why we waste energy

The latest special issue of Current Biology is about economy and biology, and my contribution looks at the energy efficiency of the hunter gatherer lifestyle compared to feeding strategies of other primates and to later developments such as agriculture. Turns out we have always prioritised time efficiency over energy efficiency, setting us on a straight path towards today's ridiculously wasteful ways of getting our calories.

The resulting feature is out now:

Shopping with hunter gatherers

Current Biology Volume 32, Issue 12, 20 June 2022, Pages R596-R599

FREE access to full text and PDF download

NB: as the 2022 features move into the open archives, I will add them to this thread on Mastodon.

Present-day hunter-gatherer populations like the Hazda in Tanzania, shown here, were included in a study analysing the energetics of this subsistence strategy. (Photo: alexstrachan/Pixabay.)

NB in the non-special section of the issue there is also an interview with Asifa Majid, whose work I have covered on various occasions and who also gave a helpful hint that was crucial for this feature. Her interview appears to be on open access.

war feeding further crises

In my series on "how to turn hours of doomscrolling into useful research" I bring you my insights on the war in Ukraine, more specifically regarding its impacts on food security. The essential take-home message is, there is no global shortage of grains to feed all of humanity, but the impact of war on market forces and logistics will mean that parts of the global south may be unable to get the food they need and we may face humanitarian crises in various places. The longer version is out now:

Global food security hit by war

Current Biology Volume 32, Issue 8, 25 April 2022, Pages R341-R343

FREE access to full text and PDF download

NB: as the 2022 features move into the open archives, I will add them to this thread on Mastodon.

The vast fields of Ukraine provide 30% of the global supply of wheat. The blue skies above cereal fields also inspired the design of the Ukrainian flag, now widely seen in expression of support for the country that has been invaded by Russian troops. (Photo: © Raimond Spekking/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).)

fairtrade fortnight

The UK's annual Fairtrade Fortnight starts today, so watch out for events near you supporting fair trade. I have rounded up some fairtrade supplies from our household for a family portrait:



A notable new addition to my shopping list since last year's fairtrade fortnight is the Geo muesly from TraidCraft, which I love to bits.


PS this is post no. 996 of my blogspot blog (there have been previous incarnations in MySpace and on yahoo 360, but not sure how many additional posts they had). Thinking of something special to do for the 1000th. Watch this space.

ten fatal flaws of the financial markets

The cover story of this week’s Spiegel (issue 50, page 40) is a lengthy but very enlightening report on the role of “the markets” in the whole mess we’re in, culminating in a list of ten things that are catastrophically flawed in the global financial system. As I didn’t find an English version I could link to, here’s my own summary:

1. The trillions circulating in the parallel universe of complex finance products (exceeding the turnover of the real world economy of goods and services by more than an order of magnitude) tend to multiply in ways that produce speculative bubbles.
2. These funds go looking for returns that would be unrealistic in the real world markets, thus sucking more and more money out of the real markets into the parallel world.
3. Banks keep inventing new finance products which tend to be opaque and often carry high risks.
4. Banks operate with insufficient levels of own (real world) funds.
5. Financial markets are intransparent and their risks unknown.
6. Concentration in these markets has produced mega banks that are too big to fail and thus a risk to the whole system.
7. Computerised trading encourages herding effects which lead to positive feedback loops, hence, disaster.
8. Interconnectedness of financial markets via derivatives synchronises them, another positive feedback loop that puts oil on the fire of any crisis in one market.
9. Financial markets resist attempts at regulation or supervision, evading into even more opaque systems.
10. Financial markets undermine conventional market economy and democracy.

The article concludes that of these 10 “monstrous” dangers, the G20 countries are currently addressing a grand total of 2, namely No. 5 transparency and No. 4 the minimum capital of banks. (Well done to our politicians – even I as a complete lay person in all things financial was aware of at least three of these! OK, only since I wrote the feature on food speculation this summer).

Now I’m really scared.

I’m beginning to realise that anything we do down here in the real world will have no effect whatsoever on this monster that’s probably going to eat us some time soon. Somebody should develop a clever algorithm that stops all these problems, for instance by introducing negative feedback and punishing herding behaviour. Trouble is, most of the people clever enough to do this are bound to be very busy making the problems worse.



The €ye of the storm ... European Central Bank in Frankfurt.

nature's value

At the end of June, I had the opportunity to take part in this year’s “World Forum for Enterprise and the Environment” at Merton College, organised by Oxford’s Smith School.

It was all about how we may still be able to avoid blowing up our planet if we get businesses to recognise the value of the natural resources they are using, polluting, or destroying with their activities.

