tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-80075576403738322502024-03-05T23:59:17.899-08:00A Green and Prosperous Middle EastThe purpose of this blog is to describe economic opportunities in such countries as Egypt and Tunisia that can serve as a basis for a future "good boom" that will create employment and benefit the local and global environment. This blog is a " work in progress" and each entry is subject to future editing and expansion.Doug Boothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08725464785512608571noreply@blogger.comBlogger12125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8007557640373832250.post-92108907638455572212014-11-12T06:02:00.000-08:002014-11-12T06:07:49.408-08:00A Climate Deal with China is a Essential Benchmark on the Way to a Stable Climate and a Global Economic Boom!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Go Barack!<br />
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U.S. and China Reach Agreement on Climate After Months of Talks<br />
By MARK LANDLER</div>
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President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China, with their delegations, met inside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Wednesday.<br />
Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images<br />
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BEIJING — <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/china/index.html?inline=nyt-geo">China</a> and the United States made common cause on Wednesday against the threat of <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier">climate change</a>, staking out an ambitious joint plan to curb carbon emissions as a way to spur nations around the world to make their own cuts in greenhouse gases.<br />
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The landmark agreement, jointly announced here by President Obama and President Xi Jinping, includes new targets for carbon emissions reductions by the United States and a first-ever commitment by China to stop its emissions from growing by 2030.<br />
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Administration officials said the agreement, which was worked out quietly between the United States and China over nine months and included a letter from Mr. Obama to Mr. Xi proposing a joint approach, could galvanize efforts to negotiate a new global climate agreement by 2015.<br />
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It was the signature achievement of an unexpectedly productive two days of meetings between the leaders. Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi also agreed to a military accord designed to avert clashes between Chinese and American planes and warships in the tense waters off the Chinese coast, as well as an understanding to cut tariffs for technology products.<br />
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A climate deal between China and the United States, the world’s No. 1 and No. 2 carbon polluters, is viewed as essential to concluding a new global accord. Unless Beijing and Washington can resolve their differences, climate experts say, few other countries will agree to mandatory cuts in emissions, and any meaningful worldwide pact will be likely to founder.<br />
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“The United States and China have often been seen as antagonists,” said a senior official, speaking in advance of Mr. Obama’s remarks. “We hope that this announcement can usher in a new day in which China and the U.S. can act much more as partners.”<br />
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As part of the agreement, Mr. Obama announced that the United States would emit 26 percent to 28 percent less carbon in 2025 than it did in 2005. That is double the pace of reduction it targeted for the period from 2005 to 2020.<br />
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China’s pledge to reach peak carbon emissions by 2030, if not sooner, is even more remarkable. To reach that goal, Mr. Xi pledged that so-called clean energy sources, like <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/energy-environment/solar-energy/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier">solar power</a> and windmills, would account for 20 percent of China’s total energy production by 2030.<br />
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Administration officials acknowledged that Mr. Obama could face opposition to his plans from a Republican-controlled Congress. While the agreement with China needs no congressional ratification, lawmakers could try to roll back Mr. Obama’s initiatives, undermining the United States’ ability to meet the new reduction targets.<br />
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Still, Mr. Obama’s visit, which came days after a setback in the midterm elections, allowed him to reclaim some of the momentum he lost at home. As the campaign was turning against the Democrats last month, Mr. Obama quietly dispatched John Podesta, a senior adviser who oversees climate policy, to Beijing to try to finalize a deal.<br />
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For all the talk of collaboration, the United States and China also displayed why they are still fierce rivals for global economic primacy, promoting competing free-trade blocs for the Asian region even as they reached climate and security deals.<br />
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The maneuvering came during a conference of Pacific Rim economies held in Beijing that has showcased China’s growing dominance in Asia, but also the determination of the United States, riding a resurgent economy, to reclaim its historical role as a Pacific power.<br />
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Adding to the historic nature of the visit, Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi were scheduled to give a joint news conference on Wednesday that will include questions from reporters — a rare concession by the Chinese leader to a visiting American president.<br />
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On Tuesday evening, Mr. Xi invited Mr. Obama to dinner at his official residence, telling his guest he hoped they had laid the foundation for a collaborative relationship — or, as he more metaphorically put it, “A pool begins with many drops of water.”<br />
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Greeting Mr. Obama at the gate of the walled leadership compound next to the Forbidden City, Mr. Xi squired him across a brightly lighted stone bridge and into the residence. Mr. Obama told the Chinese president that he wanted to take the relationship “to a new level.”<br />
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“When the U.S. and China are able to work together effectively,” he added, “the whole world benefits.”<br />
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But as the world witnessed this week, it is more complicated than that. Mr. Xi won approval Tuesday from the 21 countries of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum to study the creation of a China-led free-trade zone that would be an alternative to Mr. Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation trading bloc that excludes China.<br />
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On Monday, Mr. Obama met with members of that group here and claimed progress in negotiating the partnership, a centerpiece of his strategic shift to Asia.<br />
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Negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership are much further along than those for the nascent Chinese plan, known as the Free Trade Area of Asia Pacific, and some analysts said the approval by the Pacific Rim nations of a two-year study was mainly a gesture to the Chinese hosts to give them something to announce at the meeting.<br />
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For all the jockeying, the biggest trade headline was a breakthrough in negotiations with China to eliminate tariffs on information technology products, from video-game consoles and computer software to medical equipment and semiconductors.<br />
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The understanding, American officials said, opens the door to expanding a World Trade Organization agreement on these products, assuming other countries can be persuaded to accept the same terms. With China on board, officials predicted a broader deal would be reached swiftly.<br />
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“We’re going to take what’s been achieved here in Beijing back to Geneva to work with our W.T.O. partners,” said Michael B. Froman, the United States trade representative. “While we don’t take anything for granted, we’re hopeful that we’ll be able to work quickly” to conclude an expansion of the agreement, known as the Information Technology Agreement.<br />
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On Wednesday morning, Mr. Xi formally welcomed Mr. Obama at a ceremony in the Great Hall of the People; they later toasted each other at a state banquet.<br />
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Administration officials said Mr. Obama had pressed Mr. Xi to resume a United States-China working group on cybersecurity issues, which abruptly stopped its discussions after the United States charged several Chinese military officers with hacking.<br />
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“We did see a chill in the cyber dialogue,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser. “We do believe it’s better if there’s a mechanism for dialogue.”<br />
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On Tuesday, Mr. Obama credited APEC with originating the work on reducing tariffs, saying, “The United States and China have reached an understanding that we hope will contribute to a rapid conclusion of the broader negotiations in Geneva.”<br />
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Talks with China over expanding the 1997 accord on information technology broke down last year over the scope of the products covered by the agreement. But after intensive negotiations leading up to Mr. Obama’s visit, Mr. Froman said, the Americans and the Chinese agreed Monday evening to eliminate more than 200 categories of tariffs.<br />
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While the United States still exports many high-technology goods, China is the world’s dominant exporter of electronics and has much to gain from an elimination of tariffs. Taiwan, South Korea and Japan increasingly find themselves supplying China’s huge electronics industry, deepening their dependence on decisions made in Beijing.<br />
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The administration estimated that expanding the Information Technology Agreement would create up to 60,000 jobs in the United States by eliminating tariffs on goods that generate $1 trillion in sales a year. About $100 billion of those products are American-made. The administration faces a longer path on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, including whether Mr. Obama will obtain fast-track trade authority from Congress. That could make it easier for the United States to extract concessions from other countries, since they would have more confidence that the treaty would be ratified by Congress.<br />
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While Mr. Froman conceded that sticking points remained, he said, “It’s become clearer and clearer what the landing zones are.” He said that Mr. Obama would seek fast-track authority, but that the best way for him to win congressional passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership would be to negotiate the best deal.<br />
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Keith Bradsher and Chris Buckley contributed reporting from Hong Kong, and Coral Davenport from Washington.</div>
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Doug Boothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08725464785512608571noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8007557640373832250.post-70971740906365238162014-02-05T12:21:00.000-08:002014-09-16T11:01:28.676-07:00Travels with Airbnb<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Airbnb, a web site for finding rooms, apartments, or houses to rent in the U.S. and around the world, has taken root in countries like Italy and Tunisia where people are desperate for innovative ways to earn a little extra income. The web site's essential economic virtue is to bring into play underutilized resources, while its key social virtue is to bring together people from diverse cultural backgrounds who would not otherwise meet.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Within Airbnb, there is a definite experiential divide, as we found out on a recent trip to Italy and Tunisia. Within the website, one can rent either a room within a house with access to a bathroom and oftentimes the kitchen, or one can rent a complete domicile. The price and quality range is substantial, creating options for almost any travel budget. We discovered a distinct difference between renting a room within someone's home and a complete apartment. Doing the latter amounts to a fairly standard landlord-tenant relationship. Doing the former embeds you in the daily life of the host to varying degrees. This can give one an incredible window to a local culture and sometimes useful information about how to navigate it. One can also get involved in your host's problems of the day, which can be interesting but also stressful. You will for sure get an experience a conventional hotel cannot offer, and probably one you will never forget.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I can't get into details about our particular encounters because of the public nature of the Airbnb website and it's highly functional system of both host and renter reviews. Suffice it to say we had a wonderful dinner with young student hosts that will stick in our memories forever, we learned about the serious problems of unemployment and making ends meet in two countries, and we experienced the wonders and anxieties of family and child-rearing, having for us a familiar ring, but in a culture not our own. We also met and enjoyed a dinner and very special conversation with a fellow tenant and wonderful young Arabic-speaking American student intern working on a degree in International Studies. Again, these kinds of experiences a tour guide cannot arrange for you. While cultures vary, with each having problems and wonders of its own, in getting through daily life we are all not so different.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Securing a dwelling through Airbnb, no matter whether it's a room or an apartment, has the added virtue of embedding you in a locality outside of the usual tourist zones and exposing you more fully to the actual daily public life of the city, village, or countryside you visit. One can more easily enjoy the experience of shopping in neighborhood grocery stores, stopping for a coffee or glass of wine in a local cafe and watching the daily goings on, eating a meal in a restaurant favored by locals, walking or exercising in a local park, hiking along a country road or urban trail, and still visit famous attractions using local public transit. This we were able to do readily in Florence, Bologna, Ancona, and Rome, Italy as well as Tunis, Tunisia.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Finally, what's good for connecting one with the local culture is also good for spreading tourist dollars more effectively around the local economy. Instead of dumping your money into the coffers of multinational corporate hotels, restaurants, and tour organizers, your dollars will flow to local home owners, shops, street vendors, and transit systems, to individuals and businesses that will themselves be more likely to recycle the money they receive back into the local economy than the multinationals. This is even the case for a clever pickpocket on a crowded tram that unzipped my front pant's pocket an got my wallet. In short, Airbnb is a back door global development strategy that can help the Italy's and Tunisia's of the world to seek a better economic life. </span></div>
