20 Jun
Lost in the Supermarket?
Why the “Cheap Food Revolution” hasn’t reached poor countries. Most people don’t think twice as they pass spring apples from the southern hemisphere as they enter the supermarket, but they are participating in a cheap food revolution that has swept the industrialized world over the past couple of generations. The supermarket is the last step in a complicated global process that has changed every aspect of how we produce and consume food. In theory, the arrival of supermarkets in a country should bring with it the “cheap food” that we have enjoyed for so a number of years……..
New research on the commodity coffee market in Uganda finds that when prices percolate, coffee windfalls don’t fully reach the growers. Coffee is the world’s largest agricultural commodity, and is also one of the world’s most volatile. Large global coffee price fluctuations mean coffee has seen a number of periods of rapidly increasing prices. But new research shows that when global coffee prices rise, farmers do not see the same rise in the price they receive. In their new study for Economic Development and Cultural Change, Marcel Fafchamps and Ruth Vargas Hill look to the long-time coffee producing nation of Uganda to attempt to answer this riddle. The country’s economy is fully liberalized, and the large coffee market makes up nearly the entire bulk of its agricultural exports. “The story we tell,” say Fafchamps and Hill, “is unexpected. Normally as economists we think that competition is good, yet here it does not achieve the desired result.” To their surprise, they observed that the influx of seasonal buyers-the so-called “ddebe boys”-that attends higher prices actually means price increases are not fully passed on to the growers……..
Microbes may be smarter than we think. A new study by Princeton University scientists shows for the first time that bacteria don’t just react to changes in their surroundings — they anticipate and prepare for them. The findings, published in the June 6 issue of Science, challenge the prevailing notion that only organisms with complex nervous systems have this ability……..
The Nazca booby, a Galpagos Island seabird, emerges from its shell ready to kill its brother or sister. Wake Forest University biologists and their colleagues have linked the murderous behavior to high levels of testosterone and other male hormones found in the hatchlings. The study appears in the June 18 edition of the online journal PLoS ONE available at http://www.plosone.org/doi/pone.002460……..
Veterinarians at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo have performed the first successful reverse vasectomy on a Przewalski’s horse (E. ferus przewalskii; E. caballus przewalskii classification debated), pronounced zshah-VAL-skeez. Przewalksi’s horses are a horse species native to China and Mongolia that was declared extinct in the wild in 1970. Currently, there are approximately 1500 of these animals maintained at zoological institutions throughout the world and in several small reintroduced populations in Asia. This is the first procedure of its kind to be performed on an endangered equid species……..
A costly deadline looms for a number of growers in the Midwest, as every day of waiting for the weather to cooperate to plant corn and soybeans reduces potential yields. Illinois growers who plant corn or soybeans near the end of June can expect a 50 percent reduction in crop yield, as per a University of Illinois agriculture expert……..
The Wildlife Conservation Society has launched a study in Chile’s Karukinka reserve on Tierra del Fuego to help protect the guanaco a wild cousin of the llama that once roamed in vast herds from the Andean Plateau to the steppes of Patagonia. Today, the guanaco population has dwindled to perhaps half a million animals that live in highly fragmented populations due to habitat loss and competition from livestock. Tierra del Fuego, particularly Karukinka, holds the largest wild population of Chilean guanacos. The WCS study of these poorly understood members of the camel family will provide critical data to help restore one of the most endangered natural phenomena in Latin America the overland migration of guanacos a critical element to understanding biodiversity of the area……..
New evidence that chemical contaminants are finding their way into the deep-sea food web has been found in deep-sea squids and octopods, including the strange-looking “vampire squid”. These species are food for deep-diving toothed whales and other predators. In a study would be reported in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin, Michael Vecchione of NOAA Fisheries’ National Systematics Laboratory and his colleagues Michael Unger, Ellen Harvey and George Vadas at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science of The College of William and Mary report finding a variety of chemical contaminants in nine species of cephalopods, a class of organisms that includes octopods, squids, cuttlefishes and nautiluses……..
Maternal diet influences the chances of having male or female offspring. Research published recently in BioMed Central’s open access journal Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology has demonstrated that ewes fed a diet enriched with polyunsaturated fats for one month previous to conception have a significantly higher chance of giving birth to male offspring……..
Scientists from the College of William and Mary’s Center for Conservation Biology and The Nature Conservancy have observed the record-setting migration of a shorebird from feeding grounds on the Delmarva Peninsula to breeding grounds on the McKenzie River near the Alaska-Canada border. The bird’s six-day flight is challenging conventional scientific thinking about long-distance migration routes and underscores the ecological importance of areas of the Delmarva Peninsula, which includes the state of Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia……..
