Banana prices to go up as temperatures rise, reports the BBC. Unmentioned is that banana output has doubled over the past 20 years, surely helped by a little extra warmth and atmospheric CO2.
The post Matt McGrath of the BBC Goes Climate Banana Crazy appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
The rain has been almost constant these early months of 1996. Great storms from the US have arrived even to here, the Caribbean coast of Honduras, thousands of kilometers to the south. At times in Tela, the run-off courses thigh-deep. And every day, it seems, some piece of news about those Northern-owned Fruit Companies has […]
Most people know that fruits and vegetables are essential staples of a healthy diet, and consuming plenty of them have been found to cut the risk of various cancers. However, most of those studies have focused on how fruit and vegetable consumption benefit the health of adults, but we know that a healthy start in life can protect people from diseases later on.
When bananas start getting black spots all over them, they either become banana bread or trash, but the uses don’t stop there! Scientists have actually found that they might be useful in both detecting and treating skin cancer.
Those black spots contain tyrosinase, an enzyme also present in human skin, and in even higher amounts in people with melanoma, a potentially fatal form of skin cancer.
It is fair to say that the affairs of the Republic of Guatemala don’t register all that much in the minds, nor in the media, of Americans. This probably shouldn’t be taken as surprising. The same can be said for most, if not all, small impoverished countries. Still in recent weeks very astute readers of newspapers would have come across a small smattering of stories, all of which it goes without saying would have received sprawling headlines if they involved a larger, non-impoverished country:
When President Obama requested $3.7 billion from Congress in early July he returned the issue of border security to the forefront where it had faded since the days of large scale Mexican migration a few years ago. The exodus from Mexico stemmed from the signing of NAFTA in 1994 which pitted Mexican corn farms, long a staple of the Mexican economy, against an influx of heavily subsidized corn inputs from the U.S. Over two million Mexicans left agriculture and many headed north, drawn by the Sunbelt building boom.