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Doug Boothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08725464785512608571noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8007557640373832250.post-75027515422512064672013-10-15T08:55:00.001-07:002013-10-15T08:55:25.189-07:00Social Invention Continues in Egypt<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Anyone who cares about Egypt can’t help but feel depressed about the course of recent events in that country. The liberating optimism of the Egyptian Arab Spring has now been transformed into violent political oppression by the military in its quest to return the country to dictatorial rule by bureaucratic elites accustomed to doing the military's bidding.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Talk of public, collective social innovations, such as expanding Cairo's metro and transit system to alleviate its crushing traffic problem, or investing in public facilities to the benefit of the city's neighborhoods where informal housing predominates, for the moment is dead. Nor is anyone talking about large scale investments to take advantage of the country's abundant solar energy potential. These are the kind of projects that could create substantial benefits as well as employment opportunities for the Egyptian people. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">This is not to say that all actions with the purpose of economic and social improvement are dead. Outside the control, and under the radar, of state rule, private sector social innovators continue to do their work, including Sekem Organics, Schaduf Urban Microfarms, and KarmSolar. For a detailed discussion of these organizations, take a look at my Philosophy for a Green Economic Future or <a href="http://greenandprosperousmiddleeast.blogspot.com/">http://greenandprosperousmiddleeast.blogspot.com</a>. We can now add to this list an innovative aquaponics farm called "Bustan" on Cairo's desert outskirts raising leafy green produce and Tilapia together in a virtuous combined cycle of water and nutrients. These four organizations have carried out their various activities despite surrounding political disruptions as we will now see.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">SEKEM, headquartered at Salam City, Cairo, includes five different companies that employ approximately 1,600 people and produce and distribute a variety of organic products including natural medicines, cereals, rice, vegetables, pasta, honey, jams, dates, spices, herbs, edible oils, herbal teas, juices, coffee, milk, eggs, beef, sheep, chicken, seeds, and organic cotton textiles and clothing. The company generated approximately 240 million EGP (Egyptian Pounds) in net sales for 2012 and earned 1.5 million EGP in profit. About 22 percent of its sales originate from exports, and the rest from the domestic market. One company in the group, ISIS, distributes more than 80 percent of the herbal teas sold in Egypt. SEKEM currently operates four farms on reclaimed desert lands that provide almost a third of the company’s organic raw materials and has created permanent “Fair Trade” ties with small farmers for the rest. SEKEM’s secret weapon in desert reclamation is compost, a product it both uses itself and sells to other farmers. Compost rich soil in deserts increases fertility and productivity, retains much more water than conventional farm soil (essential in an arid climate), and sequesters substantial amount of carbon in its accumulated organic matter to the benefit of global climate stability. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">SEKEM’s goals and activities extend well beyond those of a conventional business in its pursuit of its founding mission to create ecologically sustainable oases in the desert where health-giving organic goods can be grown in a manner protective of both the local and and international environment. In and around these oases, SEKEM also seeks to create communities where individuals can not only improve their material condition, but expand their educational and culture capabilities as well. In all its efforts, SEKEM adheres to strict standards for the protection of human rights (including religious freedom), achievement of gender equity, and educational and cultural advancement as well as rigorous targets for environmental sustainability including carbon emissions reduction. SEKEM’s vision of advancing sustainable development took a substantial leap forward in 2012 with the opening of its Heliopolis University after a ten-year planning and development phase. The University offers degree programs in pharmacy, engineering, and business administration, with majors available in such area as accounting, marketing, economics, environmental studies, renewable energy, and water conservation management. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Along with everyone else in Egypt, SEKEM continues to face the challenges of political upheaval in 2013, but has worked hard to overcome economic disruptions and to further advance its environmental, economic, and social purposes. Work on soil reclamation continues this year on its Sinai farm where a new crop of organic potatoes was successfully grown and harvested. SEKEM also furthered its efforts in 2013 to more fully integrate women into the labor force by expanding their work opportunities. The custom in Egypt is for woman to stay at home once they marry and care for the family, but many women today desire to maintain a degree of economic independence as well as connections to the larger local community. To expand employment opportunities SEKEM, unlike other businesses, continues to employ labor intensive technologies as opposed to automation where economically feasible. A conference on solar thermal energy held in June at Heliopolis University featured SEKEM’s solar thermal pilot plant which provides hot water for industrial purposes on its nearby farm at Belbeis. This is a short list of SEKEM’s projects and activities that continue despite the huge political challenges Egypt is facing. Social invention and innovation is alive and well at one of the country’s most successful and solidly established independent social ventures.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">A newer, younger enterprise addressing critical environmental and economic problems, Schaduf Urban Microfarms, is also alive and well. To backyard gardeners who love to muck around in real dirt, growing plants in water somehow seems other-worldly, but the science of doing so, known as hydroponics, is a well established technology. Soil in natural conditions serves as a reservoir for water and plant nutrients, but plants don’t actually require soil to survive. Nutrients are absorbed by plants through roots as inorganic mineral ions dissolved in water. So long as their roots have access to water containing essential minerals as well as oxygen, plants can survive without soil and can be grown "hydroponically" in something as simple as water in a Mason jar, but more frequently growers use an inert medium such as perlite, gravel, mineral wool, or coconut husk with water flowing through it. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Hydroponic gardening has virtues that offer special advantages for growing plants in an arid climate like Cairo’s. In soil-based farming, applying the right amount of water is a tricky business. Too much watering causes plants to die from a lack of oxygen, and too little leads to plant starvation. For hydroponic farming, plant roots can be continuously or frequently exposed to nutrient-laden water and the plants can absorb as much or as little as they want. Unused water can be drained away and recycled keeping consumption to a bare minimum. The key challenge for the hydroponic approach is to get the balance of needed mineral in the water just right, including macronutrients such as nitrates, calcium, phosphate, and magnesium, and micronutrients such as iron, copper, zinc, boron, chlorine and nickel. In addition to an appropriate balance of nutrients, care must be taken to not let the water’s pH get out of whack or salts to build up excessively. Any interruption in water flows can be catastrophic, and water must be stored in light-free tanks to prevent the formation of algae. A successful hydroponic system can achieve high levels of productivity with a modest water and nutrient input. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The dream of social entrepreneur, Sherif Hosny, is to create 325 hydroponic rooftop gardens in Cairo. Hosny named the business, Schaduf, after a simple traditional Egyptian tool for raising water to higher ground for crop irrigation. The business offers Cairo’s poorest residents a simple form of hydroponic farming. Construct on a family's rooftop three 20 square meter ponds made of brick sides about 10 centimeters high and place a waterproof liner on the inner surface, fill with water and cover with sheets of floating styrofoam to serve as a platform for plants, and install a circulating pump for oxygenating the water. Add a standard hydroponic nutrient mix and plant the seedlings. Come by and check the pH and electrolyte levels weekly, replenish nutrients as needed, and soon with the help of Egypt's sun and heat you will have a rooftop of green produce that can be sold for 300-500 Egyptian pounds a month, significantly increasing a Cairene's family income and creating a wonderful place for children to play that pulls them away from the dangers of the streets. Sherif's company, Schaduf Urban Micro Farms, will provide a poor family with a rooftop farm costing about 4,000 Egyptian pounds that can be financed with a micro-loan easily paid off in a year. So far Schaduf has installed and maintains 15 farms, periodically checking the nutrient mix, controlling any pests organically, and collecting and selling the produce in a local Zamalek farmer's market for its clients.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">A second youthful social enterprise, Karmsolar is also successfully navigating the perils of Egypt’s political upheaval. Ahmed Zahran grew up in Cairo, received a bachelor’s degree in finance from the American University in Cairo, and a masters from the University of London. While he never was exposed to renewable energy in his studies, he gained an interest in it early on, and wanted to work in the field. Because opportunities were nonexistent in Egypt, Zahran went work for Shell Oil Company and eventually landed in the company’s carbon emissions trading department. Here it soon became obvious to him that the only way to reduce emissions was to shift from fossil fuels to solar, and his work at Shell was not going to help much in achieving that goal. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Zahran returned to Egypt and went to work for a solar energy company that unfortunately succumbed to the upheaval of the Arab Spring. This experience led Zahran to join with some friends in founding KarmSolar for the purpose of developing solar energy applications to serve the unique needs of Egyptians who live in desert landscapes. KarmSolar has gained global attention for its work on high capacity off-grid solar water pumps that recover underground water from very deep wells for agricultural uses. The driving premise of KarmSolar is to offer Egyptians the opportunity to live in off-grid desert communities and have access to essential unexploited groundwater resources available on the edges of the Nile Valley and desert oases. The idea is to pull population away from an overcrowded Nile and take advantage of the desert’s abundant sun and soil. The big problem currently for agriculture on reclaimed Egyptian desert far away from an electrical grid is dependence on diesel powered generators that require difficult to deliver and expensive liquid fuels for their operation. The big advantage offered by the KarmSolar approach is an independent local source of electrical power that can run irrigation pumps and other kinds of equipment such as water purifiers and desalinators. The marriage of solar power and water efficient-irrigation makes feasible the creation of new communities in the desert wherever groundwater can be found.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">In 2013 KarmSolar signed contracts for 400 kilowatts of solar capacity in the desert in comparison to 50 kilowatts for 2012. Even more important, KarmSolar is currently developing an all-solar village that will provide living space for 500 workers scheduled for completion by 2016 on the 5,000 acre Al Tayeebat farm in the Bahareya Oasis. This is after the company cut its teeth constructing a 50 kilowatt off-grid high-capacity solar system powering a submersible water pump on Al Tayeebat and its own eco-friendly solar-powered headquarters building using natural earth materials at Bahareya. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">We have embodied in these three Egyptian enterprises innovations in organic desert soil reclamation, hydroponic urban farming, and solar powered desert irrigation, and to this list we can now add aquaponics. At his farm called “Bustan” (Arabic for orchard) in the desert on Cairo’s outskirts, Faris Farraq, a banker who loves to grow plants and catch fish, recently adopted an aquaponic scheme of production. With the help of a local couple, he grows fresh kale, cucumbers, basil, lettuce, green peppers and tomatoes in the bright and ever-present Egyptian sun, and raises meaty Nile tilapia. Aquaponics extends hydroponics to add fish to the nutrient cycle. Vegetables grow in a neutral medium with their roots exposed to nutrient laden water from which they remove nutritious but potentially polluting chemicals. The cleansed water then flows to tanks where fish reside, eat fish food, and eliminate wastes. Fish tank waters, exposed to bacteria that convert nitrogen wastes to a form useable by plants, get pumped back through trays of leafy green vegetables, completing the cycle. In the process, very little water goes to waste and nutrient inputs to the system are efficiently absorbed by plants and fish. Just like Sekem, Schaduf, and KarmSolar, Faris Farraq is turning a water-scarce, brutally hot desert into an economic virtue capable of supplying food and a means of earning a living to the people of Egypt. While still in the experimental stage of his work, Farraq argues that his system can be expanded in scale to profitably produce as much 6-8 tons of fish and 45,000 heads of lettuce per year. Whether all this work of our Egyptian social entrepreneurs stands the test of time remains to be seen, but what they have already accomplished gives the country a ray of hope where at the moment there doesn't otherwise seem to be much. </span></span></div>
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Doug Boothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08725464785512608571noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8007557640373832250.post-1969101477237718752013-10-07T07:13:00.000-07:002013-10-07T07:19:04.894-07:00A New Kind of Revolution in Egypt<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Despite the current political chaos in Egypt, a positive revolution is going on in the desert under the radar. Taking advantage of Egypt's abundant sunshine, water-conserving aquaponics is coming to the desert and producing tons of nutritious plants and fish for the Egytian population and creating new jobs in the process. Thanks to my son Jeremy for bringing this to my attention. Go Egypt! Check out the following article. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/09/egypt-aims-for-revolution-desert-farming-2013923123946325303.html#.UlK8-wQlaMw.gmail">http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/09/egypt-aims-for-revolution-desert-farming-2013923123946325303.html#.UlK8-wQlaMw.gmail</a></span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br /></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><strong>Cairo</strong>,<strong> Egypt </strong>-The hazy desert that extends from the outskirts of Cairo has become the unlikely scene of another revolution that has the potential to transform Egypt - and it is green.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Inhospitable, yellowed wasteland is now yielding up ripe red tomatoes, fresh kale and schools of fish in a bold experiment fuelled by the country's most precious resource: water.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">This surprising harvest illustrates how Egypt is witnessing a slow transformation in attitudes towards the environment driven by groups such as Greenpeace and <a class="InternalLink" href="http://nawayaegypt.org/Nawaya_Egypt/Nawaya.html" style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Nawaya</a> alongside an innovative young sustainability movement.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In the vanguard of this movement is Faris Farrag, an Egyptian banker inspired by a love of growing plants and fishing, who has embraced the revolutionary technique of aquaponics at his unassuming farm outside Cairo called "Bustan" (Arabic for orchard).</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"As the price of water soars, as the price of petrol soars, and when the subsidies on farming disappear, this model makes sense," says Farrag.</span><br />
