Robert Pore's Ag Blog

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20, 2006 -- Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns today announced the immediate suspension and proposed debarment of AWB Limited, formerly the Australian Wheat Board, and its affiliates from participating in U.S. government programs and contracting with the U.S. government.

USDA's Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) is taking action against AWB Limited, 11 individuals, and a Minnesota-based company because sufficient evidence exists to suspect that they engaged in bribery, kickbacks and similar behavior resulting in payments to the Saddam Hussein regime.

"We have a duty to protect the public interest by ensuring the firms and individuals with whom we do business abide by the law," said Johanns. "We have taken this immediate step based on evidence of illicit activities and, in some cases, evidence of attempts to conceal those activities."

FAS has sent suspension and proposed debarment notifications to AWB Limited, Paul Ingleby, Jim Cooper, Mark Emons, Peter Geary, Michael Long, Dominic Hogan, Nigel Officer, Charles Stott, Murray Rogers, Michael Watson, Trevor Flügge, and the Commodity Specialists Company (CSC) of Minneapolis, Minn.

Effective immediately, these companies and individuals are barred from participating in any U.S. government procurements as well as many other U.S. government programs such as loan guarantees. During the suspension, FAS will conduct proceedings that may result in debarment of AWB Limited and its former employees indefinitely, and CSC for five years. AWB Limited and the 11 individuals face indefinite debarment because there is evidence to suspect that their direct involvement in the bribes and kickbacks paid to the Saddam Hussein regime were made more egregious by attempts to cover-up their actions.

Today's action follows the November 27, 2006, release of the Cole Commission Report. The Cole Commission was established by the Australian government to investigate wrongdoing by AWB Ltd. in the United Nations' Oil-for-Food Programme (OFFP). The potential wrongdoing by AWB Ltd. originally came to light in the United Nations' Volcker Commission's Report, which found that $1.8 billion of the OFFP's proceeds had been illegally diverted to members of the Iraqi government in violation of UN rules. AWB Limited was found to be responsible for diverting $220 million of that total.

On November 10, 2005, FAS suspended AWB (USA) Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of its Australian parent company. FAS did not take further action against the company at that time because the Australian Government acted swiftly in appointing the Cole Commission to investigate allegations against AWB Limited, and because AWB (USA) Limited agreed to recuse itself from participation in USDA programs during the course of the investigation. The Cole Commission Report implicated AWB Limited, individuals associated with AWB Limited, and the CSC.

NASA data from earth observation satellites is helping build the capability to determine when and where wildfires may occur by providing details on plant conditions, according to a recent study.

While information from sophisticated satellites and instruments have recently allowed scientists to quickly determine the exact location of wildfires and to monitor their movement, this geoscience research offers a step toward predicting their development and could complement data from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather satellites used to help calculate fire potential across much of the United States.

By studying shrublands prone to wildfire in southern California, scientists found that NASA earth observations accurately detected and mapped two key factors: plant moisture and fuel condition - or greenness - defined as the proportion of live to dead plant material. Moisture levels and fuel condition, combined with the weather, play a major role in the ignition, rate of spread, and intensity of wildfires.

"This represents an advance in our ability to predict wildfires using data from recently launched instruments," said lead author Dar Roberts, University of California-Santa Barbara. "We have come a long way in just the past 5 to 10 years and continue to gather much better data on the variables critical in wildfire development and spread."

To find out how well NASA satellites could detect these factors, researchers first sampled live fuel moisture, a critical measure for assessing fire danger, from several different plant species in sites across Los Angeles County, Calif. This ground-based data, collected by the Los Angeles County Fire Department over a five year period, were then compared to greenness and moisture measures from NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer and Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer. The space-based data were often closely linked to the field measurements, suggesting the instruments can be used to determine when conditions are favorable for wildfires.

"Improving the role of satellite data in wildfire prediction and monitoring through efforts like these is critical, since traditional field sampling is limited by high costs, and the number and frequency of sites you can sample," said Roberts. "This new data on the relative greenness of a landscape also allows us to see how conditions are changing compared to the past."

