My friend at China Crossroads referenced a recent post on NPR’s blog site where Andrea Hsu talks about an upcoming story on the nascent organic food movement in Chengdu, Sichuan. But she failed to mention the organic food movement is picking up in major Chinese cities such as Shanghai and Beijing…which is okay, hers is just the blog before the storm. The full story should play on NPR’s All Things Considered around May 19-23.
But here in Shanghai, Spring 2008 is ramping up to be a big season for the organic food industry. Just last week, I went to the first annual ECO Design Fair in the stunning courtyard of the super-chic, carbon-neutral hotel URBN in Shanghai, where all the food related stalls promoted organic products. (The one exception being the meat laden grill set up by URBN offering sausages and beef sandwiches for immediate consumption.) And this is where I learned of the organic foods trade fair and conference to be held at the end of the month.
The conference, called "BioFach China: International Organic Trade Fair and Conference", will be held from May 29 to June 1st 2008 in Shanghai. It opens to the public on May 31st. Their “patronage sponsor” is the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM). Other sponsors include the China Organic Food Certification Center (COFCC) and the China Greenfood Development Center, among others. These two Chinese organizations are the ones who put little green symbols on your organic foods to let you know you’re biting into, or stir-frying, a slice of certified goodness.
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Friday, May 2, 2008
The Economist: Dollar to Oil to Dollar Ratio
Here's an interesting fact...
"The price of oil touched almost $120 a barrel. This caused anxiety in the United States, where the presidential candidates are debating the merits of suspending the federal tax on petrol over the summer. Meanwhile, OPEC's president forecast that oil prices would reach $200 a barrel if the dollar continued to slide. Chakib Khelil said that “each time the dollar falls 1%, the price of the barrel rises by $4, and of course vice versa”.(Source)
That means, if nothing but the dollar's falling value influences the price of oil, then according to our circular-logic-friend, Chakib Khelil, the dollar will see another 20% decline if there's a 20% decline in the dollar ($200-$120 = $80 and $80/$4 = 20). Obviously though, no one is making a claim as to how much further the dollar will slide, right? Well, here's a hint. The official "strong dollar policy" of the US Treasury Department is a load of hogwash. Look, if I borrowed as much as the US Gov't has from all the other nations and it started to get difficult to just borrow indefinitely, I'd surely devalue the hell out of my currency before I paid them all back and send a thank you note saying...
"The price of oil touched almost $120 a barrel. This caused anxiety in the United States, where the presidential candidates are debating the merits of suspending the federal tax on petrol over the summer. Meanwhile, OPEC's president forecast that oil prices would reach $200 a barrel if the dollar continued to slide. Chakib Khelil said that “each time the dollar falls 1%, the price of the barrel rises by $4, and of course vice versa”.(Source)
That means, if nothing but the dollar's falling value influences the price of oil, then according to our circular-logic-friend, Chakib Khelil, the dollar will see another 20% decline if there's a 20% decline in the dollar ($200-$120 = $80 and $80/$4 = 20). Obviously though, no one is making a claim as to how much further the dollar will slide, right? Well, here's a hint. The official "strong dollar policy" of the US Treasury Department is a load of hogwash. Look, if I borrowed as much as the US Gov't has from all the other nations and it started to get difficult to just borrow indefinitely, I'd surely devalue the hell out of my currency before I paid them all back and send a thank you note saying...
"Thanks for the free wars and 25 extra years of superpowerdom, Suckers!"
P.S. - Especially YOU, Cheena!
P.P.S. - Hey European buddies, the Great American Tag Sale has begun! Step right up and buy America on the cheap! Buy our assets, before the Cheenese do!
BTW, I would never send such an obnoxious letter. But America might.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
MarketWatch: From field to fork -- Food Prices are high and may keep going (Outtakes)
By Kevin Kerr, MarketWatch Last update: 12:01 a.m. EDT May 1, 2008
“As oil flirts with $120 a barrel and corn shoots up over $6 a bushel, it's clear that demand is real for both commodities, and yet there's also a bit of froth in those prices as well. How much of it is speculation?
Many claim it is caused by a weak dollar and speculation -- that is naïve. While the U.S. Federal Reserve policy of "print until the ink runs out" is certainly playing a big role in these price increases, it's not the only culprit.”
------
“Take for instance the rationing of rice sales by Costco Wholesale Corp. Is this the speculators buying up stocks of rice? Hardly. I shop at Costco but have never bought a bag of rice, and now I probably couldn't. Small restaurants are buying up all they can find because prices are simply out of control. It's real demand by real people.”
-------
“The new reality for food costs is here, and for investors the opportunities are plentiful not only in the future markets, but in the equities that serve agriculture as well.”