<strong style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Reviving ancient techniques</strong><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><a class="InternalLink" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26xpMCXP9bw" style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Aquaponics</a>, an ancient form of cultivation that originated with the Aztecs, enables farmers to increase yields by growing plants and farming fish in the same closed freshwater system.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Farrag studied the technique under Dr James Rakocy at the University of the Virgin Islands, whose sustainable farming method grew in popularity in the 1980s and is n</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Enterprising farmers have implemented the system in countries as diverse as Bangladesh, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen to save water and increase output.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">As the price of water soars, as the price of petrol soars, and when the subsidies on farming disappear, this model makes sense</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Farris Farrag, former banker</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">At Bustan, the first commercial aquaponics farm in Egypt<strong>, </strong>olive trees flank the growing areas sprouting from what seems to be sandy ground, and dusty mesh screens are the only barriers protecting delicate young plants from the expansive tracts of sand.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Water circulates from tanks hosting schools of fleshy Nile tilapia through hydroponic trays which grow vegetables including cucumber, basil, lettuce, kale, peppers and tomatoes on floating foam beds with run-off flushed out to irrigate the trees.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">It is an ingenious solution to an old problem in a country dominated by unforgiving deserts where access to fresh water is a luxury in many areas.</span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><a class="InternalLink" href="http://www.global-politics.co.uk/blog/2013/08/17/egypt_security_nile/" style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">The Nile supplies Egypt</a> with almost all its water, 85 percent of which goes to agriculture - but the country has long outgrown agreements with neighbours on its share of this resource as its population has soared to 85 million, and is pressing to renegotiate terms.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Earlier this year the most populous Arab nation made global headlines in an angry disagreement over plans to <a class="InternalLink" href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2013/06/201361144413214749.html" style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">dam</a> the Blue Nile, denouncing Ethiopia's attempts to reroute the river.</span><br />
<strong style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Need for environmental policies</strong><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Compounding problems of access to water is pollution, and visitors only have to peer at the Nile's swirling eddies and water catchments to notice the gunk and assorted rubbish that confirm the low priority afforded environmentalism.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Most of the population lives on the 2.9 percent of land that is arable and use the only source of fresh water as an industrial, human and agricultural dump, undeterred by laws that prohibit the throwing of waste into the Nile.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Compounding water pollution, Egypt's annual "black cloud" caused by the burning of agricultural waste costs an estimated $6bn in damage to natural resources and a further $2bn in associated health effects, according to date compiled by the American University in Cairo.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">These challenges are a bleak reminder of how desperately Egypt needs environmental policies to protect its fragile agricultural resources.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">From Cairo's unremitting expansion into fertile areas to the mountains of garbage strewn on the city's streets, incessant congestion, and misuse of the water supply, there are precious few examples of sustainability.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Which is where Farrag believes aquaponics comes in - Bustan uses 90 percent less water than traditional farming methods in Egypt.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">He argues that his model is economically viable and scalable, producing between 6-8 tonnes of fish per year and potentially yielding 45,000 heads of lettuce if it were to grow just a single type of vegetable.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Sustainability underpins the whole operation, he says. Bustan is not land-intensive and Farrag also uses biological pest control methods, such as ladybirds to kill aphids, in order to avoid chemical inputs.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">The project also employs two locals, Abdul Rasul Hassanain and his wife Amal, who live on a nearby plot of land and have dramatically increased their role in running the farm.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Dr Ashraf Ghanem, a professor of water engineering at Cairo University, is a strong advocate of the system.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">He recently told journalists about the potential benefits of these farms in the Middle East, saying they: "Could serve as a means of income generation for unemployed women, as well as a means of education for children of the household on principles of water saving, plant and fish biology, nutrient cycle, fluid mechanics, hydraulics, microbiology and renewable energies."</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">A local non-governmental organisation, Nawaya, is taking a leading role in supporting sustainable farming and has brought locals to visit Farrag's farm in a bid to help them swap traditional irrigation techniques for sustainable methods.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">But that transition does not come cheap. Inside Bustan, the hum of pumps to ensure the<a class="InternalLink" href="http://www.infosamak.org/french/documents/egypte.html?CFID=38638643&CFTOKEN=52113375" style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"> fish</a> are raised in pools with properly filtered water is constant, raising concerns about costs - and posing questions about whether sustainable farming can only be a novelty for the wealthy.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Farrag has invested more than 300,000 Egyptian pounds ($43,500) in his dreamover the last two years - a daunting sum compared to the modest incomes of most rural Egyptians.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">But the green entrepreneur is quick to point out that the project could be set up with half that sum, and notes that Bustan was built with locally sourced construction material.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"This is all Egyptian made or stuff that's easy to find in Egypt. Anyone could do it," he says.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">With the late afternoon sun hanging low in the sky and the desert wind brushing over olive branches, the hangar-like structure of the farm rests like an oasis.<br /><br />"The beauty of this system is that you can go to a piece of land that is non-plantable, that is not viable for agriculture, because you build the system"” adds Farrag.<br /><br />"You can take a rock and build on it. And then you have tomatoes and fish in the desert."</span><br />
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Doug Boothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08725464785512608571noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8007557640373832250.post-89933856845538000102013-01-24T07:20:00.000-08:002013-03-11T06:47:14.043-07:00Solar Panels, Irrigation, and Local Social Invention in Egypt <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Ahmed Zahran grew up in Cairo, received a bachelor’s degree in finance from the American University in Cairo, and a masters from the University of London. While he never was exposed to renewable energy in his studies, he gained an interest in it early on, and wanted to work in the field. Because opportunities were nonexistent in Egypt, Zahran went work for Shell Oil Company and eventually landed in the company’s carbon emissions trading department. Here it soon became obvious to him that the only way to reduce emissions was to shift from fossil fuels to solar, and his work at Shell was not going to help much in achieving that goal. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Zahran returned to Egypt and went to work for a solar energy company that unfortunately succumbed to the upheaval of the Arab Spring. This experience led Zahran to join with some friends in founding KarmSolar for the purpose of developing solar energy applications to serve the unique needs of Egyptians who live in desert landscapes. KarmSolar has gained global attention for its work on high capacity off-grid solar water pumps that recover underground water from very deep wells for agricultural uses. The essential premise of KarmSolar is to offer Egyptians the opportunity to live in off-grid desert communities and have access to essential unexploited groundwater resources available on the edges of the Nile Valley and desert oases. The idea is to pull population away from an overcrowded Nile and take advantage of the desert’s abundance of sun and soil. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The standard approach for Nile Valley irrigation agriculture is to simply flood the fields periodically to supply water to plants. In reclaimed desert reliant on scarce groundwater, flooding is to wasteful. Movable sprinklers and drip irrigation systems offer a much more water efficient approach to growing crops. Sprinkler irrigation turns out not to be very effective for anything but low value fodder crops because of leaf salt-burn on broadleaf plants or problems with fungi forming because of water accumulation on leaf surfaces. Drip irrigation systems, with perforated plastic piping laid out in rows adjacent to vegetable or fruit plants, offer a highly efficient method of water and liquid fertilizer delivery to plant roots. In this sense, drip irrigation and hydroponic agriculture bear a similarity. Some drip irrigation farmers take advantage of a lucrative nearby European organic fruit and vegetable market by creating liquid organic fertilizer from animal manure onsite for delivery to plants through the irrigation system. One might think that the investment requirement rules out out all but big farms for drip irrigation, but already in desert landscapes hired workers learn the drip irrigation ropes and install inexpensive drip systems on their own nearby small plots. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The big problem currently for agriculture on reclaimed Egyptian desert far away from an electrical grid is dependence on diesel powered generators that require difficult to deliver and expensive liquid fuels for their operation. The big advantage offered by the KarmSolar approach is an independent local source of electrical power that can run irrigation pumps and other kinds of equipment such as water purifiers and desalinators. The marriage of solar power and water efficient-irrigation makes feasible the creation of new communities in the desert wherever groundwater can be found. Not only does this opportunity allow KarmSolar to make money to sustain itself, but also opens up a chance for Egyptians to find a new ways of making a living without having to depend on an unreliable electrical grid or an incompetent central government. This is to the liking of social entrepreneurs such as KarmSolar’s Ahmed Zahran and Schaduf’s Sherif Hosny who express concerns about government incompetence. It’s fascinating to see entrepreneurial efforts with both a social and an environmental mission, such as Sekem, Schaduf, and KarmSolar, gaining a foothold in the context of government ineffectiveness, political upheaval, and a strongly traditional Muslim culture. </span></span></div>
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Doug Boothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08725464785512608571noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8007557640373832250.post-35815026230330634522012-10-23T04:43:00.001-07:002013-04-12T18:31:42.050-07:00A Visit to Schaduf Urban Micro Farms: Cairo, Egypt<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">To backyard gardeners who love to muck around in real dirt, growing plants in water somehow seems other-worldly but the science of doing so, known as hydroponics, is a well established technology. Soil in natural conditions serves as a reservoir for water and plant nutrients, but plants don’t actually require soil to survive. Nutrients are absorbed by plants through roots as inorganic mineral ions dissolved in water. So long as plant roots have access to water containing essential minerals, plants can survive without soil. Since plant survival also requires access to oxygen through roots, roots cannot be completely and perpetually immersed in water unless it is adequately aerated or else the plants will drown. Plants can be grown hydroponically in solution using something as simple as a water in a Mason jar, but more frequently growers use an inert medium in which to grow the plants such as perlite, gravel, mineral wool, or coconut husk. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Hydroponic gardening has virtues that offer special advantages for growing plants in an arid climate like Cairo’s. In soil-based farming, applying the right amount of water is a tricky business. Too much watering causes plants to die from a lack of oxygen, and too little leads to plant starvation. For hydroponic farming, plant roots can be continuously or frequently exposed to nutrient-laden water and the plants can absorb as much or as little as they want. Unused water can be drained away and recycled keeping water use to a bare minimum. The key challenge for the hydroponic approach is to get the balance of needed mineral in the water just right, including macronutrients such as nitrates, calcium, phosphate, and magnesium, and micronutrients such as iron, copper, zinc, boron, chlorine and nickel. In addition to an appropriate balance of nutrients, care must be taken to not let the water’s pH get out of whack or salts to build up excessively. Any interruption in water flows can be catastrophic, and water must be stored in light-free tanks to prevent the formation of algae. A successful hydroponic system can achieve high levels of productivity with a modest water and nutrient input.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The other central ingredient in plant growth is sunshine, something that the rooftops of Cairo have in abundance year around. The city’s low income residents have long used rooftops to raise chickens and goats but not to grow crops. Looking out over Cairo's rooftops from a minaret or any other high vantage points, one sees mostly accumulated debris, satellite dishes, and virtually nothing green. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The dream of social entrepreneur, Sherif Hosny, is to create 325 hydroponic rooftop gardens in Cairo by 2013. Hosny named the business, Schaduf, after a simple traditional Egyptian tool for raising water to higher ground for crop irrigation. Sherif’s brother, Tarek, will join the business after completing his college education in the U.S. