Guardian Environment
Europe's plan for alternative pipeline faces big problems
With its vast underground storage tanks and network of pipes, valves and tubes, Baumgarten in the flatlands east of Vienna is one of Europe's biggest gas hubs. The first gas to cross the iron curtain was pumped through thousands of miles of pipelines from Siberia and into western Europe 40 years ago, arriving at Baumgarten for resupply across the continent. The hub remains the most important junction today, matching Russia's huge mineral riches to Europe's gargantuan appetite for natural gas. But a new energy revolution is being plotted.
With the Kremlin and the giant Russian gas monopoly, Gazprom, locked in their annual spat with Ukraine, the main transit country for Europe's gas supplies, over prices and politics, Europe is desperately seeking ways to diminish its dependence on the 140bcm (billion cubic metres) of gas it currently imports from Russia. The most favoured, most ambitious and most contentious idea is to build a new pipeline beyond the grip of Gazprom, which controls 90,000 miles of gas delivery systems. Named after a Verdi opera, the Nabucco pipeline is supposed to terminate at Baumgarten, ultimately pumping 31bcm of Caspian gas through Turkey and the Balkans to Austria. "Diversification on the terrestrial route for gas is a must for Europe," says Alexandr Vondra, deputy prime minister of the Czech Republic, which has taken on the EU presidency and sees energy policy as a priority.
The plan, born in 2002, is to thread almost 2,400 miles of pipeline through the narrow geostrategic stretch between Russia and Iran, the two countries with the world's largest reserves of gas, to central Europe. "If we have a dominant company like Gazprom trying to influence all inroads of gas to Europe, we need to develop an alternative to the supply of gas from Russia," says a senior European commission official involved in energy policy. Given the worsening fallout from the Russia-Ukraine dispute as well as the impact of last August's Russia-Georgia war on Caspian energy security, the Europeans are trying to accelerate the Nabucco plans.
"We have good reason to believe that Nabucco will fly," says Reinhard Mitschek, who manages the Nabucco consortium of six national energy companies from the 21st floor of an office block above the Danube in Vienna.
But the problems are formidable. European gas industry sources complain that EU officials are confusing political imperatives with economic, business and energy fundamentals. "This is an attempt at reverse engineering in pipeline development," said a senior industry source. "Usually you find the resource and then you build a pipeline. With Nabucco it's the other way round."
Pierre Noël, energy analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations, says: "This is a project that does not exist except in the minds of Brussels bureaucrats. They think you can build a pipeline and then the gas will flow. It's simply not credible."
Brussels has already spent millions on feasibility studies for a pipeline that will consume more than 2m tonnes of steel and comprise some 220,000 lengths of pipe from Turkey's eastern border through Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary into Baumgarten on Austria's border with Slovakia.The cost is €8bn (£7.2bn) and rising. Construction was supposed to start last year, then this year, now next year.
Last summer Mitschek ordered a survey of gas shippers and said the results showed interest in pumping 16bcm through Nabucco, half the total capacity but ample to get the pipeline operating.
The industry source said there was nowhere near enough to make Nabucco viable. "The most important issue regarding this project is to obtain enough gas," the Turkish president, Abdullah Gül, said last month. The first target for gas to fill the pipeline is Azerbaijan, whose Caspian field Shah Deniz II should come onstream around 2013, when Nabucco is due to start pumping. "This gas is expected from Azerbaijan," says Mitschek of the 8bcm, or quarter of the pipeline's capacity, needed to start Nabucco operations. But Gazprom is competing fiercely for the Azerbaijani prize in a bidding war with the Europeans, offering above- market prices for the gas while the Kremlin dangles the political carrot of arranging the return of the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh to Baku's control.
"The Russians have offered a deal," says Elmar Mammadyarov, Azerbaijan's foreign minister. "But there are different options on the table. At the end of the story, it's our gas."
A recent western audit of Turkmenistan's gas reserves cheered officials in Brussels by confirming a doubling of the known resources. But experts caution that it will be 20 years before sufficient Turkmen gas can be pumped for Europe to evade Gazprom's control. Similar calculations apply to aims of filling Nabucco with gas from Iraq or Iran, were there to be major political change in Tehran. Compounding the problems is Turkey and its worsening relationship with the EU. Well over half the proposed pipeline is to be located in Turkey.
Brussels is attempting to negotiate an agreement making Turkey the main transit country for Caspian gas to Europe. The Turks are insisting on 15% of the gas at discounted prices, a demand that would wreck Nabucco financially, say officials in Brussels.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsCountry diary: West Devon
Hardened turf and icy boulders mark the path up to the little church on Brent Tor (334 metres), blasted by wind sweeping across from Gibbet Hill on the drab western edge of Dartmoor. From the craggy summit the distant views I had expected towards Bodmin Moor and the south coast are indistinct through a cold haze. The midday sun glares off the frozen ponds below and makes silhouettes of beech trees on the straight hedge banks of Heathfield and Quither Common. This volcanic outcrop and its prominent church tower are visible from miles around, sticking up above pastoral plateaus between the upper Tamar, the wooded Lyd Valley and its gorge, the exposed tors and bogs of Dartmoor. Associated stories and legends abound, including references to the devil carrying church foundations up the hill and away from the original site, to beacons and ley lines, and to a wealthy merchant surviving a storm at sea and thankfully building a church on this landmark.
A sailor uncle of my grandfather was reputed to have saved his inheritance of the family farm in the Tamar Valley after proving that he was not illegitimate. His parents had married secretly in this isolated church. Iron age earthworks are traceable at the foot of the hill, and in medieval times farmers gathered in this conspicuous place for annual three-day sheep fairs, held on "the vigil, feast and morrow of St Michael" (28-30 September). In the 19th century manganese (used in the manufacture of glass, bleach and steel) was mined nearby and carted some nine miles south for shipping downriver from Morwellham Quay on the Tamar. Now the scrub-covered derelict workings are fenced off and shadowy, set below the cliff and stunted hawthorns edging the rocky graveyard. Services are held here on summer Sundays. Even on this bleak afternoon the hilltop site is a magnet for visitors. They stagger uphill against the wind and seek shelter for a while in the darkening church, away from the penetrating cold and before the sideways gaze of St Michael, grasping his sword and balance in the east window.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsEco soundings: January 7 2009
Cumbria county council, and the smaller Copeland and Allerdale councils, are gagging to host Britain's giant deep dump for high-level waste. They do not put this to the vote, but justify their support by saying that the US is building a similar one at Yucca mountain in Nevada. What the councils may not know is that Nevada wants nothing to do with the depository and the state has drawn up a 1,000-page document stating exactly why not. All Cumbrian councillors should soon receive a letter from the state governor "setting the matter straight".