Click Here for Full Article
“As oil flirts with $120 a barrel and corn shoots up over $6 a bushel, it's clear that demand is real for both commodities, and yet there's also a bit of froth in those prices as well. How much of it is speculation?
Many claim it is caused by a weak dollar and speculation -- that is naïve. While the U.S. Federal Reserve policy of "print until the ink runs out" is certainly playing a big role in these price increases, it's not the only culprit.”
------
“Take for instance the rationing of rice sales by Costco Wholesale Corp. Is this the speculators buying up stocks of rice? Hardly. I shop at Costco but have never bought a bag of rice, and now I probably couldn't. Small restaurants are buying up all they can find because prices are simply out of control. It's real demand by real people.”
-------
“The new reality for food costs is here, and for investors the opportunities are plentiful not only in the future markets, but in the equities that serve agriculture as well.”
Click Here for Full Article
VentureBeat: Bright Ideas With Little Energy
Super-Efficient Lighting Technologies Provide Energy Saving Ideas
Thomas Slater April 29th, 2008
In Australia, the husband and wife team behind Lumiflux has found a way to make a 50 year old technology seem new and, well, shiny. Electroluminescence, or EL, has been the technology behind your digital watch night-light and a series of small lamps from Sylvania for a long time. Until quite recently, though, EL was not bright enough for more widespread area lighting applications.
Ernest and Gabriella Kabay have developed EL panels that are flexible, easily cut to shape and 2-3 times brighter than previous generations of EL. This makes them ideal for outdoors advertising and signage.
In the US alone there are approximately one hundred million exit signs. Every year, these require thirty to thirty five billion kilowatt-hours, which costs two point eight billion dollars to produce and is the equivalent of four million cars on the road. Lumiflux EL signage would reduce that to 10% of current figures. In “exit” signs alone, there are impressive potential savings. The possibilities go much further, Kabay says. Outdoor advertisements, highway billboards, business signs and anything else normally requiring a large surface area to be lit up would all save an enormous amount of power by using EL instead of fluorescent technology.
ElectroCeramescent (ECer) lighting is a competing technology from the US, and a close relative of EL technology. ECer lighting co-developed by Meadow River Enterprises and Osram-Sylvania, in collaboration with the United States Department of Energy, can light up a billboard over forty times more efficiently than fluorescent lighting. An average fourteen-by-twenty foot billboard lit with fluorescent lights requires 550 watts of power — ECer brings that requirement down to 12.5 watts.
ECer lights are composed of a ceramic-and-steel structure that can be laser-cut to any desired shape. The sign itself is the light — which means that instead of lighting up an entire sign (“Exit”) with artificial daylight conditions, only enough light to contrast with the night is needed. This dramatically reduces power consumption and light pollution, while increasing visibility. Since it is made from steel and ceramic, durability is not expected to be an issue. “Property of…” signs may be expected to last 50,000 hours with little maintenance, even in harsh conditions and high-vandalism areas.
While EL and ECer lighting might save the world with their outdoors efficiency, they still aren’t bright enough for indoors lighting. For human working range brightness it is hard to do better than natural sunlight – which is, at the time of this writing, still free. To that end, the research and manufacturing giant 3M has patented a way to pipe daylight and Fluorosolar has found a way to take advantage of ambient UV light.
3M’s light pipe starts with a solar collector called a Heliostat. This is, essentially, a small domed structure which lets light inside but won’t release it. The Heliostat is aimed at direct sunlight throughout the day. From the Heliostat, it is transmitted through a tube with a highly reflective lining. These light pipes go from the roof (or any place with high sun exposure) to the area to be lit up. At the end of the pipe is a diffuser — and from the diffuser comes natural, electricity-free sunlight. During the day, this system provides free light. At night, artificial light can be introduced into the pipe or other high-efficiency sources could be used.
Fluorosolar takes a different approach. Instead of trying to capture the full spectrum light that we can see, FluoroSolar uses a flat panel to capture UV rays that are present even on cloudy days. This UV light is then sorted into red and green light before being piped to the interior of a building, where it is combined with artificial blue light. Red, green and blue together form the basis of what we call useful light.
The bonus prize with Fluorosolar is that no IR light is taken in or created in the process. With no additional heat being taken in or made, there is no extra burden on climate control systems. It is also the only light-piping technology that doesn’t require auxiliary light input for cloudy days, and is therefore the only realistic sun lighting in sad, rainy places like Seattle.
One technology that promises to do both indoors and outdoors lighting within the next few years is a plasma light bulb from Luxim, a company that recently took a $21 million funding. OK, so maybe their bulbs aren’t in the bedside table configuration, and maybe they won’t be anytime soon. It is, however, a plasma light bulb, a fact that demands the respect and attention from the tech crowd of our great nation.