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The business offers Cairo’s poorest residents a simple form of hydroponic farming. Construct on a family's rooftop three 20 square meter ponds made of brick sides about 10 centimeters high and place a waterproof liner on the inner surface, fill with water and cover with sheets of floating styrofoam to serve as a platform for plants, and install a circulating pump for oxygenating the water. Add a standard hydroponic nutrient mix and plant the seedlings. Come by and check the pH and electrolyte levels weekly, replenish nutrients as needed, and soon with the help of Egypt's sun and heat you will have a rooftop of green produce that can be sold for 300-500 Egyptian pounds a month, significantly increasing a Cairene's family income and creating a wonderful place for children to play that pulls them away from the dangers of the streets. Sherif's company, Schaduf Urban Micro Farms, will provide a poor family with a rooftop farm costing about 4,000 Egyptian pounds that can be financed with a micro-loan easily paid off in a year. So far Schaduf has installed and maintains 15 farms, periodically checking the nutrient mix, controlling any pests organically, and collecting and selling the produce in a local Zamalek farmer's market for its clients.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">While visiting Cairo, my wife and I, along with our son and his boss, ate a celebratory dinner costing 2,000 Egyptian pounds at a fancy restaurant on the Nile called the Sequoia, a place where Cairenes go to be seen. This means roughly that a low-income rooftop garden costs about 8 Sequoia meal equivalents, an amount of money that doesn’t mean much to us affluent westerners, but can make a huge difference to the lives of Cairo’s urban farmers.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Leaving a successful career as the Middle East Regional Managing Director for mining Giant Rio Tinto Alcan, Sherif Hosny moved on to become a creator of rooftop gardens. Ask him why he gave up a lucrative career to take up urban farming, he will tell you that he wants to help others, likes working with plants, and desires to earn enough income to live on. In these motivations, Hosny differs little from Ibrahim Abouleish, the founder of SEKEM. While he grew up in a Muslim family, Hosni doesn’t claim that his faith played any special role in his decision to found Schaduf, yet what he is doing satisfies Islamic premises much like SEKEM does. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Hosny chose to do a business rather a nongovernmental organization (NGO) so he wouldn't have to worry about raising money for operations, and he wanted the people he helps to have a vested interest themselves in sustaining the final product, the rooftop farm. If nothing else, Schaduf’s clients will work hard to pay back the micro-loans they take out for their farms, and once they do, their take-home income jumps, encouraging them to keep their efforts up. NGOs are a part of the picture for rooftop farming and make a difference for Schaduf by helping to identify eligible clients and arranging micro-loans. The beauty of the whole venture is that it is self-funding and can be readily scaled up as the business grows.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Hosny continues to work on new ideas for rooftop farming, including an organic nutrient mix to replace the standard chemical variety. Schaduf's most important innovation to date has been the development of the simple brick-sided floor pond to replace the usual wooden racks hydroponic gardeners typically use for plant trays, which turn out to be uneconomical in Cairo because wood is too expensive. In the past Hosny experimented with an aquaponic approach to micro farming using tilapia, but the fish couldn't survive Cairo's winter temperatures in the shallow tanks required by a rooftop location, and heaters proved to costly for his low-income clients. Schaduf is considering selling rooftop hydroponic gardens to more affluent customers who want to grow their own plants and create a green space for their family. This would augment Schaduf's sales and income and increase the scale of its operation allowing the venture to better serve its low-income farmers.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Sherif Hosny fits the classic definition of a social entrepreneur, someone engaged in business to solve social or environmental problems, not just to earn profit. Schaduf and Hosny offer opportunities for poor families to increase their income, expand the supply of healthy greens for Cairenes, and create much needed green space in a city that has very little. In this effort, Hosny and Schaduf engage in social invention—the search for new and innovative methods for solving social and environmental problems. Schaduf not only applies a time-tested technology in a new way, but is creating a new form of pesticide-free agriculture that functions without fossil fuel inputs and requires very little water, a huge benefit in a desert environment. Schaduf, like any other entrepreneurial venture may or may not work out, and if it doesn't Hosni will move onto something else. Given the important functions Schaduf fulfills, I hope and suspect that it will succeed and contribute to a better future for Egyptians.</span></span></div>
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Doug Boothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08725464785512608571noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8007557640373832250.post-8498183915311296792012-06-21T08:48:00.000-07:002012-06-21T08:48:01.718-07:00The Virtues of a Middle Eastern Cuisine<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Middle Eastern restaurants seem to be all the rage in Paris, London, New York, and almost any other European or American city. We in the affluent West have taken a shine to pitas, hummus, falafel, kebabs, stuffed grape leaves, yogurt sauces, and vegetable stews with eggplant, pine nuts, olives, squash, peppers, and a variety of wonderful spices. Shifting toward a Middle Eastern diet would not only be a tasty thing to do, it would be good for our health and a benefit to the environment. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">We in the U.S. consume a bit more than 3,800 calories a day per person of which a whopping 900 come from animal products. This figure is unadjusted for spoilage, waste, and loss in food preparation, meaning that the actual U.S. average daily calorie intake is more like 2,700. The recommended healthy calorie intake for a moderately active adult male is about 2,400 with no more than 10 percent coming from protein. Clearly, we Americans consume much more meat than we need and way too many calories. Nearly 24 percent of our calories come from meat protein alone, well above the 10 percent recommended amount. No wonder we face an epidemic of obesity. The developed countries of the world as a whole including N. America and Europe, don’t do much better in achieving a healthy diet, with an average daily calorie consumption of 3,600 of which 750 comes from animal products. Japan is the only affluent country in the world that comes anywhere near a healthy diet at 2,700 per capita daily calories consumed with 350 from meat products. Despite discouraging statistics on calorie intakes from most affluent countries of the world, we needn’t necessarily despair about solving the global obesity epidemic. A variety of time-tested, tasty global cuisines that are good for us are available from all over the world including Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. An abundance of calories and large intakes of animal-based protein isn’t essential to the pleasures of eating. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Consider what would happen if we in the U.S. adopted a Middle Eastern diet or one comparable to it. Our daily calorie consumption would drop to around 3,300 with about 300-400 coming from meat. Our calorie intake would then be on par with Turkey and Saudi Arabia, both of which are fairly affluent, and a bit above Tunisia, a developing country. We Americans could accomplish parity with a Middle Eastern diet simply but cutting our meat consumption in half. Doing so would not only bring substantial health benefits, but would also amount to a huge favor for the environment. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The essential environmental problem with meat flows from the large amount of land and energy required to grow animal feed grains. To produce a gram of animal protein in the developed countries requires about 10 grams of vegetable protein. Because our extraordinary intake of animal protein in the U.S., we devoting half our farmland to animal protein production for just 24 percent of our calories. If we cut our meat consumption in half and move toward a “Middle Eastern” calorie standard, we could cut our agriculture land for animal products in half, reducing our total land devoted to agriculture by a fourth. This would leave a substantial chunk of land available for natural habitat restoration, renewable energy production, or other uses. Feed grains, especially corn, require a massive amount of fossil fuel energy to cultivate, not only to run farm equipment, but for producing the large volumes of nitrogen fertilizer and pesticides applied to fields and crops. A hectare of corn uses up the amount of energy equivalent to that in 230 gallons of gas, and emits an equivalent of 4 metric tons of CO2 annually. Cutting corn production by a quarter in this country (about half is currently devoted to animal feed) alone would reduce our CO2 emissions by approximately 30 million metric tons per year. Reductions in fertilizer runoff from Midwestern corn fields that end up in the Gulf of Mexico would lead to a lessening of the “dead zone” that appears there annually as a consequence of fertilizer-induced oxygen depletion. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">To sum up, the citizens of North Africa and the Middle East use much less land and energy than we westerners do for food and have a healthier diet as a result. In short, their food production system is much more compact than our own both directly by using less land, and indirectly by absorbing less fossil fuel energy. Hopefully, this part of the world will remain with its wonderful cuisine, and think carefully how to export its products more extensively to the benefit of us all. </span></span></div>
</div>Doug Boothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08725464785512608571noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8007557640373832250.post-78813087346971541882012-05-29T07:42:00.001-07:002013-03-11T06:43:34.099-07:00North Africa’s Solar Energy Future<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">You may remember as a young child playing with a magnifying glass on a sunny day frying ants, burning holes in paper, or even starting a fire, much to you parent’s horror. Concentrating solar power (CSP) works essentially the same way as your magnifying glass. In a CSP solar energy field, a series of parabolic mirrors capture and focus the suns energy, just like a magnifying glass, on special receiving pipes, heating up oil inside. The hot oil runs through a heat exchanger creating steam that in turn powers an electrical generator. The spent steam is condensed in a cooling tower and runs back to the heat exchangers to repeat the process. To keep the power plant running all night, part of the plant's solar capacity is used to store heat energy in molten salt for generating steam after the sun goes down. High voltage direct current lines are given the job of transmitting electricity to distant markets because their energy loss is only about 3 percent every 1,000 kilometers, much less than alternating current lines. Concentrating solar plants come in a variety of configurations including flat mirrors focused on a tower and mirrors arrayed in a dish focused on a central generating unit, but the most widely used technology is parabolic trough mirrors capable of tracking the sun.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">CSP is the wave of the energy future for North Africa and the Middle East and by extension for deserts everywhere in the eyes of both the World Bank and DESERTEC, an international foundation devoted to the goal of producing clean energy from the world’s deserts. A possible solar future is laid out for five countries, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Jordan, in the World Bank's publication, “Middle East and North Africa Region Assessment of Local Manufacturing Potential for Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) Projects.” This is a bureaucratic mouthful, but the study is must-reading for anyone who wants to learn about the potential of solar energy in hot desert landscapes. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">CSP is a tried, although not quite yet true, technology in terms of its cost competitiveness, with plants operating in the U.S., Spain, Morocco, Egypt, and elsewhere. Currently, CSP can’t match the low production costs of coal-fired power plants, but this will happen in the future as industry-wide scale economies and the technology learning curve that accompanies them are realized. CSP produces electricity currently at 0.14-0.18 Euros per kilowatt hour (KWh), but by the time 5 gigawatts (GW) of capacity is installed worldwide, this cost should fall to 0.08-0.12 Euros, which will be within shooting distance of the current average of 0.10 Euros per KWh for coal in Europe. Right now 2 GW of CSP capacity is either installed or under construction globally and another 12 GW is on the drawing boards. Utilities in Europe that burn coal today are required to purchase carbon emission allowances, which now sell for around 10 Euros per metric ton. This adds about 0.01 Euros to the cost per KWh which will rise after 2013 when emissions caps in Europe are tightened and the costs of allowances is projected to increase beyond 30 Euros per metric ton, boosting coal-fired costs to 0.13 Euros per KWh. At this point CSP will look better than coal as a long-term source for European electrical energy. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">In North African, CSP will not only provide a secure and economical source of energy, but will also be a substantial employment generator for both the export and domestic energy markets. Under a scenario of aggressive growth in CSP capacity, the World Bank predicts that installed capacity will reach 5 GW by 2020 and will grow to 14.5 GW by 2025. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The recently completed construction of a hybrid CSP and natural gas plant at Kuraymat, Egypt, 90 miles south of Cairo, offers a preview of possible job opportunities. Of the 150 MW total capacity, the CSP portion will deliver 20-25 MW. Roughly 60 percent of the total project value for the solar portion flowed to local businesses who undertook site preparation and construction, provided the mounting structure, tubes, electrical cables, and carried out grid connections, engineering, and procurement. Local businesses and utility employees benefit permanently from carrying out the plant's operations and ongoing maintenance. The components unavailable locally and imported for Kuraymat included mirrors, the receiver, heat transfer fluid, and the steam generator. As the North African CSP market expands, some portion of these components can probably be produced locally, particularly mirrors and receivers. The Egyptian glass industry has grown both in capacity and sophistication in recent years and could become a future supplier of parabolic mirrors. Egyptian companies today not only manufacture the high-quality clear glass required for CSP mirrors, but are also able to bend glass into parabolic shapes and to coat it with a protective shield to defend against desert blowing sands. The suppliers of power generating equipment, such as General Electric and Siemens, have unmatchable specialized production experience that can’t be duplicated locally, and such equipment will have to be imported as will molten salt heat storage facilities whose production is also highly specialized. Plant design will also be a global affair, but the supply of domestic engineering talent will expand as local educational institutions ramp up programs in solar technologies. A potentially important, but tough to document, spillover effect of a more technologically sophisticated local population will be innovation and employment creation in an array of related economic arenas. Knowledge begets new ideas, and new ideas beget new ways of making a living.