Bottom line"Get on your arse for climate change!" That's the war cry of Franny Armstrong, whose Age of Stupid climate change film will open in a handful of cinemas in March. Franny, who made the McLibel film, writes: "Whether it goes on to 300 screens in week two, or gets dumped in the bin, depends on how many bums we get on seats in week one." She's now planning a "people's premiere, with a satellite internet hook-up.
Cold comfort farmingHere's a new year's resolution for British greenies: must stop expecting that Obama will change everything. Eco Soundings sees that he has made Tom Vilsack his farming supremo. This is the man who vociferously promoted the US dash to ethanol and biofuels that helped make hundreds of millions of people in poor countries hungrier. He is also the biotech industry's poster boy since he banned the right to regulate where GM foods could be grown.
Summers dazeObama has also made the manic neoliberal Larry Summers his economic adviser. Ring any bells? Summers was the top World Bank economist who argued that rich countries should export toxic waste to the poor "because many poor countries were under-polluted" and had air pollution that was "probably vastly inefficiently low". This prompted the late, great Brazilian environment minister, Jose Lutzenburger, to respond: "Your reasoning is perfectly logical, but totally insane. . .Your thoughts [provide] a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional 'economists' concerning the nature of the world we live in." In a sad commentary on the free market times, Lutzenburger was sacked and Summers rose to the top.
Ode to a whaleThere is no more committed environmentalist than Captain Paul Watson, who is even now aboard the good ship Steve Irwin chasing Japanese whalers under the midnight sun in Antarctic waters. In a letter to Eco Soundings, the founder of whale conservation charity, Sea Shepherd, begins ecstatically: "Oh, how I love this part of our planet, where humanity is scarce, and wildlife can live in harmony with the natural laws of ecology". Then he's dark: "But there is still the evil force of whaling haunting these waters. Down here, death stalks the whales, and we are here to stalk death." And finally, he's poetic:
"On the ragged edge of the world
I'll roam
And the home of the whale shall be
my home
And saving seals on the remote ice
and snows
The end of my voyage . . .
who knows, who knows?"
At least two Labour councils just do not seem to get why first a public inquiry and then London's mayor, Boris Johnson, rejected plans last year for the £500m motorway-scale Thames Gateway bridge over the river between Beckton and Thamesmead. But Greenwich and Newham councils, egged on by London assembly member John Biggs, seem determined to carry on polluting the poor in their constituencies in the name of regeneration. Papers seen by Eco Soundings show that they have already been to see Boris to lobby him to change his mind, and are now planning to petition ministers to pick up and directly fund the discredited project.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsMini-turbines set to harness energy from pressure in UK gas pipelines
The enormous pressure inside the gas pipeline grid that supplies UK homes is set to be harnessed to generate clean electricity.
Work to place small turbines inside the gas network will start later this year at Beckton in east London. This first scheme will produce 20MW by 2010 from the natural gas that rushes through the pipes. Repeated across the country, the technology could generate up to 1GW – equivalent to the output of a conventional coal or nuclear power station.
Andrew Mercer of company 2OC, which has developed the "geo-pressure" technology, said: "We're very lucky that somebody else has built this pipeline infrastructure. We can borrow it to produce renewable energy."
When natural gas is drilled from underground reservoirs it is at far too high a pressure to be used safely in homes. "It would just blow up your gas cooker," Mercer said. Instead, the pressure must be released at hundreds of sites across the supply network known as letdown stations.
Currently, the energy contained in this released pressure is wasted. The new technology aims to capture it to generate electricity.
2OC has teamed up with the National Grid, which owns most of the gas pipeline network in the UK, to build mini-power stations at eight letdown stations over the next few years. They will install devices called turbo expanders that generate electricity as the gas pressure is reduced. The turbines used are compact – 20cm in diameter – but can generate 1MW of electricity each.
The idea is not completely new. US companies experimented with turbo expanders in the 1980s and Mercer said a handful of similar efforts have already been set up in Europe. "But this isn't a cheap way to generate electricity. The reason it hasn't really taken off is that it's expensive."
Blue-NG, the joint venture developing the UK projects, aims to reduce costs by combining the turboexpander with a combined heat and power (CHP) engine, which generates both electricity and heat. Mercer says this boosts the efficiency of the CHP unit to over 70%. The CHP engine would run on vegetable oil squeezed from local rapeseed, though 2OC is experimenting with other fuels, such as synthetic oil made from wood.
Electricity may not be the only useful product of the turboexpander technology. Reducing the gas pressure also brings about a sudden drop in temperature, typically from 10C to -30C. Mercer calls this "free cold" and says it could be used as a cheap and green way to replace refrigeration units and air conditioning. He says 2OC is in talks with two companies that are interested in siting computer data centres, which require massive cooling, near UK letdown stations.
The technology could also cool the London Underground network he claimed, though Transport for London has balked at the likely cost.
Another use could be to provide cooling for giant concentrated solar power plants, which are gaining credibility as a future large-scale energy source. One plan is to site such plants in desert regions of north Africa, and to transport the electricity generated to Europe. Mercer says a lack of available cooling water could cripple such schemes. Siting solar plants near letdown stations, which are common in gas-rich North African countries and the Middle East, would halve the costs and double the electricity generated, he said.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsFood labelling: Benn seeks more transparency on packaging
Food companies and supermarkets must be more honest about where their food comes from, the environment secretary, Hilary Benn, said today.
Benn said firms should state clearly on labels the country of origin for their prime ingredients – instead of where products were last significantly processed – so consumers can make a more informed choice about what they buy and eat.
The scare over dioxins in Irish pork last month revealed problems in identifying which products were affected and demonstrated why better labelling was needed, he told the Oxford farming conference.
Talks have begun at European Union level about changing labelling rules so consumers know where animals used even in processed foods are born, reared and slaughtered, but these could take two years to implement.
Benn appealed to the UK food industry to take the initiative, saying "the EU moves a lot slower than consumer demand does. Processors and retailers could get ahead here by voluntarily introducing country of origin labelling. I intend to meet them to discuss how this can happen."
He said people were thinking more about the quality, nutritional value and environmental impact of the food they ate. "When you buy a car you know its service history. When you buy a house you get a detailed survey. So why do we accept knowing so much less about what we are putting in our bodies? Well, I say, we shouldn't."
Present EU rules can obscure where food really came from. "A pork pie made in Britain from Danish pork can legitimately be labelled as a British pork pie," Benn said. "That's a nonsense and it needs to change."
The Food and Drink Federation, the industry trade body, gave a cool response to Benn's calls, saying there were already regulations to protect consumers from being misled. Helen Munday, its director of food safety and science, said it supported food companies who wanted voluntarily to put country of origin labelling on products but suggested there was a big difference between primary foods, where the country of origin was a bigger issue for consumers, and generic products such as meat pies, pizzas and lasagnes, which used a number of ingredients from a range of suppliers.
