We don’t normally think about the supply chain involved in getting the food that you consume on to your table, but it is at times long and tortuous. For example, it has been said that it takes about 50 companies to prepare a can of Campbell’s soup, each one attending to a very specialized task. Although that is true for processed food, the fact is that it can be no different even for foods that require little preparation, and the food industry can be known to be highly political and may have some practices that might make you think twice about whether you really should be eating what’s on your plate or not.

Did you know that the term banana republic, used as a pejorative term to refer to politically unstable countries with corrupt governments, originally referred to Latin American countries that were huge suppliers of bananas?  In the early 20th century, Read the rest of this entry »

We don’t normally think of bats as important animals to save because there seems to be so many of them, and that they’re more of an annoyance rather than a really important part of the ecosystem. Yet, in the United States, bats are currently in some danger and conservationists and other individuals are swinging into action to save them. You might ask yourself why they’d bother, but the truth is that all animals and plants do generally play an important role in the ecosystem and bats, as it turns out, are hugely important and they can even generate a substantial amount of economic value. We were highlighted to this piece of news by this article.

Bats are what is known as apex predators, which means they lie at the top of the food pyramid and play an integral role in managing the activity of the other creatures below it in the pyramid. Bats generally eat insects and help control the insect population. Fruit bats in particular are Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve recently seen this short film that describes gorillas as 98.6% close to humans. While we can’t exactly say whether the number is accurate or not, it is undeniable that the genetic codes of many of the great apes (of which gorillas are only one of the family) are extremely similar to those of the human race, and it is in the slight differences between the genetic codes that make the great apes all vastly dissimilar to one another. The film follows a few families of gorillas and we think one thing is immediately striking, although gorillas are commonly depicted as aggressive and dangerous animals, this isn’t necessarily the whole pictures. In fact, sometimes human aggression can be a lot more scary and dangerous than gorilla aggression.

Admittedly, we haven’t seen any gorillas up close in the wild so we will have to fall back on the work of pioneers such as Dian Fossey and the many groups of conservationists and field biologists who spend a lot of their times with gorillas. It turns out that, in the wild, gorillas are remarkably social animals who are practically never violent with members of their own family or other species. The only times when gorillas get aggressive with one another is when there is competition between two families and the two dominant males of each family engage in a fight to the death. Although Read the rest of this entry »

In the 1980s, Malaysia made a critical decision in moving from an agricultural economic base to an economy based on manufacturing and remains on the cusp of moving towards a knowledge society. The idea seems to be sound – by moving to a more “value added” economic activity, the country and its people can benefit from greater returns on their investments. So, it was interesting to find a group of articles on Bloomberg today on how some big international investment funds are starting to look at investing in agriculture again as a way of generating good return on investment.

According to this article from Bloomberg, some international private equity funds have invested in free range goat farming projects in Australia, which promise 12% returns on investment, and according to this article also from Bloomberg, George Washington University in the United States is planning on raising its investments in agricultural projects to 10% of its total endowment. Read the rest of this entry »

It has been said that the greatest opportunities arise from the most trying conditions and there really aren’t as many trying times as the recession that most countries around the world are going through right now. Nevertheless, it’s good to know that there are some enterprising businessmen in Malaysia who still see opportunities in some of the unlikeliest places. We recently saw this story from The Star that tells the story of an enterprising Malaysian who saw a hill of discarded rice husks, commonly thought of as industrial waste, and saw an opportunity to reprocess and convert them into household items. Better yet, it appears that his industrial process doesn’t even need to use any harmful chemicals and is eco-friendly.

In fact, waste management is a huge business although it’s the type of thing that we tend to keep at the back of our minds. Most people certainly don’t want to be thinking of waste all the time! However, throughout these blogs, we have always been attracted to the idea of reusing “waste” products and turning them into something desirable again – after all, so many of the planet’s resources are non-replenishable. We’ve also written in these blogs about some companies around Malaysia who are in the business of collecting used cooking oil and converting it into biodiesel. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve just realized that we haven’t really written all that many articles about crude oil, despite the fact that it is such an important strategic resource in today’s world. Although all our discussions about alternative energy sources are important and would serve to build a cleaner and greener world tomorrow, the fact remains that we are still very dependent on crude oil and other petroleum byproducts to power much of our modern society. With so much knowledge about digging crude oil from the ground and exploring for new oilfields, you’d think the science would be settled on the origins of crude oil, but it’s really not quite that simple. In this article, we delve into the world of the slightly bizarre.

The standard story of the origin of crude oil is, of course, that crude oil is generated from the breakdown of the detritus of ancient life that have fallen deep within the earth and are subjected to the immense temperatures and pressures underground. This causes all those complex organic molecules to break down into much simpler hydrocarbons which then go up to make crude oil, from which all the useful products that we use for industry and our daily lives are distilled. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a growing community of people across the world, but largely concentrated in the United Kingdom and the United States, who are becoming more interested in living off-grid. The concept of living off-grid is simple in theory although much harder to do in practice. Living off-grid involves disconnecting your home from the electricity grid (hence the term) and powering the entire home either with sustainable energy harvested from the wind or the sun, as well as ensuring that everything else at home is managed sustainably. In short, the idea is to live with as little impact as possible to the environment, and some savvy off-grid enthusiasts actually generate enough excess electricity to put it back on the electricity grid and earn money for selling the surplus.

While this is a practically non-existent trend in Malaysia probably because of a lack of awareness as well as the infrastructure and engineering knowledge to do this, we think it makes an excellent case study on the lengths that some communities around the world are taking in an effort to reduce their impact on the environment. Of course, there are communities in Malaysia that don’t live off the electricity grid although that’s largely because they live in locations where electricity isn’t supplied and many of them live on either fuel-powered generators or without electricity at all. It’s just not the same if you’re forced to be without electricity rather than making a conscious choice to live off-grid. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re starting to see more articles now about the state of fishing around the world, with many articles decrying the depletion of fish stocks around the waters of Europe and questioning whether the endangered bluefin tuna will manage to survive the turn of the next century. We’ve already talked about what fish to eat and what to avoid from an environmental perspective, but in this article, we’d like to focus more on sustainable fishing and use the United States as a case study because some of the best sustainable fishing practices are being done in and around the US and have actually led to an increase in fish stocks rather than a decrease as found in many other regions in the world.

No sustainable fishing policy can be successful unless there is effective action from consumers, advocacy groups, and enforcement authorities as well as fish suppliers throughout the supply chain. In 2006, for example, Read the rest of this entry »