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">For the North Africa-Middle East region, the World Bank forecasts the creation of 34,000 CSP-related permanent jobs by 2020 under its aggressive expansion alternative and 64,000-79,000 permanent jobs by 2025. These include both operation and maintenance employment and a permanent manufacturing and construction workforce to feed a continuous expansion of CSP for both the local and European market. This projection is based on achieving an installed capacity of 5 GW by 2020 and another 2 GW in equipment exports, and 14.5 GW installed by 2025 plus 5.2 GW of equipment exports. The job creation figures don’t include multiplier effects that will lead to employment increases in the larger local economy. Newly hired workers will inject some portion of their new found income into the local economy as consumer spending which will in turn further expand employment and create still more income and spending. A multiplier effect of 1.5 times the initial CSP employment creation is not out of the question. Some North African countries, such as Egypt, possess significant oil and gas reserves, but the employment rate per unit energy is much less in fossil fuel than solar, and these reserves will ultimately be depleted while solar energy will be renewed daily as long as the sun shines. A solar future looks much better than continued reliance on fossil fuels.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Bringing solar power to the North African desert will be a huge undertaking requiring an unparalleled volume of social coordination and invention. The social entrepreneurship needed will exceed the capacity of any single business enterprise and will call for a coordinated effort that can be met only by governmental and nongovernment organizations. We don’t normally think of not-for-profit enterprises, either within or outside of government, as being entrepreneurial, but reality needn’t always accord with popular perception as we will now suggest.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The DESERTEC Foundation is one of those nongovernment organizations (NGOs) that just might make a difference in the world’s energy future. Rather than retire and head for the golf course, Dr. Gerhard Knies, an expert in particle physics who spent his research career at such institutions as CERN and the University of of California-Berkeley, founded in 2003 the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation, a network of experts in renewable energy. This organization in turn created the DESERTEC Foundation in 2009 to promote the development of solar energy in desert landscapes. The Foundation encourages academic research and training programs in renewable energy throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, pushes cooperative research programs with private businesses interested in renewable energy, and sets up programs with businesses to facilitate specific projects such as wind energy in Morocco and a 2 Gigawatt Concentrating Solar plant in the Tunisian desert.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Our energy future according to the thinkers at DESERTEC lies in the sun-drenched desert wastelands of the world. Hot deserts receive so much solar energy annually that no more than 1 percent of their 36 million square kilometers would be needed to replace present-day global fossil fuel energy consumption. Primary global energy consumption from fossil fuels currently equals 107,000 Terrawatt hours (TWh) a year, and a kilometer of hot desert receives 2.2 TWh of solar energy annually, of which 0.33 TWh can be captured at a presently attainable 15 percent electricity conversion rate. Even if total fossil fuel energy demand ultimately doubles, which exceeds current projections for the next half-century, no more than 2 percent of desert landscapes would be needed for solar energy production under the radical assumption that all of our fossil-fuel replacing energy comes from deserts. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The experts at DESERTEC favor solar thermal technology, such as concentrating solar power (CSP) as opposed to photovoltaics, which generate electricity only when the sun shines. As we already know, solar thermal plants can collect heat energy in the daytime and store it for use at night, allowing around-the-clock electrical energy production. A drawback of solar thermal technology is its potential to disturb the ecology of certain sensitive desert landscapes. Some deserts, such as the Sonoran and Mohave in the U.S., contain threatened species, but avoiding the destruction of rare habitat seems reasonable under a solar energy regime through careful placement of solar thermal facilities given the huge amount amount of desert landscape available worldwide. In sensitive habitats, photovoltaic panels may be the better technology to use because they needn't be installed in the more disturbing large scale facilities typical of solar thermal. Solar panels can be tucked in along exists roads and power lines without doing much damage. At some point in the future using daytime solar energy to produce hydrogen through electrolysis will become cost effective which can then be stored and used for 24-hour electricity generation. Hydrogen powered fuel cells that produce electric energy have a variety of potential applications including running motor vehicles or supplying electricity on demand. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">In the near term, a clean energy future for Europe and the Mediterranean Basin includes a substantial role for concentrating solar-based energy production (CSP) from the deserts of North Africa. DESERTEC projects an installed CSP capacity in North Africa by 2050 of 400 GW with 100 of that serving the European energy market. Using the World Bank’s projection of 25 one-year local jobs per MW of installed capacity, this means that an average of 250,000 manufacturing and construction jobs per year would need between 2011 and 2050 to reach 400 GW of installed capacity. To permanently maintain 400 GW of capacity after 2050, including end-of-life equipment replacement, will require approximately 320,000 permanent jobs, based on studies of existing thermal solar plants. With a continuous growth of CSP in North Africa of 4 GW annually, CSP employment will reach 570,000 by 2050, and continue to grow slowly after that. This will be a substantial addition of jobs for the North African labor force, which is currently about 60 million for the CSP-coalition countries. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Big solar energy projects in the North African desert have gone beyond the abstract discussion phase and are now coming into reality. One of the most ambitious of these is the proposed TuNur CSP plant to be located in the southern Tunisian desert. TuNur, a DESERTEC supported project, will deliver 2,000 megawatts of energy into the Italian electrical grid through a direct current high energy line under the Mediterranean beginning in 2016. TuNur is a joint venture between British solar developer, Nur Energie, and a Tunisian company, Top Oilfield Services, and will use a system of large mirrors to concentrate the sun’s energy on solar towers to heat molten salt that in turn generates steam to run electric generators continuously day and night. By recycling the steam, water inputs to the system will be minimal and the impact on the desert landscape modest. Total investment in the project will be nearly $10 billion, and 20,000 local jobs will be created in mirror fabrication, plant construction, and maintenance. On completion, TuNur will be the largest solar energy project in the world. Top Oilfield Services’ bread and butter in the past has been servicing the petroleum industry, but ironically its future looks to be in desert-based solar where its desert experience will be a special advantage. If TuNur succeeds, it will train a generation of Tunisian engineers and technicians in solar energy and set the foundation for a new source of employment in the country’s future. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">To think about clean and green economic development on such a huge scale as DESERTEC’s vision for a solar future can be mind boggling. In reality, creating a compact green economy in North Africa and elsewhere will involve an accumulation of many different approaches and technologies and the work of all sorts of entrepreneurs, social and otherwise, at a range of scales. For small scale options, take a look at posts here on Schaduf and KarmSolar.</span></span></div>
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Doug Boothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08725464785512608571noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8007557640373832250.post-22596426985880266632012-05-11T11:56:00.000-07:002013-03-11T06:48:35.632-07:00Greening Tunisia: Organic Olives and Rooftop Solar Heaters<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Environmental Virtues of Tunisian Organic Olive Groves</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Tunisia has the largest amount of land (300,000 hectares) devoted to organic agriculture of any North African country, and almost half of that is in olives. Fueled by growing European demand for organically grown foods, organic olive groves are an expanding presence on the Tunisian landscape. Are more organic olives a good thing for both the Tunisian people and the environment? Certainly olives are nothing new to the Middle East. For centuries olives have played a leading role in Mediterranean cuisine, and have flourished in the region's semi-arid climate. There is even nothing very new about organic olive cultivation, which only in the last fifty years has given way to more chemically oriented schemes of production utilizing fossil fuel-based fertilizers and pesticides. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Olive grove cultivation in the Mediterranean region takes place both on irrigated farms occupying gentle slopes and on dryland farms on steep and moderate slopes. A key regional threat to the sustainability of olive groves is soil erosion, especially on steep slopes, a problem that can be substantially mitigated with temporary plant covers. Such plant covers go hand-in-hand with organic management techniques whose primary local environmental benefits include increased plant biodiversity, reduced erosion, diminished pesticide residues, and increased organic matter in soils. Eliminating in olive groves the use of fossil-fuel based chemical fertilizers and pesticides and the greenhouse gas emissions they cause benefits both the local and global environment. Unlike many other crops, olive productivity doesn’t respond very well to intensified applications of fertilizers and irrigation, meaning that not much is lost by giving up such practices. Olives themselves are composed mainly of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen and extract very little plant nutrients from soils, making it possible to close the nutrient cycle locally by spreading olive-oil mill wastes and pruning cuttings. Unlike many other crops, organic olives don’t require a huge importation of nutrients and energy from outside the local agroecosystem if wastes are fully recycled. Achieving the capacity to depend on recycled nutrients doesn't happen overnight after conversion to organic production; organic materials, such as compost and manure, will have to be imported to groves for a time until the humus content of the soil builds up. The major pest in olive groves is the olive fruit fly, but fortunately it can usually be controlled through traps, organic pesticides, and a quick collecting of fallen olives. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The virtues of Tunisian organic olives are simple. Since less than 10 percent of Tunisian olive groves are currently organic, employment can be increased by a conversion to organic methods because of their greater labor intensity. Organic dryland olive cultivation requires as much as 14-19 percent more human energy than conventional methods, a pattern common to many kinds of organic agriculture. Much of this increase results from the spreading of recycled waste materials and careful attention to ground-cover cultivation. In addition to increased labor incomes, since organic olive oil sells at a premium, conversion could ultimately increase the earnings of olive grove owners once conversion costs are recovered. Finally, for the sake of the global environment, a conversion to organic olive production reduces fossil fuel consumption and carbon emissions. In sum, organic olive cultivation is good for both Tunisia’s economy as well as both the local and global environment. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Back in the days of the first energy crisis (early 1980s), installing rooftop solar panels was all the rage, only it wasn’t for generating electricity. To do that, one would need photovoltaics, but those were prohibitively expensive at the time. Rather, individuals on the cutting edge of energy conservation were installing rooftop solar panels for the purpose of heating water. The insulated glass-covered panels consisted of small pipes set in heat-absorbing fins through which liquid circulated for exposure to the sun’s rays. With the subsequent crash in energy prices, rooftop water heaters went out of fashion, but the technology didn’t disappear. Today rooftop water heaters are back in a part of the world where they truly make sense, the Middle East. In Palestine, 76 percent of households have installed solar water heaters as a countermeasure to the Israeli ability to cut off electricity at any moment. Even if the lights go out, Palestinians still have hot water.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">With help from the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) and the Italian-led Mediterranean Renewable Energy Program (MEDREP), the Tunisian Government instituted a program in 2005 called Prosol (Program Solaire) to encourage the installation of rooftop water heaters. To get one, a homeowner goes to a solar water heater supplier, fills out an application, presents a utility bill, signs a loan agreement with a bank for a 5-year repayment from the monthly energy cost savings, and makes a 10 percent down payment. Loan payments are added to customer gas and electric bills, and if payments fall in arrears, the utility has the option of shutting off service. In the first two years of the program, interest costs were subsidized partly by banks because of a low risk of nonpayment and partly by the UNEP, and MEDREP funded a 20 percent capital cost subsidy for the heaters. After 2006, the Tunisian government took over funding of the capital subsidy and exempted solar heaters from the VAT tax and a portion of the customs duty on imported units. As of 2010, approximately 356,000 square meters of heater panels have been installed in 119,000 households and the annual installation rate had risen to 80,000 square meters. As a direct result of the program, 1,100 qualified installers found employment, 3,500 total jobs have been created in 50 companies, and households will save a total of $600-1,300 (U.S.) on their energy bills over the solar heater’s lifetime. Conversions to solar heating in Tunisia to date has reduced annual CO2 emissions by 755,000 tons, a number that will rise to 1.95 million tons by 2016 given a projected total of 376,000 installations. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">We normally think of governments as slow-to-change bureaucracies wedded to rule-oriented procedures in the delivery of government services. The Prosol case offers us an interesting example of entrepreneurial social invention by a government. While governments don’t always rise to the need for new ideas in addressing social and environmental problems, in some instances they do, just like socially inventive businesses or nongovernmental organizations such as a SEKEM or a DESERTEC. Like many other governments in Middle Eastern and Africa, Tunisia subsidizes household energy costs for the alleged purpose of alleviating poverty. Economists have long attacked such subsidies for causing wasteful energy consumption, excessive air pollution, added greenhouse gas emissions, and failing to benefit the poor very much. Unfortunately, energy subsidies of this kind are politically challenging to eliminate because doing so raises energy costs for a large portion of the population. By supporting and subsidizing the installation of solar water heaters, the Tunisian government reduced the need to pay out subsidies for fossil fuel energy that would otherwise have been consumed to the tune of $100 million, a figure that will fall to $46 million if a proposed subsidy phase-out plan is actually implemented, but enough to still more than cover the $22 million government outlay for the Prosol program. In short, Prosol provides a special financial benefit to the Tunisian government which undoubtedly helped motivate the program in the first place. Another financial boost equalling $350,000-700,000 annually comes to Tunisia from sales of Prosol generated greenhouse emissions reduction certificates (CERs) to European countries under the Kyoto Clean Development Mechanism. Once a projected 376,000 solar heating units are installed by 2016, the annual revenue flow from CERs should triple. If any single agency got the ball rolling for Prosol, it would have to be the UNEP who did the original study setting out all the program's possible benefits.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The simple idea of solar water heating has brought the Tunisian people reduced utility bills, more business activity and employment, reduced government costs, increased revenues from Europe for CERs, and reduced dependency on fossil fuels. Because of Prosol, the planet as a whole benefits from lower` greenhouse gas emissions. Compact clean energy in this instance amounts to economic boon and a true free lunch for Tunisia. Other countries including Egypt have seen the Prosol light emanating from Tunisia and are now starting their own programs. </span></span></div>