In the case of processed foods she said: "We don't think country of origin labelling is necessary, unless its absence would mislead consumers. Creating different labels to reflect the changing origin of the ingredients used to cook such complex products would be a bureaucratic nightmare – and one that would add further, unnecessary costs to our sector at a difficult time for all our food producers."
Benn's speech also touched on the role of British farmers. He said: "I want British agriculture to produce as much food as possible. No ifs, no buts."
He also appealed to farmers to produce more homegrown fruit and vegetables. "In 2007, the UK was 11% self-sufficient in fruit, 58% in vegetables and 79% in potatoes – the result of people buying what they want. With the skills and ingenuity we have in agriculture and horticulture we could produce more fruit and vegetables here in the UK. The market is there, so what's holding us back? If there is demand then production should follow. So the answer is to buy more British and eat more British."
Currently the UK is 60% self-sufficient in all foods and about 75% self-sufficient in foods that can be produced in this country.
Benn insisted there would still be rules to protect soil, habitats, landscape and "the very climate on which all of these depend", but supported farmers in their concerns over new EU pesticides regulations which are likely to be approved next week despite UK opposition.
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Colin Luckhurst: The Severn barrage would be good for renewable energy, but opposition from conservationists is powerful
The case for a Severn barrage has been debated for the last 15 years. With a tidal range only exceeded by the Bay of Fundy in Canada, the possibilities of renewable energy generation have been endlessly rehearsed. A barrage stretching across the wide mouth of the estuary from south Wales to the northern coast of Somerset could hold the turbines that – judging by the example of the only European example now in place, at the mouth of the river Rance in Brittany – could generate electricity both from the incoming tide and the normal river outflow.
It's an enticing prospect, albeit a very expensive one to build, but it rises on the political agenda with every hike in the costs of fossil fuels. With demand for hydrocarbons falling as economies drift into recession, the immediate appeal of the Severn barrage will subside. But as demand goes up and the costs rise, the case for the barrage will be back.
The Rance barrage shows the potential. Energy pressures on France have been acute since the 1870 war robbed the economy of the Alsace-Lorraine coalfields. France tried everything in the years that followed: hydroelectricity wherever the mountains provided gravity fall; solar power where the sun was strong enough. The final answer was nuclear and 50 reactors were built throughout France. They are now the dominant source of electricity and the EDF bill at my Breton retreat tells me that power there is 88% nuclear-generated. And, to be fair, the kilowatt price is rather below the one British generators charge to UK consumers.
The opposition to the Severn barrage – which is powerful, especially with a new proposal for tidal lagoons and turbines rather than a "strip barrier" – reflects the importance of the Severn estuary as a wildlife corridor, a description very much to the taste of the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust. Historically, the annual migration of eels from the Sargasso Sea saw them swimming up the Severn each spring after their long haul across the Atlantic. Gloucestershire residents then swept them up from the bank in large nets. They knew the eels would sell well in Europe, where they enjoy a reputation as an aphrodisiac. Locals ate the surplus with a plate of bacon and eggs. Competition for nets and fishing spots was intense and violence was not unknown.
But the eels were not the only conservation issue. The Severn valley in its lower course has elements of wilderness and the water meadows there were one of the very few areas where I might hope to see snipe. The ornithologist Sir Peter Scott established Slimbridge in Gloucestershire as the headquarters of the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust and it continues to be a major winter refuge for migrant waterfowl. Bewick's swans and white-fronted geese figure among a host of winter visitors including wigeon, teal, lapwing and dunlin, along with ruff, redshank, and black-tailed godwits. The success of the reserve brings visitors throughout the year as well as providing food and safety to the migrant birds that pair and nest on Siberian tundra but overwinter in Britain.
If the barrage is built, what is the likely impact on Slimbridge and its live, flowing waters? Again, the Rance barrage provides a good example. The landward side is quiet watermeadow land with a much-reduced river flow to the turbines. Essentially, the effect of a barrage is to slow the exit speed of the river water, which now has to power the turbines before reaching the estuary and the sea. Polluted seas mean the eel population is smaller than it used to be, but any barrage would have to take them into consideration. Slimbridge is far enough upriver to be unaffected by the construction work, but the maintenance of the river level and the speed of the flow would be critical to the health and welfare of the birds – particularly the migrant population. Would they continue to return to their winter feeding sites?
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsFit for purpose? No, fit for the landfill
There is one glittering prize manufacturers will not be keen to grab this year, the Landfill Prize 2009. As someone who carps almost constantly about the overpackaged, the unnecessary and the resource-squandering of consumer goods to the extent that many acquaintances now refuse to go shopping with me – I would have been a valuable addition to the judging panel. Sadly I wasn't asked, so I'm exorcising my consumer fury remotely, here. Please do join in.
For starters, I would nominate plug-in air fresheners – whichever happens to be the most "innovative" model on the market. Not only do they offer an unremitting exposure to toxins (presumably therein lies the innovation) but to add insult to injury they require electricity to do this.
I would also like to nominate my "eco" mobile phone. Its case is apparently biodegradable, but in common with many of these items, only when composted in a commercial in-vessel composter that achieves temperatures hotter than hell to which I have no access and there is no collection system. Meanwhile, it cannot be recycled via the normal route because its partially-compostable innards won't withstand the disassembly. As it doesn't work properly, far from assuring longevity of purpose, I can no longer justify charging it.
The Landfill Prize, then, serves as a timely reminder that the purpose of design is to make things better for humanity, not to design directly for landfill. This is something that could get lost in translation, what with the recent rallying call to the high streets to save the economy – implicit in this is the idea that ethically it's fine to turn a blind eye to cheap, fast fashion of uncertain provenance or furniture with a lifespan shorter than a mayfly as long as its all fiscally stimulating. Rubbish – like the design.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsRio slum barrier plans spark outcry
Plans to surround a Rio de Janeiro slum with a 650-metre-long concrete barrier have come under fire from environmentalists and human rights activists.
Authorities say the R$1m (£300,000) "eco-barrier", which will encircle part of the famous Dona Marta slum in southern part of the city, is intended to protect the nearby Atlantic rainforest from illegal occupation as well as improve security and living conditions for slum residents.
As tenders for construction of the 3-metre-high (10ft) wall opened yesterday, critics claimed the project was a form of "social apartheid", comparing it to Israel's security barrier.
"This is something that is very similar to what Israel does to the Palestinians and to what happened in South Africa," said Mauricio Campos, from the Rio human rights group Network of Communities Against Violence.
He said a wall would serve only to "segregate" slum residents from the rest of society.
The wall is expected to be completed by the end of this year and, according to reports in the local press, may be followed by similar barriers around Rio's other slums, know as favelas.
