Thanks, Paul for your comments. The British Gas ASA ruling was fascinating. Just another example of a company jumping on the green bandwagon and using it as a marketing opportunity.
Actually, I'm increasingly finding this whole issue of offsetting rather upsetting. I heard a report on Radio Four about a farmer in, I think, Sri Lanka who had decided to stop growing rice and instead plant trees for an offset scheme . But, he had bought his trees from an unreliable supplier and, two years into the scheme his trees were covered in leaf blight and were useless. He was faced with having to dig them up and start again.
But there was worse. The offset scheme only paid up if the trees were healthy and this farmer was facing desperate times -- no crop and no income.
A sad individual case but you do begin to wonder whether all these farmers in desperately poor parts of the world being persuaded to give up their crops to solve Western consciences is a good idea. I know the reasons for the world food shortages are complex but surely persuading farmers not to farm food when the world needs it is hard to justify?
Lucy Wildman
I'm Lucy Wildman, Research Editor at Reader's Digest magazine which means that I'm in charge of making sure that everything you read in Reader's Digest is accurate every month. I live in Highbury in North London, a stone's throw away from Arsenal's Emirates Stadium, with my husband, Tim, a writer, daughter, Vicky, 13, who's in year 9 at school and has just made her GCSE choices and son, Max, 3, who is convinced he is a Superhero and jumps off high objects at every opportunity. With food and energy bills soaring, I'll be bringing the cold hard eye of family economics to the RD Green Challenge. We, along with most hard-pressed families, can't afford to pay much more than we do already for goods and services and any changes we make will have to fit in with our family's budget.
1 comment:
Hiya Lucy - no problem!
Oh gosh - yes - that's another modern moral dilemma - two actually:
Food Miles - do you buy local and support our local farmers who are a rare breed and look after our own food independence, or do you buy food grown in developing countries and support farmers and workers over there..?
Offsetting - our government actually seems to be proposing that we start doing renewables target offsetting too now! I picked that up on Dale Vince of Ecotricity's blog that your colleagues blog mentioned (cor blogs abound!) - satisfy the NIMBYs and build big wind turbines in Africa and claim the C02 savings for ourselves!
I can't deny that we need more trees to help create more oxygen that we burn up like there is no tomorrow, and also to turn C02 into wood but as you point out - it isn't only biofuels now that are taking up farming land in developing countries - but the fact is that the farmland was forest a couple of centuries ago before population growth dictated that the forest be cleared for food requirements.
What a conundrum!! Does anyone else out there get a bit depressed by all this?
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