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Doug Boothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08725464785512608571noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8007557640373832250.post-86459360183838381672012-04-17T07:49:00.001-07:002012-04-23T06:25:36.697-07:00Compact Clean Energy in Egypt and Tunisia<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">European countries placed themselves under the gun to find clean sources of energy by signing the Kyoto Protocol back in 1997 with its goal of globally reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Thirty-seven Kyoto Annex I countries agreed to meet specific emission targets beginning in 2005, but the United States Congress failed to ratify the treaty, and in 2011 Canada withdrew because of a failure to meet its targets, leaving 35 countries with actual emissions caps. Low-income developing countries who signed the Protocol participate by undertaking projects that create certified greenhouse gas emissions reductions through the Clean Development Mechanism. Once created and certified, such reductions can be sold to Annex I countries that in turn use them to help meet their own emissions caps. Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism thus enables Annex I countries to seek out less costly emissions reductions in developing countries to substitute for higher cost reduction alternatives at home. The bulk of the Clean Development Mechanism projects have occurred in China, India, and Latin America, with very few in North Africa and the Middle East. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Despite their modest share of the global volume, the inventory of actual and potential Clean Development projects for Egypt and Tunisia offer a glimpse of the kinds of carbon-reducing activities with a potential for future expansion. Projects fall under several headings, including clean energy production, energy efficiency, switching to less carbon intensive fuels, control of landfill gases, and industrial emissions reductions. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Although it has a lengthy list of potential projects, Tunisia has been slow out of the gate in getting projects actually approved for emissions allowance credit. Two landfill emissions reduction projects have been registered for emission reduction credit under the Clean Development Mechanism as well as a program to install 30,000 residential solar water heaters a year to replace natural gas. The water heater cost to the homeowner is subsidized by the Tunisian government and the loan required for installation is paid off over time from utility bill cost savings. The program not only reduces fuel bills, but expands assembly and installation employment by some 3,500 and decreases natural gas carbon emissions. Funding for the program comes in part from emission reduction sales to European countries. Another 22 Tunisian projects are in the early stages of approval for Clean Development, and most of these either expand clean energy production or improve energy efficiency. They include the installation of wind energy generators, electrification of rural dwellings and water pumps with solar panels, biofuel energy production using olive solid wastes, and a substantial expansion of Tunis’ light rail system. Like Cairo, Tunis is plagued with growing motor vehicle traffic as a burgeoning middle class falls in love with automobile mobility. To provide a more efficient alternative for getting around, the Tunis transit authority wants to add two light rail lines financed in part by the sale of emission reductions to European partners. By shifting to energy-efficient light rail and away from gas guzzling and traffic creating taxis and private cars, Tunisians will cut back on carbon emissions as well as other pollutants and be able to get around the city more quickly. In the long haul, a decent light rail system will spark local high density development and a more compact form of urban living instead of added auto-induced spreading into the suburbs. If implemented, All 25 Tunisian Clean Development projects would reduce carbon equivalent emissions by about 2.7 million metric tons per year and, at an average price of 10 Euros per ton, would generate 27 million Euros in carbon emission reduction sales annually for the country.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Like Tunisia, Egypt has been slow to take advantage of the Clean Development Mechanism. So far, five Egyptian Clean Development projects have been registered for emissions reductions credits and twelve more have been approved for registration. Among the first approved was a program to purchase and scrap aging Cairo taxis and finance their replacement with newer, more fuel efficient models that reduce both visible air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. In addition to vehicle scrapping, the approved projects include increased generating capacity for several wind farms, fuel switching, and waste treatment emissions reduction. Like Tunis, Cairo is looking to the Clean Development Mechanism to help expand its Metro system. Included in Egypt’s list of 76 proposed Clean Development projects is the construction of the city’s Metro line 3 that will connect the Cairo International Airport to downtown as well as extend rail transit to densely packed neighborhoods currently lacking decent public transit. Line 3 will help unclog Cairo’s horrible traffic and put a dent in the city’s air pollution as we as its carbon emissions. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Unfortunately, for Tunisia, Egypt, and the rest of the developing world, the Clean Development Mechanism itself is under threat because the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012 and nothing is yet on the horizon to replace it. The 2009 Copenhagen climate treaty negotiations failed to produce a binding agreement on global emission limits and the best negotiators could come up with is an agreement to abide by voluntary emissions restrictions. The 2011 negotiations in Cancun Mexico made little additional progress, save the creation of a Green Climate Fund to administer $30 billion from wealthy developed countries for low-income developing country clean energy and emissions reduction projects through 2012, and future additions rising to $100 billion per year by 2020. Negotiations will continue with the hopes of settling on a binding climate treaty to take effect in 2020. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Although immediate treaty requirements to control emissions are gone, the European Union on its own plans to abide by emission controls that will lead to a 21 percent reduction by 2020 relative to 2005 levels. The key mechanism for accomplishing this goal will be the EU Emissions Trading Scheme whereby emission caps will shrink over time and the number of emission allowances supplied to the market will decline. Carbon emitters, who are required to possess allowances for any emissions, will be competing to buy up increasingly scarce allowances at higher and higher prices, giving clean energy a growing relative cost advantage. To make matters worse, the tsunami that hit Japan in 2011 and resulting nuclear power crisis upset from afar the European energy cart. Japan’s Fukushima nuclear meltdown left in its wake a newly planned German withdrawal from nuclear power and a reluctance by other European countries to continue down the carbon-free nuclear path as a means to supply electricity while satisfying carbon allowance caps. Given the confluence of continuing EU requirement to reduce carbon emissions and the move away from nuclear power, Europeans are scrambling for new clean sources of energy, and they are looking enviously across the Mediterranean to the coasts and deserts of North Africa with their abundance of wind and solar energy. Because the EU allows clean energy to be imported directly into its electrical grid, energy development in nearby North Africa is increasingly attractive to European utilities in the face of tightening caps on emissions.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Judging from recent news about both solar and wind projects in Egypt and Tunisia, the Clean Development Mechanism list for each country only scratches the surface for creating new clean energy sources. One of the most ambitious of these is the TuNur solar project located in the southern Tunisian desert. TuNur will deliver 2,000 megawatts of energy into the Italian electrical grid through a direct current high energy line under the Mediterranean. TuNur is a joint venture between British solar developer, Nur Energie, and the Tunisian company, Top Oilfield Services. TuNur will use a system of large mirrors to concentrate the sun’s energy on solar towers to heat molten salt that in turn generates steam to run electric generators continuously day and night. By recycling the steam, water inputs to the system will be minimal and the impact on the desert landscape modest. The total investment in the project will be nearly $10 billion, and 20,000 local jobs will be created in mirror fabrication and plant construction and maintenance. On completion, TuNur will be the largest solar energy project in the world. Top Oilfield Services’ bread and butter in the past has been servicing the petroleum industry, but ironically its future looks to be in desert-based solar where its historical oilfield experience will be a special advantage. If TuNur succeeds, it will train a generation of Tunisian engineers and technicians in solar energy and set the foundation for a new industry and source of employment in the country’s future. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Tunisia is of course not the only North African country with solar potential. Egypt with its huge expanses of desert possesses an unmatched solar energy resource, receiving an average of 8 kilowatts per hour per square meter per day in solar insulation, almost twice that of California, a center of solar development in the U.S. Yet the country is just beginning to take advantage of this resource. A combined solar-natural gas plant at Kuraymat, 100 kilometers south of Cairo, is just about to come on line with 20 megawatts solar production, and 100 megawatt solar plant is in the planning stages at Kom Ombo. Egypt has a goal of 7,200 megawatts of installed solar capacity by 2020. Despite its solar potential, Egypt so far has made its greatest renewable energy advances in wind, taking special advantage of an abundant Gulf of Suez wind resource. Currently, the country has 550 megawatts of installed wind capacity in the Gulf and looks to develop another 6,600 KW nationwide by 2020. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Advances in solar technology that matter most to the average Egyptian may well be on a much smaller scale than the typical desert solar installation. Just as in Tunisia, Egypt is looking to accelerate the installation of solar water heaters in its urban areas. Heating water for bathing on a kerosene stove in poor neighborhoods of Cairo is difficult and dangerous work which solar water heaters will eliminate. Researchers are also experimenting with simple solar water purification devises, essentially blue plastic bottles that utilize the sun’s ultraviolet rays, affordable to poor Egyptians who otherwise lack access to clean water. KarmSolar, an Egyptian company, has developed a solar technology for high-capacity irrigation pumps that can be used on remote, off-grid farms, expanding the potential reach of irrigation agriculture farther into the desert without have to rely on cranky, polluting diesel power. One of the big problems faced in remote Bedouin desert villages is the lack of a fresh vegetable supply despite a year-around growing season. This can be countered by a solar-powered hydroponic growing system design for use in arid environments, extending the Schaduf rooftop garden idea discussed in an earlier post to localities lacking in electricity. Creative Egyptian researchers are working hard to prove that solar and other innovative technologies are not just for the affluent countries of the world. <b>How could you not love the idea of ‘Bedouin solar powered hydroponics?’ </b></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The kinds of clean energy projects underway and on the drawing boards in Tunisia and Egypt possess the side benefit of conserving the human use of space and in the process leaving more for nature. This is most clearly the case for rooftop water heaters, hydroponic gardens, and mass transit projects that stimulate more compact forms of urban living. One might think that petroleum and natural gas are the most space conserving forms of energy of all since they come out of the ground or the seabed through a pipe, but this conclusion would be short sighted. With global warming caused by carbon emissions from fossil fuels, extensive human and natural landscapes will be completely lost. From a sea level increase of just one meter brought on by climatic warming, Egypt alone would loose as much as 4,500 square kilometers of the Nile River Delta. Needless to say, other low-elevation countries of the world could suffer even greater catastrophes from sea level rises. With more heat and drought, desert climatic zones will expand at the expense of grasslands, savannas, forests, and croplands. At the other end of the climatic spectrum, northerly and southerly polar and tundra zones will shrink in extent along with high elevation forest and subalpine vegetation zones. In comparison to these losses, devoting two or three percent of the earth’s deserts to solar energy production and putting up coastal wind farms seems like a minor spatial price to pay. </span></span></div>