In a statement, the state governor, Sergio Cabral, who ordered the "eco-limit" fence to be built, said it was part of moves by his administration to improve living standards and protect slum residents from the armed gangs that control many of Rio's 600 or so slums.
"What has happened in Rio de Janeiro over the last two decades has been the passivity of authorities in relation to the uncontrolled growth of the slums," he said.
Such walls would, Cabral said, help the city deal with "drug trafficking and vigilantes, [by] putting limits on uncontrolled growth".
Dona Marta is home to an estimated 7,500 people. The favela was the setting for an award-winning documentary about cocaine by the British film-maker Angus Macqueen, as well as a 1996 Michael Jackson music video directed by Spike Lee.
Jackson's producers were forced to negotiate access with the local drug traffickers. Since last November, however, the shantytown has been under 24-hour police occupation as part of a state government initiative to make Dona Marta a "model favela". In December, Rio's security secretary boasted that the slum was "free from the law of the rifle".
The pilot project aims to rid the favelas of traffickers using a mixture of military force and "hearts and minds" community policing. A football pitch was recently opened in Dona Marta as part of a R$40m redevelopment programme, which includes building new houses and installing wireless internet, as well as the controversial wall.
Rio's environmentalists have given a frosty reception to the plans, arguing that unless low-cost housing options are given to the poor, they will continue to encroach on the hillsides of the city and into the surrounding rainforest.
"It is hypocrisy to talk about protecting the Atlantic rainforest without considering the issues of housing and transport to take the pressure off the forest," Sergio Ricardo, a leading environmental campaigner in Rio, told the Jornal do Brasil newspaper.
Cabral said the redevelopment plans showed the city government was investing in Rio "like never before".
Plans to erect walls around Rio's sprawling slums first surfaced in 2004, but were abandoned after a public outcry.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsNew herbicide offers hope in battle against Japanese knotweed
Japanese knotweed, the bane of gardeners and train companies, might finally have met its match.
More than 120 sites across London are to be sprayed with a new chemical herbicide in a bid by one of the capital's Tube companies to become the first railway operator in Europe to eradicate the problem.
If the trial along 75 miles (120km) of lines is successful, it could be extended to other London Underground services and the national network.
Across the entire country, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has estimated that the total cost of eradicating Japanese knotweed would be more than £1.5bn.
The mass spraying of chemicals is likely to prompt concern about the impact on other plants and insects and the birds that feed on them.
However the company, Tube Lines Group, says the move will drastically cut the quantity of chemicals used and help native plants and other wildlife, which struggle to push through the huge root network or survive under the dense canopy of the knotweed. It will also slash the cost stopping it from undermining bridges and buildings, and blocking sight of signals, the company says.
"Trackside land around London Underground network makes up 10% of all London's green space, so it is important to do everything we can to protect wildlife from this invasive plant," said Steve Judd, environment asset manager of Tube Lines Group.
Japanese knotweed was imported into the UK for ornamental gardens in the 19th century and has since proved one of the most damaging invasive species, and difficult to eradicate.
New plants can grow from roots weighing as little as 0.8g, and can spread their own roots up to 7m underground.
Spreading the plant is now a criminal offence and by law it has to be buried in deep hazardous waste sites. As a result Network Rail, the national railway operator, advises its workers not to strim or flail the plant.
Instead Network Rail, Tube Lines and other organisations traditionally relied on digging out the plant or spraying with a glyphosate herbicide – like the more popularly known Roundup.
Now Tube Lines, which operates the Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly lines, hopes instead of three sprays each year for seven years, the new chemical – Tordon – will eradicate the knotweed by spraying just once a year for two years.
Neighbouring properties will also be sprayed to help prevent the weed returning.
Suppliers warn Picloram, the active agent in Tordon, also kills other plants, and the US Environment Protection Agency says it is "slightly toxic" to aquatic plants and animals. However the Environmental Protection Agency also says the health risks to workers and the public are typically "negligible", and it is "practically non-toxic to birds, mammals and honeybees". Picloram also does not appear on the "sinlist" of the nearly 300 chemicals campaigners most want banned, a list compiled by several groups lobbying in the sector led by the International Chemical Secretariat.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsRow over Russian gas chokes supply to rest of Europe
Germany, Russia's biggest political ally in Europe, tonight warned that its supply of Russian gas could swiftly collapse as the dispute between Ukraine and Moscow intensified and Europeans began freezing in their homes.
The Russian monopoly provider Gazprom accused Ukraine of filching gas supplies due for Europe.
The row escalated today, with gas volumes slashed even further, as a swathe of countries in eastern and southern Europe reported a complete shutdown of supplies or serious disruption on the coldest day of the winter. Russian shipments of gas to the Balkans, including Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Greece, Bosnia, Serbia and, beyond them, to Turkey shut down or were slashed by up to two thirds.
The disruption of supplies also spread to Italy, Austria, Slovakia, the Czech republic, Hungary and Slovenia as well as Poland.
Amid a growing political and diplomatic crisis, Oleh Dubyna, head of Naftogaz, Ukraine's state energy firm, said he would restart negotiations on price contracts in Moscow on Thursday with Gazprom executives.
Failure of these talks could force leading EU governments to switch supplies of gas to a growing number of European countries hit by acute shortages from Russia via Ukraine. Europe gets a quarter of its gas from Russia and 80% of this passes through Ukraine.
The EU's gas coordination group will meet in emergency session on Friday, to consider shifting plentiful supplies of gas held in storage in unscathed countries to those "in distress". Slovakia declared a state of emergency tonight, while other countries said they were in crisis.
Bulgaria, one of the hardest hit, said people had started freezing as it began moves to reboot a controversial nuclear power plant. Ukraine said it would switch heating to fuel oil as other European countries began a desperate search for alternative supplies, with Turkey turning to Iran.
These moves emerged as the Czech premier, Mirek Topolanek, the current EU president, raised the "extreme option" of a three-way summit with Russia and Ukraine to resolve the growing political crisis, while Russia and Ukraine continued to blame each other for the commercial and political deadlock.
In London, Gazprom's deputy chief executive, Alexander Medvedev, accused Ukraine of unilaterally closing three export pipelines without warning. "It is unprecedented in the history of the gas market," he told reporters.
"Ukraine is in obvious breach of its obligations as a transit country... We have become a hostage to irresponsible behaviour."
Ukraine insisted that the fault lay with Russia. Naftogaz, the Ukrainian state gas company, denied it was to blame for the sharp drop in supplies, and said Gazprom had itself rerouted gas to just one out of the four pipes. "We did not turn anything off, there is simply no gas there, there is zero," Naftogaz spokesman Valentyn Zemlyansky told the Kiev Post.
E.On, Germany's biggest energy firm, said supplies could run out if the cuts and sub-zero temperatures continued. Wingas, co-owned by the chemicals group BASF, issued a similar warning. Both are close Gazprom partners.