At around 140 lumens per watt, Luxim’s plasma bulbs are almost ten times more efficient than Tom Edison’s old invention. But despite their 30,000 hour lifespan, the current cost of the bulbs restricts them to use in projectors and commercial lighting. The upside is that in many commercial applications the Luxim plasma technology would allow for fixtures to shrink dramatically — a plasma bulb the size of a fingertip can out-perform a traditional bulb the size of your head — and consume less power.
LiFi, as Luxim calls it, is still in its adolescent stages. At the 2008 Light & Building trade fair in Frankfurt, Germany, Luxim marketed their plasma technology as fit for stage lighting, pavilion lighting, parking garages sporting events and everywhere else you need really big lights. Most notably, though, Luxim saw their plasma bulbs as being an ideal fit for hybridized light pipe systems — in this application, they claimed 30,000 hours of lifespan and 120 lumens per watt. Edison only managed 15. All this performance, though, is still in a large-lighting application package. This is not a problem for Luxim, though — the outdoors lighting market is big enough that they aren’t yet concerned with household products.
Source
Thomas Slater April 29th, 2008
In Australia, the husband and wife team behind Lumiflux has found a way to make a 50 year old technology seem new and, well, shiny. Electroluminescence, or EL, has been the technology behind your digital watch night-light and a series of small lamps from Sylvania for a long time. Until quite recently, though, EL was not bright enough for more widespread area lighting applications.
Ernest and Gabriella Kabay have developed EL panels that are flexible, easily cut to shape and 2-3 times brighter than previous generations of EL. This makes them ideal for outdoors advertising and signage.
In the US alone there are approximately one hundred million exit signs. Every year, these require thirty to thirty five billion kilowatt-hours, which costs two point eight billion dollars to produce and is the equivalent of four million cars on the road. Lumiflux EL signage would reduce that to 10% of current figures. In “exit” signs alone, there are impressive potential savings. The possibilities go much further, Kabay says. Outdoor advertisements, highway billboards, business signs and anything else normally requiring a large surface area to be lit up would all save an enormous amount of power by using EL instead of fluorescent technology.
ElectroCeramescent (ECer) lighting is a competing technology from the US, and a close relative of EL technology. ECer lighting co-developed by Meadow River Enterprises and Osram-Sylvania, in collaboration with the United States Department of Energy, can light up a billboard over forty times more efficiently than fluorescent lighting. An average fourteen-by-twenty foot billboard lit with fluorescent lights requires 550 watts of power — ECer brings that requirement down to 12.5 watts.
ECer lights are composed of a ceramic-and-steel structure that can be laser-cut to any desired shape. The sign itself is the light — which means that instead of lighting up an entire sign (“Exit”) with artificial daylight conditions, only enough light to contrast with the night is needed. This dramatically reduces power consumption and light pollution, while increasing visibility. Since it is made from steel and ceramic, durability is not expected to be an issue. “Property of…” signs may be expected to last 50,000 hours with little maintenance, even in harsh conditions and high-vandalism areas.
While EL and ECer lighting might save the world with their outdoors efficiency, they still aren’t bright enough for indoors lighting. For human working range brightness it is hard to do better than natural sunlight – which is, at the time of this writing, still free. To that end, the research and manufacturing giant 3M has patented a way to pipe daylight and Fluorosolar has found a way to take advantage of ambient UV light.
3M’s light pipe starts with a solar collector called a Heliostat. This is, essentially, a small domed structure which lets light inside but won’t release it. The Heliostat is aimed at direct sunlight throughout the day. From the Heliostat, it is transmitted through a tube with a highly reflective lining. These light pipes go from the roof (or any place with high sun exposure) to the area to be lit up. At the end of the pipe is a diffuser — and from the diffuser comes natural, electricity-free sunlight. During the day, this system provides free light. At night, artificial light can be introduced into the pipe or other high-efficiency sources could be used.
Fluorosolar takes a different approach. Instead of trying to capture the full spectrum light that we can see, FluoroSolar uses a flat panel to capture UV rays that are present even on cloudy days. This UV light is then sorted into red and green light before being piped to the interior of a building, where it is combined with artificial blue light. Red, green and blue together form the basis of what we call useful light.
The bonus prize with Fluorosolar is that no IR light is taken in or created in the process. With no additional heat being taken in or made, there is no extra burden on climate control systems. It is also the only light-piping technology that doesn’t require auxiliary light input for cloudy days, and is therefore the only realistic sun lighting in sad, rainy places like Seattle.