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</div>Doug Boothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08725464785512608571noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8007557640373832250.post-40365230976279642692012-03-20T12:47:00.000-07:002013-04-13T13:15:50.241-07:00Compact Living in a Developing City: Cairo, Egypt<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The outward growth of cities, and the move to a more spatially expansive mode of living, has now become global in extent. The decline in urban density and the move to an auto-dominated system of urban transit has been most extreme in the U.S. compared to the rest of the world. Urban density in Europe is almost four times as great as the U.S. and in the Middle East nearly eight times as great. The affluent cities of western Europe are much more compact than comparable American cities, and the low income cities of the Middle East such as Cairo are among the most compact in the world. If the growing and developing cities of the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Asia adopt an American-style love affair with the motor vehicle and dramatically reduce their urban densities as a consequence, global urban carbon emissions will skyrocket. If these cities instead follow a European model and stick with high density living, the results will be much less damaging to the climate. Judging from the volume of motor vehicle traffic in Cairo and Istanbul, Middle Eastern cities may be edging toward the American model just at the point when Americans are re-considering the virtues of low density living and choosing to reside in more compact central cities. Is it possible for the developing cities of the world to short-circuit the suburbanization process the West and stick with high-density living? Will social inventions and innovations that promote continued high density living be adopted by low-income cities experiencing economic improvement? Let’s investigate this possibility for Cairo, Egypt.</span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Cairo is among the largest, densest, and oldest cities in the world. The city today is at the pinnacle of global compact urban living with the average Cairene managing on less than one seventh of urban land as an average Chicagoan. Most residents of urban Cairo live in some of the densest neighborhoods in the world, giving them less than a fourth of the land area per person enjoyed by the average Parisian who lives much more compactly than most Europeans. Cairo extends in a narrow corridor along the Nile River with desert looming to both the east at west at the the dividing point between upper and lower Egypt. To the north of the city, the Nile’s floodplain begins to fan out as multiple channels form and find their way to the Mediterranean. Without the Nile and its agriculturally rich floodplain, Egypt as we know it today with its great historical treasures would not exist. Of Egypt’s 73 million inhabitants, 95 percent crowd into 4 percent of the country’s land area that makes up the Nile Valley and Delta. With the exception of a few oases and coastal areas, the remainder of the country is uninhabited, hot desert. Since the 1930s, the population of greater Cairo has increased from a million to more than seventeen million residents. Through 1980, the growth of Cairo could be explained mainly by rural to urban migration within Egypt, but since then population growth in metro Cairo driven by high birth rates has become predominantly an internal affair. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">A first-time traveller to Cairo can easily be overwhelmed by an array of intense visual and aural stimuli: beautiful mosques, unrelenting traffic, the haunting call to prayer, urban noise, hundreds of unfinished but occupied concrete and masonry multi-storied buildings, the beautiful Nile, crowded sidewalks and markets, pedestrians dodging through traffic, garbage, mysterious women in colorful head scarves, men in traditional dress, kids everywhere, police on every corner with weapons at the ready, the pyramids off in the distance, and covering it all a blanket of air pollution. Our new traveller will soon discover that getting from one point to another in the city poses a serious challenge. Sitting in traffic is an inevitable daily pastime, burning up a half a billion dollars in fuel yearly. The fastest way of getting around is Cairo’s metro, but it provides access to less than a third of the city and accounts for only a bit more than a sixth of individual trips within the city. Half of all trips are taken in private minibuses, shared taxies, and overcrowded municipal buses. Despite an explosion in automobile traffic, most Cairenes can’t afford private cars. Only about 10 percent of Cairo families possess motor vehicles and those account for just 20 percent of urban travel. Taxies are everywhere and supply 29 percent of all trips, but private cars lead the way in Cairo’s traffic congestion because of their numbers and low occupancy rates. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">By global standards, Egyptians consume very little energy per person and emit little carbon, but as the country advances economically, both are on the rise. Of 84 global cities, Cairo is fifth up from the bottom of the list for per capita transport-related carbon emission (Atlanta, Georgia is at the top). Notwithstanding the auto-induced air pollution one sees in Cairo, the city still attains high energy efficiency per person and correspondingly low carbon emissions because of both its high density and poverty, much like many other low-income cities worldwide. An emerging love affair with the automobile among Cairo’s elite nonetheless bodes ill for the future. If individual Egyptian incomes continue to advance at their recent pace, then more and more Cairenes will be able to afford cars, and, without new mass transit alternatives, the city’s traffic will become increasingly frozen and air pollution more intense.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Cairo’s compactness today has little to do with urban planning and much to do with how low income housing has been created in the past forty years. For most of Cairo residents, housing supplied legally in the formal housing market is simply unaffordable. The gap in housing supply for almost two-thirds of metropolitan Cairo residents has been filled by an informal market functioning outside of land use law and building codes. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Because cropland along the Nile is privately owned and desert lands to the east and west are in government hands, private lands are favored for housing construction at Cairo's edge for their more secure ownership tenure. The government can kick squatters off desert lands, but it can’t easily evict owners from legally titled private lands. The military and various government agencies control desert parcels convenient to Cairo but are not about to relinquish them for informal housing, pushing development onto privately owned agricultural lands. For government to bring informal housing construction to a halt by draconian means would cause a huge housing supply crisis no one wants. Because informal housing construction is focused mostly on privately owned agricultural parcels, Egypt looses upwards of 400 hectares of prime cropland a year due to Cairo’s expansion, a loss that many say the country can ill-afford given that only about 4 percent of its total land area is arable. In reality the 2,300 hectares lost to development on agricultural lands has been more than offset by the thousands of hectares added annually to cultivation by desert reclamation projects elsewhere in Egypt. To economize on scarce and expensive urban land, informal housing is constructed at very high densities matching those in any of Cairo’s historic, Medieval-era districts, an outcome confirmed in aerial photo comparisons of the two kinds of neighborhoods. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The informal housing development process begins with a farmer subdividing and selling land to individuals or families who wish to construct dwellings. New landowners then put up dwellings for their own use or to generate income from rentals or sale. Frequently, an owner will construct a one or two story concrete and masonry building to start, move in, and add on three or four stories more as soon as money can be saved up. Because of this staged pattern of construction, communities on Cairo’s edge have a perpetually unfinished look about them. Much of the informal housing in existence today was originally paid for with remittances from Egyptians working abroad in the oil-rich Gulf states. For builders to follow the letter of the law for subdivisions and building codes would be much too costly, and the government is not about to follow the drastic step of tearing down existing, much needed housing just because it doesn’t happen to comply with current regulations. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The norm in third-world large-city informal housing is rickety shanty-towns, but Cairo is very much the exception. Families, who put up most of Cairo’s informal housing, act as their own contractors and carefully control quality in constructing simple, but solidly built concrete and masonry structures. A typical building will occupy a footprint of about 100 square meters and rise up to as high as five stories, with one or two apartments per floor. Again, construction usually occurs in stages, with one or two floors to start. Rooms are arranged around a central stair well and air shaft, and include a kitchen, living area, and one or two bedrooms. The provision of potable water, electricity, and sewerage hookups for informal housing is slow to arrive, and often requires substantial payments and bribes to government officials by building owners, but the more than 90 percent of housing in Cairo’s informal areas have all three services. This is not to say that their functioning is very reliable. Plugged sewers, broken water mains, and electricity blackouts occur with some frequency in most areas. Lanes between buildings are narrow with little sunlight penetrating to street level, and public open space is absent. The main access roads in informal areas get created by filling in old irrigation canals, and many of the lanes are old irrigation laterals. While informal neighborhoods suffer from poor air circulation, traffic congestion, and a lack of public facilities such as schools and clinics, they are more than just warehouses for the poor and breeding grounds for crime and revolution. They possess extensive kinship networks, a vibrant street life, active mosques, local markets, employment in stores and small shops, connections to larger Cairo through ubiquitous private minibuses, and a core of middle class families. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The single biggest government effort to provide housing has been the planned creation of eight, spatially expansive, satellite suburban new towns in the desert outside of the built-up Cairo urban area. In laying out these new towns, government planners adopted a western suburban vision of spread out, auto oriented residential subdivisions, shopping malls, and industrial and office parks with the hope of diverting population expansion away from the city, but, contrary to the portrayal of a dream-like suburbia in the many billboards and ads one encounters in and around Cairo, the new towns have been an unmitigated failure. Simply put, new town housing is inaccessible or unaffordable for all but a small minority of Cairo’s residents. To get into Cairo from new towns via minibuses for work takes way too long even if housing were cheap enough. To make the commute with ease requires owning a car, something that, as we already noted, very few Cairenes can afford. Despite a huge public investment in roads, sewers, water, street lightning, public spaces, landscaping, and treatment plants, the new towns count for only about 10 percent (1.8 million) of greater Cairo’s population today on some 1,200 square kilometers. This amount of land is equivalent to about 70 percent of Cairo’s current built-up urban area which houses nearly 15 million people. Vast plots of new town subdivided land remains undeveloped, and numerous new housing units remain unoccupied. The suburban dream so far in Cairo has turned out to be a dismal flop.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The future of housing in Cairo looks to be not in new towns, but in existing, compact, energy efficient, informal neighborhoods, and, given their past success in supplying reasonably decent housing at an affordable cost, this is a good thing. Cairo’s housing future will brighten further if a more democratic and responsive government eventually brings an improvement in basic local services, especially garbage collection, and in transportation, education, and public open space. In the meantime, more inexpensive rooftop gardens would be a plus for bringing green space and nutritious food to Cairo’s informal neighborhoods, a serious opportunity for Schaduf’s rooftop farms and micro-financing NGOs.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Despite its current poverty and political troubles, Egypt’s material and social development improved markedly in the past few decades. The UN’s Human Development Index, which is based on per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP), life expectancy at birth, infant mortality, and schooling, increased in recent reports for Egypt at an annualized rate of 1.5 percent a year, nearly matching the booming Asia/Pacific region. The index goes beyond pure economic growth and accounts for both health and educational attainment. Improvements in the country’s human development suggests that Egypt’s Arab Spring may well have flowed less from material depravation than a growing desire for political freedom and democracy. Social science research on global human development processes tell us this: improved material and physical security along with increased educational attainment bring forth demands for more extensive self-expression, both personal and political. Once attained, self-expression in its turn fosters more effective democratic governance and increases political demands for a variety of social goals, including gender equity, economic justice, racial tolerance, and environmental protection. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The emergence of democracy in Egypt will likely be a messy and protracted affair, but once it gains a foothold we can expect a growing public interest in government actions favorable to compact living and the environment. Less developed countries such as Egypt express greater concern for economic security and less for personal autonomy and individual freedom than the affluent west, but younger generations of Egyptians, who have grown up in a world with less infant mortality, improved health, and greater educational attainment, express post-material values with greater frequency than their older peers according to recent research based on the World Values Survey. Yet Egyptians as a whole continue a powerful commitment to traditional religious values and don’t yet score very highly on aggregate measures of self-expressive values. While tensions run high between Egyptian youth and their more traditional elders around such questions as personal freedoms and gender equity, the two groups seem to be in agreement on protection of the environment, especially in Cairo where environmental degradation is a part of the daily experience. Historically, environmental action has been suppressed by a dictatorial government whose predominant interest is in political control. Unleashing the forces of democracy will no doubt take Egypt in unexpected directions, but a path to environmental improvement that helps retain urban compactness is a distinct possibility. Simple social inventions are available to Cairenes that can bring substantial environmental improvement, support a continued compact form of urban life, and expand much needed employment opportunities. Let’s consider a few of the more important examples.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Cairo already operates two modern underground metro rail lines, but they only serve about thirty percent of the city. If all lines currently on the drawing boards for Cairo were constructed, metro access would be expanded to most of the city’s neighborhoods. A shift from commuting by minibus, taxi, and private automobile to riding the metro would bring substantial reductions in traffic congestion and local air pollution as well as climate-warming carbon emissions. The ease of getting around Cairo would be vastly improved, making it a more convenient and pleasant city to live in. A key economic virtue of metro expansion would be the huge number of construction jobs created, not only for the rail line themselves, but for the commercial and residential construction that will follow near metro stations. An efficient metro could be complimented with investment in a feeder system of dedicated bus lanes and low-emission hybrid buses. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Expanding the metro system is neither an especially innovative nor new idea. The real need for social invention here is in the financing of such a project given that Egypt remains a relatively poor country with limited resources for such a huge investment. Nonetheless, Egyptians could take advantage of two funding sources for transportation and other projects, one internal and the other external. The Egyptian government currently spends a fifth of its budget on energy subsidies, primarily for gasoline, amounting to nearly 100 billion Egyptian pounds a year ($16 billion). By any standard, this is a huge amount of money and constitutes a substantial source of funding for both alternative transportation and clean energy projects. Such subsidies could be slowly reduced over time with the bulk of the reductions coming after transit projects are up and running and can provide inexpensive alternatives for Cairenes to get around. The up front costs of such projects could be borrowed against future government revenues flowing from reduced fuel subsidies along with a slowly rising tax on carbon emissions. Egypt’s ratification of the Kyoto Protocol makes it eligible for the funding of projects that will reduce carbon emissions which an expanded Cairo metro would achieve. The Cairo government already plans to sell certificates of emission reductions (CERs) to European countries for its third metro line currently under construction and terminating near the airport. Future global treaties on greenhouse gas reductions will likely contain subsidies to developing countries for meeting treaty provisions on a much larger scale than Kyoto. A one meter rise in sea level induced by global warming would cause the inundation of as much as 4,500 square kilometers of the Nile delta and displace some 6 million inhabitants, a disastrous possibility for Egypt, rendering the country a deserving recipient of funding for fighting climate change.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Other “low-hanging” projects that yield significant greenhouse house gas and air pollution reductions are already in the works and would benefit from a financing boost. Conversion of taxis and minibuses to compressed natural gas as fuel is currently being promoted and could be moved along with incentives for vehicle conversion and refueling station construction. Even with an improved metro, minibuses and taxis will continue to be an essential piece of Cairo’s transportation pie. A second step bringing further emissions reductions would be the introduction of a system of electric powered taxis and minibuses. Deals could be struck with automakers for job-expanding final assembling of such vehicles in Egypt, and a leasing system established to avoid the need for individual operators to bear the initial purchase cost. A side benefit of electric vehicles would be a substantial reduction in traffic noise. Of course, added clean sources of electric power will be needed for both the metro and electric vehicles. Egypt possesses a substantial potential for wind energy in the Gulf of Suez and projects to develop it are in the planning stage, and, as we know, the Egyptian desert offers some of the highest solar potential in the world. Good solar sites already being developed along the edge of the Nile Valley not far from existing power lines. Again, the key need for all this is creative financing spearheaded by an entrepreneurial Egyptian government. Given its history, such creativity seems unlikely, but with democracy and realization of obvious opportunities for much needed economic expansion, who knows. A free, energized, smart Egyptian population demanding a more responsive government is already being unleashed by the Arab Spring, but patience will be required by those pressing for a different and better future. The democracy learning curve can be lengthy, and powerful political forces wedded to the past will have to be overcome. </span></span></div>