Tonight, the supply cuts spread to France, where GDF Suez, the country's biggest gas group, reported reductions of more than 70% via Ukraine.
Medvedev, who later held talks in Berlin with the German government and senior EU officials, accused Kiev of acting for political, not commercial reasons, and demanded the return of stolen gas. Gazprom tried to alleviate
the situation among EU customers by switching supplies via other routes. But Ukrainian officials accused the Russians of playing "cat and mouse" and of deliberately creating serious problems. The two sides are in dispute
over price increases imposed on Naftogaz. Prior to the Berlin talks, Michael Glos, Germany's economics minister, warned that Russia's reputation as a gas supplier and Ukraine's reputation as a transit country were at stake.
In Brussels, a senior EC spokesman said: "Energy relations between the EU and its neighbours must be based on reliability and predictability and existing commitments to supply and transit must be honoured in all circumstances. Disruption risks damaging the reputation of Russia and Ukraine as reliable suppliers."
The EU's gas coordination group, set up under a 2004 directive, comprises representatives from the 27 governments, commercial companies and transmission operators as well as European commission officials.
Officials from both Gazprom and Naftogaz have also been invited to attend, as the EU stepped up pressure on both to resolve their dispute.
The Czechs and the EC called the situation "completely unacceptable" as, "without warning and in clear contradiction with the reassurances given by the highest Russian and Ukrainian authorities," supplies had been substantially cut.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsIran goes solar in search of cheap power
Mention energy and Iran in the same sentence and you're duty-bound to express some concern about the country's ambitions for nuclear power and, as a result, raise dangerous questions about weapons. But while that are-they-aren't-they game has been going on between the country's leaders and the wider international community, renewable energy experts in Iran have been quietly working on capturing sunlight to power their country.
According to officials, Iran has started 2009 by inaugurating a pilot solar plant in Shiraz, Fars province. It is a concentrating solar power (CSP) system, using parabolic mirrors to focus sunlight onto a tube of water that is super-heated to make steam that is then used to turn electricity-generating turbines.
According to the Mehr Iran news agency, Iranian energy minister Parviz Fattah said: "The country backs the use of alternative and renewable energy sources. In future alternative energy sources will be greatly developed in the country. The growth of investments in this sphere is expected."
The solar radiation hitting the Earth contains around 10,000 times the energy needs of the world's population. CSP is seen by many as a simpler, cheaper and more efficient way to harness the sun's energy than other methods such as photovoltaic panels. But it only works in places with clear skies and strong sunshine. As such, large CSP plants of up to 20mw each are already in construction in the sunnier parts of the world.
Spanish firms, in particular, are moving quickly with CSP: more than 50 solar projects around Spain have been approved for construction by the government and, by 2015, the country will generate more than 2GW of power from CSP, comfortably exceeding current national targets. The companies there are also exporting their technology to Morocco, Algeria and the US.
At present the Iranian plant is small (just 250KW, probably enough for just over 200 family homes while the sun is shining) but the locally-
built mirrors join thousands of smaller-scale solar-thermal installations already in place around the country.
Whether Iran has plans to build bigger solar plants or add photovoltaic panels to those plans is unclear, but an ambitious move in this direction would be a good idea. Not only because the region has a huge resource of sunlight falling onto it, so tapping even a small proportion of that would be a cheap and clean way to provide energy for the country. But, just perhaps, solar plants could also placate those international observers that are suspicious of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's nuclear plans.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsBush designates ocean conservation areas in final weeks as president
George Bush will designate nearly 200,000 square miles of the Pacific Ocean as conservation areas on Tuesday, recasting his record on the environment just two weeks before leaving the White House.
Tuesday's formal announcement will establish Bush as the leader who has protected more of the oceans than anyone else in the world, environmentalists said.
The three regions in the Pacific Ocean encompass some 195,280 square miles of remote and relatively uninhabited island chains.
They include pristine coral reefs, vanishing marine species and the deepest place on Earth.
Their preservation brought rare praise from environmentalists who have spent much of the last eight years fighting Bush on climate change, air pollution, and wildlife management.
"The president has given the world a Texas-sized gift," said Diane Regas, manager of the ocean programme at the Environmental Defence Fund.
But the marine reserves were as much a gift from Laura Bush, who was credited with heading off determined opposition from the vice-president, Dick Cheney, as well as business leaders in the Mariana Islands who had lobbied on behalf of fishing and energy exploration.
White House officials, in a conference call with reporters, described three distinct areas: the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific, a chain of remote islands in the central Pacific, and the Rose Atoll off American Samoa.
"These locations are truly among the last pristine areas in the marine environment on Earth," said James Connaughton, who heads the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
The Marianas Marine National Monument will protect the Mariana Trench - deeper than Mount Everest is tall and five times the size of the Grand Canyon - and a string of 21 active volcanoes and thermal vents.
The area is home to 300 species of stony corals and some of the most diverse fish populations in the Mariana Islands. It also harbours the Micronesian megapode, a bird which uses the heat from the volcanic vents to incubate its eggs.
The Pacific Remote Islands National Monument will cover coral reefs
surrounding Kingman Reef, Palmyra Atoll, Howland, Baker and Jarvis islands and Johnston Atoll and Wake Island.
The islands and atolls are home to nesting sea birds and migratory shore birds, and endangered turtles. The waters off Kingman Reef teem with shark and other predators.
The "tiny but spectacular" Rose Atoll Marine National Monument will protect a coral reef area known for rare birds such as petrels as well as reef sharks and parrot fish, Connaughton said.
The conservation plan will ban commercial fishing, mining and energy exploration within the protected areas. Recreational fishing will be allowed only a limited permit basis
"This is very very big. Basically in the last several years, it's on par with what we have been able to accomplish on land in the last 100 years," Josh Reichert, the managing director of the Pew Environment Group, said in a conference call with reporters.
However, Bush fell short of meeting scientists' recommendation for a protection zone extending 200 miles off the islands.
The protected areas will extend for only 50 miles.
In addition, only the waters between the ocean floor and the rim of the Mariana Trench will be protected - not those rising from the rim to the surface of the water.
The US military will also continue to operate in the monuments.
However, environmentalists said the announcement would help protect oceans that are under threat from overfishing and global warming.
The initiative, coming in the final fortnight of the George Bush presidency, also gives the incoming Barack Obama administration a strong take-off point on ocean conservation.
The move was at odds with the Bush administration's record on other green issues and even on marine protection. When petrol prices soared last summer, Bush lifted the ban on offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and off California.
But environmentalists who worked with the White House to develop the conservation plan say that Bush had developed a personal commitment to marine protection.
