查看更多>>摘要：On 19th January, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that Member States will no longer be allowed to grant derogations on the use of sugar beet seeds coated with neonicotinoids. Fearful of their livelihoods, some 4000 beet growers with over 600 of them in their tractors, drove into Paris and demonstrated few meters from the French Ministry of Agriculture on February 8th. To understand the determination of our farmers, we need to look at the global policy changes taking place in France. European civil society is very concerned about environmental issues. Even more so in our country, where food is considered -a sacred good, civil society is questioning how we manage our fields. While this is commendable, it is also very challenging because the increasingly urban population are far removed from the reality of farming and not well informed about the demands of agricultural production. In the 1980s, 7 % of the French worked in agriculture; today, it is around 1.5 %. Moreover, France is a country where ideals remain strong - from childhood, we are inculcated with the writings of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who considered nature to be inherently good, corrupted by modern society.
查看更多>>摘要：March raw sugar settled at 21.38 cents per lb on February 15, following the six-year peak of 21.89 cents the previous week. May white sugar settled at US$566.00 a tonne. Over the past month, sugar prices have rallied sharply on concern about smaller global sugar production. On January 31, the Indian Sugar Mills Association (ISMA) cut its 2022/23 India sugar production estimate to 34 million tonnes from an Oct estimate of 36.5 million tonnes and cut its India 2022/23 sugar export estimate to 6.1 million tonnes from an Oct forecast of 9 million tonnes. In addition, ISMA said that it sees India's sugar mills diverting 4.5 million - 5.0 million tonnes of sugar to ethanol production in 2022/23. The supply tightness in the first half of 2023 will ease in the second half as Brazil commences the 2023/24 campaign in April, which should ensure more ample availability.
查看更多>>摘要：Mills investing in expanding sugar production capacity ahead of 2023/24 appears to be likely, according to Valor Economico. This is catalysed by concerns among millers about uncertainties about what President Lula's administration policies for fiscal balance, monetary policy, fuel pricing policy, and fuel tax policy will look like, in addition to doubts about the direction of the foreign exchange rate. Since these factors tend to impact the ethanol market more immediately, millers feel prioritising sugar production is a safe haven before the new campaign commences in April. The commodities broker Marex recently echoed expansion in sugar production, but for a different reason. "Sugar has been needing the sugar mix in Brazil to run close to the maximum for 3 years now and will almost certainly continue for another year. That is proof that supply has been inherently tight; in other words, we need a substantial source of additional exports. [The answer is no India because] But India is not a 'cheap' producer," Marex says. "We do think that mills will install more [sugar production] capacity in the future; in fact, it is probably by far the cheapest and quickest way to create additional sugar supply, and moreover, it looks as if increasingly sugar will offer a better return than ethanol in Brazil".
查看更多>>摘要：We have seen thyssenkrupp Industries India products in a variety of locations the world over. What is the size of the company, and what does it do in the sugar industry? thyssenkrupp Industries India is a group company of thyssenkrupp AG a German Engineering conglomerate, generating over 41 Billion Euros in revenue annually, operating in 48 countries and specialising in industries such as steel, automotive components, material services, submarines, plant technology, and so on. Sugar plants and machinery are part of the plant technology business vertical, through which we provide complete turnkey solutions for sugar plant setup.
查看更多>>摘要：Progress in industrial biotechnology over the past ten years has fuelled a new wave of innovation impacting the production of chemicals and goods for the health, agriculture, consumer and energy + materials sector. This has been led by developing a metabolic engineering toolbox comprising omics technologies, computational systems biology, protein engineering and synthetic biology. The toolbox facilitates the engineering of a metabolic pathway in microbes to produce the desired molecule. In the January 2020 report Safeguarding the Bioeconomy by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, the value of bioeconomy was estimated at US$1 trillion in the USA alone.
查看更多>>摘要：Researchers from the University of Queensland (UQ) and the Technical University of Munich have developed a process to convert cane sugar into a platform chemical for aviation fuel, plastics, rubbers and food additives. The researchers, led by UQ's Professor Gary Schenk, sourced the enzyme dehydratase from Paralcaligenes ureilyticus to speed up the slowest step in processing sugar into isobutanol. "Usually during a biomanufacturing process, cells such as yeasts are used as a production platform, but in our research, only a small number of a sugar acid-specific dehydratase enzyme was used," Professor Schenk said. "Having sugar-converting enzymes operate outside a cellular environment meant we could bypass many of the pitfalls of the more traditional cell-based biomanufacturing methods. "This has led to much higher yields of isobutanol with fewer unwanted side products."
查看更多>>摘要：Limonoids are responsible for the bitter taste in citrus (e.g., limonin) and the active constituents of neem oil, a widely used bioinsecticide (e.g., azadirachtin), and have potential as anti-cancer drugs. However, despite the commercial value of limonoids, commercial-scale production has been challenging due to a limited understanding of how these molecules are synthesised in plants. Using ground-breaking methods, researchers at the John Innes Centre and Stanford University have revealed the biosynthetic pathway of these useful molecules, which certain plant families make, including mahogany and citrus.
查看更多>>摘要：Plant adaptations to nutritional scarcity are informed by plant microbiomes playing fundamental roles in shaping the host responses to biotic and abiotic stresses and modulating plant phenotypic plasticity. These microorganisms can form complex and stable associations that determine plant speciation, geographic distribution patterns, and diversity to a much stronger degree than previously acknowledged. Researchers at the State University of Campinas's Institute of Biology (IB-UNICAMP) in Sao Paulo state identified 522 genomes of archaea and bacteria associated with the roots and soil of two plant species native to the Brazilian montane savanna ecoregion known as campos rupestres ("rocky meadows") that are enriched in genes involved in organic compound intake, and phosphorus and nitrogen turnover.
查看更多>>摘要：Plants use membrane separation mechanisms to distinguish between molecules with similar chemical properties. Membrane separation enables the distribution or retention of resources and the efflux or compartmentation of waste. Plants use specialised membrane separation mechanisms to adapt to challenging soil solution compositions and distinguish between resources and waste. Researchers from The Australian National University (ANU) are adapting plants' membrane separation mechanism to develop new techniques to separate and extract valuable minerals, metals and nutrients from resource-rich wastewater.
查看更多>>摘要：A modelling study led by researchers at the University of Edinburgh predicts that the increasing prices of energy and fertilisers will significantly affect food production, food prices, and ultimately, food insecurity in the coming decades, more so than supply chain disruption caused by the war in Ukraine. Researchers used a global land-use computer model to simulate the effects of export restrictions and spikes in production costs on food prices, health, and land use through to 2040.
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