Personally, I would prefer if people could just do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, and wouldn’t need price tags and bribes to steer them in the right direction. But as we do live in a society where money talks, and which isn’t going to change any time soon, I guess the ecosystem services idea may well be our best chance for saving what's left of our natural environment.

As this is all very topical and important, I wrote a feature about what I learned at the Forum, which is out in Current Biology today:

Valuing Nature
Current Biology, Volume 21, Issue 14, R525-R527, 26 July 2011
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2011.07.003
FREE access to full text and pdf file

Oh, and I especially enjoyed Sandra Bessudo's talk (in Spanish) on the natural wealth of Colombia, and what should be done to protect it, so here's a picture of her:



This is my own photo, but there are lots of official photos from the event at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment's photostream.

fairtrade fortnight

In the UK, fairtrade organisations are celebrating fairtrade fortnight (28.2.-13.3.), so I rounded up some of the fairtrade products I use regularly - turned out to be all coffee, chocolate, tea. There weren't any fairtrade fruit around at the moment, and I forgot to include the orange juice (fruit passion):

how greed wrecked our economy

I don't care much about money, so it takes exceptional circumstances to get me thinking about the state of the economy, but I have a feeling that the time has come to look at these things more closely than I normally do. What I'm particularly struggling to understand right now is why and how politicians (especially in the UK!) have allowed finance to run wild without realising that this would result in the systematic destruction of the real-world economy, i.e. of the companies that actually produce useful things but only yield modest profits.

There was an interesting comment by Andrew Simms in yesterday's Guardian, explaining how several British corporations originally founded with an agenda committed at least partially to moral principles (e.g. by Quaker families) came to be corrupted and wrecked by corporate finance. Some quotes I highlighted:

Twinings' fate highlights the quietly corrosive, long-term effect of the excessive privilege given to finance. Over decades its hypnotic hunger for unrealistic profit has corrupted or wrecked many other eminent corporations in Britain – often companies that, like Twinings, helped define our national identity.

Glib dismissals that this is the way of the world, the inevitable outcome of otherwise efficient markets, ignore the fact that indulging the lords of finance has wrecked the productive economy, just as much as it bankrupted the public finances.

If the corporation is to have a future, the public sphere will have to demand a redesign – and return finance to its proper, subservient role of supporting the wider economy.

On a related note, in a comment published last week, Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang challenges the notion that deregulated finance helps the economy overall. In the long term, Chang argues, the economy was doing better in the "bad old days" of the 1960s and 70s, when regulations were much tighter.



This charming little beast guards the boundary of the City of London, I think it may be telling us something about what's going on in the square mile!

protected areas and their economic impact

As conservation is all about the economy these days, people are wondering whether nature reserves and similar protected areas are actually helping or harming the people living in the area. They might harm by stopping people from exploiting natural resources, but they may also help by offering opportunities in eco-tourism and benefits from ecosystem services.

If one wants to know which way the overall balance turns out, there appears to be very little hard data to go on, but now K. Andam et al. have published a "controlled study" in PNAS trying to eliminate error by comparing the economic development of sites with a nature reserve to that of sites similar in all aspects except that they are lacking such a protected area.

Carrying out this kind of analysis on various sites in Costa Rica and in Thailand, the authors come to a cautiously optimistic conclusion, namely that the "treated" samples (i.e. with a protected area) have done somewhat better than the control samples.

So now if your conservation project runs up against local nimbyism, you can always throw a copy of that article at the opposition.


source:
Kwaw S. Andam, Paul J. Ferraro, Katharine R. E. Sims, Andrew Healy, and Margaret B. Holland
Protected areas reduced poverty in Costa Rica and Thailand
PNAS published ahead of print May 24, 2010, doi:10.1073/pnas.0914177107

Abstract and free access to PDF file.

investing in nature

I only reluctantly admit this -- because I foolishly believe in people doing the right thing without being bribed to do so -- but the economy, if handled correctly, could possibly save the planet. In February, Pavan Sukhdev held the annual Earthwatch Lecture here at Oxford and explained how an appreciation of the real value of natural resources left intact (e.g. south american rainforest as a water pump for the Argentinian cattle industry) could shift the balance so far that preserving wild nature would appear as a sound investment rather than a financial burden.