He took the first step in 2006, using a law originally intended for antiquities to create a protected area in nearly 140,000 square miles in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands called the Papahanaumokuakea marine national monument.
It was at the time the world's largest protected marine area. Last August, Bush asked Connaugton and other administration officials to review the prospects of creating new conservation areas in the Pacific.
The effort met determined opposition from Cheney and local business leaders in the Marianas. But Bush had a key ally in his wife, Laura, who became unusually engaged in policy making. The First Lady arranged briefings for White House staff from scientists who supported the measure to try to blunt Cheney's influence.
"We and others in the environmental community have been at odds with this administration on lots of things, but if one looks at this one event it is a significant conservation event," Joshua Reichert, managing director of the Pew Environment Group, said.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsThe price of bacon: Jon Henley investigates industrial-scale pig farming
Heaving with heavy goods, the A67 from Eindhoven barrels through the flat, featureless fields of the south-eastern Netherlands on its way to the German border. On a frozen December morning, nothing very much moves beyond the road's edge; a horse stamps at a trough, a tractor pushes along a narrow track. Every half mile or so, behind a stand of poplars, a neat brick farmhouse - raked gravel drive, lace curtains at the windows - slides into view. Next to it is a large, windowless and vaguely ominous shed, the size, perhaps, of a small aircraft hangar.
It will hold, almost certainly, several hundred pigs. In a country famed for the unnatural feats of its intensive farming sector (the Netherlands occupies less than one-thousandth of the world's surface, but is its third largest exporter of agricultural produce), this area, known as De Peel, is more densely populated with pigs than anywhere else on the planet.
Some of the sheds are multistorey; they're called pig-flats. There's a fair chance - especially if you're partial to bacon - that you've eaten meat from one of them. A good proportion of the 20m pigs born, fattened, sent abroad or slaughtered each year in the Netherlands come from here, and the Netherlands has become the biggest single supplier of our morning rasher.
"This," Hans Baij of the animal welfare group Varkens in Nood, or Pigs in Distress, had told me the day before in his office in Amsterdam, "is advanced industrial pig farming. There's nothing natural about this whatsoever. It's about science, sperm selection, antibiotics, piglets per sow, grams per day, muscle-to-fat ratios. It's what this country does. Welfare doesn't come into it."
Picture, for a moment, a pig. Engaging, maybe. Large, pink, ungainly, certainly (though that's not how they always were; the original pig was compact and capable of speeds up to 40mph). That strong, muscular snout was designed for rooting around in soil and undergrowth; a sense of smell acute enough to snuffle out buried truffles was plainly intended for forensic foraging.
In many languages, pigs are a byword for anything gross, unpleasant, unhygienic. They're actually very clean; they hate a dirty bed, and will select a latrine area and use it. They are the most curious and intelligent farmyard animals. (A professor from Pennsylvania State University has demonstrated that pigs learn problem-solving games faster than dogs and as quickly as chimps, and will remember the lessons for three years or more.)
Orwell, of course, knew that. Winston Churchill, a serious pig fancier, saw it too. "I like pigs," he said. "Dogs look up to you; cats look down on you; pigs treat you as equal." A shame, then, that we treat pigs the way we do. Britons ate 1.6m tonnes of pork in 2007. We're so fond of the meat that we now import more than 60%, including 40% of all fresh and frozen pork and an astonishing 80% of all bacon. In fact, our pig meat imports - mainly from Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany - have been soaring for nearly a decade; the Netherlands, and those sheds, account for almost half our bacon imports. Demand for UK pork, meanwhile, has slumped 36%.
There is one very good reason for this, say British farmers. It is that in 1999, we introduced standards on pig welfare - regarding the space in which they are reared - that have yet to come into force across the rest of the EU. They have made our pork a great deal more expensive.
"To rear our pigs the way we do," says Vicky Scott, who with her sister and father, Kate and David Morgan, wean more than 500 piglets a week on their 1,000-sow intensive farm near Driffield in Yorkshire, "costs us about 12p a kilo extra. Will that be reflected in the price we get for it? What do you think?"
Some Dutch and Danish producers do rear pigs for the UK market to UK rules. But according to the British Pig Executive, an alarming 70% of the 970,000 tonnes of pig meat we import each year does not meet British welfare standards. What's more, you are probably buying it without knowing it: retailers are perfectly entitled to label foreign meat British if it has been processed here.
The pigs from which much of that foreign meat comes will have led very different lives to many of those reared in Britain. Here, for example - and in Sweden, Switzerland and Norway - the use of a particularly nasty piece of kit called a sow stall has now been outlawed; it is legal in the rest of the EU until 2013. A sow stall is a narrow metal cage, on a bare concrete and slatted floor, in which pregnant sows spend all three months, three weeks and three days of their gestation. They can move a few inches back and forwards, but not turn around. Lying down and getting up is difficult, too.
"It prevents almost all their natural activities," says Phil Brooke, welfare development manager for Compassion in World Farming (CIWF). "They can't forage, they can't root around, they can't prepare a nest for their young. They're subject to bone and muscle weakness, digestive and urinary illnesses, cardiovascular problems. Many display signs of severe psychological problems, stress and frustration."
In much of mainland Europe, too, and on a by no means negligible percentage of British farms, naturally boisterous and playful fattening pigs also spend their days and nights on bare concrete and slatted floors; their faeces and urine fall through and are flushed away. In theory, EU regulations require plentiful "environmental enrichment" - straw, in other words - for bedding and rooting, but an undercover report by CIWF last month showed that 100% of farms surveyed in Spain, 89% in Germany and 88% in the Netherlands provided none. Such rules are, it seems, not very easy to enforce when animal welfare is weighed against export earnings.
If they're lucky, the animals may get a chain or a plastic football to play with. But since there is rarely enough light to see by (pigs are quieter in the dark), fighting and biting are more common than playing. To minimise the effects of this, the vast majority of piglets' tails are routinely docked soon after birth, and their teeth clipped, again in breach of EU rules.
Routine tail-docking in particular, Brooke and Baaij both argue, is a good general indication of pig welfare: pigs reared on extensive farms, outdoors, with plenty of scope for foraging and rooting, rarely need their tails docked. "If they've got plenty to do, they're happy," says Baaij. Otherwise, basically, they go for each other, with tails and ears the favoured targets. And once a pen full of pigs gets the scent of blood, the consequences can be catastrophic; pigs are, after all, omnivores.
In much of Europe too, male piglets are routinely castrated. That's because the powerful flavour of male pig meat - boar taint - is distasteful to many consumers. The operation is performed without pain relief, although the Dutch plan to adopt a gas anaesthetic, voluntarily, later this year. (British pigs are not castrated because they are slaughtered younger, before the taint develops.)