The satellite data worked best on landscapes where one plant type was dominant. The amount of vegetation cover in an area and its growth rate also influence the reliability of satellite data for wildfire prediction.

The study also found that in areas where branches and dead foliage often help spread fires, changes in the proportion of green vegetation to other plants may also indicate locations of potential fires, especially after moisture values fall below a critical level. The proportion of greenness determines the manner in which plants absorb and scatter sunlight and plays a major role in moisture retention.

Although scientists have long recognized the importance of moisture conditions in wildfire development, this research suggests that other variables may be just as significant. "While live fuel moisture values are critical in the development of wildfires, it's clearly not the last word. Even if vegetation is extremely dry, there are a number of other factors that influence whether a fire will develop and how quickly it spreads, including the ratio of live to dead foliage, plant type, seasonal precipitation, and weather conditions," said Roberts. "In Southern California, if a strong Santa Ana wind event occurs before our first major rainfall in the fall or winter, the risk for wildfire is significantly heightened."

As researchers continue to better understand wildfire development, they are also creating fire spread computer models that use wind speed and direction forecasts to determine where fires will travel. And in the near future, scientists will likely be able to map fire severity to get an indication of the overall impact of a wildfire on the landscape and environment, including the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. As the data record from recent satellites continues to grow, scientists will also be able to better track historical changes that might modify fire danger to provide better information for decision makers.

LINCOLN, Neb. -- A guppy in Trinidad may provide some answers about how changes in ecosystems and evolution interact.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln stream ecologist Steve Thomas is studying how evolution plays out in real time. Thomas is studying a fast-evolving guppy in Trinidad to track the effects of ecosystem changes on a species and the subsequent effects of its evolution on the local ecosystem.

Thomas's research, which also will look at human effects on the environment and subsequent changes in evolution, is part of a project involving several universities. It's funded by a five-year, $5 million National Science Foundation grant.

Popular notions that evolution operates too slowly to produce changes in human time, and certainly not in less than a decade, are not always correct, said Thomas, of UNL's School of Natural Resources.

"This system provides a unique opportunity to study evolution in real time, over the time an NSF grant can cover and over which ecological studies typically occur," he said. "What we've observed in the past is that these evolutionary changes occur after predation risk has been altered."

Streams in Trinidad are well suited for these experiments because they are separated by waterfalls creating stream sections with different kinds of guppy predators. David Rznick of the University of California, Riverside, who leads the overall project, has demonstrated that predation risk for guppies can influence size of offspring, age and size at maturity and aspects of growth and aging, Thomas said.

The study begins in January and involves a 12-person team with expertise in molecular biology, population ecology, ecosystem science, biogeochemistry and applied mathematics.

Administered through the NSF's Frontiers in Integrative Biology program, these grants support interdisciplinary work on the planet's most challenging scientific questions.
In a $1.7 million part of the overall study, with $307,000 directed to UNL, Thomas will work with Alex Flecker of Cornell University and Catherine Pringle of the University of Georgia on the ecological feedbacks between food web structure and evolutionary changes.

"For example, if we observe shifts in diet, do we get changes in algal composition, abundance and productivity?" Thomas asks. Algae feed invertebrates, which in turn are eaten by the fish.

Thomas, Flecker and Pringle form the ecosystem team, Thomas said. They will examine stream "metabolic" activity, an investigation Thomas will lead. They will use oxygen measurements to estimate the sum of all photosynthetic and respiration activity in an entire reach of the stream.

In addition, Thomas will lead experiments that use a stable isotope of nitrogen as a tracer to track nitrogen flow through the ecosystem and food web.
"If these evolutionary changes alter diet, we should see that in the way nitrogen flows through the system," he says.

He and colleagues also will manipulate light conditions in two stream reaches to examine how changes in the base of a food web influence the evolution of guppy populations. These changes will approximate the human effects of deforestation or other thinning effects on the canopy.

Flecker and Pringle will examine more direct interactions between guppy feeding and prey items and interactions between fish presence and algal growth and composition.
Thomas's portion of the grant will employ several UNL graduate and undergraduate students and help support post-doctoral researchers at Cornell and Georgia.