With this in mind I have looked at two examples of finance deals aiming to save rainforests -- one in Ecuador, coupled to (non-exploration of) crude oil, and the other in Guyana -- and written a news feature for Current Biology which is out today:

Ransom for rainforests
Current Biology, Volume 20, Issue 5, R217-R218, 9 March 2010
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2010.02.022

summary and restricted access to pdf file

incompetence explained

As I'm grounded due to the Eurostar problems, it's a perfect time to think about incompetence in the workplace. This ubiquitous phenomenon was brilliantly explained 40 years ago in the book The Peter Principle by Lawrence J. Peter and Raymond Hull.

The fundamental principle of the title states simply that:

"In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His [or Her] Level of Incompetence."

Now I like to think of this in terms of schools, where everybody has seen the principle in action. If a teacher is doing a good job at teaching s/he will get promoted to deputy head or head teacher, meaning they will do less of the teaching which they are good at, and more of the management work which they may not be so good at.

If a head teacher still does a good job at leading the school, they may be promoted to lead a larger school, which they might find more challenging. If they are still good at that, they may become school inspector or some sort of bureaucrat quite remote from everything they used to be good at.

The trouble is that in every step of the process, people who do well get removed from what they do well, while people who don't do quite as well, are stuck at what Peter calls their Level of Incompetence.

Note that it's nobody's fault in particular, it's just an in-built flaw of having a hierarchy where people get promoted on the basis of their performance.

The best way to avoid getting stuck at one's level of incompetence is to get out of the rat-race and do something that is outside of any hierarchical order. I seem to remember that in the book -- as it reflects 60s society -- the male employees can't refuse promotion or abandon the rat race, as their wives would object to the feared loss of social status. Hoping that men are more liberated today, they may find it easier to escape!

I hear that the original book got reprinted this year, so get a copy if you can. It really explains a lot of things that would otherwise remain forever mysterious. Like the fact that trains can be stopped by the wrong kind of leaves, or snow that's too fluffy.

innovations by the isis

In the current issue of Oxford Today, there is my feature about technology transfer in Oxford, based on an interview with my former head of department, Graham Richards, and on the case study of Oxford Nanopore Technologies, a spin-out company from the chemistry department aiming to develop single molecule electronic genome sequencers.

Read my feature here (open access for all).

green economy ?

As several clever people have pointed out already, the current financial crisis and the resulting massive state intervention is a unique chance for governments to redirect the economy not only towards financially sustainable operations but also towards a ecologically sustainable economy (and towards mitigation of climate change in particular).

Detailed analysis of the "green component" of state rescue packages in various parts of the world has shown, however, that this opportunity is used only very little. Most recently, the UK government has disappointed those who hoped for a green budget. Read my news feature in today's issue of Current Biology (issue 9,p. R345):

Green shoots
(restricted access)

Summary:
While the UK government presents a budget hoped to tackle economic as well as environmental challenges, other countries have taken the lead in harnessing the economic interventions for ecological gains.

the spirit level

There is an interesting new book looking at lots of parameters relating to quality of life, and coming to the conclusion that inequality harms not only the poor but creates damage across all layers of society:

The Spirit Level
Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better
by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
published by Penguin in March 2009.

It is reviewed in the Guardian. While one always has to be careful with attributing simultaneous statistical changes to a causal relationship, the wealth of data pointing in the same direction suggests that inequality really is bad for everybody's wellbeing.

What needs explaining is the observation that even richer people are suffering in unequal societies (US and UK always at the top of these charts!). The one hypothetical explanation that might account for that paradox is status anxiety. When you live on such a steep slope that the mere thought of sliding down makes you sick or drives you to crimes, life is unhealthy even at the top.

divine chocolate

I don't normally read chocolate wrapping papers, but last week I did, and I found that the inside of my chocolate paper had an interesting story to tell:


The story of how small-scale cocoa growers in Ghana got to own a chocolate company in the UK . . .

In autumn 1998, Divine, the first ever Fairtrade chocolate bar aimed at the mass market was launched onto the UK confectionery market. In an exciting new business model, the co-operative of cocoa farmers in Ghana own shares in the company making the chocolate bar. Two farmers' representatives came to London to celebrate at the most Divine launch party in town. Here's how it all happened . . . . .

Getting it Together
In the early 1990's, the structural adjustment program involved the liberalisation of the cocoa market in Ghana. A number of leading farmers, including a visionary farmer representative on the Ghana Cocoa Board, Nana Frimpong Abrebrese, came to realise that they had the opportunity to organize farmers, to take on the internal marketing function. This would mean that they could set up a company, to sell their own cocoa to the Cocoa Marketing Company (CMC), the state-owned company that would continue to be the single exporter of Ghana cocoa.