"Across Europe, we found examples of poor welfare and excessive use of confinement systems and mutilations in lieu of good welfare practice," the CIWF report concluded, lamenting the effects of "an industrial system on a highly sentient, intelligent" animal. "Pigs looked uncared for, they showed aggressive behaviour and there was nothing for them to do. Across Europe, pig legislation is being ignored and welfare conditions are often appalling."
So is that what it's like, then, in those Dutch pig farms? Perhaps unsurprisingly, it isn't all that easy to find out. The big farms at least seem distinctly wary of allowing a journalist access. Any number of Dutch welfare groups, including the highly vocal Varkens in Nood, backed by an array of Dutch writers and artists, are now on their case. CIWF has accused them, along with most other continental pig farmers, of routinely breaking EU laws. This month they might also have to face up to Jamie Oliver, in a TV special aiming to do for intensively reared pigs what the TV chef did last year for battery chickens.
At the pristine and gargantuan Houbensteyn Group in Ysselsteyn, home to a barely imaginable 25,000 pigs, a manager tells me bluntly that they can't let me in as they have too much work on in the run-up to Christmas. Another factory farm near Helmond cites stringent hygiene laws that mean no one can so much as poke a nose round the door without taking their outdoor clothes off, donning disinfected boots and laundered boiler suit, even taking a shower.
Introduced after a catastrophic outbreak of swine fever in 1997 that saw 10m Dutch pigs slaughtered, they're a useful deterrent for the curious visitor. "Too much of a bloody performance," says Jaap, the chief stockman. "What do you want to see, anyway? Look, everything here's spotless. You can't even smell this place from the outside. We put in a new air filtration system last year."
Smaller farms prove more open. A few have even installed neat little viewing windows so visitors can gaze into a couple of presumably carefully selected pens - Step in the Shed, the scheme is called, and it's very popular with Dutch primary schools.
John Rooijakkers, who runs a farm of 750 breeding sows with his brother Martin at Aarle-Rixtel, near Eindhoven, will not tolerate British farmers' accusations of unfair competition. "I'm losing money," he says. "Most Dutch pig farmers are. Only the most efficient 20-30% are making any. The European pig market is cut-throat, and it's swings and roundabouts - you may have tougher welfare regulations, but we have far more stringent environment and hygiene laws. Holland is much smaller, much more densely populated than Britain. Don't talk to me about regulations."
Rooijakkers is unusual in the Netherlands in keeping some of his pregnant sows on a mountain of straw, because a portion of his pigs are destined for "a big British supermarket" which he declines to name. For the same reason, some of his male piglets are not castrated. (He does, though, dock their tails: "Show me a single intensive pig farmer who doesn't.")
Elsewhere, tiny piglets - Rooijakkers says proudly that he averages 15 in a litter, where a free-range sow will typically deliver 10 or 12 - scrabble around their mothers on a blue plastic grate. The sows are locked into farrowing crates, similar but slightly bigger than sow stalls and used by many intensive pig farms in Britain too. The sows find it just as difficult to move in them, but they protect the baby pigs from being crushed.
"I have a 0.2% mortality rate," boasts Rooijakkers. "On organic farms they're lucky to get away with 16%. Where's the animal welfare there, then, when you're talking dead piglets? Anyway, you have to be realistic: today's pigs would all be sick within a week if you started raising them outside. They couldn't take it. All those germs."
But next door to the farrowing crates, weaned piglets squal and leap viciously at each other in a bare concrete pen, a punctured yellow ball their only distraction. When you open the door to the small viewing room Rooijakkers has installed, they're suddenly bathed in fluorescent light. Hang around for a while, and the light goes off: it's there for the visitors. Unless you're looking at them, the pigs live in near-total darkness.
Upstairs in his office, Rooijakkers blames the system. "We're supplying what the market wants," he insists. "And where are we, the farmers, in the chain? The retailers tell the slaughterhouses what they'll pay, the slaughterhouses set their prices for us. Everyone takes their margin, and right at the bottom it's the farmer. People, consumers, just aren't being realistic; they want cheap meat, then they're worried about welfare. Buy organic, then! Pay twice the price. But no one will do that."
A few miles down the road in Panningen, Lowie and Jeanette Kersten are similarly blunt. Their farm, Op den Haegh, is small: around 300 sows. Through their viewing windows, you can see pregnant sows lumbering around a barren concrete pen. They are fed automatically. It's an ingenious system. When each pig sticks her head round the feeder door, a computer reads an electronic chip clipped in her ear and calculates whether or not she she has had her daily fill. If she has, the door stays shut; if she hasn't, she's allowed in.
Next door are sows and piglets in spotless but desolate crates. Signs explain that the climate is computer controlled, and make much of how modern pig-farming is doing all it can to minimise the risk of disease, and reduce its impact on the environment. Weaned pigs are on stark concrete and slats; a chain swings from the ceiling and a piglet makes a desultory grab. And there is a whole long side of this big shed whose darkened windows you simply cannot see through; inside is a pale pink mass of occasionally writhing forms. And the occasional furious squeal.
The Kerstens are a charming, and plainly thoughtful, couple in their 50s. They invite me into their immaculate farmhouse kitchen for coffee. "It's all a compromise," says Lowie. "Everyone would like to see better conditions for pigs, but change demands time, good laws, an effort from everyone in the chain and responsibility, from the producer, the retailer, the consumer and the politician. The cold fact is that better welfare means more expensive meat. We'd love to produce it; are people ready to buy it?"
In fact Lowie already does produce some more expensive meat. Half of his piglets are of a different race to the others. They are taken off the farm and raised, in the open air and with special feed, on the grounds of a monastery, under a new label he has developed with colleagues. "The meat from my monastery pigs is tastier, with good fat - supermarkets don't want fat, they want pure lean, and modern pigs are bred to deliver that," he says. "But good restaurants want flavour, and they want meat with a story. Something distinctive."
Wouldn't he like to raise all his pigs that way? "Look," says Jeanette firmly, gesturing at the shed behind her. "We're producers. We do this to earn money. That's what I tell the schoolkids who come here. There's been a whole lot of research to see if we could produce the amount of meat we need any other way ... We're very professional. And pigs aren't people."
On the whole, if you're concerned about pig welfare, you generally are better off buying British (assuming, of course, you can be sure it actually was reared in Britain). Things are not perfect here, but they are quite a lot better: CIWF's undercover inspectors found only 36% of British farms they visited did not use straw, although 54% still carried out routine tail docking. But Vicky Scott and Kate Morgan's farm in Yorkshire feels a world removed from those stifling Dutch sheds. Their pigs are reared on straw, in huge, open-sided sheds that let in all the daylight and - on another chill winter morning - the fresh air you could want.