One technology that promises to do both indoors and outdoors lighting within the next few years is a plasma light bulb from Luxim, a company that recently took a $21 million funding. OK, so maybe their bulbs aren’t in the bedside table configuration, and maybe they won’t be anytime soon. It is, however, a plasma light bulb, a fact that demands the respect and attention from the tech crowd of our great nation.
At around 140 lumens per watt, Luxim’s plasma bulbs are almost ten times more efficient than Tom Edison’s old invention. But despite their 30,000 hour lifespan, the current cost of the bulbs restricts them to use in projectors and commercial lighting. The upside is that in many commercial applications the Luxim plasma technology would allow for fixtures to shrink dramatically — a plasma bulb the size of a fingertip can out-perform a traditional bulb the size of your head — and consume less power.
LiFi, as Luxim calls it, is still in its adolescent stages. At the 2008 Light & Building trade fair in Frankfurt, Germany, Luxim marketed their plasma technology as fit for stage lighting, pavilion lighting, parking garages sporting events and everywhere else you need really big lights. Most notably, though, Luxim saw their plasma bulbs as being an ideal fit for hybridized light pipe systems — in this application, they claimed 30,000 hours of lifespan and 120 lumens per watt. Edison only managed 15. All this performance, though, is still in a large-lighting application package. This is not a problem for Luxim, though — the outdoors lighting market is big enough that they aren’t yet concerned with household products.
Source
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Original Content: Jatropha Happens!
What was the hold up?
You may be wondering why I made one post in September 2007 and only now am I getting around to a second post. Well, in between I was working for a VC/PE start-up here in Shanghai trying to formulate an investment strategy worthy of creating a fund. It was an amazing experience working with and meeting such excellent people. Some really interesting projects have passed across our desks, but alas, we have not yet made any investments. But in the process of scouring boardrooms and government bureaus across China, I have eaten some of the the weirdest things to crawl on this earth (see photos below).
Unfortunately, we started with a strategy that is still unproven, is still very high risk, and we just didn't have enough human resources to get it off the ground. The industry we've been working on is the "Jatropha to Biodiesel" industry in China and Southeast Asia. Working on this project I've been to Yunnan, Sichuan, Guangxi, Hainan, Guangdong, Beijing, and Jakarta, Indonesia. Along the way, we've also looked into hydro power, industrial property development, residential developments, Chinese medicinal herb crops, wind power, rubber tree seeds to biodiesel, waste water treatment facilities and more. I've attended three Jatropha related industry conferences held in Beijing, Hainan and Jakarta, respectively, and have collected untold amounts of information and paperwork on Jatropha. And after all that, I still can't answer one simple question...how much yield can you expect from one ha of Jatropha plantings?
A Hechi City, Guangxi Province specialty
A Panzhihua City, Sichuan Province Specialty called Sand Crawlers (爬沙虫)
You may be wondering why I made one post in September 2007 and only now am I getting around to a second post. Well, in between I was working for a VC/PE start-up here in Shanghai trying to formulate an investment strategy worthy of creating a fund. It was an amazing experience working with and meeting such excellent people. Some really interesting projects have passed across our desks, but alas, we have not yet made any investments. But in the process of scouring boardrooms and government bureaus across China, I have eaten some of the the weirdest things to crawl on this earth (see photos below).
Unfortunately, we started with a strategy that is still unproven, is still very high risk, and we just didn't have enough human resources to get it off the ground. The industry we've been working on is the "Jatropha to Biodiesel" industry in China and Southeast Asia. Working on this project I've been to Yunnan, Sichuan, Guangxi, Hainan, Guangdong, Beijing, and Jakarta, Indonesia. Along the way, we've also looked into hydro power, industrial property development, residential developments, Chinese medicinal herb crops, wind power, rubber tree seeds to biodiesel, waste water treatment facilities and more. I've attended three Jatropha related industry conferences held in Beijing, Hainan and Jakarta, respectively, and have collected untold amounts of information and paperwork on Jatropha. And after all that, I still can't answer one simple question...how much yield can you expect from one ha of Jatropha plantings?
Wild Jatropha an a hilltop in Panzhihua, Sichuan Province
This is not to say I am somewhat dimwitted. But rather that the question is so contextual that giving an answer is nearly impossible. And it's quite frustrating. I'll explain many of the variables that effects yield, in another personal post (once I verify my NDA allows for it).
For now, you'll just have to be satisfied with photos of some of the strangest foods. Unfortunately, I never got a picture of the stewed bear claw served to me once in Huzhou, Zhejiang. G-d forgive me.
A Hechi City, Guangxi Province specialty
A Panzhihua City, Sichuan Province Specialty called Sand Crawlers (爬沙虫)
BTW, you eat them deep fried. And surprisingly, they're not bad or gooey.
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