These farmers pooled resources to set up Kuapa Kokoo, a farmers' co-op, which would trade its own cocoa, and thus manage the selling process more efficiently than the government cocoa agents. Kuapa Kokoo - which means good cocoa growers - has a mission to empower farmers in their efforts to gain a dignified livelihood, to increase women's participation in all of Kuapa's activities, and to develop environmentally friendly cultivation of cocoa. The farmers who set up Kuapa Kokoo, were supported by Twin Trading, the fair trade company that puts the coffee into Cafédirect and SNV a Dutch NGO.

Doing the Decent Thing
Kuapa Kokoo weighs, bags and transports the cocoa to market and carries out all the necessary legal paperwork for its members. Kuapa strives to ensure that all its activities are transparent, accountable and democratic.
It doesn't cheat the farmers by using inaccurate weighing scales, as other buying agents often do, and because it operates so efficiently, it can pass on the savings to its members. After seeing the benefits Kuapa gains for its members, more and more farmers want to join and the association now has upwards of 40,000 members organised in approximately 1300 village societies.

Pa Pa Paa - The Best of the Best
Cocoa from Ghana is of a high quality and trades at a premium on the world market. Kuapa Kokoo's motto is pa pa paa - which means the best of the best in the local Twi language. Kuapa's premium quality cocoa is now sold to chocolate companies around the world.

A Choc of One's Own
The cocoa farmers, who were already getting a Fairtrade price from some international customers, voted at their 1997 AGM to invest in a chocolate bar of their own. They decided that rather than aiming for the niche market where most Fairtrade products were placed, they would aim to produce a mainstream chocolate bar to compete with other major brands in UK.

A Brand New Day
Together with Twin, Kuapa helped set up The Day Chocolate Company in 1998, with the enthusiastic support of The Body Shop, Christian Aid and Comic Relief. The company was named in memory of Richard Day, a key member of the team at Twin that had helped Kuapa Kokoo develop its organisation.
The Department for International Development pulled out all the stops to guarantee Day's business loan, and NatWest offered sympathetic banking facilities.

Simply Divine
Divine Fairtrade milk chocolate, made from Kuapa's best of the best fairly traded cocoa beans was launched in October 1998 and by Christmas 1998, had made it onto the supermarket shelves . . .

A first for Fairtrade
The farmers' ownership stake in The Day Chocolate Company a first in the fair trade world, means that Kuapa Kokoo has a meaningful input into decisions about how Divine is produced and sold. Two representatives from Kuapa Kokoo are Directors on the company's Board, and one out of four Board Meetings every year is held in Ghana. As shareholders, the farmers also receive a share of the profits from the sale of Divine. This innovative company structure was recognised when Divine was awarded Millennium Product status.

Beans mean Business
In a ferociously competitive chocolate market worth almost £4 billion in the UK alone, being the new bar on the block can be a daunting prospect. But as so many people adore delicious chocolate, the potential for Divine's success is huge. There are hundreds of chocolate brands available in the UK, and the biggest companies spend up to 10% of their profit margins - tens of millions of pounds - in their fight to retain their brands' positions in the Chocolate Top Ten.

Divine has been developed to appeal to the British public's palate, and it tests favourably against all the market leaders. The UK has one of the highest per capita levels of consumption of chocolate in the world and therefore, even capturing a small proportion of this market translates into real benefits for cocoa farmers.

The latest news
In 2006, original Day Chocolate founder The Body Shop made the brilliant decision to donate its shares in the Company to Kuapa Kokoo - so now the farmers' cooperative has an even bigger stake in Divine. On 1st January 2007, Day Chocolate changed its name to Divine Chocolate Ltd to more closely align the company with our flagship brand, and the brand itself experienced a major redesign. Then on February 14th 2007 the launch of Divine Chocolate Inc in the USA was announced... Another big year in the life of Divine!

-----------------------

OK, the version on the wrapping was a little shorter, but essentially the same story. And the chocolate is good, too.

Divine Chocolate

neoliberalism

I've been wondering for a while why this new type of capitalism we see eating away our public services and infrastructures is spreading so aggressively now (while it wasn't happening, say, in the 60s and 70s). Last week George Monbiot published a comment that answered some of my questions:

How the neoliberals stitched up the wealth of nations for themselves

And this week he showed a nice example of how a private/public funding initiative (PFI) wrecked a hospital that would have needed 30 million pounds of public money for refurbishment. Now it needs 30 million pounds every year to service the debt to the private investors. Madness or what ?


This great free-market experiment is more like a corporate welfare scheme

Oh well. I'm wondering how long this whole bubble will last before it all ends in tears ...