Archives: Blogs

The Food & Water Europe Team Grows!

By Tina Callebaut

I recently started an internship of six months at Food & Water Europe and I am the newest addition to the small international Brussels-based team. During my first week I got to know the team a little better, I was given a tour around the ecologically renovated office building Mundo-B (which we share with 60 other NGOs) and I was introduced to the many issues Food & Water Europe is working and campaigning on. There was (and still is) a lot of information to take in, not to mention the many acronyms involved: PCI’s, RES, CEF, SGC, TAP, ECI, etc.… But I can only be very grateful for the warm welcome I’ve received in this small Spanish-Austrian-German working family.

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Spain, A Country Full of Manure

 

By David Sánchez

Over the last few decades, small- and medium-scale farms raising livestock have given way to factory farms that confine thousands of cows, pigs and chickens in tightly packed facilities. Uncontrolled agribusiness power and misguided public policies have pressed livestock producers to become significantly larger and to adopt more intensive practices, which come with a host of environmental and public health impacts that are borne by consumers and communities.

Spain and its pork meat industry is a clear example, as we expose in a new report released today. Spain is the third largest exporter of pork after China and the United States and has the largest pig population in the EU—over 28 million animals. Production and exports are growing as a result of high industry consolidation and low production costs. But that means that the industry is getting concentrated in just a few hands, with the number of farms diminishing rapidly and farmers getting squeezed in the process. Between 1999 and 2013, 180,000 pig farms disappeared in the country, with a massive impact in rural communities.

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Blog: Celts Oppose Fracking While Dragon Ships Bring U.S. Fracked Gas

By Andy Gheorghiu

In a historic vote at the beginning of this year, Ireland opted in favour of a law that will make the green island the world’s first country to fully divest from fossil fuels. This goes even further than the decision by the 2015 decision of Norwegian parliament to divest the country’s sovereign wealth fund from dozens of coal-related investments.

And it’s not the only clear movement of the Celtic Tiger towards a much needed post-fossil future. On October 27, a bill calling for a fracking ban passed its first hurdle in the Irish House of Representatives (Dáil Éireann). In the meantime, Irish officials have also decided to undertake a public consultation on the provisions of this bill together with the Joint Research Programme on the Impacts of Hydraulic Fracturing on the Environment and Human Health, led by the Irish Environmental Protection Agency.

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How the EU Is Supporting European Dependence on Gas

By Frida Kieninger

On 17 February, the EU Commission published the outcome of the call for funding under the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF), a financing tool with the aim of supporting “the development of high performing, sustainable and efficiently interconnected trans-European networks in the fields of transport, energy and digital services.” We had a deeper look into the funding instrument’s impact on energy infrastructure and found that the CEF fails to ensure efficient, and even more so, sustainable interconnections.

Since its creation in 2014, the CEF has provided €1billion to support gas projects, while electricity projects received only around €532million. These numbers are contrary to the declared CEF objectives of allocating the majority of its funds to electricity projects, and the EU-Commission’s own perceived need for Europe to invest further €140billion in electricity and “only” €70billion in gas infrastructure

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Fracking, Health and Regulations: What the EU-Commission is (NOT!) doing about it – Part II

By Andy Gheorghiu and Frida Kieninger

(Part I)

DG Environment from the EU-Commission seems to have its hands bound and is largely unable to protect Europeans from health hazards caused by fracking. There are a few initiatives such as the Human Biomonitoring Initiative (HBM4EU) or the EU platform for chemical monitoring data (IPChem), but these are far from leading to binding legislation aimed specifically at unconventional gas production.

However, the Commission just recently published a review concerning the effectiveness of its non-binding “Recommendation on shale gas and fracking,” which was adopted on January 22, 2014.

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Fracking, Health and Regulations: What the EU-Commission is (NOT!) doing about it – Part I

By Andy Gheorghiu and Frida Kieninger

In November 2016, the EU-Commission organized a “workshop on public health impacts and risks resulting from oil and gas extraction.” Behind this title are mainly questions around fracking and a hesitant attempt by the Environment Directorate General (DG ENV) – historically the most supporting part of the Commission concerning environmental issues – to find out more about its impacts on public health.

Scientists from the U.S. and Europe, as well as industry representatives and NGOs, had their say at the workshop. While the public health impacts of oil and gas extraction though fracking in the U.S. have been analyzed in several studies, most were sponsored by the oil and gas industry and are seriously biased towards its interests. Nonetheless, there is an enormous amount of evidence that fracking negatively affects public health, as confirmed and acknowledged by this compendium of scientific, medical and media findings.

However, authorities still think that there is a lack of data. This is mainly due to the public’s dependency on industry to obtain information about fracking chemicals, injection mixtures, amounts, and due to the absence of much needed baseline studies, measuring indicators before hydrocarbon production.

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