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Doug Boothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08725464785512608571noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8007557640373832250.post-3258529304763266952012-03-15T08:23:00.006-07:002013-03-11T06:30:58.982-07:00Sekem and Organic Agriculture in Egypt<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Ibrahim Abouleish grew up in a Cairo neighborhood in the 1940s and 1950s where many Jewish families lived, attended a Christian school, and became deeply attached to his Muslim faith at an early age. He attended university in Austria where he obtained a medical degree as well as training in research chemistry. After completing his studies, he embarked on a successful career in pharmacological research in Austria, married an Austrian, and started a family. He took a special interest in the study of philosophy, especially the works of Rudolph Steiner, which he used to read and interpret the Koran in what he considered to be a spiritually more insightful fashion. Dr. Abouleish enjoyed and admired European culture but remained a committed Muslim throughout his life. Unlike many other Egyptians, Dr. Abouleish expressed opposition to war with Israel in the 1960s. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Although he returned to Egypt frequently to visit his family, Dr. Abouleish did not travel extensively in the country until 1975 when he took an eye-opening trip with an Austrian friend. He was shocked by the catastrophic degradation of agriculture in the Nile Valley and the physical decline of Cairo and its living conditions. Construction of the Aswan High Dam in his eyes was an unmitigated disaster by halting the age-old annual flooding of the Nile that covered fields with life-giving fertile mud. Farmers were forced to compensate for this loss of fertility by applying large amounts of fertilizer which led to excessive salting and soil compression. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">On his return to Austria, Dr. Abolish further investigated and pondered what had happened to Egypt and began to seek alternatives to the continued degradation of the rural landscape. He became especially interested in biodynamic agriculture, a type organic farming developed by students of Rudolph Steiner’s anthroposophy. This form of farming had been successfully applied for decades in Europe, especially in Italy. After traveling and learning about biodynamic methods, Dr. Abouleish set aside his research career and, with his wife and children, moved back to Egypt in 1977 to establish an organic farm. The farm became the focal point for the SEKEM initiative, the name of which was adapted from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics for the life-giving vitality of the sun. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">SEKEM, headquartered at the original farm site north of Cairo, includes five different companies that employ 1,800 people and produce and distribute a variety of organic products including natural medicines, cereals, rice, vegetables, pasta, honey, jams, dates, spices, herbs, edible oils, herbal teas, juices, coffee, milk, eggs, beef, sheep, chicken, seeds, and organic cotton textiles and clothing. One company, ISIS, distributes more than 80 percent of the herbal teas sold in Egypt. SEKEM currently operates five farms on reclaimed desert lands that provide almost a third of the company’s organic raw materials and has created permanent “Fair Trade” ties with small farmers for the rest. SEKEM’s secret weapon in desert reclamation is compost, a product it both uses itself and sells to other farmers. Compost rich soil in deserts increases fertility and productivity, retains much more water than conventional farm soil (essential in an arid climate), and sequesters substantial amount of carbon in its accumulated organic matter. As a result of its aerobic composting operation, SEKEM is awarded carbon credits which it can sell in the European carbon allowance market. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">While SEKEM is a profitable venture, its goals and activities extend well beyond those of a conventional business. SEKEM has successfully advanced its founding vision of creating ecologically sustainable oases in the desert where health-giving organic goods can be grown in a manner protective of both the local and global environment. In and around these oases, SEKEM seeks to create communities where individuals can not only improve their material condition, but expand their educational and culture capabilities as well. In all its efforts, SEKEM adheres to strict standards for the protection of human rights (including religious freedom), achievement of gender equity, and educational and cultural advancement as well as rigorous targets for environmental sustainability including carbon emissions reduction. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Through its Development Foundation, SEKEM established a school located on its headquarters farm serving 300 kindergarten, primary, and secondary students. The students come from a diversity of social backgrounds, including both Muslims and Christians, and the school emphasizes respect for all religions and contains both a mosque and chapel. In addition to following the Egyptian state curriculum, the school makes a special effort to provide courses in crafts, drama, dance, and music. SEKEM has its own orchestra that performs in the local community and gives special support to the practice of Eurythmy, a dance form originating in Europe.The Foundation has also established a modern medical center nearby that serves 120 patients or more a day from employee families and the local community. The clinic offers a variety of outreach programs that address such issues as women’s health, family planning, and sanitation. In addition to these efforts, the Foundation also offers vocational training and education in organic methods. The SEKEM Academy located near Cairo undertakes applied research in agriculture and pharmaceuticals and helped to create the Heliopolis University which just recently opened and is offering degrees in pharmacy, engineering, and business. All students will take a set of core courses using a holistic approach to education focusing on culture, the environment, globalism, and the full development of personal abilities. In sum, SEKEM in its short lifetime has created an impressive set of institutions with a visionary hope for realizing sustainable social and economic progress in the Egyptian countryside. How such a social invention occurred is a fascinating tale worthy of our attention.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Starting up something so unusual as an organic farm in an autocratic country dominated by the military and run by centralized bureaucracies proved to be a demanding and frustrating task. One day bulldozers and soldiers arrived on the SEKEM farm and started pulling down three-year old trees to clear the land. A local general had decided to turn the farm into a military area to take advantage of a water supply from wells dug for crops, and the intrusion was brought to a halt only because Dr. Abouleish was friends with President Sadat and could ask for his help. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">One of the biggest challenges to SEKEM arose from pesticide spraying on neighboring cotton fields spilling over onto the farm’s medicinal herbs and other organic crops, threatening the company’s certification as a biodynamic producer. Fearing a collapse in the cotton crop, the Egyptian government refused to curtail pesticide spraying. SEKEM set out to prove on test plots that organic methods to control pests can be just as effective and no more costly than conventional pesticide applications. After several years of testing, SEKEM demonstrated the effectiveness of organic methods, and pesticide use was eventually halted on all of Egyptian cotton fields. As a reward for its efforts, SEKEM successfully entered the organic cotton business.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Egyptian pesticide companies of course were unhappy about the loss of a lucrative market caused by SEKEM and began a campaign to generate negative publicity against the company. Newspaper articles soon appeared suggesting that organic agriculture is unaffordable for poor countries like Egypt and that SEKEM is a pawn of wealthy Europeans. The most damaging attack came with a widely circulated news report that the company’s employees engaged in sun worship on the job, a practice seen as idolatrous and horrific to faithful Muslims. The news article grossly misrepresented a weekly employee assembly where all stand in a circle to emphasize the importance of each individual in the work of the whole and the equal dignity of everyone. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">To combat attacks by prayer leaders in local mosques, Dr. Abouleish decided to invite all local Muslim community leaders, mayors, and sheiks to SEKEM to show how the company’s mission promotes important virtues of the Muslim faith. He used passages from the Koran to illustrate how organic agriculture meets the call for faithful Muslims to be “...responsible for the earth, plants and animals.” To make his point more fully, Dr. Abouleish quoted the following from the Koran along with other similar passages:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The sun and the moon pursue their ordered course. The plants and the trees bow down in adoration. He [God] raised the heaven on high and set the balance of all things, that you might not transgress it. Do not disrupt the equilibrium and keep the right measure and do not lose it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">He went on in the meeting to explain exactly how biodynamic agricultural methods support the balance of nature more effectively than the kind of farming that makes heavy use of pesticides and fertilizers. The audience was impressed by the connection between organic agriculture and the call of the Koran for human stewardship of the earth and nature. Positive articles about SEKEM soon appeared in the Egyptian media and public doubts about the company evaporated. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">This brief summary of SEKEM’s overcoming of early tribulations offers only a partial and incomplete picture of its accomplishments. For the complete story, I urge readers to take a look at Dr. Abouleish’s inspiring book, <i>SEKEM: A Sustainable Community in the Egyptian Desert</i>.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The SEKEM experience demonstrates a potential in Egyptian agricultural for expansion and employment growth while at the same time doing good turns for both local rural communities and the environment. One of the biggest advantages Egypt and other north African countries such as Tunisia possess for organic food production is their proximity to European markets. Demand in Europe for organics has been growing rapidly in recent years, and the ability of Egypt to provide crops in all seasons is a special competitive benefit. Because of its reduced demand for water relative to conventional crops, organics place less pressure on scarce water resources, and since organics don't require pesticides or synthetic fertilizers, a transition to organic cropping in and adjacent to the Nile Valley would substantially diminish the region’s water pollution problems. The buildup and retention of carbon in organically cropped soils and the reduced dependence on fossil fuel based pesticides and fertilizers that comes from a transition to organics has the positive side-benefit of diminishing the impact of agriculture on climate change. Since organic methods are often more labor intensive than mechanized conventional agriculture, a shift in cropping to organics would in itself increase employment. Perhaps the biggest benefit of SEKEM’s approach is its practice of creating farms on desert lands through the addition of compost to the soil and the development of highly efficient irrigation systems using deep wells. In this way, Egyptian agricultural production is expanded without placing added pressure on scarce Nile Valley land and water resources. SEKEM can’t be accused of ignoring the Egyptian need for good food since almost 70 percent of its total sales occur in the domestic market. The lucrative export market essentially provides added financial power to SEKEM for investing in domestic agriculture to the benefit of Egypt as a whole. The point is simple: expansion of organic agriculture in Egypt and elsewhere can be good for both economic development and the environment, and in this endeavor SEKEM offers an enticing model for solving a multitude of economic, social, and environmental problems in rural areas of the Middle East. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Ibrahim Abouleish is just one man who has successfully sought an intersection between the Muslim faith and European post-materialist values. In his life, he oriented himself both to the tenants of Islam, and to self-expression, individual freedom, tolerance for human differences, and environmental protection. Islamic scholars have little trouble constructing an environmental ethic rooted in the Koran and Islamic theology, but whether such ethical constructs matter in the political arena is the real question we have to address. The SEKEM experience points to the potential for a sea change of environmental practice within the confines of Islamic teaching. The real issue is whether there is support for environmental improvement among those who possess real economic and political power. If the Arab Spring leads to full political democracy in Egypt, then the values of the public as a whole on this issue will be more likely to move to center stage and survey research suggests that the environment will be on the agenda. Philosophy again will matter, but it will now be a blending of Islam and post-materialism, and chances are social entrepreneurs such as Ibrahim Abolish will be leading the charge to a better environmental and economic future. </span></span></div>
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Doug Boothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08725464785512608571noreply@blogger.com0