Most paper requests come by e-mail.

It was a surprise (to me) to receive this. It felt like coming from another era.

I know, it has been long time I passed here…, I will try to change that.

And my ‘come-back post’ talks about another thing which has been long time… a manuscript.

Seven months ago I submitted a manuscript. And. The current status in the editorial system is ‘with editor’.

Two months ago I send an e-mail to the editors inquiring about the status of the review process of the manuscript, hoping that the editors do not update the editorial system regularly and that parts of the reviewing process are done off-line.

But, the response was not what I hoped for:

• First mail: from the Managing Editor: [>10 submissions per week], [>500 files in progress], [you can imagine the correspondence], [we will inform you], …
• Second mail (few seconds later than the first one): from the editorial system: [your manuscript will be handled by another editor]

I feel that these two mails indicate that my manuscript is still just ‘with editor’ (1. The managing editor does not inform me whether the actual status of my manuscript is different than indicated in the editorial system or not and 2. the manuscript changes handling editor).

I am quite new in this, and would like to ask some things:

• Seven months ‘with editor’: is this reasonable?
• How persistent may one be in contacting the editors to draw attention to ones manuscript?
• How would editors react on a retraction of a manuscript by the authors?

Thanks in advance

The last three months we have been doing a lot of field work here in India. First there was the socio-economic survey on Jatropha farmers in Allahabad. Later two MSc students came here from Belgium for their Master Thesis project which I am guiding. We went back to Allahabad (Uttar Pradesh) for field measurements. And did the same in Devaprayag and Srinagar (Uttrakand), Bawal (Haryanna) and tried to do the same, but failed, in Pantnagar (Uttrakand).

One of the parameters to be measured was the soil infiltration rate. This was done by a local made double ring infiltrometer:

In the clay soils of Allahabad, one measurement took about 4 hours to stabilize. Time enough to read some more about India. As you can see I took: ‘In spite of the gods – the strange rise of modern India’ by Edward Luce. On the cover William Dalrymple states “without question the best book yet written on the New India”. This is most probably true. I can really recommend this non-fiction book to anyone who wants to understand the strange rise of modern India a bit better. It requires almost no foreknowledge on India. Being here spices up some of the anecdotes narrated, but an own India experience is not necessary to like this book.

(but yeah, so far…)

My stay in India is coming to an end. Today it was Mahatma Ghandi’s birthday, a national holiday of non-violence, but tomorrow is my last day at my New Delhi office. Monday we leave for a two weeks tour in Kerala (South West India) and at the end of the month I will re-join my colleagues in Leuven, Belgium.

As I will be working on the data gathered here in India, and still have some anecdotes from the field I want to share, I hope I can boost my frequency of blogging after my return…

I was quite surprised when I saw this:

Large, readable online version on WebCite

The first remarkable thing is that Jatropha shows to be a quite hot topic with currently 3 Jatropha articles in the top 10 downloaded Biomass & Bioenergy Journal. Renewed interest in downloading Jatropha papers started about April 2007.

The second thing is that our article (Achten et al. 2008) is on the fifth place in this ranking. Me being surprised is not just false modesty, it mainly is true and genuine surprise. The given rank is for the downloads during the period Januari – March 2008, while our article was only accepted on March 13th, 2008 and available online since May 15th, 2008.

Is this paper hot or what?

Germination of Jatropha curcas L.

Jatropha curcas L. is an upcoming biofuel crop, which is claimed to simultaneously reclaim wastelands, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance socio-economic development in rural areas of the South ¹.

Jatropha plantation in Allahabad, India

According to me/us sufficient scientific knowledge is yet to emerge to support commercial large scale Jatropha biodiesel production ². Knowledge gaps are most persistent in Jatropha’ genetics, agronomy and physiology.

But I wanted to talk about a discussion in the socio-economic domain: the positive and negative aspects of the labor intensive character of the Jatropha cultivation on livelihoods of rural communities in the South.

The main thing is the unequal ripening of the Jatropha fruits (see picture). Fruits are best harvested at maturity. But since the fruits, which grow in bunches, do not all ripen at the same time, harvesting takes a lot of time.

Jatropha fruits. From left to right: unripe – half ripe – ripe.

