{"id":2461,"date":"2008-03-30T12:22:58","date_gmt":"2008-03-30T12:22:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/?p=2461"},"modified":"2008-03-30T12:22:58","modified_gmt":"2008-03-30T12:22:58","slug":"enviro-roundup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/?p=2461","title":{"rendered":"Enviro roundup"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The focus internationally tends to be on wheat prices, but to the world&#8217;s poor rice is more important, and the <a href = \"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/03\/29\/business\/worldbusiness\/29rice.html?ei=5087&#038;em=&#038;en=8202a8316f6b1e12&#038;ex=1206936000&#038;adxnnl=1&#038;adxnnlx=1206875765-BpEO7e6r1dsIgf4adIYx8g\">price has doubled in three months<\/a> &#8211; that&#8217;s when you can lay hands on it at all.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Vietnam\u2019s government announced here on Friday that it would cut rice exports by nearly a quarter this year. The government hoped that keeping more rice inside the country would hold down prices.<br \/>\nThe same day, India effectively banned the export of all but the most expensive grades of rice. Egypt announced on Thursday that it would impose a six-month ban on rice exports, starting April 1, and on Wednesday, Cambodia banned all rice exports except by government agencies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Another example of the long-term, and often ill-understood, impact of human actions: <a href = \"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/environment\/2008\/mar\/30\/pollution.conservation\">metal-eating bacteria are poisoning the British Peak District<\/a>. They are mopping up pollution from sources that stopped spewing it out  50 years ago.<\/p>\n<p>But on the mildly good news front: four states, <a href = \"http:\/\/www.independent.co.uk\/environment\/climate-change\/four-nations-in-race-to-be-first-to-go-carbon-neutral-802627.html\">Iceland, New Zealand, Norway and Costa Rica<\/a> are in a race to become the first carbon-neutral state. Of course one thing that unites them is that they are, on a world scale, very small states. Still, it is a start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The focus internationally tends to be on wheat prices, but to the world&#8217;s poor rice is more important, and the price has doubled in three months &#8211; that&#8217;s when you can lay hands on it at all. Vietnam\u2019s government announced here on Friday that it would cut rice exports by nearly a quarter this year. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environmental-politics","author-natalieben"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2461\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}