Scott uses farrowing crates for birthing, although she prefers the term maternity units. "It may look like factory farming," she says, "and it's not very nice to see, but I really believe no better system's been invented." She docks her animals' tails ("We're planning on doing a trial without it, but if they start tailbiting, really, it's horrendous") and clips their teeth ("We've tried not doing it, but they make such a mess of their pen mates. Pigs' teeth are incredibly sharp.") Both operations are done when the piglets are a day old. But the most important thing, for her, is the straw.
"I would never, ever finish [fatten] pigs on slats," she says. "I've always said that. You only have to look at them. They need it, it's the way they're made. It's inconceivable to deny them it." And the family's pigs do, indeed, look pretty damn happy. But there's precious little encouragement from the market to do things that way, or to refund the extra pence per kilo of pork that the straw - and the extra labour to muck it out and replace it - costs them.
The business is tough enough as it is: when animal feed prices went through the roof last summer, Morgan and farmers like her were losing £26 on every pig they sold. "The retailers always say the customer likes the cheapest," she says. "We say we think the customer would actually like the choice. But the bottom line is, if people don't want to pay for higher welfare, farmers will stop doing it."
The best conditions, of course, are free-range, although there is a lot of confusion about what that means. Some 40% of breeding sows in Britain are kept outdoors, compared to fewer than 1% in the Netherlands; but only 7% of the piglets born to them are reared outdoors after they're weaned and only 2% are fattened, or finished, outdoors. "Outdoor bred" is not the same as "outdoor reared". The best guarantee of all is organic, but that comes at a considerable cost.
On a magnificent high field bordered by the Ridgeway near the Wiltshire village of Bishopstone, Helen Browning keeps her 250 saddleback sows producing some 65 piglets a week, about 3,500 a year. The pigs sleep in spacious, clean, straw-filled arks and have free access to the open field around them. Eastbrook farm is a mixed farm and the pigs are integrated into the agricultural cycle; they'll spend a couple of months trashing - and very effectively fertilising - a patch of land and then move on, to be replaced by grass or an arable crop for a few years.
Unlike high-intensity systems, in which pigs are removed from their mothers at three weeks or even earlier, Browning's piglets are weaned at a more natural eight weeks. "They're stronger, maturer, they don't need antibiotics," she says. Farrowing crates and the like, Browning believes, have bred the maternal instincts out of most modern sows. And the never-ending, retailer-led search for ever-leaner meat means they simply don't have enough fat on them to nurse their litters for long anyway.
Browning's pigs are kept in the same family group, and they have an awful lot of room to create an unholy mess of their field. The day I was there, wading through the mud, they were positively gambolling: racing round the field, playing (there's no other word) games. In 20 years of raising pigs, Eastbrook farm has not experienced a single case of tail biting.
"Pigs are clever animals, curious animals, they're clean animals, they tell you about their problems," Browning says. "They're not like cows, they're not stoics, they vocalise. They wear their hearts on their sleeves. And they're funny. They have pretty simple needs, really: space, lots to do."
But all this comes at a price. Tim Finney, managing director of Eastbrook's organic meats business, reckons that amounts to an extra 30 or 40p a kilo just to keep the system running, plus another 70p a kilo for the organic feed. "Overall," he says, "it probably costs us about double what it costs to produce a conventional pig. Although if we weren't organic, we could run the farm the same way and produce meat that was maybe 25% more expensive. That would still be a huge step forwards in welfare terms."
High-welfare organic meat is of course a niche market, recession-sensitive, and Finney admits he's is budgeting for zero growth for the coming year. But the alarming thing is that today, even moderately good welfare standards are coming under pressure. When it comes to pig welfare Britain is, Browning reckons, "genuinely squeaky clean" compared to much of the rest of the world; "probably the best in the world, in fact, for conventional pig-keeping". But what counts, it seems, is price.
Some years ago, the late Lyall Watson, who devoted his last book to The Extraordinary Potential of Pigs, wrote that if you look properly behind the eyes of any pig, you will see "a liveliness, an intelligence for which you are just not prepared". These are not like other animals. If it matters to us that our morning rasher or chop or pork pie does not comes from a genetically engineered fat-free pig that spent its brief life in a dark, bare, windowless shed stuffed full of antibiotics and reduced to attacking its pen-mates for entertainment - a pathetic parody, in short, of a pig - we're going to have to reach deeper into our pockets. Right now, that seems increasingly unlikely.
Rasher by rasher
Buying better bacon
• Sainsbury's Basics Cooking Bacon Rashers, 670g: £1.57 (£2.34/kg)
• Asda Smartprice Unsmoked Streaky Bacon (250g): 87p (£3.48/kg)
• Sainsbury's Taste the Difference Wiltshire Unsmoked Back Bacon, 240g: £3.19 (£13.29/kg)
• Helen Browning's Organic Unsmoked Streaky Bacon Rashers, 184g (available from Sainsbury's): £2.79 (£15.16/kg)
• Duchy Originals Organic Dry Cured Unsmoked Back Bacon Rashers (184g) £4.89 (£26.58/kg)
• Prices taken from mysupermarket.com
Useful resources
• Compassion in World Farming (CIWF)
www.ciwf.org.uk
• Varkens in Nood / Pigs in distress
www.varkensinnood.nl/english_.htm
• Helen Browning organic farming
www.helenbrowningorganics.co.uk
Country diary: East Cheshire hills
We came down from the high ground as the first lights were twinkling in the frosty air over Macclesfield. We could just make out the black whale-back silhouette of Alderley Edge but, in general, the Cheshire plain seemed lightless and lifeless. Along the hillside lane at Calrofold we passed the former home of the late, lamented Brian Redhead, then entered even deeper shade where the trees began. It was the end of a short winter's day on these heights, crossing from the confines of the Goyt Valley in Derbyshire to come over the moortops and into view of broad prospects across Cheshire as far as the Clwydian Hills over the Welsh border.
The lane beyond Calrofold circles down around Cliff Hill to come by Higher Hurdsfield, at the very upper-eastern limit of Macclesfield, before coming through the great trees that wrap about Swanscoe Hall. By taking narrow Kerridge Road we slant northwards up the western flank of delightful Kerridge Hill, that spine of gritstone once the scene of busy activity to quarry this useful rock. Down at the north-west corner of the ridge stands Kerridge village, its unusual name derived from the Old English Gaeg Hrycg - key ridge. This stone settlement clusters close below the flank of its hill and, to my mind, is one of the prettiest in all the Peak District. It's a busy little place but quite overlooked by visitors to these south Pennine hills.
We, of course, never saw the crest of Kerridge Hill, but the street lights were on in the village, casting our long shadows across the empty byways as we went. And then we were down in adjacent, bustling Bollington where the Macclesfield Canal crosses on its towering aqueduct, now a solid block of blackness under the stars. This fine waterway once served the several flour and textile mills that still stand as giant edifices in this district; now, though, it is a well used recreational facility, part of the Cheshire Ring.
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