The fact that it requires a lot of labor at first looks like beneficial for rural job creation. But (in general), is every job created beneficial? If jobs created are underpaid, unsure, possibly health threatening, …in short, not meeting any international standard on labor, are they worth being created? Maybe not…, but in cases where there are no other opportunities, even such job can be still bring relief to important problems, but can also cause new problems… So, should they be created in such circumstances?
Next to these social aspects you, of course, also have the economic aspects. The end product of the Jatropha system (also calculating the by-products) should at least be equally expensive or cheaper than the cost of fossil diesel at the place where the Jatropha biodiesel will be marketed. As the costs of processing Jatropha seeds to biodiesel are quite fixed the pressure (for profits) often will be brought back on the labor cost. In such reasoning a labor intensive cultivation process seems less appealing to me. By being a labor intensive crop, Jatropha’ feasibility seems to be reduced to only the very poor regions of the world where there are no other opportunities.

Are my views blurred by something?

¹ Francis et al. 2005 DOI: 10.1111/j.1477-8947.2005.00109.x
² Achten et al. 2008 DOI: 10.1016/j.biombioe.2008.03.003

(view from hotel room in Leh – Ladakh – India – click to enlarge)

After a short 6 day visit in Rajasthan and Thar Desert we took a two day’s jeep trip (from Manali) trough the Himalayas to “Little Tibet”.

Crossing passes of up to 5350m we arrived in the magnificent Ladakh region in the Jammu & Kashmir state (partly disputed in the West) of India.

The Ladakhi fresh air, open blue sky and Buddhist-Tibetan atmosphere are highly recommended! (watch out with the height though)

Yesterday my eye fell on this little label on our ‘Trust’ sugar.

photo by myself

On one hand it is quite a relief to learn that our sugar is not just sulphurless, but apparently contains no harmful chemicals at all. On the other hand, the absence of such label on our bread, flower, water, … worries me a little.

I cannot help it, these things always dazzle me (a bit)…

John Montgomery Copyright © 2008

• Wroughton, Wiltshire, UK (close to Barbury Castle)
• Reported June 1st, 2008 (yeah, I’m slow, it just came in the Belgian newspaper today)
• Diameter: 100 m
• and apparently a coded image representing the first 10 digits of pi.

But why it dazzles me…, I don’t know. In the end it are just some lads having fun.

Maybe we should try to trample the Nature Network logo into some fields.

Following Raf… I’m releasing the Spiders

Recently (3-5 June 2008) FAO hosted the High-Level Conference on World Food Security: the Challenges of Climate Change and Bioenergy in its headquarters in Rome.

During the summit Olivier De Schutter, an independent UN expert on the right to food, called the United States and the European Union to abandon policies promoting biofuel consumption (US plans to channel 25% of US maize in ethanol by 2022 and the European Union is aiming at 10% substitution of transport fuel by 2020) (Robin Pomeroy and Alister Doyle, Reuters). The UN mainly wanted to urge the US and other nations to consider phasing out subsidies for food-based biofuels (Colum Lynch, Washington Post), because these are distorting the food market and as such enhancing current food crisis. This is without mentioning the effects on deforestation, biodiversity, water, …

The US Agriculture Secretary Ed Shafer played down biofuels’ role in soaring food prices. He says they contribute only around 3% of the sharp food price rise while campaign groups claim 30% (Robin Pomeroy, Reuters) and Michell (World Bank) concluded that 65 % of the rise in prices is due to biofuels and factors related to their rapid increase in demand for feedstocks (as given in the conference information material: Soaring food prices: facts, perspectives, impacts and actions required). Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defended Brazil’s booming ethanol industry: “We must clear away smokescreens raised by powerful lobbies who try to blame ethanol production for the recent inflation in food prices. It offends me to see fingers pointed against clean energy from biofuels, fingers soiled with oil and coal.” (Robin Pomeroy, Reuters).

Other voices recommended the World Leaders to agree on ways to make biofuels socially and environmentally acceptable before public opinion turns against them for good (Robin Pomeroy, Reuters).

In the final conference declaration, under pressure of Washington (Robin Pomeroy and Alister Doyle, Reuters), negative language on biofuels is avoided. The declaration sees “challenges and opportunities” and calls for “in-depth studies on the three sustainability pillars” and “result-oriented international dialogue on biofuels in the context of food security and sustainable development needs”.

The declaration could have been more concrete, but on the other hand this declaration puts the discussed issues on the international agenda which might be the correct first step towards a code of conduct.

It is very difficult to take a position in this complex discussion. In rural situations biofuels might even be able to increase people’s food security. Although the global food market is already heavily distorted, I also feel that subsidies for land use based biofuels should be stopped. In the end I would say that we have to take all objections (environmental, social and economic) at heart, not give up on biofuels and try to agree on a common foundation (like a set of principles) for further development (This sounds like a quite trivial stand). So…, I don’t come much further than the declaration myself.