capacity to produce good milk yields and good beef.

Our local herd is currently up the mountains.

They went up for what is known as the 'estive' - mountain summer grazing back at the end of May but will be down and around between 15th and 20th September I think.

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